Tag Archives: quality

January 9, 2013 · 9:42 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews

Tagged as , ,

December 6, 2012 · 7:29 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

Filed under Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as , ,

November 23, 2012 · 6:50 pm

“The Next Big Thing Blog hop” and me–or how I got back from my travels to friends and found more friends awaiting me….!

I got back from my trip to my doctoral graduation on Sunday, November 18, and was so happily exhausted from partying and the train trip and meeting all sorts of interesting new people both in Canada and on the train, and joyously sleep-deprived from the rocking of the train on the rails that I waited until today (November 23, the day after Thanksgiving) to put up this new post.  Thanks to all of you who asked after me, I am very, very, buoyant and full of myself now (or as people in my original part of the world would say, I’m full of buck and beans), but a special thank-you to Emma McCoy, who has nominated me in the last few days for “The Next Big Thing blog hop.”  As I understand it, I answer the ten questions she answered about her work on her site regarding her own WIP (work-in-progress), plus I notify and nominate five more people, contacting them to let them know by writing to their “About” section in each case.  Here are my answers to the questions which I observed that Emma answered on her own site:

1)  What is the working title of your work-in-progress?

The Story of the Cuffs.

2)  Where did the idea come from for the book?

Though I never read very much at all of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, I was much intrigued by one of the remarks he made about character development (tongue-in-cheek, it was), when he said his main character was flat and stencil-like.  I thought, how about a whole family full of such characters, with one family-member exception?  What would happen to them?  How would they interact?  Etc.  Hence, the Cuff family.

3)  What genre does your book fall under?

I don’t really write books in a particular genre, though I sometimes spoof a certain genre.  It follows from this that my book would probably just be categorized as “fiction” with the trade-sized paperbacks if it ever got published in a print format.

4)  Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

This is a hard question to answer, as I don’t watch as many movies or as much television as I used to.  And I can’t think of whom I would want to play most of the characters, especially not Papa and Mama Cuff when they were young.  But I would like Wallace Shawn (if still extant) to play Mr. Cuff the Papa and the mother on “The Seventies Show” (I can’t remember her name) to play Mrs. Cuff the Mama as the couple ages.  Wallace Shawn’s voice is perfect for Mr. Cuff.  And if the movie ever had a British re-make, I would want the actor Peter Sallis to play Mr. Cuff.  His voice would be the perfect British equivalent.  Somehow, I’m very responsive to voices (I had a mad crush on Patrick Stewart for a lot of my twenties because of his lovely resonant tones).

5)  What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Just the question:  what’s the difference between flat characters and rounded characters, and how can one become the other?  Or is this a false distinction?

6)  Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

My book, as with all four of my previous novels, will be copyrighted with the Library of Congress and then put on my WordPress.com blogsite (here) for pass-the-hat-around-after-reading sorts of sales.

7)  How long did it take to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Still in progress on the first draft, though I usually rewrite while still writing the first draft, so that when I’m done, I’m mostly finally done except for small changes and proofreading.

8)  What other books would you compare this book to within your genre?

As I noted before, I generally just write in the general category of “fiction,” and one always hopes, of course, that one’s book stands alone (though of course it would be vain and arrogant to say definitely that that’s the way it is.  Pat Bertram on “Bertram’s Blog” has a number of good posts on writing outside of conventional genre expectations, and I would reference her posts as a general reference).

9)  Who or what inspired you to write this book?

This book as an independent work (and it can stand alone) is as I said before inspired by a stray writer’s remark by Robert Musil.  As one part of the eight-part novel series I am working on (the fifth part, to be precise) it represents in a vague way the middle daughter sign “Li” or “fire” or “clarity” of the eight family signs of the I Ching (#30).  When I finish, there will be one book each for the father and mother, three daughters, and three sons.

10)  What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

In this book, there is a New Age witch (or a “witz,” as the three-year-old daughter calls her).

