Tag Archives: literary topics

July 9, 2013 · 8:43 pm

Catching up with Aphra Behn–More than 324 years later….

Who was Aphra Behn? The name has passed by me in literary period histories numerous times, and I’ve always thought, “Oh, yes, research for a more convenient time. I’ll have to look her up some day. Important and groundbreaking woman writer, you say? (What an unusual name!). Yes, I guess I’ll have to read her sooner or later.” Perhaps the best brief information which I can supply that simultaneously informs and tantalizes the reader comes from Wikipedia sources, for all the blurb on the book says is that she was “a Restoration poet, novelist, playwright, feminist and spy, considered by many to be the first English professional female writer.” And as the reader may or may not know, she wrote the first epistolary novel, Love-Letters Between A Nobleman and His Sister, decades before Samuel Richardson first wrote (and got first credit for) his three epistolary novels. To quote some tidbits from Wikipedia for convenience’s sake: Aphra Behn was a contributor largely to the “amatory fiction genre of British literature.” She and two other writers even less famous by name (Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood) were referred to as “the fair triumvirate of wit.” But all of Behn’s fame, such as it is, is constituted around her adult life: her early life is more or less a mystery, and features parents of the names of Cooper, or Johnson, or Amis, or Johnston. One certain fact is that she had some relation to Francis, Lord Willoughby, who was responsible for her real or imagined family trip to Surinam, which trip provoked her most famous work, a novel, Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave. In 1664, she had a short-lived marriage to Johann Behn, a man of German or Dutch extraction. She may or may not have been Catholic (she said at one point that she was meant to be a nun), but she was definitely a Stuart monarchist and Tory supporter when the parties Tory and Whig emerged. A bit later, she was drafted as a spy for Charles II to Antwerp, her code name being Astraea, which she also published under afterwards. Charles, however, didn’t pay his spy, and she was forced to borrow money to return home, where she was placed in a debtor’s prison until an unidentified benefactor in 1669 bailed her out. After this, she wrote as a scribe for the King’s Company, and from 1670-1689 crafted plays, novels, poems, pamphlets, and one translation of a French popular astronomy guide. She died on April 16, 1689 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Though her writings were disdained as improper during the Victorian era, during the 20th century and since, she has been seen as an important feminist influence and writer upon such issues as slavery, race, gender roles, and sexual desire (sometimes including same-sex groupings and a staple of her own time, transvestitism on the stage). Now to qualify and expand these remarks with some of my own and others’, based upon three different genres of her writing which I myself read.

Lest you run away with the idea that she is easy to read, be warned: her writing is full of errors of various kinds, not excluding errors of fact regarding racial and ethnic issues and misspellings and words capitalized for emphasis which we no longer treat so in modern English. In fact, the modern reader would probably find Shakepeare, an earlier writer, easier to read because he has been so modernized in most versions in print. Nevertheless, I chose to read “The Unfortunate Happy Lady: A True History” (a sort of early short story before the form existed formally, in which the paradox in the title is carried out in the fiction); “The Younger Brother; or The Amorous Jilt” (a Restoration comic play, one of her best known, played for the first time posthumously); and her novel Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave. The three different forms, though each example has its faults of writing, show the width of her life experience and sources of reference, and the ease with which she was able to enter into others’ experiences. I will deal with each briefly here, just to give the reader whose curiosity has been whetted by this strange writer a taste of what she could do.

In “The Unfortunate Happy Lady,” Behn writes a story with a happy ending (I’m not giving you much of a spoiler here, since she herself prevaricates with one in her title). This concerns a daughter of a family who, her fortunes being left in the care of her dishonest brother, finds herself put by this brother in a bawdy house where she is deprived of her share of the family fortune and left to work out her own compromise with the powers that be. That’s the unfortunate part of her “history,” though many people might take leave to doubt, by the time they finish the storybook ending, that it’s actually a “true history.” The lady has good luck, however, because the very first of her intended seducers is a gentleman (and this bit requires that one imagine a gentleman to be a single gentle man who yet might visit a bawdy house and still be a good person, not I suppose the absolute widest stretch of the imagination). He chases her around the room for a bit but then condescends to hear her story, whereupon he becomes less inflamed with passion and more inflamed with moral outrage that her brother could treat her so (this provides an interesting psychological link, for those concerned to follow it up where it leads, between moral outrage and envy at someone else’s moral freedom from restraint, a link which Freud must surely have mentioned in conjunction with judges and Pharisees somewhere in his works!). I found this story mildly enjoyable, and it was certainly the shortest work of the three, and supplied the fewest stops and halts for the reading eye trying to penetrate anachronisms in language.

The second piece I read (and I’m persuaded that had I seen a production of it it would have fared better in my judgement) was the play, “The Younger Brother; or, The Amorous Jilt.” This piece exasperated my patience, but not perhaps by its own fault. I simply have read too many other and better bits of Restoration playwrighting which are easier and less exhausting to read. In this piece on nearly every page there is an aside by one character or another, first of all. Then, there is a proliferation of characters in disguise so eagerly thrown off repeatedly that it’s hard to take up the readers’ “willing suspension of disbelief” and agree to the fiction that others on stage didn’t know who they were when they were in others’ clothes. Finally, the characters one and all seem to be visited with a kind of casual attitude towards standards of faith and piety of various kinds, not just the “amorous jilt” Mirtilla, but all, even the parent who repeatedly tries to run one son through with a sword and at one point or other wants to disinherit both sons. It’s a fine excursion into the staples and set pieces and stereotypical actions of Restoration comedy, but it has rather the nature of an imitation of too many plays watched in too rapid succession one after the other, and none of them very original. It’s again mildly amusing.

Where Behn has her greatest success among the three works I examined is with the novel Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave (and I note that these were the only three I had time for in my review of famous women precursors, which I took up a week or so ago with Colette, and which I will continue with Mrs. Gaskell next). I would first caution the reader of my post to be aware that fashions in political awareness and humanity, like fashions of any kind, age and date, and Aphra Behn was for her time a relatively keen enthusiast of a movement to end slavery. Her sympathy was many times expressed outright, and moreover the entire slant of her novel was bent toward showing the outrageously unfair and inhumane treatment of one slave in particular. Nevertheless, in the book the nobility of this slave in character terms was tied to his being royal in lineage terms, a caste preference, and she several times seems to be siding with the white colonists in their fear of their black slaves and the native Americans with whom they also have dealings. The Africans and native Americans are judged to be beautiful or the reverse often according to how close they come to white standards of beautiful limbs and features, though Behn often comments on the attractiveness of these peoples, “except for” whatever characteristic she finds objectionable. This is per the writings of her times by other commentators as well, and I suppose that it’s possible that the Africans and native Americans were thinking similar thoughts in reverse, that is, finding the white colonists appealing or the opposite according to native standards of beauty. The ending is tragic, as of course it had to be, for she was seemingly unable to concede a victory against the white colonists by a slave revolt, though some revolts in history were successful at establishing black colonies elsewhere that were independent of the white colonists and their control. That is to say, the only way to control white sympathy for her main black character, the prince Oroonoko, was at the time to have him die heroically in vastly outnumbered conditions, in a brutal and repugnant sacrifice of the prince at the stake which, if it is true, is as horrific if not more so than many lynchings in the later established American South. My best advice for the reader who wants to penetrate this book to its depths is to get a copy of the Norton Critical Edition, edited by Joanna Lipking; this edition has numerous essays and fragments of accounts of the time which add to the experience of the fiction itself, a short novel of only about sixty-five pages.

