Tag Archives: literary topics

October 16, 2012 · 3:01 pm

Anticipation and longing in Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Traveler”

In the middle of November, I will be travelling to Canada by train to attend my graduation for my Ph.D.  While there, I will stay with some dear friends, a man and woman who have helped me over many a hurdle by their concerted force and welcoming ways.  So, it was only fitting that some days ago when I happened to read Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Traveler” I immediately understood the notions and laughable moments he set forth therein:  anticipation and longing are an arrival of their own, an arrival at the state of appreciation for one’s eventual destination.  The glow cast over the trip itself is something which comes from one’s expected activities:  for me fellowship, laughter, and good times, for Federico V. in the story a regularly appointed rendevous with his lover, Cinzia U., “a resident of Rome” who also lives at the end of a train journey.

The whole of the story, a ten page short story, is taken up with describing Federico’s activities as he looks forward to the train journey, calculates just where on the train to sit and how best to get a compartment as much as possible to himself, plans the details of his trip ahead of time, and gets a “token” of his whole trip, an actual telephone token with which he will call Cinzia once he arrives.  It is significant that he only supplies himself with one, when he could easily even on his apparently middle class budget afford to supply himself with several, in case of loss or error on the phone line.  This token is in a sense the last bar that stands between him and his lover, and is simultaneously the last thing he has to do to meet her and the first contact he will have with her each time he travels.  As the text says, “Everything seemed to be there to encourage him, to give a spring to his steps like the rubberized pavement of the station, and even the obstacles–the wait, his minutes numbered, at the last ticket window still open, the difficulty of breaking a large bill, the lack of small change at the newsstand–seemed to exist for his pleasure in confronting and overcoming them.”

The whole trip is filled with things Federico already knows well from past experience:  how to keep other people at bay and mostly out of his compartment by closing the curtains; how to borrow a paper from someone who’s finished reading it; how to start out in a second class car perhaps to switch to first later in the trip; how to arrange his clothes for sleeping so that he does not wrinkle his overcoat, which he uses as a blanket; how to adjust the heat and cold to keep himself comfortable without too much resistance from other passengers; in short, how to organize each and every moment of the trip so that nothing goes wrong and he gets to where he is going with the greatest ease possible.  And yet, how can it be the greatest ease possible, when he has planned everything out with the careful consideration of an obsessive-compulsive person who has never been on the trip before?

When he is finally on the train and having his “adventure,” which to some people would be simply a rather pedestrian and necessary trip (though of course they are not travelling presumably for the same reason as he), snatches of a French love song he seems to be making up in his head flow through the text, and one wonders if he’s finally thinking of Cinzia as something other than an abstract goal.  But the fragments of the song (“Je voyage en volupté,” “Je voyage toujours…l’hiver et l’été,” “du voyage, je sais tout,” “J’arrive avec le train,” and so forth) are more about the trip itself than about his lover Cinzia, love in the wonderful city of Rome, or anything more usual that a man travelling for love might be expected to be thinking of.

When the old pillow merchant comes by out on the platform, there is even a bit of Calvino’s fantastic imagination:  “The pillow now was in Federico’s arms, square, flat, just like an envelope, and, what’s more, covered with postmarks:  it was the daily letter to Cinzia, also departing this evening, and instead of the page of eager scrawl there was Federico in person to take the invisible path of the night mail, through the hand of the old winter messenger….indeed the very fact of departing, the hiring of the cushion, was a form of enjoying [later comforts, later intimacy, later sweetnesses], a way of entering the dimension where Cinzia reigned, the circle enclosed by her soft arms.”

The comedy of the story and the gentle pathos is typical Calvino, for when he calls Cinzia up on the telephone, she is still drowsy from sleep, “and he was already in the tension of their days together, in the desperate battle against the hours; and he realized he would never manage to tell her anything of the significance of that night, which he now sensed was fading, like every perfect night of love, at the cruel explosion of day.”  On the surface, of course, the “perfect night of love” is the night he will actually spend with Cinzia; still, since they have “days” together they presumably may have also more than one night, and the “perfect night of love” about which he will never be able to tell Cinzia the significance is also the night he has spent on the train, on his great “adventure,” a modern day knight-errant struggling against modern day challenges to reach his lady.

Thus, though Calvino is never heavily ironic nor heavy-handed either, this stands as a mild cautionary tale about letting anticipation and longing build and find their natural release in an ordinary way, instead of frittering away the strength of one’s feelings through petty details and obsessive habits.  It certainly was an eyeopener of a tale for me, because ever since my trip was planned, I have been notifying my friends of every minor detail of my arrival and departure and have tried to make my plans foolproof from this end as well.  Now that I know what one of my favorite authors has to say on the subject, I will try to conduct myself with a more becoming gravitas, and save my feelings for my friends rather than for the displacement activity of hogging the seats on the train!

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October 14, 2012 · 5:59 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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October 9, 2012 · 7:59 pm

A humanly chilling tale for Halloween–A. S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest”

A. S. Byatt’s tale “The Thing in the Forest” from Little Black Book of Stories is a deceptively docile story about perspective, childhood, and nightmare (both the everyday and the fantastic kinds).  By and large, what produces the at least initially docile tone is the series of simple declarative sentences, often beginning with “the” or “there” as in any children’s well-told story with its fiats and “there once was.”  Defying the conventional writers’ wisdom about varying sentence structure, for a lot of the story these sentences march in order, simply telling what was the case without apology or intricacy, though there is intricacy in the implications attendant on the “simple” facts so posed.  This means of telling reinforces the factuality from a childlike perspective, at the same time as it heightens the mystery of “the thing in the forest.”  Just as the two little girls who are the main characters wonder if their WWII evacuation to the countryside is a punishment or a treat–and many children in England were sent into the country at the time to keep them safe–so a sense of uncertainty about the terror itself causes them to separate willingly after they “see” the thing in the forest attached to the countryhouse where they are staying.

