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August 13, 2012 · 5:22 pm

“Hell is other people.”–Jean-Paul Sartre

Buckets and buckets of ink have been spilled debating the topic of what constitutes a short long story (a short novel) and what makes up a long short story (to still qualify it as a short story).  And where does the novella fit into this system, exactly?  Also, there is the series of considerations about form and content which insist that what makes a short story or novel is not only a question of length, but has formal aspects as well.  Though I’m not going to rehash any of these arguments today–aren’t you glad?–I would just point out that this book I plan to discuss, The Stepdaughter, by Caroline Blackwood, is one of the shortest epistolary pieces of fiction I’ve ever read, with both a (strong but illusory) sense of length in the form, as might occur in a novel or novella, and a twisted ending such as one might expect to find in a short story.

In Sartre’s play “Huit Clos” (translated most often as “No Exit”), when we are told “hell is other people,” we can probably all relate imaginatively to the experience being articulated, thinking perhaps of some time or other when someone else made themselves intolerable to us.  Yet, there is a deeper meaning lurking here, and Blackwood’s novel brings it out.  Sometimes, the people around us as we ourselves imagine them to be are actually much worse than the actual people, once we get to know them a little better.  Sadly, we lose all too many opportunities to do this, and repent of it too late.  As well, sometimes a whole group of people can be adversely affected and made to suspect, resent, or misinterpret each other because of the actions of one self-centered person in their midst.  Such a character is the husband figure, Arnold, in this book.

This epistolary novel (a novel written in letters) is produced in the voice of a woman known only as “J.”   She writes letters to a sort of imaginary friend, known either as “Dear….” or “Dear So-and-So.”  The letters at first are said to be “written in [her] head,” though later it seems that she is actually writing letters; at least, she excuses herself from a conversation by saying that she has letters to write.  She always signs off in a somewhat self-indulgent style, with an adverb or adverbial phrase like “In all haste as usual,” “Dismally,” “Bitterly,” “Yours miserably,” or sometimes simply “Yrs. ever.”

Her situation is this:  she shares an expensive apartment in Manhattan (provided by her soon-to-be ex-husband) with her 4 year old daughter, an introverted, fat teenage daughter passed on from her husband’s previous marriage (Renata), and an au pair.  While she is filled with rage that her husband goes away to France with a new, younger, French girlfriend and plans to leave her, her rage is expressed at first by being mutely directed outward towards the people with whom she lives.  She seems to have little self-knowledge, but instead detests first the au pair, then Renata; finally, she reveals that she no longer takes pleasure either in her friends and their offers to help or in spending time with her own little daughter.

But startling revelations are in store for “J.”  As she (and the book’s narrative, following her state of mind) pass from Part 1) resentment and rage through Part 2) opening up and understanding to Part 3) frantic fear of loss, she makes a decision to tell Renata that her husband, Arnold, Renata’s putative father, has left her.  When she does, the story begin its progress toward a truly agonizing dénouement as Renata, the previous bump on a log who did nothing much but bake instant cakes and consume them all herself, takes a hand in the action.  The experience of this short novel (or novella, or long short story) is to make one realize yet again how dependent we are not only upon what we think we share with other people, but also upon what they think they share with us:  missing reciprocity is the unspoken story in this book.

Though Caroline Blackwood has written other books by now, this was her first novel, published in paperback form by Penguin Books in 1984 (the date of first release in hardback was 1976).  Yet, it is not at all dated; for many, many women, particularly those grouped around the central figure of a male “character” like Arnold, who at worst is a conniving, serially-monogamous-while-still-cheating-near-the-end-of-a-relationship monster, and at the best is insincere and ambivalent, these issues still need to be aired.  And Arnold is a central mystery, for we never hear his voice except through the women’s quotes and interpretations of what he says.  Fiction can here fulfill one of its major functions; it can allow us to be other selves, and to learn from the experience, even to see where we ourselves have gone wrong.  I don’t mean either that this book is meant only for women:  I suspect that many men attentive to fiction might find “The Stepdaughter” worthwhile reading as well.

And lastly, I would like to raise a mourning paean over a distribution catalog that has now been discontinued.  “A Common Reader” catalog, whose home was situated at 141 Tompkins Avenue in Pleasantville, NY (doesn’t it just sound bookish and fun?) was the place I obtained “The Stepdaughter”; it was in fact a place from which I ordered most of the books that I bought from the United Kingdom.  I wanted to pass the full address and phone number along (for the benefit of some Luddites such as I have been who still love to get boxes in the mail from “real” book companies), but when I went to wikipedia to research them, it seems they ran from 1986-2006 and were then discontinued.  Such a short time, and they provided me with so much pleasure!  Goodbye old friend!  (I still haven’t bought a Kindle, so though I read some fiction and poetry from the Internet, I technically haven’t deserted.)  To my own readers, I’d say:  read, read, read, though, that’s the main thing, regardless of where you get your reading from–and I’ll be writing again soon!

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August 8, 2012 · 3:00 am

Some novels which use the demotic (people’s) voice–Part III

Part III–The later twentieth and twenty-first century American fictions in particular which I have considered (though others cannot be excluded) focus on ridding the characters of the “names” their relatives, their society, or they themselves have previously given them, or making the “names” they have significant of a new identity or idea.  To mention just a few, in The Shipping News, there’s Quoyle, “the newspaperman” (whose past life is indeed a “coil,” like the cultural knots in a rope from which he descends and which he wants to limit).  He transitions from a name alone to a fuller identity when he happens upon the “scoop” of his own life, the startling news that the aunt whom he loves is actually his mother, and that he is not excluded from receiving mature sexual love from a girl he meets.  In The Lacuna, a young man is named alternately by those around him as a tool against his father (by his mother), a servant (even by his enlightened employers in his later life), a suspicious character (by the paranoid, communist-fearing functionaries of the United States government of the time), and finally as a good friend, and these are the roles and identities he generally accepts.  Finally, with the aid of his good friend, a woman, he is able to escape into a never-quite-previously lived “lacuna” (lacuna can mean either “absence, gap,” or “lagoon”)–into an idyllic past, and his further identity thus becomes a lacuna itself, a mystery.