And this concludes my perhaps too brief and first encounter and my introduction for you of Aphra Behn, a remarkable woman in anyone’s terms, more than 324 years after she herself passed out of this world. While I cannot say I liked her without reservation, I can without restriction say that it has enriched my knowledge of people and of literature to have read her. I hope you will cast among her works for some that suit you (and there are many) and be equally surprised and provoked to thought.

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Tagged as literary ancestors, literary conscience, literary topics

June 26, 2013 · 4:33 pm

Filling in blanks in a literary education via early feminists and women writers….

Recently, it occurred to me (the more especially when I read about Colette on Wikipedia) that I had for too long now neglected several important writers who happened to be female and part of the history of the world novel. Oh, I’d read Mrs. Ann Ward Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho in a Gothic literatures class, but I’d not followed up on the lead provided into the world of famous female writers, who often were the inspiration for later male writers, a thankless task which in fact often received little thanks and credit from the male writers who followed them, or at least none from the male literary establishment (I’m thinking now of the fact that Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela is usually talked about as the first epistolary novel, a startling innovation for the time (1740), and his further novels Clarissa (1748) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753) continued the tradition, but the actual initiator of the epistolary novel was the feminist writer Aphra Behn, with her novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, which was written in 1683). I also consider the fact that Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette’s Claudine series, her first published works, were published under her first husband Henry Gauthier-Villar’s pen name “Willy,” and that she had to go through extensive legal contortions to get them back in her own name, with the proof being in her original manuscripts. As well (and on a milder note, though still discouraging to female writers), Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, Baronesse Dudevant (alias George Sand) first published her own collaborative works through a liaison she had with the writer Jules Sandeau, under the pseudonym “Jules Sand.” The name “George Sand” continued to be her pen name for the rest of her life.

At any rate, it seemed good to give some time and space to several female writers selected from amongst the many early female writers at random, and I’ve determined to write posts on some of their many works in turn (though not necessarily in chronological order). the writers I’ve selected are Mrs. Radcliffe, Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, Aphra Behn, Colette, and George Sand. I’ve felt no commitment to unearth their most popular books or their most scandalous (in some cases, the two were one). I thought that today I would start with a few novellas and a novel I found by Sidonie Colette which just happened to be the first ones that came in at the library when I was ready to work on them.

There’s first of all a distinct difference in the two volumes by Colette which came to hand. The one I picked up initially was the set of three novellas in one volume, Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances. While mildly evocative of a scandalous mode of life, the book had no listed translator, there was no foreword or introduction about Colette, in short, the book was an old-fashioned attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too, by publishing three slightly naughty stories by a noted female libertine without proper framework and introduction being offered. The stories fall well within the range of Colette’s true topic, which as far as I can see without reading everything thing she wrote but by reading these three novellas and a widely different novel, The Pure and the Impure, is not sex and sensuality of various kinds per se, but is instead the topic of sexual politics as it affects everyone, whether straight, gay, or one of the many shades of in-between which Colette’s almost visionary world allows.

Most people have seen either the screen or the stage version of Gigi, have read the book, or know the story by hearsay. The story is that of a young woman born into the demimonde and struggling innocently against the restraints and liberties practiced and the understood rules followed by her own female relatives, all of whom seem to have been rich men’s mistresses and public performers at some point, the latter of whom historically speaking were always “loose” women however inwardly respectable their instincts because that was the life forced on them by public understandings of their role. The story is a charming one with a happy ending, and doesn’t at all prepare one for the bittersweet tale of repeated divorces and romantic misadventures contained in the second novella in the same volume, Julie de Carneilhan, which is about the daily life of an impoverished divorced woman in Paris whose days are often haunted by the spectre of hunger and worn-out clothing. This is grim, to be sure, but even Julie makes her escape, in her case back to the past with her brother, in the end of the tale. The third tale, Chance Acquaintances, takes a more autobiographical tone, is narrated in the first person, and in it the speaker is addressed as “Madame Colette.” This is a tale drawn (however exaggeratedly or truly) from the days in Colette’s life when she herself was on the music hall stage, and when it was beginning to be fashionable for people in a higher walk of life (not just the men, but the women also) to be on first-name terms with music hall performers. The perspective is the one taken of a conventional marriage from the point of view of Colette, who is drawn into its sexual politics willy-nilly and takes a hand in keeping the seamy underside of the marriage from one of its participants. “Chance acquaintances” being the topic, we are drawn sympathetically close to the speaker, who does not spare her casual friends from our stricter views of them, and whose most devoted friend seems to be her cat, who travels everywhere with her. As she is packing to leave the resort where she met the man and wife who occupy center stage in her tale, she says of the cat, who is “helping” her pack by getting amongst the suitcases, “I think she had understood it all, and that she was appealing to me yet once more to extricate both of us from chance acquaintances and from bitter disappointments–the full horror of which I had been hiding from myself–from fortuitious towns and strange rooms and all the rest of it. She was imploring me to blaze a trail just wide enough for my feet and for hers, a trail that would be obliterated behind us as we went.”

By contrast with the three novellas, Colette’s novel The Pure and the Impure is more direct (though since in this case we are provided with a translator’s name, Herma Briffault, and an introduction by Janet Flanner, we can also wonder if it just wasn’t translated more honestly). It starts out with a chapter taking place in a residence which serves as a casual opium den and dosshouse for sexual liaisons of an “irregular” nature, whether between two unmarried heterosexuals or cheating spouses, two women, two men, or some other variant on a theme. The first chapter concentrates a lot of attention on the subject of Charlotte, a woman “of a certain age” who flatters her younger lover by “singing” like a nightingale when he gives her pleasure. The suggestion is that her faking it is a generous act of love rather than the impiety and hypocrisy which our own time insists on seeing it as. The very suggestion that the faking is a part of the true love act itself when it occurs (and it seems that she derives pleasure from the confidence and assurance she gives the younger man) is a real eye-opener from a twentieth-century stick-to-the-truth point of view. The hypocrisy is still troubling, but Colette writes with such complexity of the love act and the politics of loving between whomever that she at least introduces some doubt into the equation of “duplicity equals lack of love.”

The second chapter of The Pure and the Impure focuses on an aging Don Juan-like character and his attitudes towards his conquests. Colette writes as herself doing something like interviewing him, only for her own benefit instead of for a news station. She compares and contrasts his attitudes about sex and sensuality with what she imagines were the perspectives of the great legendary Don Juan, and comes up with some surprising conclusions. The most unusual thing about her way of considering his views is that she often sides with what would seem to a woman of our time to be sexist politics aimed at making women less secure and comfortable in their love. She reiterates often, though, that this man is not a lover of her own, but a friend to whom she is talking, and thus more or less excuses herself from challenging him except in a friendly way.

As if brought on or excused or justified by the combination of the previous two chapters (one in which a woman feels bound to fake or at least exaggerate orgasms and the next in which a man articulates a seemingly unfeeling and predatory attitude towards women), and always assuming that anyone thinks such life choices have to be justified, the rest of the book is predominantly about gay relationships, first among women, then among the famous two “ladies of Llangollen,” then among men. She provides then a short chapter focusing on how and why a jealous quarrel over a man is in reality a strong and vital relationship between the two women fighting over him. Finally, the question of what is pure in love is mooted, and Colette’s last remark in the book is: “The word ‘pure’ has never revealed an intelligible meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench an optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it–in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.” Thus, for Colette, there is presumably no “white light” in love, but only a collection of various shades and hues.

