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December 29, 2012 · 5:20 pm

Marguerite Duras’s “The Lover”–A Book Without Boundaries, Yet Bounded

Marguerite Duras’s August 1984 book The Lover, published in the heyday of deconstructive thought, bears the signs of that thought in the sense that while it operates without boundaries, it yet is bounded by the very system that calls it forth.  It is a paradox, in fact.

The book has no boundaries of time and space, first of all.  The story, which purports to be mainly about the love affair between a girl in her mid-teens and her lover in his late twenties in French colonial Indochina, is broken up into short segments of a page or two to less than a page, and the time and place sequences are confusing in their order, since the story does not proceed from the beginning to the end, or start at the end and go back to the beginning forward, or even proceed in a sequence with various flashbacks, in short in any of the more standard ways in which a story often is told.  Rather, it is mostly all flashback, so to speak, but the flashbacks come in what seems like any old order.  As the main character, the young Lolita-like Caucasian teenage girl with the Chinese lover says near the beginning, “The story of my life doesn’t exist.  Does not exist.  There’s never any center to it.  No path, no line.  There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.”  This is not only a character speaking of herself and giving some insight into what she is like, however, but an off-the-cuff analysis of how the story itself operates and is written.

Other boundaries which are broken are taboos.  She is Caucasian, he is Chinese, which is a taboo in the French Indochina of the time because even though he is rich and she is poor, she is of higher status than he is.  Her lover is also nearly twice as old as she is.  In several places, she says outright that her elder brother is a fratricidal “hunter” who is responsible for the death of her younger brother (who is two years her senior), though it’s unclear in what exact sense this is true.  Her mother doesn’t love her children all equally, which is often thought of as taboo as well.  The lover uses her as a prostitute, yet even this set of boundaries is not observed, because he loves her and tells her so, and even after many years, at the end of the book when he calls her in Paris, he says he still loves her.

The decadence of the whole book is heralded in the main atmospheric conditions, which also have no boundaries, but saturate the entire “feel” of the book.  The climate of Indochina of the colonial period, with its heat, humidity, conditions of fever and wood-rot and somnolence, is made to stand as the “objective correlative” (to use T. S. Eliot’s term) for the desire which the young girl says she has to die.  Yet at least twice when she communicates this desire to cease to exist, she follows it up with the remark that she wants to write.  It is as if in the writing itself she will somehow cease to exist.

The text as well has no boundaries of narrative perspectives which remain unbroken.  The child tells her own story through much of the book, yet there are also passages such as this one:  “Fifteen and a half.  The news spreads fast in Sadec.  The clothes she wears are enough to show.  The mother has no idea, and none about how to bring up a daughter.  Poor child.  Don’t tell me that hat’s innocent, or the lipstick, it all means something, it’s to attract attention, money.  The brothers are layabouts.  They say it’s a Chinese, the son of the millionaire, the villa in Mekong with the blue tiles.  And even he, instead of thinking himself honored, doesn’t want her for his son.  A family of white layabouts.”  The narrative about the girl and her lover sometimes uses first person from her perspective, but sometimes uses third person, as if the mature writer is intruding into the story and objectifying the experience.  As well, there are two confusing segments near the halfway point in the text where a short history or sketch about an American expatriate living in Paris named Marie-Claude Carpenter and then about two collaborators in the war named Betty and Ramon Fernandez occur.  The history of these three characters is brief and intrudes in the midst of the story of the girl and her lover, and is not otherwise explained.

Perhaps the whole tale may be finally explicated by this one remark in the text, which is said of the mature writer when she is later in Paris:  “[In her lover’s voice] she heard again the voice of China.”  The entire book is thus the tale not solely of a decadent Caucasian family in China, but of their desperate love affair with the country itself in the colonial period.  As the girl says in what seems like only a casual comparison at the time, there is a similarity between having an affair with a person of lower status and colonizing a country–the book is an emotional “history” of that colonization of a rich country and that girl’s affair with a rich man who is still seen by their family and society as inferior to her because he is part of the indigenous population.  Thus, finally, this one boundary is affirmed when the lover, years later, calls her up in Paris:  “Years after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, books, he came to Paris with his wife.  He phoned her.  It’s me.  She recognized him at once from the voice.  He said, I just wanted to hear your voice.  She said, It’s me, hello.  He was nervous, afraid, as before.  His voice suddenly trembled.  And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China.  He knew she’d begun writing books, he’d heard about it through her mother whom he’d met again in Saigon.  And about her younger brother, and he’d been grieved for her.  Then he didn’t know what to say.  And then he told her.  Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he’d love her until death.”

Yes, this one boundary, between the two people, which is not only a barrier but also a line of unity, a union, is reaffirmed, yet in the overturn of the colonial administration, it is also stood on its head.  Only the male character in the end remains the same, and the girl too, perhaps, as she has written herself.

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December 18, 2012 · 4:57 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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December 6, 2012 · 7:29 pm

“The future isn’t what it used to be.”–Anonymous

In all likelihood, many of you are familiar with the less common fictional tactic adopted by Italo Calvino in If on a winter’s night a traveller, in which only the beginnings of chapters are provided.  Each new chapter starts out a new fiction, and there is a sense of genuine frustration for the reader (making a valid and curious fictional point), who of course cannot do anything about the unsatisfactory resolution (rather, the lack of resolution) of the individual stories.  Then, there’s Julio Cortazar’s book Hopscotch, which like a few other novels that have come along since, has chapters which can be read in any order.  One would think that there’s only so much innovation that can be undertaken for innovation’s sake alone.  So that when one comes to Margaret Atwood’s story, “Happy Endings,” which features in its short length six different endings to “the story” of “boy meets girl,” one of the fictional plots which Atwood has always been best at in any case, one says, “Oh, okay, this is old hat; I’ve encountered lots of stories which feature different endings, even as far back as Dickens’s Great Expectations.  It won’t be that unusual.”  And that is where one would probably be wrong.

