Tag Archives: originality

August 29, 2013 · 6:39 pm

“I come from a set of storytellers and moralists….The storytellers were forever changing the tale and the moralists tampering with it in order to put it in an edifying light.”–Victor S. Pritchett

My first remark on the short story I’m writing on today, after such a title to my post, should and must be that it is the most beautiful, meaningful, and worthwhile story I have ever read, my constant favorite, and yet it has no overweening moral emphasis whatsoever (except perhaps that generosity is not wasted, and should never be regretted, which may seem weak to those who like conclusive statements of purpose, never mind those who like conclusive endings, who will likely be perplexed by this story as well). The story furthermore will offend those who insist that fantasy fiction is not to be mingled willy-nilly with realistic fiction without a “signal” of some surreptitious and covert kind being passed between the writer and the reader, and this story plays fast and loose with this convention, giving no hint whatsoever for about 3/5 of its length that it’s going to concern a dalliance between a woman and a wonderful, sexy male djinn, or genie. It is moreover also about the purposes of stories en masse with special reference made to Eastern European and Asian stories in particular, which to some people forewarned might seem a dry topic, as they want, or think they want, to read just a story, and not a story about stories, to have the original blinding experience and not the reflexive experience of hearing the why and how of the what. But I am issuing my own kind of forewarning for my readers: A. S. Byatt’s short tale “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” (which is the longest story–a novella, really–in her fairy tale collection by the same name) is not to be dismissed as a story just for specialists in the field of narrative, or for those who are themselves storytellers or moralists with an axe to grind. It is simply the most beautiful story I have ever read, and yet it leaves many stories within it incomplete, trailing bits and pieces of connected and disconnected tales “floating redundant” (to pull out an original inspiring bit of poetry quoted by Byatt from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, wherein it describes the way serpents like the Tempter originally stood on their coils instead of being doomed to writhe on the ground).

The story is “about” Gillian Perholt, a narratologist (or, a specialist concerning the mechanisms, structures, and meanings pertinent to and inherent in the study of narrative). In this sense, as we are neatly informed in the story, narrative can be anything in our world from a tennis match, to an advertisement, to a fairy tale, to whatever creates a size and shape mentally for us to consider fictively, or in the sense of “as if.” (For those who at this point are intrigued more by the idea of narratology than by the tale itself–and at this moment, since I am investing my energies on writing about the story, not the discipline, I would just say “shame on you!”–I’d like to direct them to Mieke Bal’s excellent and easily readable book Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative.) But more than that, the story is about Gillian Perholt the woman, a woman of fifty-five (not, one would think at first glance even a popular age for a fairy tale heroine, most of them being nubile, naive, and even if intelligent, sexually attractive young virgins and neophytes taking their first run at life). She has been deserted by her husband for a younger woman, but instead of feeling misused–though we get the point that the sense of feeling misused wore itself out long ago through much of the same sort of thing–she feels free, suddenly. And freedom and its lack are other main subjects of the story, along with the generosity I first mentioned as a sort of undeclared “moral.” If there is a moral about having the traditional three wishes granted and freedom, it is that regardless of what one wishes for, “Fate is fixed,” as Gillian says in a talk she gives at a conference. But, as she continues, “‘In fairy-tales…those wishes that are granted and are not malign, or twisted towards destruction, tend to lead to a condition of beautiful stasis, more like a work of art than the drama of Fate. It is as though the fortunate had stepped off the hard road into an unchanging landscape where it is always spring and no winds blow.”

But I am getting ahead of myself, and telling my own tale of reading the book all out of order! At a conference in Istanbul, with side trips to view sights in Smyrna and places round about in Turkey, Gillian Perholt (who occasionally sees visions she has told no one else about, particularly frightening images which she believes sometimes to be premonitions of her own mortality) spends time with her good friend, Orhan Rifat, a male Turkish scholar of narrative, who alike has much to say about how and why stories function as they do. In this tale, the “frame tale” of the woman and the djinn contains numerous other stories which the characters tell each other in the manner of frame tales and inset stories worldwide, and many of these tales are intriguing enough, particularly as they are narrated briefly and in a somewhat sketchy manner by the “experts” intent on finding their meanings, to make the average reader want to follow up the tales someday and read them in the original texts. There are also new insights reported by the characters on well-known tales like the tale of “Patient Griselda,” which was told first by Boccaccio, then by Petrarch, then by Chaucer’s clerk in “The Clerk’s Tale” portion of The Canterbury Tales. Byatt has her character say, quite honestly, that it is a very well-known tale which no one much likes, apparently because of the elements of the gratuitous cruelty involved in the character Walter’s testing of his wife Griselda’s faithfulness and attention to duty (I can remember studying this tale in school and having a professor tell me that it wasn’t so much the clerk’s purpose to get his “listeners” to admire marital faithfulness as it was to point to humankind’s duty to be faithful and dutiful to God though tested as Griselda was tested by her husband Walter in the parallel case. All I can remember feeling at that analysis is resentment of Walter, the professor, and God all three!)

Belief is an important element which is examined in Byatt’s key tale of tales, and I find that I “believe” it (or most easily practice what the poet Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief”) just because it makes no special territorial claims for itself. The explanation for most of my lifetime of being impatient with Scripture and annoyed by Christianity (in which faith I was brought up) was given to me gratis in this story, and I will never forget the strength of the emotion with which I read this portion: “Angels had made Gillian think of Saint Paul. Angels had sprung open Saint Paul’s prision in Ephesus. She had sat in Sunday school, hearing a fly buzzing against a smeared high window in the vestry, and had hated the stories of Saint Paul and the other apostles because they were true, they were told to her as true stories, and this somehow stopped off some essential imaginative involvement with them, probably because she didn’t believe them, if required to believe they were true. She was Hamlet and his father and Shakespeare: she saw Milton’s snake and the miraculous flying horse of the Thief of Baghdad, but Saint Paul’s angels rested under suspicion of being made-up because she had been told they were special because true.” This echoes or at least mentions tangentially something which I’ve heard several people say before, which is that Milton’s Paradise Lost is so monumental and believeable a work of poetic art because the poet allowed himself to be a poet, (and by the way to make his Satan more poetically moving as a subject than his angels and holier characters), instead of trying to be a theologian and only secondarily a poet.

