Tag Archives: literary conscience

March 24, 2015 · 2:38 pm

Having a Good Nattering, Chin-Wag, or Gossip with a Book–Maeve Binchy’s “Circle of Friends”

I can remember the first time I was curious enough to mention Maeve Binchy’s Circle of Friends to another friend who reads, one whose tastes are perhaps a little less specialized than mine.  She said, “You probably wouldn’t like her; it’s not really literary fiction.”  I persisted, and she said “Well, it’s more like popular fiction, kind of gossipy and low-key.  No big symbols or literary stuff to interpret, it’s mostly just about people’s lives in a small town in Ireland, and how they change when exposed to social currents from Dublin.”  So, I thought, well, I’ll see the movie, which got some acclaim, and in which Minnie Driver starred, I wasn’t sure in what role; that seemed like a good way to approach the thing.

But something came up, and I missed the local showings of the movie, and by the time everything was over, I had gone on to something else.  This made me all the more curious when a copy of the book fell into my hands from a free book shelf (don’t ever believe that it really happens that way–it didn’t “fall into” my hands, I regularly prune certain free book shelves with effort and abandon to get books I think I might like to read).

True enough, when I read the book blurb, it didn’t seem like my kind of book; for one thing, it was about a hometowny little friendship between two girls who go on to university together, and it sounded fairly humdrum.  No Pulitzer or Nobel there.  Then I started to read.  I found other reasons not to get too excited about the book; for one thing, it seemed to have a number of places in which the dialogue that should logically have been in the mouth of one character came from another character, or there was a typo, or one character’s name seemed to be given for another character’s.  This was a minor distraction, however, once I got involved in the story.

What I found was that the author was a penetrating judge of character, and though most of her creations were young and just starting out in life, she had a knack also for writing about the older people in the book and their conflicts and disappointments.  Though the young university students and their cohorts are spoken of as the “circle of friends” once or twice in the book and are the central focus, by the end of the book the whole cast has become one whose lives have importance to the reader.  It’s as if we are having a gossip about them all with the village maven.  Every character, no matter how minor, has a fate or an ending, or a new beginning, and though there are no major surprises in the way they turn out, yet everything develops satisfactorily and in line with one’s sense of poetic justice.  This treatment, though it is decidedly not literary in the sense of showing just how arbitrary life can actually be, and how ironies can multiply and interact, is still the source of a satisfactory read.  After all, there are also instances in real life when people do get what’s coming to them, whether for good or for ill, and those can also be written about:  not everything is some huge black catastrophic event or supplies a constantly pointed little fictional essay that baits the reader and leads him or her to expect what isn’t delivered and to be disappointed as a source of entertainment.

Which is to say, when all is said and done, that Maeve Binchy delivers no more and no less than the blurbs have contracted for:  she is a reliable and percipient author who, though perhaps a bit lingeringly romantic or sentimental, never puts the romance or the sentiment in the position of having to carry the entire load of the plot effects.  Circle of Friends, though not a book I would necessarily find it important to reread in order to get anything I didn’t get the first time, might become a soothing anodyne that I would read again because it reassures me about humanity in the main.  I seem to remember that I read of Binchy’s death some time back, and I can now see why her devoted readers created such a stir about her potential absence: she has a kindly, open, wise, and perceptive mode of writing that while not pretending to be full of literary tricks and technical achievements is nevertheless full of human warmth and good humor.  Now I suppose all that remains is sometime to watch the movie and see if the movie magnates have managed to capture the work of her great heart on film.

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October 23, 2014 · 7:24 pm

Picture this tale for Halloween….

In the play Hamlet, Hamlet’s father’s ghost tells the young prince “But that I am forbid/To tell the secrets of my prison-house,/I could a tale unfold whose lightest word/Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,/Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,/Thy knotted and combined locks to part,/And each particular hair to stand an end,/Like quills upon the fearful porpentine.”  This is, of course, what every good Halloween story tries to do, and so today I’m going to put before you, readers, a supposititious summary of a tale and see if you think you might like to read it.  If so, then I can tell you where to find it.  Here goes:

Picture a tale in which the characters range from extreme youth to old age, and in which a highly imaginative and susceptible child is sometimes treated like a mere encumbrance and even worse, locked up in fearsome places by itself without food or water, where a ghost is thought to roam.  Feature strange lights coming and going in this place, which the child cannot translate into any portion of its known experience.  Imagine next that this child tries to escape this punishing system, only to be put in another wherein children are treated as a matter of course in somewhat the same way by some adults, receiving random kindnesses from other adults, but with no asssurance that this kindness will be available when most necessary, due to the interference of more powerful adults who are mean and petty.  Next, figure to yourself (as the French say) that the child’s best friend dies of a lingering and contagious illness, and that many of the other children around are stricken with another illness due to bad sanitation and poor victuals.  But if the central child of the tale died at this point, the story couldn’t continue, so you must allow in your imagination for the child’s survival.

