Tag Archives: originality

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.

2 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as , ,

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.

3 Comments

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

Tagged as , , ,

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.

2 Comments

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

Tagged as , , , ,

April 7, 2013 · 6:19 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews

Tagged as , , ,

March 29, 2013 · 9:18 pm

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

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

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

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

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

6 Comments

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

Tagged as , , ,

March 21, 2013 · 3:59 pm

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

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

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

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

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

4 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews, Literary puzzles and arguments, What is literature for?

Tagged as , ,

March 18, 2013 · 5:05 pm

“Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.”–Nathaniel Hawthorne

Today, I don’t propose to belabor the point contained in the title of my post, only to illustrate it with a story (not one of Hawthorne’s, but of a later author’s) which I believe establishes the point quite clearly in a fictional mode.  As you may or may not be aware, the “illumination” of the “infernal regions” wasn’t looked upon entirely negatively in the Romantic period during which Hawthorne was writing, as is evidenced by the stories Hawthorne himself wrote, such as “Young Goodman Brown” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” in both of which a devilish figure or an evil experience causes a protagonist to have a greater awareness of self and what is contained in the complex self, as opposed to viewing himself or herself as the instigator only of good things and positive experiences.  Many a protagonist has viewed himself or herself in a naive light as being totally innocent, until some tempter or provocative experience comes along to change that view, and thus to make him or her aware of the dividedness of human reactions in daily life.  And since, like David Copperfield, we would choose if we could to view ourselves as the “heroes of our own lives,” this knowledge hits us hard.  It can be seen and has been seen in some stories and tales as the impetus toward further bad behavior, because the protagonist reasons that he or she is already lost and might as well (in Milton’s words) “reign in hell” rather than “serve in heaven.”  Thus, to the true believer in God, it is a point of some discomfort that the Devil often tells a lie by revealing part of the truth, making the total “revelation” seem more convincing by force of the fact that a substantial part of it seems or is true.  It takes a real saint to stick to the belief, when visited by the view of his or her shortcomings, that “it’s not over until it’s over,” because Heaven and Hell are both beyond the purview of the ordinary fallible human being.

The heroine in our story of today, however, is not feeling guilt or remorse; rather, in Kate Chopin’s short short story “The Story of an Hour,” Mrs. Mallard is cherishing to herself the knowledge that her sometimes beloved husband is dead in a railway accident, which is the news brought to her by her sister Josephine.  Josephine and the husband’s friend Richards are both there to break the news to Mrs. Mallard as gently as possible, because though young, she has a heart condition, and they are afraid the shock of her husband’s death will kill her.  The story does not immediately show its hand, however.  Mrs. Mallard goes to her room crying, and locks herself in, and the people below assume that she is overcome with grief.  But we are told that she feels some “thing that was approaching to possess her,” which is a moment of self-knowledge that she is fighting off.  Here, instead of grief, is what is passing in the first instance when we get a clue to the contrary:  “When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips.  She said it over and over under her breath:  ‘free, free, free!’  The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes.  They stayed keen and bright.  Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.  She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her.  A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.  She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead.  But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely.  And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome….There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.  A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.”  Thus, the word “illumination” is clearly used here as counter for what she experiences in her heart of hearts, and though Kate Chopin is often hailed as a feminist avatar, she is equally clearly fair-minded in that she says of the quality she describes here that both men and women may try to impose their wills on others, for “kind” or “cruel” motives.

The heroine exults a while longer in her room in private, and then comes to the door to her sister Josephine’s bidding, and walks downstairs with her, arm in arm, ready to receive the sympathy awaiting her and presumably ready to play the role of the grieving widow in some measure.  But at the very moment they meet Richards at the bottom of the stairs, something unexpected happens, to bring the story to a close in the manner of an O. Henry story or that of the “surprise ending”:  “Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey.  It was [Mrs. Mallard’s husband] Brently [] who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his gripsack and umbrella.  He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one.  He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.  But Richards was too late.  When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease–of joy that kills.”  And at this point, it is important to remember that Mrs. Mallard does not die simply because her looked-for and projected freedom of future years has now received a knock in the head–she is also partly in joy to see her husband, just as her illumination would have predicted.  It is in fact a moment of “joy that kills,” and sudden surprise, and disappointment, and even her weak heart simply responding to too much stress.  It is in fact not only her “demon” of feeling subject to her husband, but also her “angel” of being astounded and glad to see him alive which, fighting a war in her weak physical bosom, kills her.

Thus, the “illuminating blaze of the infernal regions” is part and parcel of that mixture of emotions and states which are not “simply dark or bright.”  Hawthorne is making a counterintuitive claim that even a “dark” emotion, if taken in its pure state, is better than a mixed emotion, which involves the human being in so much turmoil that many a person will attempt to resolve the question to one extreme or the other in order not to be torn or suspended over the abyss between the two.  Is it any wonder that Kate Chopin, a Romantic by the tradition of the American fin de siècle in her own right, follows his insight and creates a heroine who loses her life in the devastating encounter of dark and bright?

6 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews

Tagged as , , ,

March 14, 2013 · 11:58 pm

A Partisan Post–Cats and the Contemplative Life….

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

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

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

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

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

8 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as , ,

March 12, 2013 · 4:42 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

Filed under A prose flourish, Articles/reviews

Tagged as , ,

March 3, 2013 · 6:30 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Comments

Filed under A prose flourish, Articles/reviews, Literary puzzles and arguments, What is literature for?

Tagged as , , , ,