Tag Archives: literary topics

April 7, 2013 · 6:19 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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April 1, 2013 · 9:49 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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March 29, 2013 · 9:18 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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March 22, 2013 · 6:13 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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March 21, 2013 · 3:59 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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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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March 14, 2013 · 11:58 pm

A Partisan Post–Cats and the Contemplative Life….

Today’s post is a partisan one, purely dedicated to cats as the companions and instigators of contemplation.  There are three famous poems at least having to do with cats (and I’m sure that there are many more poems which feature cats, but these are three particularly thought of by religious men, so since we have recently had a new Pope in the news, my thoughts turned to churchly cats doing, however, what cats do with their usual skill).  I wanted to share these poems because I myself am a cat fan and cannot help wondering if perhaps we are to see a cat in the Vatican as we have seen dogs and cats in the White House.  I mean no disrespect by this curiosity; rather, I had a strange dream last night of a tabby cat sitting high in an ornate window sill like those of the famous Basilica and fixedly watching a pigeon, and I wondered if maybe, just maybe, the new Pope would be allowed a feline companion.  Or if he even wants one.  Who knows, he may be a dog or a canary man.  Of the three poems below, the first was written by an unknown Irish monk and found in St. Paul, Carinthia, Austria in the 9th century, and has been translated by several poets, including W. H. Auden, Eavan Boland, and Frank O’Connor (the rendition below is O’Connor’s).  The second poem was written by a religious fanatic who was periodically hospitalized but was a talented poet revered more after his death than during his lifetime, Christopher Smart, who lived from 1722-1771.  The third and last poem, from 1937, was written by Canadian Methodist clergyman, philosopher, and English professor E. J. Pratt, and perhaps views the cat with what many would regard as the most realism of the three poems, but which also clearly places the cat in the position of contemplative “muse.”  I will give these three poems in their entirety below, as each is past its first copyright expiration date and has appeared on the Internet elsewhere.  Thus, I am leaving the real work today to my readers and the respective cats, and hoping that even those who are not innate cat lovers as I am will enjoy the ingenuity of the poets concerned.

Poem #1–“Pangur Ban” (translated as “White Fuller,” which Frank O’Connor retitles “The Scholar and the Cat”):  “Each of us pursues his trade,/I and Pangur my comrade,/His whole fancy in the hunt/And mine for learning ardent./More than fame I love to be/Among my books and study,/Pangur does not grudge me it,/Content with his own merit./When a heavenly time! we are/In our small room together/Each of us has his own sport/And asks no greater comfort./While he sets his round sharp eye/On the wall of my study/I turn mine, though lost its edge,/On the great wall of knowledge./Now a mouse drops in his net/After some mighty onset/While into my bag I cram/Some difficult darksome problem./When a mouse comes to the kill/Pangur exults, a marvel!/I have when some secret’s won/My hour of exultation./Though we work for days and years/Neither the other hinders;/Each is competent and hence/Enjoys his skill in silence./Master of the death of mice,/He keeps in daily practice,/I too, making dark things clear,/Am of my trade a master.”

Poem #2–“For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry (excerpt, Jubilate Agno)”:  “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry./For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him./For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way./For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness./For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer./For he rolls upon prank to work it in./For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself./For this he performs in ten degrees./For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean./For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there./For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended./For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood./For fifthly he washes himself./For sixthly he rolls upon wash./For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat./For eighthly he rubs himself against a post./For ninthly he looks up for his instructions./For tenthly he goes in quest of food./For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour./For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness./For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance./For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying./For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins./For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary./For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes./For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life./For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him./For he is of the tribe of Tiger./For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger./For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses./For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation./For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat./For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon./For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit./For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt./For every family had one cat at least in the bag./For the English Cats are the best in Europe./For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped./For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly./For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature./For he is tenacious of his point./For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery./For he knows that God is his Saviour./For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest./For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion./For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually–Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat./For I bless the name of the Lord that Jeoffry is better./For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat./For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music./For he is docile and can learn certain things./For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation./For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment./For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive./For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command./For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom./For he can catch the cork and toss it again./For he is hated by the hypocrite and the miser./For the former is afraid of detection./For the latter refuses the charge./For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business./For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly./For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services./For he killed the ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land./For his ears are so acute that they sting again./For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention./For by stroking of him I have found out electricity./For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire./For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast./For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements./For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer./For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped./For he can tread to all the measures upon the music./For he can swim for life./For he can creep.”