Say that we are given some improvements to the main character’s state to up the ante, and then the character begins again to experience more mysterious events, such as hearing dragging sounds, animals snarls, and strange unholy laughter in the nighttime as she is trying to sleep.  The child is now a young adult, and is sharing an old and seemingly haunted manor house with another child, servants who are friendly but keep close-mouthed about the nighttime disturbances, and a saturnine, ironical, and equally mysterious male owner, who deceives her about the sum total of the house’s occupants.

Think next about what the main character experiences when the male owner seems to be responsible for a frightening fire in the middle of the night, and when bedroom doors must be locked at night to prevent strange and unknown dangers from approaching.  And of course we have a seemingly happy interlude to take us off our guard:  guests come to the house, there is festivity and enjoyment, and we unwisely relax and think things are improving.  But then, an ancient and gnarled Gypsy woman appears, who, though she predicts eventual happiness for the central character, is not equally as generous in her predictions towards all the party.  And that very same night, there are blood-curdling screams in the night, animal growls, and one of the guests is stabbed; it would seem to be time for the house’s owner, something like an animal himself in some particulars of appearance, to be more forthcoming with the protagonist,  yet his responses to what has happened are still dark and quizzical, and he only is able to satisfy her fears and curiosity in part.

Now participate in the vision of the protagonist agreeing to marry the owner, only to find at the inception of her new relationship that her own clothes have been vandalized by a hideous vision who wakes her in the night, having somehow gained entrance to her sleeping chamber.  The owner tells her that she must have imagined it, or that it is a servant, and yet this only temporarily solves the manifold problems, one of which is that for some time past, all the frightening incidents in the night and mysteries in the day have caused the main character to have nightmares about crying infants whom it’s impossible to soothe.  With short surcease for joy, the prospective marital pair approach the altar, where the ceremony is stopped and the protagonist finds out that a madwoman locked in the attic of the old manor is not only the source of all the chaos in the house, but that the lunatic is also the homicidal first wife of the erstwhile bridegroom, and is still living!

Is this sounding strangely familiar?  By now it should–it’s the story, re-told with a slight emphasis on its fantastical and seemingly supernatural side, of Charlotte Brontë’s famous novel Jane Eyre.  The rest of the novel focuses, as you may already know, on the year Jane spends apart from her male lead, Mr. Rochester, her receipt of another proposal from someone she cannot bring herself to love, and her eventual return to the old manor house, Thornfield, when she learns that the mad wife is dead, having burned the house to the ground and incidentally maimed Mr. Rochester in the process.  There is only one real supernatural feature of this portion of the novel, and that occurs just before Jane returns, when she is thinking about whether or not to marry “the other guy,” and has a sort of auditory hallucination of Mr. Rochester calling out to her in grief and misery.  It is later when she sees him again that she hears from his own lips that he was in fact calling out to her that very night at that time.  And then, of course, we have our requisite moderately happy ending, charming and no doubt satisfying to Charlotte Brontë in its moral aspects (which I have largely suppressed in order to make the point that this novel resembles a standard Gothic in many of its characteristics).

So there you have it:  a good, suspenseful read for Halloween, which neither neglects the necessary chill in the blood nor disallows that a woman may love a man whom both the more squeamish moralist and the self-appointed judge of male beauty might scorn, a sort of precursor to the love of “monsters” in contemporary horror cult classics.  Why did I deceive you and say “picture this tale”?  Because this novel first reached me (when I was nine or ten) in the Classics Illustrated comic book edition, my generation’s version of the graphic novel. This post represents my third time through the “real thing.”  Now, it’s your turn to have another look at this “bootiful” novel.

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July 13, 2014 · 5:17 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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June 14, 2014 · 7:27 pm

A Conflict of Worlds–Two traditions in Amrita Pritam’s story “The Weed”

Though there are narrated sections in Amrita Pritam’s short story “The Weed,” the real interior story is about a dialogue between traditions which takes place in the actual dialogue and in the happenings of the story.  As the educated narrator says at the very beginning–a sophisticated and more worldly woman known simply as “bibi,” a term of affection–“Angoori [the younger character] was the new bride of the old servant of my neighbor’s neighbor’s neighbor.”  “Bibi” takes care in her relation of events to establish that Angoori is a joyous and cheerful and attractive young woman recently married to a much older husband, and is very traditional in her beliefs and values.

