Tag Archives: literary ancestors

May 16, 2013 · 4:41 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 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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March 18, 2013 · 5:05 pm

“Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.”–Nathaniel Hawthorne

Today, I don’t propose to belabor the point contained in the title of my post, only to illustrate it with a story (not one of Hawthorne’s, but of a later author’s) which I believe establishes the point quite clearly in a fictional mode.  As you may or may not be aware, the “illumination” of the “infernal regions” wasn’t looked upon entirely negatively in the Romantic period during which Hawthorne was writing, as is evidenced by the stories Hawthorne himself wrote, such as “Young Goodman Brown” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” in both of which a devilish figure or an evil experience causes a protagonist to have a greater awareness of self and what is contained in the complex self, as opposed to viewing himself or herself as the instigator only of good things and positive experiences.  Many a protagonist has viewed himself or herself in a naive light as being totally innocent, until some tempter or provocative experience comes along to change that view, and thus to make him or her aware of the dividedness of human reactions in daily life.  And since, like David Copperfield, we would choose if we could to view ourselves as the “heroes of our own lives,” this knowledge hits us hard.  It can be seen and has been seen in some stories and tales as the impetus toward further bad behavior, because the protagonist reasons that he or she is already lost and might as well (in Milton’s words) “reign in hell” rather than “serve in heaven.”  Thus, to the true believer in God, it is a point of some discomfort that the Devil often tells a lie by revealing part of the truth, making the total “revelation” seem more convincing by force of the fact that a substantial part of it seems or is true.  It takes a real saint to stick to the belief, when visited by the view of his or her shortcomings, that “it’s not over until it’s over,” because Heaven and Hell are both beyond the purview of the ordinary fallible human being.

The heroine in our story of today, however, is not feeling guilt or remorse; rather, in Kate Chopin’s short short story “The Story of an Hour,” Mrs. Mallard is cherishing to herself the knowledge that her sometimes beloved husband is dead in a railway accident, which is the news brought to her by her sister Josephine.  Josephine and the husband’s friend Richards are both there to break the news to Mrs. Mallard as gently as possible, because though young, she has a heart condition, and they are afraid the shock of her husband’s death will kill her.  The story does not immediately show its hand, however.  Mrs. Mallard goes to her room crying, and locks herself in, and the people below assume that she is overcome with grief.  But we are told that she feels some “thing that was approaching to possess her,” which is a moment of self-knowledge that she is fighting off.  Here, instead of grief, is what is passing in the first instance when we get a clue to the contrary:  “When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips.  She said it over and over under her breath:  ‘free, free, free!’  The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes.  They stayed keen and bright.  Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.  She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her.  A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.  She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead.  But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely.  And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome….There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.  A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.”  Thus, the word “illumination” is clearly used here as counter for what she experiences in her heart of hearts, and though Kate Chopin is often hailed as a feminist avatar, she is equally clearly fair-minded in that she says of the quality she describes here that both men and women may try to impose their wills on others, for “kind” or “cruel” motives.

The heroine exults a while longer in her room in private, and then comes to the door to her sister Josephine’s bidding, and walks downstairs with her, arm in arm, ready to receive the sympathy awaiting her and presumably ready to play the role of the grieving widow in some measure.  But at the very moment they meet Richards at the bottom of the stairs, something unexpected happens, to bring the story to a close in the manner of an O. Henry story or that of the “surprise ending”:  “Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey.  It was [Mrs. Mallard’s husband] Brently [] who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his gripsack and umbrella.  He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one.  He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.  But Richards was too late.  When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease–of joy that kills.”  And at this point, it is important to remember that Mrs. Mallard does not die simply because her looked-for and projected freedom of future years has now received a knock in the head–she is also partly in joy to see her husband, just as her illumination would have predicted.  It is in fact a moment of “joy that kills,” and sudden surprise, and disappointment, and even her weak heart simply responding to too much stress.  It is in fact not only her “demon” of feeling subject to her husband, but also her “angel” of being astounded and glad to see him alive which, fighting a war in her weak physical bosom, kills her.

Thus, the “illuminating blaze of the infernal regions” is part and parcel of that mixture of emotions and states which are not “simply dark or bright.”  Hawthorne is making a counterintuitive claim that even a “dark” emotion, if taken in its pure state, is better than a mixed emotion, which involves the human being in so much turmoil that many a person will attempt to resolve the question to one extreme or the other in order not to be torn or suspended over the abyss between the two.  Is it any wonder that Kate Chopin, a Romantic by the tradition of the American fin de siècle in her own right, follows his insight and creates a heroine who loses her life in the devastating encounter of dark and bright?

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February 11, 2013 · 8:53 pm

“The Sorrows of Young Werther,” the Sentimental Novel, and the Argument from Popular Art to Reality

In this post, in order to illustrate my points more fully and in a more authoritative manner than I can assume as a person only passingly cognizant with this particular form of novel–that is, I’ve read a number of sentimental novels for study, but I lack that sympathy with them which would help make my remarks enthusiastically informed–I intend to quote heavily from other authorities.  So, in reference to the sentimental novel, of which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is a prime and famous example, this is what Wikipedia has to say:

“The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an eighteenth century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility….Sentimental novels relied on emotional response, both from their readers and characters.  They feature scenes of distress and tenderness, and the plot is arranged to advance emotions rather than actions.  The result is a valorization of ‘fine feeling,’ displaying the characters as a model for refined, sensitive emotional effect.  The ability to display feelings was thought to show character and experience, and to shape social life and relations….[The sentimental novel] was a reaction to the [colder] rationalism of the [immediately preceding] Augustan Age.”  Wikipedia further notes something that is rather obvious in reference to this genre:  “Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is most often seen as a ‘witty satire of the sentimental novel,’ [which] juxtapos[es] values of the Age of Enlightenment (sense, reason) with those of the later eighteenth century (sensibility, feeling)….”