Poem #3–“The Prize Cat”:  “Pure blood domestic, guaranteed,/Soft-mannered, musical in purr,/The ribbon had declared the breed,/Gentility was in the fur./Such feline culture in the gads/No anger ever arched her back–/What distance since those velvet pads/Departed from the leopard’s track!/And when I mused how Time had thinned/The jungle strains within the cells,/How human hands had disciplined/Those prowling optic parallels;/I saw the generations pass/Along the reflex of a spring,/A bird had rustled in the grass,/The tab had caught it on the wing;/Behind the leap so furtive-wild/Was such ignition in the gleam,/I thought an Abyssinian child/Had cried out in the whitethroat’s scream.”

And there you have them, folks, three perspectives on the cat:  companionable, laudatory in the extreme, and finally taken wild with the wildness of the cat’s spring itself.  After having had a chance to read them again, I still reserve my own admiration for and right to admire the cat, but perhaps I should hesitate about the “election” of a cat as the ideal contemplative companion, tail twitching as it watches the pigeons in Rome–what do you think?

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March 12, 2013 · 4:42 pm

“The Sin Eater,” or Much Ado About Something, After All….

Recently, JM at thelivingnotebook provided a helpful reminder about how Freytag’s Pyramid demonstrates narrative and dramatic structures by diagram.  The diagram begins with exposition, then follows through with rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.  This is by and large the structure that an overwhelming number of novels and plays and even some works of nonfiction follow, and we are probably all familiar with its rhythms, though we may never have heard of the terminology or the title before (though of course, it is often taught in beginning drama classes or in creative writing classes).  So used to this pattern can one get, in fact, that the continual frustration of it in a work of art can seem like a meandering lack of artistry, like in fact the sheep named “Virginia Woolf,” who wanders in and out of the scenery in Alice Thomas Ellis’s The Sin Eater nibbling the shrubbery, a sort of weird objective correlative for the plot, which often seems missing, to say the least.  Yet, I maintain that The Sin Eater turns out to be “much ado about something” after all, and here’s the course of my logic:

The novel is gossipy, without many events standing forward boldly as events; even the travel to the little tourist town of Llanelys in Wales that the family makes to the bedside of their dying father and the later cricket match against town visitors which they and the villagers play are overshadowed by the many, many conversations featured in the novel.  The family sits at table or elsewhere and argues and bickers an unconscionable number of times, and one keeps expecting to see a climax somewhere, or at least some rising action, developing from all the chatter.  Rose, who has married into the clan and who is Irish, not Welsh, manages all the hosting going on, and also controls a lot of the conversation by being as controversial as possible and continually contradicting the statements and preferences of her brother-in-law’s wife, Angela, an Englishwoman by birth who is very up-to-date and at the same time is more conventional even given her wanderings from the marital path than Rose is.  In fact, much of the tension of the novel, such as it is, is generated in the dialogues between the two women, Angela carrying on a flirtation with Edward, a visiting guest, to which her husband and son of the house Michael seems to be indifferent, Rose attempting to sabotage the flirtation and criticizing it constantly in backbiting asides.  Henry, Rose’s husband and Michael’s brother, is largely clueless, and the youngest member of the family, the young woman Ermyn, is beginning a study of the Bible and forming her own grotesque opinions about how modern reality and ancient text coincide.  The “sin eater” of the title is Phyllis, their hired help, who like Rose shares a belief in the occult, and who will probably be the one who eats the crumbs of the “funeral baked-meats” off the dead man’s chest when he dies, in order to consume away his sins with them, an old Welsh country tradition.  Her son Jack the Liar and his son Gomer, her idolized grandson, make up the rest of the household along with the Captain, the old man who is lying in bed near death.