At the moment when Gillian first meets the djinn, she has already finished what she was there in Turkey for, and is in her hotel bathroom after having had a shower. She bethinks herself of the dusty bottle she bought in the bazaar, and takes it to the sink to wash off the dirt, and out pops–guess what? You know already. I would not tell even this much of the tale, not wanting to ruin the story and the buildup, except that I want to point to another very significant element of this story: Gillian expresses no surprise, horror, wonderment, in short, A. S. Byatt does not try to persuade the reader via emotional mimesis (mimicking of the character’s mental state for the reader to follow and “fall into” by that special “contract” or “agreement” I mentioned earlier). Byatt simply recounts the logistics of trying to get out of one’s bathroom when a huge foot is blocking the way. This makes it far easier for us to accept the story than if we had read any special pleading to do so. Any consideration of the matter is handled after the fact, when the characters have already been making acquaintance for quite some time. We are told of Gillian Perholt: “She was later to wonder how she could be so matter-of-fact about the presence of the gracefully lounging Oriental daimon in a hotel room. At the time, she unquestioningly accepted his reality and his remarks as she would have done if she had met him in a dream–that is to say, with a certain difference, a certain knowledge that the reality in which she was was not everyday, was not the reality in which Dr. Johnson refuted Bishop Berkeley’s solipsism with a robust kick at a trundling stone.” Instead, Byatt engagingly uses in her story the traditional formula by which stories are told in Turkey, “bis var mis, bir yok mis,” “perhaps it happened, perhaps it didn’t,” which works because it lets the reader have the choice of whether to continue reading and be enlightened and amused or to be a lug who insists on only absolute fact and thus misses all the fun and learning alike which can be derived from fiction (or what purports to be fiction!). For fact-lovers, though, Byatt even lets us know how she is manipulating the reader’s perceptions and reactions by mentioning outright the formula bis var mis, bir yok mis,” rather like a conjuror showing us empty hands before performing a sleight-of-hand which will astonish and amaze us.

And Byatt, as usual, succeeds in astonishing and amazing, so enchanting and enlivening is the tale she tells us. I definitely won’t tell you how it ends, except to say that it is a hopeful, blissfully and perennially youthful story without a perennial youth in it on the face of it, and the ending is sufficiently “open-ended” (as Gillian tells the djinn her century prefers in stories) to lend itself neither to authorial fudging and lying nor readerly despair. But enough about my reactions to the book and my experiences of it: why not read it for yourself? (And after you read it, why not read the four other stories in the same volume? Yes, it’s like letting a djinn out of a bottle, a totally magical experience!)

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

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August 18, 2013 · 2:12 pm

My alter ego who apparently isn’t so alter, Aunt Josephine….

I have been told, by a child of ten named Charles who has every right to claim that he knows me well, that I remind him of Aunt Josephine, not as to the white bun on her head or in her manner of dress, but in her personality. As I am the child’s aunt and my name is not Josephine, I took some exception to the remark, with apologies to all those out there who do happen to be named Josephine. Charles made this observation to me in front of his parent, my brother, who grinned evilly and agreed with him. Since Aunt Josephine is a fictional character in Book III of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (also known as Book III: The Wide Window) it was agreed upon that I should read said book (and write a post on it) to see for myself whether or not I could recognize any of my own traits in Aunt Josephine, most especially my tendency to worry and to warn children of things they need to know for their own safety.

Always having been sensitive to the plight of fictional characters–you’ll remember that Barrie’s Tinker Bell was in danger of disappearing unless readers said three times that they believed in fairies–I decided to give Lemony Snicket’s character a chance to entertain and enlighten me. But I’m getting ahead of myself, or rather focusing solely upon myself. Who is this Snicket? I hear you ask. To quote from the book’s biographical note itself, Lemony Snicket “was born before you were and is likely to die before you as well. A studied expert in rhetorical analysis, Mr. Snicket has spent the last several eras researching the travails of the Baudelaire orphans. His findings are being published serially by Harper-Collins.” Short and succinct. Next, you probably want to know what the book’s about. I had been told that the Snicket books were about the adventures of the Baudelaire orphans, so I knew that, but gained further knowledge of this particular book from the book blurb as well. You will notice the consistency of style with Snicket’s biographical note: “Dear Reader, If you have not read anything about the Baudelaire orphans, then before you read even one more sentence, you should know this: Violet, Klaus, and Sunny are kindhearted and quick-witted, but their lives, I am sorry to say, are filled with bad luck and misery. All of the stories about these three children are unhappy and wretched, and the one you are holding may be the worst of them all. If you haven’t got the stomach for a story that includes a hurricane, a signaling device, hungry leeches, cold cucumber soup, a horrible villain, and a doll named Pretty Penny, then this book will probably fill you with despair. I will continue to record these tragic tales, for that is what I do. You, however, should decide for yourself whether you can possibly endure this miserable story. With all due respect, Lemony Snicket.” What a way to write a blurb, with plenty of teasing clues and yet not one substantial spoiler or giveaway except the information that there are several of these books about, and that all of the adventures lack saccharine, which children don’t have much use for anyway! You can easily imagine childish and childlike hands (of whatever age) grabbing this book eagerly off the shelf.

