Tag Archives: originality

March 1, 2013 · 5:14 pm

Milan Kundera’s “Let the Old Dead Make Way for the Young Dead” and the Pulse of Humanity–“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin””

“Let the Old Dead Make Way for the Young Dead” is a story in which two people who have known each other in the Biblical sense once in the past meet up again “in a small Czech town,” and have to try to decide whether or not to make love again, fifteen years later.  They each have something operating as an impediment, a true enough picture of what I have called in my title “the pulse of humanity.”  Each is haunted by a sense of personal failure, the man because he is poor, has no Communist party status, has not done much in his life, and has had little or no success with attractive or alluring women, the woman because she is fifteen years older than he and has in the meantime been made to feel even older by a son who wants her to “act her age” (i.e., who is putting her determinedly in the past with his memories of his father).  In the more immediate sense, she has inadvertently allowed her husband’s grave lease to lapse and his corpse to be disposed of, which she knows her grown son will blame her for.  Not a promising scenario for a hot romance, is it?

And yet there is a sense of human desperation constant in the story, a sense of two people, each reaching out for something from the past with which to shore up the uncertain and unappealing future.  At first when they meet on the street, the man, who is now around thirty-five, doesn’t recognize the woman, who was thirty-five to his twenty when they made love the first time.  She is upset because the man at the cemetery refused to admit her claim about her husband’s right to the space and put it to her in concise terms that “the old dead ought to make room for the young dead.”  She is tired and footsore and depressed at no longer knowing anyone in town, so she accepts her former acquaintance’s invitation to come up to his bachelor apartment for coffee or tea.  This is her reasoning, for at first though she thinks of him as a former lover, there is no desire for him in her mind:  “She could wash her hands in his bathroom and then sit in his soft armchair (her legs ached), look around his room, and listen to the boiling water bubbling away behind the screen which separated the kitchen nook from the room.”  (This is stated indirectly from her point of view, but unless she is remembering his room from the past–and we are told he has only been living here seven years, so only the furnishings could be the same–she cannot know ahead of time exactly what she will find there.  She is in fact postulating the appearance of his room, fantasizing in a way, and she turns out to be fairly correct in her surmise.)

He in his turn is obsessed with his thinning hair and the future bald spot which he often spends time looking at in the mirror.  He has been married in the time they have been apart, was faithful, and has been divorced for seven years, and because he cannot afford to date accomplished women, and the town is deficient of eligible women in any case, he has largely been celibate, or has slept with immature women who seemed “stupid” to him.  When he asks her about her presence in the town, she tells him that she and her son come every year to her husband’s grave on All Soul’s Day, but she omits to reveal to him her unfortunate failure to hold onto the grave, as if it were a physical fault she were ashamed of; this is pertinent because the two of them are so otherwise obsessed with their physical appearances in relation to the possibility of again making love.  He notices her aging, and knows too that he will not continue to find her attractive, but at the same time “he saw the delicate movement of her hand with which she refused the offer of cognac [and] he realized that this charm, this magic, this grace, which had enraptured him, was still the same in her, though hidden beneath the mask of old age, and was in itself still attractive….”   He begins to tell her his pessimistic thoughts, only of course “he was silent about the bald spot that was beginning to appear (it was just like her silence about the canceled grave).  On the other hand, the vision of the bald spot was transubstantiated into quasi-philosophical maxims to the effect that time passes more quickly than man is able to live, and that life is terrible, because everything in it is necessarily doomed to extinction.  He voiced these and similar maxims, to which he awaited a sympathetic response….”  Instead, she tells him that it is “superficial” talk and that she doesn’t like to hear it.

Suddenly, however, he breaches the gap between them by reaching across and stroking her hand.  He begins to remember the first time they made love fifteen years before, when “she absolutely defied his imagination” not due to her deficits but to his own.  He also remembers that at the time she had whispered something to him which he had neglected to ask her about when he didn’t hear it correctly, and now there is no chance to recover it; as well, at the time she was the sexual aggressor, and now he is, and she is reluctant to be with him, is in fact very reluctant.  At the time he had been a callow youth, and had made love to her in the dark, and the time is now unrecoverable, because now she looks different, and he will never be able to see her again as she once was.  There is of course shallow thinking going on in both of them, but also honest thought, because he and she both know that he will feel the disgust all men feel at a physically imperfect woman (and though this seems like yet another narrow and unfair picture of both men and women alike when taken in the abstract, in the story it rings true, it is a true remark, because it is part of the truth of what these two characters have between them, part of the human reality they are grasping at willy-nilly which they both have need to fear will at some point elude them).

The pertinence of All Soul’s Day suddenly comes to the foreground when the narrative tells us that part of the reason she doesn’t want to give in to his lovemaking in the present-day situation is because she knows that her previous appearance fifteen years before has been a “memorial” to him, a memorial to beauty and sexuality.  He keeps telling her “don’t fight me” and “there’s no need to fight me” when he strokes her hand and tries to touch her, and she wars with the memory of her son’s attempts to age her so that he himself can become sexually more mature with the women in his own life, because he is unable to allow his mother to be an attractive woman to someone nearer her own age.  The significance of a memorial in this story thus becomes important because in the present tense, the woman finally allows the man to make love to her, and as we are told, “Evening was still a long way off.  This time the room was full of light.”  These lovely final lines make the point that as long as we have any bloom of life on us at all, death is still far enough away for love and life to intervene between us and the doom of time we all face, thus “evening” is “still a long way off.”  Finally, “this time the room was full of light” means not only that in a mature love affair we see our need for what it is and are no longer able to deceive ourselves about what we are doing, but also that our memorials to the past become of less moment and we are full of the “light” of the present, and able to show generosity and love in a complete and fulfilling way.  Thus, in terms of memorials, in this story “the old dead” (the memorials of the past) have made way for a present which, because the two lovers have no future together in a permanent sense, will shortly become “the young dead.”  Yet in showing the common “pulse of humanity,” this story is about hope, love, and eternal youth, and not about age and despair.

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February 22, 2013 · 7:58 pm

“The Intimate Connection Between Seeing and Feeling”–A. S. Byatt’s “The Matisse Stories”

As the blurb commenter of A. S. Byatt’s The Matisse Stories says, “[E]ach of A. S. Byatt’s narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, [and] each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling–about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being.”  When one researches the works of Matisse, the two words that are most closely associated with him are draughtsmanship and color.  Draughtsmanship has special affinities to seeing line, just as color has special relationships to experiencing emotion.  In her series of three short stories relating to Matisse, A. S. Byatt pays tribute to draughtsmanship and color, not only by discussing things to do with Matisse and by making her characters interested in him as someone they themselves are either aware of as a cultural figure or want to follow as an inspiration, but also by embodying qualities of good fictional draughtsmanship and color in her stories themselves.