For example, Angoori has been taught and apparently believes that it is sinful for a village woman like herself (but not a “city” woman, like the narrator) to know how to read.  She also believes that it is a great sin for a woman to fall in love with her husband except through the intervention of her father.  The acceptable tradition is that a girl child, when five or six, “adore[s] someone’s feet.”  In this, she is directed by her father’s wishes, because he has placed money and flowers at the man’s or boy’s feet.  In this way, it is decided whom the girl shall later marry.  The exceptions, those girls who have love affairs, are thought to have eaten of a mysterious “wild weed” that an intending man has placed in a sweet or paan and given them to eat.  Angoori has seen a girl in her village in such a situation, and she says that the girl sang sad songs a lot, and never combed her hair and acted otherwise oddly.  Angoori regards this as a very unfortunate situation, and is glad, apparently, that she is married to Prabhati, the old man who does not always live at her home because he is a servant and eats at his employers’ household.

Nevertheless, a few days later, the narrator finds Angoori in “a profoundly abstract mood,” and the younger woman asks to be taught to read, and to write her name.  Mark what happens next:  the narrator, Bibi, makes a guess that seems to be correct, that it is because Angoori wants to be able to write letters to someone, and to read letters back.  Instead of immediately agreeing as a friend of equal status would probably do if she knew how, Bibi asks her if she won’t be committing a sin in learning to read and write.  The girl refuses to answer, but when Bibi sees her later, she is singing a sad song, and nearly crying, as she had told Bibi the other girl in her village had done.  Bibi further intrudes and asks her if this was the song the girl in her village had sung, and she admits it.  She tries to force Angoori to sing the song to her, but on this point Angoori stands firm:  she will only recite the words.  The narrator further investigates in a logical, forceful manner, and finds that because Angoori’s husband does not eat at home, and the night watchman, Ram Tara, who has been taking tea with milk as a regular guest at Angoori’s and Prabhati’s house, as is the tradition, has been away on a visit, the girl has had not only not much food, but also not even any tea with milk.

Then the narrator Bibi remembers something else about Ram Tara:  [he was] “good-looking, quick-limbed, full of jokes.  He had a way of talking with smiles trembling faintly at the corner of his lips.”  Instead of just asking, as a person who thought of themselves as equal might do, whether or not Angoori was sad to be alone so much, or missed her friend Ram Tara, Bibi makes a particular kind of mischief by almost making a joke to herself of the girl’s village beliefs and traditions:  she asks her, in what seems a kindly but nevertheless mocking fashion, “Is it the weed?”  If the innocent and superstitious girl did not think so before, to have someone she regards as her intellectual superior ask her this sways her conviction on this point.  Far from being able to persuade herself away from her own unhappiness, she responds, “‘Curse on me!….I never took sweets from him…not a betel even…but tea….'”  We are told by the narrator, who seems to relish this point:  “She could not finish.  Her words were drowned in a fast stream of tears.”

In many ways, because this work shares certain tendencies with other 20th century modernist texts in which traditional, aboriginal, or village peoples are viewed supposedly objectively by a better educated person or persons (Edith Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome, with its frame story narrator, comes to mind), it has the tendency that makes of the village traditions and mannerisms something quaint or odd, something the character of higher status muses on with varying degrees of wonder, amusement, or curiosity.  Though these texts are not without a certain amount of compassion by and large, by this point in the 21st century even the compassion seems like a form of condescension, and as we can see in this story, even a writer like Pritam, who was clearly and solidly in the camp of those attempting to better conditions for poorer or less advantaged peoples in her native Punjab region, leaves the question of village autonomies unvisited.  While I really enjoyed the story, and felt sympathy was directed at Angoori, it’s a different matter to engineer empathy with Angoori.  This latter is more what late 20th century and early 21st century aims at, in contradistinction to and in rebellion against 20th century models of social reform and conscience.

So, to view this story from a later perspective than that in which it was written is to see highlighted not only the young girl Angoori, which I feel was the original intention of the piece, but to see also the somewhat downward-looking Bibi as a character as well, not simply as an empty tabula rasa or a quiet sounding board to receive the picture of Angoori.  This is why I call this story “a conflict of worlds, two traditions”:  whereas it is Angoori’s tradition to live simply within the bounds of her own village, and to obey its rules, it is also her tradition to respect the opinions and values of those who look down upon her from a superior social height, and to attempt to scale the heights of reading and writing, which have been posited to her as values she could espouse.  By contrast, the narrator Bibi is in her own way sophisticatedly naive, because she has too her own form of blindness in automatically assuming that it’s not simple loneliness but the love affair attributed by Angoori’s village traditions to “the wild weed” that the girl will claim as her dilemma.  The true kindliness is practiced by the author in showing these two characters face-to-face, two faces of what was once a part of India and what is now a part of Pakistan.  Amrita Pritam is clearly not the narrator, but is even one remove farther away, sharing with us a type of encounter which in all likelihood happens relatively frequently, whatever part of the world one is in.  Two forms of naiveté, two forms of sophistication, first contradicting each other then complementing each other, then cooperating with each other.  At the end of the story, it is clear that something else will happen, but what concerns us most has already been seen:  the women, working through the problem together, despite their other differences.  One will take care of the other if it is necessary, and one will make the other feel significant; and this, perhaps, is one of the fairer exchanges life offers.