The five other authors whom I am going to nominate are:

Richard Gilbert of “NARRATIVE”

David Fort of “djkeyserv140”

Kathy Bertone of “The Art of the Visit”

Deborah Rose Reeves of “First We Read, Then We Write”  (Deborah has since expressed her preference not to participate, but invites all of you interested in her writing to continue to visit.  She has a lot to offer and writes some very interesting and exciting posts, as well as having a WIP which she may choose to comment on at some future time, when she herself feels she’s ready.)

and the anonymous-by-preference author of “The Living Notebook”

Never having been nominated for a blog hop before, I have no idea of what happens next, and I hope I’ve done everything I’m supposed to and in the right order.  All I know is that I was absolutely delighted to participate, and to have been nominated by Emma McCoy, who writes a mean suspense novel herself and is in process of formalizing publication procedures for her novel Saving Angels (on her site now) while also writing a draft of her new WIP Unethical, participating in NaNoWriMo, juggling a career and family obligations, and blogging!  (She makes lazy people like me and you look bad, doesn’t she folks?)  The best to you all.  I hope everyone who is on our sites from the States is having a Happy Thanksgiving holiday, and that those of you the world over who are participating in other fall festivals that are analogous to Thanksgiving are also having a great time (hey, a party’s a party the world over, right?)  Until next post,  Victoria (shadowoperator)

10 Comments

Filed under Full of literary ambitions!, Literary puzzles and arguments, What is literature for?

Tagged as , ,

November 9, 2012 · 4:31 pm

How Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s “A Major Acquisition” helps rid his narrator of a minor inconvenience (the conflict between facts as facts and facts as whimsy)

Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s short story “A Major Acquisition” is in fact very, very short (it runs to a length of only three pages), and yet as with all his stories, the conflict between fact and whimsy is marked enough to merit comment at some length.  His story opens with the narrator being approached in a somewhat surreptitious manner by “an unusual-looking man” in the local tavern, who inquires as to whether he would like to purchase a locomotive.  The comic force is immediate:  the approach, made “in a softly intimate voice,” is one that a reader might imagine taking place between a sly salesman of risqué cards or photographs, yet the real item on offer is something as large and as unwieldy as a locomotive.

Typically, the speaker in the story is himself quite whimsical to match the events he encounters.  As he says of himself:  “Now it is rather easy selling me something, because I find it hard to say no; however, I felt that caution was warranted with a major purchase of this sort.  Although I know little about locomotives, I inquired about the model, the construction year, and the piston gauge; I was trying to make the man think that he was dealing with an expert who had no intention of buying a pig in a poke….The locomotive looked good, and I ordered it once we agreed on a price.  For it was secondhand, and although, as we know, locomotives wear out very slowly, I was unwilling to pay the catalog price.”  The obvious fact is that the speaker is a little off his hinges himself if we take him seriously, and yet the astounding fact that someone would actually flog a locomotive in this way causes all the other odd “facts” to assume a status that forces the reader to practice a “willing suspension of disbelief”; besides, the story is so engaging in its mannerisms and conclusions that the reader must accept it for what it is.

What in fact we are asked to believe is unusual is the fact that the locomotive is delivered that same night to the speaker’s house, which he sees after the fact as peculiar:  he says that the speed of delivery was “shady,” but that at the time “this never dawned on me.”  He parks in it his garage, after what we are encouraged to believe is serious consideration as to whether it will fit somewhere in the house!

The major conflict in the story between people is between the narrator’s cousin (who represents “facts as facts”) and the speaker himself (who represents “facts as whimsy”).  The cousin soon comes to visit, and Hildesheimer’s readers are told this about him, in an accusatory tone which would cause them (in a less absurd story) to see him as the villain of the piece:  “This man is averse to any sort of speculation, any display of emotion; for him, only facts are facts.  Nothing surprises him, he knows better, and can explain anything.  In short, an unbearable person.”  When the speaker tries to act as a good host and introduce an unexceptional topic for conversation by beginning “‘These marvelous autumn scents–‘” his cousin interrupts and says “‘Withering potato tops.'”  Though the speaker acknowledges that his cousin is right, he challenges his cousin’s gift of cognac by saying that it tastes “soapy.”  Whereupon, the cousin tells how many world’s fair prizes it has won in minor cities, and decides to stay over the night in the house.

The intrusion of whimsical fact throws the cousin off his game, however, because he can’t deal with the “fact” that the locomotive is in the garage where he wants to park his car.  The cousin inquires, in a practical application of having found it there, as to whether the narrator often drives it.  The narrator replies that “a few nights ago, a nearby farmer’s wife had been about to have a blessed event, and [he] had driven her to the city hospital.  She had given birth to twins that same night, but that probably didn’t have anything to do with the locomotive ride.”