The genre focuses on the values of “humanism” and often features the “weaker members of society” such as “orphans and condemned criminals” and encourages the readers to identify and sympathize with them.  For example, in The Sorrows of Young Werther, the young heroine Lotte’s brothers and sisters are taken care of by her because they have lost their mother; also, Werther, the hero, sympathizes with a young man who, like him, falls in love to no avail with a young woman as Werther is in love with Lotte, and when the young man commits a crime, Werther makes an impassioned plea for his release; finally, there is a wandering lunatic in the book, and Werther begins to compare his own state to that of the lunatic, whom he meets when the lunatic is searching for flowers for a mysterious lady whom he loves.  All of these other characters have much prose attention devoted to them by Goethe in the book, though ostensibly the attention occurs in Werther’s letters to his friend William and sometimes to Lotte.  And though the novel is thus in the main an epistolary novel, there are omniscient sections written by an unnamed “editor” which relate things to do with Werther (as he too becomes one of the unfortunates upon whom sentimentalism is to be lavished).

Hermann J. Weigand, in commenting on the way The Sorrows of Young Werther was perceived in the 1770’s when it was written (it first appeared in 1774, though Goethe continued to revise as late as 1787), has this to say:  “We are not likely to follow the example of the young people of the 1770’s and succeeding decades, who read [the book] as a sob story, and made a fad of wearing his blue frock coat and yellow waistcoat, and in many cases found in the hero’s fate an invitation to suicide.  Today we read [the book] as a highly illuminating, vivid, and colorful document reflecting the Zeitgeist of the ‘age of sentiment,’ and as a closely knit work of literary artistry.  As the fictional case history, moreover, of a highly endowed and appealing individual who allows himself to drift into disaster under the spell of a passion the danger of which he fails to sense until his will to live has been sapped and his sanity undermined, the story has a powerful appeal for the psychologically oriented reader who follows the stages of the hero’s mental disintegration with rapt fascination.”  As Weigand further remarks, in Werther’s letters a picture of his personality and qualities emerges.  He is “cultivated, well-to-do, generous, talented, sensitive, observant but more inclined to reverie, under no pressure to conform to the discipline of gainful employment, self-indulgent in his cult of pure feeling, an idealist finding pleasure in the company of simple folk and children, religious without adherence to dogma, a devotee of nature as opposed to the artificial conventions of society, preferring the cult of genius to the cultivation of taste governed by rules, an antirationalist in short, exhibiting all the winning traits of that late-eighteenth-century man who has come under the spell of Rousseau’s gospel of nature.”  And yet, with all of this going for him, he commits suicide when he must finally come to terms with the fact that the woman he loves, Lotte, cannot properly return his love in good conscience.  Lotte has been married to a young man named Albert for some time who is moreover a young man Werther likes and is friends with.  The prose in fact “imitates” Werther’s cessation of existence, at least in the translation by Catherine Hutter which I used, in the sense that though the writing is florid and overdone throughout much of the novel, overly emotional and passionate and frankly rather silly in parts (to my sense at least), when Werther is finally dead, the last sentences are stern and solemn and funereal:  “At twelve noon, Werther died.  The presence of the judge and the arrangements he made silenced the crowd.  That night, at about eleven, he had the body buried in the spot Werther had chosen.  The old man and his sons walked behind the bier;  Albert found himself incapable of doing so.  They feared for Lotte’s life.  Workmen carried the body.  There was no priest in attendance.”

Now, this translation and the appended foreword by Weigand were published in 1962, when psychology was becoming increasingly important; hence, Weigand comments that what we are likely to take from the book is the interesting psychological picture of a certain type of person, Werther himself.  There’s something in this, of course, but think of it this way:  the book was interesting in 1774, and what people took from it was what they brought to it:  a desire to find models to imitate, which funnily enough was a personality trend inherited from the Augustans, who were full of models for imitation; it’s just that with the “age of sentiment,” the very models had changed in nature, but the tendency to look for them was still there.  So, certain sentimental characteristics continued to appear in fiction even as late as Dickens, a point commented on with certain caveats by Wikipedia.  In 1962, people (notably Weigand in his commentary) were still finding in the book what they brought to it, though then what they brought to it then was a desire to watch a character’s psychological development as he “mentally disintegrated”; that is, they wanted to read a case history.  So, what do we find in the book now, if anything?  What is there for us, in 2013, in this book?