But back to Aunt Josephine (sort of). In each book, the Baudelaire siblings (Violet, Klaus, and the baby Sunny) go to a different guardian or through a different situation trying to escape the plots of evil Count Olaf, who is attempting to obtain their fortune and then get rid of them. In The Wide Window, they temporarily become the wards of their Aunt Josephine, who, like all their guardians, meets with an unsavory fate. In each case, they have trials to contend with, which in this book include Aunt Josephine’s personality. To give just a few instances, Aunt Josephine (and here is where I am supposed most to resemble her) greets the children with these words: “‘This is the radiator….Please don’t ever touch it. You may find yourself very cold here in my home. I never turn on the radiator, because I am frightened that it might explode, so it often gets chilly in the evenings.'” Aunt Josephine takes a similar line with other things: she “so far appeared to be afraid of everything in [her home], from the welcome mat–which, [she] explained, could cause someone to trip and break their neck–to the sofa in the living room, which she said could fall over at any time and crush them flat.” The telephone? “‘It should only be used in emergencies, because there is a danger of electrocution.'” But surely there could be no harm in a common doorknob? “‘When you open this door, just push on the wood here. Never use the doorknob. I’m always afraid that it will shatter into a million pieces and that one of them will hit my eye.'” Finally, there’s the question of what’s for dinner, and on a frigid evening you don’t like to find that it’s cold cucumber soup, but that’s inescapably what it is. Why? “‘I never cook anything hot because I’m afraid of turning the stove on. It might burst into flames.'” Taking yet another aspect of Aunt Josephine’s personality, there’s the question of correct English speech and grammar (those of you who’ve known me for a while or have read my bio know that I’m a former academician). As Aunt Josephine says to her younger audience, which soon gets tired of having its speech and punctuation corrected, “‘I’m sure you all need some brushing up on your grammar….Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don’t you find?'”

I hang my head. I stand condemned in the tribunal of youth for resembling Aunt Josephine. There’re only a few things that differentiate me from her, and prevent Fate from assigning me a grisly ending in Lake Lachrymose, which is adjacent to her home high on the cliff. Let’s look on page 193, farther towards the end of the book: “The Baudelaires had not really enjoyed most of their time with [Aunt Josephine]–not because she cooked horrible cold meals, or chose presents for them that they didn’t like, or always corrected the children’s grammar, but because she was so afraid of everything that she made it impossible to really enjoy anything at all. And the worst of it was, Aunt Josephine’s fear had made her a bad guardian. A guardian is supposed to stay with children and keep them safe, but Aunt Josephine had run away at the first sign of danger. A guardian is supposed to help children in times of trouble, but Aunt Josephine practially had to be dragged out of the Curdled Cave when they needed her. And a guardian is supposed to protect children from danger, but Aunt Josephine had offered the orphans to Captain Sham [the evil Count Olaf in disguise] in exchange for her own safety.” No, I stand acquitted! The only cold soup I’ve ever served my nephews and niece was one fierce hot summer when I served my famous gazpacho, and they ate it without complaint. They’ve always liked my presents. And they have accepted that I will occasionally correct their grammar, and that it usually keeps someone else from doing so later, though they still tease me about my verbal torment of them. But of all the worst charges above, of deserting them in their hours of need or of being too afraid to protect them from strangers, they can’t justifiably accuse me. So, all is well. I’m merely being twitted by my nephew Charles about my personality, something he is acute enough to have noticed. I do worry about the children, and I do warn them a lot about danger, and they find some of my danger bulletins and scenarios a little far-fetched. But that’s what aunts are for (and they’ve even forgiven me for playing them as much of an opera as I could get them to sit through!).

And when all else fails, they have the marvelous Lemony Snicket to explain things to them: “There are two kinds of fears: rational and irrational–or, in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don’t. For instance, the Baudelaire orphans have a fear of Count Olaf, which makes perfect sense, because he is an evil man who wants to destroy them. But if they were afraid of lemon meringue pie, this would be an irrational fear, because lemon meringue pie is delicious and has never hurt a soul. Being afraid of a monster under the bed is perfectly rational, because there may in fact be a monster under your bed at any time, ready to eat you all up, but a fear of realtors [one of Aunt Josephine’s fears] is an irrational fear. Realtors, as I’m sure you know, are people who assist in the buying and selling of houses. Besides occasionally wearing an ugly yellow coat, the worst a realtor can do to you is show you a house that you find ugly, and so it is completely irrational to be terrified of them.” You see? It’s wonderful to know that even we antique Aunt Josephines of the world have found a children’s friend and ally so perfectly in command of all a child needs to know, and one who, as we will also admit if we are candid, is readable enough for us to enjoy as well, admitting us once again into that magical world of childhood where even “a series of unfortunate events” can be redeemed by authorial honesty and wit combined. I’m very much afraid that I’m going to find myself borrowing the other Lemony Snicket books some day soon, the more especially because I hear that the last volume of A Series of Unfortunate Events has come out, entitled simply The End. I predict, however, that just as these books have each had a number of readings-through by my nephew, who returns to them repeatedly, the books will have a long and happy life with children and their parents everywhere, regardless of their title or plot line. Sadly, now, I have to give the book back; but now perhaps I will start with Book I and read through ’til the end. Harry Potter, move over, you’re going to have to share center stage!

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

Tagged as literary topics, originality, quality

August 15, 2013 · 6:11 pm

“On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the province of Gascony, stood, in the year 1584, the chateau of Monsieur St. Aubert….”–Ann Ward Radcliffe

From not having said much of any real help for my readers about George Sand in my last post, I go now to Ann (Ward) Radcliffe, about whom I could say much more had I “time and space,” as Chaucer has it. First, a dab at biography, just to allow you to get yourself situated. And it will have to be a dab, because Radcliffe was something of a congenial recluse and nothing much is known about her life. In fact, when Christina Rossetti attempted to write her biography in later years, she had to stop for lack of factual information (and this was in an era when fanciful notions and apocryphal stories about authors were still able to pass as currency). Ann Ward was born into a merchant family which had professional connections with medical practice, in 1764. In 1787, she married William Radcliffe, and shared a childless but happy marriage with him until she died in 1823, of a serious asthma attack. They were companionable, as was evinced by the fact that she started her writings as a way of occupying her time while he was out late, and reading her compositions to him when he came home at night. She kept an exceedingly private life, and despite her many travel descriptions in her books, did not travel extensively herself, but took her descriptions from art works and others’ accounts. Most readers, however, find them convincing and properly detailed, full of the Romantic love of scenery which was current at the time, particularly love of the more dramatic and wilder aspects of nature, varied with a love of the simple pastoral as well.

