Tag Archives: originality

June 21, 2014 · 4:31 pm

How much does God weigh?–Emily Dickinson and her quizzical answer

Today is a hot, sunny, beautiful day of summer, when the sky and the ocean are both full of blue ecstasy, and that makes it just right for a little ditty of a post on the natural world, so that I can return to it as soon as possible and leave the air conditioning and the computer to their own devices (yes, I’m getting lazy in the summer heat, you guessed it).  So, I chose a short three-stanza poem by Emily Dickinson, who is the perfect poet when images from nature come into question, as so many in her huge corpus of short poems have images and a figurative lexicon drawn from nature and its seasonal languages, even when the subject is death, or the departure from the world of nature.  This poem (#632 of her poems), however, includes some of her homey domestic images as well, the images of a woman used to keeping house and dealing with household implements.  But the real “kicker” about this poem is the way it goes along so very, very simply only to hit us with a real conundrum of an image at the very end.  Here is how it goes:

“The Brain–is wider than the Sky–/For–put them side by side–/The one the other will contain/With ease–and You–beside–/

The Brain is deeper than the sea–/For–hold them–Blue to Blue–/The one the other will absorb–/As Sponges–Buckets–do–/

The Brain is just the weight of God–/For–heft them–Pound for Pound–/And they will differ–if they do–As Syllable from Sound–”

There is something a bit sly and even coy about the way she leads us into her   transcendent world, which while using simple everyday images, sensations, and experiences makes such astounding transitions to experiences beyond this world.  She starts easily enough, by observing that the brain can contain both the image of the sky and the experience of seeing it, as well as the self.  “Well, okay, Emily D.,” one is bound to say, “I think we can accept that for starters.”  Then, she passes on to another apparently limitless thing the senses encounter, which curiously enough is less big than the sky, when it seems that it might otherwise be more poetically ordinary to start with the smaller of the two items (the sea) and build up in the next stanza to the larger (the sky).  But then, we find that her quirkiness or perhaps odd sense of humor has assigned a color to the brain (she says of the brain and the sea “hold them–Blue to Blue–” which means to compare the two “blue” items).  This makes us forget for the moment our previous quibble about relative sizes of infinite or quite large things, and leaves us, bemused, to go on to the last stanza.

Here, in the last stanza, Dickinson is asking us to perform another and even more daunting task, really quite impossible even for the believer in God, and certainly more than impossible for the questioner or doubter.  Not that it’s been easy up until now:  so far, we’ve put the brain and the sky side by side, we’ve held the brain and the sea up to each other for comparison, at least mentally, and been asked to imagine the brain soaking up the sea as a sponge would a bucket of liquid.  Now, we are being asked to “heft” the brain and God, to judge whether or not she is just when she suggests that they are of a similar “weight” and “differ–if they do–” and here the problem comes in.  Now, we are no longer being asked to judge of something which can at least be visualized with a great deal of imagination:  now we have to guess what the difference might be, if there is any, between “syllable” and “sound.”  The one is presumably the visual or physical or mental notation of the second, which proposes a more sophisticated relationship than between the items in the other two stanzas.  If one reads the items in order and assumes that the brain is the “syllable” and God the “sound” (and there is really no assurance that this is the correct “formula,” except that “sound” seems slightly more mysterious, as God would probably be thought to be), then the first, the brain, records or notates the second, God, and the second is the fulfillment of the first.  But it’s a stretch.

Perhaps the useful thing to end this post with is the observation that Dickinson, in many if not all of her poems (and yes, I do want to assure you that my curiosity was once pronounced enough to take me through the whole volume), likes to play “riddle me this” with images and concepts.  She finds in so many instances that the natural world speaks to her of what is beyond it, yet retains its own quiddity and essence, partaking of the “great beyond” without being any less literal and precious as what it is on earth.  Even the experiences of imagining death use homey and everyday images and pictures drawn from the natural world, because death is the great riddle of our existence, yet is a part of the natural world as well, and Dickinson was well acquainted with its appearance in nature.  And now that I have paid my tribute both to one of the greatest American poets of all time and to the lovely and perplexing world of nature that inspired her, I’ll quit writing, and go off to be inspired by the summer day myself (for so at least one always hopes to be).  Goodday to all my readers, and here’s hoping that even if you aren’t in the middle of summer where you are, that you find something in the natural world to make you happy today.

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June 6, 2014 · 10:19 pm

“Diana of the Crossways”: Not “The End of the Novel of Love,” but “The Beginning of the Novel of the Theory of Love”

Once again, as I look back in memory over the course of not-too-distant posts, I see that I have been inspired to write something by way of tribute to the erudite and talented blogger Caroline, who first supplied me with the information about a very interesting book which has provoked a lot of my recent thought.  That book is called The End of the Novel of Love, and in typical fashion I feel a need to discuss something from that book.  I can always discuss things with Caroline on her site, and she welcomes many and diverse points of view and responds with great verve and élan to them.  But I have chosen to recategorize one of the novels chosen by Vivian Gornick as her subject matter in The End of the Novel of Love, and therefore it is perhaps more proper to post on my own site than to monopolize Caroline’s site in a quibble about terminology with an author she chose who is a quite talented writer as well.  But let’s begin at the beginning.

This is Vivian Gornick’s thesis statement in the first pages of her book:  “In a thousand novels of love-in-the-Western-world the progress of feeling between a woman of intelligence and a man of will is charted through a struggle that concludes itself when the woman…melts into romantic longing and the deeper need for union.  There are, however, a handful of remarkable novels written late in the last century and early in this one [Gornick’s book was published in 1997] where, at the exact moment the woman should melt, her heart unexpectedly hardens.  Just at this place where give is required, some flat cold inner remove seems to overtake the female protagonist….The woman has taken a long look down the road of her future.  What she sees repels.  She cannot ‘imagine’ herself in what lies ahead.  Unable to imagine herself, she now thinks she cannot act the part….[I]n these novels this is the point at which the story begins.”