The “thing” too is simply described, with only a gentle introduction and a slight variation from the previously repetitive sentence structure:  “Did they hear it first or smell it first?  Both sound and scent were at first infinitesimal and dispersed.  Both gave the impression of moving in–in waves–from the whole perimeter of the forest.  Both increased very slowly in volume, and both were mixed, a sound and a smell fabricated of many disparate sounds and smells.”  In the rest of the description, which tells what smells exactly and sounds precisely the thing is composed of, the fantastic is at war with the flowing pace of the language, not elevated or unusual, but causing a concatenation of images for the reader to be appalled by.  The “thing” is apparently not aware of or not after the two main characters, but at first seems simply to inhabit that time, place, and set of conditions.

When the characters become two grownup women, vacationing after the deaths of their mothers within a week of each other, they happen to meet up in the house again, in front of a “medieval-looking illustrated book” which is on display at the house in the room where they had previously eaten as children there, though there is in the present time no record of any of the children having visited.  Other war time events that took place in the great house are extensively commemorated, they find.  Thus, there is a reversal:  in the original encounter, they had no previous warning of “the thing in the forest,” though both of them were on record as being there, since they were later returned to their mothers, who unlike their fathers survived the war; now, there is no indication that the two main characters were there, whereas there is the illustrated book about family legends regarding the “thing.”  The “thing” can clearly take over places and people in at least this sense of memory.

In the book, the “thing” is spoken of as the “Loathly Worm,” not a dragon with wings but an “English worm,” and is described as having been killed several times by the “scions” of the house (it needs periodically to be “re-killed” because like the earthworm it is compared to, it can grow new heads).

One important feature of the story is that though Penny, the tall thin little girl, now a trained child psychologist, and Primrose, the short plump blonde child, a babysitting storyteller for children, are so different in other respects, the episode has clearly been a major force in both their lives in different ways, as their “vocations” attest, since both have wound up caring for children.

As the two women converse over tea, they finally agree that they both “saw” the Loathly Worm and that it has continued to affect them.  As Penny says, “….I think that there are things that are real–more real than we are–but mostly we don’t cross their paths or they don’t cross ours.  Maybe at very bad times we get into their world, or notice what they are doing in ours.”  For the first time, they admit that maybe the monster disposed of a little girl named Alys whom they had refused to let play with them:  “There had been a mess, a disgusting mess, they remembered, but no particular sign of anything that might have been, or been part of, or belonged to, a persistent little girl called Alys.”  The two women agree to meet up again, but when the time comes, both of them sit alone in separate B & Bs, as if paralyzed by the fear they once felt.  Something peculiar affects them and keeps them apart.

Primrose decides the next day to go back to the forest, while Penny walks off in the opposite direction.  This is characteristic of their personalities as adults:  while Primrose the fairy tale teller is practical and down-to-earth, Penny, the “rationcinative” is impractical and given to avoidance.  Primrose takes a different path into the wood than they had taken the first time.  She enjoys the flowers at first, and the birds and small animals.  We see her as a child in retrospect, loved and protected by a mother who creatively made her some toy stuffed animals each Christmas.  Her view as a developing child is a touching one.  “She told herself stories at night about a girl-woman, an enchantress in a fairy wood, loved and protected by an army of wise and gentle creatures.  She slept banked in by stuffed creatures, as the house in the blitz was banked in by inadequate sandbags.”  She reasons to herself in the present that she should get to the center of the “forest” and Byatt uses a sentence in quotation marks to show that Primrose is the heroine of her own story, thinking of it as a different story she might tell to the children she tends:  “‘She came to the centre and sat on the mossy chair.'”  We are told that normally she does not frighten the children with this particular story of the Loathly Worm from her past.  “She frightened them with slimy things that came up the plughole, or swarmed out of the U-bend in the lavatory, or tapped on windows at night, and were despatched by bravery and magic.  There were waiting goblins in urban dumps beyond the streetlights.  But the woods in her tales were sources of glamour, of rich colours and unseen hidden life, flower fairies and more magical beings.  They were places where you used words like spangles and sequins for real dewdrops on real dock leaves.”  When Primrose has sat a while, she becomes prey to warring desires, the one to go home and the other to stay exactly where she is, questioning if she ever had a home.

Though Penny has taken an apparently opposite route, she too winds up on one side of the wood, so that (as in many a fairy tale) the wood becomes that magical place that all of the champions against it must face.  “She had wagered on freedom and walked away, and walking away had brought her here, as she had known it would.”  She begins to move “as if she were hunted or hunting.”  Since she is apparently looking for the monster, she quite logically begins to trail its scat:  “She found things she remembered, threadworms of knitting wool, unravelled dishcloth cotton, clinging newsprint.  She found odd sausage-shaped tubed of membrane, containing fragments of hair and bone and other inanimate stuffs.  They were like monstrous owl-pellets, or the gut-shaped hair-balls vomited by cats….It had been here, but how long ago?”  She comes out at a place she suddenly recognizes, and finds some “small bones” and a tortoiseshell hairslide, and suddenly the reader begins to speculate again about the child Alys.  Is this a fantasy tale, or a tale about a reality too horrible to relate?  Did the two girls perhaps do something to Alys to make her stop following them through the wood?  Is there a real monster?  In the past, are they seeing a bomb fall, or perhaps seeing the results on the ground of a bomb that has already fallen?   At this point present and past become one for a moment, because the traces of human death are still there.  Penny thinks for a moment of bringing the bones together and burying them, but does not do so.