Though originally, I had planned to read several novels of Radcliffe’s for purposes of comparison, I still retain a fond memory of The Mysteries of Udolpho, and as it is 676 pages long of tiny, close type and has moreover been described by several commentators not only as the archetypal Gothic novel but as the best one, which was imitated by many other writers, I decided to write my article on it alone, and leave the reader to perhaps pursue The Romance of the Forest, The Italian, and Radcliffe’s other works. This one work alone, however, made Gothic romance more acceptable to a larger audience, which might have dismissed genuine supernaturalism. As well, the book advocates female sufferage, and the triumph of the mind over the more fantastic of the emotions. The book is parodied by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, whose heroine Catherine Morland has read Radcliffe and been superstitiously affected. In her writings, Radcliffe practiced what she referred to as “terror” instead of the “horror” (terror with a mixture of the gross, reviled, or repugnant) espoused by other such writers as “Monk” Lewis, and she tried to exemplify this not only in her last novel, The Italian, but in an essay as well (which was published after her death by her husband).

The Mysteries of Udolpho begins with the heroine Emily St. Aubert in the bosom of her small family (death is ever present in her life; her two young brothers die as infants, and first her mother passes away when Emily is a young woman, and then her father dies when he and Emily are travelling afterwards). Lest you be concerned that you won’t have enough plot tangles, twists, and mysteries to keep you busy, however, the book even from the beginning is bejeweled with smaller mysteries throughout, beginning with a mysterious unseen lute player and a poem with Emily’s name in it written on a wall of a fishing-house she and her parents frequent, as well as a miniature picture Emily sees her father kissing after her mother’s death (and which is not, needless to say, a portrait of her mother). This early history takes place in a pastoral setting much celebrated in the classic “novel of sentiment.” To give you just a taste of the lovely prose which is so much better than that in the average Gothic novel or novel of sentiment, I will quote from a couple of passages in the book relating to Emily’s father: “M. St. Aubert loved to wander, with his wife and daughter, on the margin of the Garonne, and to listen to the music that floated on its waves. He had known life in other forms than those of pastoral simplicity, having mingled in the gay and in the busy scenes of the world; but the flattering portrait of mankind, which his heart had delineated in early youth, his experience had too sorrowfully corrected. Yet, amidst the changing visions of life, his principles remained unshaken, his benevolence unchilled; and he retired from the multitude ‘more in pity than in anger,’ to scenes of simple nature, to the pure delights of literature, and to the exercise of domestic virtues….To [his small estate in Gascony] he had been attached from his infancy. He had often made excursions to it when a boy, and the impressions of delight given to his mind by the homely kindness of the grey-headed peasant, to whom it was intrusted, and whose fruit and cream never failed, had not been obliterated by succeeding circumstances. The green pastures along which he had so often bounded in the exultation of health, and youthful freedom–the woods, under whose refreshing shade he had first indulged that pensive melancholy which afterwards made a strong feature of his character–the wild walks of the mountains, the river, on whose waves he had floated, and the distant plains, which seemed boundless as his early hopes–were never after remembered by St. Aubert but with enthusiasm and regret. At length he disengaged himself from the world, and retired hither, to realize the wishes of many years.”

Madame St. Aubert is an equally admirable character, who participates fully in her husband’s and daughter’s enthusiasms for nature, and often roams with them. As to Emily herself, we are given an interesting insight into her character which later may cause us to question her insights (and thus have those delicious doubts of the main character’s state of mind which Gothic readers revel in). We are told: “She had discovered in her early years uncommon delicacy of mind, warm affections, and ready benevolence; but with these was observable a degree of susceptibility too exquisite to admit of lasting peace. As she advanced in youth, this sensibility gave a pensive tone to her spirits, and a softness to her manner, which added grace to beauty and rendered her a very interesting object to persons of a congenial disposition.” We are told, however, that her father attempts to correct her “susceptibility” and “strengthen her mind,” to teach her “habits of self-command; to teach her to reject the first impulse of her feelings, and to look, with cool examination, upon the disappointments he sometimes threw in her way.”

After her mother dies and Emily and her father begin to travel, they first meet the man who is destined to become the romantic hero, Valancourt. His consideration for her now ill father impresses Emily’s mind, heart, and sensibilities (and at the end it will turn out that he fortuitously lives only 20 miles from their old home). It is at this point that her father tells her that he is ruined and that they are in danger of losing their home. Some time after this, Emily’s father dies due to illness as well. Emily now has to be protected by her aunt Madame Cheron, who marries an Italian brigand (the owner of the castle Udolpho). He in turn imprisons Emily there, trying to force her to marry a fellow countryman of his own, and Emily wonders if she will ever see Valancourt again. The tale twists and turns with all the tortuous (and torturous) windings of high mountain passes, and many more characters are introduced. At this point, I cease my retelling not so much to avoid a spoiler (though there is that) but as much to observe some reasonable measure in the length of my post, which simply cannot be allowed to be long enough to tell all the gritty details.

A few more remarks about the book are in order, however. While the long essays at poetry supposedly written by Emily are a trifle tedious (and the quotes from famous poets a bit short), the prose is not only moving and suspenseful, but often full of high sentiment as well. As I said before, there is much incident and plot complication to keep readers occupied, and for once this standard Gothic series of devices works quite well. What works less well for modern sensibilities and ethnic beliefs is the manner in which the main negative characters are often Italian and Catholic, which speaks of a frequent prejudice of the English Gothic novel of the period: they were suspicious of the Catholic Church and of a stricter society, and often relied on cultural stereotypes. It must also be remarked, however, in all fairness, that some of the main negative characters are Emily’s own aunts and uncles, so I suppose this in a way redresses the balance. The combination of lovely descriptive travel and landscape prose as well as the overwhelming characteristics of Gothic mystery (the latter of which always turn out to have a realistic explanation, however, which added to Radcliffe’s renown and stature) make this book one that you should read if you read no other classic Gothic romance. After all, if so notable a literary light as Jane Austen felt she needed to parody the book, can we do less than investigate what aroused her ironic tendency and set her pen a-writing? I submit that The Mysteries of Udolpho is not only a good Gothic novel, in fact the best I’ve read so far, but just a plain all around virtuoso performance by a woman who preferred to appear only as an author, and keep her private life as mysterious as Udolpho itself, if not as wicked!