In the next and penultimate paragraph of the story, the narrator confesses to the reader, “Incidentally, all this was made up; but on such occasions, I cannot resist embroidering a little on the truth.  I don’t know whether he believed me; he silently registered everything, and it was obvious that he no longer felt very comfortable here.  He became monosyllabic, drank another glass of cognac, and then took his leave.  I have never seen him again.”  Thus, the inconvenience of having a locomotive in the garage helps rid the narrator of the inconvenience and discomfort of having his factually oriented killjoy cousin around.  He seems to consider it a fair trade, though he does note that a short time later there is a report that the French National Railroad is missing a locomotive, which had simply disappeared from the switchyard.  As he comments on his experience from this perspective (and Hildesheimer clearly loves to play with the reader’s reactions thus), “I naturally realized that I had been the victim of a fraudulent transaction.  When I saw the seller in the village tavern a short time later, I acted cool and reserved.  On this occasion, he tried to sell me a crane, but I did not wish to have any more dealings with him.  Besides, what am I going to do with a crane?”

This last line is in a way the most pointed comedy in the whole absurdist piece:  one might as easily ask what he plans to do with the locomotive, which there is no indication that he will get rid of or return to its rightful owners.  The whole story is written in an “as if” manner, observing the fictional boundaries of a sort of magazine cautionary tale about not trusting strangers, and about alienating one’s relatives by odd behavior; yet the assertiveness of the narrator’s behavior clearly labels his attitude as one which he feels he is right to have.  Thus as with most of Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s stories, the reader is asked to navigate back and forth between probabilites, impossibilities, improbabilites, and what we are told are dead certain facts, and by the way to take part in a joyous sort of play with reality.  I hope my readers will be able to find this fine collection of short stories in a bookstore or library; the translator I have read is Joachim Neugroschel, and the exact title is The Collected Stories of Wolfgang Hildesheimer.  You will find, if you do get a chance to read all of the stories involved, that your efforts to keep track with Hildesheimer’s quick shifts between “fact” and whimsy are well-rewarded.

2 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews

Tagged as , ,

October 31, 2012 · 4:38 pm

Helping to restore the “wyr,” or life force, after calamities to nature–Daniel Heath Justice’s “The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles”

Today, I have an apology to offer my readers, and a presumably good excuse for it.  The apology is this:  I promised some time ago to finish reading, and to write a review of, Daniel Heath Justice’s (already obviously excellent and motivating) omnibus revised edition of The Way of Thorn and Thunder:  The Kynship Chronicles.  That is, I rather cavalierly assumed that I would be finished with it by the end of October and would have already written a satisfying and provocative post on it.  The book is quite long (588 pages, plus a 28-page Glossary of Names and Stories at the End), but that isn’t part of my excuse:  I’ve read long books, longer works, before, and have been able to comment on a number of books at one time in some earlier posts.  The problem is just that chore after chore and routine after routine from daily life got in the way, so that I barely had time to do simpler readings in order to complete the posting schedules I’ve set for myself.  I had hoped to finish the book and leave myself time to comment, but now that I am 159 pages into the work, it has already become obvious that I cannot begin to do credit to it.

First of all, on the most pragmatic level, there are perhaps even more significant if not more main characters in the book than there are in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, or at least as many.  This bodes well for the book’s ethos, because it helpfully represents that every voice is heard, even those which may not be helpfully inclined.  Secondly, the book has several spiritual paths to Enlightenment through craft, not one generalized sort of wizardry which is split into good and evil practitioners, though the most sympathetic path is that of the wyr, or the Green and growing world, the world of the various Tree-Born Kyn, and Beast-Clan Tetawi; there are also Other Folk of the Everland and Beyond and The Sons and Daughters of Man, to give the names of just the groups of main characters.  The concepts of sexuality have also been expanded to include other than just male-female relationships, which along with many other features in the book indicates a generosity of the picture of empathetic life force for everyone.

The path leading to further experience of the wyr as a flowing life force for one of the main characters, Tarsa’deshae, a she-Kyn Redthorn Warrior destined to become a wyr Wielder, is a rite of passage, in which (as far as I have read so far) she encounters her “true face” as a mysterious floating mask suspended in mid-air in the tunnel behind a waterfall in the main council town of the Kyn.  When she accepts the correct mask, she has a vision of the Eternity Tree, and swims in a body of water which surrounds it:  a brief quote cannot begin to describe the beauty of the full description, but I will provide it anyway.