Perhaps we can take a certain comfort from the thought that just as The Sorrows of Young Werther inspired some odd forms of imitation as in those who dressed as the character was said to dress, or very negative actions as in those who were inspired, like Werther, to commit suicide for some motive or other, there are always people who imitate unhealthy tendencies they may find in art.  Art, in short, is not to blame.  In addition to being generally encouraging, this might appease those adherents of violent or at least action-packed videos who don’t like to hear that their favorite art form is the source of real-life violence, though of course calling it art might be over-generous.  But what of the opposite point of view?  That is, we, homo sapiens sapiens, self-knowledgeable and aware of being self-knowledgeable, self-reflecting humankind, have perhaps come full circle back to a certain naive (though not innocent) interpretive stance, one in which some of us see art as having an intimate connection with the way we conduct ourselves, one in which art legislates and dictates our world strategies.  There are among this number those others of us who do not enjoy the violence, either depicted in artistic terms or encountered in real life, who attempt to eliminate the whole tawdry mess by lumping it all together as something undesirable to be gotten rid of.  So there are still two tendencies of humankind thus, one which excuses art by pointing to the unlikelihood that art could cause someone to “do that,” and the other which insists that art should be “healthier, more wholesome, more idealistic.”  But wasn’t young Werther idealistic?  Wasn’t Werther cultivated, and loving to children, and kind to the unfortunate and to older people, and polite to those which society considered his betters?  To return to the notion from the early 1960’s commentator Weigand that the novel is intended as a psychological portrait for our times, the picture of the tumultuous decline of a young man who has everything going for him, isn’t this just exactly the sort of background story often referred to by those who say of a young criminal or suicide “He was so quiet, and nice.  No one would have thought he would do something like this”?  Is it only a chance acquaintance with a young woman like the beautiful Lotte which inspires such self-destruction by an unsuccessful suitor?  And what of the aggravations young Werther suffered in his attempt to work as a secretary to an ambassador after he left Lotte’s side?  Or what of his signal and powerful humiliation at the hands of a Count who had befriended him, brought on by the interference of others who did not like him?

All of these considerations are perhaps pertinent to a contemporary reading of The Sorrows of Young Werther, the moreso as we are everyday provided with examples of young and not-so-young people killing themselves and/or other people, ostensibly because of one primary thing in their lives, but often brought on, in the history we are after the fact given of them, by a whole series of events.  It is, though overly sentimental in its manner of expression quite often, not only a romance but also a casebook for our times.  We have to remember one key item of resemblance between Werther and the ordinary contemporary suicide/homicide:  in at least one spot in the novel, Werther reveals that he had had thoughts not only of destroying himself, but also of destroying Lotte and/or Alfred.  And this speaks to the hopelessness and general destructive tendency Goethe was so aware of in his otherwise exceptionally gifted hero, as well as to characteristics we might expect to find in a modern Werther, a young man born to distinguish himself somehow, who rather than settle down into being an average young man like his friend Albert or a sage counselor as his correspondent William is said to be, determines to distinguish himself through annihilation, and thus make an indelible, if tragic, mark on the world.  This is the true sign of the romantic hero as he just a few years later came to be delineated in fiction and poetry, and sadly, often imitated in fact by some of those who were of the ones determined to model themselves on their fictional heros:  he was determined to be distinguished, by whatever means necessary.  And perhaps that is what we all need to remember, if there is a moral at all to be drawn from this particular fiction:  sometimes, in some contexts at least, it’s okay just to be average and forget about being overly distinguished!

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January 21, 2013 · 6:04 pm

Other-hatred and Self-hatred in John Gardner’s “Grendel”–Knowing Your Enemy

In some English class or other, from middle school days through college days, most of us have read some version of “Beowulf,” the Old English heroic tale pitting man against monster, in which Beowulf wins and goes on later to fight a crafty dragon, who then dies only when Beowulf’s friend and thane Wiglaf fights by his side; but Beowulf dies from his wounds, and receives a hero’s burial.  In this version of the tale (and for so very long, there was no other version), the men know and care little about the monster Grendel’s characteristics or inner qualities, all that concerns them is how to combat and kill him so that he will cease to haunt their meadhall and eat their thanes.  As far as his motives go, he is of the race of Cain and therefore commits murder.  As the text of Beowulf reads, “Unhappy creature, he lived for a time in the home of the monsters’ race, after God had condemned them as kin of Cain.”  Full stop.  If we are led to think of Grendel’s motives at all, we perhaps suppose that after being attracted by the noise of the meadhall (Heorot) being built, he feels envy because the men sleeping at night inside “felt no sorrow, no misery of men.”  But his motives are unimportant, for he is clearly the evil-doing interloper, and as such does not merit our sympathy or understanding.

Taking his cue from slight hints in the text, however, John Gardner fully fleshes out a picture of Grendel not as a monster of a different race from humans, but as one having some relationship to them:  he understands their language, and can speak it though unclearly (later in Gardner’s rendition, Grendel taunts the coward Unferth and is haltingly understood by him).  He himself is aware of his relationship to men, and attempts more than once to approach or be understood, though it is to no avail.  He is hated and scorned, and because he feels a kinship to man, he internalizes these feelings and hates and scorns himself, and everything else as well.  Gardner has clearly taken hints from Robert Browning’s monster Caliban in “Caliban Upon Setebos” (a borrowing of yet another monster in later days, this time from Shakespeare’s Caliban in “The Tempest”).  Like Caliban, Grendel reasons upon his own life, the things he observes of men, the relationships between the two, and God, the universe, and the nature of things.  In these “studies” of mankind, God, and nature, Grendel is led by the dragon (Gardner introduces the cunning dragon who will be Beowulf’s downfall as a “tutor” of Grendel, one who can read his mind) and by the Shaper (the scop or poet whom he hears singing and intoning poems for men in the meadhall at night).  Of the scop’s song, he says that “he had made it seem all true, and very fine,” even though he thinks it is lies.  He asks himself, “What was he?  The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and [the people] who knew the truth [] remembered it his way, and so did I….I was so filled with sorrow and tenderness I could hardly have found it in my heart to snatch a pig!”  He thinks not only of the heroic tales but of the tale of Creation which the scop sings as “the projected possible.”  He thinks, “It was a cold-blooded lie that a god had lovingly made the world and set out the sun and moon as lights to land-dwellers, that brothers had fought, that one of the races was saved, the other cursed.  Yet he, the old Shaper, might make it true, by the sweetness of his harp, his cunning trickery.  It came to me with a fierce jolt that I wanted it.  As they did too, though vicious animals, cunning, cracked with theories.  I wanted it, yes!  Even if I must be the outcast, cursed by the rules of his hideous fable.”