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August 12, 2013 · 6:55 pm

When “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” is a useless remark….or, George Sand and me….

Well, I’ve waited long enough to spring my no doubt invalid responses to George Sand on the world, and after exchanging a few remarks with my friend DJ in the comments to my last post have decided to cut the crap and get down to it. I don’t care for George Sand. Now, this would not be such a disappointment had I not already slotted her in as one of the luminary lights in my pantheon of important female forebears (also spelled forbears, I’ve been told), and did I not have personal reasons for being predisposed in her favor sight unseen, and wanting to like her. Many years ago, when I was younger and a lot more foolish (we’ll hope) than I am now, a pompous, overbearing, full-of-himself slightly older literary twit with whom I happened to be under the illusion that I was in love dismissed George Sand with a facetious condemnatory remark about her socialism and her feminism and said she was a bad writer. It gave me a bad impression of him, because I knew she was loved by feminists everywhere, and when I recovered from my own fixations with him à la Sand, I resolved to read her as soon as possible (which doesn’t explain why it took me nearly twenty-five years to do so–but then we all have to forgive ourselves for some derelictions of this sort). So you can imagine my disgust and chagrin to find, over the course of the last month or so, that though her shorter works are passable, her novel Indiana, the first novel she published under the name George Sand, was so unreadable that I actually must simply disappoint you and tell you that I was unable to finish it for this post (I did valiantly soldier through 166 of 272 pages, but just decided that I had better things to do and more valid and important chores than listening to her dither on about every emotional qualm and quirk and in and out–though there were amazingly few “ins and outs” of a sexual nature for a novel supposedly about love and lust–of some tepid love affairs which her narrator kept telling me were hot stuff, without being able one whit to convince me. In this case, she could’ve made do with a little more “showing” and a lot less “telling”!).

But to be fair to you my readers, I should begin at the intended beginning of my post and give you the good parts that I can reproduce (from Wikipedia) about her life, because her life was apparently far more interesting than her works, just to judge by what I’ve seen (and I’m going to refer you to Wikipedia for a fuller biography as well, because I don’t want to tax your patience here by retailing absolutely every detail). George Sand was born Amantine (or Amandine) Lucile Aurore Dupin, to an aristocratic father and a petit bourgeoise mother, and was raised largely by her paternal grandmother on the family estate of Nohant at Berry. She was born in 1804 and died in 1876, thus living through several changes of government in France. She became a French novelist and memoirist of world fame. Aurore (as she was often known to friends) had two children, Maurice and Solange, with her legal husband, Casimir Dudevant, before a separation finally was agreed upon by the two of them. She had numerous affairs with famous men, among them Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset, and Frédéric Chopin. Franz Liszt and Gustave Flaubert were close friends, Flaubert having started out as a “pen pal,” and George Sand was much admired by Honoré de Balzac. There was also some hint in her letters and in her life of a lesbian affair with the actress Marie Norval. Sand’s literary debut was the result of a liaison with the writer Jules Sandeau, whose name she partially borrowed for her own nom de plume. Indiana was her first complete novel under her new pen name. Sand also was the author of some literary criticism and political texts as a socialist. Some of her less significant but more startling and apparently memorable characteristics to people at large were that she often dressed in men’s clothes and smoked in public, not usually permitted to women at that time.

The first novella of Sand’s that I read was passingly interesting, inasmuch as it reversed a formula for writing with a lot of both male and female writers even now, in which the woman is the object of a man’s attentions and desires. In this novella, entitled The Marquise, a French noblewoman falls in love not with her socially accepted actual lover, the Vicount de Larrieux, but with a somewhat seedy actor named Lélio, who enchants her by the nobility, grandeur, and passion which he assumes in his roles on the stage. She is the subject and he is the object, and he falls in love with her too, but the ending is not what you might suppose it to be (no, you’ll have to read it for yourself, but it’s more interesting than Indiana, and it’s shorter, too. It also comes in a volume with another novella by Sand, Pauline, both ably translated by two collaborators from the Academy Chicago Publishers, Sylvie Charron and Sue Huseman). As one of the two commentators remarks, “Sand deconstructs the myth of the seducer (Don Juan) by reversing roles….”

As to Pauline, the second of the two novellas I recently read of Sand’s, it’s centered rather more on the relationship between two women than on any romantic relationship featuring a woman and a man, though there is a relationship between one of the two women and a man which is of secondary plot interest. What I mean is this: the two young women, Pauline and Laurence, have diametrically opposed lives and interests. They part when young, but meet up again before they are old. Pauline has spent years taking care of her mother while Laurence, while living with her own mother and two younger sisters, has had a successful career on the stage (at a time when the theatre was still a somewhat scandalous career for a woman). Pauline goes to live with Laurence, and meets a male friend of hers who is not trustworthy, but whom Laurence does not at first suspect to be out to wreck the peace of the household. Montgenays, the male “friend,” wants to be a lover of Laurence’s, but tries to achieve his objective of making her jealous by making up to the more naive Pauline, who falls in love with him. Laurence figures the schemer’s motives out and tries to prevent Pauline from ruining her life over him, but Pauline is jealous of her and suspects her motives to be interested. Again, I’m not going to give a spoiler, because this one is good enough to read for yourself. The novel Indiana is a different matter.

With every intent to be fair (Sand wrote Indiana not long after she had started out as a writer), I can’t like this book. But I will tell you a bit about it, so that if you are interested by the topic, you can read it yourself in spite of me and perhaps have something more vital to say about it than I do. It has plenty of promise, dealing with the topics (which are potentially titillating enough for everyone) of “adultery, social constraint, unfulfilled longing for romantic love,…[the] exploration of nineteenth century female desire” complicated “by class constraints and by social codes about infidelity,” and by the question of “women’s equality in France…[u]nder the Napoleonic code.” No one could claim that this book doesn’t go by the old saw “all drama is conflict.” After all, when people want to share passion and everyone and everything around them frustrates them (note the restraints mentioned just above), that’s conflict! In addition, there’s historical interest (possibly) in the picture of the “subordination of the colonies to the French empire.”