“The Wielder couldn’t identify the color of the Tree’s bark–there didn’t seem to be a word to describe it.  It was neither silver-blue, nor grey, nor green, but a shifting marriage of the three….The leaves were of all seasons and none.  The burning red, brown, and orange of autumn flared amidst the young green of spring-born morning, and these mingled with ageless silver, copper, brass, and gold.  The Tree was of all species, all forms, all genders and none, but each image was unique in its way, and each leaf grew large and lush, wild beyond living memory, as tendrils of endless generations of ivy wrapped themselves around the great trunk and branches, dipping deeply into the waters that lapped against the wide and reaching roots.”  There is a union of opposites in the image of Tarsa in the pool of water while her clothes are consumed away by a mystic flame of life from the Tree and through the water itself, and then her elders and teachers come to claim her as one of themselves.  But this is by no means the end of the story, as all the stories in the book are still waiting to be resolved at this point; this is as far as I have read, and I simply had to share the description of the Tree, though there’s a lot more about it and about the force of wyr to read in the book.

Thus, though I have failed on my original promise to write a full review/article on this so-far gripping and spiritually very fine book by the end of October, I hope I have whetted your appetite for the book itself:  it’s less important in the final analysis that I get a lot of credit for writing a good post on the book, though I naturally want to do it justice, than it is that you read the book and we get a chance to discuss it.  So, if you read no other fantasy novel this whole year and even if you think fantasy except for classics like The Lord of the Rings isn’t your “thing,” please consider that this book is truly a world classic and isn’t just like Tolkien’s in the sense that unlike Tolkien it isn’t limited to Western culture’s mythologies and traditions, but is about the World, as its multiple cultures and divination traditions indicates.  I will faithfully try to finish the rest of the book as soon as I possibly can, and perhaps do another post on it when I’m done, but I couldn’t let the last day of October go by without reverting to my promise and attempting to fulfill it as far as I can.  As I said before, I may have covered only 159 pages so far (to the beginning of Chapter 12), but I’m already anticipating re-reading it once I’ve finished it, as I have with Tolkien’s work many times in the past.

Though I know that many people just now are still recovering from the latest of natural disasters, recent storms such as Hurricane Sandy that have hit as well as the massive snowstorms that have blanketed parts of the United States due to Sandy’s conflict with the jet stream, I am writing today because I have mostly been only inconvenienced by the storm, and would like to share something which might provide spiritual inspiration for others who are equally looking to help people in need of a worthwhile distraction from their own worries.  I would like to position this novel squarely where its talented writer has already positioned it in the writing:  in the belief that we all have a part to play in the world, and that what happens to one person does not happen to him or her alone, but happens to us all; thus, we need to share in whatever way we can to restore the “Eternity Tree” of life to those around us both near and far, and to improve the flow of life force to us all.  I hope it won’t seem callous thus that I am going on with my life in an ordinary way, having given Sandy its due and picked up again where I left off.  And maybe, just maybe, if I get really lucky, my post will lift someone’s spirits who needs it, or will place a copy of The Way of Thorn and Thunder:  The Kynship Chronicles in someone’s hands, someone who needs a spiritual boost from a writer who is a true leader and an inspiration for the way to go forth after much destruction.  And this applies not only to Sandy, but to tsunamis, and earthquakes, and tidal waves and tornados:  there is for each culture a Good Book to which people look for guidance, but in the world there are in more modest ways also many “good books,” “great books” even, which can help to show the way when life seems most threatened by disaster.  Justice’s book is one such book, is all I am claiming.

4 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as ,

October 26, 2012 · 4:58 pm

Ann Patchett’s “State of Wonder”–a mystery and a story about conflicting loyalties in the Amazonian forest

So many times it seems that I start a post wanting to share my sense of the book, but am forced to “spoil” the plot by retelling large chunks of it in order to make my points about the quality of a book.  This time, however, even if my post turns out to be a great deal shorter than usual (which is what I always seem to threaten but rarely deliver on), I’m determined to keep the book’s character development and events largely a mystery because they are just too good to ruin for my readers.

The story in State of Wonder begins in Minnesota at Vogel, a large pharmaceutical company, which has recently received news about Anders Eckman, a lab technician who has been sent to the Amazon to check on the progress of a recalcitrant researcher (a Dr. Swenson, who is in her seventies).  Dr. Swenson has sent news that Eckman has died of a fever.  Marina Singh, Eckman’s office mate, receives the news from her boss, Mr. Fox, with whom it later turns out she is having an affair.  Neither is married to or involved with anyone else, because this isn’t where the drama of the story lies, but also because there is a certain constraint between them due to their relative positions in the company, Marina calls him only “Mr. Fox,” seems mostly to think of him that way, and only uses his first name about once.