The first story, “Medusa’s Ankles,” follows the developing relationship of a middle-aged woman with her hairdresser Lucian, which is begun when she sees a Rosy Nude of Matisse’s used as an ornament in the hair salon and walks in on impulse.  Though the draughtsmanship of the story shows that the people in the salon are in reality constantly a disappointment to the patron’s attempts to develop a roseate view of life, her sense of emotional color overcomes the negative things she notices (for example, when the renovation of the salon goes through a less than sympathetic actual color scheme).  Thus in the first story, for a long stretch of the plot, the “line” of the story and the “color” are at odds, at war with each other in a creative way.

Because Lucian, in contrast with the stereotypical conversational habits of hairdressers, focuses on his own life story rather than on hers, the patron does not become involved with it, and is even mildly irritated by the relation of it, until Lucian dwells too long on his wife’s thick ankles, one of the petty things driving him into the arms of his girlfriend.  Then the patron realizes that she too is a middle-aged woman with thick ankles, and becomes irate and destructive, supposedly because she doesn’t like the way her hair is done (by an assistant that one time instead of by Lucian himself).  One sees that in the “line” of the story, Lucian has rejected the patron twice, not only in his “shadow plot” rejection of his own wife, but in this time passing her hair styling on to an assistant.  The “colors” of the salon, the delicate combinations of cream and pink which have given way to steel, “storm-grey” and black and white, are “clarified” out by her wrathful destruction of the salon, which resolves itself because Lucian says insurance will pay, and he’s getting out of the salon business anyway.  The final irony is of course that later at home the patron’s husband, who doesn’t normally notice her hair, comes out with an interesting remark:”‘You look different.  You’ve had your hair done.  I like it.  You look lovely.  It takes twenty years off you.  You should have it done more often.’  And he came over and kissed her on the shorn nape of her neck, quite as he used to do.”  At this point, though there is no longer a place for the patron to get her hair done unless she goes somewhere else, the line and the color of the story have otherwise reached a peaceful resolution.

The second story, “Art Work,” begins with a direct “quote” from Matisse in the sense that it is a word-picture of a Matisse painting, Le Silence habité des maisons, and is a domestic scene of a mother and child together over a book, under a “totem” picture on the wall.  But the story which follows is about the domestic life of two married artists with two children, and how they get along with Mrs. Sheba Brown, their housekeeper.  For she is the “totem” in their lives, and comes to dominate the scene in the way totems do.  All of the characters and objects in the story are described in language which strives to paint a verbal picture, replete with shapes and color words, even to what may seem, to a reader uninitiated to Byatt’s way of making points, a callous degree.  For example, with no outright emotional color words but with literal color words, Mrs. Brown’s bruises and discolorations at the hands of a man with whom she has been close are “painted.”  The distance in this relation is obviously meant to depict the distance the family keeps from involvement with Mrs. Brown, though their relations are friendly on the surface.  There are also many descriptions of the interiors of rooms, as if Matisse were himself observing.

Mrs. Brown has been with the family for more than ten years, and is firmly resented by the husband, Robin Dennison, because she straightens up his painting studio, and because she dresses in fantastic color combinations, which Robin, though he wants to imitate Matisse’s vivid colors, cannot appreciate.  The “kicker” to the story occurs when, after a gallery agent comes to look at Robin’s work and decides not to feature it, Mrs. Brown makes a play for her attention for her own knitted art works (made from the cast-off rags of the family’s clothes) and immediately gets an exhibition of her work.  It is thus she and not them who has kept the “history” of their family in her use of the clothes, which Debbie Dennison, the mother, is able to identify and remember the provenance of when she sees the bits and pieces used creatively at the gallery.  Mrs. Brown does, of course, find them another housekeeper, but her surprise dereliction of duty has had some unusual results.  For one thing, Debbie retreats from her profitable but spiritless magazine work to make wood-engravings for children’s books, her original love, and Robin, though just as angry at the new cleaning lady, experiences a rebirth as well.  The story ends with Debbie’s reaction to Robin’s new work, explained initially to her by Mrs. Stimpson, the new cleaning lady:  “‘It’s a picture of Kali the Destroyer.’  It is not right, thinks Debbie, that the black goddess should be a simplified travesty of Sheba Brown, that prolific weaver of bright webs.  But at the same time she recognises a new kind of loosed, slightly savage energy in Robin’s use of colour and movement.  ‘It’s got something,’ says Mrs. Stimpson pleasantly.  ‘I really do think it’s got something.’  Debbie has to agree.  It has indeed got something.”  Hence, it’s possible to see that in restoring both a certain “line” to the two artists in the Dennison family by causing them to re-visit their creative roots and also by giving them a certain “color” through her lesson to them of how they had failed, as a family, to know her well enough as a friend to be aware of her secretive art work, Mrs. Brown has been instrumental in a key art lesson from Matisse’s own palette.

In the third and most somber of the three stories, “The Chinese Lobster,” a Dean of Women, Dr. Himmelblau (“blue heaven,” a significant name if ever there was one!) and Peregrine Diss, an art professor, are meeting to discuss a suicidal problem student who has made a complaint of sexual harassment and intellectual neglect against the professor, her supervisor.  But as the title indicates, the real subject isn’t so much the student (though copious amounts of detail about the student, her life, her works, and her attitudes, as provided by her letter of complaint, are provided in the story as a sort of red herring); rather, the subject is the “meal” art provides us with, and what we can make of our lives when art fails us.  In a glass box at the front of the gourmet Chinese restaurant, there is a lobster, some crabs, and some scallops, all on display but not kept in salt water, which means they will gradually expire in agony.  Though this point is not made strongly at the beginning of the story, as the two academics have a leisurely lunch, Dr. Himmelblau remembers how a friend of her own after numerous suicide attempts succeeded and died, and it becomes obvious to her that Professor Diss knows something about suicide too, as she sees by the scars on his wrists.  So, they more or less make a mutual decision to let the really quite untalented student change supervisors, to someone whom they know will be sympathetic and will pass her, rather than be responsible for failing her and having on their hands a suicide attempt.  Their whole meal has been very artistic, and they have discussed Matisse, whom the student was studying for her work, but dominating the whole conversation is their mutual awareness that art fails to reach some people, even amongst those who consider themselves devotees.  As they finish the meal, however, something has happened.  Though Gerda Himmelblau has herself made some half-hearted attempts to end her life, we only find out about it near the end of the story when Perry Diss and she are getting ready to leave the table.  He has forged a bond with her when the two of them were previously seemingly at odds, and it is because they both know what can happen when there’s “a failure of imagination,” that is when someone fails adequately to think about how the people left behind will feel.  They part with no absolute assurance of any kind, either to each other, or to the reader from the authorial voice.  The scallops in the glass display box, we are told, have died, though the crabs and lobster are still alive.  “The lobster and the crabs are all still alive, all, more slowly, hissing their difficult air, bubbling, moving feet, feelers, glazing eyes.  Inside Gerda Himmelblau’s ribs and cranium she experiences, in a way, the pain of alien fish-flesh contracting inside an exo-skeleton.  She looks at the lobster and the crabs, taking accurate distant note of the loss of gloss, the attentuation of colour.”  It seems thus as if one is forced either to take matters in one’s own hands when in pain and end things, or to slowly and painfully expire while waiting life out, as the helpless shellfish in the display case are doing.  The story ends with Dr. Himmelblau kissing Diss on the cheek and the two of them parting amid assurances that somehow ring a little hollow, though they are now at one, not only on their problem with the student, but also on the questions of art and life.  The message delivered by the “line” and “color” of the predominant image of the title seems thus to be that art is not something which offers assurances, but instead is something which offers only itself, as Dr. Himmelblau realizes “cruelly, imperfectly, voluptuously, clearly.” This indeed is an encapsulization of “the intimate connection between seeing and feeling,” as the two characters stand before the glass display case and empathize both with each other and with the “alien fish-flesh.”  If there is a positive message, it is in their new relation to each other, their achieved understanding and empathy.