Primrose enters the forest in the morning of this day in the present of the story; by the time Penny sees “the full moon” and is “released” by the forest, night has clearly come.  Now what do our two main characters do?  Whereas Primrose had previously made up a better type of forest to tell children about, and as Penny had specialized in dreams as a child psychologist, so they both take their own way out again.  They end up going back to town in the same train, but both remembering the expression of misery on the face of the monster, they avoid each other on the platform.  “They saw each other through that black imagined veil which grief, or pain, or despair hangs over the visible world.  They saw each other’s face and thought of the unforgettable misery of the face they had seen in the forest.  Each thought that the other was the witness, who made the thing certainly real, who prevented her from slipping into the comfort of believing she had imagined it or made it up.”

Penny is haunted, and after returning to town, goes back later to the original entrance they’d come in by, wanting to see the monster face to face.  Her story ends with her hearing and smelling its approach.  Primrose overcomes it by telling her children’s group at a mall about it in fairy tale form.  These are two characteristic choices again, but now it is Penny who is facing what she previously avoided and Primrose avoiding ever so delicately what she previously faced, trying to envelope the “Loathly Worm” in a net of fiction.  Byatt’s choice of her subject, however, is characteristic of both, for as readers we are encouraged not only to believe in the monster on a fantastic level, but also to look beyond it, to a harsh reality, the facts of war, death, decay.  And we see, as I believe Byatt wants us to see, that in our century, war is not about a man’s heroic contest with a Loathly Worm, nor perhaps was it ever so simple a thing, even symbolically.  It’s about the quotidian level of destruction which goes on daily through the deliquescence of all uncomplicated daily things which are eliminated in their simple nature during wars and which become so much detritus, trailing mournfully and sluggishly and stinking thorough a “forest,” which bears a mute resemblance to Dante’s “dark forest” also.  Unless we see the conglomeration of all the tiny emblems of our lives which war engulfs, we are unable to track it down; it is we ourselves who are gone and forgotten and left in pieces.

Yet, when this ghastly tale is done, the tale is not after all the worst there is:  for, forgetting would be the worst, and we remember in tales like this one, too.  Whether writing in deadly earnest factual prose or writing a supple and light prose of great poetic and fairy tale beauty, writers like A. S. Byatt don’t forget, nor do they allow us to do so.

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October 5, 2012 · 4:24 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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October 3, 2012 · 5:21 pm

On the subject of growing old–Oscar Wilde and Andrew Marvell

As we know from two very different perspectives, there is always a penalty to be paid when one ages:  either one becomes older and wickeder and uglier, or one (in sadness) acquires the ability to be more mature and more knowledgeable and more composed about one’s appearance (a moralist’s view of older and wickeder and uglier.  As a non-professional moralist and a person of 55, sometimes I feel I belong to one camp, sometimes to the other).  Both Oscar Wilde and Andrew Marvell have written on the topic of youth and age in well-known works, Wilde in his novella “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and Marvell in his poem “To His Coy Mistress.”  As well, the two authors are interested in what can constitute the golden mean of outwitting a loathesome age or the just punishment for evading the maturity that should come naturally to a naturally composed person.

In “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Dorian is at first merely a somewhat flighty, attractive, shallow young man who is beloved by the painter Basil Hayward, a man painting his portrait.  But along comes Sir Henry Wotton (Harry to his intimates) who derives a certain amusement from dragging Dorian into haunts of bad repute and amongst evil characters.  Dorian makes a wish that his portrait, a triumph of the painterly art when Hayward finishes it, might take on the characteristics of his appearance as he ages, and leave him free to appear always young and handsome (and as the Arabic saying goes “Be careful what you wish for, because you will surely receive it”).  This is in fact what happens.  By the end of the novel, Dorian has murdered the author of his artistic being, Hayward, and outdone Wotton in the degree of his depravity.  When he tries to destroy the by-now-unsightly picture, however, catastrophe strikes, reminding us that “The truth will out” or “What’s bred in the bone will not out of the flesh,” or a hundred other aphorisms.  I say aphorisms are in a sense the point here, because Wilde was in some works especially a moralist, and the notions of morality were never far from even his lightest touch with the pen.

With Marvell’s poem, the point is a little otherwise, and it’s really a triumph to both authors that this should be so.  What I mean by this is that Wilde wrote his story and ended it as he did and published it when he was only thirty-five; his story is about how much more graceful and mature and moral it is to accept age as it comes.  By contrast, Marvell wrote his frolicky poem “To His Coy Mistress” by the time he was about 60, a poem in which apparently the lady being addressed is a young virgin and the male voice speaking has much of the urgency of an equally young swain courting her.  But then, who better to be an expert on the carpe diem theme, perhaps, than a man a great deal older than a woman he is courting, so that possibly my point is not well-made?  At any rate, his reminder that “The grave’s a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there embrace” is definitely a pointed reminder to the lady.  As he also informs her, it may be that “worms shall try/That long-preserved virginity,/And your quaint honor turn to dust,/And into ashes all my lust.”  (Note for my readers:  at the time Marvell was writing, “mistress” may or may not have meant “mistress” as we use it today.  It also meant “girlfriend,” “lady of the house,” “one whom I admire,” and sometimes simply “Mrs.”  As well, in a context like this, the word “quaint” was a pun on the “c” word, which is used rudely these days as a word for a woman one disrespects.  The disrespect was not current in Marvell’s poem.)