That this Freytagian Pyramidal structure is not suited to The Sin Eater becomes glaringly obvious even by the middle of the book lengthwise, because there is no action being taken.  The cricket match, which occurs every year and should provide a crowd scene replete with action, seems to be organized almost as an afterthought, though with Rose’s usual careful spitefulness and deliberate attentions to the refreshments.  Meanwhile, Angela flirts with Edward, Edward gets drunk, people come and go, Michael ignores the flirtation, Henry makes inane and pointless comments, Rose repeatedly tries to incite others to anger, Ermyn, shut in by partial deafness, misreads cues and interprets the actions of others in line with her new study of the Bible, which in a humorous twist she hides in a copy of Country Life to read because she knows that the others will think Biblical study odd.  And Phyllis, in a power-grabbing dynamic perpetuated against the very family she works for, saves all the best tidbits for her grandson Gomer, and constantly plots against the family’s happiness, though until the end in a futile and repetitive way.

What happens at the end is after all the “kicker.”  For, the short-lived rising action, foreshortened even, arises just after the end of the cricket match near the end of the book, when the visiting hooligans are trashing the cricket field and refreshment tent at night, and the family have all gone home to the farm house.  Ermyn is sent out in the dark with a flashlight to look for a visitor’s purse, and she comes across Michael and Gomer having a sexual encounter in the dark in the bushes.  When Michael is startled and runs for the house, Gomer grabs Ermyn instead and attempts to rape her, in line with what she has been reading in the Bible about the visitor’s concubine in the land of the Benjamites.  A house visitor, one of the local gentry, comes along and rescues her, though she finds his heroic attitude humorous, and it’s unclear whether or not he manages actually to save her before she is violated.  By the next day, Gomer has gone into hiding elsewhere, and Ermyn is driven even further into herself, telling no one about what happened, not even Rose, whom she admires, when Rose has her come to help clean up the blood where the fight took place the night before.

The climax comes at the very end of the novel instead of earlier, and there is no denouement–instead, Ermyn sees Phyllis (apparently in revenge for what Ermyn now knows has been going on between Michael and Gomer before and for which Phyllis hates Michael) tampering with Michael’s car, but again says nothing.  Suddenly Rose announces that Gomer has been located, and that Henry has borrowed Michael’s car to take him and Jack (Phyllis’s son) to pick up Gomer.  Phyllis dashes out the door, too late to undo what she has done, with the emotional certainty that she has killed or maimed her own grandson and two others who were not guilty of offending her.  The novel ends with this climax:  “Phyllis was running as fast and as futilely as the wind from the sea.  Somewhere, in another world, someone was howling as the sin eaters of old must have howled, fleeing the houses of sorrow weighed down with strange sins.  Up on the hills the wind swept softly around the old church where the saint slept on undisturbed.”

I say, however, that Phyllis has the “emotional certainty” that she has killed or maimed three people, because the novel ends where it does and there is no active conclusion to it, but only the thematic one given in the text I’ve provided in the paragraph immediately above.  If there is certainty, it is in all the omens and magic words and reiterations of the word “bloody” which occur, the word “bloody” occurring in swearing contexts, but coming true in literal ones, and mentions of the “hounds of hell” and other old country traditions appearing repeatedly in Rose’s and in Ermyn’s thoughts.  Ermyn’s readings from the Bible also seem to have a literal component.  So, the novel ends with the climax; the only way in which the reader is not cheated of the dramatic element is in fact contained in the picture of Phyllis, trying unavailingly to catch up with the car before it leaves, taking Henry and her son Jack (instead of the miscreant Michael) to get Gomer, and not knowing at what point the brakes will fail, or the engine falter, or whatever she has perpetuated come about.  Thus, the novel is “much ado about something,” after all:  Phyllis has a lingering resentment against Michael from the beginning, which is never articulated except when she all-but-deliberately breaks a dish or gives Gomer the best of the food.  The family is taking from her family by the old droit du seigneur standards, in spite of the fact that they put up with her querulousness and cantankerousness.  It’s just that in this novel (and it turns out to be an exciting novel, after all), the real action is submerged beneath at least two or three layers of other realities:  1) the literal conversational reality, casual and fairly meaningless 2) the level at which Angela is attempting to start a relationship with Edward and Rose shows a desire to mock and frustrate her 3) the level at which Rose and Ermyn celebrate their different perspectives on life, the occult and the nascent Biblical.  All of these are levels which Alice Thomas Ellis, the mischievous novelist, flourishes in the reader’s face, being deliberately misleading until the very end of the book as to where the dramatic motivations and energies of the novel are going to finish up.  It is up to the discerning reader to allow himself or herself to be entertained and edified by the picture of dysfunctionality long enough to ask the important question:  “What is all the tension about?” and to reach that startling and evocative ending in which all becomes apparent.