The story concerns Indiana Delmare, an aristocratic Creole from the French colony of Bourbon (now called Réunion), married to a much older husband, Colonel Delmare, and living in the small family circle of him, herself, and her British cousin Rodolphe (Ralph) Brown. Noun, a less aristocratic Creole, her “milk sister”–the literal translation for “foster sister,” i.e., a baby who was fed by the same nurse’s breasts, and who becomes a companion or servant to the primary character–meets a young aristocrat named Raymon de Ramière, and becomes his sexual victim, while he is really in love with Indiana and wants to be her lover instead. Noun becomes pregnant by Raymon and when she finds out that he loves Indiana, drowns herself. After this, this book promptly becomes less and less interesting. Noun is really the most interesting character in it, for the short time she is there. This is because, I think, of something else that Wikipedia generously offers up, in its wisdom: the book is full of the “conventions of romanticism, realism, and idealism.” That’s a lot of isms in one novel to be dealing with, back and forth, back and forth. First, the characters are saying ridiculously romantic things to each other, then the narrator is putting the reader at least firmly back on his or her feet by realistically focusing on what the characters actually hope to gain (psychoanalyzing them, pre-Freud, that is). Finally, the characters (particularly Indiana and her cousin Ralph, with whom I’ve been told by Wikipedia that she actually ends up living on a farm in the colonies–sorry, no way to avoid this spoiler) are idealized versions of people. It’s hard to imagine even the two most noble characters trying out life together on a farm such as the kinds that were often resorted to in the Romantic period and later by idealistic poets and writers: so there’s the idealism. I want to emphasize, though, that even the idealism is tempered by investigation of motives: even Ralph, who is said to seem boring and phlegmatic to all the other characters because they don’t understand him, and who has possibly even better motives than Indiana herself, is examined in depth in some parts of the novel. As Sand says of Raymon and Indiana, respectively, one was mind, the other was heart: in retelling their stories, she is both mind and heart, and is to be commended for having both, even though I find her terribly tedious in this book. I did like the two novellas, and might even like other books of hers, who knows?

It’s only fair, after panning Indiana so thoroughly, to tell you what its commentator says: “Filled with autobiographical allusions, psychological undertones, brilliantly drawn characters, and the well-reasoned attack on male domination of women that so frightened its [original] reviewers, Indiana remains a mesmerizing classic and a wonderful introduction to one of the greatest women authors of all time.” In an odd way, the drawbacks of the book are at the same time its virtues. While it painstakingly examines the characters, their motives, and their causes, and does so with an energy and knowingness that proclaims its writer’s inner knowledge of that of which she speaks, it does go on and on, and there’s a point at which so many twists and turns of the emotions could only be interesting to the people involved (you know, when you hear lovers arguing intensely about something, or overhear a woman or man trying to describe a lover’s quarrel to a best friend, how you sometimes get the feeling that you “just had to be there”?). Well, even though I’ve been there, I find it painful rather than enlightening to go over so many old conundrums and riddles of the heart and mind so intricately dealt with, at least as Sand does it, and since I know you don’t want me either to “go on and on,” I leave you with this thought, expressed better than I can say it by another expert on love, also with the first name George (Gordon, Lord Byron):

“So, we’ll go no more a-roving/So late into the night,/Though the heart be still as loving,/And the moon be still as bright./For the sword outwears its sheath,/And the soul wears out the breast,/And the heart must pause to breathe,/And love itself have rest./Though the night was made for loving,/And the day returns too soon,/Yet we’ll go no more a-roving/By the light of the moon.”

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Filed under Articles/reviews, Literary puzzles and arguments

Tagged as back out there, literary ancestors, literary topics, originality, quality

July 18, 2013 · 5:18 pm

“Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature.”–Wikipedia quote

Though of Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell’s works I had originally intended to read and post on both the volume I picked up entitled The Cranford Chronicles and the very long novel (incomplete at the time of the author’s death) Wives and Daughters, because it took such an unconscionably long time to read The Cranford Chronicles (which is in fact composed not only of the novel Cranford but also of two related novellas), I have decided to post on the first only and to leave Wives and Daughters as a project for another time. When I looked up Mrs. Gaskell’s works, I was surprised to learn that Mr. Harrison’s Confessions and My Lady Ludlow, which bookend the novel Cranford in the volume The Cranford Chronicles, are in fact novellas usually published separately, so I can only imagine that the unnamed editor/collector at Vintage Books saw some connection amongst the three works, perhaps that of similar fictional locale, since they all three take place in sedate, small villages. It’s true, of course, that these three novels are not among the novels largely and ostensibly about the industrial North of England, which Mrs. Gaskell is so noted by social historians for having written about; nevertheless, she makes her points about the changes which came to England at the time and their effects upon the poor by showing the changes as they had their impact upon the small family seats and villages [I refuse to say “impacted”–that’s not a correct verbal usage].

First for a bit of background about Elizabeth Gaskell, née Stevenson, courtesy of Wikipedia, the rapid poster’s friend. Her father was a Unitarian minister who gave up his orders for conscientious reasons and was finally appointed Keeper of the Treasury Records. Her mother, who produced eight children–only two of whom survived to adulthood–died when Elizabeth was thirteen months old, which her father felt left him no recourse but to send the infant to her mother’s sister, one Hannah Lumb, for raising. Elizabeth led a life with an uncertain future, but was a “permanent guest” at her aunt’s and at her grandparents’ house. Her father remarried but Elizabeth did not see her father’s new family for many years. Her older brother John, however, visited her and her aunt regularly before he went missing (he was a sailor with the East India Company on an exploration to India).