Now, the first book discussed by Gornick is a bit anomalous in one respect already, because whereas several of the earliest novels discussed are by women, just as early in time is this first book by a man, George Meredith.  It is his book Diana of the Crossways.  And because it is by George Meredith, it shares certain similarities with his other more well-known book The Egoist, in that it uses up an inordinate amount of time developing the theory of something:  in the case of The Egoist just what egoism really is along with a case history, in Diana of the Crossways the theory of just what true and genuine and unselfish love of a woman by a man is.  In the book describing Diana Warwick, née Merion, there are several case histories of the way men love women, but only one of them is worthy of Meredith’s golden scepter, so to speak.  And Meredith is quite straightforward even as to the way he structures his novel as to which of the forms of love is to be accounted the correct one.

For one thing, his entire lengthy first chapter is theory, all theory, a recounting not of characters and places and events, but of ideas relating to his overall topic.  When he finally positions Diana at the Irish ball for Lord Larrian in Dublin, where Diana shines as a belle and is made much of as a pronounced wit, her willing foil is her friend Lady Emma Dunstane, who praises her to others and is willing all through the book to come to her aid as much as her own ill health allows.  There are several main suitors in this initial setting, of whom one is the overly gallant Irishman Sullivan Smith, and another the steadier and more sedate Englishman Tom Redworth.  Two other male figures court Diana, the never-appearing but always in the background bad husband who makes her Diana Warwick, and the slightly younger politician Percy Dacier who almost persuades her away from her husband when they are having “irreconcilable differences.”

Of course, in the England of the time, a no-fault divorce was not even dreamed of, and Diana is in danger for quite some time of suffering lengthy legal proceedings set up by her jealous (without cause) husband.  It is in fact Diana’s wit, charm, intelligence, and dash which have caused her husband to be jealous of her, and which also cause a certain proportion of her society in the form of malicious gossips to bring much suffering and grief down upon her.  She attempts to make a living with her pen, which works at first because of her notoriety, but then tapers off.  The rest of the novel, I leave to other readers to pursue for themselves.  Suffice it to say, that this novel is not so much about the end of a loving career for a woman as it puts an emphasis on Gornick’s second point, that the woman is resistant to her potential future because she wants her freedom.  It is only when Diana sees a way clear to her freedom that she chooses happily for herself, and still emerges with a mated life.

My point, then, is not so much to contest Gornick’s overall theory as to point out that in the case of George Meredith, whose novels are heavy (some would say top-heavy) with theories and explanations and lengthy philosophizing about relationships, the novel of love is not so much ended as it “suffers a sea change” into the beginnings of the novel of the theory of genuine love.  And as in The Egoist, the female figure is the main protagonist, only in this case, there is more than one Sir Willoughby Patterne to be dealt with.  Thus, if you would see a positive “pattern” eventually work his way to the forefront of the fiction, this is the book for you to read, though you must wait for quite some time for him to work his way to the forefront of Diana’s imagination and to win her away from her reluctance.  Still, even George Meredith for all his serious thoughts on the issue provides the reader with a happy ending, and that is something that not all the authors whom Gornick writes about feel able to do.  It is a much-fraught issue, and one which will continue to bear serious thought for those who read Gornick’s provocative book.

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May 17, 2014 · 3:53 pm

“Daniel Deronda”–George Eliot’s dream of justice

George Eliot being George Eliot, the notable “bluestocking” amongst Victorian and earlier female novelists, one of her most famous heroes, Daniel Deronda, occupies what one might find the closest place next her heart by turning out a scholar himself.  But more than that, and more essentially close to her own preferences and feelings, he turns out to be a momentally just man, a man who fulfills Eliot’s program of fair play in managing to be fair to everyone, and only finally and modestly to himself (in the very long eponymous novel, Daniel Deronda).

One thing that is characteristic of all Eliot novels, as least as far as this reviewer has seen, is that she can use what in another less thoughtful writer would be stereotypical situations in a new, different, and provocative way (like a drowning, a seduction, the revelation of a hero’s or heroine’s ancestral descent, a parent’s dereliction of duty, an attempted suicide, on and on ad infinitum).  She takes these staples of the earlier Romantic period and turns them not only into serious and provocative material for the picturing of the character’s internal workings, but also into meditative and theoretical and intellectual examinations of what the actual situations mean themselves as events.  It is this interrogation of persons and actions from which her novels derive their deep seriousness of purpose for which she is famed.  And it’s not only Romantic novelists with whom she can be contrasted in this regard:  even so serious another Victorian novelist as Dickens makes more melodramatic “hay” of his fields of enquiry than she does from the same sorts of plot elements.  Just for example, drawn from any Dickens novel you want to name in which parents are less than honest or just plain conniving, Dickens wrings out the last final drop of suspense and sentiment from the action by making the dishonest parent figures appear again and again at intervals and submitting the young hero or heroine to their machinations until the reader “feels” the sadomasochistic squeeze of events.  By contrast (and for example in Daniel Deronda) when the young Jewish heroine Mirah Lapidoth’s wastrel father comes back into the picture, it is not after a huge build-up, though he is mentioned early on; rather, he comes in near the end as a minor blocking figure and simultaneous deus ex machina of sorts (by stealing the wealthier character Deronda’s diamond ring, he precipitates the declaration of love Deronda makes to Mirah).  Once he is gone, he is gone, and he does not appear again to further complicate matters, which is to say that Eliot relies less on unlikely coincidences than Dickens does.

The bifurcation of the plot into two plots following the fortune of two different heroines (whose stories are joined through Deronda himself) makes up the structure of the book.  One is the story of young, beautiful, haughty and vain Gwendolen Harleth, who marries (without love) Henleigh Grandcourt, an even haughtier slightly older man, not only to save her family from poverty but also to ensure herself of a powerful and wealthy future.  She for a while has what she wants in material terms, but has enough conscience to be tortured by the knowledge (which came to her before her marriage) that she has married a man who had a wife in all but name and four dependents through her before meeting Gwendolen.  In addition, he is a sadistic and controlling person who mentally abuses her until he drowns in a boating accident.  To Gwendolen, Deronda is a sort of conscience and guide, upon whose counsel she comes to rely more and more in her own travails with her personal destiny.