Even earlier in one of the precursive texts I looked at, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Ethan is by his wife treated or “named” a shiftless, no-good husband; is gradually accepted as a transgressive but gallant suitor of sorts by his cousin Mattie; and ends his days caught between the two “names,” his identity a cipher, that of a “dead man,” as one of the internal characters defines him at the end.  He is a condensation only of the name “Frome” and the evidence of “the hard compulsions of the poor.”

The transition largely achieved by the struggles of the main characters themselves from being “only a name” to fulfilling (or “filling full”) an identity, cultural or personal, is not restricted to the Americans, however.  Firmly and repeatedly undercutting his audience’s expectations, the author/narrator-as-author-as-narrator of London Fields at the end of the novel turns out to be the “murderer” he himself has been seeking (to “kill off” one of the characters).  He steps thus with great irony and satirical intent into the shoes he has sought to fill (as if forcing the reader to write the novel), and satirizes audience expectations of identity patterns for characters, authors, and readers.  This ending rejects and simultaneously glorifies the use the reader would make of him, and constructs by ironies that point in all directions a narrative “identity” of his own making, which is that of a whimsical dictator, a character nearly as sadistic as the woman who is to be murdered is toward her lovers.

To revisit the topic of the picturesque briefly, contemporary authors sometimes focus less overtly on figurative language from page to page, but choose summational titular and thematic structures (“the shipping news,” “prodigal summer,” “the lacuna,” “the joke,” “London fields,” “a thousand acres,” even “the girl with the dragon tattoo”) as partial naming concepts.  They then “fill in” the significance of such things by close attention to character study as plot, setting, etc.  The character becomes the plot, the character’s interior in some way evokes or resembles the setting, and so on.

Though my treatment in three parts has not been exhaustive, it has been as far as I can see at the present time.  All of the contemporary novels I’ve mentioned above are in my opinion well-written and show a consistent concern with quality of reading experience which signals aesthetic significance, and each has a moral value system firmly in place.  You may have to find your way through multiple ironies to it, and sometimes traditional moral values are revised or moral elements are shifted around to allow for a more contemporary viewpoint–but clearly these writers, who manipulate the demotic and traditional voices of literature and experiment with both romance and realistic elements in their fiction, and who show characters caught up in the process of finding their own identities–these writers just as obviously have no doubts or qualms of any force about their own voices or identites in these books.  I hope if you haven’t read some of them you will find some new “friends” among them, after my long demand on your patience.

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August 8, 2012 · 2:03 am

Some novels which use the demotic (people’s) voice–Part II

Part II–The book London Fields by Martin Amis, which is discussed by Scott in his book, has a complicated sort of voyeurism as one subject (and as far as romance is concerned, an intricate satire of voyeurism is the key element in the examination of romance here).  This book is seen as a sort of “art-speech,” containing near examples of skaz and the demotic voice, while flouting a general disregard for any specific political agenda to promote them.  (But more about this book later.)

Another set of works which deserves mention because it has reached a world demotic community (in translation) is the trilogy of “the Girl” books by Stieg Larsson beginning with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  The books are not only written in the popular form of a Swedish mystery-cum-suspense series, which is demotic in its own country, but by taking up the world community topics of computer hacking, cruelty to women, espionage political, industrial, and personal, and sexual mores in a contemporary society, they also are able to reach a popular world community of such breadth as is rare.  Moreover, the books are clearly addressed, through their picaresque travelling heroine, to a democratic world community beset with these issues.  Not only have they reached a world community, but also they depict such sexual frankness and open social violence that they overtly take up the topic of cruelty at large and discovery of it by those who can take matters into their own hands, whether legally or simply justifiably by popular “vote.”  The gritty realism cuts against a simple sense of romance in the Larsson novels.  Perhaps the most one can say of these novels as potential avatars of the romance genre is to point to the unlikely degree to which the multiply challenged heroine manages in spite of all vast hurdles to overcome the challenges in her way.  And we are with her all the way in an enthusiasm for her abilities and with sympathy for her struggle.

Other contemporary authors choose to follow earlier role models by writing various kinds of regional fiction, using the culture, language, and sense of belonging special to certain communities or professions.  For instance, there is Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres, in which the subject matter (farming), settings, and character descriptions are special to the Iowa farming community.  There is not a specific dialect or idiom operating to translate the experience, except for the rueful practicality of the characters’ outlooks, and the way in which the rape of the daughters by the father, and old and forgotten secret, is made to parallel the story of the simultaneous rape of the land.  The surfacing of this secret, along with its sensational nature, and the focus on the psychological twists and turns of the plot, are surely at least tangentially related to the romance mode (it should be understood that I am using “romance” in the technical sense here).  As well, there are encyclopedic listings of Iowan native plants, flowers, and wildlife at the scene at the farm dump between Ginny and Jess (a romance in the usual sense of the word–read the book!).  Pictures of the culture also occur perhaps  in something so fleeting and elusive as the inflections in conversations which aren’t quite dialect, but which have the sense of certain speakers’ rhythms.

A really notable writer who has rung changes on the fictional particularizing skills of earlier precursors (whether the ones I named or others) is E. Annie Proulx, especially in her books The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain.  Like many contemporary novels, hers either celebrate or detail changes in contemporary life, and break forth with cataclysms directed against the past and revelations about it.  The suppression and subsequent revelation of a hidden truth or way of life is equally a sign of the romance mode and variations of the realistic mode, and is perhaps the point at which the two are branches of the same tree.  Each of these two books contains some demotic speech markers in speech rhythms and abruptions as well.  Also, there are cultural markers in the first book, such as occurs at the beginnings of many chapters, where detailed instructions for the tying of different shipping knots, or regional sayings, are in evidence.  The first book furnishes a qualified “happy ending”–“And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”  Brokeback Mountain by contrast furnishes a bleak picture of the past and its limitations rising to choke off the present, another frequent topic of demotic literature.  In this book, a bisexual man is left alone to mourn his gay lover’s death by beating at the hands of some other men who found him out, and there is thus the frequent demotic topic of society’s punishments of transgressions made against its prejudices.