Grendel, this Grendel, is both intelligent and has moral perceptions.  He perceives the boasts in the meadhall (of which many a teacher has made learned analysis as to their poetic merit) as the ravings of drunken men bent upon impressing each other.  He notes that men often kill men, slay other animals, and destroy landscape as a sort of warfare, without meaning to eat.  He notes the waste of the men journeying back and forth across the land with tribute of goods and animals to other kings who have dominion over them.  And as the dragon tells him of human rationality, which is supposedly the division between humans and Grendel as well as between humans and animals, “They only think they think.  No total vision, total system, merely schemes with a vague family resemblance, no more identity than bridges and, say, spider-webs.  But they rush across chasms on spider-webs, and sometimes they make it, and that, they think, settles that!”   This Grendel constantly spies on the humans, keeps in touch with what affects them (as if he is an outcast one of them), and feels anguish when the Shaper (the scop) is dying.  He refers to it as “meaningless anguish,” but its meaning is obvious.  Even more, this Grendel becomes capable near the end of the book not only of reflections upon past, present and future, which he first learned from the dragon, but also of poetry.  When the scop dies, it is as if it’s the end of an era for him, until suddenly the Geats (Beowulf and his warriors) appear.

Grendel’s reaction to their presence is strange.  He feels a sort of gleeful excitement because something new is in his world, but it is clear that he does not fully recognize his enemy.  He tells himself that he could avoid the meadhall until they leave again and so be perfectly safe, yet he knows he will not do so.  He notes that Hrothgar, the king of the meadhall, and his thanes are not best pleased to have strangers coming in to finish off their monster for them, so he concludes, with an odd sort of loyalty to old enemies, that he must finish off the newcomers for the honor of Hrothgar and his retainers.  He has an additional motive, however, and that is that he is afraid of tedium possibly resulting from his life as it is.  As he thinks to himself, “All order, I’ve come to understand, is theoretical, unreal–a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world–two snake-pits….Violence is truth….”  He thinks when he hears the stranger (Beowulf) speak, however, and answer a challenge in the meadhall against his bravery, that Beowulf is “crazy.”  He’s had this thought long before in the book about men when he watched them killing each other, yet he seems fascinated by Beowulf and fatally drawn to him.  “I grew more and more afraid of him and at the same time–who can explain it?–more and more eager for the hour of our meeting.”

When his fall finally comes, he is able to persuade himself that it came about through an “accident,” that he was caught off guard by Beowulf, who then took advantage of him and tore his arm off.  In the end of the novel, Grendel is surrounded by animals, “enemies of old,” who are watching him die.  “I give them what I hope will appear a sheepish smile….They watch with mindless, indifferent eyes, as calm and midnight black as the chasm below me.”  Then he asks the key question, really, of the whole book:  “Is it joy I feel?”  This is the motive of self-hatred having come full circle in Grendel’s life.  At the last, he says to the mute witnesses of his death:  “Poor Grendel’s had an accident….So may you all.”  Thus, the self-hatred leads into other-hatred just as often as the expression of other-hatred (feasting on his enemies) used to lead him into further self-hatred as he got further and further away from any possibility of fellowship.  Yet, part of the driving force of his self-hatred also comes from the fact that there was never really a chance of rapprochement between him and the humans, because from the very first they were, in his words, “stupid” and “crazy” and suspicious of him.  Finally then, the book is a book about fate, just as the original text carried notions of fate, though in “Grendel” we are concerned not with the nobility and fate of men but with the nobility and fate of the “monster” who wants to be one with and of them, yet cannot make them understand.  Published in 1971, in a time when the heroic outcast figure was once again becoming popular in literature, this book takes the formulas a step further, containing many moments when Grendel is petty and non-heroic, and yet the book transmutes even these moments into startlingly emotive episodes which excite recognition and fellow feeling in us for the anti-hero of the tale.  In its ability to force us to recognize our own thoughts and impressions, feelings and speculations, this book teaches us to know what are proverbially called our own worst enemies:  ourselves, both in the singular application and in the plural application, in which all men and women are to some degree enemies of the others, not the least because they are enemies to their own best instincts.  I think now, having read and commented at length upon so dismally moving and darkly motivated a book, I will go and read a light-hearted poem or improving essay, just to lift my spirits again, lest I too begin to feel like a Caliban or Grendel and foist my destructive instincts upon others!