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March 30, 2014 · 1:09 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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July 25, 2013 · 10:25 pm

“[W]hen feeling out of sight/For the ends of Being and ideal Grace”–Loving and being loved in high Victorian style

How many times have you heard that we live in a cynical and harshly knowing age of decline? How many great poems have you sighed your way through, wishing that the notable He or She loved you in such and such a way as that, thought of you that way, or wasn’t seeming to be trying to negotiate a trade-off of his or her worst qualities for yours, in which each person accepts the other’s flaws while wanting in secret the best the other has to offer (and where is that best, anyway, that was so notably there “at the beginning”?).  I have a new friend (and this friend is someone in need of a sympathetic ear, so I am doing my best to listen and respond) who has asked me, via e-mail, to try to figure out why her relationship isn’t working out just the way she wants it to.  And the reason she thought of asking me to cogitate and come up with a post on it is because she feels that with my capacious memory of literary love texts and the noble expressions of poets on the subject, I might qualify as a kind of expert.  “Don’t I wish!”  I told her.  Were I an expert, my own love life might be in better shape, Mr. Right would be lovingly languishing and simultaneously flexing his poetic “muscles” at my feet, in short, I would have put my own knowledge to good use for my own benefit.  So far, my moments of hope for the eventual rightness of my individual fate repose in such historical knowledge as that Elizabeth Barrett Browning, though an aging invalid and hemmed in by family disapproval, still managed to enchant Robert Browning to the point that he married her and bore her off to a happier fate than old maidishness.  Today, of course, the concept of being “an old maid” or “a born bachelor” is supposedly outdated, though people cast other sorts of aspersions, suppositions, and assertions at those who stick close to the family or who live alone without a partner, everything from being “a weirdo” to “playing for the other team” to “disliking human interaction.”  The fact is, some people just aren’t as lucky or as outgoing as others, which I suspect is my friend’s case (we’ll call her Lucy).

Though I have never seen Lucy face to face, she communicates that she is of ordinary appearance, not especially pretty nor the reverse, and carries a few extra pounds which come and go with her moods.  She says that she has had romantic interludes and experiences with various men during her lifetime (she is about ten years younger than I, which makes her in her mid-forties), and is willing to have more, with the right party.  But she also reports that she is “sick and tired” (that old phrase!) of going out of her way to try to: 1) meet eligible men 2) get their attention 3) hold their attention through enough dates or encounters to ensure that they are well-enough known to go to that formidable “next step,” intimacy, and 4) win the prize she at least thinks she wants, a long-term or life-time commitment of some kind (Lucy wants a small private wedding ideally, but is not averse to the concept of a permanent partner).  The man currently in her life is not as much in her life as she would prefer.  When I asked her what her favorite poet had said about love (just to get a handle on the assignment she was handing me), she said she had lots of favorite poets, but she liked that poem–what was it?–something about “How do I love thee?”  I sighed.  My task, I could see, in this era of waning romantic faith, was gargantuan by those terms.    Because unwittingly, Lucy had chosen Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the very poet whom I had had in the back of my mind as a fortuitous model for my own hopes!  Let me refresh your memory:  here’s how Sonnet XLIII (from E. B. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese) goes:

“How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways./I love thee to the depth and breadth and height/My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight/For the ends of Being and ideal Grace./I love thee to the level of every day’s/Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight./I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;/I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise./I love thee with the passion put to use/In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith./I love thee with a love I seemed to lose/With my lost saints–I love thee with the breath,/Smiles, tears, of all my life!–and, if God choose,/I shall but love thee better after death.”