The book The Joke by Milan Kundera is one which in its native language is another book full of skaz.  The fifth edition “Author’s Note” describes the difficult course of getting an accurate English translation.  The book blurb claims that it has “fidelity…to the words and syntax” and to “the characteristic dictions and tonalities” of its multiple narrators.  This matter aside, there is an attempt at fidelity to cultural practices in the descriptions of a Bohemian wedding ceremony in Chapter Seven, complete with the ritual wedding dialogues and actions.  As well, there is in addition to the otherwise scholarly analysis of folk songs of Chapter Four a recounting of the musicians’ lives as they are seen to live with their music.  There is a doubling of the picture, with two cultures in one place:  the original Bohemian culture and the Soviet regime which is superimposed over it, as they are lived out by the main character, a member of the original culture caught up in the toils of government repression.  Conflicts between two reigns or cultures is far from unheard of in romance, and were it not for the fact that the stark realism of Kundera’s text plays against it, one could also point to the picturesque elements upon which romanticism is fed, such as the celebration of village life and tradition, here an ironic picturesque because it is threatened.

A cultural doubling similar to this one can be seen in the book The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver.  In this book, a young boy is brought up alternately by his mother in the Mexico of the 1930’s, and in close contact with the Trotskyite faction there, and then by his father in Washington, D. C. during the early years of the Communist scare.  Here, the two cultures, each of which has its own demotic voice and events, are not layered one over the other as in Kundera’s book, but are placed side by side for purposes of contrast.  The main character lives his life drawing elements first from one cultural milieu and then from the other.  There is in both cases a demotic fiction clearly in place.  In this book, the picturesque of modest living and the picturesque of artistic concerns are mingled in the (imagined) views  given of the household(s) of Diego Riviera and Frieda Kahlo; likewise, the main character’s final escape to an idyllic setting sounds a note of the romance tradition.

Another book by Barbara Kingsolver also deserves mention in any serious discussion of demotic voice.  This is the book Prodigal Summer.  There is in this book a deliberate focus on dialect and pronunciation from as early as page 4, when a mountain person recognizes an American Northerner by the sound of “y” at the end of a vowel; on page 25, a Northerner teases an American Southern speaker about the double locution “still yet,” made for emphasis.  There are examples of how skaz of the area sounds to a strange ear.  The book takes up the topics of farming, plants, animals, and insects as a world cultural knowledge practiced not only by specialists and scientists, but also by folk specialists born to the culture as a people.  The overarching topic is the stewardship of the earth, and in their conflicts over this issue, the characters make outright comparisons of their different regional dialects and customs.  They are thus sophisticated in their understandings of their own speech.  Of most interest in terms of the picturesque and/or romance tradition is the mingling of an overall appreciation of nature not only by the simpler folk who live in the midst of it, but by those of more sophisticated intellectual tradition who also enjoy it.  The “prodigal summer” to which the novel refers is in fact the main vehicle of romance and superfluity for all concerned, with its exaggerated and lush influence over the personal identities of the people involved.  Personal identity will be further explored briefly in Part III.

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August 8, 2012 · 12:26 am

Some novels which use the demotic (people’s) voice–Part I

Part I–In writing a long and complicated post (which I’ll feature in three parts for easier reading) I’d like to discuss identity issues as they impact first upon some precursory texts of contemporary fiction, and then upon some contemporary fictions themselves.  The literary issue which is involved here is the question of identity in narrative voice, when talking especially about the more contemporary and lately widespread use of the “demotic” voice (or the literary voice “of the people” as opposed to the “mandarin” voice or “high art” voice).  The demotic voice includes not only the speech of characters in dialogue, but especially features “skaz,” or, following Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition, “homodiegetic…narration which takes its cue from oral rather than written discourse.”  For more on “skaz” and “homodiegetic” see note below in Part III*.  (An earlier example of skaz is the narrative voice in Huckleberry Finn.).  Yet another point to be considered when one is determining how fictional voice operates is the issue of romance (in the technical literary sense) versus realism.  I would like to credit the valuable discussion of mandarin and demotic voices in fiction in Jeremy Scott’s book The Demotic Voice in Contemporary British Fiction.  Though he discusses a number of authors whom I am not going to mention here, his entire thesis is useful for understanding the questions relating to voice in fiction.

Taking the precursors to contemporary fiction first in order to say how they are related, I need to remark that they were particularizers and in-depth analyzers of the life and culture of certain communities, and often chose demotic speakers or humbler dialogues in the construction of their pictures of societies.  There are no doubt many precursors:  I’m only going to discuss three.  These precursors left a legacy behind them, which contemporary practitioners of the demotic novel in general have followed, been inspired by, or perhaps coincidentally (and intertextually) come after, changing a mandarin (or high literary) ethos for a more demotic one, inspired by the voice of whomever they took “the people” to be.  Scott remarks in his book that probably the first novel to imitate a character’s dialect and style of locution in the narration is Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent:  An Hibernian Tale.  In this book, a supposedly native Irish speaker gives his views on the aristocracy for whom he works.  The effects of “hearing” Thady Quirk (the native speaker) are broadly burlesque; he is clearly a folk narrator made up by someone with a rather distant relationship with the real Irish.  He’s funny, but he’s also made fun of, in addition to being the source of comedy aimed at others.  The opinions he has of his employers, however, ring true enough, though they are exaggerated for comic effect.

