Tag Archives: literary conscience

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 13, 2013 · 5:54 pm

Mark Twain and the importance of deceit in civilization– “Is He Living or Is He Dead?”

Having recently taken into my home yet another waif of a volume found on my local library’s “free” shelf, I began to peruse it this morning and found that Mark Twain, as many of you already know by having read his works, is not only a yarn-spinner but a liar extraordinare.  And he’s proud of the fact!  At least, his writing persona is proud of the fact in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.  And all you have to do is think back on almost any Twain fiction, essay, or diatribe to see that lying is not only one of his favorite topics, but one of his favorite pastimes, from “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to the smallest and least significant essay.  If he’s not advocating a falsehood, he’s practicing one in the full knowledge that the reader is most likely in on the joke, though different readers may have different reactions, some readers being complacent and some of them uncomfortable.

The volume I found myself closeted with this morning was entitled The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays, and was a reprinted volume put together from several other reprinted volumes at some point in time by P. F. Collier and Son Co. in a Harper Brothers edition, a publishing history that reeks of some of Twain’s own invented lines of fictional descent and which would have delighted the great man himself.  In an aside in an essay entitled “My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It,” Twain remarks, “….[A]ll people are liars from the cradle onward, without exception, and…they begin to lie as soon as they wake up in the morning and keep it up, without rest or refreshment, until they go to sleep at night.  If [my parents] arrived at that truth it probably grieved them–did, if they had been heedlessly and ignorantly educated by their books and teachers; for why should a person grieve over a thing which by the eternal law of his make he cannot help?  He didn’t invent the law; it is merely his business to obey it and keep still; join the universal conspiracy and keep so still that he shall deceive his fellow-conspirators into imagining that he doesn’t know that the law exists.”  Of course, in this essay Twain writes a lot about “the lie of silent assertion,” in which people pretend that nothing is wrong when something actually is.  But this quote still distributes itself equably over many situations when people lie out loud about something, as well as practicing the silent lie of assent.

The story in question which I’m commenting on today is one called “Is He Alive or Is He Dead?” from the same volume, and its comedy relies on the fact that often people don’t know 1) who a famous artist is 2) whether he or she is alive or dead and 3) what the value of his or her paintings actually is.  Nor do they want anyone to know that they don’t know, another stock comic device as well as often being an actual fact about people.  In this story, four starving artists (the actual famous artist François Millet makes a cameo appearance) are trying desperately to think of a way to make a living, when nearly no one will buy any of their pictures.  The narrator is one of them, and he lists Millet and two other artists (whom he names Claude Frère and Carl Boulanger) who are in this predicament.  Putting their heads together, they decide to achieve fame via the well-known assertion that dying often makes an author or artist famous whereas he or she could not achieve this status in life by any means.  Taking this as the inspiration for their deception, they “make” Millet the artist who will “die” (actually in their plan he retreats to live in private, hiding while pocketing his share of the proceeds), and so they all paint lots of pictures and studies and sketches as “students” of “the famous Millet” (as they talk him up to people they meet), and he paints many pictures as well.  The other three give out that he is dying or near to dying when they try to sell his paintings and their own studies, and of course the ploy works, and they all become not only respected but much richer than they would otherwise have been.

This case of fradulent art practice is one with which many people can sympathize as long as it’s a case of comedy written by Twain, in which the in extremis condition of starving while trying to make a living off something as high-minded as one’s art provides the average reader with the impetus towards sympathy.  But an art dealer, for example, even one gifted with a genuine interest in tangled histories of art provenance, might be smiling or grimacing even a little more wryly than the average reader in following the artistic quartet’s adventures.  For, there’s a formula to be used in bringing off this kind of artistic triumph, and it goes something like this:  a) a serious situation or need that most or all readers can sympathize with; b) an ingenious idea, so ingenious that the reader feels the temptation of the characters’ own desire to see it employed; c) a discussion of whether or not it’s honest and safe, a strategem which allows the author to engage the reader even more thoroughly by exploring what most people ask themselves about any course of action, whether they have the moral stomach for it and whether it’s any use to try it.  This is a key element in the formula, because it enables the writer to get the convinced reader even more fully on the characters’ side.  Next follows d) at least one example of the stratagem successfully employed, and then the plot is taken as having been acted upon, so there’s no reason not to go on practicing the deceit in question (in terms of the moral equation which says “to lie once is to lie always,” not true if you believe in reformation of character, but nevertheless true in the sense of the story’s fictional structure).  In this case, this last step is a continuation of the fiction that the famous artist (Millet, having become famous in fiction as well as being famous in non-literary fact) is dead.

The entire story is enclosed within an exterior story in which one of the four artists, now a rich man (whom the external narrator “disguises” by naming him “Smith”) tells him the inset story of the four artists because they have seen another rich man (who it turns out is Millet, living under an alias) go out the door of the hotel, and “Smith” wants to tell the narrator the tale.  Why he should want to reveal Millet’s secret to a comparative stranger is the one weak point in the story, but it’s more or less successfully glossed over by the knowledge most people have of quick familiarities between people who travel and end up telling their own life stories to people they meet on the way, comfortable in the knowledge that most likely they won’t see them again.