One would be wrong, because quoting a phrase, “the future isn’t what it used to be” when it comes to this six-part short story:  there are six different segments, each supplying a different ending from part A to part F, to the opening statement “John and Mary meet,” true.  But they all have the same ending, too.  How can this be?  Here’s how the stor(ies) progress:

“A–John and Mary fall in love and get married.  They both have worthwhile and remunerative jobs which they find stimulating and challenging.  They buy a charming house.  Real estate values go up.  Eventually, when they can afford live-in help, they have two children, to whom they are devoted.  The children turn out well.  John and Mary have a stimulating and challenging sex life and worthwhile friends.  They go on fun vacations together.  They retire.  They both have hobbies which they find stimulating and challenging.  Eventually they die.  This is the end of the story.”

In story B, the variation is that John doesn’t appreciate Mary, and things go gradually downhill between the two of them until Mary tries to fake a suicide so that John will “repent” and they can marry; unfortunately, she is too successful at her attempt.  John ends up marrying Madge and the story continues as in A.

In story C, John is an older man already married to Madge, and falls in love with Mary, who cheats on him with James, a younger man of Mary’s own age.  When John discovers them in flagrante delicto, he shoots both of them and himself.  Then, we are told, with a pricelessly dry tone, “Madge, after a suitable period of mourning, marries an understanding man called Fred and everything continues as in A, but under different names.”

The next story, story D, picks up with Fred and Madge, who, however, might as well be John and Mary for all the difference it makes to the eventual outcome, which we’ll get to in a minute.  They live by the sea, and when their life is threatened by a tidal wave, “the rest of the story is about what caused the tidal wave and how they escape from it.”  The last line reads “they…continue as in A.”

Story E also picks up with Fred and Madge, but begins with a sentence which by its very structure takes up the previous story, story D, in medias res (beginning with “Yes, but,” “but” usually being a connective and not technically grammatically correct at the beginning of a sentence):  “Yes, but Fred has a bad heart.  The rest of the story is about how kind and understanding they both are until Fred dies.  Then Madge devotes herself to charity work until the end of A.  If you like, it can be ‘Madge,’ ‘cancer,’ ‘guilty and confused,’ and ‘bird watching.'”  Here, the author is both playfully and carelessly tossing away the variations and alternatives which would usually be a significant part of the plot and character choices and would help structure the story.  Thus, it’s obvious by now, if it hasn’t become obvious already, that the thematic point of the story, not the plot or the characters, is where the author has really invested her energy.

F suggests “If you think this is all too bourgeois, make John a revolutionary and Mary a counterespionage agent and see how far that gets you.  Remember, this is Canada.  You’ll still end up with A, though in between you may get a lustful brawling saga of passionate involvement, a chronicle of our times, sort of.”  (This paragraph is truly a masterful exploration of tone, inasmuch as the “see how far that gets you” implies that it won’t get you very far.  The humorous self-deprecatory note of “Remember, this is Canada.  You’ll still end up with A” is part of the national treasury of such moments, which disallows Canadian grandstanding on the issue of birthright and which also bespeaks a certain justifiable pride in it all the same.  Finally, the phrase, “a chronicle of our times” followed by “sort of” is yet another way of taking literary pretension down a peg, by use of the casual voice.

The essence of the piece is contained in the last two paragraphs of F, in which we are told that all the endings “are the same however you slice it…The only authentic ending is the one provided here:  John and Mary die.  John and Mary die.  John and Mary die.”  That the essence is not only about life, however, but is about life as lived by fiction writers is revealed by the last few lines:  “So much for endings.  Beginnings are always more fun.  True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with.  That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.  Now try How and Why.”

One can see from even these short quoted segments of fabula* that Mieke Bal is correct in her assumption in Narratology:  Introduction to the Theory of Narrative that “a structural correspondence…exist[s] between the fabulas of narratives and ‘real’ fabulas, that is between what people do and what actors do in fabulas that have been invented, between what people experience and what actors experience….[If not,] then people would not be able to understand narratives.”  This is a necessary remark to make because of the history of modernist and strains of post-modernist thought opposed to narratology, in which the assumption sometimes is that there is no essential relationship between the experience of characters (“actors”) and the experience of “real” people.  I say that Bal is correct because of the very sense we get even in Atwood’s highly conscious and deliberate and ironic short story that “the future isn’t what it used to be”:  that is, the future changes with our expectations, and our expectations must become narrower as do our opportunities, and all we finally can know for certain about the opportunity of this span of “real” fabula we possess is that it always has death in it.

Finally, Atwood’s challenge, “Now try How and Why” does in fact transcend the fictional experience again, however, and stand for the Alpha (“How do we come to be here?”) and Omega (“Why are we here?  What is our purpose?”) not only of fictions, but of real people as well.  The opposition is thus posed between “happy endings” and “the only authentic ending,” with the challenge being perhaps to see where they coalesce and whether, if the future is changing every time we get a step farther forward, it necessarily is as “grave” a matter (to make a very old and bad pun) as we might otherwise think it.  Atwood’s story certainly has its share of mordant and deflating wit to keep it from too solemn a tone, while it is the very lack of morbidity itself which insures it a place among serious works about life.