That’s goin’ some, ain’t it?  Whoo-ee!  And note the capitalized words “Being,” “Grace,” “Right,” “Praise,” and most of all “God” (Lucy had already confessed to being a partial disbeliever, or at least an agnostic–so what was she wanting to do with and about that “God” crack, as well as the other emphasized words?).  Why is it that we often want what we possibly would not know what to do with if we had it?  Or was Lucy just wanting a shove from the right quarter to make her into some kind of a believer again, if not a religious one, then a believer in high-flown ideals and morals and all the rest of it, or perhaps in high Victorian style alone?  But high Victorian style (when not of the Pateresque and art for art’s sake kind) was based upon genuine belief in the eternal verities, or at least upon knowing where to look for them (as Tennyson himself, the Poet Laureate, said in his long poem In Memoriam, “There lives more faith in honest doubt,/Believe me, than in half the creeds”).  Not to mention that “feeling out of sight for the ends of Being and ideal Grace” is one hell of an attempt to “cop a feel”!  (Sorry, Lucy, my twenty-first century nature couldn’t resist the word play).

But E. B. Browning didn’t just write this sonnet, she wrote the whole series of them.  So, as an attempt to deal seriously with, if not to answer, Lucy’s dilemma, let me quote yet another sonnet by Barrett Browning, and one which, instead of only sounding the noblest sentiments of love, gives credence to a certain sort of pragmatism of love, though it still purports to lead the lover to “eternity.”  In this sonnet, Sonnet XIV, we see the speaker warding off half-way measures and ill-luck, and seeking the best kind of love that it’s possible to have and still be humanly vulnerable:

“If thou must love me, let it be for naught/Except for love’s sake only.  Do not say “I love her for her smile–her look–her way/Of speaking gently–for a trick of thought/That falls in well with mine, and certes brought/A sense of pleasant ease on such a day”–/For these things in themselves, Beloved, may/Be changed, or change for thee–and love, so wrought,/May be unwrought so.  Neither love me for/Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry–/A creature might forget to weep, who bore/Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!/But love me for love’s sake, that evermore/Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.”

Really, all the less noble kinds of love mentioned in this second sonnet are kinds of love we see all around us every day, the physical, the mentally companionable, the charitable–and there are many more less-than-total types of devotion which we are being invited to imagine, as in our own thoughts we ponder these few examples.  But I say that this is a more pragmatic poem than the first because it relies not on so many superlatives of the imagined world we inhabit as it does upon one single one:  “love’s eternity.”  In fact, the only word capitalized for emphasis here is “Beloved.”  There is no appeal to God, or Being, or Grace–the poet’s only claims are that there is love in the present tense of the person being addressed, and that love has some sort of eternity, some longer life, that will persist if the correct attitude is achieved.  Now, where exactly does that leave my friend Lucy?

How does one match the correct attitude to the correct recipient?  Hasn’t it always been that we think we have to find the correct recipient for what we already have estimated that we have to offer?  But perhaps our estimates are off.  If one starts to build a house, and the final cost is more than the estimates, there’s bound to be legal trouble a-brewin’!  So, maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t trust our own estimates of what we have to offer, right?  Maybe we should find a good friend to help us estimate what we can claim to be all about, romantically speaking–but the good friend (in this case, I’ve ended up more or less estimating only my own sense of difficulty in this role) may likewise be too strict or too generous, or enters the human equation with other defects of attitude, capability, or experience.  So, Lucy, here’s my answer to your dilemma, which you asked to see appear on my website:  in this case, attitude-correction and altitude-correction may be the same thing.  If your present lover doesn’t inspire confidence in you with his abilities as you have perceived them so far, rather than reproaching yourself for wanting to be loved as a high Victorian, in punctilious faithfulness and somewhat sentimentalized Romanticism, or reproaching him as do-less, faith-less, without feeling, and the rest of it, try a little forthrightness, which was above all what E. B. Browning was all about.  She not only confessed the “depths” and “breadths” and “heights” of her own love, but told her lover what she wanted, and spelled it out directly and exactly.  And though she still used a word we sometimes scoff at these days (“eternity”), she “came down” from her high altitude up there with “Being” and “ideal Grace” and at least referenced precisely what she had in mind.  So, how should you do this?  If your lover wants to watch burly men bash each other over the head with hockey sticks, make a deal:  you’ll do this if he’ll listen to you read E. B. Browning’s sonnets, at least these two.  I know, you’ve already struck compromises like this, and often they come under the category of doing something I’ve already mentioned in my first paragraph, that is, making a trade-off of your worst qualities (from his point of view, perhaps) for his (perhaps, from yours).  But stick with it.  Give him a chance to express just exactly what he finds over-the-top (or lacking) in your view of love.  After all, E. B. Browning didn’t say that she “saw” what she was angling for immediately when she strove with the equations of love:  she said she was “feeling out of sight/ For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.”  And, to cap this whole quotation-game-with-serious-consequences off, it was her own ideal mate, her husband Robert Browning, who wrote about at least the artistic effort itself that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what’s a heaven for?”  So, since you are looking to the artistic effort of E. B. Browning for inspiration with how to handle your lover, why not look to how her lover might have answered too, accepting that it’s heaven itself which if we believe in it can finally answer all our hopes, but because we are finite at least in this life, we may have to reach and reach and reach, and still be less than perfectly satisfied?  Note that I’m not telling you to “settle,” but why not give your lover a dose of the poetry that you feel frees you up and feeds your soul?  You may find that his notion of the steamy love affair is just as excited by a woman’s poetic voice avowing eternal love as yours is by the idea of seeing strong men forget themselves when possessed by powerful emotions (I’m blurring the lines between love poetry and hockey here to make my point).  Dear Lucy, I hope this piece of writing satisfies some need you’ve felt to have your problem considered as seriously as I know how to consider it, which is to say, with the occasional jest, but no less seriously than I do for myself.  All the best with your man, or failing him, with his potential successor, and the best of hopes for general love and happiness.