But there’re two more layers of deceit practiced in this story, and one is that of “Smith,” who see “Millet” and tells the external narrator the story:  it’s the layer in which someone tells an incredible story, and then as proof takes a match out of their pocket and says challengingly, “You don’t believe me?  Here’s the match I had in my pocket when it happened!”  Of course, Smith doesn’t say this to the narrator, but he might as well have–for what’s to prove that the man named Smith isn’t a congenital liar who just happens to see the man he calls “Millet” and dreams up a tale about him, or a creatively inspired liar (a writer!) like Twain?  And then, there’s Twain himself, that arch-fabulist of all fabulists, behind the scenes, no doubt chuckling over every word, even from wherever he is now (and we all know where we go when we keep company with The Father of Lies, as the devil is popularly called)–yet who can help but believe that when confronted with such a solid satirical moralist (as Twain often is) that some god didn’t pass him along to heaven anyway?

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October 14, 2012 · 5:59 pm

“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”–Samuel Beckett sums up a reader’s experience of Kafka’s “The Castle”

A few weeks ago (and it was longer ago than it should have been, because I had a real difficulty forcing myself back to Franz Kafka’s The Castle every time I put it down), I decided that since Kafka is so very important to existentialism and existentialism is not only so monumental in 20th century thought but is also still healthy and well in portions of some contemporary novels, books, and plays, I should read him.  The only Kafka I’d read before was “The Metamorphosis,” and I quite enjoyed it, so I expected equally well to enjoy The Castle.  Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for my finally getting the point of the book), it was no such thing!

After the first few chapters, I found the book painful to pick up (in the attention-span sense), excruciating to make my way through, and delightful to put down.  I read it at long intervals interspersed with other things of more interest and apparent moment, and took it as in the old days people took their castor oil in the spring, as a sort of needful and necessary tonic.  Definitely I appreciated all the variety and color of the other works I was reading much, much more by contast with The Castle.  Not making it any easier was the fact that there were insertions which had to be made periodically and read with the understanding that they had been in one version of the book and not in another, and the book’s tangled history of revision and translation was against me, was, in fact, truly Kafkaesque (now I really, really know what that word means whereas before I merely threw it around as a synonym for “existential”; there is a difference, because “Kafkaesque” means something more like “existential” plus “evilly absurd and apparently pointless, though endlessly involved”).

The basic situation is even too complicated to explain at length, though I’ll make a start at it:  “K.,” the main character, is travelling at night and comes to an inn where he is allowed to stay on a bag of straw in the parlor.  But in the middle of the night, a castellan from a previously unmentioned castle which dominates village protocol wakes him and insists that he does not have the right to stay without permission from the castle itself.  Though there has been no previous statement that K. is a land-surveyor on the way to a job, and in fact he doesn’t at first even seem to know where he is, he says that he has been called to do work, and they take him at his word!  The castle, when contacted over the phone, even acknowledges that he has been called.  From there on, the absurdities rapidly proliferate, with different bureaucrats from the castle and village endlessly complicating the affair by the good or bad ways in which they receive K., and the manner in which they quickly change the tenor of their remarks to him from favorable to unfavorable at the drop of a hat.  Each man and woman, it seems, has a vision of his or her own importance to the castle, and though they seem always to understand amongst themselves how the game of changing places and importances is played, K. himself remains on the outside, always at the mercy of whomever he happens to be speaking to at the moment and their quick-change artists’ psychologies, even when he is talking to Frieda, a woman to whom (for once acting as quickly as the rest) he has become affianced.  Nor does this connection avail him of anything much but a momentary peace, however, for his relationship with Frieda unravels nearly as easily as the rest, and he goes on trying to find other routes than Frieda to Klamm, an important bureaucrat whose previous involvement with Frieda he’d hoped to capitalize on in order to get ahead.

I did read the book until the end, and read the revisions, and deleted passages, and continuations.  One of the more intriguing bits of information which has accumulated about the book is that Kafka said (to his friend and executor Max Brod) before he himself died that he was planning to have K. the land-surveyor be told on his deathbed that though he himself had not technically acquired a legal place in the village, because of “‘certain auxiliary circumstances'” it is going to be allowed for him to stay there.  It’s been a long time since I’ve been so glad to see the end of any book I’ve read.  And I have to recognize that so many people before me can’t be wrong:  the book is a monumental work of art (and is monumentally boring as well).  It’s one of those works of art that once done, cannot be done again in a like manner by anyone else, though I’ve run across lots of books now which have been called “Kafkaesque.”

Then, my mind was jogged by Thomas Mann’s tribute to Kafka, in which he called The Castle one of Kafka’s “warmhearted fantasies” and suggested that like The Trial it might cause people to break into open laughter if they heard it read aloud.  I remembered my frustration with the book: was I really so off-target?  After all, when I thought of Samuel Beckett’s remark from “Waiting for Godot,” (“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”), isn’t that the reaction I was actually having?  And the fact is that even though people are constantly coming and going in Kafka’s book, nothing really happens!  The awfulness I was so in angst over was what was making others capable of laughter in Mann’s view!  The only end that is really suitable to the whole experience is the one Kafka confided to Brod before his own death, and later recanted about, also to Brod, telling him that he planned to leave the work unfinished!  Now, finally, I understood.