In many of her books and short stories, A. S. Byatt uses color language and spends quite a lot of time painting vivid images of people, rooms, inanimate objects, and natural surroundings.  She glories in the extravagances of vocabulary, and causes the attentive reader to visualize color and line with emotions at the ready, and to react imaginatively to the sensuous word-play and imagery.  In this book, she has excelled as usual with this technique, and has pointed openly to at least one of her own inspirations, Henri Matisse; she can easily rejoice in the title “the Matisse of prose writers.”

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February 17, 2013 · 5:01 pm

A Poem and a Meditation on Being an Individual, and On What “Read[s] Human and Exact.”

In searching for poems to write about this morning (and I was definitely in the mood to write about good poetry, having recently finished a longish bout with prose in having published a fifth novel), I was reading through my own favorite poems in a treasured Norton anthology and came across a poem by Robert Graves which has always struck me as particularly talented.  Luckily, since it has been in at least one published version since 1938 and has already been published in full on the Internet at least once, I can share the whole poem with you here without transgressing copyright laws.  Here is the poem:

The Devil’s Advice to Story-Tellers

“Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue,/Keep probability–some say–in view,/But my advice to story-tellers is:/Weigh out no gross of probabilities,/Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of/Known instances of virtue, crime or love./To forge a picture that will pass for true,/Do conscientiously what liars do–/Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid/The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade:/Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps/That may shake down into a world perhaps;/People this world, by chance created so,/With random persons whom you do not know–/The teashop sort, or travellers in a train/Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again;/Let the erratic course they steer surprise/Their own and your own and your readers’ eyes;/Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)/Motive and end and moral in the air;/Nice contradiction between fact and fact/Will make the whole read human and exact.”

This is excellent compositional advice for prose, and I think of it every time I remember my maternal grandmother, who used the expression “telling a story” to mean “lying.”  She would look at me gravely during a particular moment of my stellar mendacity and say, “Now honey, are you sure you aren’t telling a story?”  It would always make me grin ruefully and would thus give the game away, but the dialectal expression itself was so apt and funny that I couldn’t help myself.  There were even one or two occasions when I was telling the truth and she almost didn’t believe me because of my typical reaction when she made her query.

So, now, what does this poem have to do with “being an individual”?  Just this:  I have recently discovered, thanks to a friendly and frequent commenter writing in, that there are at least three other Victoria Bennetts with writing aspirations, some in poetry and some in prose, and my feeling is that the mild adventure I’ve gone through in coping with this does indeed “read human and exact” even better than if I’d come up with a glorious lie about it.  I am probably the oldest of the Victoria Bennetts currently writing (I was 55 on my last birthday), arguably at least one of the best or at least most conventionally educated, and have had experience writing both poetry and prose.  Most of what I’ve written or at least what has been published is available on this site, though there is more to come if I live long enough.  Having said that, it’s now time for my big adventure:

Today, in trying to revise my “About the Author” page to contain my middle name (my full name is Victoria Leigh Bennett), I inadvertently eliminated the whole page instead of just the PDF of information, and so lost all of the kind and wonderful comments that were also stored on the page, along with the notices of awards people have from time to time nominated me for and at least one movie which a fellow blogger, JM at thelivingnotebook, was kind enough to send me for this weekend.  The movie is one I had copied down the link for, and I plan to watch it this weekend, the only time the movie is available, so at least that wasn’t totally lost, but I would have liked to have retained the other material as well.  But people do write in to the “About the Author” column from time to time, so I hope and trust that I will hear from people again there before all is said and done.

No, the real adventure was contained in finding out just how many other Victoria Bennetts there are around.  It is a particularly euphonious and stately name–don’t worry, I’m not complimenting myself–after all, I didn’t name myself–very Latinate, and though I respond to various nicknames, I have learned also to answer to my full name, which for some reason as one ages gets used more and more.  Now, I was used to the idea that there were Victoria Bennetts in home decorating, Victoria Bennetts who ran office companies, and various assorted other and sundry Victoria Bennetts who either bore the name from birth or had married into it as regards the last name.  But what I was really shocked to find was that there were several other WRITING Victoria Bennetts around.  On the advice of my commenter who informed me of one of these in particular, I found that just on one website there was a Victoria Alexander Bennett, a Victoria Louise Bennett, and yet another Victoria Bennett who, like me, had chosen not to use a middle name.

This was sobering indeed.  That there were so many of us (and doubtless more to come!) was very discouraging.  But then I thought:  if it doesn’t discourage me that there are so many people writing in general every year, and that I am in competition with all of them, then why should it bother me that there are several other Victoria Bennetts, who moreover don’t even all write the same sorts of things, to judge by my research?  And I also thought that after all, writers are very determined and tenacious when it comes to tracking down authors whom they want to read.  As long as no writers are copying the ideas of other writers explicitly and misusing them, there’s plenty of room for us all, surely.

And as to Robert Graves and his delightful, whimsical, mischievous, and diabolical little poem?  I’ve got news for him and his devil–though they may know how to write fiction so as to “make the whole read human and exact,” when it comes to reality and finding one’s own individual space, it’s like the man said:  you can’t make this stuff up!

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February 14, 2013 · 11:04 pm

Accepting the Versatile Blogger Award and passing it along to others….