From the beginning, there is a blurriness between the loyalty Mr. Fox feels to his relationship with Marina and his use of her as an employee.  When he goes to tell Karen Eckman about her husband’s death, he leaves Marina to do the hard emotional work, and leaves it largely to her after that to care for Karen’s upset over the issue and her urgent insistence that she would know if Anders were actually dead.  There is also an obscurity in the pull Marina feels between helping Karen and helping Mr. Fox, until the two threads of narrative entertwine:  it turns out that whatever it is that Mr. Fox feels for Marina, he wants her to go to the Amazon and push Dr. Swenson some more about her research, when it will be done, for example, what the results are.  It is a fertility drug being researched in the confines of the Lakashi nation as far as Marina knows.

There is some play with conflict in the early parts of the novel when Marina must decide whether or not to go to the Amazonian jungle and resolve the mystery surrounding Eckman’s death while also prodding Dr. Swenson for her employer.  One such moment of indecision for Marina is when she must decide whether or not to take Lariam, an anti-malaria drug which causes almost hallucinogenic nightmares in the taker, as Marina knows because she had to take it as a child in order to visit her father in India.  Another is when she distances herself from Mr. Fox’s demands by taking with her a special cell phone he has sent, while leaving it in her suitcase, which gets inconveniently (or conveniently) lost.  Finally, when she reaches Manaus, Dr. Swenson’s port-of-call on a bi-monthly basis for supplies, there is the sense of straining loyalties as well.  Dr. Swenson has left Barbara and Jackie Bovender, a married couple of alternative culture nature, in charge of her apartment and of fending off inquiries about where exactly in the jungle she is.  They themselves don’t even know exactly, and Dr. Swenson in the protection of her research has cut herself off from telephone, computer, and every other form of modern technology, even from her employer.  The Bovenders genuinely like Marina and are torn by their obligations to be nice to her and also to respect the wishes of Dr. Swenson, their employer.

When Marina finally makes contact with Dr. Swenson and a young deaf Hummocca boy whom she adopted in the past under unarticulated circumstances, she is at first strenuously rejected by Dr. Swenson and then unwillingly accepted.  It turns out that Dr. Swenson was once Marina’s teacher and mentor before she became a pharmocologist, when both were in obstetrics, and Marina made a serious error in a caesarian section, one which she herself saw as a reason to change careers.  Since the drug being researched involves fertility, there is an overlap of interests, as when Marina gets to meet the Lakashi people and becomes willy-nilly their obstetrician and general surgeon.  She is very, very unwilling to do so, but because of Dr. Swenson’s past and present influence over her, her loyalty causes her to allow herself to be committed to the project.

Past this point, I am unwilling to proceed, because I don’t want to give everything away.  But I will give some hints:  the fertility drug can cause unexpected people to become pregnant, and has some interesting side effects; Anders Eckman’s death has more to it than is first articulated, much, much more; there are other doctors there doing an unproclaimed kind of research with Dr. Swenson; Marina Singh experiences some of the joys and perils of “going native,” as it used condescendingly to be called, a topic in literature important in such works as The Heart of Darkness most noticeably; and the most heartbreaking scene in the whole book is when the deaf boy, Easter, whose hero was Eckman before Eckman disappeared, is used unwittingly at first as a counter in an unexpected barter.  Beyond these hints, which I hope will lead you to discover the book for yourself and experience the complexity of Patchett’s ability to consider all variables involved in experiments with life forces and the interactions between different peoples, I won’t go.  Please dip into the book at your earliest opportunity, and follow it through to the startling ending.

3 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews, Literary puzzles and arguments

Tagged as , ,

October 24, 2012 · 2:57 pm

Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s “The Light Gray Spring Coat”–Coincidence and the Inconsequential in Fiction

Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s “The Light Gray Spring Coat” is at first encounter a short, short, and flimsy tale about a coat, of all things.  It isn’t as “big” or as long as Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” for example, though it is riddled with absurdities as well.  It is rather about coincidences and the inconsequential which add up to the breakdown of true communication, and the result is that it causes one to wonder if one has in fact understood what real communication is about.