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March 3, 2013 · 6:30 pm

A. E. Housman’s “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff”–The Choice Between Allopathic and Homeopathic Medicine

There are times, not a few of them, when I have a great deal of difficulty in writing a post.  It’s not that I haven’t read scads of books that, with a little re-familiarization, I could comment upon.  It’s not even so much that it’s always a “dark and stormy” day.  And it’s not that I think that some people somewhere won’t be interested.  Sometimes, it’s just that I’m like Terence in A. E. Housman’s poem, “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff,” and am in a mental, moral, spiritual, or psychological slump, in a deep, dark hole, and can’t dig myself back out.  But today when I began to feel that way (and I haven’t been posting regularly as much as I ought lately), I decided to share with you just what I often do when I’m in a blue mood.  And this is the truth:  I turn to Housman’s poem.  It’s not that I necessarily take any part of the advice contained in it (and there are two different remedies propounded, one an allopathic or party-throwing solution, and the other a homeopathic or training-for-bad-days-ahead one).  [As you are no doubt aware, the original meaning of allopathy is a type of medication or treatment that runs counter to the illness, homeopathy is a type of medication or treatment that imitates or runs like to the illness.]  Even when I don’t take the advice, however, I get a lift from the rhythm and rhyme, and from the wit and insouciance and just plain poetry of Housman’s work.  Luckily, since it’s another poem that has a version whose original copyright has expired and which is published elsewhere on the Internet, I can share it here with you in its entirety.  It’s a little long, but my posts lately have been short, so as I analyze it (with your tolerance), I’ll take it apart and present the whole piece in order as it comes.

The poem begins with dialogue, presumably aimed at Terence by a friend or friends, after Terence has been gloomily poeticizing.  The friend even goes so far as to make fun of Terence (and this part always gives me a wry grin at some of my own sadder poetic offerings) by parodying his offerings in a made-up poem about a cow, adding a bucolic note to the proceedings:  “‘Terence, this is stupid stuff:/You eat your victuals fast enough;/There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,/To see the rate you drink your beer./But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,/It gives a chap the belly-ache./The cow, the old cow, she is dead;/It sleeps well, the horned head:/We poor lads, ’tis our turn now/To hear such tunes as killed the cow./Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme/Your friends to death before their time/Moping melancholy mad:/Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.'”  The friend is not of course automatically right, but one can hear the pragmatic, practical voice of a born optimist, and the voice itself gives hope because it suggests that there is an alternative to the way our as-yet-unheard-from Terence sees things.

Another voice speaks now, though not in quotation marks, a sort of intermediate voice between the first voice and Terence.  This voice has yet another suggestion:  there’s always alcohol!  And we’ve already heard that Terence likes beer, in the first stanza.  This voice is in a sense partly Terence, yet not entirely, because Terence’s real justification and response come in the last two stanzas.  But now for this stanza in the intermediate voice first:  “Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,/There’s brisker pipes than poetry./Say, for what were hop-yards meant,/Or why was Burton built on Trent?/Oh many a peer of England brews/Livelier liquor than the Muse,/And malt does more than Milton can/To justify God’s ways to man./Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink/For fellows whom it hurts to think:/Look into the pewter pot/To see the world as the world’s not./And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:/The mischief is that ’twill not last./Oh I have been to Ludlow fair/And left my necktie God knows where,/And carried half-way home, or near,/Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:/Then the world seemed none so bad,/And I myself a sterling lad;/And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,/Happy till I woke again./Then I saw the morning sky:/Heigho, the tale was all a lie;/The world, it was the old world yet,/I was I, my things were wet,/And nothing now remained to do/But begin the game anew.”  The last two lines and one or two in the middle refer of course to some of the main drawbacks of alcohol, which are that it always requires to be renewed to be efficacious, and can leave one “mucky.”  Its effect, when it is working, is allopathic; that is, it works in opposition to the “illness” of reality by causing one “to see the world as the world’s not.”