Hello, readers!  Today I have decided to accept the Versatile Blogger Award, not only because it is, as it always is, an honor to be nominated, but also because today I am not engaged in another time-consuming project which would prevent me from accepting.  Also, I am quite adamant that I want to pass the award along to some other folks, some of whom I have nominated for other awards before, others of whom have not been previously nominated.  As you are probably aware, the correct procedure is to thank the person who nominated you, tell at least 5 things about yourself, nominate at least five others to receive the award, and let them know that they have been nominated, so that they can pass the award along should they also choose to accept.  So, here goes:

I would like to thank JM at thelivingnotebook for nominating me, and for saying such kind and wonderfully encouraging things about my work.  He is a male graduate student at a large public university in the States, who chooses to be anonymous in a suitably mysterious way, knowing full well that one day he will burst full blown like Athena from the mind of Zeus upon the public in an acclaimed work of fiction or non-fiction and will then have to reveal his true identity (or this is my take on it, anyway!).  He teaches undergraduates writing and composition, and is in his 30’s, born on Cape Cod but something of a rover, to judge by some of his posts written from other locations.  He considers his blog to be “a framework for exploration and discovery,” and writes many valuable, informative, and tutelary posts on various aspects of writing, as well as composing music and putting links to that on his blog as well.

Now, as to telling the five things about myself, and hoping not to repeat myself from the other award I accepted, here are the five facts.  While they may not be original enough to illuminate the writing process much, perhaps they will at least indicate my potential membership in the club of writers, with all of its pitfalls and foibles:

I have written books and poems from the time I was in first grade, often using the prose or poetry involved to trade friendly slurs with friends who also wrote (hence my interest in satire) or to praise and acclaim them (hence the happy, comic moments in my comedy and satire which highlight positive personal characteristics).

My first poem was published in a teacher’s magazine when I was in the sixth grade.

Also when I was in the sixth grade, I wrote a hysterically inaccurate historical play based on Ivanhoe (I give this work to a character in one of my novels).  In my play, the Normans lived in England and the Saxons invaded them (the exact opposite of what actually happened).  This is probably one of the reasons I have never written historical novels!

One of my scariest literary memories is one of having Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” read to me in bed at night by a friend at whose house I was staying for a sleepover.  And I love cats, but man! was that one scary!  But the main character got just what he deserved for harming the cat in the first place.

I have three more novels to complete before my projected series of eight novels will be complete (these novels, however, can be read separately, and have no plot connections to each other).

Now it’s time to nominate at least five other people to share my award:

First, I would like to nominate Emma McCoy, the author of a frightening and vital suspense novel “Saving Angels” and of a work-in-progress entitled “Unethical” which I am all agog to read when she finishes with it. Emma has been completing full character sketches for her characters in her WIP, and has published one or two or them on her site just to whet our appetites.  She has had some personal challenges to overcome this year, in particular an experience with grief and a brand new job, but blogs often to keep her readers informed as to what’s happening with her and her site.  She is also seeking other avenues of publication for “Saving Angels” and took place in 2012’s NaNoWriMo.  Her facebook address and her e-mail address are also published on her site.

Next, I would like to nominate Caroline at Beauty Is A Sleeping Cat (I couldn’t agree more!).  Caroline is an enthusiastic reader of fiction and non-fiction, who hails originally from Paris, and whose original languages are German and French.  She is the daughter of a multinational family and has all the strength of this variety behind her in her multi-lingual blogsite, on which she canvases and discusses literatures of many countries, usually doing her reading in some language other than English, all the while making her analyses and her knowledge of translations available to English speakers as well.  Caroline has multiple M.A.s, in cultural anthropology and French literature and linguistics.  In her latest post, she has branched out into Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry, doing a service to the literary communities around her.

Thirdly, I would like to nominate djkeyserv140, the prolific and talented writer from Australia who, while rigorously engaged in seeking full-time employment of an extra-literary variety, is also keeping a number of us happily engaged with his science fiction, historical, fantastic, and etc. worlds fictively.  While working on a major WIP, David has also written a very exciting story about two Japanese swordsmen named Mune and Mura, and is currently writing a story about a mining colony on Venus, a very tantalizing tale which promises some odd and curious developments to come.  Other short stories are also listed on his site.  To a vigorous sense of what readers might find gripping in action, David joins a really strong capacity for narration and descriptive word-pictures.  Together, the two make for some excellent reading.

My fourth nomination goes to Katherine Gregor, a writer originally situated in London who has recently decided to make a sudden and dashing move to another city, from which she plans to continue her intriguing and poetically gifted prose writings involving traditions from various parts of the United Kingdom and Europe.  Katherine has many opinions to share, all of them happily quite entertaining and challenging to various elements of the bland status quo; we can all do with a large dose of what she has to say, just to keep us from becoming too solemn or out-of-balance.  “Scribe Doll” is how she bills herself, and that is what she is!

Lastly, I would like to nominate Richard Gilbert, of the blogsite NARRATIVE.  Richard has said on his own that he considers he has formed a “bivouac between the two literary camps of New York and academia,” and all things considered, I find this very just.  Richard writes about and keeps tabs on memoirs and non-fiction narratives and essays in general, but still finds time for the occasional remark which relates these categories to fiction as well.  The father of a family, who has a wife and two grown children, Richard has practiced subsistence level farming for ten years, and has lived to tell about it in various publications.  Meanwhile, he is writing his own memoir and teaching writing at Otterbein University, after having taught at a number of other major midwestern universities.  Richard’s blog is one sure way of keeping one’s finger on the pulse of narrrative, whatever one’s chosen and preferred form.

Thanks again to all of you who have ever nominated me for an award, whether I followed through or not–they were all appreciated, whether or not I felt I could take them up at the time.  I hope that those whom I have nominated will feel like accepting as well, for I have certainly enjoyed reading them, just as I have enjoyed reading JM’s inspiring posts on thelivingnotebook.

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January 25, 2013 · 6:53 pm

A rattling good tale in the old-fashioned manner and the modern moment–Joseph Conrad’s “The Warrior’s Soul”

There are fashions in modes of fiction, and sometimes even in the same author’s work, more than one fashion (or era style) can be observed.  Many stories outlive their own time, and continue to have an influence on new generations of readers.  This is especially true of some of the works of Joseph Conrad, whose novella The Heart of Darkness continues to be read, interpreted, and re-used for its modern-day applications and significances (as one might note by recalling that the movie “Apocalypse Now” was based loosely upon it).  Even his novels Lord Jim and The Secret Agent, though more dated than The Heart of Darkness, are still quite popular in classrooms and library circulation systems alike.  Yet, there is something more to this selection of fashions than just a come-again go-again style or styles to be considered; there is also the role played by the various elements of the story in relation to each other which helps establish and make popular the style.

Recently, I rescued from a free book bin a book of four short stories by Joseph Conrad called Tales of Hearsay, and each of the four stories is constructed as the telling of a tale, with three of them using the fictional device of a frame story in which the external narrator relates a story from the past.  In this sense, the story is not unlike The Heart of Darkness, which also uses a frame story.  Yet, the story I’m concerned with today is of an older time both in its setting and in most of its tone, and is a quite simple story for most of its length, with none of the complexity of Conrad’s famous novella.  It is the first story in this book, “The Warrior’s Soul,” and it has all the earmarks of a very old story style indeed, with a passionate young lover, a mysterious beautiful woman, a slightly older gallant soldier, a war, an intrigue, a significant promise, a deathly request–where shall I begin, and where else could it end than in a story of this kind?