The second line of plot concerns Mirah Lapidoth, whom Daniel has rescued from an attempted suicide, and with whom he falls in love very gradually.  As he goes about trying to find her mother and brother for her, from whom she was separated many years before by her degenerate gambler of a father who abducted her and used her to make his living, and from whom she escaped to London, Daniel simultaneously meets up with other Jews who all seem certain that he is one of themselves, which he turns out to be.  He takes up a serious study of Hebrew and Jewish customs before he knows who his own parents were, under the tutelage of a man named Mordecai who turns out later to be Mirah’s long ago separated brother.  This coincidence, however, seems natural, because he has in fact been searching for her family in places where it would be natural to expect them.  Less natural (but touched with the hand of miracle rather than melodrama) is the unexpected meeting in a synagogue in Frankfort with the best friend of his grandfather, who immediately asks him about his parentage.  At this earlier point in the novel, Daniel denies Jewish descent, not being aware of who his mother and father were, and only having come into the synagogue out of a sort of curiosity about the people whom he had met in London.

The full development of the “man of justice” theme is achieved by the end of the novel:  Daniel has helped to make Gwendolen less selfish and more inclined to seek the good of others and accept her own lot.  He has freed Mirah from the clutch of her past and made her his wife.  He has made Mordecai his brother-in-law and placed him in a better economic condition, though Mordecai is slowly dying of consumption.  He has righted wrongs he came across and learned to accept parts of his own heritage and surroundings which at first left him cold (such as his real, distant, unaffectionate mother, and the effervescent Cohens, friends of Mordecai’s).  Finally, in justice to himself, without undue soul-searching he marries Mirah and heads for the East, there to embark upon a study of his own people and their customs and conditions.  But even this apparent self-involvement is to bear the fruit of justice for some others; namely, he intends in the fullness of time to benefit the Jewish people by improving their status in the world.

There are women writers who seem to “fall in love” with their male protagonists, in fact who create them as if they were writing a recipe for a love affair they would like to have themselves.  Dorothy Sayers in her creation of Lord Peter Wimsey has been accused of so doing, for one.  If George Eliot is in any way culpable of this in Daniel Deronda then it would be better to say that she has “fallen in deep and enamored intellectual discussion with” her hero, making him the fulfilled pattern of what she most admired in scholars and learned men who also have a societal role to occupy in the larger world.  And just as Deronda emerges from his dream of doing something larger for a group of people somewhere in the world into a reality which is simultaneously the closest and best personal fulfillment he could hope for, so the reader emerges from the dream of the two heroines with the hero at one point poised equidistant between them into a vision of justice and peace which helps some mightily, and helps everyone at least to bear what burden they must.

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May 14, 2014 · 4:56 pm

Fatema Mernissi and “Scheherazade Goes West”–Women’s status East and West

This post is going to be a limited one, partly out of modesty because my main competency is with self-proclaimed fiction and not apparent sociological research.  Another reason this post is short is because the engaging and talented author of the book Scheherazade Goes West, Fatema Mernissi, more or less reasons to a standstill, not really claiming that there are not good and bad qualities to both East and West when it comes to women’s rights, but seeming almost to claim that the East still has some edge, which is not what most western women (and men too, for that matter) would expect to hear.

Her argument runs briefly like this:  In the East, men control women through control of space but not through the intimidation of their intellects (which is clearly untrue now at least in the light of things which have happened since she wrote, such as the recent abduction of the schoolgirls in Chibok, Nigeria by the Boko Haram, which signifies control of both factors).  Mernissi says that the traditional seclusion of women in an Eastern harem is such a control of space, as is the insistence that women go veiled in public, along with other laws and statutes pertaining mainly to women or to the public relations of men and women.  She claims that the Eastern man perceives this as a necessity not because he does not regard women as his equals, but because he knows that a woman’s intellect is equal to his and has chosen other means of control.

Much of Mernissi’s argument concerns the different ways women are pictured in art, both East and West, and she mentions some surprising things:  the East, which most Westerners believe traditionally prohibits pictures of living things en masse regardless of country, has in fact many portraits of active and assertive women who were queens or wives or both, dressed in hunting gear or clothed for other vigorous activity, whereas the female figures painted in harem situations by Western painters, even those who knew better, are seen as nude, passive and available merely.  While this line of argument is certainly interesting and vital, it’s a question as to how much one can determine of a society’s traditions by looking mainly at art.  Luckily, Mernissi hits many different notes in her concerted debate on the issues.

Mernissi, who was born in a harem, points to the long tradition of allowing women to cultivate their creative, intellectual, and cultural qualities within the harem’s walls which, though their talents were to be used to fascinate and entertain the male still, were nevertheless appreciated as necessary accompaniments to the sensual relationship.  She finds that by contrast, men in the West prefer for women to at least act brainless and less accomplished than the male because they are threatened by women’s equality.  The surprise ending of the book comes when she suddenly has an “epiphany” in the department store she goes to that Western men control women as well through the clothing and cosmetic industries and by insisting that the women diet crazily and look like young girls in their physical beings before they are allowed to take a role in public affairs.  She points out that in the East, women have seamstresses make their clothes, and that sizes are rarely discussed (at least speaking of women of her high status, which factor in my opinion should be seen to throw a different light on some of her arguments).

She does acknowledge that she has an advantage of higher social status, but puts the observation in the mouth of a male conservative who is telling her that her work is unimportant in its focusing on “what men want” and who is telling her she has an obligation to help less fortunate women instead.  I say, they are both right:  she does sometimes overlook the differences between herself and less financially or socially fortunate women, but also there is more than one way to help, and her book certainly helps by showing the upward path in all its reality.  When all’s said and done, it’s clear that men in both East and West have much explaining to do, or since many are all too ready to explain why their systems should be as they are, that women and men “of good will” (as the saying goes) must both occupy themselves, whichever part of the world they are in, with improving the lot of those less fortunate than themselves.  This is so true that it is a truism of many different sorts of political or societal effort, but in this case in particular, it’s not that one system needs to replace the other (we should remember that Boko Haram means “Western education is forbidden”).  Let each society open its mind to ways in which the other has some superiority, and let each society see that its own citizens are all treated equally with each other, that is probably the most and the least that we should expect.