If I didn’t know better, I might almost think the two volumes by Colette were written by two different people. The book of novellas is terse and sometimes cynical, but not outspoken in the usual sense of the word–it is allusive and elusive both. Sexual pleasure is rather an arrangement two people come to for the predominant pleasure of one over the other, with one party clearly losing out. The novel, by contrast, though there are opportunistic relationships like this spoken of also, is mainly about consensual sexual and romantic relationships, however unusual or improvised, which give pleasure to both people. Colette is only one writer, of course, and only one person, and her views are those of her own experience and lifestyle. But I’d like to think that regardless of what particular “team” one “plays for,” to quote a much-overused sexual metaphor of our own time, Colette in her quest for emotional, sensual, and sexual freedom and the supremacy and sanctity of the love relationship in our makeup speaks for us all, and that we can all learn something from reading her sometimes sad, often quizzical, but also frank and open “essays” on the art of love.

(My remarks on the other writers I’ve mentioned in this post will follow in days to come.)

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Filed under Articles/reviews, Full of literary ambitions!, Literary puzzles and arguments

Tagged as literary ancestors, literary topics, originality

June 20, 2013 · 8:50 pm

Shadows of reality and shades of the imagination in Isabel Allende’s collection “The Stories of Eva Luna”

The storyteller’s art is above all a way of defeating mortality, a way of underlining moralities and playing them off against each other, and a way of leaving one’s mark on the world. But in The Stories of Eva Luna, the storyteller’s voice drifts like smoke across the scene and disappears from one story to the next, fading out between moments and leaving only a taste of clean, clear water, somewhat in the same way the sand mandalas of the Tibetan monks are visible for a short time then blow away in the next strong wind. The only continuous thing is thus the spell of words rising and falling and then halting, in fact introducing mortality at key points, sometimes making moral points and sometimes not, and allowing even and especially the storyteller to evade capture by leaving no mark at all behind. It is not a coincidence that these characteristics coincide with an opening and closing mention in the book of the tale of Scheherazade, for the character Eva Luna narrates tales in bed in this fiction at the request of her lover Rolf Carlé (another character from the original novel Eva Luna, to which this collection of stories is a sequel).

The picture of South American life is what emerges most clearly, whether it is the life of the twentieth century or of the earlier centuries with their conflicts between Spanish conquerors and aboriginal citizens; in fact, history is set at odds in the South American scene of these stories, because the economic climate pictured herein is one in which several histories are being played out at once in the same or near physical space, with the economically privileged citizens living cheek-by-jowl with and in seeming ignorance of or indifference to the native tribes and their traditions. Indeed, part of the richness and irony of Allende’s portrait of South American life comes from this juxtaposition of different traditions, and in the very midst of this scene, the storyteller takes a central place, and is received differently by different portions of the populace.

There are aristocrats and dictators, peasants and native Indians, prostitutes and degenerates, revolutionaries and banditti, sexy women and virile men, aged men and women of both wisdom and foolish credulity, children who suffer and children whose innocence protects them, and in the middle of all this, the fortune tellers and storytellers and magicians (who are sometimes one and the same) take up their posts. Yet, in all this richness and confusion, it is clear that this is not reality, but a facsimile, a model of reality touched with the magic of the storyteller’s art, particularly in those places where the more fantastic elements of belief come into play with both Christian and secular miracles, ghosts, curses, places and people who disappear in thin air, reappear, then fade out again, doctors and professors of strange sciences whose cures and discoveries cannot be re-documented. Yet the story also touches reality in those places where Eva Luna appears as a character, or one of her friends or acquaintances from the novel Eva Luna is woven into one of the dependent stories as a character, sometimes in words very similar to that of their original appearance in the first book. Thus, the figure of the storyteller sits before us always, and in fact, the first section in the book is one spoken by the lover Rolf Carlé, describing the storyteller as she appears before him just as he asks her for stories.

The book circles back to the reference to Scheherazade in the end with a sad story about a young girl who comes to an unenviable end which Rolf is unable to prevent, and Eva Luna is stricken too, because of her empathy with Rolf. Rolf is a famous camera man, who has tried to mobilize help for the young girl, but to no avail, and Eva suffers because Rolf’s emotional paralysis is one which has been lying dormant for years under a layer of accomplishment and happiness with her, until the young girl cannot be saved. I don’t think it ruins the experience of reading the book at all to quote from the last page of the final story “And of Clay Are We Created,” in which the storyteller must cede ground to reality because at a certain point fiction is stricken mute. She addresses Rolf directly, just as originally in the book he addressed her in his description of her: “You are back with me, but you are not the same man. I often accompany you to the station and we watch the videos of [the young girl] again; you study them intently, looking for something you could have done to save her, something you did not think of in time. Or maybe you study them to see yourself as if in a mirror, naked. Your cameras lie forgotten in a closet; you do not write or sing; you sit long hours before the window, staring at the mountains. Beside you, I wait for you to complete the voyage into yourself, for the old wounds to heal. I know that when you return from your nightmares, we shall again walk hand in hand, as before.” On the final page just after this, we read: “And at this moment in her story, Scheherazade saw the first light of dawn, and discreetly fell silent.” Thus, there are some wounds that storytelling cannot heal, wounds that require private introspection, a kind of private storytelling akin to self-therapy rather than the more public storytelling of having even one other person present. But paradoxically, by stating this in the story framework, Allende has given the cue and initiated the moment of healing by indicating that it starts with a voyage into self, a fearless exploration of nightmare terrain. Finally, by reverting back to Scheherazade and the “first light of dawn,” the hope of awaking from nightmare terrain of whatever negative stories we all have privately or share with each other is extended to each of us as we read, and we too see the “first light of dawn” and the preservation of who and what we are for yet another day. By concurring in this adventure of the storyteller’s art, we thus defeat mortality a little longer, reinforce the humanly shared morality of helping one’s neighbor to live and have joy, and by chalking this reading up to experience, leave our own mark on the world of the imagination, having found yet another thing we can share with others to make all our lives better and richer.

“[The art of the novel] happens because the storyteller’s own experience of men and things…has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.”–Murasaki Shikibu

Isabel Allende’s novel Eva Luna, written about a sort of modern-day Scheherazade continually dancing on the edge of the volcano of societal upheaval with her tales as her only defense against falling, is first and foremost a novel about new beginnings. Eva’s mother Consuelo dies when Eva is only a child, and from then on, Eva makes her way through the various strata of society from being a house servant to being a loved informally adopted daughter to being a well-known and respected formal story-teller. But it is not a rags-to-riches story per se, because one is always having one’s attention called to the reversals and contretemps in the plot of Eva’s life, and there is never an easy answer to her dilemmas, despite the basically strong and positive way in which she seems to confront her problems.

A key theme relates to the role literature plays in our lives, whether of the “high” literary variety or of the popular variety heard on the radio and seen on the television screen. What seems to be important is the impetus to keep on telling, keep on telling, and never stop. It’s almost as if Eva is spinning out a thread like a spider from which she may hang until her feet touch solid ground again, for in every part of her life, and regardless of whom she is staying with or living with or serving, there is always someone to whom she can tell her tales, which gives her an added purpose in life to merely being a house servant or a dependent.

Yet another important element in the book Eva Luna is the plethora of generations of mothers and mother figures, and the degree to which they contribute support to younger women, not so much financially as psychologically and spiritually. There are many male characters, but they are often seen as adversarial unless they manage to think beyond the machismo of the average male in the South American society of the time portrayed in the book, during some part of the twentieth century. Possibly due to the fact that while being born in Peru, she is a Chilean, Allende seems purposefully to have left the exact South American country she is writing about imprecise and has instead created a sort of composite land for the story. Yet still the female characters, in their subsidiary place in society, are yet seen as the hidden strength of the country, while the men bickering and politicking and warring and torturing and imprisoning each other are seen as passing fads, with one following behind and more or less resembling another, despite their apparent differences.