The story begins when the character narrating, Paul Holle, receives a note from a long-lost cousin who had disappeared twelve years before after going out to mail a letter.  But the absurdity begins almost at once:  the cousin writes, requesting that Holle mail to him in Australia his “light gray spring coat,” but notes that he may keep the book about edible mushrooms which is in the pocket, because there are no edible mushrooms in Australia.  When Holle tells his wife that he’s had the letter from his cousin, she doesn’t respond in a characteristically human way, by asking where the cousin has been all this time, or expressing surprise that they’ve heard from him.  Rather, she simply asks “‘Really?  What does he write?'”  When Paul tells her the message, he reduces it likewise to something inconsequential:  “‘He needs his light gray coat, and there are no edible mushrooms in Australia.'”  His wife responds that the cousin (Eduard) should then eat something else.  The conversation ends here, and once again, all lines of ordinary communication are shut down:  there is no further curiosity expressed between these two characters about Eduard’s motives in leaving or his choice of Australia, or anything else for the time being.

The next section begins with “Later, the piano tuner came.”  One wonders just what the “through line of action” could be, but this is not left a mystery for long.  While the piano tuner is working, Paul notices that what he takes to be his cousin’s “light gray spring coat” is hanging in the closet, and knowing his wife’s habits, is surprised that she has brought it downstairs so promptly from the attic, “for normally my wife does something only after it no longer matters whether it gets done or not.”  He takes the coat and mails it out, but forgets to remove the book from the pocket.  When he gets back, his wife and the piano tuner are searching for something, which turns out to be the piano tuner’s coat:  it is the one which Holle has mailed out to his cousin by mistake.  When he tells them he has just sent it to Australia, “by mistake,” he explains no further, nor do they ask for an explanation, except that his wife asks “‘Why [to] Australia?'”  He only repeats “By mistake,” and the piano tuner takes his part in the farcical dialogue: “‘Well, then I won’t intrude any longer,’ said Mr. Kohlhaas [the piano tuner], somewhat embarrassed, if not particularly surprised.”  The humorous here is invested in the fact that Kohlhaas is not in fact surprised, since he knows nothing about the similar appearing coat, nor about the cousin.

They give the piano tuner the cousin’s coat in exchange, but the mistake (despite the fact that Paul has a sherry with the man and they talk about pianos) is never explained.  Two days later, they receive a box of mushrooms from the piano tuner, and a letter which he found in the pocket of the cousin’s coat, sending a now twelve years old ticket to the opera to a friend and telling him that he was going to be out of town for a while.  The incurious wife only asks about why they’re having mushrooms for lunch, and when she’s told that the piano tuner sent them, remarks that it’s “nice of him,” but he “shouldn’t have” without apparently seeing any connection with the previous remark at the beginning about there being no edible mushrooms in Australia.  When she sees the opera ticket on the table, she asks about it too, but when told simply that it’s twelve years old, says only “‘Oh well….I wouldn’t have cared to go to [it] anyway.'”

But the ridiculousness of the situation doesn’t end there.  The cousin writes another letter and says that he needs to be sent a tenor recorder.  The cousin reports that in the coat pocket of the coat he has received “(which, strangely enough, had grown longer)” he has found a book on how to play the recorder and is going to use it.  He also says, however, that recorders are not “available” in Australia (this is patently absurd, to borrow a phrase, but by now the point is clearly made).  When Paul reports to his wife that he’s had another letter from his cousin Eduard, the wife once again asks, as if by rote, “‘What does he write?'”  When Paul ridiculously condenses the whole matter into the information “‘He says there are no recorders in Australia.'”  His wife simply responds:  “‘Well, then he should play another instrument.'” Paul agrees.  The story ends with the simple two-sentence paragraph, “My wife is refreshingly and disarmingly matter-of-fact.  Her replies are straightforward but thorough.”