Leaving school at the age of sixteen after having been taught the usual basic skills, lessons, and accomplishments of a young lady of her time, Elizabeth spent some time in London, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Edinburgh with various cousins and friends. When she was almost twenty-two, she married a Unitarian minister named William Gaskell. They settled in the northern city of Manchester. Her married life was apparently checkered with some heartbreak. The subjects, though not the steadfastness of her tone in her fiction, seem to show it: her first two children died. The other four, however, survived. In 1835, she began a diary on family events and her opinions, which probably put her in the frame of mind to continue to express herself through writing. The next year, she and her husband co-authored a cycle of poems which were published in Blackwood’s Magazine. She continued to write for the magazines under various pseudonyms, penning her first novel, Mary Barton, in 1848.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s friends and visitors included Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Eliot Norton, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Hallé. Her novel Cranford (her best-known work) was published in Dickens’s journal Household Words. She continued to write novels for the rest of her life, some of which required travel. Elizabeth Gaskell died in 1865 of a heart attack while looking at a house she had purchased. Her last novel, Wives and Daughters, though unfinished when she died, was the one she thought her best. In 2010 there was a memorial for Elizabeth Gaskell placed in Poet’s Corner, in Westminster Abbey.

Now for my own opinion of the three works of hers which I read in the omnibus The Cranford Chronicles, an opinion perhaps not as humble as it ought to be, given that Mrs. Gaskell was such a prolific and talented writer, and occupied and still holds such an important place in English literary history, especially since the revision of the literary canon has been going on. Her work drags. I suppose I had been led to expect, by the snippets and fragments of “Cranford” which I managed to catch on the BBC production featured on American PBS programs a few years back, that I would be meeting up with a character as coyly dimpled in the delivery of her lines as Dame Judi Dench, or a railway martinet as sure of his own beliefs as the character whom all the ladies went in dread of on that show. But as I came to find, the railway scenes from the BBC were a total fabrication when it came to the three works I was actually reading, which Alex, in her recent comments on her own site when she wrote her talented post about Cranford, had warned about. As she noted, the television mini-series seems to have been a compilation of Mrs. Gaskell’s works. But to blame Mrs. Gaskell for not having written a BBC mini-series attuned to modern tastes would be a real case of unfairness, wouldn’t it, as well as an unpardonable anachronism? So instead of saying what’s wrong (the slow pacing) and what’s not there, let’s look on the bright side (now that the task is accomplished) and say what was good about it, or charming, or thought-provoking.

In the first part of The Cranford Chronicles, Mr. Harrison’s Confessions, I was pleased to watch Mrs. Gaskell leave the safe and well-known (to her) ground of the female character and venture into the more hazardous waters of the male mentality. Hazardous because of course Mrs. Gaskell, though clearly understanding men quite as well as women, excels in her portraits of women in different walks of life. It was a sheer delight, after the basic comedic “givens” of the situation were set up, however, to watch Mr. Harrison (a new doctor) try to follow the sometimes self-contradictory dictates of his older and authoritarian colleague all the while also trying not to get himself married off to the wrong woman (which in this case multiplied itself into “women,” as every single woman within the tiny village of Duncombe who wasn’t absolutely ancient seemed to have an interest other than medical in trying to monopolize the young doctor’s attention). This shortest of the three works was my clear favorite, not because it was short in this case, but because Mrs. Gaskell managed so much in so short a compass (that is, not because of the shortness, but in spite of it). Though it’s clear that the novella will have some sort of happy ending, the tensions are handled excellently, and when I finished reading it, I was wanting more.

Cranford itself, occupying the middle position in this volume, has a very slowly emerging main character, Miss Matty, whose gallant modesty itself seems to constitute the nature of the whole volume. Which is to say, though this was not my favorite of the three works, I can clearly see that it’s in contention for the position of “the best” (it’s priceless in its portrait of what’s often referred to derogatorially as “decaying gentlewomen,” but contends with My Lady Ludlow, the third work, for first place in the category of comprehensive portraits of society. As most of the main characters in Cranford are “gentle,” their society is thoroughly painted, but the characters in My Lady Ludlow supply more of a range of different societal positions, and thus have a different kind of interest and variety). Miss Matty’s and the other ladies’ even more recessive biographer, a person who until almost three-fourths of the way through the book is unnamed, focuses all her discussion on the minor and (as it turns out) not so minor fortunes and misadventures of these ladies, not omitting their foibles and vanities, but encouraging us to appreciate their individuality while particularly and gradually concentrating more and more attention on Miss Matty herself. It’s rather as if the commonly named narrator Miss Mary Smith is a foil in her constant focusing of attention on the most genuinely humble of the ladies and in her own refusal to say much about herself (and I mean “common” only in the most inoffensive way, i.e., a “frequently occurring” name, as goodness knows, it would not flatter me myself to refer to the name “Mary Smith” as “common” in any rude way, having both Marys and Smiths in my own family tree!) After quite a lot of rueful comedy is generated by the way in which the ladies gossip and are motivated by silly though human questions of precedence and correct behavior, we see them draw together and operate as a supportive group, disregarding their differences, when Miss Matty has a stroke of ill fortune. There is an equally modest happy ending which ties up all loose ends, and though the main characters have often been figures of fun, they have humanized their readers, perhaps, by their very lack of major vices and their jumping at the shadows of even small hints of vices. Though the atmosphere is rather claustrophobic for my tastes with so many maiden ladies and widows and so few men in the mix, yet they are strong and determined women, and thus Mrs. Gaskell has given feminism its due though in the way of her time and taste.

As to the last of the three works I’m considering today, My Lady Ludlow, it’s a rather rambling work which takes place at Hanbury, the family seat of the widowed Lady Ludlow. A character named Margaret Dawson is the narrator, and here again we have a portrait not only of a main character, Lady Ludlow, but also of those who surround her and constitute her daily society. In this case, however, the characters run the gamut from Lady Ludlow’s aristocratic relatives to the lowest of the characters on the totem pole, the poachers and tinkers whom Lady Ludlow herself, at the opening of the fiction when Margaret Dawson first meets her, would never think would have contact with the more fortunately placed characters. Nearly as long as Cranford, this novella describes the gradual (very gradual) relaxing of Lady Ludlow’s strict upper-class beliefs about religion, society, business, in short, upon all areas of life which impinge upon her. Time after time, some aspect of progress which is usually for the benefit of the poorer characters meet up with opposition from Lady Ludlow. It’s not that she’s unkind, but she is quite adherent to the preferences of the upper classes to give charitably to those who are under their thumbs rather than to increase the privileges, rights, and capabilities of the lower-class characters by changing the way society operates. For the longest time, she stubbornly though politely opposes her own steward and the village rector who both have in mind improvements, and it’s a mark of how much she is respected that all but a very few characters follow her absolutely and unquestioningly (until such time as she gives way and changes her mind). It in fact takes most of the length of the novella for her to change the staunchest of her opinions and procedures, and it is only after a deep personal loss that she eventually brings herself to do so. It is in fact while she is sad and in mourning that she seems the most to reach out to those to whom she has in the past opposed, and they are more than ready to accept her olive branch. Once again, the requisite happy ending is in order, in which all parties seem to relax their former standards slightly and to strive to get along as a group. Mrs. Gaskell is nothing if not supportive of the basic structure of society in these three works, however society may need change from time to time or come to be refigured.