The basic story is this:  Just before the time in history when Napoleon marched on Russia, a young Russian soldier attached to a diplomatic corps is in France, in Paris.  He is first inspired by and then falls madly in love with a beautiful society hostess whose drawing room he frequents, and who in a kindly, slightly more mature woman’s fashion, tolerates his adoration and is kind to him.  While there one evening, the young man is witness to some sort of political intrigue between her and a slightly older male French officer, and the upshot of this situation is that the two save him and his diplomatic corps from internment indefinitely in France during the coming war by warning him in time for him to flee.  He is able to pass the warning along to his superiors, and all escape safely back to Russia, after he has vowed to the officer that if ever he can help him even unto his life, he will.  Time elapses, and we are now at the scene of France’s defeat in Russia and Napoleon’s death-filled and starving retreat from Waterloo.  As an old Russian campaigner (the external narrator of the story) sits by the fire one evening in the freezing winter weather, the young soldier comes into the firelight leading a sore-encrusted, raggedy, starving French officer dressed in full regalia except for his nearly frozen feet, which are wrapped in sheepskins.  As it turns out, this officer is the once gallantly attired and regal-mannered older officer of the mysterious woman’s drawing room, who had been so kind to the young Russian soldier when he was staying in Paris, and who had allowed him to escape.  After making himself known to the young soldier, the French officer begs him to shoot him and put him out of his misery, and after a while of debating with himself, the young soldier does so, to be sternly rebuked by his fellow soldiers for shooting a prisoner, all of whom had before reproached him for being too soft and loverlike in his mannerisms, all except the old campaigner, who tells the tale to the end.  For, though the young soldier is able to retire later without overt disgrace, he must retreat to his country province “where a vague story of some dark deed clung to him for years.”

The simplicity with which the mutual sacrifice of the gallant French officer and the high-minded Russian soldier is enacted is part of the old-fashioned quality of the tale.  We are told at the end as a form of summation, “Yes.  He had [shot him].  And what was it?  One warrior’s soul paying its debt a hundred-fold to another warrior’s soul by releasing it from a fate worse than death–the loss of all faith and courage.”  Even the rather trite and well-worn phrase “a fate worse than death” (though it may perhaps have received one of its first usages in Conrad’s tale) slips past the critical reader’s censor rather more easily if one is content to forego modern complexities of thought.  Yet, even in Conrad’s simple tale, at the end we read of the young soldier “He was stooping over the dead in a tenderly contemplative attitude.  And his young, ingenuous face with lowered eyelids, expressed no grief, no sternness, no horror–but was set in the repose of a profound, as if endless and endlessly silent meditation.”  That is true Conradian prose of the complex variety, but it occurs only at the very end of the story, so we may read past it in our first reading, and notice mainly the ease of expression in the portrait of the scene.

The picture of the woman involved too is part of the nimbus cast round the act of glory in battle which is the unspoken referent of both the warriors’ activities, in fact is of the essence of the glory itself.  As the old Russian campaigner relates, “She was of course not a woman in her first youth.  A widow may be….She had a salon, something very distinguished; a social centre in which she queened it with great splendour….Upon my word I don’t know whether her hair was dark or fair, her eyes brown or blue; what was her stature, her features, or her complexion.  His love soared above mere physical impressions.  He never described her to me in set terms; but he was ready to swear that in her presence everybody’s thoughts and feelings were bound to circle round her.  She was that sort of woman….She was the very joy and shudder of felicity and she brought only sadness and torment to the hearts of men.”  It is in fact against  the background of the salon that we are supposed to imagine, superimposed, the image of war to come, and then later, in the scene in the Russian snowy waste, the image of the woman and the salon superimposed over the scene by the fireside, as in the hallucinatory double image sometimes used in film-making.  For, it is the woman and the salon that both men are glancingly referring to in their moment of mutual “heroism” (or what Conrad has used to represent the replacement of a more standard act of heroism as it is usually portrayed, meaning ferocity in battle).  Their heroism lies in the determination of one not to be less than the man he has been because of being in a situation of extreme suffering that might cause him to perform less than heroic acts, and in the determination of the other to act up to the top of his bent and be worthy of the life (and the death-shot) that the other has entrusted to him.  They are brothers and equals in this sense, though one is years older and the other relatively untried.

It is only the hallmark of Conrad which in fact saves this tale from being a typical sentimental (and therefore pernicious) tale of heroism in warfare, for sentimentality about war is as loathsome to the genuine soldier as it is to the conscientious objector; and that is why I would like to return to that final section of the tale, which portrays the old campaigner and the young soldier over the French officer’s corpse.  For, they do not accede to his request immediately.  At first, the young soldier cannot bring himself to kill the French officer, who is then seized up with an “agony of cramp” as his limbs begin to defrost by the fire.  The young soldier says, “It is he, the man himself….Brilliant, accomplished, envied by men, loved by that woman–this horror–this miserable thing that cannot die.  Look at his eyes.  It’s terrible.”  The old man realizes what the young man means, because “We could do nothing for him.  This avenging winter of fate held both the fugitives and the pursuers in its iron grip.  Compassion was but a vain word before that unrelenting destiny.”  The French officer continues to beg, then calls the boy in anger a “milksop” to try to drive him to do the deed.  There is another pause.  At this point, the old man turns his back and then hears the young man’s gunshot.  He says, “I give you my word [I guessed it because] the report of Tomassov’s [the soldier’s] pistol was the most insignificant thing imaginable.  It was a mere feeble pop.  Of the orderlies holding our horses I don’t think one turned his head round.”  The gunshot is thus made into a small thing, which has an inverse great effect upon the future of the young soldier Tomassov.  Another key Conradian tactic comes into play, though, and that is one I did not mention when I previously quoted the passage about one warrior’s soul “paying its debt a hundred-fold to another’s warrior’s soul by releasing it from a fate worse than death–the loss of all faith and courage.”  And that is that immediately following this sentence, Conrad continues, “You may look on it in that way.  I don’t know.  And perhaps poor Tomassov did not know himself.”  And then he goes on to paint the picture of the young soldier, his hat off in a gesture of respect, bent over the corpse.  There’s all the makings of a great melodramatic death scene, yet by giving the reader a choice, by saying “You may look on it in that way.  I don’t know,” Conrad has robbed the matter of its melodrama and produced not only a rattling good tale in the old-fashioned manner, but a triumph of modern tone at the very last minute.  It is at this moment that one suddenly remember the other Joseph Conrad, the author of The Heart of Darkness, and all the complexity which he was able to bestow on the topics of colonization and decadence in Africa.  For this story too is from the same pen, and in small measure at least bears the hallmark of that great work of Conradian modernism.  And is saved thereby.