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July 9, 2013 · 8:43 pm

Catching up with Aphra Behn–More than 324 years later….

Who was Aphra Behn?  The name has passed by me in literary period histories numerous times, and I’ve always thought, “Oh, yes, research for a more convenient time.  I’ll have to look her up some day.  Important and groundbreaking woman writer, you say?  (What an unusual name!).  Yes, I guess I’ll have to read her sooner or later.”  Perhaps the best brief information which I can supply that simultaneously informs and tantalizes the reader comes from Wikipedia sources, for all the blurb on the book says is that she was “a Restoration poet, novelist, playwright, feminist and spy, considered by many to be the first English professional female writer.”  And as the reader may or may not know, she wrote the first epistolary novel, Love-Letters Between A Nobleman and His Sister, decades before Samuel Richardson first wrote (and got first credit for) his three epistolary novels.  To quote some tidbits from Wikipedia for convenience’s sake:  Aphra Behn was a contributor largely to the “amatory fiction genre of British literature.”  She and two other writers even less famous by name (Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood) were referred to as “the fair triumvirate of wit.”  But all of Behn’s fame, such as it is, is constituted around her adult life:  her early life is more or less a mystery, and features parents of the names of Cooper, or Johnson, or Amis, or Johnston.  One certain fact is that she had some relation to Francis, Lord Willoughby, who was responsible for her real or imagined family trip to Surinam, which trip provoked her most famous work, a novel, Oroonoko:  or, The Royal Slave.  In 1664, she had a short-lived marriage to Johann Behn, a man of German or Dutch extraction.  She may or may not have been Catholic (she said at one point that she was meant to be a nun), but she was definitely a Stuart monarchist and Tory supporter when the parties Tory and Whig emerged.  A bit later, she was drafted as a spy for Charles II to Antwerp, her code name being Astraea, which she also published under afterwards.  Charles, however, didn’t pay his spy, and she was forced to borrow money to return home, where she was placed in a debtor’s prison until an unidentified benefactor in 1669 bailed her out.  After this, she wrote as a scribe for the King’s Company, and from 1670-1689 crafted plays, novels, poems, pamphlets, and one translation of a French popular astronomy guide.  She died on April 16, 1689 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.  Though her writings were disdained as improper during the Victorian era, during the 20th century and since, she has been seen as an important feminist influence and writer upon such issues as slavery, race, gender roles, and sexual desire (sometimes including same-sex groupings and a staple of her own time, transvestitism on the stage).  Now to qualify and expand these remarks with some of my own and others’, based upon three different genres of her writing which I myself read.

Lest you run away with the idea that she is easy to read, be warned:  her writing is full of errors of various kinds, not excluding errors of fact regarding racial and ethnic issues and misspellings and words capitalized for emphasis which we no longer treat so in modern English.  In fact, the modern reader would probably find Shakepeare, an earlier writer, easier to read because he has been so modernized in most versions in print.  Nevertheless, I chose to read “The Unfortunate Happy Lady:  A True History” (a sort of early short story before the form existed formally, in which the paradox in the title is carried out in the fiction); “The Younger Brother; or The Amorous Jilt” (a Restoration comic play, one of her best known, played for the first time posthumously); and her novel Oroonoko:  or, The Royal Slave.  The three different forms, though each example has its faults of writing, show the width of her life experience and sources of reference, and the ease with which she was able to enter into others’ experiences.  I will deal with each briefly here, just to give the reader whose curiosity has been whetted by this strange writer a taste of what she could do.