There is, however, another darker side to the book, and it’s one which I would give myself credit for having apprehended from the start.  It’s the notion which I’ve seen articulated in several places, that evil is not really a derring-do procedure of demons and imps and ghosts and horrible hallows; evil can, in fact, have something boring and procedural about it.  The lack of moral imagination and dullness of mind which endless days and nights of bureaucratically following an unscrupulous leader bring about, for example, might be mentioned.  Hannah Arendt has mentioned them, in reference to Eichmann, in Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil.  There, she says, “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us–the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”  How many people in concentration camps must’ve been affected by the way in which, when they appealed to human empathy, to their Gods, even, it might have seemed that “nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes” (except Death), until the final devastating end of the war, when the great insults and affronteries that human life had borne became so evident that no one could deny or ignore them anymore?  And it’s still much the same today:  the same calculations of number of bullets and guns needed, number of missiles at the ready, the same mind-numbing statistics about casualties to one side’s or the other’s blame, the same helplessness of refugees and starving peoples, and the recurrent mutilations of the weak and innocent, and we continue the evil pattern.  Even Kafka, though he and his friends apparently laughed until tears came when he read them his other great work, The Trial, which Thomas Mann tells us “deals explicitly with the problem of divine justice,” might have been stricken to silence and have been unable to laugh.

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October 8, 2012 · 12:22 am

“You are no bigger than the things that annoy you”–Jerry Bundsen, and why I am a very small person

Today, I had planned to get up, have morning coffee, and write a sterling post on a fascinating topic (or at least on a topic which intrigued me long enough to enable me to invest my attention in it wholly for the time it usually takes me to write a post.  Whether my readers find these topics equally fascinating is a matter for them to tell me, I hope in the “comments” sections).  Then, I’d thought, I’d have a leisurely breakfast.  Next would come a trip to my building’s gym and twenty to thirty minutes of exercise and weight-lifting (I know, I know, I’m a weakling, but supposedly the way to build up graceful muscles rather than bulk is to do it gradually, every day, with some exercises in particular no more than every other day).  After this, aglow with energy and good health,  I was to come back up and read my primary e-mail, which I nearly always enjoy doing on a Sunday because so many of the websites I’m following are active with others’ comments on that day; also, I get a certain increase in comments on my own on some of the weekends.  Next, I was going to read, read, read from some books I have out of the library to try to get them done before I have to return them, no more renewals allowed.  Then lunch, then writing on my fifth novel, which is underway  but stalled right now.  Finally three o’clock coffee and a final burst of exercise for the day in the form of a forty-minute walk and some sit-ups.  After that, I only had to work in dinner, and then I would be able to relax and watch a Poirot mystery on PBS after “The Simpsons,” and then bedtime and more reading.  Ideally, I also had to work in time to wash my hair, listen to some music while I did laundry, and a few other odds and ends, but these things were not essential to a good Sunday, so I knew I could let them slide if I had to.

Does anything strike you as odd about this list?  Such as, perhaps, that I had planned way too much for one day, and was doomed to disappointment?  Yes, maybe, but what strikes me about it even more is that I neglected to take account of the fact that it’s very hard, almost impossible, to get on a computer for other chores and not read your e-mail.  It’s just human nature, I think, on a hazy, warmish Sunday morning when the sun is out just a bit to want to interact with other humans in some way or other, even if only through e-mail and comments and website postings, three things I really enjoy inordinately.  And there’s where the devil entered, because I have two different e-mail programs (this may be normal for you, but I got along for almost ten years with only one), my primary one which is connected to this website and a secondary one which only posts me new info about twice a month, and which I have never learned to work quite properly.  The upshot of this is that I have become negligent (oh, why? oh, why?), and read it only about once or twice a month.

What took my time from about 8:00 this morning until about 3:00 this afternoon?  Trying to get this e-mail program to do things anything like the way my other program does (which is easy and self-evident in the way it operates), in order to read roughly 98 e-mails that had suddenly come through.  And none of these messages were spam or junk or anything like that, but verifiable messages from reputable senders which had to be at least glanced at before I could go on to the next message.  I worked diligently, but I simply could not master all of the options and operations on the secondary e-mail.  Periodically, I took a break:  I got sick to my stomach once with anxiety, which occasionally happens when I have too many things to attend to;  I made sure I had my daily coffees (which on second thought probably wasn’t great for the stomach issue); I ate lunch at about 3:00.  The rest of the time I and a willing and intelligent helper with more computer experience than I do tried and tried to get the e-mail program to work.  Finally, the best we could do was to read all the e-mail and put the things it turned out I didn’t need into the delete file, and respond to a few things.  Whew!  What an ordeal!

None of the other chores got done except for the 40 minute walk and sit-ups and dinner of a sort, the exercise being good for getting rid of some tension and dinner good for a little further relaxation, once it was done.

Do you see now why–considering the size of the things that annoy me, vis-à-vis the title of this post–that I consider myself a “small” person (in literal terms, I’m a stocky 5’9″)?  It’s because the very things which compose some people’s daily routine defied me (a series of computer glitches and problems which originate in conundrums much more serious than a simple lack of knowledge about which thing to click on, a full schedule which doesn’t allow for any wiggle room in order to get lots of things done correctly).  In fact, it wasn’t so much that I was defied by computer problems as that I allowed myself to be upset (I didn’t mention I was upset?  I raised my voice in talking to the computer, in talking to my kind helper, I swore like the proverbial sailor, I banged my hands on the table, I held my head in my hands, and other such signs of sturm und drang).