This, however, does not mean that there is not an opportunity for love between men and women. The women in the book (and this includes a transgender woman named Mimi with whom Eva Luna resides in the latter part of the novel) keep looking for love, accepting the men as much as possible as they are, never giving up hope for a better life or a better relationship, forgiving and overcoming and enduring in a way that Allende evidently sees as essentially female. The men, in their turn, look to the women for nurturing and companionship and sexual love, and are conventionally male in general, with the good and the bad alike that goes along with this. The question of love is not relegated only to passionate sexual relationships, however; family or family-like love and societal love of one’s fellows are equally subjects of the book.

While Eva Luna’s stories are told to happy, unhappy, and desperate people alike in the novel, Allende makes her character Eva, a storyteller from a very young age, aware of the way in which stories not only help ameliorate harsh conditions, but also can distract from harsh realities which need to be addressed. For instance, in the final pages of the book, Eva negotiates with the Comandante of the government over just how much of a real recent event (the freeing of guerrillas by their comrades, friends of Eva’s) can be put into her televised fictional script (since the government is trying to suppress the guerrillas by keeping quiet about news of their success). This shows not only how Eva’s stories have power over the small and comparatively simple events in her friends’ lives, but how they also acquire power in the daily events of a country as well.

Allende has emphasized throughout her own story that while people are continually requesting happy endings to stories from Eva, Eva chooses instead to go for high drama and complicated and tragic endings. But for her story of Eva Luna’s own life, Allende generously and equivocatingly gives us a choice: after providing a qualified happy ending for Eva with a lover, in which the “judicious” and “modest” degree of love and happiness they win is at the end of the penultimate paragraph said to be worn to “shreds,” Allende ends with “Or maybe that isn’t how it happened,” and then goes on to suggest that sometimes reality responds to how it is described rather than the other way around. This means (according to the storyteller) that though she has provided a slightly elevated and ecstatic description of Eva’s love, it isn’t totally fictional. And here the indeterminacy and open-endedness of stories which is a contemporary preference finds acceptance.

It took me a long time to read this book, partly because I found its episodic structure a bit distracting, partly because of other things that have to do with time commitments rather than with literature. But I’m not sure it wasn’t the ideal way to encounter the adventuresome and inventive Eva Luna, who was always in another scrape, always surviving somehow, always finding another audience for her stories. Eva Luna is a character of Allende’s who becomes a character in her own tales, so that a voice from beyond the world of fictional limits speaks to us, penetrating and interpenetrating our own views of reality and story, and giving us hope of passing beyond our own limits, our imaginations having become our swords with which to slash through the veil between worlds.

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Filed under A prose flourish, Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as back out there, literary topics, originality

June 5, 2013 · 5:05 pm

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

This sixth amendment to the Constitution of the United States in the title of my post is, like most other statutes and rules and regulations, an ideal, or it speaks of ideal conditions. For example, a lot of prosecutions in society are prosecutions of public opinion, which while they have no legal status, yet have consequences upon the people involved, on both sides of the issue (or on all sides, since some controversies are more complex than ones that have only two sides). And if no one accuses you outright, but only begins to look at you askance with certain assumptions in his or her mind which lead to consequences likewise, what do you do? How defend yourself against a charge that is not openly articulated? And what if, little by little, the unspoken accusations do eventually lead to an official sort of “trial”–and I emphasize the word “eventually”–how do you find an “impartial jury”? The gossip, backbiting, and publicity that may surround such trials by public opinion cause no one to be sure that she or he is truly impartial, though he or she may be truly committed as far as possible to finding justice as an ideal. And what if the crime one is suspected of participating in is so horrific, so publicized, so hated and full of distress for so many people, that it is practically impossible to achieve an impartial trial not only in the “State and district” concerned, but even in the world in general? This is the situation of Jassim and Salwa Haddad, a Muslim couple settled in Tucson, Arizona and living there just after the 9/11/01 plane bombing of the World Trade Center in Laila Halaby’s extraordinary novel Once in a Promised Land.

Let me hasten to point out that this novel is not an apologia for Muslim causes, yet nor is it weak in its indictment of Western culture in its lack of center and soul, from at least the perspective of Salwa and Jassim, who are used to a more stable and conservatively structured family culture. The novel is above all honest about its own limitations of vision in the sense that it does not try to portray Western culture as dramatically evil or depraved, but as diverse and as complicated as it is in any large American city, with its real estate deals, business offices, cheap restaurants, areas of lovely homes, small neighborhoods, drug dealers, all the while acknowledging that even this complex view is seen from outside by two fairly recent immigrants. Jassim, the husband, is a hydrologist, studying water tables and rainfall gathering methods, and attempting to garner the knowledge necessary to help the globe, particularly someday his own part of it in Jordan, to sustain itself hydrologically and not waste water. Salwa, the wife, works in a bank and sells real estate, and is most susceptible to the lures of Western society (in her case, in the form of lacy pajamas and frilly underwear, which she acquired a taste for when a female relative a long time before first sent her silk pajamas).

One of the most interesting things about this novel is that it is not really about 9/11, but is about Salwa and Jassim and their love life, and Salwa’s at-first secret pregnancy and miscarriage, Jassim’s equally hidden car accident (known to officials but not originally to his wife) in which he unintentionally kills a skateboarder, and the forces that gradually motivate these divisions and nearly cause the couple to part. It is the story of a marriage, and it’s just that one of the forces that almost tear them from each other’s arms is the day of 9/11; Salwa indignantly and heroically challenges Anglo-Americans who treat them with prejudice or suspicion, Jassim tries to reason or decides to ignore the issues all together. But not only their relationship is at stake: Jassim is also suspected unjustly by prejudiced right-wingers at work and by a man, a former Marine clearly suffering from some kind of battle stress and psychological fatigue, who informs some FBI friends that Jassim is suspicious, and so starts an intrigue which ends up threatening Jassim’s posh and advantageous job working with water resources in Tucson. Both Salwa and Jassim are being courted by members of the opposite sex, and because they are experiencing growing distance from each other, part of the climax and catastrophe of the novel is invested with these elements which have thrust them apart.

The ending–and I don’t need to issue a spoiler alert, because it’s somewhat unclear–winds two threads of plot together, the main story line and a line from folk tales about a female demon called a “ghula” in Salwa’s tradition, which has been in the story from the beginning. The suggestion is that Jassim and Salwa are returning to Jordan, but that is not a foregone conclusion, nor is it a definite one: it is said that the man is carrying the “injured” woman “home,” though whether it is to her family home in Jordan or to their mutual home in Tucson is not entirely clear. The ghula is apparently the symbolic equivalent of the 9/11 experience for all those Muslims and people of Eastern descent who, while guilty of nothing to do with the bombings, suffered from a sort of racist and ethnocentric fervor in the United States immediately afterwards, and in the West in general.

Possibly the most valuable thing about this book, or arguably, anyway, is that the two main characters are presented as ordinary undemonized people, full of their own troubles, whose troubles have the misfortune to get wound up in a larger societal perspective which does demonize them. This characteristic allows the reader to experience the psychological difficulty of sorting out the common issue of “in for a penny, in for a pound.” What I mean by this is that it is not always true that someone guilty of one crime or sin or misdemeanor or piccadillo is therefore guilty of something more major, but often one small lie or one flaw of character causes a jury (for example) to decide in favor of conviction on a charge when perhaps the accused is not guilty of the larger charge at all. This kind of fiction forces us to practice discrimination (in the positive sense of the word) in our choices and in our judgements, so that we become better able to say that sometimes, “in for a penny” is just “in for a penny,” and has nothing to do with “a pound,” and that not all old sayings and saws are what they are cracked up to be.