Another precursor is the American Sarah Orne Jewett in some of her novels and stories.  While she says there is “a likeness to be traced” to some particular town in her work, she also says the “sketches” of characters are not usually drawn from that town.  She is different from Edgeworth because, having only colorful local humor in one of her books such as Deephaven, she does not burlesque her characters, but treats them with a very careful attitude of respect.  Her two main characters in Deephaven follow and illustrate the staid morality of New England, though there are a few remarks which seem to suggest the subject of a “Boston marriage.”  In one such remark, for example, the speaker compares the two young ladies, herself and her friend, to the “ladies of Llangollen” (a “Boston marriage” was at the time a term for close emotional, personal friendship between two women, who would probably identity themselves as gay today).  The two ladies operate as an audience for the characters of the town, who are “characters” in more than one sense.  There are a few occasions when Jewett is particularly broad, and she is at those times reminiscent of Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn, though again she is not as sly and satirical by half as Twain (who is give a nod by Scott as a writer of demotic fiction).  By way of contrast with Deephaven, in Jewett’s A Country Doctor, there is less of a demotic voice, mainly because there are fewer humble characters who speak a naturally simpler language.  There is also a strong plot line concerned more with a single character (a young woman who wants to become a doctor) rather than with a whole culture.  In The Country of the Pointed Firs as well, there is more “hybrid” characterization and subject matter than in Deephaven, which is a set piece of dialect examination without much of a plot or story to it.  (Scott also makes use of the term “hybrid” in several different ways, to indicate the duality or mixture of story line, voice, and characterization).

A final major precursor (though there are undoubtedly many more which could be discussed) is Edith Wharton, not at all in her society novels, but in her novel of the New England countryside, Ethan Frome.  In her “Introduction,” the characters are compared to “granite outcroppings.”  They are said to be seen through the limited understanding of two “chroniclers.”  It is in fact the most external narrator who purports to understand them and who details the rhythms of speech and occasional grammatical lapses or “picturesque” language.  The starkness of the surroundings is both natural and societal.  The narrator, who is said to be more complex and sophisticated in understanding in this “Introduction,” empathizes near the end with the “hard compulsions of the poor,” this hardness bodied forth in the unsympathetic landscape.  Had Scott commented on Wharton, he might have noticed the frequency with which she does as he says Thomas Hardy does, and “often seek[s] to dramatise the internal lives of [his] characters…by displacing character ‘sensibility’ onto the landscape.”  This tendency also relates to the picturesque and romance traditions, to be taken up in more detail later, in Part II.

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August 6, 2012 · 2:13 pm

“Always be smarter than the people who hire you.”–Lena Horne

The French author Muriel Barbery’s highly acclaimed novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog (translated into English in 2008 by Alison Anderson) is a book for and about self-directed readers and smart people, particularly frustrated ones. In it, a hôtel building’s concierge, Renée Michel, unprepossessing physically and getting on in years, hides behind the concierge stereotype.  After all, this is all that is expected or wanted of her by the vast majority of the building’s inhabitants.  But behind her mask, she is a self-taught intellectual (an autodidact, to use the correct term) who reads and/or comprehends everything from philosophy to fine music and art, with a generous smattering of topics her employers are themselves too ignorant and worldly truly to understand.  The book goes a long way to prove that wealth is not necessarily a sign of intelligence, nor is intelligence an index to personal income and status.

The second heroine of the book is a pre-teen named Paloma Joss, who is also very gifted, and who understands too much to feel comfortable with her family’s privileged lifestyle.  Paloma lives in the hôtel, but isn’t planning to continue that way for long:  she contemplates setting things on fire, but then confusedly though valiantly decides to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday.  She keeps a journal of “Profound Thoughts,” and some of them truly are profound.

The status quo and equilibrium of the building’s social system are disturbed, however, when a wealthy but unusually modest Japanese gentleman moves in.  For he sees through Renée’s cover almost at once, perceiving her as a kindred soul (he is not only wealthy but is also intelligent, educated, and genuinely well-bred).  He is clearly determined not to allow the concierge to continue to hide out behind her mask of dullness.  She and he and Paloma become acquaintances and then friends, all three of them joining to defy the class and age barriers that would keep them apart.

I won’t reveal the startling and moving ending except to quote Renée:  “The paths of God are all too explicit for those who pride themselves on their ability to decipher them….”  Paloma’s voice ends the novel, which is only fitting, especially since she is thought of by the concierge as “the daughter I never had,” and is at the ending a voice of hope.  She is thus a member of one of those human families we all make for ourselves, sometimes consisting partly of actual relations, sometimes not.  Amongst them, Renée, Paloma, and Ozu (their new friend) have sketched out the parameters that bound what people, rich or poor, can aspire to achieve–the territory is boundless.

This book, lest you think it a solemn, preachy text, is constructed of many comic moments, both when sketching out characters through their dialogue, and in the actual events that happen to people when they least expect it.  One of my favorite moments occurs when Renée is shyly visiting Ozu, and makes a trip to his bathroom, only to find that his toilet plays music at top volume when flushed.

Barbery has in this book successfully mingled the nobler aspects of the human race with the humorous and the painful to show that everywhere a human being is, so there is a potential fellow just hiding and waiting to be found by an appreciator.  May we all keep this in mind as we meet other people, and may we hope to find in them something we can relate to, however sad, funny, ironic, or small.

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August 2, 2012 · 4:06 pm

“Culture is not life in its entirety, but just the moment of security, strength, and clarity.”–Jose Ortega y Gasset

Today I’d like to air a few connected topics, such as the difference between what it is to love and what to own (and when there isn’t a difference); the implications of calling someone else a “primitive,” or a “savage” purely by force of where they come from in the world or what group they belong to; and the connection between my previous two topics.  This will in all likelihood be a sketchier post than usual, because these topics have been written upon by others with so much greater depth and skill that all I can do is point the way to writings other than my own meager post.