All in all, I am quite glad I read Mrs. Gaskell. She will never win a prize for the rapidly occurring “hook” at the beginnings of her works, for it takes her some time to build up steam and provide a basic conflict or drama for her characters to participate in. Her works instead excel in character portraits, to judge only from these three-in-one, and as such the action is secondary. She is not one of whom Henry James’s dictum that plot is character and character plot is very convincing, because while for James this is true and he shows a tight and firm connection between the two, she by contrast often seems to have very little in the way of plot for long stretches of at least the two later works here, and this disjoins the two elements of structure which for James were so intimately connected. Of course, she wrote so much that I am quite prepared to be contradicted by others who may have read more of her works. I would also advise anyone having trouble with characterizations in particular to observe her techniques, her pacing being of less significance in that regard. She is a highly talented verbal portrait painter, and though she is capable of capturing a significant incident with a few lines, these incidents are quite often moments indicative of interior states of mind or of character analysis going forward.

So, during this long, seemingly never-ending summer, when you’re looking for a book to spend time with and really get in the midst of, you could do worse than to spend time with Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell and to watch her cause characters to materialize right before your eyes. If nothing else, start with Mr. Harrison’s Confessions, full of gentle though sometimes quite pointed humor, and expect to step back in time with a Victorian chuckle rather than a contemporary guffaw (because, you know, the true ladies and gentlemen in Mrs. Gaskell’s worlds don’t guffaw!).

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Tagged as literary ancestors, literary topics, originality, quality

July 12, 2013 · 2:49 pm

An Update (Intermission) Post of a Talented Fantasy, Historical, and Sci-Fi Writer

Though my next scheduled post on famous women forebear writers is due soon, I couldn’t resist offering an intermission here covering the works being done by a talented and imaginative writer whose blog I’ve covered before when it was under another title. D. James Fortescue is the writer in question, and for his territory he has carved out the broad areas of historical fantasy, fantasy, and science fiction.

The first story of his I would like to mention is currently completed, and is entitled “Mune and Mura.” It is a historical work about two Japanese swordsmen, actual historical figures who in reality were from different eras, brought together by DJ as friends and accomplices. This story is a tribute to friendship and an energetic and insightful view into feudal Japan and its history. (I’m not going to tell what happens finally in any of the tales, in this case because I don’t want to spoil the fun and in the case of the next two stories to be described because I don’t yet know what the endings are and wouldn’t want to spoil them in any case.)

A work which DJ has nearly finished and has been posting in segments is a work of fantasy named “Sayeh and Zia.” It’s yet another fine work, this time set in ancient Persia and Egypt, concerned with the merchant and cavaranserai cultures, and composed largely of fictional characters from DJ’s rich imagination, though real people and historical places are mentioned. In both this and the aforementioned swordsmen historical tale, magical objects figure importantly, in “Mune and Mura” magical scrolls and swords, in “Sayeh and Zia” magical masks. I leave the reader to unearth how these objects are used and their pertinence to the characters involved.

Another work which DJ has nearly finished is “On Venusian Cloud Colony Number Nine,” a work of science fiction which explores the relations between people and between peoples nearly as much as it does between planets. This work is as gripping and suspenseful as a whodunit, which in a sense it is, because when one of the members of the mining team on Venus comes down with strange symptoms, “whodunit” is indeed the pertinent question, not why. I won’t say more, but this tale, in its trip from Venus to Earth and back to Venus, is my favorite of the short fictions DJ has given us, though they are all three meritorious and worthy of respect. I eagerly scan my mail every day for signs that “Sayeh and Zia” and “On Venusian Cloud Colony Number Nine” are being continued for me to read, and I sometimes imagine that I am like an old-time reader of Charles Dickens’s serially published works, waiting for the next installment to come out, or like an aficionado of the radio in the old days when cliffhanger endings were provided for each on-going radio adventure series.

As well, DJ is engaged in writing a lengthier WIP which seems to have stalled sheerly because his brain is teeming with so many good ideas at once that he has been rushing to put them down for us to read. The three aforementioned short stories are a case in point. As well, he not only takes time to mention the works of others and pay tribute to published authors, of whom he keeps up a rigorous reading schedule and posts on his site the names and some assessing information about the works he reads, but he also generously covers the works of others like himself whom he calls “aspiring fellow writers,” of which I have been lucky enough to have been one, even though we don’t write similar sorts of fiction.

In all of these ways, DJ has clearly thrown his hat into the ring to be considered a serious and valuable addition to every reader’s library from the ‘net, and I hope you will travel across to his site and have a look at all the work he has done and what he has accomplished: I promise you won’t be disappointed.

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Tagged as originality, quality

June 26, 2013 · 4:33 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tagged as literary ancestors, literary topics, originality

June 20, 2013 · 8:50 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tagged as back out there, literary topics, originality

June 5, 2013 · 5:05 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tag Archives: originality

“I come from a set of storytellers and moralists….The storytellers were forever changing the tale and the moralists tampering with it in order to put it in an edifying light.”–Victor S. Pritchett

My alter ego who apparently isn’t so alter, Aunt Josephine….

“On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the province of Gascony, stood, in the year 1584, the chateau of Monsieur St. Aubert….”–Ann Ward Radcliffe

When “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” is a useless remark….or, George Sand and me….

“Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature.”–Wikipedia quote

An Update (Intermission) Post of a Talented Fantasy, Historical, and Sci-Fi Writer

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

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

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

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

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