The end of the poem, however, is where Marvell’s “fable” diverges from Wilde’s.  Wilde’s fable has a serious and a tragic ending; Marvell’s fabulous poem surpasses the flourish of imagery at its beginning with a truly cosmic witty imagination at its end:  “Let us roll all our strength and all/Our sweetness up into one ball,/And tear our pleasures with rough strife/Thorough the iron gates of life:/Thus, though we cannot make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.”  Or, do the two fables (and I am using the word “fable” imprecisely in this paragraph) really diverge?  Wilde’s novella shows one failure to stay young at heart and hope at least, a failure which is particularly desperate.  Whatever age Marvell’s speaker and his mistress may be imagined to have, they have come up with yet another solution:  to “seize the day” and make the most of the time they have together.  Yet to some readers, this solution seems a little hasty, as does Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” on a similar theme, beginning “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”  In all cases, the devastating abilities of time and old age are acknowledged; the main divergence of the fables is in which choice they choose to portray.  Wilde’s tale is cautionary though witty, Marvell’s is witty, though with an underlying morality of seriousness.  Both authors are indicating the need for a golden mean, though one shows a character notably failing of it and another is trying to persuade a woman to disregard her doubts, her doubts holding her back because of a kind of “coyness”; there is, after all, no indication in the poem that she is unwilling to listen.

And so, readers, just as an afterthought, what were you planning to get around to soon?  What had you determined to carpe diem, or “seize the day” about?  Perhaps you were planning to wash the car, or read a particular book, or pay a peculiar relative a visit, or write a post:  as Wilde would have it, do so with loving-kindness and an awareness of your privilege of being still among the living, and as Marvell would have it, don’t forget why you’re doing it today (because you’re still vital enough).

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September 25, 2012 · 8:52 pm

Richard Bausch and open-endedness in fiction–in “Peace” and “Something Is Out There.”

A few weeks ago, I commented on short stories in general that they often have a surprise ending, and that this is characteristic of the short story form.  While this is more true than not of the traditional short story, in some short forms (such as Richard Bausch’s short story “Something Is Out There,” the title story of a 2010 collection by the same name) the seemingly truncated surprise or what is often called the “open-endedness” which has become a regular feature of novel writing these days is followed, and a prime example of that quality in fiction is evidenced in another Bausch work, his 2008 novel Peace.

There are other similarities as well between the two works, not only in the way they are put together, but in narrative voice and setting/climate of the action.  The narrative voice in Peace is faintly reminiscent in its restraint of Ernest Hemingway at his best, though we fortunately escape from the sometimes chicken-playing maudlin tough guy attitude of the main characters in Hemingway’s war novels, which appears to some extent even in the war novel which I personally believe to be his best, For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Though the lofty grandeur of Hemingway one-liners is also missing, in its place in Peace we have what seems a more honest approach to the subject of war from the point of view of a corporal named Marson and two privates in Italy in WWII who are charged with going forward over a mountain to ascertain where the enemy is and in what number.  They are guided by a possibly disloyal Italian guide, and have also to contend with a sniper somewhere in the dismal, wretched winter forest around them.  In “Something Is Out There,” a Virginia family is weathering a winter snowstorm too, after their male breadwinner has been shot off the roof by a former business partner.  In this fiction, the part of the “sniper” is played by the fears they suffer while waiting for a cousin to come through the storm to celebrate Christmas with them, not only because he is late, but because they keep getting calls and an unknown visitor comes, all wanting to speak to the father, who is in the hospital.  The mother of the family, Paula, plays the role of the commanding presence which is analogous to the role played by Corporal Marson in Peace.  Both must defend the others grouped around them, and just as the soldiers in the novel are all unashamedly afraid of dying, so the family with perhaps equal cause feels hunted by what they fear may be lurking in the winter landscape around the house in which they are gathered.  Both the soldiers in the forest and the family in the snowed-in house are plagued not only by the weather, but by uncertainty and the elemental forces around them.  The soldiers don’t know if they are being followed or not, and have to contend with hearing shots in the night without knowing at first who is shooting or being shot; the family in the house is waiting for their family member Christopher to arrive in his Jeep, and is speculating whether the father who was shot is involved in illegal business; both the soldiers and the family have to deal with repeated snowfalls or bad weather, and both are forced to function in the dark, the soldiers because they are out in the night forest, the family because they are in the middle of a power outage.  All of these things constitute similarities between the two stories.

Probably the most structurally interesting thing about the two fictions, however, is that both are left open-ended.  While not wanting to reveal the endings entirely, I can safely tell you that the soldiers go on being soldiers in the midst of conflict without playing out entirely all the different threads of plot which are provided them earlier on:  Marson comes to certain realizations and resolves, but he goes on being a soldier whose first mission is to kill the enemy.  The family members all do various things to make themselves feel safe, but even for Paula, the main character, there is no assurance that her solution is going to safeguard her family or the house:  there is not even an absolute confirmation that they are being rational instead of merely needlessly panicky.  The storm has in some sense dictated isolation, but their isolation is no assurance, since for all they know “something is out there,” the most primitive fear of humankind hidden in the “cave” of its fears.  In fact, it is the open-endedness of these two fictions which helps the reader identify with the fears felt by the characters in each case, fears which bring out basic character traits that sometimes lead to an inability to get along with each other and less frequently to a genuine sort of heroism.  And it is the open-endedness of real life, imitated fictionally here, which makes the two works so convincing and so capable of speaking to what we know of ourselves and others.

(I would like to reference Caroline’s blog Beauty Is A Sleeping Cat for her Literature and War Readalong 2012.  I was not able to get around to reading Richard Bausch in time to participate in her readalong, but her blog was the inspiration behind my getting the book Peace and reading it in the first place when I was able to, and also led to my checking out the book of Bausch’s short stories.)

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September 24, 2012 · 3:20 pm

Just what kind of bird was it? And what was the cat doing there?