Terence, however, comes into his own and manages to justify his apparently gloomy poetic tendencies in the last two stanzas.  He answers (though again, the poet does not put the lines in dialogue form):  “Therefore, since the world has still/Much good, but much less good than ill,/And while the sun and moon endure/Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,/I’d face it as a wise man would,/And train for ill and not for good./’Tis true, the stuff I brew for sale/Is not so brisk a brew as ale:/Out  of a stem that scored the hand/I wrung it in a weary land./But take it:  if the smack is sour,/The better for the embittered hour;/It should do good to heart and head/When your soul is in my soul’s stead;/And I will friend you, if I may,/In the dark and cloudy day.”  Thus here the “medicine” recommended by Terence is homeopathic; that is, it is the same sort of treatment as what happens in reality, in which “luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure.”

Terence’s final “proof” of the real superiority of his “poetry” comes in the final stanza, and is itself wry and caustic, though still in an unusually good-humored way:  “There was a king reigned in the East:/There, when kings will sit to feast,/They get their fill before they think/With poisoned meat and poisoned drink./He gathered all that springs to birth/From the many-venomed earth;/First a little, thence to more,/He sampled all her killing store;/And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,/Sate the king when healths went round./They put arsenic in his meat/And stared aghast to watch him eat;/They poured strychnine in his cup/And shook to see him drink it up;/They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:/Them it was their poison hurt./–I tell the tale that I heard told./Mithridates, he died old.”  And it is of course the king Mithridates that this tale is of, which Housman, in Terence’s voice, is using here as a metaphor for “training for ill and not for good.”  The advice is seemingly pessimistic (i.e., always expect the worst), yet the proof of the argument is in the fact that by poisoning himself Mithridates was not attempting to die, but in fact to live a long and healthy life.  There is thus a friendly, even funny, paradox contained in this poem, which the progression from the original objection to Terence and his “work” to his final answer has made apparent.

My reaction to this poem is usually to feel quite sing-songy and happy for a while after I read it, not only due to a certain affection for some forms of old-fashioned rhyming verse, but also due to my admiration for the craftsmanship of it.  When we see something well-done, even on occasions when we require to be persuaded of the perspective contained therein or even if we don’t entirely agree with it, yet we appreciate the skill with which the writer or poet put it forward.  So, the next time you find yourself in a mood to kick a can at the world and say, “To hell with it all, I’m sick of it,” have a look at Housman’s poem:  he not only won’t lie to you about finding happiness, he’ll tell you what to do with whatever share of gloom comes your way.  In a way, the poem itself is a “dose” of the “poisonous” meat and drink Mithridates took, a dose of homeopathic medicine from the storehouse of Housman. [His collection of poems entitled A Shropshire Lad had the original title The Poems of Terence Hearsay, thus hinting that Terence is a persona of Housman himself, though he was actually from Worcestershire, and used Shropshire in his poems only because of certain associations he had with the area.]

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March 1, 2013 · 5:14 pm

Milan Kundera’s “Let the Old Dead Make Way for the Young Dead” and the Pulse of Humanity–“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin””

“Let the Old Dead Make Way for the Young Dead” is a story in which two people who have known each other in the Biblical sense once in the past meet up again “in a small Czech town,” and have to try to decide whether or not to make love again, fifteen years later.  They each have something operating as an impediment, a true enough picture of what I have called in my title “the pulse of humanity.”  Each is haunted by a sense of personal failure, the man because he is poor, has no Communist party status, has not done much in his life, and has had little or no success with attractive or alluring women, the woman because she is fifteen years older than he and has in the meantime been made to feel even older by a son who wants her to “act her age” (i.e., who is putting her determinedly in the past with his memories of his father).  In the more immediate sense, she has inadvertently allowed her husband’s grave lease to lapse and his corpse to be disposed of, which she knows her grown son will blame her for.  Not a promising scenario for a hot romance, is it?

And yet there is a sense of human desperation constant in the story, a sense of two people, each reaching out for something from the past with which to shore up the uncertain and unappealing future.  At first when they meet on the street, the man, who is now around thirty-five, doesn’t recognize the woman, who was thirty-five to his twenty when they made love the first time.  She is upset because the man at the cemetery refused to admit her claim about her husband’s right to the space and put it to her in concise terms that “the old dead ought to make room for the young dead.”  She is tired and footsore and depressed at no longer knowing anyone in town, so she accepts her former acquaintance’s invitation to come up to his bachelor apartment for coffee or tea.  This is her reasoning, for at first though she thinks of him as a former lover, there is no desire for him in her mind:  “She could wash her hands in his bathroom and then sit in his soft armchair (her legs ached), look around his room, and listen to the boiling water bubbling away behind the screen which separated the kitchen nook from the room.”  (This is stated indirectly from her point of view, but unless she is remembering his room from the past–and we are told he has only been living here seven years, so only the furnishings could be the same–she cannot know ahead of time exactly what she will find there.  She is in fact postulating the appearance of his room, fantasizing in a way, and she turns out to be fairly correct in her surmise.)