Perhaps it would be best to start with my first extensive intellectual exposure to one topic, which was an extremely readable and well-written book by Professor Victor Li entitled The Neo-Primitivist Turn:  Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity.  Alterity means something like “otherness,” as when we experience contact with someone from a society which we at least perceive to be unlike our own.  “Culture” is another term sometimes used to discuss perceived differences; and “‘modernity’ as a conceptual term can be shown to harbour a primitivist logic as well” (p. 153).  In the course of his thorough exploration of these terms, Li discusses the works of other theorists on the topics involved.  Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Marianna Torgovnick, Marshall Sahlins, and Jürgen Habermas are treated in some detail.  But don’t let me scare you away with fears that this discussion is hard to follow:  Li is not only a scholar’s scholar, he is a writer’s writer, and discusses these topics in a manner to be understood by someone who has only previously encountered the above list of names on a syllabus, or perhaps some of them not at all.  Let’s hear Li in some of his own words, from his “Preface”:  “Knowing as we do today that there have never existed peoples untouched by history, why do we continue to believe that such groups of people, by-passed by modern history, still exist?  Why do we still believe in the idea of the primitive when the term ‘primitive’ itself has been increasingly withdrawn from circulation?  Why still harp on the primitive when we have been made aware that primitive society was an invention of the modern West?….We will no doubt notice, especially in these politically enlightened times, that the word ‘primitive’ does not appear in the description.  Instead, acceptable terms like ‘individual cultures,’ ‘ethnic groups,’ or ‘living tribes’ are used….[These] may just be euphemisms inasmuch as they are still employed as concepts opposed, as ‘primitive’ once was, to a globalizing modernity” (p. vii).  The terms of Li’s book are thus fairly easily inaugurated for discussion, and space requires that I leave you to discover on your own Li’s distinctive ability to follow all the ins and outs of his work.  He uncomplicates as much as possible such an innately involved discussion.  Lest we miss the point, however, he comments with wit and insight in the conclusion of his book on Will Self’s short story “Understanding the Ur-Bororo,” in which a fictional tribe is said to identify themselves as ‘”The People Who You Wouldn’t Like to be Cornered by at a Party” (this story can be found in Will Self’s collection of short stories The Quantity Theory of Insanity Together With Five Supporting Propositions).  In contrast with the usual fictions structured around outlandish and/or “colorful” and/or particularly “wise” tribes, the story about the Ur-Bororos is that not only are they a “boring” tribe, but “[t]hey also view themselves as boring.”  They are thus ultimately unsatisfying to theorizing.  Nevertheless, Li sees in Self’s story also the point that though the story “dispels the myth of primitivism…the reader still takes away from the story a sense of longing for the horizon of difference represented by the primitive” (p. 219).  This analysis of the story occurs in Li’s “Conclusion,” which has the accurately pointed sub-title “‘Theorizing always needs a Savage,'” a remark which Li cites as coming from Michel de Certeau.

With this excellent book in the back of my mind, I recently read Clarice Lispector’s short story “The Smallest Woman in the World,” in which an explorer actually locates a person, supposedly isolated by all but her immediate surroundings, from the rest of the world.  We are told that the tribe she belongs to will soon be exterminated:  “Besides disease, the deadly effluvium of the water, insufficient food, and ranging beasts, the great threat to the Likoualas are the savage Bahundes….The Bahundes hunt them….they catch them in nets and eat them.”  The voice of the story is a primitivizing one, which compares the littlest woman (who is pregnant) to a “monkey,” and says “Little Flower [a name given her by the explorer who finds her] scratched herself where no one scratches.”  Of her picture in the Sunday Papers in several countries, we are told “She looked like a dog.”  But intertwined with this first voice, in the complexity of the narrative we soon hear a new voice, making comments about love, both about what so-called civilized people know of it and what Little Flower knows of it.  Some of the readers of the Sunday tabloids flatly refuse to extend empathy when they look at her; others picture only how she would fit into their own society for their own use, as when they imagine her waiting at table, or being a “toy” for the children.  One woman almost honestly considers “the malignity of our desire for happiness,” and “the cruel necessity of loving.”  She thinks of her child who wants Little Flower as a toy as “clever,” “dangerous,” and “ferociously…need[ing] to play”; yet, she loves him “obstinately,” and though she knows her thoughts about her child will haunt her, she decided to buy him a new suit.  In a switch back to the jungle picture, we see Little Flower rejoicing internally and falling in love with the strange looking white man, but not in any “me Tarzan, you Jane” fashion.  Rather, she is as much in love with his boots and his ring as she is with him, and the source of her joy is because she hasn’t been eaten.  “Not to be devoured is the most perfect feeling.  Not to be devoured is the secret goal of a whole life….one might even say [she felt] ‘profound love,’ since, having no other resources, she was reduced to profundity.”  She answer the explorer that it is “very nice to have a tree of her own to live in….because it is good to own, good to own, good to own.”  Here we see both the similarity and the difference between the two “different” cultures.  Both want to own, though because her difficulty of surviving is so great, Little Flower thinks of a tree home as something to own.  She is as greedy in her desire “to own” as the “cultivated” societies are to own her, whether by the invasion of her privacy, the imagining of her as a toy or servant, or the simple turning away from their common humanity.  Yet both share the same desire.  And the story makes it clear:  so often, when we think we love, we actually want to own a person or an experience, or what we think they symbolize.  These are only summary points of a really quite gifted short story, which has to be read to be fully appreciated.  I did, however, want to select not only short stories today but some intellectual background for them which if you take it slowly and carefully is just as good reading, and is very illuminating on its own.

So, to achieving a world of better understanding of each other no matter where we come from, and in favor of doing as little careless theorizing as we can, this is my post for today.  I hope you will enjoy reading these texts as much as I did.  shadowoperator

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August 1, 2012 · 3:10 pm

Albert Camus and the Existential Dilemma, in Two Texts

I recently decided to re-read Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which I first read years ago for a philosophy course, and which made little sense to me then because I had such difficulty identifying with the main character, Meursault.  It’s a classic of existential fiction, however, so this time I persisted in my efforts to understand.  I read the excellent 1988 translation of Matthew Ward, who translated the book following American standards of speech and writing, which was better not because of any political chauvinism, but because Camus himself suggested at the time he wrote it that he was intent upon following the American or Hemingwayesque model of fiction writing.