What creates the highly comic atmosphere of this story is in fact the combination of coincidence (the two light gray spring coats appear similar, each has an instruction book in its pocket, there are several letters) with the inconsequential manner in which every possibility for the characters to create a genuine kind of communication about the events is neglected and short-circuited.  It’s true, the issues at hand are not major life and death issues and are purposely mundane and somewhat silly.  Yet, if this is how these characters ordinarily communicate, what on earth would they do with a more devastating event?  In each case where there is an opportunity for the narrating character to explain more about what he knows, he neglects to do so.  What’s more, the other characters (including the piano tuner, who loses his own coat and finds a book on mushrooms in the replacement coat he is given, and the cousin, who receives a coat that doesn’t fit and a book on recorders in the coat pocket) regard this situation as normal, and don’t ask for further information.  The punchline of the whole story truly does occur in the final paragraph, because the speaker is praising his wife’s matter-of-factness, straightforwardness and thoroughness which she exhibits while lacking total information without which she is acting or advising action.  One must therefore wonder what this marriage is based on, a serious point in the midst of so much humor, if the characters or even one of them routinely hide matters from the other, or speak so definitively about something they don’t have complete information about.  But they obviously feel secure with each other this way.  And in fact, since all the characters in the story share this notable lack of curiosity, what sort of world is it they live in which provides for such incompetence in social circumstances without devastating catastrophes of misunderstanding?  If the stakes were a little higher and had to do with something more than a misplaced overcoat, this story itself might depict such a catastrophe.  As it is, once again Hildesheimer has managed to captivate and enchant with his off-beat, quizzical, absurdist view of life.

2 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews

Tagged as , ,

October 18, 2012 · 7:07 pm

How magic resides in the lessons of life–Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist”

When we hear a simple tale told by a grandparent in an unpretentious style, with a sort of humorous, or sad, or wry punchline attached to the end, we may make the mistake of assuming that it’s just a matter of another old country saying (or street-wise rejoinder, for that matter), that the punchline is something not really to be taken seriously.  But if we had lived that person’s life through, we might well think otherwise–in fact, that punchline or reduction of a piece of reality to what seems like a formulaic old saw might in that case be something to make us sit up and take notice, or mumble under our breaths, or sigh dramatically, or feel a shiver as if a “person just walked over our graves.”

Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist is all about the experience of attaining life wisdom through a sort of personal journey, paying attention to signs and omens along the way and always keeping one’s goal in sight even when it seems delayed by everything that happens to one.  And the book is full of teacher figures eager to share their principles with the right student and knowing more than he does himself about his dreams.  Signs and omens and pilgrimages to Mecca and belief in Jesus Christ and Allah and prophets and seers and Gypsy fortune tellers and scholars and merchants and even, yes, an alchemist all have their place.  Even encounters with rogues and thieves and people who threaten to murder one are or become learning experiences for an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago, who starts out only by having unusually troubling dreams.  When he asks a Gypsy woman to interpret, she tells him that if he goes to Egypt and visits the Pyramids, he will find a treasure that makes him a rich man.  It’s obvious that a kind of symbolic alchemy is going on in the text, however, because as Santiago is led on through the book by various prophesying and teaching figures, he accepts a spiritual sort of quest in place of a monetary one, and thus is in the process of refining himself and allowing himself to be refined by others.

Santiago learns that he is in search of living out his own “Personal Legend” and is being led by these others to perceive the “Soul of the World” in all living things.  Reading the signs and omens as he learns to do, he seems not ever actually to use or to use only once the two magic stones, one black and one white, Urim and Thummim, pronosticating stones given him by Melchizedek, a mysterious “king” with a Biblical name who says he is the “king of Salem” and wears (under a voluminous robe) a golden breastplate.  Santiago learns the importance of accepting his fate and learning to perceive it truly and follow it well because, as an Arabic crystal dealer for whom he works for a year says, “Maktub,” (“It is written”) by “the hand that writes all,” though the words used are always “Personal Legend” and never the less gentle and more dreaded word “Fate.”

What’s the most unusual is the combination in the book of an uncomplicated story line with what amounts almost to a treatise on belief, as Santiago goes from being a shepherd to a traveller to a temporary employee for a candy dealer in Tangier, then for a crystal merchant in Tangier, whom he so enriches by his merchandising concepts that he makes enough money to decide whether he wants to pay his passage back to Spain and forget the whole matter or go forward.  But he would have worked for neither of the two men had he not been robbed at a time in Tangier when he was unable to speak Arabic; what he later learns to speak fluently is known as “the universal language without words.”  He also learns that understanding and following one’s Personal Legend is a matter of not perceiving himself as a victim of the thief, but as someone following his own destiny.  After all, as he also knows by this time, “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation.”  (In my edition of this book, there are questions for discussion, and one of them is centered around whether this does not convey at least a hint of narcissism–but when one has covered the entire book and realizes that the doctrine taught throughout is that the main unifying force of the whole world is love, and that acting in line with love in fact helps one find one’s Personal Legend, the point is dismissible, I believe.)