The Shakespearean sonnet and the past, present and future of love of a friend….

Shakespeare wrote many a sonnet about the love of friends and friendship, and though we have commentators and historians to tell us that some of his sexual loves were female and others male, the friendship component of many of the sonnets is a free-standing element of them, which could lead one to read those particular sonnets aloud to friends of a more Platonic nature and mean it just as literally. Today, I would like to illustrate this point with a comparison of three of them, representing a sort of past, present and future in the conceptual history of a friendship.

First, the past: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past,/I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,/And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:/Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,/For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,/And weep afresh love’s long since canceled woe,/And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:/Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,/And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er/The sad account of fore-bemoanéd moan,/Which I new pay as if not paid before./But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,/All losses are restored and sorrows end.” Here, the past is the main emphasis of the poet’s conception, yet he thinks of the “dear friend” and ceases to mourn, though there is no sure sign that the friend is still alive in the present tense except possibly for the direct address in the word “thee” (which is still temporally ambiguous to a certain extent).

Then, the present: “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,/I all alone beweep my outcast state,/And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,/And look upon myself, and curse my fate,/Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,/Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,/Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,/With what I most enjoy contented least;/Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,/Haply I think on thee–and then my state,/Like to the lark at break of day arising/From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;/For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings/That then I scorn to change my state with kings.” In this sonnet, though the poet does speak of “thy sweet love remembered,” almost as if the love were in the past, the main gist of the poem casts the experience of the poet in the present: he is even despairing of “deaf heaven” at the beginning of the poem, yet by the end he forsakes the considerations of “sullen earth” and his “state” transitions into something like a “lark” which “sings hymns at heaven’s gate.” Thus, the change is not so much within heaven as within the poet’s experience and attitude toward heaven, and the poem is the moment of transition contained in an awareness of the present.

Finally, the future: “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,/So do our minutes hasten to their end;/Each changing place with that which goes before,/In sequent toil all forwards do contend./Nativity, once in the main of light,/Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,/Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight,/And time that gave now doth his gift confound./Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth/And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,/Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,/And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow./And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,/Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.” In this poem, which looks at the entire span of human life as a gradual hopeless fight of the pebbles against the sucking sea, of youth against gradual aging, of “the flourish set on youth” against the wrinkles, “the parallels set in beauty’s brow,” there is yet that promise for the future and future humans and ages which occurs in more than one Shakespearean sonnet: “And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,/Praising thy worth….” The poet has thus secured a future existence not only for himself, but for his friend who inspires him to write as well.

Thus, for the perfection of a form united with a concept, for the developing view of past, present, and future as they impinge upon a great poet’s awareness, and for deservedly famous tributes to love and friendship, these three sonnets by Shakespeare that I have reproduced here and commented on in passing are ideal: if you enjoyed them, why not read them aloud with a friend, to a friend, when occasion presents itself? Even better, commit them to memory or do some art work to accompany the words on parchment paper as a special gift for a friend who’s down in the dumps. Even if your friend is not an expert with Shakepearean English, the meanings are fairly clear if you read with the punctuation, and worth sharing.

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Filed under Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as literary ancestors, literary topics, memory, quality

May 13, 2013 · 4:15 pm

Gerard Manley Hopkins and two incidents of mourning for self, young and older

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a poet almost from the beginning, son of a poet and of a pious woman. In later life, he combined the two streams of his existence by becoming a Jesuit and by taking up again (in 1875) the writing of poetry, which he had left off when assuming the life of a religious, having destroyed all his earlier poems as too worldly. After his death and much later in 1918, the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, who had been a friend of Hopkins’s, saw that his poems were published. Today I would like to remark upon my two favorite poems of his, both frequently anthologized and both published in several other sites on the Internet.

The first poem to be considered is contemplative but a bit whimsical, even lightly teasing of a child who is sad or melancholy without a precise way of recognizing the cause or expressing her state. The speaker is an older individual, one who feels that he sees her situation well, and can enlighten her as to the sources of her frustration or grief. There is both a formal cause and an efficient cause: that is, the change of season is the formal cause of her grief, but her sadness has a deeper source, an efficient cause, “the blight man was born for.” Here is the poem in its entirety:

“Spring and Fall (to a Young Child)”

“Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?/Leaves, like the things of man, you/With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?/Ah! as the heart grows older/It will comes to such sights colder/By and by, nor spare a sigh/Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;/And yet you will weep and know why./Now no matter, child, the name:/Sorrow’s springs are the same./Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed/What heart heard of, ghost guessed:/It is the blight man was born for,/It is Margaret you mourn for.”

When the speaker himself is the sufferer, however, the matter is not even this blithe or teasing or capable of being sifted out as to the cause. In the second poem, which had no precise title but was instead given its first line as a title, we see the lyric voice itself as expressing the suffering, and it is far more serious in tone; there is not any hint herein that the speaker sees an end or a meaning to his grief, only that death itself will end the matter, a tough plight indeed in which to be. The expressive quality is here heightened, so that no one can possibly miss the meaning, and the formal cause is muddled together with the efficient cause in the line ” O the mind, mind has mountains: cliffs of fall,” as if there were no other explanation. There is even a Shakespearean quote from Edgar (as the madman Poor Tom) in King Lear, when the fugitives are wandering around out in the storm without cover and the misery is extreme: “Creep, wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind.” The unquantifiable misery in this poem is in stark contrast with Margaret’s almost self-centered complaint in the first poem, though both take a dim view of human happiness. Here, then, is the second poem:

“[No Worst, There Is None. Pitched Past Pitch of Grief]”

“No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,/More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring./Comforter, where, where is your comforting?/Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?/My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief/Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing–/Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-/ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’./ O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap/May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small/Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,/Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all/Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”

It is almost as if the second poem is an instance of the prediction from the first poem coming true: the speaker in the first poem predicts that “as the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder by and by,” and sure enough, in the second poem it does, though “knowing why” is a little sketchy, and it is said to be because of the state of the mind’s “mountains,” which are “frightful, sheer,” and “no-man-fathomed.” But these poems have a therapeutic use, as poems often do, even if we aesthetically hesitate to use them as “medicine,” because that seems perhaps an inappropriate way to use literature. Here’s what I mean: if you are feeling really, really low, whether in spring and fall or in a rainstorm or on a dull, gray, stormy day, you can read “Spring and Fall,” and end by counselling yourself that after all, “it is Margaret [yourself] you mourn for,” and perhaps find some self-discipline that enables you to put the matter aside. But if you’re really feeling abysmal and totally lousy, you can read “[No Worst, There is None. Pitched Past Pitch of Grief],” and not only achieve catharsis, but go catharsis one even better: no matter how dreadful I’m feeling, I have only to read this second poem and I immediately perk up a little: not only did someone else feel as I do, but his expression of mourning for the human condition is even more extreme than anything I could possibly come up with, even at my most poetic and articulate, and my case is not, after all, that bad.

So, enjoy the upcoming summer if you are in the temperate zone, and if you are not, or when the summer cheats on you and issues a cold, rainy day or when it is over altogether, drag out the Gerard Manley Hopkins and give him a read: he has happy poems and sad poems, all beautifully evocative, but even if you only get acquainted with these two I’ve discussed today, you will be doing yourself a favor: Hopkins is one of those poets at heart who have shared their hearts and minds without stint, and who will always have something to say to you if you want to listen.