So, what is the answer to being a “larger” person?  I did thank my helper after we were done; I tried to show some humor about my previous upset.  I ate a light dinner, so that I could get a good night’s sleep, ready to start again tomorrow.  I’m very low energy right now (this is a real-time post!), so if my post seems silly to you or bitchy, that may be why.  In truth, in the same way people tell us that we never really make up lost sleep, so also maybe we never really make up for badly invested energy.  At least, however, I can feel that the energy I’ve spent in writing this post has been well-invested, if only in the sense that it may operate as a cautionary tale:  don’t be as “small” and petty as to allow yourself so much self-indulgent emotion.  It’s that complicated, and that simple.  Though I was myself only good at meditation and yoga for a brief time of my life (when life was simpler anyway!), find some way to take yourself out of what is bugging you, or at least some way of recovering your equilibrium periodically while you are trying to address your difficulties.  Otherwise, you will need to acknowledge to some other people who may be expecting to see you or hear from you or read you (as I owed you, my readers, a post earlier today) that you are, at least upon occasion, a “small” person.  Here’s hoping you don’t mind hearing from me anyway!

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October 5, 2012 · 4:24 pm

“Why I Transformed Myself Into a Nightingale”–Wolfgang Hildesheimer and choice of form

At first reading, “Why I Transformed Myself Into a Nightingale” is a light, frivolous, playful short story featuring a fantastic tale of episodes in the life of a magician.  The first paragraph which begins the story is even fantastic while it sounds rather dry and factual in form, because the “magician” is telling the story after the transformation has taken place, when (presumably) all he can do is sing.  We therefore are entering his fantastic world from the first moment, because it would seem (from his bothering to explain to us his choice) that we can understand the nightingale’s “words” in his song:  “Acting on the strength of my convictions, I transformed myself into a nightingale.  Since neither the reason nor the resolve necessary for this sort of action lies within the realm of the ordinary, I think the story of this metamorphosis is worth telling.”  Yet, as will emerge, both the “reason” and the “resolve” are a great deal more easily understandable for readers than what the narrative voice asks us to believe, which is that he mastered the art of turning people into animals.  We are asked to accept the totally fantastic in addition to a tale of a man being in a rather ordinary though selfish frame of mind, or at least one which is ordinary by comparison.

The speaker begins by telling us about his parents, his father being a zoologist, his mother an actress.  It is almost as if the practical and the (aesthetically) magical meet in his family history and descent thus.  He describes the magic kit they give him to amuse himself with, which he soon masters and discards when he reads the condescending legend on it, “The Little Magician.”  Later, he asks for regular magic lessons and is caught up in giving performances for those who know him well.  A noticeable change comes about in the magician’s attitude toward what he does, however, as he grows up:  “I outgrew my teacher and began experimenting on my own.  I didn’t neglect my academic education, though.  I read a lot and went around with school friends whose patterns of development I observed.  One friend who had been given an electric train in his childhood was preparing for a career with the railroad; another who had played with tin soldiers decided on a career as a military officer.  In this way, the work force was regulated by early influences.”  Nevertheless, the magician is at least convinced that he himself is not influenced by early training, though it becomes obvious through his later “choice of form” that he is deceiving himself.

As he tries to select a career, a very telling notion occurs to him, which shows that as a person he is on the surface more concerned with ethics than others of his age.  Yet, he too ends up making “ethical” choices which clearly show in a fantastic way that he has not entirely escaped “interference” in the lives of others, which he says he is trying to avoid:  “[I had a] growing awareness that I couldn’t select a conventional, bourgeois profession without in some way interfering with other people’s lives….When I came to this realization, I came to yet another, namely that only the momentary state of things can be perceived, that it is merely idle speculation to try to draw conclusions or gather knowledge from experience.  I decided to spend my life in leisure and contemplate nothing.  I got two turtles, sat down on a lounge chair, and watched the birds above me and the turtles beneath me.  I had given up magic because my art had reached a state of perfection.  I felt that I was able to change people into animals [emphasis mine].  I didn’t make use of this ability, though, because I believed that this sort of interference into another person’s life was completely unjustifiable.”  Yet at the same time, the narrator reports that he himself has a strong desire to become a bird, because it leads what he calls a “pure existence.”  He is thinking on one level that he cannot interfere with anyone else, yet he is thinking on another that “I need[] only a test of my art” to know for sure if he can change people into animals!

As with every story of temptation, once he imagines the possibility, an “opportunity” comes along to test his powers.  A friend, Mr. Werhahn, comes to visit, and is full of complaints about the journalists whom he manages as an editor.  He happens in the midst of his complaints to catch sight of the speaker’s turtles and desolately remarks that he would like to be a turtle.  And, it’s no sooner said than done, though if our speaker had really meant what he says about non-interference, of course, he wouldn’t so readily have interpreted the remark as a factual, genuine expression of desire to be transformed.  Upon the instant, he has three turtles, though offering the reader a sop, he says, “(Just for the record, I’d like to assure you that I purchased the other two animals as such.)”  This is a very comical version of the sort of thing people say when they are making excuses for other excesses.