This book as I indicated before is written with humor and an engaging tone, never badgering or hectoring, and is documented with footnotes to every chapter for those who wish to pursue the matter in greater depth.  All in all, I’m very glad that I took the opportunity to add some depth myself to my picture of the Eastern world; it replaces that sense that I had taken away from our constant news broadcasts in their slant that suggests that Eastern women have never had anything approaching equality or good education before the Western education system came along.  Whereas the Boko Haram is lethal to the responsible and good conduct of societal affairs, and the schoolgirls have been following the education they themselves chose, which they have a clear right to do, I think we in the West must also realize that there are things we could do, ways we could interact which might be a little less likely to rile violent opposition and ways to be less condescending in our interactions with other cultures.  I mean, let us help where we can, but be careful of attaching certain unspoken price tags to what we have to offer.  By what I’ve seen of her writing, mutual respect is what I think Fatema Mernissi would appreciate and advise; I concur.

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April 23, 2014 · 2:52 pm

Edwidge Danticat’s “The Farming of Bones”–There’s no such thing as a small massacre

Ours is a time in which people of conscience are becoming more and more aware of the cruelties of wars and “police actions” which have been fought across the globe from times so far back we have lost count of them, and often it’s the “big” conflicts which have been memorialized, the battles which have resulted in more deaths in sheer numbers which are remembered and moralized on most.  In modern times, some of these are the French Revolution, the American Civil War, WWI, WWII, fighting in Korea, the Vietnam War, the wars in Sarajevo, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan.  Many of these wars are remembered at least in the North American continent because the United States has been involved, and the United States, to whatever degree right or wrong, sees itself as a “major player,” and often people in the United States either ignore or are not aware of conflicts in which they play mainly a passing role.  But in order to realize that there is no such thing as a “small” war or massacre, one has only to understand from the testimonies from writers around the world that cruelty is an absolute, not something of numbers and degrees, which when it is employed wreaks havoc and shock and causes a maximum of human suffering regardless of how many people exactly were persecuted or died.  One such writer who leaves vital and pertinent testimony is Edwidge Danticat, in her novel The Farming of Bones, a book about the 1937 “unrest” between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, in which Haitians were massacred and brutalized in their thousands by the Dominican Republican dictator Trujillo’s forces and also by civilians.  I call it “unrest” ironically, because it was much more than that, but the “Yankis” who are referred to only as a former interfering force in the book would have called it so, from their perspective of “big” wars and conflicts.  They are merely a shadow in this book, which is upclose and personal when it comes to the characters who are affected.

The book begins with a quote which is not only thematic, but also becomes part of the plot structure in a later incarnation of event.  The quote is from Judges 12:4-6, describing how in a war between the men of Gilead and the Ephraimites, the men of Gilead held the fords, and tested all passersby by their ability to say the word “Shibboleth.”  If instead they were unable to pronounce the word and said “Sibboleth,” they were killed.  The Bible records that 40,000 were killed in this manner, and though the number is not the issue, it shows the extent to which a by-word can be applied and misapplied in a world of danger and cruelty.

But for at least half the book The Farming of Bones, the setting is in the Dominican Republic, in which the French and Kreyol-speaking immigrants from Haiti are employed as house servants, workers in the cane fields, and otherwise “peasant” labor, while the Spanish-influenced Dominicans are the gentry and aristocracy of the area.  And at least half the book tells the story, both in the present and through flashbacks, of Amabelle Désir, a daughter of herb healers and an employee of the Duarte household, her daily life in the Dominican Republic as a second-class citizen, and her love for Sebastien Onius, her man, who comes to her at night sometimes.

The gentility with which the two treat each other is an indirect comment upon the harshness of Pico Duarte, Amabelle’s employer, and his relationship with his wife, Valencia, with whom Amabelle was raised after her parents died in a flood and she was left an orphan.  Sebastien lives at a distance from Amabelle, and one night he wants her to undress and they simply sit in the dark, for as he tells her, “It is good for you to learn and trust that I am near you even when you can’t place the balls of your eyes on me.”  By contrast, Pico leaves his wife in childbirth and goes to support the Generalissimo in various actions, returning to see the babies (twins), but leaving again after the boy baby dies, and not perhaps valuing the girl baby as much.  As Amabelle says of Sebastien, “When he’s not there, I’m afraid I know no one, and no one knows me.”  Again by contrast, Valencia, her “milk sister,” is supported by her whole family, her father “Papi” (Don Ignacio), his estate, the local doctor and priests, and the servants.

When word first comes that the Dominicans under Trujillo are killing Haitians (who have been employed by them and who are currently living in the Dominican Republic, where the first part of the story is set), Amabelle does not believe it to be true, and many around her also think of it as a rumor.  She finally makes plans to meet up with Sebastien in order to go back to Haiti by cart with the local priests and the doctor, all of whom are thinking of helping to get Haitians safely across the river and the mountains back to Haiti.  The sad results of the delay with which the original news was greeted by many, however, have their part to play, and it is in a company mostly of strangers that Amabelle finally leaves the place which has been her home for many years.

When the group Amabelle is escaping with reach a town nearer to their destination, where they are hoping to meet up with others, they are greeted by a rowdy and violent crowd of Dominicans, who “try” them by the verbal system with the word “perejil,” or “parsley,” a common herb to both parts of the island.  When they can only say “pesi,” they are brutalized, though in fact their tormenters already have made their minds up about them in advance.  Amabelle thinks that she could say the word the “right” way if she had time to gather her thoughts, but she isn’t given the chance.