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April 27, 2013 · 1:41 am

The old-fashioned and repellent question of “breeding,” and a way in which it still applies

When I was but a young person, I attended a summer day camp which had horseback riding as an activity, and I also took horseback riding lessons independently. What sticks in my memory are two horses in particular, Prince and Show Prince, two horses whose similarity in name bore not at all upon their individual equine temperaments and manners. The pure thoroughbred, Prince, whose people had retired him to the stable for cheaper boarding on the condition that young people could (after being taught to be gentle to his mouth) ride him for lessons, had the manners of the most flawed and cranky aristocrat. He tried to buck. He had a habit of twisting around and trying to bite his rider, and with the best will in the world to be gentle to his mouth, it was hard to do, because he fought his young rider constantly, fishtailing and dancing around, not in high spirits as would a racer, but in pure spite and bad temper. By contrast, the mixed breed largely Appaloosa, with the misnomer Show Prince (a misnomer because though he could win trophies as an Appaloosa, he was not a thoroughbred competitor), was a perfect and lovable mount, one whose manners were kind, whose gait was so gentle that I once found myself galloping and being held on safely almost by his will when all I was asked to do was trot. He was affectionate and dear, responsive and never ill-intentioned, and had a truly gentle mouth because it would never occur to anyone to jab at the reins. Thus though Show Prince was perhaps less valuable in dollars, he was a dream of a horse, the ideal horse with children, who yet had some pride of place in breeding circles as a show horse. I was years away from having heard of a writer named Henry James, for whom the question of human “breeding” was so very important that it was one of his most constant subjects, which he turned back and forth and back again and examined in great detail. Yet, years later, when I read his short story “The Real Thing,” one of the first things that popped into my mind were my old acquaintances, Prince and Show Prince, in one of those unbidden sorts of thoughts that will occur when the mind is not censoring itself.

People are not horses; horses are not people. That much is clear. When we discuss the question of “breeding” in people, there has historically and repellently been a tendency to assume that wealthier people are necessarily “better bred” than poor people, though there has also been the opposing mythology (for “breeding” is a mythology in the sense of an informing societal belief) of “nature’s gentlemen,” that is, of those of poorer status who have an innate sense of what to say and do in difficult situations. The writer Henry James was one much given to exploring the questions relating to breeding and good manners, and in “The Real Thing,” an artist, an aspiring portrait painter who makes the main part of his living in doing magazine and book illustrations, meets up with both sorts of people. He has some regular models, such as Miss Churm, an irrepressible Cockney, and Oronte, an impoverished Italian man who acts as his butler as well, and they both have a sense of how to pose for various portraits of aristocrats and rich people in novels with whom they have nothing in common. By contrast, there are also a Major Monarch and his wife, who come by when recommended to the artist by Mr. Rivet, another artist. They are genuinely “well-bred” people, who have fallen on hard times financially. They have looked for work, for what they might be able to turn their hands to, among various venues, and have at last hit upon the stratagem of asking to pose as the artist’s models for aristocrats and well-bred people, reasoning that since they are “the real thing,” it ought to be easy.

This is a mistake, as the artist finds out. He tries his best, but is unable to make anything successfully of Major and Mrs. Monarch. Whatever they do, they simply are not “right” for the role of artist’s models. For what they lack, it turns out, is the ability to practice “imitation,” which Miss Churm and Oronte have in abundance. Miss Churm has so much that she is able to pose as an Italian, whereas the Italian Oronte, in the right costume, makes a perfect artistic model of an English gentleman! At a point near the end of the story, the artist has to tell Major Monarch that he can’t afford to lose the artistic contract in order simply to give them employment. The text reads: “I drew a long breath, for I said to myself that I shouldn’t see him again. I hadn’t told him definitely that I was in danger of having my work rejected, but I was vexed at his not having felt the catastrophe in the air, read with me the moral of our fruitless collaboration, the lesson that in the deceptive atmosphere of art even the highest respectability may fail of being plastic” [italics mine].

The artist does see his erstwhile “well-bred” models, though. His friend Jack Hawley, who has returned after an absence, has told him that they are ruining his work, and so he is “disconcerted” when they turn up again, to watch him sketch at a love scene between his other two models. The artist feels that “this is at least the ideal thing.” Not “the real thing,” but “the ideal thing.” Suddenly, Mrs. Monarch offers to straighten the hair of Miss Churm, whose curls seems a little untidy to her for the scene. The artist is at first afraid that Mrs. Monarch means some harm. “But she quieted me with a glance I shall never forget–I confess I should like to have been able to paint that–and went for a moment to my model. She spoke to her softly, laying a hand on her shoulder and bending over her; and as the girl, understanding, gratefully assented, she disposed her rough curls, with a few quick passes, in such a way as to make Miss Churm’s head twice as charming. It was one of the most heroic personal services I’ve ever seen rendered. Then Mrs. Monarch turned away with a low sigh and, looking about her as if for something to do, stooped to the floor with a noble humility and picked up a dirty rag that had dropped out of my paint-box.”

The next ten minutes are telling. While the artist continues to work, the Monarchs (so tellingly symbolically named for their erstwhile social status) do his dishes and clean up his kitchen in order to be useful to him. As he says, “They had accepted their failure, but they couldn’t accept their fate. They had bowed their heads in bewilderment to the perverse and cruel law in virtue of which the real thing could be so much less precious than the unreal; but they didn’t want to starve. If my servants were my models, then my models might be my servants. They would reverse the parts–the others would sit for the ladies and gentlemen and they would do the work.” For the time being, this dutiful bowing to the forces of “fate” ruins his ability to work, and he dismisses the sitters temporarily. He continues to allow the Monarchs to work for him for another week, then he gives them “a sum of money to go away.” He gets the remaining contract for designing the rest of the book series’ art works, but as he says, “my friend Hawley repeats that Major and Mrs. Monarch did me a permanent harm, got me into false ways. If it be true I’m content to have paid the price–for the memory.”

What’s most obvious is that the “false ways” the Monarchs get him into are ironically the opposite of the “true ways” of art, which are in turn only the arts of “imitation,” as opposed to the attempt to secure “the genuine.” Miss Churm knows how to “look over a head” in an imagined “crowded room,” though she says honestly that she would rather be “looking over a stove”; it’s no doubt a bit chilly in the artist’s rooms in her borrowed costumery. But the point is that the artist can make it look good through “the alchemy of art,” which does not need the actual facts with which to construct a painting or illustration. And it’s hard to believe, honestly, that the artist really doesn’t mind if he has been done a “permanent [artistic] harm,” or that he feels repaid in having “the memory” on which to look back. Still, when the Monarchs first walk in, before he knows they want to be paid as models, he assumes they are there to pay him, that is, to sit for a portrait of themselves as wealthy people do. This is perhaps the crowning irony, that they would have been appropriate for his most genuine aspiration to fulfill itself in terms of. Or is the crowning irony that Mrs. Monarch shows a kind of quality of gentleness that he is in fact incapable of painting, that is individual, not class-oriented, and not susceptible to artistic representation?