Today, I read a new post by another blogger whose site has provided me with many pleasurable hours spent reading.  The blogger is Emma McCoy, and her blogsite, which I recently reviewed, is at http://emmamccoy.wordpress.com/ .  Today, Emma wrote about the problem of writer’s block, though she doesn’t dwell on that topic.  The main gist of her article is about how one can free up one’s mind with the process of free association (learned from psychology, a field in which Emma seems to be an expert).  Emma starts her own free association and lets it run for a while, letting us see openly just what some of her inner connections are within the topics her mind runs through.

This is significant to me right now because I’m in the process of working on my fifth novel and am stuck in place, having left off at the last point where I had anything to say and having been unable to pick up for about a week now.  So, following Emma’s example in my somewhat quirky way, I decided not to free associate, but to pull out a little poem of my own which stays in the back of my mind as a sort of chant, and which sometimes lures me back into the creation process when I find all else murky and dark.  Here it is:

“It flew over the fence without a word.

The heart of cat is caught by bird.”

This little poem comes up somehow in my mind every time I’m stuck, and I don’t even know why, but sometimes it helps me back into writing what I want to continue with.  Of course the bird “flew over the fence without a word,” it’s a bird, after all!  One has to posit a third actor, perhaps a human watching the bird-cat interaction; the knowledge of the cat’s overweening interest in the bird stirs in the human the idea that it’s not just the cat’s possibility of catching the bird that’s at stake here, but the fact that the sight of the bird twittering and dancing in the grass or on the fenceline, or pulling up a worm or sitting in a bush only seconds later perhaps to startle and fly away over the fence has captured the cat’s attention much more effectively than the cat could have caught the bird.  But this is to make prosaic a line or two of poetry (I know, it’s not great, but it is poetry).

So, the same thing goes for the writer and the reader both.  What catches the reader-as-cat’s attention is of course getting into the whys and wherefores of the story, the drama of the encounter depending upon explanations inasmuch as the explanations are the scaffolding of the dramatic encounter.  What the reader’s main attention is on, of course, is the actual interaction:  Does the cat leap?  Does the bird get away?  What does the cat do next?  Some of the details might be:  Just what kind of bird was it?  And what was the cat doing there?  Was it an outdoor scene entirely, with a real risk implied, or was Tabby an indoor cat watching from behind a picture window?  Fulfilling this sort of question-and-answer contract with the curiosity of one’s readers is akin to giving them a good scratch behind the ears (no condescension intended, it’s my cat-within-cat metaphor getting away from me) and a treat, and helping them to console themselves, perhaps, for not having seen the end of the story, that the bird would in fact fly over the fence and into other perspectives.

First, however, the initial cat/bird metaphor to be fulfilled is not the contract between writer and reader, but the contract between the writer and herself, to find a bird worth watching and a cat who just might leap, given the chance.  Lest you think I’ve wandered away from my basic metaphor again here, let me just say that it’s as you suspect:  before the bird can fly over the fence taking your heart with it, so must it do in analogous form for me.  I have to sit watching the bird through the window, preening my whiskers as I think of being able to knock it down and bite into that feathery mass.  But it has somehow to escape sucessfully from me, too:  it has to surprise me and catch me off guard and carry my own heart over the fence with it until I say, “Ah, yes, now that’s a bird after my own heart!”  For of course, it’s the old tale of “the one who got away” except that the tale itself is the point, and the tale comes not only from a capture, but from imagery and incident and detail and (here’s the tricky part) allowing the spirit to fly away over the fence, which is after all the essential part of what it is to be a cat watching a bird and feeling one’s own heart airborne as well.

This is my possibly pedestrian evaluation of one of my own poems, and how it recurs in my life at some of my trickiest moments of fiction writing.  I would love to hear from you about what gets your creative mind working.  Thanks to Emma for her free association, which you can see and respond to at her site, listed above.

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September 15, 2012 · 5:24 pm

“Where, oh where have the heroines gone?”

Today’s post is not so much about a specific story or stories as about a now 14 year old collection of stories about heroines from around the world collected by Kathleen Ragan, with a foreword by Jane Yolen.  The collection is entitled, Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters:  Heroines in Folktales from Around the World.  These folktales are not, however, so-called “chick lit,” and are opposed in every way to that concept.  They do not deal with women in reference to men, except as it is necessary not to leave out the other half of the human race:  the women are not gossipy gal pals seeking for husbands or passive ladies in castles waiting to be rescued, but are instead active instigators of their own future actions and constructors of their own fates.

As Jane Yolen points out in the “Foreword”:  “Hero is a masculine noun.  It means an illustrious warrior, a man admired for his achievements and qualities, the central male figure in a great epic or drama.  A heroine, on the other hand, is the female equivalent.  Or is she really his equal…?  We might as well have called her a hero-ess or a hero-ette, some kind of diminuitive subset of real heroes….Or so the Victorian folk tale anthologists would have had us believe.  They regularly subverted and subsumed the stories that starred strong and illustrious female heroes, promoting instead those stories that showed women as weak or witless or, at the very best, waiting prettily and with infinite patience to be rescued.  And the bowdlerizers did it for all the very best of reasons–for the edification and moral education of their presumed audiences.”  The enduring yet submissive model of womankind was of course the Victorian ideal, one which demanded that women leave to men all the decisive action.  These versions of womankind were passed down to women even as late as the 1950’s, when they appeared in some Disney cartoons in which the main drift of the heroine’s effort–and I use the word “drift” deliberately here– was to be rescued from a victimized status and fall into the arms of the rescuing prince.

In the “Introduction,” Kathleen Ragan tells how her search for books for her young daughter which featured true female heroes went (and in some quarters the term “heroine” has gone the way of “stewardess” and other words which are deemed antiquated).  They were reading a lot of Dr. Seuss at the time, but disturbingly in this great author’s works for children, Ragan began to find that there were almost no female role models, or at least none which were positive in nature.  She started by changing the pronouns when reading to her daughter, but this presented problems of its own, because with the astounding memory of children her daughter caught every mistake and slip-up.