He in his turn is obsessed with his thinning hair and the future bald spot which he often spends time looking at in the mirror.  He has been married in the time they have been apart, was faithful, and has been divorced for seven years, and because he cannot afford to date accomplished women, and the town is deficient of eligible women in any case, he has largely been celibate, or has slept with immature women who seemed “stupid” to him.  When he asks her about her presence in the town, she tells him that she and her son come every year to her husband’s grave on All Soul’s Day, but she omits to reveal to him her unfortunate failure to hold onto the grave, as if it were a physical fault she were ashamed of; this is pertinent because the two of them are so otherwise obsessed with their physical appearances in relation to the possibility of again making love.  He notices her aging, and knows too that he will not continue to find her attractive, but at the same time “he saw the delicate movement of her hand with which she refused the offer of cognac [and] he realized that this charm, this magic, this grace, which had enraptured him, was still the same in her, though hidden beneath the mask of old age, and was in itself still attractive….”   He begins to tell her his pessimistic thoughts, only of course “he was silent about the bald spot that was beginning to appear (it was just like her silence about the canceled grave).  On the other hand, the vision of the bald spot was transubstantiated into quasi-philosophical maxims to the effect that time passes more quickly than man is able to live, and that life is terrible, because everything in it is necessarily doomed to extinction.  He voiced these and similar maxims, to which he awaited a sympathetic response….”  Instead, she tells him that it is “superficial” talk and that she doesn’t like to hear it.

Suddenly, however, he breaches the gap between them by reaching across and stroking her hand.  He begins to remember the first time they made love fifteen years before, when “she absolutely defied his imagination” not due to her deficits but to his own.  He also remembers that at the time she had whispered something to him which he had neglected to ask her about when he didn’t hear it correctly, and now there is no chance to recover it; as well, at the time she was the sexual aggressor, and now he is, and she is reluctant to be with him, is in fact very reluctant.  At the time he had been a callow youth, and had made love to her in the dark, and the time is now unrecoverable, because now she looks different, and he will never be able to see her again as she once was.  There is of course shallow thinking going on in both of them, but also honest thought, because he and she both know that he will feel the disgust all men feel at a physically imperfect woman (and though this seems like yet another narrow and unfair picture of both men and women alike when taken in the abstract, in the story it rings true, it is a true remark, because it is part of the truth of what these two characters have between them, part of the human reality they are grasping at willy-nilly which they both have need to fear will at some point elude them).

The pertinence of All Soul’s Day suddenly comes to the foreground when the narrative tells us that part of the reason she doesn’t want to give in to his lovemaking in the present-day situation is because she knows that her previous appearance fifteen years before has been a “memorial” to him, a memorial to beauty and sexuality.  He keeps telling her “don’t fight me” and “there’s no need to fight me” when he strokes her hand and tries to touch her, and she wars with the memory of her son’s attempts to age her so that he himself can become sexually more mature with the women in his own life, because he is unable to allow his mother to be an attractive woman to someone nearer her own age.  The significance of a memorial in this story thus becomes important because in the present tense, the woman finally allows the man to make love to her, and as we are told, “Evening was still a long way off.  This time the room was full of light.”  These lovely final lines make the point that as long as we have any bloom of life on us at all, death is still far enough away for love and life to intervene between us and the doom of time we all face, thus “evening” is “still a long way off.”  Finally, “this time the room was full of light” means not only that in a mature love affair we see our need for what it is and are no longer able to deceive ourselves about what we are doing, but also that our memorials to the past become of less moment and we are full of the “light” of the present, and able to show generosity and love in a complete and fulfilling way.  Thus, in terms of memorials, in this story “the old dead” (the memorials of the past) have made way for a present which, because the two lovers have no future together in a permanent sense, will shortly become “the young dead.”  Yet in showing the common “pulse of humanity,” this story is about hope, love, and eternal youth, and not about age and despair.

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