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January 17, 2013 · 5:53 pm

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” –Anais Nin

There are many different kinds of friendships one makes in life, not the least of which is the kind made with the authors of our favorite books, though we may never meet them or exchange a word with them.  As Wentworth Dillon, the Earl of Roscommon said, “Choose an author as you choose a friend.”  One might equally well reverse the equation and say, “Choose a friend as you choose an author.”  Then, there’s the more remote, hail-fellow-well-met kind of human friendship and goodwill which Sam Walter Foss had in mind when he said “Let me live in my house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.”  And there’s a connection between these two ideas, if you’ll grant me the time to expound upon it.

Perhaps, however, the most significant idea which I want to put before you today is that from Anaïs Nin’s Diary, in which she says (as I quoted in the title of my post), “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”  Each friend we meet is thus an opportunity to extend ourselves further into the human equation (if I may use so dry and mathematical a figure for so “moist” and fulsome a reality).  Whether we are meeting a friend of the mind through a book or a friend of the heart in a café or private home, or whether our friend is the result of some combination of an intellectual and emotional friendship, we are witnessing and participating in the birth of a new world, and this new world causes us to grow and develop human characteristics that were perhaps formerly shut off from us, as we had never encountered the need or the use for them in ourselves or others.

In essence, we become a new person in relation to our new friend.  A new human quadrant or area, the area of the Venn diagram formed by the overlapping of the two circles (us and our friend) now exists in the world, and it is, one hopes, for the enriching of the overall human being, that being spoken of in the quote which above mentions being “a friend to man,” in the general category of humankind.  For, as the interior growth we experience causes us to be able to understand other people better, so it is that “tout comprendre, tout pardonner,” as the French say, or “to understand all is to forgive all.”  Though possibly forgiving “all” is a bit much to imagine, the sentence is generous and tolerant and conveys quite adequately the sense of latitude it’s meant to.  And it is through our understanding of our own dilemmas that we come to understand those of our fellows and vice versa.  That is, often in looking for the solution to a personal conundrum, we can find illumination in the situation of a friend and how he or she has handled something, just as surely as if we had received advice from them given from the heart.

Those of you, both friends and acquaintances, who have been following my column for some time and have been wondering just what this possibly preachy or in some other manner showy little disquisition on another aspect of friendship has to do with creative writing will now get your answer:  for it is one of the main ways we create characters, through the employment of our pictures of ourselves and others, that shows that we have a true connection with the human equation, as I previously called it, always assuming that we have created well and truly.  That is that we imagine:  we imagine beings, sometimes partially like ourselves, sometimes partially like our friends, to inhabit our worlds.  Even our villains must be drawn from this pool in order not to be just stock “flat” figures, but to have body and life.  We must be able to imagine their internal struggles too, just as we do those of the more positive characters.  So now, we have come full circle in our examination of this view of friendship, back to the point where I started, selecting books as we do friends:  for even our favorite authors supply us with models we can use for our characters, to be followed in a rough way, not slavishly, an idea I’m sure you will find a truism entirely, since so many famous writers have commented upon the influences on and sources of their works.  Make sure that you too select both your friends and your favorite writers by a revised sort of Golden Rule:  as you would want them to select you:  because they sincerely admire/respect/want to imitate well your being with their own.  My preachment is over, and for those of you who may be pondering what brought it on this time, it is the effect of reading about a serious quarrel between two fiction writers in a letter written by another (memoir) writer, and wondering how they all came to be friends in the first place.  And no, I won’t tell who it is, chances are you’ve not heard of them, and I’m feeling foolish now that I have!  But there may be a day when I have to create some rather silly villains, and I’m saving up a non-specific, very generalized, and non-libelous set of characters, and you can guess whom they’re based upon.

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December 18, 2012 · 4:57 pm

“A detective digs around in the garbage of people’s lives. A novelist invents people and then digs around in their garbage.”–Joe Gores

In his short anthology, Classic Mystery Stories, Douglas G. Greene pays “a tribute to the first great age of fictional sleuthing,” the stories being drawn from 1841 to 1920.  Of course, he dates the first detective story from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue, as it is “widely acknowledged” to be the first by critics and mystery buffs alike.

As Greene notes in his introduction, “We may well enjoy suspense thrillers and psychological probings of diseased brains and even (in our guiltier moments) shoot-em-ups with plenty of AK-47s and car chases” [though writing today in the light of the Newtown shootings, these things seem very distant and far away on our scale of preferences of things to read about.  Writing and reading about such things has indeed been the very topic of a number of posts on the Internet in WordPress, all of which acknowledge our inundation with images and sounds and stories of ‘shoot-em-ups’ which make us less sensitive.  Nevertheless, I continue my post today with a sense that my interest in Greene’s book will not be unfairly mistaken as an encouragement of this sort of writing, the more especially as his book features only genuine mystery tales.]  As Greene continues, “….[W]hen it comes to the mystery story, there is nothing to rival the genuine tale of–to use Edgar Allen Poe’s word–ratiocination, wherein the detective solves the crime by investigation and observation, by using his or her wits.  In this genre fisticuffs may occasionally be acceptable–but only after the detective has already worked things out through brainpower.”

The three tales I want to mention are hardly even tales, but are instead billed as mere conversation-starters by their author.  Charles Dickens grouped them together under the title “Three ‘Detective’ Anecdotes.”  As Greene notes, “Poe’s stories were popular, but for detective fiction to become a major form of popular literature, public attitudes toward crime had to turn from sympathy for the criminal (as had been the response to the picaresque romances and Newgate Calendar tales of previous centuries) toward admiration for the law-enforcer.”  He notes that the Bow Street Runners were often “corrupt” and that it was not until the “creation of Scotland Yard in 1829” and 13 years later the “Criminal Investigation Department” (CID) that the “success and relative honesty of the Detective Police became known, [and] the old image of the crooked thief-taker was gradually replaced by the upright Bobby.”