The rest of the story deals with Amabelle’s life without Sebastien, on the Haitian side of the border, except for the end, some years later, when she bribes a driver to drive her back across the border.  She goes to visit Señora Valencia and hear about her daughter Rosalinda, who is now married, and also meets Sylvie, the current servant.  It is now that she mentally revisits the past and realizes that she and Valencia were really ever only strangers to each other, for all that they played together as children, their different parts and roles in the household of Papi holding them apart.  Finally, she goes to try and find a cave which she associates with Sebastien, but has no success in finding it for certain.  Much of this novel is in fact the mourning for people and things lost through wars, battles, conflicts, actions, hostilities, and quarrels.  As Edwidge Danticat writes on her last page, “And the very last words, last on the page but always first in my memory, must be offered to those who died in the massacre of 1937, to those who survived to testify, and to the constant struggle of those who still toil in the cane fields.”  Truly, there are no small massacres; numbers are not what we should be concentrating on when we discuss genocide and political murder, but the sheer inhumanity of the manner in which we often use other people, and the quick escalation of hatred which threatens to sink us all into obliquity, both victims and persecutors.

Danticat’s book is simultaneously a beautifully written testiment to human survival, which persists though the human spirit is insulted and damaged by its encounter with the dregs of harshness and meanness that inspire people to consider others less than themselves because of factors of birth and nationality, caste and class.  All of us can surely benefit by exposure to her marvelously supple prose and insight into what really constitutes a loving human situation, and her cues as to where the human equation needs to be re-configured.  Danticat writes with love even of the loveless, with compassion even of those who show they have none, and with certainty that in the moments of uncertainty we have our survival, when we hesitate to pronounce on someone else’s fate.  This book is one of the simplest and yet most complicated I think I have ever read, and is in my estimation one of the best books of its time.

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March 30, 2014 · 1:09 am

Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help”–Better as a movie script than as a book?

After trying to purchase the audiobook and getting the book itself by mistake (a gift for my mother a year or so ago), I finally took it upon myself to read Kathryn Stockett’s book about an aspect of civil rights in the American South of the last mid-century, The Help.  I was curious as to why so many people, most of whom I knew had feelings and politics on the correct side of the civil rights question, seemed lukewarm about the book.  Why, hadn’t it been compared to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird by more than one of the reviewers?  Wasn’t it a genuine effort to capture the voices and sentiments of the women who worked as maids and nannies for the southern white supremacists?

Well, the voices weren’t the problem, as it turned out.  The voices, once one got over that rather ordinary reader’s annoyance with having to follow a dialect, a perplexing dilemma from Mark Twain on up, the voices, I say, were a delight.  They seemed genuine, and insightful, and heartfelt.  Once I hit my stride with following the dialect and spelling, it was far less troublesome than Mark Twain himself, and I got into the rhythm of it, eager to read more of what the women had to say.

But the truth is, since reading the book, I’ve realized that no, it isn’t like Harper Lee, who was writing more or less at the same time as some major civil rights changes were arduously making their way onto the scene.  Harper Lee’s book was courageous, whereas unfortunately, as popular and right as The Help is, it’s got a much larger choir to preach to, and by that much is the more run-of-the-mill.  As my brother put it, “It’s been done before, been done better, and I guess I have to say I’m just tired of seeing yet another privileged white slowly clue in to what’s at stake.”  He wasn’t talking about Kathryn Stockett herself, the author, I don’t think, but about the character of “Miss Skeeter,” who helps the maids publish their book so that the world will know what actually goes on from their point of view in the houses of their white employers.

This is why I think that the book quite possibly is better as a movie, though I never thought I would say that about any book.  I’m planning to see the movie to verify my impressions, but somehow I think that once the topic is as mainstream as this one is, a movie is the proper venue for it.  This is a form that allows people to congregate in a public space and share what they (by this time) almost certainly all agree about, which is the uncontestable opinion that civil rights is an important and valid endeavor with which to engage and something that has a continued reality and force whose ever rights we’re talking about.  And if there are some who don’t agree, in all likelihood they will be shamed into silence by the internal logic of the characters’ modest demands, though they may possibly continue to defy public opinion in private.

While I realize that this book has become the darling of book clubs all over the country, I would just ask this question about its literary quality:  is there that sense that the author had to pay the penalty of serious insight in order to write it, or is it a little flimsy, a little thin?  Though To Kill a Mockingbird is uplifting in the end, there is a sense of genuine penalty paid about it, a feeling of tragedy and at the same time a feeling of being borne aloft.  Though the intentions of The Help may not have been exactly the same, what penalty is actually paid by Miss Skeeter for what she does?  She goes to NYC and becomes a writer, at least that is what is predicted of her future.  She escapes the consequences of at least some of her actions, and though her mother is dying, for some reason this is not played upon in the same way we can imagine Harper Lee using it.  It’s instead a sort of “feel good” book.  So, maybe this is a good book-to-movie script, but after all, let’s not exaggerate and compare it to something it cannot reach to.  It’s a well-written, workmanlike bit of writing, which follows all the rules and touches most of the bases, but it’s not a great American novel.  It’s enjoyable seeing the white supremacists–particularly a real bitch named “Miss Hilly”–get their comeuppance, but it’s important to remember that the challenges that were there when Harper Lee was writing are far less now than they were then, and by that much exactly is The Help the lesser novel.

It’s still worth reading, however, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the period and in the stories and feelings of the ordinary people who stood in the shadows of the great integrationists and civil rights leaders, for they too have their stories, real or imagined, and this is a capable imagining of some things we know from other documents to be true.  I did enjoy the book, and we can all use some reinforcement of what we already believe to be true, as long as what we believe is on the fair side of things.  But we should also find books that enable us to be challenged in the fair things we have difficulty believing at first, in the things which provoke our imagination to allow us to grow closer and closer to the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind.  It is only then that we can award the highest accolades to a work of art and place it in the pantheon of great works.

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March 18, 2014 · 5:33 pm

More than one side to every story–the dovetailing roles of reader and hero in a poem by W. H. Auden

I am a devout reader of fiction, poetry, sometimes plays, occasionally essays, even once in a while catching sight of the back of a cereal box that for some reason or other merits my attention.  And I’m always trying to situate or re-situate myself in relation to what I read, what I learn, and what I have learned to celebrate.  This is why, perhaps, a particular poem by W. H. Auden has so earned my allegiance, though whether or not he himself would think it one of his rhetorically best, I don’t know.  What I appreciate most about it is its imagistic succinctness and suggestive power, and its ability to use very conventional poetic and writerly tactics and techniques to tell a thematic story.