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January 21, 2013 · 6:04 pm

Other-hatred and Self-hatred in John Gardner’s “Grendel”–Knowing Your Enemy

In some English class or other, from middle school days through college days, most of us have read some version of “Beowulf,” the Old English heroic tale pitting man against monster, in which Beowulf wins and goes on later to fight a crafty dragon, who then dies only when Beowulf’s friend and thane Wiglaf fights by his side; but Beowulf dies from his wounds, and receives a hero’s burial.  In this version of the tale (and for so very long, there was no other version), the men know and care little about the monster Grendel’s characteristics or inner qualities, all that concerns them is how to combat and kill him so that he will cease to haunt their meadhall and eat their thanes.  As far as his motives go, he is of the race of Cain and therefore commits murder.  As the text of Beowulf reads, “Unhappy creature, he lived for a time in the home of the monsters’ race, after God had condemned them as kin of Cain.”  Full stop.  If we are led to think of Grendel’s motives at all, we perhaps suppose that after being attracted by the noise of the meadhall (Heorot) being built, he feels envy because the men sleeping at night inside “felt no sorrow, no misery of men.”  But his motives are unimportant, for he is clearly the evil-doing interloper, and as such does not merit our sympathy or understanding.

Taking his cue from slight hints in the text, however, John Gardner fully fleshes out a picture of Grendel not as a monster of a different race from humans, but as one having some relationship to them:  he understands their language, and can speak it though unclearly (later in Gardner’s rendition, Grendel taunts the coward Unferth and is haltingly understood by him).  He himself is aware of his relationship to men, and attempts more than once to approach or be understood, though it is to no avail.  He is hated and scorned, and because he feels a kinship to man, he internalizes these feelings and hates and scorns himself, and everything else as well.  Gardner has clearly taken hints from Robert Browning’s monster Caliban in “Caliban Upon Setebos” (a borrowing of yet another monster in later days, this time from Shakespeare’s Caliban in “The Tempest”).  Like Caliban, Grendel reasons upon his own life, the things he observes of men, the relationships between the two, and God, the universe, and the nature of things.  In these “studies” of mankind, God, and nature, Grendel is led by the dragon (Gardner introduces the cunning dragon who will be Beowulf’s downfall as a “tutor” of Grendel, one who can read his mind) and by the Shaper (the scop or poet whom he hears singing and intoning poems for men in the meadhall at night).  Of the scop’s song, he says that “he had made it seem all true, and very fine,” even though he thinks it is lies.  He asks himself, “What was he?  The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and [the people] who knew the truth [] remembered it his way, and so did I….I was so filled with sorrow and tenderness I could hardly have found it in my heart to snatch a pig!”  He thinks not only of the heroic tales but of the tale of Creation which the scop sings as “the projected possible.”  He thinks, “It was a cold-blooded lie that a god had lovingly made the world and set out the sun and moon as lights to land-dwellers, that brothers had fought, that one of the races was saved, the other cursed.  Yet he, the old Shaper, might make it true, by the sweetness of his harp, his cunning trickery.  It came to me with a fierce jolt that I wanted it.  As they did too, though vicious animals, cunning, cracked with theories.  I wanted it, yes!  Even if I must be the outcast, cursed by the rules of his hideous fable.”

Grendel, this Grendel, is both intelligent and has moral perceptions.  He perceives the boasts in the meadhall (of which many a teacher has made learned analysis as to their poetic merit) as the ravings of drunken men bent upon impressing each other.  He notes that men often kill men, slay other animals, and destroy landscape as a sort of warfare, without meaning to eat.  He notes the waste of the men journeying back and forth across the land with tribute of goods and animals to other kings who have dominion over them.  And as the dragon tells him of human rationality, which is supposedly the division between humans and Grendel as well as between humans and animals, “They only think they think.  No total vision, total system, merely schemes with a vague family resemblance, no more identity than bridges and, say, spider-webs.  But they rush across chasms on spider-webs, and sometimes they make it, and that, they think, settles that!”   This Grendel constantly spies on the humans, keeps in touch with what affects them (as if he is an outcast one of them), and feels anguish when the Shaper (the scop) is dying.  He refers to it as “meaningless anguish,” but its meaning is obvious.  Even more, this Grendel becomes capable near the end of the book not only of reflections upon past, present and future, which he first learned from the dragon, but also of poetry.  When the scop dies, it is as if it’s the end of an era for him, until suddenly the Geats (Beowulf and his warriors) appear.

Grendel’s reaction to their presence is strange.  He feels a sort of gleeful excitement because something new is in his world, but it is clear that he does not fully recognize his enemy.  He tells himself that he could avoid the meadhall until they leave again and so be perfectly safe, yet he knows he will not do so.  He notes that Hrothgar, the king of the meadhall, and his thanes are not best pleased to have strangers coming in to finish off their monster for them, so he concludes, with an odd sort of loyalty to old enemies, that he must finish off the newcomers for the honor of Hrothgar and his retainers.  He has an additional motive, however, and that is that he is afraid of tedium possibly resulting from his life as it is.  As he thinks to himself, “All order, I’ve come to understand, is theoretical, unreal–a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world–two snake-pits….Violence is truth….”  He thinks when he hears the stranger (Beowulf) speak, however, and answer a challenge in the meadhall against his bravery, that Beowulf is “crazy.”  He’s had this thought long before in the book about men when he watched them killing each other, yet he seems fascinated by Beowulf and fatally drawn to him.  “I grew more and more afraid of him and at the same time–who can explain it?–more and more eager for the hour of our meeting.”

When his fall finally comes, he is able to persuade himself that it came about through an “accident,” that he was caught off guard by Beowulf, who then took advantage of him and tore his arm off.  In the end of the novel, Grendel is surrounded by animals, “enemies of old,” who are watching him die.  “I give them what I hope will appear a sheepish smile….They watch with mindless, indifferent eyes, as calm and midnight black as the chasm below me.”  Then he asks the key question, really, of the whole book:  “Is it joy I feel?”  This is the motive of self-hatred having come full circle in Grendel’s life.  At the last, he says to the mute witnesses of his death:  “Poor Grendel’s had an accident….So may you all.”  Thus, the self-hatred leads into other-hatred just as often as the expression of other-hatred (feasting on his enemies) used to lead him into further self-hatred as he got further and further away from any possibility of fellowship.  Yet, part of the driving force of his self-hatred also comes from the fact that there was never really a chance of rapprochement between him and the humans, because from the very first they were, in his words, “stupid” and “crazy” and suspicious of him.  Finally then, the book is a book about fate, just as the original text carried notions of fate, though in “Grendel” we are concerned not with the nobility and fate of men but with the nobility and fate of the “monster” who wants to be one with and of them, yet cannot make them understand.  Published in 1971, in a time when the heroic outcast figure was once again becoming popular in literature, this book takes the formulas a step further, containing many moments when Grendel is petty and non-heroic, and yet the book transmutes even these moments into startlingly emotive episodes which excite recognition and fellow feeling in us for the anti-hero of the tale.  In its ability to force us to recognize our own thoughts and impressions, feelings and speculations, this book teaches us to know what are proverbially called our own worst enemies:  ourselves, both in the singular application and in the plural application, in which all men and women are to some degree enemies of the others, not the least because they are enemies to their own best instincts.  I think now, having read and commented at length upon so dismally moving and darkly motivated a book, I will go and read a light-hearted poem or improving essay, just to lift my spirits again, lest I too begin to feel like a Caliban or Grendel and foist my destructive instincts upon others!