As a journalist and an editor of Household Words, Dickens “spent nights with the police, invited almost the entire C.I.D. to the magazine’s offices for a party,” and recorded their investigations in these three anecdotes in 1850.  He was also influenced by them to write a “positive” Inspector Bucket in Bleak House in 1853, and Greene credits particularly Dickens with beginning the process of making the police detective a hero.

The first anecdote concerns a murder of a young woman, in which the predominant clue left behind is a pair of gloves under the pillow of the bed in the chamber where the young woman is found with her throat cut.  It’s a simple enough tale of attempting to find who had cleaned the gloves, in order to find out who owned them and had dropped them off at the cleaners.  Most of the story is a sort of comedy of errors of who found the gloves where and did what with them, and the story unravels as the detective finds the man who owns the gloves.  The main function of this story, however, is not so much to find the man who actually committed the crime as it is to clear the man who owns the gloves (circumstantial evidence) from having participated in the murder.  So it’s a sort of clearing away of a “red herring.”

The second anecdote concerns the apprehension of the “Swell Mob” (a gang of thieves) working Epsom Race Track on Derby Day.  The detectives get together to catch them, but the thieves manage to steal a bit of diamond jewelry off one of the three detectives anyway.  They are all caught, but when they are caught, nothing can at first be found by the two main detectives.  Finally, however, by an “artful touch” (and think here of the term “artful” in the same way as you would the phrase from another Dickens classic, “the artful dodger”), one of the detectives recovers the goods.    I’m not going to reveal exactly what this “artfulness” is, as it would ruin what is already a slight anecdote.  At the end of the story, the thief darts out of court and climbs a tree to escape, but is truly “up a tree,” because they catch him!  This combination of craft and silliness, whether drawn from real life or dreamed up totally by Dickens, has the feel of real life about it, certainly.

The third anecdote concerns a series of thefts from the medical students at “Saint Blank’s Hospital” (obviously, a particular famous hospital was in Dickens’s mind, for which he substituted the name “Blank” as was the custom of the time).  Again, even the ratiocination is not marked in this case, as it mainly consists of finding a hiding place in the cloakroom and waiting for the thief to show up and reveal himself.  Because the detective’s knowledge of men and women upon observation is concerned, however, he is able to determine just by watching the porter that the porter, though drunken, is not the man at fault.  Also, it is another case of the policeman being shown to be not only equal but superior to the thief in honesty and capacity.  Just as with the previous anecdote, there is a final bit of history given of the case after the case is officially over, in the sense that we are told that the criminal killed himself while waiting in prison.  Dickens is thus not as much concerned with heightening the drama of the tale (though a suicide is certainly dramatic) as he is with giving it a touch of verisimilitude:  the thief was a student, and the shame of being apprehended stealing from his fellow classmates and being carted off to jail contributed to his suicide itself.

Dickens’s basing of his characters (both policemen and criminals) on the types of people he was actually familiar with from his experiences as a journalist just goes to show that as melodramatic and unlikely as some of Dickens’s plots may seem to be, he did have the realistic research wherewithal to construct fairly accurate portraits of men and women, and these short anecdotes reveal Dickens in some of his most simplistic plotting.  I am greatly endebted to Greene’s selection of these anecdotes and notes for my material in this post, for though I’ve read a lot of Dickens, I had never before read these stories and realized just how close to reality Dickens could write.

For those of you who are Dickens fans, or even for those of you who are just coming to Dickens for the first time, Caroline at Beauty Is A Sleeping Cat is conducting a Dickens in December Readalong this month.  Why not drop by and participate in the readings and the conversations?  There’s nothing like a long Dickens novel to be read over the cold or at least inclement winter months when you’re trapped inside!

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November 30, 2012 · 6:11 pm

American Gothic Romance and the impatiences of (one) modern reader– “Wieland; or, the Transformation”

“In a land without castles or ghosts, [Charles Brockden] Brown found the suggestion for a Gothic tale of terror in the strange case of a farmer in Tomhannock, New York, who believed he had been commanded by angels to kill his family.  He provided a sensational plot to interest all readers, while writing a novel of ideas that explored ‘the moral constitution of man.’  The elder Wieland, a mystic, builds a temple on his estate for his private devotions.  One night he is killed by a mysterious flash of light.  His children live on happily with their companions, using the temple as a summerhouse–until they begin to hear unearthly voices, a charming vagabond joins their circle, and the father’s fanaticism overtakes the mind of the son.  In its time Brown’s writing presented a searching and original study of mania and remorse, foreshadowing Poe and Hawthorne.”

This paragraph immediately above is a copy of the blurb from the Dolphin Book edition of Wieland; or, The Transformation:  An American Tale which I read, and I supply it because my topic today is not so much what actually happened in the story as something I’ve noticed in my own perusals of Gothic fiction, an impatience with the character’s avowals of various emotions and beliefs which makes me want to say, “Oh, c’mon now, you surely don’t expect me to believe that that was your honest reaction to that event/remark/action.”  In this tale, as in many such tales, the narrator is a woman, and we are asked to believe that she is an upright and well-trained and veracious person, as well as being a composite of all the womanly virtues, etc.  Therefore, certain (Gothic Romantic) pretenses are in order when she speaks.  But it makes one skim over her narrative and skip certain words and phrases and even sentences and paragraphs, because it seems so masochistic of her to insist upon suffering so!