For, the story in this poem is less about the events and actions contained therein, and more about the opposed voices, each playing its role in the poem, with the hero’s voice speaking penultimately, which gives it a certain force.  As will be familiar to lots of readers, he (or she) speaks best who speaks last, or so many an argument would have us believe.  The only thing after the hero’s last speech is a “stage direction” in the quizzical, mysterious, external voice–external, that is, to the quarrel–and this leaves us wondering if in fact it is after all the hero who has won the argument, or if the poem itself encapsulates the constant back and forth of the hero’s actions and the reader who demands action of the hero, with the “he” in the final line being the reader of the poem itself.  But enough of my being mysterious–here’s the poem, with its rhyming, sing-song, alliterative and assonantal qualities in full swing:

“‘O where are you going?’ said reader to rider,/’That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,/Yonder’s the midden whose odors will madden,/That gap is the grave where the tall return.’/

‘O do you imagine,’ said fearer to farer,/’That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,/Your diligent looking discover the lacking/Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?’/

‘O what was that bird,’ said horror to hearer,/’Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?/Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,/The spot on your skin is a shocking disease?’/

‘Out of this house’–said rider to reader/’Yours never will’–said farer to fearer/’They’re looking for you’–said hearer to horror/As he left them there, as he left them there.”

As should be apparent from perusing the poem carefully, the “reader,” “fearer,” and “horror” (or perhaps “feeler of horror”) are aligned in passive observation on one side of the situation, whereas the “rider,” “farer,” and “hearer” are aligned in action on the other.  The first voices, which occupy the first three stanzas, are cautionary and fearful, warning and pointing out dangers (real or imagined) of the hero’s destiny.  In the final stanza, the hero (or the “rider,” “farer,” and “hearer”) answers the previous stanzas one by one.  Where is he going?  “Out of this house.”  As to whether or not his “footsteps” will successfully fulfill their destiny by defying adversity, the “farer” is able to say at least to the apparently stay-at-home “fearer”:  “Yours never will.”  When the purveyor of “horror” in the third stanza attempts to scare either sense or timidity–whichever it is–into the “hearer,” to this the “hearer” retorts in the fourth stanza “They’re looking for you,” meaning something perhaps like what Shakespeare said in Julius Caesar, that “Cowards die many times before their deaths;/The valiant never taste of death but once,” or perhaps as in the lines of F. D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

There’s a final bit of mystery in the last line, as I indicated before, as to who exactly is speaking in the non-quotation mark enclosed last line.  One possibility, if one reads it as following directly from the tail end of the line before it, says that the “hearer” is the one who “left them there,” whoever “they” might be.  Does it mean that the “hearer” left the “horror” (or again, the horrified spectator, perhaps the aghast reader) to the not-so-tender mercies of the “bird,” “shape,” “figure,” and “shocking disease,” or is there some other person or speaker being identified who left the two interior voices alone with their quarrel?  Or is it both things at once, as can happen in literature in general, because it is a magical realm (and nothing more magical than a poem like this one, in which so many and various things are being hinted at once)?

Whatever readers may make of this poem’s hints and intimations, its arch and exaggerated playfulness with word sounds and rhythms, one thing is for sure:  it is a work of art, made by one of the major poets of the twentieth century, and has earned its place amid many another of Auden’s poems by its quality of an elevated teasing out of the special relationship obtaining between the reader (or spectator) and the writer (or actor).  It is the poem I think of every time I have trouble trying to understand another poem, whether or not of Auden’s, and a poem I find myself turning to again and again for the sheer love of its sound and the dance it leads my mind through the figures of.  I hope my readers have enjoyed exploring this poem with me, and have gained something from my suggestions, tentative though some of them must necessarily be.  Now if only it’s not necessary entirely to rid myself of that delicious readerly apprehension for the good of a hero or character which Auden seems to be joshing his own readers about!  But I don’t for a minute think that he would have gotten rid of that reaction in reality:  what else keeps readers coming back for more, if not for the traps and conundrums set them by writers and poets???

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March 10, 2014 · 4:02 pm

David Foster Wallace and the novel that escapes category–or, my experience reading “Infinite Jest”

There are books you read, books you quote, and books you live with.  Among the books I read, I would include lots of things I read merely out of curiosity and then was dissatisfied with later, dissatisfied enough to “diss” them publicly or just to ignore them completely when it came time to comment here on my site.  Then, there are the books you quote, those which speak to some inner part of you and which have certain resonances in some of their lines or chapters which you want to hug to you especially, and to let others know of your appreciation, you make a big production out of memorizing some of their parts.  Those are the books that stay with you the longest, even though later you may revise your notion of their importance and quit dragging them into every conversation at every cocktail party you go to.  Finally, there are the books you live with, and these form a special category of books, books which you find may not have been entirely sympathetic to your particular world view, but which you started and so feel you should finish, out of some obligation to some real or imaginary world court of opinion; these books are mostly long, long books, which take a long time to finish, and which you perhaps read only in small dribs and drabs on a regular basis, and which you therefore live with, willy-nilly.  Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume series A Dance to the Music of Time was such a book sequence for me, and now, having finished the much shorter but still very long book Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, I can safely say that it too is one of the books one lives with.  I read about 5-10 pages a night for several months until I had finished the 1079 pages (inclusive of notes), and just last night I finally finished reading, with that deflated feeling that you get when you realize that now you’re done and will have to get used to a new cast of characters.  You can’t help but feel that letdown, said to be mimetically similar to the letdown authors themselves often feel when they finish writing a book and must turn their attention to something else, some other project.