Ragan then resorted to her local library, but had trouble there, too.  As she relates, “Although there were five to ten editions of ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ‘Snow White,’ and ‘Cinderella,’ each illustrated by a different person, there was a very limited depth to the stock of heroines in the library picture book collection….The current selection of fairy tales presented to children makes a sharp differentiation in the treatment of boys and girls.  The female role models are beautiful, passive, and helpless victims….Male role models include a range of active characteristics:  adventurous Jack the Giant Killer, resourceful Puss in Boots, the underestimated third son who makes the princess laugh, and the gallant knight who rides up the glass mountain.”  And when she did resort to anthologies of folktales, she found that “many of the women were negative characters:  a nagging mother-in-law who makes life intolerable even for the devil, a woman who personifies the misery in the world, or women who allow themselves to be mutilated by loved ones.”  There were also wicked witches and wicked stepmothers.  Ragan, taking her mission quite seriously, considered that it was time to fulfill a need, “the need for an anthology of folktales with positive women as the main characters.”

Ragan reviewed over 30,000 stories, and found positive heroines in tales from all over the world.  They had just become submerged.  “These forgotten heroines are courageous mothers, clever young girls, and warrior women; they rescue their villages from monsters, rule wisely over kingdoms, and outwit judges, thieves, and tigers….[A] female Prometheus brings navigation to Micronesia.  Seven Thai women, after severing the head of a monster, carry it for seven years to free their country of the monster’s curse.  A Cheyenne woman gallops into the thick of battle to rescue her brother.”  Ragan also mentions the original German edition of Grimms’ fairy tales (Kinder und Hausmärchen, published in 1812).  Among the tales in this collection, there is a Little Red Riding Hood who goes through the woods another time, encounters a second wolf, and “vanquishes this wolf herself.”

Ragan recounts how some people argue that gender doesn’t matter in a story, because the child reader will empathize with the hero or heroine.  But her anecdotal research suggested that the case was far otherwise:  regardless how gripping the story, both girls and boys identified with characters of their own sexes, no matter how miniscule a part that character or characters played in the action.  So, she kept up her search, assigning fairy tales a key role in her adult reading too, “because I felt that somehow they were meant to answer questions and fulfill a need.”  After reading through story after story, she finally concluded that characters didn’t have to be perfect in order the meet the readers’ empathetic needs:  “[I]t seemed to me that the heroines I chose no longer had to be perfect.  I found I could smile at a cantankerous character and admire her perseverance….I could even forgive myself for not becoming as patient or as beautiful as Cinderella.”

In choosing the tales, Ragan went for “source books” that were in English or had been translated into English.  This automatically meant that there were more stories available from countries that either still have or at some time in the past have had connections colonial or otherwise with England or North America.  She notes a certain “dearth” thus among the stories collected from “South American Indian” stories.  Nevertheless, the overall drive of the collection was to go for multiculturalism in the stories.  She has also tried to stick closely to the oral form the stories take, following the words and word choices of their tellers rather than tidying them up for a literary audience.  She followed several criteria relating to the choice of the stories themselves, one of which was quite interesting from a “victorious heroine” point of view:  her eldest daughter begged her not to include any stories in this collection in which the heroine dies at the end of the tale.  Though this may seem at first like an unfair limitation, ask yourself just how many heroes’ tales end with the hero dying without his subsequent being going on to grace the heavens, or figure as some important element in the biosphere, atmosphere, or other “heavenly” location, and chances are you won’t be able to think of many.

Ragan started out by observing heroines for a standard who were parallel in qualities to heroes, but soon at least some of her emphasis had changed.  “[A] whole new class of heroines emerged.  Some ‘heroines’ did things that resonated with my innermost feelings but that refused to be classified as heroic:  a woman who sensed the importance of an insignificant looking coin, a girl who loved to dance, or a woman who told a story.  A simple conversation between two women when taken at face value could elicit a shrug of the shoulders.  Yet underneath this ordinary conversation, the effort that women make to keep relationships alive in a family or community swells like the incoming tide.”

In quoting so extensively from this book’s “Foreword” and “Introduction,” I realize that I’ve done a lot for you of what you are perfectly capable of doing for yourself, assuming you have the book in hand.  Yet because it has been out since 1998 (published by W. W. Norton and Co.), and there is still sometimes a noticeable dearth of good collections of stories featuring strong women and girls as role models, I feel it’s important to let as wide an audience as possible know of this valuable effort in folklore research.  True, in the field of children’s books there has been a boom since 2000 in the more gender-free language and roles assigned characters in books, so that it’s easier for boys to admire girl characters as well as the tough-guy heroes they historically have admired; there are also more leading female and male role models which girls can imitate and still “feel like Mommy,” and thus not odd in any way (I’ve often thought that though children are credited usually with being highly creative and innovative, which they are, they are also nature’s conservatives in their views of which parent they want to imitate, and in a certain sense of individuals perhaps this is right, but in some ways it’s a shame.  A girl with an admirable, strong, outgoing father figure should be as free to imitate him as to imitate her shyer more reclusive mother; likewise, a boy who likes to tidy house or cook should be free to imitate whichever parent does this the most, without feeling peculiar).

You may wonder–or you may not, but I’m going to tell you anyway, I hope you won’t mind–which folktale was my favorite as I was growing up.  It was “Clever Gretel,” I think from the Grimms’ Brothers collection, though I’m not entirely sure.  It’s the story in which a servant girl manages not only to eat portions from the chicken her master, due to arrive any moment, is saving for a guest, but manages to persuade the guest due to the continuing of an initial misunderstanding that the host is going to chop off his limbs (she does this as she trims off each limb of the bird and eats it in the kitchen).  When the master comes home, she cleverly lets him think that the guest stole the bird, whereupon the master begins to pursue the already terrified and fleeing guest, and Gretel settles herself in the kitchen and finishes off the bird.  Another thing about children–their moral sense is still in development, so Gretel’s cleverness is far more appealing than her dishonesty is significant.  And another thing about me–I still consider the story my favorite!