So, though Henry James often plays favorites and writes far more sympathetically of the so-called upper classes and less so of the so-called lower classes, even to the point of being often and sometimes justifiably labelled an elitist, in the world of art, at least in the world of this story, he recognizes no aristocrats except those who “can make the thing work.” Thus essentially, my old friend Show Prince told me a much-valued secret a long time ago, when we were trotting and cantering and galloping around together: Prince may have gone to some sort of valuable stud farm and have sired other genuine aristocrats as crabby and intemperate as himself, and have made the thing work that way, in a sense “doing the dishes” like the Monarchs, but for making the thing work as a mannerly steed with the true sweetness and aplomb of the real artistic gentleman, give me Show Prince (and Oronte and Miss Churm) every time.

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Filed under A prose flourish, Articles/reviews, Literary puzzles and arguments

Tagged as literary ancestors, literary topics, originality, quality

April 15, 2013 · 5:01 pm

The Nature of Human Imperfection, Idealism, and the Spectre of Human Doubt–Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”

One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s best-loved and most effective tales (which Edgar Allan Poe praises for the mastery of its brevity and “single effect”) is his tale “Young Goodman Brown,” about the spiritual adventure–rather, misadventure–of young Goodman Brown, who journeys away from his young “aptly named” wife of three months, Faith, on an “evil purpose,” about which he tells himself, “‘Well, she’s a blessed angel on earth, and after this one night I’ll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven.'” Now, there are ways of arguing as to whether this short story is a fable, parable, or exemplum, all special kinds of allegorical endeavor, and one could make a closely reasoned argument for any of the three, but this technical detail is of less moment, to my way of thinking, than the fact that Hawthorne seems to prefer a final mystification as to which of the three exactly it is. As M. H. Abrams told us long ago in A Glossary of Literary Terms, if it’s a fable, it “exemplifies a moral thesis or a principle of human behavior; usually in its conclusion either the narrator or one of the characters states the moral in the form of an Epigram.” Well, in a long paragraph at the end of the story, the narrator shows young Goodman Brown’s life history in brief after he has (perhaps, or apparently) attended a witches’ sabbath. The narrator draws a conclusion, however fictionalized and broadly painted: the moral seems to be either that one should, if one wants to retain faith (that key word again), either never part from the right path or–and this is a split moral, from which we see the saturnine features of Hawthorne grinning at us broadly–we should have a sufficiently complex view of human sin and redemption that we can allow for the occasional straying from the right path, as long as we also envision human goodness to reside in a disproportionate overbalance on the “good” side of actions and intentions. On the other hand, if the story is an exemplum, it’s told as “a particular instance of the general theme of a sermon.” If in fact we see Hawthorne’s story as an example of the way ministers and priests and speakers of various kinds often preface their sermons and talks with an illustrative story, then this is an exemplum; but given Hawthorne’s complexity of vision and the way he often in his tales seems to prefer putting his reader over a barrel or leaving the reader sitting on a fence (to mention just two uncomfortable psychological results of his work), he makes a somewhat quizzical preacher. Still, if complications and complexity are the issues he is trying to raise, then this story is a perfect exemplum of the issues involved. Finally, if the story is a parable, or “a short narrative presented so as to stress the tacit but detailed analogy between its component parts and a thesis or lesson that the narrator is trying to bring home to us,” this would account for the ease with which the analogies in the story as it is structured shine forth (though again, one has to beware of seeming ease when Hawthorne is the source–he likes to throw the occasional spanner into the works).

Now for the story itself: young Goodman Brown (and the story, as must be obvious by now, is set in the American Puritan era) leaves at sunset to make a journey of some sort overnight away from his young wife Faith. Faith begs him not to go in a key but indeterminate phrase, on this night “of all nights in the year.” Thus, the night, which fills Faith with apprehension at the thought of being alone, is an important date somehow, perhaps Halloween or some other night of ill omen. As he tells her in response, “‘Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee.'” He feels guilty and thinks that it’s as if “‘a dream had warned her what work is to be done to-night.'” And of course, near the end of the story, we are proposed the option of thinking of Goodman Brown’s adventure in the forest that he too might have had a dream: “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?” But then the solemn knell of Hawthornian tones rings out in the final paragraph: “Be it so if you will; but alas! it was a dream of ill omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream.” For, when young Goodman Brown goes forth toward the woods, he goes to meet a man “in grave and decent attire” (and many texts tell us that the devil appears as a gentleman) who bears “a considerable resemblance to” young Goodman Brown as if they were “father and son,” though “more in expression than in features.” In short, as this fable, exemplum, or parable leads us to believe, he goes to meet the devil and attend a witches’ sabbath.

Several times during the course of his journey farther and farther into the woods, Brown bethinks himself of his Christian teachers and people who have been held up to him as moral examples, and he wants to turn back, and even declares his purpose to the devil, who slyly doesn’t resist his suggestions but leaves him with his options open. Still, as they walk on, he sees and hears these very moral examples heading for the same place he is heading, and saying such things that he believes they have been deceiving him all along. They talk about a “goodly” young man who is going to be taken into their communion, and the devil, when young Goodman Brown protests that his own family has always been free of the taint of sin, responds thus: “‘I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and that’s no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village….They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends with you for their sake.'” When young Goodman Brown–though still walking ahead–objects that he doesn’t want to break Faith’s heart, the devil cunningly agrees with him and allows him to step to one side of the path, where he nevertheless sees other moral exemplars of his youth coming along to the meeting, and hears them greeting his new acquaintance in a friendly manner.

When the devil gives Brown his staff to lean upon (again, an involved kind of symbolism from Hawthorne), he tells Brown, “‘You will think better of this by and by….Sit here and rest yourself a while; and when you feel like moving again, there is my staff to help you along.'” Next come along in front of the resting Brown some male members of the “communion,” who discuss the fact that a “goodly young woman” is to be taken into the fold, and though the well-known figures further demoralize Brown, he looks up to the starry heavens and shouts, “‘With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!'” But then, a cloud comes between him and the stars, and we read: “Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of voices.” He then in desperation begins to call out Faith’s name, but hears mocking voices and a woman’s scream. “‘My Faith is gone!’ cried he after one stupified moment. ‘There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.'” He has of course before been relying on the Christian doctrine that if a man or woman is sufficiently good, that they may even take a sinning mate into heaven with them; but because this is his weak point, relying upon Faith rather than upon himself, this is where he is morally the weakest (or perhaps Hawthorne wants to point here to the necessity as well of Good Works, which from what we have heard from the devil in Brown’s moments of doubt, Brown’s relatives haven’t practiced).

There is a dramatically rewarding and frightening scene of Brown in the woods at the witches’ sabbath, where he comes face to face with the other “convert,” Faith, his wife, and the devilish figure says, “‘Lo, there ye stand, my children….Depending upon one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.'” Then, after they are welcomed by the whole group, Brown suddenly perks up and shouts to the apparent figure of his wife, Faith, “‘Faith! Faith!….look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one.'” The text says he doesn’t know if she does or not, but that the whole scene promptly vanishes, the fiery hearth and forest as well as the rest, and he finds himself sitting on a rock.

So, what do we have? We’ve had the chilling apparitions associated with demon worship, yet we have the option (or do we?) of interpreting the whole thing as a dream. At the very least, we have the option of assuming that in the end Brown repented of his bad mistake, and departed “a sadder and a wiser man.” But the end of Hawthorne’s tale tells us instead, in a lengthy paragraph, that Brown felt suspicion and dread the rest of his days of everyone around him, including Faith, who continues in the end of the tale to greet him as she did at the beginning. The last line reads, “And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession [again that word “goodly”!], besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.”