Infinite Jest, a book at least one critic insists defies category, was my nighttime reading propped up in my bed, and I laughed out loud in the still night many times while reading it, but resisted tearful behavior until the very end last night, when I wanted to say, in the words of the song, “Is That All There Is?”.  This was not only in response to having reached the end of the book and knowing that another book would have to take its place, however, but also in response to the expression of futility with which the book ends, or so it seemed to me.  I have no plans to discuss this in terms of what took place in the events of the book, not only to avoid having to issue a “spoiler alert,” but also because I feel everyone has the right to be disappointed in his or her own way, and I want those who are interested in this book to have their own experience of it.  Perhaps I’m mistaken, and the final vision is one of heavenly light on earth, and if so, I wouldn’t deprive anyone of that experience.  But the book ended too soon and with the wrong protagonist for my money, and left a lot of loose ends and too many balls still in motion to suit me.

It’s quite possible that I was looking for the wrong sort of reading experience, not a contemporary one at all, and one thing Wallace’s book is definitely is contemporary fiction.  It gets compared to Gaddis and Pynchon and even Beckett, though it’s different, very different, from all three, less literarially inclined than Gaddis, less technically inclined than Pynchon, and somehow younger and more hopeful than Beckett until the end at least.  But that younger quality with all its smarts and dreams lying disappointed while the rest of the action remains off-stage somewhere else (in another novel, perhaps) is so very sharp and beautiful and bright-minded throughout most of the novel that when the end of the novel came (set in a scene that’s a flashback) I wanted to scream “But what happens to —?” and “What about those —?”  “What’s going to happen when —?”  Yes, there’s no denying that Wallace did what every good entertainer does, and left his audience wanting more.  And as all the critics tell us, one of the main subjects of the book is the nature of entertainment in North America, particularly in the United States (though for some reason, possibly the very polite and inoffensive nature of our neighbor to the North, Wallace has made Canada the whipping-boy for some of his most cutting satirical lashes).  Then again, maybe I haven’t understood him correctly.  If the futility of our forms of entertainment is the true subject of his book, then tickling us up with the recurrent situational joke, or adolescent fart quip, or dose of black humor, or Feydeau scene and then deserting us where he does at the end is the way to make the point.  But then, this moves the entire novel, which seems sunny in parts, a youthful world in which someone is destined to be the hero, a lot closer to Beckett and farther away from Pynchon and perhaps even Gaddis, though those authors too have their portrayed moments of futility.

Basically, I lived with this book and was intrigued and amused enough to finish the whole thing, though I occasionally tired of the obsession with various drugs, recreational and abused-prescription, which was one of the necessary sub-topics of the given subjects of entertainment and pastime.  And I was sorry when it ended, and I had to tear myself away from at least two of the protagonists, if not more.  And, I found that it continued a tradition begun even as long ago as James Joyce, with the prose speaking the voices of the protagonists with stutters of bad English and negligent phrasing and incorrect vocabulary items when necessary and with perfectly groomed English phrasing when needed elsewhere.  That this book belongs to the contemporary world is nothing against it, in fact it reinforces the prerequisite quality of my recommendation of it as a vade mecum of what not to do if one wants to lead a placid, legal life (jest though one might term it).  It has passion, for a jest, and even its own kind of poetic justice and poetry, which I guarantee will keep the open-minded reader going (but generally in hopes of a resolution, I would think, which doesn’t come in easily recognizable terms).  The ending of the book, though apparently a flashback, is also possibly a simultaneous flash forward into the ending of a character, and has heightened language such as is used of enlightened states and sad upheavals, and which is the language of tragedy.

Be all this as it may, my post must be as seemingly inconclusive as the book is, though not nearly as long.  The book is a work of art, but like all works of art, it will have its admirers and its detractors.  As to my perspective vis- à-vis Infinite Jest, I think I understood it, I know I admire it, I lived with it for several months, but I don’t want to marry it: but that’s okay, it’s got many another critic vying for its attentions and willing to re-read over and over again in order to lock down what he or she feels is a definitive reading.  I’ll just be getting on with another long book at bedtime, and leaving my own readers to make up their minds to read it or not, love it or not, quote it or not.  And, of course, I hope anyone who has something to add to my knowledge or experience of reading the book will comment here:  I purposely did not attempt the gargantuan task of naming characters’ names and detailing their actions, but anyone who wants to do so is welcome, and I’ll do my best to respond.

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March 6, 2014 · 6:22 pm

Yvor Winters’s “A Song in Passing” and the “Undiscovered Country”

Yvor Winters, a modernist with a difference (and to some, one belonging to the New Critical movement, but not to others), wrote this short poem, “A Song in Passing,” about death, and dying, and the experience of mortality:

“Where am I now?  And what/Am I to say portends?/Death is but death, and not/The most obtuse of ends./No matter how one leans/One yet fears not to know./God knows what all this means!/The mortal mind is slow./Eternity is here./There is no other place./The only thing I fear/Is the Almighty Face.”

According to Wikipedia, Winters felt that even an poem about disintegration should not have a structure which imitates disintegration.  He referred to this form of writing, which he eschewed, as the “fallacy of imitative form.”  He felt that the Whitmanesque tendency to create sprawling style in order to write about the greatness and spread of the American continent was a mistake.  Instead, one’s structure in a poem should contain the meaning without imitating one’s subject.

In the poem quoted above, the frequent modernist tools of an irony of double-edged words and contradictory statements carry the weight of portraying the speaker’s fear of death and the hereafter.  For example, to begin with the title, “A Song in Passing” sounds light-hearted and lyrical until one realizes that “passing” has a more ominous meaning than the same sort of lyrical emotion generated by such a song in Robert Browning’s poem sequence, “Pippa Passes,” in which “God’s in his heaven–/All’s right with the world!”  In Winters’s short poem, “God knows what all this means!” is at first a casual non-religious expression of ignorance in which “God” signifies only mystery, and then when the capping line of the stanza comes, “The mortal mind is slow,” the notion of God begins to seem more like a real possibility.

This more serious “passing” contradicts the idea of a “song” to the extent that the  poem is about death and dying and thus the effort to “sing” is full of attempts to be conclusive.  But then there are those pesky moments of apparent bewilderment, then more definitive statements, and finally (in the last stanza) an outright reversal of rhetorical direction.