Next, “I used my art one other time before my own metamorphosis.”  In this case, however, the magician feels some degree of compunction, symbolically because it has to do with music, an art form in which one, while singing lyrics, may express many emotions which are contrary-to-fact.  This second case also has to do with birds, living as which may not appeal to others as it does to the speaker (to enter for a moment into his odd world).  He is sitting at an inn under a tree drinking apple cider, when five young girls come along and start singing a song, in which a speaker expresses a desire to be a sparrow.  The narrator is annoyed by their sounds, and so takes their words as factual:  he changes them into sparrows.  Though the reader may see no real difference in the two cases of transformation so far described, the narrator says that his worry is because “I had the feeling that I had acted emotionally, under the influence of my (certainly justified) irritation.  I thought that this wasn’t worthy of me, so I decided not to delay my own metamorphosis any longer.”  He assures us that he is not afraid of prosecution, because of course he could change his pursuers into “toy fox terriers!  It was more the certainty that, for technical reasons, I would never find the unspoiled peace I needed for the pure enjoyment of things, undisturbed by the will.  Somewhere a dog would always bark, a child scream, or a young girl sing.”

He decides to change himself into a nightingale because he likes the idea of flight from place to place and ironically enough “I wanted to sing because I love music.  The thought that I would interfere in the life of someone else whose sleep I might disturb did occur to me.  But now that I am no longer human, I have put away my human thoughts and interests.  My ethic is now the ethic of a nightingale.”  The real question here is whether he ever really had a human ethic, a human relationship to others, which would enable him to see their point of view.

Thus, this story about a choice of form is a meditation upon what it is really to enter into the pains and sufferings and also the joys of other human beings without wanting to change them.  Many serious ethical world texts express the idea that we cannot change the world, only ourselves.  But the ultimately selfish, egotistical/egoistical narrator comes to this belief only from a limited point of view, not because he wants to master and control his own worst impulses, but with regret because he cannot have total control over what is going on around him.  Yet, Hildesheimer is always light of touch, and we can see that this story is not only about a choice the narrator has made, to be a beautifully trilling bird perched on a branch in the dark night singing, but a choice the author has made likewise, to be a storyteller who gets across singingly in few words some of the same points that a long, anguished, and argumentative treatise on ethics might do.  We may of course remember that magic is also known as “legerdemain,” or lightness of hand.  The story is written almost as a parody of the sort of speech, partly cautionary and partly leadership-oriented, that an important public figure might be expected to give to students who are trying to choose a career, and this is where the author’s appeal is especially notable.  Is it a case of “don’t do what I did,” or is it a case of “this is what makes me particularly suited to stand before you today”?  The story almost seems to suggest that all along the character is deficient of human moral considerations, and thus is better off as a nightingale, with “the ethics of a nightingale,” those which he seemed to start out with.  Yet, the whole piece is one which a reader may be enchanted by, and may read through with whimsy, almost without noticing the seriousness of it.  As the narrator says finally, “Now it is May.  It is dusk, and soon it will be dark.  Then I begin to sing, or, as humans say, strike up my song.”

I have given some long quotes from this story, and more or less summed up the action, yet there is still a great deal to be gotten from it, and those interested in what I’ve written should certainly read it for themselves.  For one thing, there’s the moral/magical question of why, when most magic tricks involve the restoration of order once the “trick” is done (the egg is put back together somehow, the assistant is shown to be still in one piece), the narrator cannot change his friend back from a turtle to a human, or why the girls cannot be changed back from sparrows?  And who exactly is the public speaker/nightingale voice narrating?  What do you think?  A truely magical story, wouldn’t you say?

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September 6, 2012 · 1:27 am

Why can’t we take the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy seriously (for a change) and see how it works (or doesn’t)?

Yes, I confess, I’m one of those people who don’t hear about a publishing sensation until most of the public excitement and in this case notoriety is over; I don’t get to read most books until the library carries them, since my book budget is growing smaller and smaller these days.  So, though I did hear about Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels, I heard about it in a murmurous brook-like current, far away from the great hue and cry of the reading mainstream.  Once I knew just what the debate was all about, I thought to myself, “Well, it sounds like absolute garbage and malarkey, but you should never condemn anything you haven’t read, at least not without giving it a cursory glance.”  I’m glad I did read the first book.  Not because I found it good, however, but because I gave it a fair shot.  I had to persuade myself to continue reading after that, having already assured everyone whose opinion I respect in the literary field that I probably wasn’t going to continue with the second and third volumes.  Having done so anyway, I now can say that there’s no need to take it down with the sort of overwrought negative hype which is diametrically opposed to the positive hype of the advertisers; all you have to do is attempt to take the book seriously, and that in itself dispels it as any sort of major contender for lengthy spans of attention.