* “A fabula is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors….Actors are agents that perform actions.  They are not necessarily human….”  [A full set of definitions and terms used in narratology, the theory of narrative, is available in Mieke Bal’s book, as cited above.]

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November 30, 2012 · 6:11 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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November 27, 2012 · 4:55 pm

Awareness at the moment of death–the elegiac and the factual, Tennyson and Dickinson

Two of the most beautiful short poems in the English language have been written by two different poets, one the paternalistic Poet Laureate of England during Queen Victoria’s reign, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the other the dainty highly realistically-imaged wordsmith Belle of Amherst, Emily Dickinson.  And in both poems, the moment of death is of key concern and is a centralized concept, with the tenses and surrounding matter in the two poems suggesting that there is life after death from which to survey the moment itself.

In the first (1847), Tennyson writes “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,/Tears from the depth of some divine despair/Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,/In looking on the happy autumn-fields,/And thinking of the days that are no more.”  This all seems fairly normal, and highly elegiac, though in the second stanza we get “Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,/That brings our friends up from the underworld,” and thus the poem speaks of the life after death for the first time, since this “underworld” is not our contemporary one of goblins and demons, but the classical one with which Tennyson was familiar, one from which Aeneas’s or Dido’s ghost might rise to speak or sign.  But the really emphatic moment of death sequence occurs in the lines “Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns/The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds/To dying ears, when unto dying eyes/The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;/So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.”  In the last stanza, in fact, there is even an ambiguous line with the comparison “Dear as remembered kisses after death,” with the ambiguity residing in the question of who exactly is doing the remembering, the dead person or the living person!  And of course the poem ends with the the clincher of the “we are immortal though perpetually separated and saddened” argument, “O Death in Life, the days that are no more!”  It seems at first as if the elegiac mournful tone itself has simply transported the poet into imagining that he has once been dead and has experienced the sensory input of “dying ears” and “dying eyes,” and yet the whole gist and force of the poem resides in calling to life, desperately, longingly, things that once have been.  They are “no more,” but live on in memory, and as I’ve noted, it is unclear who exactly is doing the remembering, the dead or the living (or both).

In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “I heard a Fly buzz–when I died–” (1896), the poet takes another tack entirely.  As is usual with Dickinson, she selects not the grand high tone of Tennyson, but a simple domestic image, that of a fly buzzing and bumbling around in the room in the midst of some solemn human doings.  There is, of course, the element of grand belief:  “The Eyes around–had wrung them dry–/And Breaths were gathered firm/For that last Onset–when the King/Be witnessed–in the Room–” though whether the “King” here is God or Death is in Dickinson’s own style uncertain, as either is a possibility, given the frequency with which both appear in her poems.  She talks briefly of making a will at the moment of death, then continues with the simple, factual statement (in which the Fly is both only itself and a symbol of something much larger and more final):  “–and then it was/There interposed a Fly–/With Blue–uncertain stumbling Buzz–/Between the light–and me–And then the Windows failed–and then/I could not see to see–“.

In both cases, the poems go not to a Christian heaven or an afterlife reference, so my readers may be wondering why I am so emphatic that the two poems signify a point beyond that of death as the poetic speakers’ locale.  My answer is this:  in the Tennyson poem, Tennyson generalizes about what dying ears and eyes see and encounter, which suggests that the speaker is knowledgeable about the general experience of having been a dead or dying person, and has “lived” to tell about it (in this poem).  In the Dickinson poem, the very tense of the initial verb and the whole verb sequence of the poem tells its tale:  “I heard a Fly buzz–when I died–”  provokes the question (which is answered), “Yes, and what happened then?”  The fact that the speaker says what she says from the past tense suggests that she is speaking from a point further along in time (and Dickinson has adopted this tactic elsewhere too, as in “Because I could not stop for Death–” and “My life closed twice before its close”).

Thus, the similarity in the two poems is in the positioning of a character’s awareness in a person lying in bed dying, though with Tennyson, the whole experience is a meditation on “the days that are no more,” and a more generalized sense of loss; with Dickinson, the sparse, dry tone impresses by its very lack of mourning, and its sense of loss only comes to a head with the lines “And then the Windows failed–and then/I could not see to see,” a loss not of memories or of days long past, but of the very sense and capacity of sight.  “Windows” as images of the eyes are of course a poetic staple, but in this case, the poet hangs on until the very last moment to the realistic and the sense of symbolism only surfaces when one has entirely finished the poem.

Both of these poems have long been favorites of mine, and I hope that this short post will cause you to look them up in their entirety if they are previously unknown to you, and will make them favorites of yours as well.  They are easily located, both appearing in almost every short collection and anthology of the two poets.

As you may have noticed, I am easing my way back in gradually to doing my posts, not having done more than one or two in the last two weeks since I took a brief hiatus.  I do plan to resume doing more, but I am in the process of covering several works upon which I want to write, and none of them are done yet, so that will have to be my excuse.  I want to thank all of you who have been keeping up with my blogsite and welcome you if you are a new follower.  Onward and upward!

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November 11, 2012 · 4:36 pm

A riddle about an unlikely comparison–“How are James Tiberius Kirk and Magda Danvers of ‘The Good Husband’ alike?”