I started out, as I usually do, by reading the book blurb, to see if I could recall highlights from my previous reading.  I nearly always do this even when I know what the books are about.  In this case, though, I felt the blurb was a bit incorrect.  In order to emphasize the sense of an existential experience which could happen to anyone, the blurb writer speaks of the story “of an ordinary man who unwittingly get drawn into a senseless murder….”  In this same paragraph, there’s also a quote from Camus about “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”

The fact is, however, Meursault is not exactly an ordinary man.  First of all, when the prosecutor at his trial accuses him of feeling no remorse for the murder he committed, he says of himself, “I would have liked to have tried explaining to him cordially, almost affectionately, that I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything.”  This is chilling.  This is surely more of a sociopathic reaction than an “ordinary” one.  Also, he feels no regret for being party to a casual acquaintance’s abuse of the other’s girlfriend.  Yet by ordinary standards, he is implicated in this too.  So he’s not really ordinary in the accepted sense.  As well, unusual atmospheric conditions pertain to his case:  though we are aware from statistics that more violent crimes are committed during excruciatingly hot weather, in Meursault this reaches an extreme–as he thinks just before he commits the murder, the heat of the day and “the sun [were] just the same as [they] had been the day I’d buried Maman….”  This may be the one way in which Meursault is ordinary, i.e., that a death of a near relative is the first (and perhaps not just correlative but also causative) event in the sequence which ends with his execution.  Even in the plain, unvarnished prose of the book, we perhaps can see it as a key precipitating event to his reaching out to other people around him, one of whom, Raymond, is not a good friend for him to have.  Rather, because he is full of “gentle indifference,” as he later says, he suddenly is accessible when Raymond randomly reaches out to him.  Expressions or states of being or mind occurring over and over begin to carry the emotive force of the book; we read of “no way out” (an expression much like Sartre’s “huit clos,” often translated as “no exit”).  Also, there are matters of “chance,” and the “dizziness” in Meursault’s head which causes him to be so bothered by the heat.  He even ends up saying in court that it was “because of the sun” that he committed the murder.  One might propose to oneself to ask what the mother’s death in cooler weather would have produced:  the same “gentle indifference” and submission to “chance,” or ordinary mourning behavior, which others see as lacking in him and which lack they say indicated ahead of time his clearly criminal nature.

It is also not “inadvertently” exactly that he is drawn into the excessiveness of Raymond’s life, but unresistingly, as if he has no limits within him which could be recognized as moral waystations.  He says of himself at the trial at one point, “for the first time I realized that I was guilty.”  Therefore, though the terms of existential and absurdist fiction have been applied to The Stranger, there are also clear signs that these terms don’t mean the same thing as they come to mean rather more directly in Camus’s short story “The Guest,” from his 1957 book “Exile and the Kingdom.”

In “The Guest,” a teacher, clearly not sociopathic but intensely kind in his regard for other people, treats a soldier and the soldier’s Arab prisoner alike with humanity and brotherhood, only to be “absurdly” put in the position to be judged at fault both by the soldier’s regime and by the prisoner’s society.  This story has another “surprise” ending, so for the benefit of those who haven’t read it, I won’t say more of the plot.  Again, however, the physical setting is very evocative of locale and weather conditions, though in this story it is winter which prevails.  To get my point, i.e., how much more truly absurd the fate of the teacher may turn out to be than Meursault’s, one has only to compare the two of them.

The juncture where the two tales meet, however, is at the fulcrum of choice.  For the true existentialist position is that one has an amount of choice (more or less limited by pre-existing circumstances), and one is responsible for that choice.   And this is an observation which holds true in both stories, whether as in the first we see a near sociopath–whose main excuse is the heat of the day–or as in the second we witness a person practicing human kindness, tolerance, and understanding.  As I once was told by an excellent teacher, “You are free, so make your choice.”  We all have a few pre-existing conditions to cope with; what matters is what we do with what we’ve got.

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July 29, 2012 · 7:20 pm

“It is a foolish thing to make a long prologue, and to be short in the story itself.”–Second Maccabees

My title quote aside, I often find myself making a lengthy introduction to something I mean to discuss which is sometimes only slightly longer than the “prologue” itself.  And there have been times when I’ve just outright broken the above rule and abided by the old formula whereby one first embarks upon a long explanatory bit and then stops, draws breath, and says to one’s audience (who are perhaps getting more and more exasperated by the minute), “To make a long story short.” Then one gives the “punchline” or gist of one’s tale, which could’ve been handled in a much shorter form.  My excuse today is that not too long ago I ran across an appealing story about a story-teller which made me think of one of the most gifted story-tellers I ever knew myself (a junior high school history teacher of mine), and I wanted to intertwine the two subjects, or at least to present them together in a series of thoughts about story-telling, both oral and written.

In both cases (one case drawn from J. D. Salinger’s short story “The Laughing Man” and the other from my personal recollection), the story-teller was an older person, in both cases a man (though it might equally well have been otherwise), and one who was employed in the education or development of a much younger group of human beings.  In Salinger’s story, “the laughing man” is the hero of a set of tales told by a sort of camp counselor or after-school activities teacher, a hero whose rollicking career goes from episode to episode for quite a long time, each episode having a cliff-hanger ending, and inspiring a group of young boys to feel a strong personal connection with both the teacher and the hero of the stories.  It apparently matters not how unlikely and incredible the adventures are, the hero is believable to the boys’ hero worshipping attitude (and of course, it’s clear from the way the narrative is structured that in some interior, subconscious way they associate the hero with the teacher, believing incoherently almost that the fortunes of one rise and fall with the fortunes of the other).  When the teacher suddenly “breaks” the story-telling “contract” with the students, they are easily able to assign a cause from his personal life, and there’s a fine and singular sort of imagery at the very end of the story which, though it’s not a surprise ending in itself, signals the end of an era in a boy’s life just as readily as if it were an action.  A veil or curtain has been drawn aside, not only about the teacher, but about the story-telling process itself.  And I’m not going to spoil the story for you by telling you any more about it (just in case you either haven’t read it ever, or haven’t seen it recently).