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January 13, 2013 · 5:54 pm

Mark Twain and the importance of deceit in civilization– “Is He Living or Is He Dead?”

Having recently taken into my home yet another waif of a volume found on my local library’s “free” shelf, I began to peruse it this morning and found that Mark Twain, as many of you already know by having read his works, is not only a yarn-spinner but a liar extraordinare.  And he’s proud of the fact!  At least, his writing persona is proud of the fact in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.  And all you have to do is think back on almost any Twain fiction, essay, or diatribe to see that lying is not only one of his favorite topics, but one of his favorite pastimes, from “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to the smallest and least significant essay.  If he’s not advocating a falsehood, he’s practicing one in the full knowledge that the reader is most likely in on the joke, though different readers may have different reactions, some readers being complacent and some of them uncomfortable.

The volume I found myself closeted with this morning was entitled The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays, and was a reprinted volume put together from several other reprinted volumes at some point in time by P. F. Collier and Son Co. in a Harper Brothers edition, a publishing history that reeks of some of Twain’s own invented lines of fictional descent and which would have delighted the great man himself.  In an aside in an essay entitled “My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It,” Twain remarks, “….[A]ll people are liars from the cradle onward, without exception, and…they begin to lie as soon as they wake up in the morning and keep it up, without rest or refreshment, until they go to sleep at night.  If [my parents] arrived at that truth it probably grieved them–did, if they had been heedlessly and ignorantly educated by their books and teachers; for why should a person grieve over a thing which by the eternal law of his make he cannot help?  He didn’t invent the law; it is merely his business to obey it and keep still; join the universal conspiracy and keep so still that he shall deceive his fellow-conspirators into imagining that he doesn’t know that the law exists.”  Of course, in this essay Twain writes a lot about “the lie of silent assertion,” in which people pretend that nothing is wrong when something actually is.  But this quote still distributes itself equably over many situations when people lie out loud about something, as well as practicing the silent lie of assent.

The story in question which I’m commenting on today is one called “Is He Alive or Is He Dead?” from the same volume, and its comedy relies on the fact that often people don’t know 1) who a famous artist is 2) whether he or she is alive or dead and 3) what the value of his or her paintings actually is.  Nor do they want anyone to know that they don’t know, another stock comic device as well as often being an actual fact about people.  In this story, four starving artists (the actual famous artist François Millet makes a cameo appearance) are trying desperately to think of a way to make a living, when nearly no one will buy any of their pictures.  The narrator is one of them, and he lists Millet and two other artists (whom he names Claude Frère and Carl Boulanger) who are in this predicament.  Putting their heads together, they decide to achieve fame via the well-known assertion that dying often makes an author or artist famous whereas he or she could not achieve this status in life by any means.  Taking this as the inspiration for their deception, they “make” Millet the artist who will “die” (actually in their plan he retreats to live in private, hiding while pocketing his share of the proceeds), and so they all paint lots of pictures and studies and sketches as “students” of “the famous Millet” (as they talk him up to people they meet), and he paints many pictures as well.  The other three give out that he is dying or near to dying when they try to sell his paintings and their own studies, and of course the ploy works, and they all become not only respected but much richer than they would otherwise have been.

This case of fradulent art practice is one with which many people can sympathize as long as it’s a case of comedy written by Twain, in which the in extremis condition of starving while trying to make a living off something as high-minded as one’s art provides the average reader with the impetus towards sympathy.  But an art dealer, for example, even one gifted with a genuine interest in tangled histories of art provenance, might be smiling or grimacing even a little more wryly than the average reader in following the artistic quartet’s adventures.  For, there’s a formula to be used in bringing off this kind of artistic triumph, and it goes something like this:  a) a serious situation or need that most or all readers can sympathize with; b) an ingenious idea, so ingenious that the reader feels the temptation of the characters’ own desire to see it employed; c) a discussion of whether or not it’s honest and safe, a strategem which allows the author to engage the reader even more thoroughly by exploring what most people ask themselves about any course of action, whether they have the moral stomach for it and whether it’s any use to try it.  This is a key element in the formula, because it enables the writer to get the convinced reader even more fully on the characters’ side.  Next follows d) at least one example of the stratagem successfully employed, and then the plot is taken as having been acted upon, so there’s no reason not to go on practicing the deceit in question (in terms of the moral equation which says “to lie once is to lie always,” not true if you believe in reformation of character, but nevertheless true in the sense of the story’s fictional structure).  In this case, this last step is a continuation of the fiction that the famous artist (Millet, having become famous in fiction as well as being famous in non-literary fact) is dead.

The entire story is enclosed within an exterior story in which one of the four artists, now a rich man (whom the external narrator “disguises” by naming him “Smith”) tells him the inset story of the four artists because they have seen another rich man (who it turns out is Millet, living under an alias) go out the door of the hotel, and “Smith” wants to tell the narrator the tale.  Why he should want to reveal Millet’s secret to a comparative stranger is the one weak point in the story, but it’s more or less successfully glossed over by the knowledge most people have of quick familiarities between people who travel and end up telling their own life stories to people they meet on the way, comfortable in the knowledge that most likely they won’t see them again.

But there’re two more layers of deceit practiced in this story, and one is that of “Smith,” who see “Millet” and tells the external narrator the story:  it’s the layer in which someone tells an incredible story, and then as proof takes a match out of their pocket and says challengingly, “You don’t believe me?  Here’s the match I had in my pocket when it happened!”  Of course, Smith doesn’t say this to the narrator, but he might as well have–for what’s to prove that the man named Smith isn’t a congenital liar who just happens to see the man he calls “Millet” and dreams up a tale about him, or a creatively inspired liar (a writer!) like Twain?  And then, there’s Twain himself, that arch-fabulist of all fabulists, behind the scenes, no doubt chuckling over every word, even from wherever he is now (and we all know where we go when we keep company with The Father of Lies, as the devil is popularly called)–yet who can help but believe that when confronted with such a solid satirical moralist (as Twain often is) that some god didn’t pass him along to heaven anyway?