First, let’s take the characters and ethos/psychology.  The greatest amount of the time spent in all three novels (Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed) is spent in steamy sex scenes between the two main characters, Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey.  This is true despite the fact that the female character enters the novel as a sort of maladept Keystone Kop, full of slapstick awkwardness and social incapacity.  Though there’s a certain way in which she is a true-to-life girlish, giggling, virginal walking orgasm in the making, the amount of intentional or unintentional humor directed at her in the first 25-35 pages or so makes it hard to take her as a serious contender for the passion of a darkly threatening, sophisticated, rich, mysterious male lead, though this is not a fault of these books alone but one which they share with the modern romance genre in general.  It does make it harder to believe, perhaps, that Christian Grey is a dominant male, or Dom, in a BDSM sort of preferred role, inasmuch as even someone who likes to encounter submissives, or Subs, must surely find such a dishrag as Anastasia Steele no challenge to his imagination.  The text, of course, makes the point again and again of telling us that she is subverting his power and challenging him in ways in which he has never been challenged by anyone else, and they are constantly celebrating a series of “firsts” with each other.  For he too is trying to change her, and it’s here that the characterization isn’t really strong enough to sustain the claims of the plot:  they are both trying and hoping to change the other to some extent, certainly in the first book, and to a certain extent in the other two as well.  And as we have been often told by professionals such as psychologists, marriage counselors, and statisticians, not to mention novelists, relationships don’t survive well in which people go in expecting to be able to change the other person from whom they were when they met each other.  Furthermore, we are asked to believe that Grey’s development of self-awareness comes from the interaction not only with his therapist, but also with Anastasia; but the facts of therapy and relationships, as we have often heard, are that we must not only want to make changes ourselves, but must take it upon ourselves to make these changes, no matter how we are accompanied.  Yet over and over again, Grey shows himself to be recalcitrant and difficult, in fact as if he really does have a split personality, a diagnosis word which E. L. James throws off casually without fulfilling the adequate terms of the diagnosis.  As to the BDSM going on in the novel, I’m not going to pretend either that I am competent to judge it or that I am shocked by it:  though I doubt that it would convince aficionados of that sort of relationship, there is enough petty meanness in most of us that we can at least imagine being a dominant, bossy, demanding individual, and enough pusillanmity that we can at least imagine what it is to bow to someone else’s will constantly.  I also doubt that it is a fantasy romance meant to appeal to BDSM experts, but rather think it is meant to titillate the more adventurous of ordinary readers.  A few posts here and there have spoken to this fact, and I bow (figuratively speaking) to superior experience and knowledge.  The other characters fill the roles of friends, friends who have mirroring romances, jealous and envious enemies, and supernumeraries.  Perhaps the most interesting negative character is the aptly named Jack Hyde, though he is a standard suspense-novel villain strayed into the romance genre.  There’s never really any doubt that he will get his, though the “his” is not the one he was striving for; first of all, he’s totally outmanned and outgunned by Grey’s “troops” and Anastasia’s late-but-at-last-arriving good sense, and he turns out to have an interesting connection with the past.  This suspense element is what actually helps drive the rather tired third novel, and is the main thing that keeps what interest it has going, since any reader who’s still speculating about what Anastasia and Christian will get up to on any occasion when they are alone in a room for more than one minute–or, in fact, when they are in public and are not the immediate focus of attention–has a seriously lagging imagination.  Also interesting is the late introduction of Hyde’s female accomplice, a not totally convincing but still more intriguing than not plot development.  What’s somewhat distressing in the series is that in opposition to an abusive male figure in Christian’s past and the character Jack Hyde in Anastasia’s and Christian’s present, there is no counterbalance of good except Anastasia herself.  As she says at one point, she wants to be Christian’s “Alpha and Omega.”  This is to say, in quite literal Biblical terms, that she wants to be God.  Though I don’t mean to suggest that the book necessarily needs a god or gods (though she has an “inner goddess” and a “subconscious” both mentioned overtly and constantly throughout the book), it seems somewhat impious even from an agnostic’s point of view to suggest that one human being can play this role for another.  She is, in fact, wanting to be dominant in an overweening way herself if this is to be taken seriously.

Next, I would like to comment on the language in the novels, which has amused and bemused more commentators on the book than one.  Put in simple terms, the books are very badly written, and need a good editing job from several different perspectives.  The simplest criticism one can make has been made by a number of people before now:  that is, that James does not distinguish between the slang terminology of America, where the action of the novels largely takes place, and the slang of England, which is often used instead.  “Packages” are therefore “parcels” and “strollers” or “baby buggies” are “prams,” among the least confusing things.  Far more serious, however, is the bad grammar and style.  This also kept me laughing irreverently from page to page here and there.  The constant repetition of words and phrases to convey emotions and actions which were repetitive but which good writing would have portrayed with varied language was part of the problem.  For example, when aroused, the female character very often thinks to herself “Oh my” in italics.  When she’s being approached sexually in a way unfamiliar to her, she acts almost as if shocked and indicates the area of touch concerned as “down there.”  She’s constantly either “biting her lip” or “flushing crimson.”  And the male character after a certain point in the action in which he has spanked her is said to have a “twitchy hand”; he also “pouts” at her in a corresponding attention-grabbing way to her lip-biting.  Thus, the characters don’t really develop, despite indications in the outright story to the contrary:  they simply follow a series of repetitious prompts, a code of sorts to let the reader know what’s coming (so to speak).  The bad grammar is much more obtrusive, however, and of that the dangling and misplaced modifiers in phrases and clauses are the most offensive.  To take one example from the second book, when the two characters are on the man’s catamaran and he is enjoying strapping her into a life vest, we read a sentence something like this (bear with me as I try to reconstruct it, the book has already been returned to the library):  “Being secured, he grinned and patted her arm” or whatever.  The problem there is that “being secured” modifies (reflects meaning on) “he,” not on her or her vest, not mentioned in the sentence in question.  And it does no good grammatically speaking to say “you know what she means, though,” because good grammar and good writing depends not on these kinds of contraband understandings, but upon obvious accuracy.  What this sentence in fact says is perhaps accurate to what some people think of the books as a whole, that the character Christian Grey would be better off to himself and everyone else were he restrained in a tight straitjacket (never mind the even more amusing question of how, once restrained, he managed to pat anything, however much he might be grinning maniacally.)  An even more ridiculous example which I’ve racked my brains to recollect exactly but which escapes me at the moment occurs when the misplaced modifier tells us that Christian’s erection is doing something that an erection unequipped with additional limbs simply could not do.  Inanimate objects as well sometimes take on the characteristics which almost certainly are meant to apply to the characters themselves.