I have first to apologize to all the original Star Trek fans out there who will no doubt be searching so diligently for a lengthy comment about the James (Tiberius) Kirk character, when all I have to offer is a mere comparison.  But there’s something about him which has been the key character asset to stick in my mind for years now, my favorite tidbit about him, and in more recent years, I’ve located a female equivalent in the character of Magda Danvers (alias Marsha Danziger) in Gail Godwin’s excellent novel The Good Husband.  Finding this similarity is reason enough for self-congratulation for a good feminist (such as I try to be), because it proves once again that creative and notable character traits are the preserve of humans in general, not of one sex or the other.  But enough of the tease:  what is it that I want to discuss, you ask?  It’s that tricky quality of psyche and personality which caused James T. Kirk to come up with a solution to an apparently insoluble problem on a Star Trek examination, part of his back history, in fact:  instead of agonizing and wasting time on the boundaries of the exam itself and ultimately coming in as an “also-ran” or a “good-enough,” Kirk simply reprogrammed the test.  This has often been commented on as having been envisioned as a particularly American trait, but this too is unfair:  it’s no more American solely than it is male solely, but in fact is part and parcel of the way humans in general function when under greatest pressure (and let’s not forget to give some extra-fictional credit to the fact that the actor who so notably portrayed Kirk is William Shatner, himself originally not a U.S. but a Canadian citizen).

So, how is this like what the character of Magda Danvers does in the book The Good Husband?  She too in her back history as it is given in the book has in a sense “reprogrammed” the test:  when doing her thesis for her degree and receiving some guff about it from her committee members, she simply goes ahead and publishes it as a book before submitting it to the committee for the exam, which to those of you unfamiliar with the procedure is doing things backwards; by this means she more or less forces the hand of her committee.  It is only fitting that her book should be about visionaries and should be called The Book of Hell, for her pattern of life is a truly visionary one which inspires a number of other people, both those closest to her and those in the extended circle around her, those at the periphery of the ripple effect in the body of water where a pebble has been thrown in.

The particular insight of Magda’s which applies in her personal life and which inspires others when she is dead is “Mates are not always matches, and matches are not always mates.”  Her mate is Francis Lake, a much younger man whom she met when he was in a midwestern seminary, and whom she married.  As everyone around them is aware, she pursues her career and Francis attends to the caring homebody side of the relationship, not ceasing his attentiveness when Magda becomes ill with her final illness.  She has been teaching since her degree was granted, and teaches those around her to receive her death with grace and dignity as she does, referring to her final illness as “my final teacher” and death as her “final examination.”  She continues to challenge those around her with life-changing speculations and questions, and considerations which will keep them busy long after she is gone (but she has ensured that she will never be forgotten).

The second couple in the book, and the couple most nearly affected by the drama at the center of Magda’s life, is that of Alice Henry and her Southern novelist husband Hugo, the couple whose marriage is in difficulties.  But there is some question as to whether what attracts Alice most is Magda’s intellectual challenge to those around her, or the nearly irresistible atmosphere of the “perfect marriage,” something which Alice cannot tell herself by any means that she has with Hugo.  So what will happen when Magda, on her death bed, “wills” Francis to the newly single Alice?  What happens when Alice remembers the bequest but Francis seems not to?  And who has the last word in the world of the novel as it is written?  At the risk of telling too little, I am avoiding telling too much:  characters who live beyond the lifespan granted them by their authors, those characters who inspire us for years to come, are those who show themselves capable of doing what’s now called “thinking out of the box,” and coming up with questions and solutions that call out the best from their fictional friends, adversaries, and colleagues.  About such characters, we too as readers are the beneficiaries, as we may “play” any role in our minds of any character in the book; we may be the friend or adversary, but we may also learn, by example, how to be more like the main character ourselves, perhaps toning down some of the character’s more outrageous traits while achieving the same sort of creative thought pattern.  So, here’s to James Tiberius Kirk and Magda Danvers (who reinvented herself in choosing a different professional name):  long may such characters come along in various kinds of fictional endeavor and handily help us out of our self- and other-imposed traps–to the tricky but honest in human nature!  As Albert Einstein said of God (upon whom many believers feel we should base our actions) “Herr Gott is subtle, but not malicious.”  Such characters as Kirk and Magda Danvers embody this quality of being “subtle, but not malicious,” and show us something of the limits we can aspire to test.

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November 9, 2012 · 4:31 pm

How Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s “A Major Acquisition” helps rid his narrator of a minor inconvenience (the conflict between facts as facts and facts as whimsy)

Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s short story “A Major Acquisition” is in fact very, very short (it runs to a length of only three pages), and yet as with all his stories, the conflict between fact and whimsy is marked enough to merit comment at some length.  His story opens with the narrator being approached in a somewhat surreptitious manner by “an unusual-looking man” in the local tavern, who inquires as to whether he would like to purchase a locomotive.  The comic force is immediate:  the approach, made “in a softly intimate voice,” is one that a reader might imagine taking place between a sly salesman of risqué cards or photographs, yet the real item on offer is something as large and as unwieldy as a locomotive.

Typically, the speaker in the story is himself quite whimsical to match the events he encounters.  As he says of himself:  “Now it is rather easy selling me something, because I find it hard to say no; however, I felt that caution was warranted with a major purchase of this sort.  Although I know little about locomotives, I inquired about the model, the construction year, and the piston gauge; I was trying to make the man think that he was dealing with an expert who had no intention of buying a pig in a poke….The locomotive looked good, and I ordered it once we agreed on a price.  For it was secondhand, and although, as we know, locomotives wear out very slowly, I was unwilling to pay the catalog price.”  The obvious fact is that the speaker is a little off his hinges himself if we take him seriously, and yet the astounding fact that someone would actually flog a locomotive in this way causes all the other odd “facts” to assume a status that forces the reader to practice a “willing suspension of disbelief”; besides, the story is so engaging in its mannerisms and conclusions that the reader must accept it for what it is.