Do you have a favorite folktale, about hero or heroine?  Feel free to mention it here, I’m not prejudiced!

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September 13, 2012 · 4:03 pm

Guy de Maupassant and obsessive states of mind

Guy de Maupassant is a writer for whom the states of mind of his characters are sometimes very important, whether they are apprehended from the outside or the inside of the character concerned.  To consider this point today, I would like to contrast two stories from Selected Tales of Guy de Maupassant which, though very different in nature, both show how adversely characters can be affected by negative or excited states of mind.  The first is “The Horla,” often interpreted as a simple ghost story about possession, and the second is “The Piece of String,” one of de Maupassant’s citizen peasant stories.

In both cases, the main characters are obsessed, but in different ways.  “The Horla” is written in the form of diary entries in the first-person by an unnamed person in comfortable circumstances with his own home and servants, and is thus subjective in form.  “The Piece of String” is told in the objective third-person voice about an unfortunate citizen peasant, M. Hauchecome, and what results from an encounter he has with an old enemy, M. Malandain.  Both main characters in both stories become obsessed by coincidences; in the first case (the unnamed diarist), these coincidences are things such as having seen a ship coming from Brazil in the harbor on the very day he becomes ill with “melancholy,” having read an article about a supposed vampire from Brazil, having watched a “doctor” hypnotize his cousin, and having a male servant in his absence fall ill from the illness which he himself seems free of as long as he is not at home.  Each and all of these things can be explained away, but the character takes them all together and concludes that he is more or less possessed by a demon spirit.  M. Hauchecome in “The Piece of String” starts out with a much simpler obsession:  he sees a piece of string in the street and due to his being “economical like a true Norman,” perhaps another sort of obsession, must bend and retrieve it.  His enemy M. Malandain, seeing him, and either hearing fortuitously of a missing pocketbook or just spreading gossip before the fact, sets it about that M. Hauchecome has found the pocketbook and not returned it.  The obsession of the writing character in “The Horla” is one for which there is no visible outside objective cause easily observable by others.  In “The Piece of String,” though there is only a preexisting interior conflict between the main character and his chief enemy to start with, it is a real objective situation with real legal consequences which comes about.

The two main characters both suffer from obsession, it is true, but in the case of the aristocratic diarist, he diagnoses himself as suffering from “melancholy” at a time when melancholy was a general term for almost any kind of mental illness other than mania, no matter how simple or how severe.  In some manifestations, it was simply a sort of hobby for upperclass people just as minor psychological traumas are today, in other cases it was quite serious and was treated in the asylums of the time by doctors other than medical doctors.  It could range from mild depression to depression plus psychotic episodes.  The character is wealthy, apparently has nothing much to amuse himself with, spends a lot of time alone by himself in the surrounding landscape brooding, and is thus in one sense “asking for it,” assuming that is, that one takes this as a purely psychological story.  But it also has key features of a good rousing vampire story complete with ghostly elements, much as the story of the governess in Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” did.  People have argued over James’s story for a very long time as well, some arguing that it is a ghost story plain and simple, others insisting that the governess was a hysteric.  By contrast, in the story “The Piece of String,” the events are shown from an objective point of view as a simple obsession which entirely takes over a man’s mind due to external circumstances which are real to start out with.  In this case the results are brought on by the deliberate connivance of an enemy and disbelief of the other townspeople in M. Hauchecome’s honesty.  The obsession, however, causes him to go into what used to be known as a “decline,” an illness usually reserved in fiction for aristocrats and wealthy people, in this case suffered by a citizen peasant with a peculiar inability to let well enough alone.

In M. Hauchecome’s case, his isolated social status as an apparently unmarried citizen peasant is such that his final demise affects mostly himself.  Again, though it is brought on at first largely by the ribbing of others about his dishonesty, the real irony in the case is that he is painfully aware that he is intrinsically dishonest and cunning enough to have done what they insist he did, though this one time he happens to be innocent.  In the case of the unnamed wealthy diarist, his social status, though he is isolated sometimes at home by his own choice, is one in which his final dissolution of sanity affects his servants as well.  Other people die because of his obsession, part or all of which may be a vampire, or part or all of which may be due to hypnotism or hallucination.  He himself at first verges toward hypnosis as an explanation before becoming totally taken up totally supernatural answers–but because we see this all from within the orbit of his own mind, we don’t finally know which it is.

Thus, though Maupassant is too good a story-teller to engage in many outright “morals to the stories,” one thing he seems to be quite determined to communicate, whether in the lighter handling of “The Piece of String” or in the more solemn and spooky atmosphere of “The Horla,” is that obsession is not only an unhealthy state in and of itself, but it can also prevent one from seeking adequate terms in which to combat oppression, whether by a ghost or by a doubtful populace.  The diarist does most of what he does in order to convince himself that he is sane, yet also seems to be trying to persuade himself at the same time that he “sees” a vampire; the citizen peasant, instead of returning cunning for cunning and trying to think of a way out of the dilemma his enemy caused him, instead allows himself to be put in the much weaker position of protesting vociferously to one and all on every occasion (even that of his own death) that he is innocent.  If there is a “message” to these two stories, it is perhaps this one:  obsession can visit both high and low status people, without regard for person or circumstances, and if persisted in leads to extremely negative consequences for someone.  Taking it thus with a grain of salt, whether by shaking one’s head ruefully at the diarist (or perhaps looking over one’s shoulder to make sure there are no invisible vampires about!) or by laughing with and at the peasants is often the best we can do when confronted with such lapses of luck and judgement.