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January 9, 2013 · 9:42 pm

The unity and interplay of comedy and horror in the tales of Saki (H. H. Munro)

Many years ago, when I was just a teenager and had a part-time job which allowed me a generous disposable income to spend on books and records, I bought an omnibus edition of The Complete Works of Saki.  Though I didn’t understand fully what “mafficking” was, I was enchanted by the lilt and insouciance of one particular verse, which ran thus:  “Mother, may I go and maffick,/Tear around and hinder traffic?”  Later I came to know that Mafeking was a town in South Africa where the Boer War was fought, and that “mafficking” was wild and boisterous celebration upon achieving a victory (for example, in warfare).  But playful strewing about of place-names from the Victorian and Edwardian eras and warfare in jest weren’t the whole of the charm of Saki’s stories, verses, and plays.  He has a particular gift for uniting comedy and horror with the emphasis in one story being on one of the two elements, and on just the opposite in another story.  Two stories which play with this uncanny combination, a combination which I have remarked upon before as being particularly effective in conveying both parts of the equation, but especially the chill that runs down one’s spine at a good horror story, are “Gabriel-Ernest” and “The Open Window.”  The first has a tinge of comedy and is otherwise a short horror story; the second seems to be a horror story at first, but keeps the surprise about the jest until the very last sentence of the story, and builds up excellently to that point.  The first story, “Gabriel-Ernest,” works by contrast by starting out with the outré note in the first sentence.

In Gabriel-Ernest, an artist named Cunningham informs his friend Van Cheele in the first sentence that “There is a wild beast in your woods.”  When Van Cheele responds to this by insisting that the “wild beasts” are limited to a fox and a few weasels, Cunningham takes back his remark, but it gives the reader pause.  The next day, when he goes to visit his own property on a ramble, Van Cheele finds a young boy, totally naked, stretched out full length by a pool, sunning himself.  We are told his eyes are light-brown, “so light that there was almost a tigerish gleam in them” and that they watch Van Cheele “with a certain lazy watchfulness.”  When Van Cheele challenges him as to his presence there, the boy says that he lives on “flesh,” and from there on, Van Cheele is on the losing side of the dialogue.  He keeps trying to make ordinary sense of what the boy says and does, but the boy succeeds in intimidating him physically, and the next day, after Van Cheele has been considering that a lot of small animals and a child or two have gone missing lately, the boy turns up naked again, in Van Cheele’s morning-room this time.  When Van Cheele becomes angry and challenges him again, the boy responds with wild equanimity, “You told me I was not to stay in the woods.”

Van Cheele’s aunt comes in and is promptly deceived by the two of them, the boy because he sits indolently under the copy of the “Morning Post” which Van Cheele hurriedly drapes over him, Van Cheele because he can’t seem to recognize just what’s wrong, though he knows that something is very, very wrong.  He decides that he will have to contact Cunningham and take his opinion about the situation, so he unadvisedly leaves the boy in his aunt’s care and his aunt when he leaves is “arranging that Gabriel-Ernest [their name for the “adopted” boy] should help her to entertain the infant members of her Sunday-school class at tea that afternoon.”  Cunningham tells Van Cheele that the boy had vanished right in front of him and to a further query says, “on the open hillside where the boy had been standing a second ago, stood a huge wolf, blackish in color, with gleaming fangs and cruel, yellow eyes.”

We are next told that Van Cheele “did not stop for anything as futile as thought.”  He thinks of sending a telegram to his uncomprehending aunt, but realizes that “‘Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf’ was a hopelessly inadequate effort at conveying the situation, and his aunt would think it was a code message to which he had omitted to give her the key.”  The story’s ending smiles and leers at us just as wolfishly as Gabriel-Ernest himself, an ending in which when the “boy” and the infant with him disappear, the aunt concludes that Gabriel-Ernest has jumped into the water to save the infant and that both have drowned, and sets up a brass plaque in the parish church.  The last line, smirking at us and our readerly discomfort, reads:  “Van Cheele gave way to his aunt in most things, but he flatly refused to subscribe to the Gabriel-Ernest memorial.”

In “The Open Window,” the quantity of horror to comedy is reversed, though the dead pan delivery of comedy at the last line occurs again.  A guest, Framton Nuttel, who is taking a cure for his nerves by paying a set of “formal visits on a set of total strangers,” finds himself sitting in Mrs. Sappleton’s living room talking to her fifteen year old niece.  The niece tells him what seems like a perfectly lucid story of how his aunt has had a “great tragedy” in her own life three years previously.  As she explains it, “Out through that [large French window], three years ago to a day, her husband and her two young brothers went off for their day’s shooting.  They never came back….Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do[,]…her youngest brother[]singing, ‘Bertie, why do you bound?’….Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that window–“.  Well, the niece has clearly set the scene.  In comes the aunt and keeps looking out the window with anticipation, which chills the marrow of the young visitor, because he’s nervous and he believes what the niece has told him of her aunt’s mental obsession.  He tells them about his own illness in an effort to stem his rising nerves as the aunt keeps watching the window.  Finally, she leaps up and says “Here they are at last!….Just in time for tea, and don’t they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!”  But when Mr. Nuttel faces the niece sympathetically, she too is looking out the window with a horrified look on her face.  When he looks out, he does indeed see three figures carrying hunting guns and a little spaniel, and hears a hoarse voice singing “Bertie, why do you bound?”.  “Framton grabbed wildly at his [walking-]stick and hat; the hall-door, the gravel-drive, and the front gate were dimly noted stages in his headlong retreat.  A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to avoid imminent collision.”  The people converging on the room (all of whom are actually alive) discuss the mystery of his rapid departure, and the aunt says, “A most extraordinary man….could only talk about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of good-bye or apology when you arrived.  One would think he had seen a ghost.”

The niece, however, is equal to this occasion too, and so is “Saki.”  In the penultimate paragraph of the story, the niece says, “I expect it was the spaniel….he told me he had a horror of dogs.  He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just above him.  Enough to make anyone lose their nerve.”  As the final line of the story runs, in Saki’s wonderfully condensed tongue-in-cheek explanation:  “Romance at short notice was her speciality.”

Many of Saki’s stories use the combination of the horrific chill and the comic chuckle, but the two above are certainly among the most well-known of them all.  As the Introduction’s writer Noël Coward says of Saki, “Many writers who raise youthful minds to a high pitch of enthusiasm are liable, when re-read in the cold remorseless light of middle age, to lose much of their original magic.  The wit seems laboured and the language old-fashioned.  Saki does not belong to this category.  His stories and novels appear as delightful and…sophisticated…as they did when he first published them.  They are dated only by the fact that they evoke an atmosphere and describe a society which vanished in the baleful summer of 1914.  The Edwardian era…must have been, socially at least, very charming.  It is this evanescent charm that Saki so effortlessly evoked.”  Why not have a glance through some of Saki’s stories and pay a visit to that world of “evanescent charm” for yourself?  All you have to lose is your solemnity.

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December 6, 2012 · 7:29 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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November 27, 2012 · 4:55 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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