What in fact we are asked to believe is unusual is the fact that the locomotive is delivered that same night to the speaker’s house, which he sees after the fact as peculiar:  he says that the speed of delivery was “shady,” but that at the time “this never dawned on me.”  He parks in it his garage, after what we are encouraged to believe is serious consideration as to whether it will fit somewhere in the house!

The major conflict in the story between people is between the narrator’s cousin (who represents “facts as facts”) and the speaker himself (who represents “facts as whimsy”).  The cousin soon comes to visit, and Hildesheimer’s readers are told this about him, in an accusatory tone which would cause them (in a less absurd story) to see him as the villain of the piece:  “This man is averse to any sort of speculation, any display of emotion; for him, only facts are facts.  Nothing surprises him, he knows better, and can explain anything.  In short, an unbearable person.”  When the speaker tries to act as a good host and introduce an unexceptional topic for conversation by beginning “‘These marvelous autumn scents–‘” his cousin interrupts and says “‘Withering potato tops.'”  Though the speaker acknowledges that his cousin is right, he challenges his cousin’s gift of cognac by saying that it tastes “soapy.”  Whereupon, the cousin tells how many world’s fair prizes it has won in minor cities, and decides to stay over the night in the house.

The intrusion of whimsical fact throws the cousin off his game, however, because he can’t deal with the “fact” that the locomotive is in the garage where he wants to park his car.  The cousin inquires, in a practical application of having found it there, as to whether the narrator often drives it.  The narrator replies that “a few nights ago, a nearby farmer’s wife had been about to have a blessed event, and [he] had driven her to the city hospital.  She had given birth to twins that same night, but that probably didn’t have anything to do with the locomotive ride.”

In the next and penultimate paragraph of the story, the narrator confesses to the reader, “Incidentally, all this was made up; but on such occasions, I cannot resist embroidering a little on the truth.  I don’t know whether he believed me; he silently registered everything, and it was obvious that he no longer felt very comfortable here.  He became monosyllabic, drank another glass of cognac, and then took his leave.  I have never seen him again.”  Thus, the inconvenience of having a locomotive in the garage helps rid the narrator of the inconvenience and discomfort of having his factually oriented killjoy cousin around.  He seems to consider it a fair trade, though he does note that a short time later there is a report that the French National Railroad is missing a locomotive, which had simply disappeared from the switchyard.  As he comments on his experience from this perspective (and Hildesheimer clearly loves to play with the reader’s reactions thus), “I naturally realized that I had been the victim of a fraudulent transaction.  When I saw the seller in the village tavern a short time later, I acted cool and reserved.  On this occasion, he tried to sell me a crane, but I did not wish to have any more dealings with him.  Besides, what am I going to do with a crane?”

This last line is in a way the most pointed comedy in the whole absurdist piece:  one might as easily ask what he plans to do with the locomotive, which there is no indication that he will get rid of or return to its rightful owners.  The whole story is written in an “as if” manner, observing the fictional boundaries of a sort of magazine cautionary tale about not trusting strangers, and about alienating one’s relatives by odd behavior; yet the assertiveness of the narrator’s behavior clearly labels his attitude as one which he feels he is right to have.  Thus as with most of Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s stories, the reader is asked to navigate back and forth between probabilites, impossibilities, improbabilites, and what we are told are dead certain facts, and by the way to take part in a joyous sort of play with reality.  I hope my readers will be able to find this fine collection of short stories in a bookstore or library; the translator I have read is Joachim Neugroschel, and the exact title is The Collected Stories of Wolfgang Hildesheimer.  You will find, if you do get a chance to read all of the stories involved, that your efforts to keep track with Hildesheimer’s quick shifts between “fact” and whimsy are well-rewarded.

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October 26, 2012 · 4:58 pm

Ann Patchett’s “State of Wonder”–a mystery and a story about conflicting loyalties in the Amazonian forest

So many times it seems that I start a post wanting to share my sense of the book, but am forced to “spoil” the plot by retelling large chunks of it in order to make my points about the quality of a book.  This time, however, even if my post turns out to be a great deal shorter than usual (which is what I always seem to threaten but rarely deliver on), I’m determined to keep the book’s character development and events largely a mystery because they are just too good to ruin for my readers.

The story in State of Wonder begins in Minnesota at Vogel, a large pharmaceutical company, which has recently received news about Anders Eckman, a lab technician who has been sent to the Amazon to check on the progress of a recalcitrant researcher (a Dr. Swenson, who is in her seventies).  Dr. Swenson has sent news that Eckman has died of a fever.  Marina Singh, Eckman’s office mate, receives the news from her boss, Mr. Fox, with whom it later turns out she is having an affair.  Neither is married to or involved with anyone else, because this isn’t where the drama of the story lies, but also because there is a certain constraint between them due to their relative positions in the company, Marina calls him only “Mr. Fox,” seems mostly to think of him that way, and only uses his first name about once.

From the beginning, there is a blurriness between the loyalty Mr. Fox feels to his relationship with Marina and his use of her as an employee.  When he goes to tell Karen Eckman about her husband’s death, he leaves Marina to do the hard emotional work, and leaves it largely to her after that to care for Karen’s upset over the issue and her urgent insistence that she would know if Anders were actually dead.  There is also an obscurity in the pull Marina feels between helping Karen and helping Mr. Fox, until the two threads of narrative entertwine:  it turns out that whatever it is that Mr. Fox feels for Marina, he wants her to go to the Amazon and push Dr. Swenson some more about her research, when it will be done, for example, what the results are.  It is a fertility drug being researched in the confines of the Lakashi nation as far as Marina knows.