Thus, Hawthorne’s story is about the nature of human imperfection and its involvement with idealism: too much idealism, which demands that one never err or make a mistake, can be the real mistake, because any little slip can cause one to assume that there is no way to recoup the loss. This was one of the perpetual criticisms which Hawthorne, in all his tales, seemed to be making of Puritanism: too strict and unrelenting a moral code seems to invite mistakes, because people are human, and cannot help the occasional misstep. Thus, those who are held up as models in the average community, like ministers, deacons, judges, and virtuous women, are often held up by Hawthorne as short-changing those who rely upon them. But were so much not expected of them in the first place, idealistically, or were more forgiven them, then they would not seem so flawed and dramatically imperfect. Hawthorne cleverly selects a prime sin in Puritan times, consorting with the devil and witches, because it involves us to some extent in the realm of the imagination: we can propose to ourselves that it is an allegory even, in which whatever it was that young Goodman Brown was going away for that night was perhaps some quite ordinary sin, symbolized by the illicit meeting in the woods, and thus was a sort of flaw more of us might be able to sympathize with rather than something a bit anomalous. The spectre of human doubt is the face of young Goodman Brown himself, gloomy and brooding over all the scene that had previously been so filled with joy for him–once doubt enters, can it ever fully be dismissed? Or is human doubt the nature of human life? This is why I say that Hawthorne’s dark visage grimaces at us a little in stern amusement: he knew that his tale was one that we couldn’t easily dismiss with an either-or idealistic answer, because he allows us the same freedom either to doubt or believe that the devil-figure allows Brown, and if we lack imaginative robustness and are so weak-minded as to be swayed by a cloud that sweeps over the midnight stars and the sound of the wind shrieking in the forest trees, then we deserve what we get. And what we got this time was a superlative tale by a master of the short story, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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Filed under A prose flourish, Articles/reviews, Literary puzzles and arguments

Tagged as literary ancestors, literary conscience, literary topics, originality, quality

April 11, 2013 · 8:25 pm

Robert Frost’s “Neither Out Far nor In Deep”–The Nature of Aspiration, Longing, Disappointment, and Fulfillment

Today, I had it in mind to share a poem by Robert Frost, “The Bearer of Evil Tidings.” Unfortunately, this poem has no version which is in the public domain yet (i.e., which has been out for a sufficient period of time and can be found elsewhere on the Internet), and so my own sense of aspiration and longing to communicate both the poem and an analysis closely interwoven with it cannot be met. Strangely and funnily enough, however, as I was searching the Frost poems that are quotable in full, I ran across another Frost poem which I find intriguing and worth commenting on, and so I wasn’t doomed to disappointment, but instead was able to fulfill at least some part of my desire to share a Frost poem today. The title of the poem is “Neither Out Far nor In Deep,” and it appears in several other places on the Internet, but I want to quote it in full, so here goes:

“The people along the sand/All turn and look one way./They turn their back on the land./They look at the sea all day./As long as it takes to pass/A ship keeps raising its hull;/The wetter ground like glass/Reflects a standing gull./The land may vary more;/But wherever the truth may be–/The water comes ashore,/And the people look at the sea./They cannot look out far./They cannot look in deep./But when was that ever a bar/To any watch they keep?”

Some commentators on this poem (who can be found in other sites on the Internet) like to point out that the people who watch the sea and its horizon are deluded (are in fact “gulls” like the bird in the foreground, that is, “dupes”). Others point to the finite nature of human achievement. By contrast, I would like to point to the infinite nature of human aspiration, which persistently looks at that which seems opaque, or boundless, or impenetrable. The received wisdom about this poem also seems to be that Frost is taunting or mocking the effort to see “out far” or “in deep,” but I’m not sure that’s really the point of the poem. It may well be that he is in fact practicing a sort of self-mockery in titling his poem “Neither Out Far nor In Deep,” as if he was aware that his own view is shallower than that of those whom he is watching. The mystery of the sea beckons, casts its external evidences forward (like ships and sand–the “wetter ground”–and the gull) and seems to frustrate or deliberately limit what can be seen. Still, the humans insist on their view of the horizon and the water which “comes ashore” to such an extent that Frost, writing of them, does not say that they “turn their backs on the land” but rather that they “turn their back on the land,” as if they were all one body.

As one body thus the humans “look at the sea all day,” regardless of the land behind them which “may vary more.” They clearly find something which makes up to them for the fact that “they cannot look out far” and “they cannot look in deep”–perhaps after all, Frost is not slighting the watchers at the shore, but is instead commenting on and commending to our attention the nature both of disappointment and fulfillment, and the difference between goal and process, between achievement and journey. For, despite the fact that the sea seemingly limits our abilities to penetrate its meaning, still the goal and the achievement of doing so may not be the correct things for us to be focusing on. Perhaps instead we are meant to be focusing on the process of the quest and the journey, of the seeking itself. And thus, the people who sit and stare so fixedly at the sea are not necessarily the “dupes” of the view (and of Frost, one might add), but instead are doing what humans always do when faced with a limitless puzzle–continuing to ponder and question the conundrum in view, somehow secure in the “knowledge” that even if none of the present watchers manage to circumvent the enigma’s unending nature, yet there is more than enough of that nature there to supply generations to come with riddles which they can solve, not perhaps the ultimate riddle of existence, but smaller goals to achieve which all chip away at that riddle, piece by piece, adding more and more to the stock of human understanding. And here, I’ve mixed Frost’s metaphor, by suggesting that the sea (a fluid, after all) is a solid something which can be chipped away at like a block of stone–I apologize to my critical readers for this figure, though of course I could switch my figure and say that Frost, in mentioning “the wetter ground like glass” means to foreground the sand as an objective correlative of sorts for what the sea itself endlessly washes back and forth, gradually itself eroding the solid earth beneath.

Finally, the nature of human faithfulness to “keeping watch” is perhaps also being commented upon, whether or not one sees it as commendable being a matter of individual interpretation: “They cannot look out far./They cannot look in deep./But when was that ever a bar/To any watch they keep?” suggests other sorts of watches, such as religious vigils and death watches over deceased bodies or ill persons, and the victory of human perseverance in maintaining watches of these sorts. For, who can look “out far” or “in deep” to the endless mystery of human life and death, and not wonder “wherever the truth may be?” Whether “on the land” of our ordinary perspectives or “on the sea” of our more unusual views and speculations, we are both limited by our capacities and distinctly suited by our longings and aspirations to touch some small parts of the “infinite sea,” and find some sorts of fulfillment in the watches we keep. Thus, though today I did not get to put before you the full text of “The Bearer of Evil Tidings,” I was able to find some measure of fulfillment and soften my own disappointment by putting before you yet another Frost poem, which I hope you have enjoyed. A simple search of the author’s name and the title of the poem, listed together, will take you to various sites where other commentators have written on it.

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Filed under A prose flourish, Articles/reviews, Literary puzzles and arguments

Tagged as literary topics, little bits and pieces

Tag Archives: literary topics

Catching up with Aphra Behn–More than 324 years later….

Filling in blanks in a literary education via early feminists and women writers….

Shadows of reality and shades of the imagination in Isabel Allende’s collection “The Stories of Eva Luna”

“[The art of the novel] happens because the storyteller’s own experience of men and things…has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.”–Murasaki Shikibu

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

The Shakespearean sonnet and the past, present and future of love of a friend….

Gerard Manley Hopkins and two incidents of mourning for self, young and older

The old-fashioned and repellent question of “breeding,” and a way in which it still applies

The Nature of Human Imperfection, Idealism, and the Spectre of Human Doubt–Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”

Robert Frost’s “Neither Out Far nor In Deep”–The Nature of Aspiration, Longing, Disappointment, and Fulfillment

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