In “The Unfortunate Happy Lady,” Behn writes a story with a happy ending (I’m not giving you much of a spoiler here, since she herself prevaricates with one in her title).  This concerns a daughter of a family who, her fortunes being left in the care of her dishonest brother, finds herself put by this brother in a bawdy house where she is deprived of her share of the family fortune and left to work out her own compromise with the powers that be.  That’s the unfortunate part of her “history,” though many people might take leave to doubt, by the time they finish the storybook ending, that it’s actually a “true history.”  The lady has good luck, however, because the very first of her intended seducers is a gentleman (and this bit requires that one imagine a gentleman to be a single gentle man who yet might visit a bawdy house and still be a good person, not I suppose the absolute widest stretch of the imagination).  He chases her around the room for a bit but then condescends to hear her story, whereupon he becomes less inflamed with passion and more inflamed with moral outrage that her brother could treat her so (this provides an interesting psychological link, for those concerned to follow it up where it leads, between moral outrage and envy at someone else’s moral freedom from restraint, a link which Freud must surely have mentioned in conjunction with judges and Pharisees somewhere in his works!).  I found this story mildly enjoyable, and it was certainly the shortest work of the three, and supplied the fewest stops and halts for the reading eye trying to penetrate anachronisms in language.

The second piece I read (and I’m persuaded that had I seen a production of it it would have fared better in my judgement) was the play, “The Younger Brother; or, The Amorous Jilt.”  This piece exasperated my patience, but not perhaps by its own fault.  I simply have read too many other and better bits of Restoration playwrighting which are easier and less exhausting to read.  In this piece on nearly every page there is an aside by one character or another, first of all.  Then, there is a proliferation of characters in disguise so eagerly thrown off repeatedly that it’s hard to take up the readers’ “willing suspension of disbelief” and agree to the fiction that others on stage didn’t know who they were when they were in others’ clothes.  Finally, the characters one and all seem to be visited with a kind of casual attitude towards standards of faith and piety of various kinds, not just the “amorous jilt” Mirtilla, but all, even the parent who repeatedly tries to run one son through with a sword and at one point or other wants to disinherit both sons.  It’s a fine excursion into the staples and set pieces and stereotypical actions of Restoration comedy, but it has rather the nature of an imitation of too many plays watched in too rapid succession one after the other, and none of them very original.  It’s again mildly amusing.

Where Behn has her greatest success among the three works I examined is with the novel Oroonoko:  or, The Royal Slave (and I note that these were the only three I had time for in my review of famous women precursors, which I took up a week or so ago with Colette, and which I will continue with Mrs. Gaskell next).  I would first caution the reader of my post to be aware that fashions in political awareness and humanity, like fashions of any kind, age and date, and Aphra Behn was for her time a relatively keen enthusiast of a movement to end slavery.  Her sympathy was many times expressed outright, and moreover the entire slant of her novel was bent toward showing the outrageously unfair and inhumane treatment of one slave in particular.  Nevertheless, in the book the nobility of this slave in character terms was tied to his being royal in lineage terms, a caste preference, and she several times seems to be siding with the white colonists in their fear of their black slaves and the native Americans with whom they also have dealings.  The Africans and native Americans are judged to be beautiful or the reverse often according to how close they come to white standards of beautiful limbs and features, though Behn often comments on the attractiveness of these peoples, “except for” whatever characteristic she finds objectionable.  This is per the writings of her times by other commentators as well, and I suppose that it’s possible that the Africans and native Americans were thinking similar thoughts in reverse, that is, finding the white colonists appealing or the opposite according to native standards of beauty.  The ending is tragic, as of course it had to be, for she was seemingly unable to concede a victory against the white colonists by a slave revolt, though some revolts in history were successful at establishing black colonies elsewhere that were independent of the white colonists and their control.  That is to say, the only way to control white sympathy for her main black character, the prince Oroonoko, was at the time to have him die heroically in vastly outnumbered conditions, in a brutal and repugnant sacrifice of the prince at the stake which, if it is true, is as horrific if not more so than many lynchings in the later established American South.  My best advice for the reader who wants to penetrate this book to its depths is to get a copy of the Norton Critical Edition, edited by Joanna Lipking; this edition has numerous essays and fragments of accounts of the time which add to the experience of the fiction itself, a short novel of only about sixty-five pages.

And this concludes my perhaps too brief and first encounter and my introduction for you of Aphra Behn, a remarkable woman in anyone’s terms, more than 324 years after she herself passed out of this world.  While I cannot say I liked her without reservation, I can without restriction say that it has enriched my knowledge of people and of literature to have read her.  I hope you will cast among her works for some that suit you (and there are many) and be equally surprised and provoked to thought.