In my own case, the story-teller was a man with a life which was better shielded from us as students.  He was a great humorist in his own right, was a good teacher, and was  (as I later learned) well-versed in literature in some respects, even though history was his field of work.  Here’s how it went:  we were in a state history course.  It was dull and slogging enough as subject matter to us, because even a good teacher could only do so much to “kick against the pricks,” as the expression goes, and teach it separately from the way most history classes were taught at that time, with lots of memorization of names and dates, and battles and generals and all that “stuff.”  He did his best to highlight the facts with us to inspire our memory abilities, and it was probably the best a history class could be for its time.  But what really was inspiring, especially to incipient English majors like me, were the stories he told us, one per week on Fridays, after our weekly state history test.

Somehow, my teacher always made the story last just exactly the same time as the class period.  He always finished on time.  The most interesting thing I found out about his surprise ending story choices, which had us hanging onto our seats until the very last moment, however, was that most of the stories he re-told came from written literature!  He spoke in a slow, suspenseful drawl–punctuated with little leaps and bounds of words at exciting junctures in the story–and he always managed to catch us off-guard at the end, whether with laughter, gasping, or awe.  When I got a little older and more mature, I discovered that our story-teller had been an enthusiast of the short story form from mostly American sources, both male and female, though he had a slight preference for the male writer.  I later identified his story “friends” in such authors as Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Shirley Jackson, Stephen Crane, and Katherine Anne Porter.  There were even stories such as Katherine Anne Porter’s “He,” in which much of the drama relies upon the literary qualities, and upon conversations and voices of the characters–in their clutches and grabs at their mutual history (and which involves a developmentally disabled child, a subject needing delicate handling and a sure touch for junior high school students, especially when it’s Friday and they’re feeling the exuberance of release from an exam).  He “re-told” the story by inventing his own lines of narration and dialogue, getting the serious issues and themes across to us without moralizing, keeping the story on its real and essential track, modifying for our understanding without talking “down” to us.  In short, he became a performer himself, playing upon our minds and hearts and human qualities and teaching us to extend ourselves imaginatively to others through an experience of fiction.  And the best part at the time was that we didn’t have to do anything but listen; we didn’t have to write a paper on the stories, we didn’t even need to crack a book open.  It was a shared experience, one that often had us grinning and exchanging glances across the aisles at the startling conclusions of the stories, or perhaps even raising hands and asking questions as we almost always failed to do in English classes, where “this stuff” was paramount.  It was a wonderful experience, one which affected my own desire to become a writer just as much as anything I then or later encountered in print.

And that’s my re-told story for today.  Though it’s not much of a review per se, if you’re interested in looking up J. D. Salinger’s story, you will find it to be told in his usual matter-of-fact, apparently-uninterested-in-details stark manner, one which makes much more significant the final imagistic summary in the story.  You can find the story in a collection known as Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger, issued (and probably re-printed or re-issued by now) by Bantam Books (the original copyright was put through by Little, Brown, and Co.).   Today is the end of my weekend, and tomorrow I will be once again in the midst of myriad reading and writing chores.  I hope you all enjoyed the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics, and are finding time to watch the competitions that interest you the most.  Ciao for now!

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July 28, 2012 · 4:40 pm

“Hope is the thing with feathers.”–Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson wrote:  “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers–/That perches in the soul–/And sings the tune without the words–/And never stops–at all–“….  This is a very well-known quote, to which even Woody Allen felt the need to respond (by titling one of his comic books Without Feathers, for example).  We all feel hope for one thing or another, aspirations of one kind or another, desires that we cannot perhaps meet in the present, but which we hope to fulfill in the future.  In the nature of the thing itself, it matters not whether it’s a hope for a particular education, kind of job, one specific individual to share our life with, or our poetic “muse”: whatever may be the inspiring element of our own hopes, it reaches fulfillment because of some of the same characteristics, which might be called “persistence towards the elusive future, capitalization on the possible present.”  (That last phrase is just something I made up for lack of a better one, it’s not a quote.)  First of all, we have to persist in hanging on to the future, which seems to be trying just as stubbornly to elude us at every turn.  Secondly, we have to capitalize on anything good in the present which might lead us to that ever receding goal.  We all face these challenges, and it’s in the documents of our successes, failures, and survival on the path that we enrich and entertain and inspire each other.

One writer who has composed for us a story very much of this encouraging and rugged nature is the Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, another graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, who has written several books and volumes of poetry about her experiences, somewhat fictionalized but always true-to-life.  The book of hers about which I want to comment today is the book of short “vignettes” (as the blurb writer denominates them) composed around the life of Esperanza (a word for “hope,”) who doesn’t like her own name and would prefer to be called “Zeze the X.”  The book is entitled The House on Mango Street, published some time back, in 1984 (this is the paperback date; the hardback date may well have been earlier.  The story appears in a slightly different form in the anthology I mentioned in an earlier post a day or two ago).

In the autobiographical note in the anthology, Cisneros is quoted as saying that she has discovered for herself a way to write stories “that were a cross between poetry and fiction….[I]  wanted to write a collection which could be read at any random point without having any knowledge of what came before or after.  Or, that could be read in a series to tell one big story.  I wanted stories like poems, compact and lyrical and ending with reverberation.”  (The only other writer I am aware of who has written by a similar method is the writer Julio Cortazar, who wrote a book named Hopscotch, of which the chapters can be read in any order.)