The one significant repeated word/concept, “fear,” is at the very heart of the poem.  If one were to discuss in Shakepearean terms the proposition contained in the abrupt about-face of the last stanza, “The only thing I fear/Is the Almighty Face,” one would look to Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, in which he speaks of the country of death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourne/No traveler returns,” the country which “…makes us rather bear the ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of….”   Yet note how it’s the back and forth from attitude to attitude, from pose to pose, from concept to concept, which dictates the movement of the poem, and not an emotional outpouring, not even Wordworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.”  This poem smiles wryly and nervously, like someone with a slight facial tic attempting to control his or her movements, and yet we see the cause of the repressed feeling just as clearly as if the poet had wept buckets of verbal tears over his topic, which on the whole would probably have struck us as cloying.

This is a poem whose wit is as evident as its statements are terse, and it seems obvious that Winters’s light touch is meant to convey neither a faith in God nor an atheist’s skepticism, but the average person’s quandary when confronted with the question of final things.  Though the situation may be average, however, the poem shows an outstanding and spectacular mastery of form, which helps the ordinary person in real life to cope with such overwhelming questions and the possibility of even more overwhelming answers in the end.  How fortunate we are to have a poet whose perspective is not so far from the average, yet whose means of expression is so extraordinarily lithe and graceful!

 

 

 

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March 4, 2014 · 5:29 pm

Tennyson, Swinburne, and the spirit of parody

In 1867 (and 1869), the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson published a poem attempting to reconcile pantheism with Christianity of the traditional “God the Father” variety.  The poem was entitled “The Higher Pantheism,” a title which itself indicates that plain pantheism was to Tennyson a “lower” sort of religious thing.  Due to the poem’s being already published elsewhere on the Internet, I am able to give you the whole of this contrarious and sometimes confused-seeming poem, and though it is long for my page, I will do so in order that you can see for yourself the “knots” Tennyson tied up his religious logic in to form a “basket” to hold his beliefs.  The Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria obviously had a duty to God and country which came above poetic quality, though his parody writer Swinburne (writing in 1880) had good things to say about the writing while finding the thought muddy (the version of Swinburne’s parody which is published online at the University of Toronto Press T-Space by Professor Ian Lancashire has notes about a letter of Swinburne’s containing some lines of the parody, though in order not to violate Professor Lancashire’s online copyright, I am reprinting Swinburne’s parody from an edition which occurs elsewhere on the Internet on free sites without the letter.  Those who are interested in reading the letter and comments can do so at T-Space ).  Here is Tennyson at his elevated and obfuscational best in “The Higher Pantheism”:

“The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains–/Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?/Is not the Vision He, though He be not that which he seems?/Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?/Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,/Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?/Dark is the world to thee; thyself art the reason why,/For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel ‘I am I’?/Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest thy doom,/Making him broken gleams and a stifled splendor and gloom./Speak to him, Thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet–/Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet./God is law, say the wise; O soul, and let us rejoice,/For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice./Law is God, say some; no God at all, says the fool,/For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool;/And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;/But if we could see and hear, this Vision–were it not he?”

Actually, the poem is rather fine in many respects, though its singsong quality can be an annoyance, and the tone is of one trying a bit too hard to make ends meet spiritually.  But his poetic successor Swinburne, who was also his occasional imitator (in metrical terms, though not in spirit) made much of Tennyson’s little weaknesses in “proving” God’s existence, and did so partly by tactical repetition of meter and rhyme in the same style of singsong, no mean feat for the average poetaster but probably quite easy for Swinburne, who had a gift of meter, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance on his side anyway, to name a few only of his poetical qualities.  Here’s his delightful parody of Tennyson, entitled “The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell”:

“One, who is not, we see; but one, whom we see not, is;/Surely this is not that; but that is assuredly this./What, and wherefore, and whence? for under is over and under;/If thunder could be without lightning, lightning could be without thunder./Doubt is faith in the main; but faith, on the whole, is doubt;/We cannot believe by proof; but could we believe without?/Why, and whither, and how? for barley and rye are not clover;/Neither are straight lines curves; yet over is under and over./Two and two may be four; but four and four are not eight;/Fate and God may be twain; but God is the same thing as fate./Ask a man what he thinks, and get from a man what he feels;/God, once caught in the fact, shows you a fair pair of heels./Body and spirit are twins; God only knows which is which;/The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk in a ditch./More is the whole than a part; but half is more than  the whole;/Clearly, the soul is the body; but is not the body the soul?/One and two are not one; but one and nothing is two;/Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be true./Once the mastadon was; pterodactyls were common as cocks;/Then the mammoth was God; now is He a prize ox./Parallels all things are; yet many of these are askew;/You are certainly I; but certainly I am not you./Springs the rock from the plain, shoots the stream from the rock;/Cocks exist for the hen; but hens exist for the cock./God, whom we see not, is, and God, who is not, we see;/Fiddle, we know, is diddle; and diddle, we take it, is dee.”

Aside from enjoying the beard-tugging going on in the parody, one of the first things one notices is that the parody is about one-fourth again as long as the original poem.  Clearly, Swinburne was enjoying himself, and the very forthright and yet absurd ridiculing going on is part and parcel of his own vision.  For example, it’s not so much only an exaggeration of Tennyson to say “The soul squats down in the the flesh, like a tinker drunk in a ditch” as it is a combination of the two poets’ attitudes in their poems, Tennyson more or less an apologist for the “higher” view, that the body is a “sign and symbol” of the soul’s division from God, hence a sort of “dirtier” thing which must be excused or apologized for, Swinburne a celebratory poet of things earthly, who yet feels their transitory nature as an impetus to memorialize them in poetry.  And this, the exaggeration of what one can take away from another’s poetry added to one’s own ingenious inventions in a similar meter and rhyme, is the very spirit of parody.  One could perhaps say that the best way truly to understand a poet or writer is to attempt a substantial and stylistic parody–after all, one must get the gist of the thought and tempo in order to make fun of it:  one must know what both oneself and the other are about.

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