If you doubt my words, I’ll just give you the final paragraph of the book Wieland (pronounced as in the German VEH-lundt).  Don’t worry:  if you want to read this book, you won’t miss anything by knowing the last paragraph from the beginning:  “I leave you to moralize on this tale.  That virtue should become the victim of treachery is, no doubt, a mournful consideration; but it will not escape your notice, that the evils of which Carwin [a trickster] and Maxwell [a seducer and murderer] were the authors owed their existence to the errors of the sufferers.  All efforts would have been ineffectual to subvert the happiness or shorten the existence of the Stuarts [Maxwell’s victims], if their own frailty had not seconded these efforts.  If the lady had crushed her disastrous passion in the bud, and driven the seducer from her presence when the tendency of his artifices was seen; if Stuart had not admitted the spirit of absurd revenge, we should not have had to deplore this catastrophe.  If Wieland had framed juster notions of moral duty and of the divine attributes, or if I had been gifted with ordinary equanimity or foresight, the double-tongued deceiver would have been baffled and repelled.”  This is of a piece with the opening poetical epigraph:  “From Virtue’s blissful paths away/The double-tongued are sure to stray;/Good is a forth-right journey still,/And mazy paths but lead to ill.”

This is pitching it a little too strong, and is rather like blaming the rape victim for what she was wearing when she was attacked.  First of all, there’s the perspective of the narration.  The story is told from the beginning in a way which capitalizes on the miraculous.  And there’s the fact that the father Wieland’s death is a mysterious matter, full of lightning flashes from heaven and the spontaneous combustion of his clothing (he is found in the temple/summerhouse where he regularly goes to worship, with all his clothes burned away from his body while his body is bruised, and then he dies a few hours later with “insupportable exhalations and crawling putrefaction” a factor in driving all mourners away from his body).  What I’m saying is that the narration is a sort of “fake-out,” a “sleight-of-hand,” because through most of the story the characters hear mysterious voices telling them to do or not to do things, and moreover it’s not just one character hearing the voices, rather it’s several.  Given the beginning, what else could one suspect but that heavenly or devilish voices are the sources of their visitations?

But pitted against these seemingly overwhelming odds, the prissy female narrator is constantly reassuring us of her own and nearly everyone else’s virtue and prudence.  The only thing of which she is not possessed in supernatural degree is “foresight,” and the amount of foresight she would have had to have to know what was actually happening would have been impossible (and I’m not going to tell  you; you’re going to have to read this book, both the exciting and good parts and the “draggy” and “gloopy” parts yourself–yes, those last two are critical terms).  Without having been a mind reader, she could not have known in any way or even remotely have guessed, in my view, what was happening to her.

So why all the “I would rather have stabbed myself than have defended myself against a potential rapist/murderer,” and “It would have been better to blame myself than to have assumed that a self-proclaimed liar/villain was to blame”?  I think it must be because it increases the reader’s suspense and tension to a certain nearly unbearable point.  The fact that it could also exasperate a reader and make her want to shake the protagonist silly (if the protagonist weren’t silly enough already) doesn’t seem to be a factor that was considered by Charles Brockden Brown.  Also, Brown was early on the author of a work on the rights of women, and as a champion he perhaps felt that it was necessary to “gild the lily” (that is, to make something good or holy enough even holier).  It has often been the case that male authors writing as women have felt the need to make the narrator more virginal, or naive, or just plain good than a realistic heroine would be, and of course this is a Romantic Gothic work, not a realistic one.

There are also a number of spots in which, true to form, the heroine/narrator decides upon a course of action which the foreshadowing clearly tells the reader is a mistake:  oh, if only she would take the opposite course of action, then this whole tragical farce would be cleared up!  But then, the story would be over, too!  So, it’s a choice between having one’s emotions as a reader manipulated and played upon, and coming to the end of the story too soon.  Personally, I stuck it out to the end, though the structure caused me to skip a sentence or a paragraph here and there during the last ten pages or so, because quite inartistically, some minor characters from early on suddenly resurfaced and had a story told about them which had little or nothing to do with the main fiction, or at least if the smaller story was meant to “point a moral, and adorn a tale” it wasn’t as apposite as it might have been to the main story:  why, for example, didn’t it have something to do with voices from heaven, or inspiration, or family dramas?  It actually seemed to be a sort of afterthought.

I realize that normally I review or write essays upon books that are of major worth, and though this book is a bit dated and not as good as other Gothic thrillers like Frankenstein or Caleb Williams (to name the two far poles of sensationalism that this thriller seems to lie between, partaking of the gory details of one, and the human drama of the other), it’s still worth reading.  It’s a book which was ahead of its time in 1798 America when it appeared, because fiction wasn’t well thought of on this continent then, and Brown had various troubles trying to survive as a literary figure, having to rely on a law career as well as having a position writing history and working on magazines.  But I really have been self-indulgent in this post, because my topic has not been so much a delineation of the progress of the tale itself (I don’t want to ruin the experience of the novel for the reader) as a topic about the price sensationalism paid and still perhaps pays in order to be allowed to outrage our sentiments legally:  the moralistic trappings of the narrator’s tale constitute the “wedding” that sometimes follows after (or accompanies rather than precedes) the “seduction.”