There is some play with conflict in the early parts of the novel when Marina must decide whether or not to go to the Amazonian jungle and resolve the mystery surrounding Eckman’s death while also prodding Dr. Swenson for her employer.  One such moment of indecision for Marina is when she must decide whether or not to take Lariam, an anti-malaria drug which causes almost hallucinogenic nightmares in the taker, as Marina knows because she had to take it as a child in order to visit her father in India.  Another is when she distances herself from Mr. Fox’s demands by taking with her a special cell phone he has sent, while leaving it in her suitcase, which gets inconveniently (or conveniently) lost.  Finally, when she reaches Manaus, Dr. Swenson’s port-of-call on a bi-monthly basis for supplies, there is the sense of straining loyalties as well.  Dr. Swenson has left Barbara and Jackie Bovender, a married couple of alternative culture nature, in charge of her apartment and of fending off inquiries about where exactly in the jungle she is.  They themselves don’t even know exactly, and Dr. Swenson in the protection of her research has cut herself off from telephone, computer, and every other form of modern technology, even from her employer.  The Bovenders genuinely like Marina and are torn by their obligations to be nice to her and also to respect the wishes of Dr. Swenson, their employer.

When Marina finally makes contact with Dr. Swenson and a young deaf Hummocca boy whom she adopted in the past under unarticulated circumstances, she is at first strenuously rejected by Dr. Swenson and then unwillingly accepted.  It turns out that Dr. Swenson was once Marina’s teacher and mentor before she became a pharmocologist, when both were in obstetrics, and Marina made a serious error in a caesarian section, one which she herself saw as a reason to change careers.  Since the drug being researched involves fertility, there is an overlap of interests, as when Marina gets to meet the Lakashi people and becomes willy-nilly their obstetrician and general surgeon.  She is very, very unwilling to do so, but because of Dr. Swenson’s past and present influence over her, her loyalty causes her to allow herself to be committed to the project.

Past this point, I am unwilling to proceed, because I don’t want to give everything away.  But I will give some hints:  the fertility drug can cause unexpected people to become pregnant, and has some interesting side effects; Anders Eckman’s death has more to it than is first articulated, much, much more; there are other doctors there doing an unproclaimed kind of research with Dr. Swenson; Marina Singh experiences some of the joys and perils of “going native,” as it used condescendingly to be called, a topic in literature important in such works as The Heart of Darkness most noticeably; and the most heartbreaking scene in the whole book is when the deaf boy, Easter, whose hero was Eckman before Eckman disappeared, is used unwittingly at first as a counter in an unexpected barter.  Beyond these hints, which I hope will lead you to discover the book for yourself and experience the complexity of Patchett’s ability to consider all variables involved in experiments with life forces and the interactions between different peoples, I won’t go.  Please dip into the book at your earliest opportunity, and follow it through to the startling ending.

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October 24, 2012 · 2:57 pm

Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s “The Light Gray Spring Coat”–Coincidence and the Inconsequential in Fiction

Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s “The Light Gray Spring Coat” is at first encounter a short, short, and flimsy tale about a coat, of all things.  It isn’t as “big” or as long as Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” for example, though it is riddled with absurdities as well.  It is rather about coincidences and the inconsequential which add up to the breakdown of true communication, and the result is that it causes one to wonder if one has in fact understood what real communication is about.

The story begins when the character narrating, Paul Holle, receives a note from a long-lost cousin who had disappeared twelve years before after going out to mail a letter.  But the absurdity begins almost at once:  the cousin writes, requesting that Holle mail to him in Australia his “light gray spring coat,” but notes that he may keep the book about edible mushrooms which is in the pocket, because there are no edible mushrooms in Australia.  When Holle tells his wife that he’s had the letter from his cousin, she doesn’t respond in a characteristically human way, by asking where the cousin has been all this time, or expressing surprise that they’ve heard from him.  Rather, she simply asks “‘Really?  What does he write?'”  When Paul tells her the message, he reduces it likewise to something inconsequential:  “‘He needs his light gray coat, and there are no edible mushrooms in Australia.'”  His wife responds that the cousin (Eduard) should then eat something else.  The conversation ends here, and once again, all lines of ordinary communication are shut down:  there is no further curiosity expressed between these two characters about Eduard’s motives in leaving or his choice of Australia, or anything else for the time being.

The next section begins with “Later, the piano tuner came.”  One wonders just what the “through line of action” could be, but this is not left a mystery for long.  While the piano tuner is working, Paul notices that what he takes to be his cousin’s “light gray spring coat” is hanging in the closet, and knowing his wife’s habits, is surprised that she has brought it downstairs so promptly from the attic, “for normally my wife does something only after it no longer matters whether it gets done or not.”  He takes the coat and mails it out, but forgets to remove the book from the pocket.  When he gets back, his wife and the piano tuner are searching for something, which turns out to be the piano tuner’s coat:  it is the one which Holle has mailed out to his cousin by mistake.  When he tells them he has just sent it to Australia, “by mistake,” he explains no further, nor do they ask for an explanation, except that his wife asks “‘Why [to] Australia?'”  He only repeats “By mistake,” and the piano tuner takes his part in the farcical dialogue: “‘Well, then I won’t intrude any longer,’ said Mr. Kohlhaas [the piano tuner], somewhat embarrassed, if not particularly surprised.”  The humorous here is invested in the fact that Kohlhaas is not in fact surprised, since he knows nothing about the similar appearing coat, nor about the cousin.