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September 10, 2012 · 9:09 pm

John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and fictionalizing history

There are two books which I both enjoyed thoroughly the first time I read through them, but I recently (this summer) read through both of them again, and my conclusions are a little different.  Whereas I had previously not thought of them as being much alike, suddenly I realized that they have a number of points in common, for all that the authors wrote from very different standpoints and apparently with different purposes.  The first (in publication date) is John Barth’s uproarious satirical send-up of the historical poet Ebenezer Cooke’s poem “The Sotweed Factor:  Or, a Voyage to Maryland” called The Sotweed Factor (tobacco grower/merchant), first published in 1960.  The poem which the fictional Cooke writes is also known in Barth’s satire as “The Marylandiad.”  Pynchon’s 1997 satire is set in the Americas also, but on the section between Maryland and Pennsylvania which came to be known as the “Mason-Dixon line,” and is entitled (you guessed it) Mason and Dixon.  Pynchon creates a character occasionally mentioned named “Timothy Tox,” who supposedly wrote in the past a poem known as “The Pennsylvaniad,” and has various scenes in which another weed entirely (pot) is consumed by the characters.  In some ways, Pynchon is taking on Barth’s fiction as much as he is imposing changes on his own, because he changes the way in which the fictional world itself is handled.

In Barth’s satire, Ebenezer and his twin sister are polymaths, and their separation and gradual rejoining are a part of the overarching plot structure, though much of the novel is a sort of picaresque trip around the Colonies in the end of the 17th and the first part of the 18th centuries.  Pynchon’s satire is set about a generation later, just before the Revolutionary War, though it starts before that with a fictionalized history of how Mason and Dixon meet up and go about forming a working relationship.  Their story is told (and partially imagined) by the “Reverend Cherrycoke,” a fictional character who supposedly was with them on their expedition to America, and is relating (and sometimes bowdlerizing) the tale for a family group.  In contrast to Barth’s satire, in which the characters are extremely well-educated, Pynchon’s satire takes place in an late Enlightment atmosphere in which some people know some things, but about which it is in fact the reader who must be the polymath in order to follow all the different Pynchonesque threads of narrative.  Mason and Dixon is more of a satire for specialists than Barth’s book and than Gravity’s Rainbow, in that both Barth and the earlier Pynchon tell more universal “jokes” or spend more time explaining their frame of reference; slyly, of course, but the explanations are still there.  In Pynchon’s book on the two astronomers/surveyors, however, one gets the feeling that some of the best punchlines are reserved for mathematicians, scientists, historians, surveyors, and engineers of all kinds; Barth’s book is more purely satirical and literary in nature.  Pynchon’s later book is also told with rather less of the boyish glee that those followers of Pynchon since Gravity’s Rainbow might be expecting, while the boyish glee itself is to be found in the character of Jeremiah Dixon as painted by Pynchon.

In both novels, Barth’s and Pynchon’s, one of the major subjects is what has come to be known as “culture shock,” in which the visitors from England are astounded by the difference of culture in America, or what sometimes seems like a total lack of culture, even to the tolerant Dixon.  There is also more of outright material escaped from a fantasy novel in Pynchon’s work, which might at first seem to be at variance with his strong tendency to follow a daybook from Mason’s and Dixon’s expedition.  There is, for example, a Learned English Dog who speaks, and a mechanical Duck, an exaggerated version of the interest of the time in automatons and machines.  In Barth’s novel, though many, many incidents are far-fetched, they don’t invite comparison to a fantasy novel.

Both novelists feature additional poetry in their books, Barth keeping to the subject of Cooke’s grievances with America, where he has come to claim an inheritance of a “sotweed” plantation, though the poetry fragments he gives are widely at variance except in structure with the real poem Cooke wrote.  The poems Pynchon contributes to his book are manifested as plenty of anachronistic comic songs, but few with the satirical, orgiastic, and scatological wit of those in Gravity’s Rainbow.  Both writers make up fictional meetings between their fictionalized characters and other real historical figures, but Pynchon spends more time actually constructing dialogues that, though odd and unlikely, seem emblematic of what we know of the historical characters.  An example of this is an encounter between Mason and Dr. Johnson and Boswell which takes place in a tavern.  Barth takes another tack; for instance, he creates long sections of a lascivious journal supposedly kept by Captain John Smith about his own sexual exploits.  There is more rowdinesss of this sort in Barth’s book (and one must guess that he inspired Pynchon early), whereas Pynchon seems to rely in an allusive and elliptical way to what (he must have known) readers expect from reading his earlier books.  A hint of this is in the cue-like mention of something being colored “magenta and green,” a color combination which occurred with frequency in Gravity’s Rainbow, almost as if readers were some of the Pavlovian dogs from the earlier novel, taught to salivate with anticipation at the repetition of “magenta and green” and to expect something major to happen.

Both books end “not with a bang but a whimper,” though this is not to say that the endings are not significant.  They are very different, however.  Barth’s book ends with its satirical edge unhampered, however much the characters have declined in fortunes, whereas Pynchon’s book ends on an elegiac note for the end of Jeremiah Dixon, who died sometime before Charles Mason, and the later final illness of Mason, bringing to a halt the worldly close friendship of the two men.  So vivid has been the picture of otherworldly visitations and unearthly happenings, however, that there seems to be almost a certain hope suggested.  Certainly, though the two books cater to some extent to slightly different audiences, the characters live beyond the novels for us, the readers.  I hope you will have the time and patience to read one or both of them, as they well repay the trouble.

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