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October 20, 2012 · 2:20 pm

What did I know about dinosaurs before there was Jurassic Park? Plenty–all of it confused!

When I was a child in grade school (known to some as primary school), I had already started out with the reading habits I have today, reading anything and everything I could get my hands on that interested me.  My interests were more shapeless and inchoate then, because even with all the reading I did, I hadn’t yet narrowed things down to simple preferences.  I had interests (monsters, ghosts, dinosaurs, love stories, folk and fairy tales, tales of heroes and heroines, things rather in the fantastic line than not).  Those early years were the years which saw the creation of that great masterpiece “Vicki and the Spider” by my friend David D., a story in which I fell into a giant pit and was eaten by an equally giant spider, a masterpiece made of sheets of that giant paper teachers used to give us to write on with our giant pencils (no wonder the spider was so big, everything in our world except us was big in those days!).  This scurrilous publication of course called for retaliation, but I took the high road and gave my friend David a nobler foe than a creepy old spider in my follow up short “novel” “David and the Lion.”  The literary gods were clearly pleased with me, for after David D. moved away to another part of the country, they continued to inspire me to read and to write, and led me to some of my favorite books earlier than was suggested for my age range.

First there were the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, then some secretary who solved crimes whose name I no longer remember, but whose titles always featured color names, such as “Murder in Maroon,” and so forth and so on.  Then, there was the terrifying short story which I’ll swear also had the name “The Woman in White,” but which unlike Wilkie Collins’s novel of that name featured a jealous and vindictive wraith of a first wife who stalked a betrothed man with a bread knife and at one point visited him in a dream, trying to slice him in half.  Though he doubted the veracity of the dream the next morning when he first awoke, when he looked down, half of his mattress was cut in ribbons!

One of my earliest memories was of my first fantasy/science fiction novel, however.  It was  a dinosaur story which had far more of fantasy than science about it, and was read in the days when my friend David was still around with his brotherly recommendations about what to read.  There was nothing cute and cuddly about these dinosaurs, no “The Land That Time Forgot” about any of them.  They were fearsome and toothy and nearly inescapable except for those very accustomed to surviving with them–and here’s where the Jurassic Park element comes into play:  where, in what space and time, is it likely that humans and dinosaurs would ever interact?  Just as in “Jurassic Park,” in this book, whatever its obviously forgettable title was, the anachronism was alive and well, and events conspired to make the book exciting if totally inaccurate.

When I refer to anachronisms, I’m not referring to the part of the book in which two boys, friends, go to a mysterious carnival/state fair where they visit the booth of some piece of machinery like Zoltan the Fortune-teller, who predicts an adventure (or was it an actual human fortune-teller?  I’ve forgotten).  Nor am I referring to the fateful tent they enter which is full of dinosaur bones and skeletons.  Nor am I referring to whatever happens to them to throw them back into the past, into a dinosaur-filled realm in the world, where all around them the world is a constant menace and a threat.  What I am referring to by anachronism is the fact that in this world (as happens by scientific accident in “Jurassic Park”) there are real, live humans alive at the same time as the dinosaurs, picking their way carefully in the giant footsteps of their monster-like neighbors!  The only other fiction I’d ever seen at the time in which a dinosaur was alive at the same time as humans was the cartoon “The Flintstones” on television, in which a very tame and dog-like dinosaur was the family pet, and there were a few other dinosaurs scattered in the storyline here and there, all geared to (human) domestic purposes.  By contrast, this book about the two boys and the dinosaur-age boy they learn to communicate with was thrilling!  What excitement!  What chills as they barely escaped the vicious monsters time after time!  What a life-like picture (I thought in my small person’s head) of a village of stone age (?) people forced to live alongside forces and beings constantly trying to eradicate or simply to eat them!  This was the life!  This was camping out!  This was reading!

Inevitably, of course, the two boys fall asleep or faint in the past, or get hit over the head, or something along those lines, just as they are about to be eaten.  They wake up again in the dinosaur bones tent, or at Zoltan’s booth, somewhere which of course makes them half doubt their big adventure (though it’s at least a minor sort of adventure in adult terms for even two very emotionally connected individuals to go through a sort of folie à deux experience in this way).  And the book is over.  And within a short amount of time, David D. moved away, and before the year was out, we studied dinosaurs, and a teacher concerned to keep us from nightmares and to provide us with the truth as was her duty and prerogative informed us that in fact dinosaurs and humans had never inhabited earth at the same time, far from it!  I promptly lost my interest in dinosaurs and started to think more about ghosts and monsters, things which were in my dreams often enough and could lurk helpfully in the shadows until teachers were otherwise occupied, and which were murky enough to exist in the miasma of a young reader’s mind, however much adults might deny them.

Though I can’t blame my entire lack of interest in science that isn’t carefully explained in detail which makes it alive for a non-specialist on this early disillusionment about dinosaurs and humans, who knows but that I might be scraping down the sides of an early human encampment with a trowel and saving crockery specimens with the best of them had the threat of meeting up with dinosaur bones in the same burial plot been possible there?  What about you?  What are the most memorable reading experiences of your early childhood, and how do you feel they shaped your later reading self, career, or intelligence?  My comment pages are always open!

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