The House on Mango Street opens with a terse, tense, though melodic relation of all the many houses (and streets) Esperanza has lived in (and on) with her family during their urban migrations from apartment to apartment building.  Esperanza first becomes aware of her own and her family’s poverty when a nun from her school points to the apartment from the sidewalk and says “You live there?”  Esperanza remarks only, “The way she said it made me feel like nothing.”  But true to the nature of her being (and living up to her name and her quality of mind) Esperanza relates, “I knew then I had to have a house.  A real house.  One I could point to.  But this isn’t it.  The house on Mango Street isn’t it.  For the time being, Mama says.  Temporary, says Papa.  But I know how those things go.”  Thus, Esperanza’s dreams are at variance with her worldly wise awareness of the things adults say and do, even though she herself is still a child.  Her experience and attitude are much the same regarding the friends she sometimes hopes to have.  Other incidents and conversations which are well-imagined and which are perhaps remembered concerning the writer’s comrades and friends are told in a lyrical style all their own, achievning what Cisneros herself aspires to do in her work.

In the penultimate story in the book, entitled “A House of My Own,” Esperanza adds evocative details to what she wants in a house:  “Not a flat.  Not an apartment in back.  Not a man’s house.  Not a daddy’s.  A house all my own.  With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias.  My books and my stories.  My two shoes waiting beside the bed.  Nobody to shake a stick at.  Nobody’s garbage to pick up after.”¶  “Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.”  Here, the rhythmic flow of the sentences creates the “space” for the readers to dip into Esperanza’s world imaginatively, adding their own like feelings and experiences of being crowded/longing for release, with the final line of “clean as paper before the poem” being the line that vindicates both Esperanza’s desire to escape and the reader’s persistence in following the writer’s exploration of the nature of hope.  Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own, move over (or at least make room!):  Sandra Cisneros and her whole house are coming through!

(Today’s a short post, but I hope a worthwhile one.  I’m having a great time with my family members who’re visiting, and I hope your weekend is going well too.–Cisneros’s book is available from Vintage Contemporaries of Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.  Get it soon, and enjoy the fine combination of poetry and prose which is a goal well-realized by Cisneros.)  shadowoperator

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July 27, 2012 · 4:26 pm

“New lamps for old, new lamps for old….”–story of Aladdin’s magic lamp

Did I mention that I’m a sucker for picking up old books that still have great reading value, whether at free book give-aways, low cost second-hand stores, Amazon.com Marketplace sellers, and anywhere and everywhere that people will give me a good book on the cheap that I think I might want to read?  “Want to read” is the key element here; I’m not really a “first edition book” kind of person.  Well, a few weeks ago, I picked up at my local library (which has both a free book shelf  and books for sale) a great short story anthology which is really not that old.  It was published in 2007.  I would encourage anyone interested either in teaching a beginning literature class to others (or simply to themselves) to get it.  It’s called The Story and Its Writer:  An Introduction to Short Fiction, and is edited by Ann Charters from the University of Connecticut.  I have it in the 7th edition (sorry, I don’t know if it’s been re-issued yet).  In this wonderful book, there are not only the same old short stories from the standard literary canon (“canon” in this instance refers to a body of literature which is well-established in both popularity and critical quality);  the book also features stories by more recent authors who are quickly enlarging the canon by leaps and bounds with their fine fictions.  In many instances, the stories are matched with one or several related stories, commentary, or casebook entries by the same or another author.  At any rate, if you are unable to get this book due to where you live (outside the U.S.) or due to scarcity of copies, I would still like to recommend the two stories I will be discussing briefly today, both by Kate Chopin.  I’m sure they may also be found elsewhere, though getting her comments on Maupassant may take a bit of digging in a bookstore or library.

First of all, if you read Chopin’s somewhat lugubrious novella The Awakening, whether you liked it or hated it, I want to warn you that her short stories are very different in nature from her novella.  The two stories, “Désirée’s Baby” and “The Story of an Hour,” though both written with her fine, sure touch, are clearly influenced by the French male writer Guy de Maupassant, and a brief commentary on de Maupassant’s works, written by Chopin, is in the commentary section of the anthology.  What she shares most with de Maupassant is not only the ability to condense the average emotive incident into strikingly full “moments of truth,” but also a skill at delaying the key event until the end:  she is obviously an accomplished writer when it comes to the surprise ending.

The first story I’ve mentioned by her, “Désirée’s Baby,” only about 4 pages long, is set in the American South of the Antebellum period, when slavery was still in its heyday.  The story concerns the events taking place which are centered upon what people do and say in an atmosphere where the birth of a new baby or presence of an orphan on a plantation leads to speculations about bloodlines.  I won’t give the ending away, except to say that the ending is ironic (you may remember that I discussed what is and isn’t ironic in an earlier post this week).

The second story, “The Story of an Hour,” is also ironic, and is even shorter (about 2 pages, as if the author was signalling the intensity and brevity of time with the length of the story itself).  Here, the irony is guided by the fact that we are inside the main character’s mind and awareness by means of a partially omnniscient/partially indirectly discoursed narrative:  we understand her as the other characters do not, and the surprise ending centers upon their misunderstanding of her feelings.

As Chopin says of de Maupassant in her commentary, “It was at [a] period of my emerging from the vast solitude in which I had been making my own acquaintance, that I stumbled upon Maupassant.  I read his stories and marvelled at them.  Here was life, not fiction; for where were the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinking way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making?  Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and saw with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw….it [is] genuine and spontaneous.  He gives us his impressions.”  More than this of the two stories and the commentary I leave you to read for yourselves, and I hope you will.  The story of de Maupassant’s which I think of most immediately upon reading Chopin is (I believe) called “The Diamond Necklace,” or “The Necklace,” a very well-known story indeed.  I mention it in case you’ve read it, so you’ll have an inkling of what to expect from Chopin (and also, you may find yourself delighting in the stories of de Maupassant too once you have read her).

So, the next time you happen to visit a free or used or remaindered book shelf, keep your eyes pealed for one of those “lamps” (books, in this metaphor) which light us along our way like this one did me.  You may find a treasure like I found, which kept me from having to choose between “new lamps” and “old lamps” because it had both historically traditional and newly traditional stories.  No one should have to choose only one!

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