Now as to the modern romantic novel tradition that the book is written in, I think that using the higher number of openly sexual scenes, the book does a reasonable job of making overtly physical the mostly emotional sadomasochistic tendencies of the average romance novel.  Teasing the reader is of course the game not only in romances but in suspense and mystery novels, and there are wee portions of the latter two in this romance as well, concerning the mystery of Christian’s past, the suspense of what will happen when Jack Hyde has the upper hand of the main characters, et cetera.  But it’s not just a matter of teasing the reader with the typical reversals and re-reversals of fortune that occur in almost any novel, popular or not:  the usual romance novel in fact plays off a sort of emotional sadomasochism which often subsists in the relationships between women and men.  Sometimes, it’s the sufferings of the boy-next-door who finally gets angry at the girl for momentarily preferring an apparently more vigorous lover, sometimes it’s the girl-next-door who, like Anastasia Steele, is deeply in love with a richer, more sophisticated man who doesn’t treat her in an easily understandable way.  Whichever variation on the forms it is, there is a certain amount of cruelty in the characters’ relationships, a degree of deliberate melodrama and perversity, which governs the way the plot unfolds.  All I’m suggesting is that this trilogy of novels makes these things into overt sexual acts, however well or badly they are portrayed, however realistically or not.

Lastly, you may wonder about my qualifications for making judgements concerning a novel series of this kind, considering that I have heretofore prided myself on writing about already acclaimed and worthy works of literature about which there has on that matter been little contest.  Let’s just say that I read a fair amount of mindless modern romantic drivel in my adolescence, and these three novels, though catering to that same impulse only for an at least slightly older demographic, isn’t the worst I’ve read, which tells you yes, these things can get pretty bad before they exhaust the patience of addicted readers.  This has in fact been an odd sort of holiday for me from the serious literature I generally cover; now, however, I look forward to rejoining the works of critical merit and worth which render so much more in the way of valuable reading experiences.  Here’s to all you readers of quality works who’ve occasionally stepped off the straight and narrow and felt embarrassed, but not known where to look about your guilty secret–since E. L. James stepped on the scene, the opportunity to read something literarily neglectful, occasionally boring, and sometimes just plain bad has increased exponentially:  I leave the knowledge, I feel safely, in your competent hands.

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August 29, 2012 · 3:43 pm

Life strategies suggested by a poem by Seamus Heaney

Just how often, when you are smarting from some sort of a blow to your pride, equilibrium, feelings, intelligence, or perhaps more life-endangering, your physical person, has some other well-meaning and ultimately interfering soul muttered “Oh, well, we should all learn to turn the other cheek…”?  And usually their remark trails off into an infinity of foolish remarks, because most people do not suffer either fools or bullies or well-meant interference gladly, and you (listening to this from them), however much you are a follower of Scripture or perhaps only an admirer of some of the wisdom there, find other bits of doctrine hard to swallow.

Your hour has come!  Rather, it came back in 1996, when Seamus Heaney told the other side of the “turn the other cheek” story in his poem “Weighing In.”  This poem came to my attention first because it’s one of my brother’s favorites, and I felt compelled to read it and compare it with the man I know and see just what made the poem (and him!) tick.  Before I go any further with this, I should say that my brother is a very erudite and accomplished university teacher, who puts up with a great deal and never complains, or at least he seasons his complaints with the salt of jest, which never grows old.  He never complains about his students to me, of course, because his students don’t ask him computer questions and don’t ask him to design websites the way his sister has until recently.  But according to the poem, I’m not just supposed to say mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa and let it go at that.  I’ll try to give, in my prosaic and ultimately less interesting flow of words, some sense of what Seamus Heaney has to say on this subject in his poem “Weighing In,” which comes from his collection “The Spirit Level” (in Ireland, a spirit level is what we refer to as a “carpenter’s level” in the U. S.  You know, that straight hunk of wood or metal which has a little window full of liquid in the middle of it–when the liquid bubble is exactly in the middle of the window, then the surface you have it placed on is level!).

Heaney begins the poem “Weighing In” by describing another piece of builder’s machinery, a “56 lb. weight.”  He characterizes it as a “solid iron/Unit of negation.”  His main point in the first few stanzas of the poem is that it’s nearly too heavy to lift at all until placed upon a weighbridge (which holds another balancing weight on it).  Then, “everything tremble[s], flow[s] with give and take.”