They give the piano tuner the cousin’s coat in exchange, but the mistake (despite the fact that Paul has a sherry with the man and they talk about pianos) is never explained.  Two days later, they receive a box of mushrooms from the piano tuner, and a letter which he found in the pocket of the cousin’s coat, sending a now twelve years old ticket to the opera to a friend and telling him that he was going to be out of town for a while.  The incurious wife only asks about why they’re having mushrooms for lunch, and when she’s told that the piano tuner sent them, remarks that it’s “nice of him,” but he “shouldn’t have” without apparently seeing any connection with the previous remark at the beginning about there being no edible mushrooms in Australia.  When she sees the opera ticket on the table, she asks about it too, but when told simply that it’s twelve years old, says only “‘Oh well….I wouldn’t have cared to go to [it] anyway.'”

But the ridiculousness of the situation doesn’t end there.  The cousin writes another letter and says that he needs to be sent a tenor recorder.  The cousin reports that in the coat pocket of the coat he has received “(which, strangely enough, had grown longer)” he has found a book on how to play the recorder and is going to use it.  He also says, however, that recorders are not “available” in Australia (this is patently absurd, to borrow a phrase, but by now the point is clearly made).  When Paul reports to his wife that he’s had another letter from his cousin Eduard, the wife once again asks, as if by rote, “‘What does he write?'”  When Paul ridiculously condenses the whole matter into the information “‘He says there are no recorders in Australia.'”  His wife simply responds:  “‘Well, then he should play another instrument.'” Paul agrees.  The story ends with the simple two-sentence paragraph, “My wife is refreshingly and disarmingly matter-of-fact.  Her replies are straightforward but thorough.”

What creates the highly comic atmosphere of this story is in fact the combination of coincidence (the two light gray spring coats appear similar, each has an instruction book in its pocket, there are several letters) with the inconsequential manner in which every possibility for the characters to create a genuine kind of communication about the events is neglected and short-circuited.  It’s true, the issues at hand are not major life and death issues and are purposely mundane and somewhat silly.  Yet, if this is how these characters ordinarily communicate, what on earth would they do with a more devastating event?  In each case where there is an opportunity for the narrating character to explain more about what he knows, he neglects to do so.  What’s more, the other characters (including the piano tuner, who loses his own coat and finds a book on mushrooms in the replacement coat he is given, and the cousin, who receives a coat that doesn’t fit and a book on recorders in the coat pocket) regard this situation as normal, and don’t ask for further information.  The punchline of the whole story truly does occur in the final paragraph, because the speaker is praising his wife’s matter-of-factness, straightforwardness and thoroughness which she exhibits while lacking total information without which she is acting or advising action.  One must therefore wonder what this marriage is based on, a serious point in the midst of so much humor, if the characters or even one of them routinely hide matters from the other, or speak so definitively about something they don’t have complete information about.  But they obviously feel secure with each other this way.  And in fact, since all the characters in the story share this notable lack of curiosity, what sort of world is it they live in which provides for such incompetence in social circumstances without devastating catastrophes of misunderstanding?  If the stakes were a little higher and had to do with something more than a misplaced overcoat, this story itself might depict such a catastrophe.  As it is, once again Hildesheimer has managed to captivate and enchant with his off-beat, quizzical, absurdist view of life.

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October 18, 2012 · 7:07 pm

How magic resides in the lessons of life–Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist”

When we hear a simple tale told by a grandparent in an unpretentious style, with a sort of humorous, or sad, or wry punchline attached to the end, we may make the mistake of assuming that it’s just a matter of another old country saying (or street-wise rejoinder, for that matter), that the punchline is something not really to be taken seriously.  But if we had lived that person’s life through, we might well think otherwise–in fact, that punchline or reduction of a piece of reality to what seems like a formulaic old saw might in that case be something to make us sit up and take notice, or mumble under our breaths, or sigh dramatically, or feel a shiver as if a “person just walked over our graves.”

Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist is all about the experience of attaining life wisdom through a sort of personal journey, paying attention to signs and omens along the way and always keeping one’s goal in sight even when it seems delayed by everything that happens to one.  And the book is full of teacher figures eager to share their principles with the right student and knowing more than he does himself about his dreams.  Signs and omens and pilgrimages to Mecca and belief in Jesus Christ and Allah and prophets and seers and Gypsy fortune tellers and scholars and merchants and even, yes, an alchemist all have their place.  Even encounters with rogues and thieves and people who threaten to murder one are or become learning experiences for an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago, who starts out only by having unusually troubling dreams.  When he asks a Gypsy woman to interpret, she tells him that if he goes to Egypt and visits the Pyramids, he will find a treasure that makes him a rich man.  It’s obvious that a kind of symbolic alchemy is going on in the text, however, because as Santiago is led on through the book by various prophesying and teaching figures, he accepts a spiritual sort of quest in place of a monetary one, and thus is in the process of refining himself and allowing himself to be refined by others.

Santiago learns that he is in search of living out his own “Personal Legend” and is being led by these others to perceive the “Soul of the World” in all living things.  Reading the signs and omens as he learns to do, he seems not ever actually to use or to use only once the two magic stones, one black and one white, Urim and Thummim, pronosticating stones given him by Melchizedek, a mysterious “king” with a Biblical name who says he is the “king of Salem” and wears (under a voluminous robe) a golden breastplate.  Santiago learns the importance of accepting his fate and learning to perceive it truly and follow it well because, as an Arabic crystal dealer for whom he works for a year says, “Maktub,” (“It is written”) by “the hand that writes all,” though the words used are always “Personal Legend” and never the less gentle and more dreaded word “Fate.”