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June 20, 2013 · 8:50 pm

Shadows of reality and shades of the imagination in Isabel Allende’s collection “The Stories of Eva Luna”

The storyteller’s art is above all a way of defeating mortality, a way of underlining moralities and playing them off against each other, and a way of leaving one’s mark on the world.  But in The Stories of Eva Luna, the storyteller’s voice drifts like smoke across the scene and disappears from one story to the next, fading out between moments and leaving only a taste of clean, clear water, somewhat in the same way the sand mandalas of the Tibetan monks are visible for a short time then blow away in the next strong wind.  The only continuous thing is thus the spell of words rising and falling and then halting, in fact introducing mortality at key points, sometimes making moral points and sometimes not, and allowing even and especially the storyteller to evade capture by leaving no mark at all behind.  It is not a coincidence that these characteristics coincide with an opening and closing mention in the book of the tale of Scheherazade, for the character Eva Luna narrates tales in bed in this fiction at the request of her lover Rolf Carlé (another character from the original novel Eva Luna, to which this collection of stories is a sequel).

The picture of South American life is what emerges most clearly, whether it is the life of the twentieth century or of the earlier centuries with their conflicts between Spanish conquerors and aboriginal citizens; in fact, history is set at odds in the South American scene of these stories, because the economic climate pictured herein is one in which several histories are being played out at once in the same or near physical space, with the economically privileged citizens living cheek-by-jowl with and in seeming ignorance of or indifference to the native tribes and their traditions.  Indeed, part of the richness and irony of Allende’s portrait of South American life comes from this juxtaposition of different traditions, and in the very midst of this scene, the storyteller takes a central place, and is received differently by different portions of the populace.

There are aristocrats and dictators, peasants and native Indians, prostitutes and degenerates, revolutionaries and banditti, sexy women and virile men, aged men and women of both wisdom and foolish credulity, children who suffer and children whose innocence protects them, and in the middle of all this, the fortune tellers and storytellers and magicians (who are sometimes one and the same) take up their posts.  Yet, in all this richness and confusion, it is clear that this is not reality, but a facsimile, a model of reality touched with the magic of the storyteller’s art, particularly in those places where the more fantastic elements of belief come into play with both Christian and secular miracles, ghosts, curses, places and people who disappear in thin air, reappear, then fade out again, doctors and professors of strange sciences whose cures and discoveries cannot be re-documented.  Yet the story also touches reality in those places where Eva Luna appears as a character, or one of her friends or acquaintances from the novel Eva Luna is woven into one of the dependent stories as a character, sometimes in words very similar to that of their original appearance in the first book.  Thus, the figure of the storyteller sits before us always, and in fact, the first section in the book is one spoken by the lover Rolf Carlé, describing the storyteller as she appears before him just as he asks her for stories.

The book circles back to the reference to Scheherazade in the end with a sad story about a young girl who comes to an unenviable end which Rolf is unable to prevent, and Eva Luna is stricken too, because of her empathy with Rolf.  Rolf is a famous camera man, who has tried to mobilize help for the young girl, but to no avail, and Eva suffers because Rolf’s emotional paralysis is one which has been lying dormant for years under a layer of accomplishment and happiness with her, until the young girl cannot be saved.  I don’t think it ruins the experience of reading the book at all to quote from the last page of the final story “And of Clay Are We Created,” in which the storyteller must cede ground to reality because at a certain point fiction is stricken mute.  She addresses Rolf directly, just as originally in the book he addressed her in his description of her:  “You are back with me, but you are not the same man.  I often accompany you to the station and we watch the videos of [the young girl] again; you study them intently, looking for something you could have done to save her, something you did not think of in time.  Or maybe you study them to see yourself as if in a mirror, naked.  Your cameras lie forgotten in a closet; you do not write or sing; you sit long hours before the window, staring at the mountains.  Beside you, I wait for you to complete the voyage into yourself, for the old wounds to heal.  I know that when you return from your nightmares, we shall again walk hand in hand, as before.”  On the final page just after this, we read:  “And at this moment in her story, Scheherazade saw the first light of dawn, and discreetly fell silent.”  Thus, there are some wounds that storytelling cannot heal, wounds that require private introspection, a kind of private storytelling akin to self-therapy rather than the more public storytelling of having even one other person present.  But paradoxically, by stating this in the story framework, Allende has given the cue and initiated the moment of healing by indicating that it starts with a voyage into self, a fearless exploration of nightmare terrain.  Finally, by reverting back to Scheherazade and the “first light of dawn,” the hope of awaking from nightmare terrain of whatever negative stories we all have privately or share with each other is extended to each of us as we read, and we too see the “first light of dawn” and the preservation of who and what we are for yet another day.  By concurring in this adventure of the storyteller’s art, we thus defeat mortality a little longer, reinforce the humanly shared morality of helping one’s neighbor to live and have joy, and by chalking this reading up to experience, leave our own mark on the world of the imagination, having found yet another thing we can share with others to make all our lives better and richer.

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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 29, 2013 · 9:18 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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