Having established his governing metaphor thus in the first four stanzas of his poem, he goes on to consider what this imagery means in human terms:

“And this is all the good tidings amount to:/This principle of bearing, bearing up/And bearing out, just having to/Balance the intolerable in others/Against our own, having to abide/Whatever we settled for and settled into/Against our better judgement.  Passive/suffering makes the world go round./Peace on earth, men of good will, all that/Holds good only as long as the balance holds/The scales ride steady and the angels’ strain/Prolongs itself at an unearthly pitch.”

But having enunciated this poetic and sparse and tightly and neatly rhetorical principle in its human terms, Heaney goes on in the next section of the poem to elucidate what the two sides of the balance are in Scriptural terms, the part of the balance we’re familiar with hearing in terms of Christ’s “turning the other cheek” and the less familiar (if in realistic fact more common) command to “refuse the other cheek.”  For Heaney sees the knuckling down to others’ whims and egos as humoring “The obedient one you hurt yourself into,” a question therefore of masochism (though this makes a somewhat more simplistic idea of his intricate and involved picture of the emotional and psychological elements involved).  He suggests that what Christ did in fact when the soldiers were mocking him was to exercise “the power/Of power not exercised, of hope inferred/By the powerless forever.”  Then, he begs the party addressed in the poem, “just this once,” to say who hurt him or her, “give scandal, cast the stone.”

Finally in this mastery of poetical imagery and argument, he brings the poem down even more to the personal level and a specific time (“one night when follow-through was called for”) and apologizes for having withheld retaliation for a remark from his friend which required a swift and presumably angry rejoinder, and says that he thus “lost an edge.”  The last two lines of the poem tell us that this was a “deep mistaken chivalry,” and that “At this stage only foul play cleans the slate.”

This poem is a vital and thorough recognition not only of the struggles we go through in making and holding on to our accomplishments and strengths, but also of the difficulties we encounter in making and holding on to friends.  In relatively small space, the poem links our friends to our innermost habits of response and self:  do we forgive too readily, do we take offense too easily?  Is there a middle ground?  Can “chivalry” be “mistaken,” can we be too gentle with a friend?  And just when does a friend need to hear from us that he or she has gone too far, and not from the point of view of our own concerns only?  The entire question of a fair balance is, after all, what hangs in the balance.

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August 23, 2012 · 4:36 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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July 25, 2012 · 12:45 pm

“Imagination is a good servant, but a bad master.”–Unknown

Before starting on my topic for today, I’d like to ask anyone who knows where this quote comes from to respond with the author’s name.  I couldn’t find the source of the quote after a lot of looking, so I’d like to be able to attribute it to someone specific (it’s one of my favorite quotes).

Now then, down to business.  A few days ago, I wrote a post headed by a quote from Herman Melville which read, “Dream[ing] horrid dreams, and mutter[ing] unmentionable thoughts….”  Those of my friends who read the post commented to me in private (why, oh why, didn’t they post a comment, to open this issue to discussion?).  They said that in showing a sense of humor about women possibly being buried under the floorboards of a castle by men, a scenario which might well occur in a Gothic novel (I deliberately said “castle”–after all, how many of us ever do more than tour in one of those?), I was being too “glib” about some of the truly dreadful things that happen to women at the hands of men.  I was merely trying to make the point that in ordinary day-to-day life, too much imagination or imagination ill-used can lead us to view our loved ones askance unfairly (chances are if either men or women find themselves imagining too much too often, there’s something wrong in the relationship–at least one side of the equation isn’t happy).

The friend who was the main instigator in challenging me about this pointed out that with the recent shootings in Aurora, CO and all the other gun-related crimes that have occurred in recent history, as well as all the times in the late 20th-early 21st century when men have been known to abuse/do away with their wives and girlfriends, I should’ve shown more restraint in my sense of humor about Gothic notions.

First of all, these are two separate issues unless you’re firm and sure in your mind (as I can’t say I am yet) that things are totally worse now than they ever have been.  As to all the mass shootings which have occurred in the time span I’ve referred to, yes, I do think those are worse, and I can only recommend Diane Feinstein’s point, that we urgently need more and better gun control.

About the second issue, however, I would ask whether we really have more instances of abuse/killings of women by men than we’ve ever had, or whether it’s simply a matter of the men being oftener discovered and, one hopes, prosecuted for their crimes.  While this view of the crime passionnel, as it’s called, takes a dimmer view of men’s goodness in the first light (that is, men are doing nothing new), it takes a more hopeful view of the penalties men must pay for their criminal excesses these days.  Better investigation means more correct arrests (aided of course by the press when it is a responsible one), which means more adequate prosecution (again, one hopes.  My discussion lacks statistics, but where would we look, exactly, for reliable statistics on sexual savagery down through all of history?).

And it is in this light of the whole discussion of the issue that I raise the thought that both humor (taking things less seriously because one winces at them) and heightened Gothic horror (taking things at a fever pitch of seriousness because one shivers at them) are both defense mechanisms against what is too dreadful actually to be taken lightly in any real sense.  So, I like to think that in the space of a post I have dealt squarely with the issues my friend(s) raised.  I do, however, reserve both the right to joke about things that make me (and possibly you) uncomfortable–and by this means perhaps to relieve some of the tension–and the right and obligation to take things seriously when requested to do so.  Here’s to my friends and readers, for their forbearance and this topic for discussion.  Please leave a comment at any time:  your input is valuable.

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