What’s the most unusual is the combination in the book of an uncomplicated story line with what amounts almost to a treatise on belief, as Santiago goes from being a shepherd to a traveller to a temporary employee for a candy dealer in Tangier, then for a crystal merchant in Tangier, whom he so enriches by his merchandising concepts that he makes enough money to decide whether he wants to pay his passage back to Spain and forget the whole matter or go forward.  But he would have worked for neither of the two men had he not been robbed at a time in Tangier when he was unable to speak Arabic; what he later learns to speak fluently is known as “the universal language without words.”  He also learns that understanding and following one’s Personal Legend is a matter of not perceiving himself as a victim of the thief, but as someone following his own destiny.  After all, as he also knows by this time, “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation.”  (In my edition of this book, there are questions for discussion, and one of them is centered around whether this does not convey at least a hint of narcissism–but when one has covered the entire book and realizes that the doctrine taught throughout is that the main unifying force of the whole world is love, and that acting in line with love in fact helps one find one’s Personal Legend, the point is dismissible, I believe.)

Santiago in fact goes to the Sahara and, surrounded by dangers such as tribal warfare, makes his way with his caravan to an oasis, meeting an Englishman along the way who first introduces him to the idea of alchemy, carries a load of books along, and also has two prognosticating Urim and Thummim stones.  The Englishman is trying to learn from books what the shepherd is learning from life.  At the oasis, the Englishman seeks for knowledge of the alchemist who is said to live just to the south of there, and Santiago falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Fatima whom they have stopped to ask for information.  This later becomes a temptation to him also, to forget about the treasure near the Pyramids and stay with her.  But fate intervenes again:  the boy reads the omen of two hawks warring in the sky, and reports back to the oasis chieftains (who are at peace with each other in the oasis) that a warring tribe is about to descend.  He is threatened with death if this turns out to be a false prediction, but he has spoken truly, and the chieftains muster in time successfully to defend the oasis from attack.

The boy’s fate takes another turn when the real alchemist seeks him out and challenges him because he read the signs of the desert accurately.  Because the boy shows courage at this meeting at swordpoint (said to be the most necessary thing to have in order to stand up to one’s Personal Legend), the alchemist leads him further into the desert, within a short distance of the Pyramids, to an old Coptic monastery.  There the alchemist shows the boy how to transmute lead into gold, but when the boy asks if he himself will ever be able to do so, the alchemist responds that it is his own Personal Legend to have done so, not the boy’s.

When Santiago is actually standing in front of the Pyramids, he is remembering that his heart earlier told him to be aware of the place where his tears fall, because there is where his heart is and his treasure also.  At this point, he weeps at the beauty of the Pyramids and the desert night, and so takes the command literally and begins to dig with his hand in the desert soil beneath him, hoping to unearth a literal treasure.  But at the next moment, he is set upon by refugees who take his only remaining gold from him and beat him nearly senseless.  They have asked, though, what he is doing there, and when he tells them he is digging for treasure because he twice dreamed of it there, they scoff at him and prepare to depart.  One of them in mocking him, however, goes go far as to tell him that he had fallen asleep on just that spot on the desert two years before and had dreamed something about a treasure buried in an old sycamore tree near a ruined church on the field of Spain where the shepherds and their flocks sometimes stayed, but that he himself is not so stupid as to cross the whole desert and into another country to follow a dream.  They leave, and suddenly Santiago realizes that he is now rich beyond his dreams, because he does have that kind of belief, and he can get his way back again somehow and claim the treasure.

Lest one assume that this story ends with the usual lessons about alchemy being only a means of transforming a metal or only truly being about changing people from one state to another morally or spiritually, it is for Santiago both:  it is this complexity which means that if he is a wise man and a rich man, he will never confuse the two, but will always pay his debts of teaching and learning and of wealth in the proper coin.  It also is not a tale which rewards us only with the unadventurous thought that “happiness is best found in your own backyard.”  That would be a truly unrewarding moral to the story.  Luckily, Coelho provides an Epilogue in which Santiago goes back to Spain, retrieves his treasure, and feels the kiss in the wind of his desert woman, Fatima, waiting for him.  The optimism of the text leads us to believe that he will go back to the oasis, too.  Thus, though he has achieved his Personal Legend, he will never have to reproach himself, as others in the story do, with not having had the courage to act on their dreams.  He is both materially and spiritually successful, but it took the second to bring about the first, and it is the second which will ensure that he does not misuse his material goods.

The 1993 English edition of the text translated by Alan R. Clarke and published by HarperCollins has a brief biographic sketch of the author and tells how he himself was repressed first by his parents from following his dream to be a writer, and then imprisoned and tortured by a repressive political regime for defending free expression.  When he was freed, he first decided to live what he regarded as a more “normal” life.  But then he had “an encounter with a stranger,” whom he had first met in a dream.  “The stranger suggested that Paulo should return to Catholicism and study the benign side of magic.  He also encouraged Paulo to walk the Road of Santiago de Compostela, the medieval pilgrim’s route.”  After that pilgrimage, Coelho’s writing career took off.  As of the 1993 printing, “The Alchemist went on to sell more copies than any other book in Brazilian literary history.”  It just goes to show that what to one person might be a tall tale or a moralistic fantasy chockful of truisms is for another a guide to true wisdom, and that discovering one’s own Personal Legend means listening sometimes to older, wiser voices that speak of their own experience of things, so that one doesn’t have to find everything out through trial and error.  And Paulo Coelho is one of those voices who speak truly of life’s tribulations, though he disguises them ever so well as simple learning exercises, perhaps so that we can learn to resist discouragement as well as his character Santiago did, and as he himself obviously had to do.  This book, though, is a delight as a literary experience as well, with its simple style and clear explanations of complicated states of mind.  I predict that it is the fate of Santiago the shepherd boy in The Alchemist to continue to please readers for many years to come.

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