Santiago in fact goes to the Sahara and, surrounded by dangers such as tribal warfare, makes his way with his caravan to an oasis, meeting an Englishman along the way who first introduces him to the idea of alchemy, carries a load of books along, and also has two prognosticating Urim and Thummim stones.  The Englishman is trying to learn from books what the shepherd is learning from life.  At the oasis, the Englishman seeks for knowledge of the alchemist who is said to live just to the south of there, and Santiago falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Fatima whom they have stopped to ask for information.  This later becomes a temptation to him also, to forget about the treasure near the Pyramids and stay with her.  But fate intervenes again:  the boy reads the omen of two hawks warring in the sky, and reports back to the oasis chieftains (who are at peace with each other in the oasis) that a warring tribe is about to descend.  He is threatened with death if this turns out to be a false prediction, but he has spoken truly, and the chieftains muster in time successfully to defend the oasis from attack.

The boy’s fate takes another turn when the real alchemist seeks him out and challenges him because he read the signs of the desert accurately.  Because the boy shows courage at this meeting at swordpoint (said to be the most necessary thing to have in order to stand up to one’s Personal Legend), the alchemist leads him further into the desert, within a short distance of the Pyramids, to an old Coptic monastery.  There the alchemist shows the boy how to transmute lead into gold, but when the boy asks if he himself will ever be able to do so, the alchemist responds that it is his own Personal Legend to have done so, not the boy’s.

When Santiago is actually standing in front of the Pyramids, he is remembering that his heart earlier told him to be aware of the place where his tears fall, because there is where his heart is and his treasure also.  At this point, he weeps at the beauty of the Pyramids and the desert night, and so takes the command literally and begins to dig with his hand in the desert soil beneath him, hoping to unearth a literal treasure.  But at the next moment, he is set upon by refugees who take his only remaining gold from him and beat him nearly senseless.  They have asked, though, what he is doing there, and when he tells them he is digging for treasure because he twice dreamed of it there, they scoff at him and prepare to depart.  One of them in mocking him, however, goes go far as to tell him that he had fallen asleep on just that spot on the desert two years before and had dreamed something about a treasure buried in an old sycamore tree near a ruined church on the field of Spain where the shepherds and their flocks sometimes stayed, but that he himself is not so stupid as to cross the whole desert and into another country to follow a dream.  They leave, and suddenly Santiago realizes that he is now rich beyond his dreams, because he does have that kind of belief, and he can get his way back again somehow and claim the treasure.

Lest one assume that this story ends with the usual lessons about alchemy being only a means of transforming a metal or only truly being about changing people from one state to another morally or spiritually, it is for Santiago both:  it is this complexity which means that if he is a wise man and a rich man, he will never confuse the two, but will always pay his debts of teaching and learning and of wealth in the proper coin.  It also is not a tale which rewards us only with the unadventurous thought that “happiness is best found in your own backyard.”  That would be a truly unrewarding moral to the story.  Luckily, Coelho provides an Epilogue in which Santiago goes back to Spain, retrieves his treasure, and feels the kiss in the wind of his desert woman, Fatima, waiting for him.  The optimism of the text leads us to believe that he will go back to the oasis, too.  Thus, though he has achieved his Personal Legend, he will never have to reproach himself, as others in the story do, with not having had the courage to act on their dreams.  He is both materially and spiritually successful, but it took the second to bring about the first, and it is the second which will ensure that he does not misuse his material goods.

The 1993 English edition of the text translated by Alan R. Clarke and published by HarperCollins has a brief biographic sketch of the author and tells how he himself was repressed first by his parents from following his dream to be a writer, and then imprisoned and tortured by a repressive political regime for defending free expression.  When he was freed, he first decided to live what he regarded as a more “normal” life.  But then he had “an encounter with a stranger,” whom he had first met in a dream.  “The stranger suggested that Paulo should return to Catholicism and study the benign side of magic.  He also encouraged Paulo to walk the Road of Santiago de Compostela, the medieval pilgrim’s route.”  After that pilgrimage, Coelho’s writing career took off.  As of the 1993 printing, “The Alchemist went on to sell more copies than any other book in Brazilian literary history.”  It just goes to show that what to one person might be a tall tale or a moralistic fantasy chockful of truisms is for another a guide to true wisdom, and that discovering one’s own Personal Legend means listening sometimes to older, wiser voices that speak of their own experience of things, so that one doesn’t have to find everything out through trial and error.  And Paulo Coelho is one of those voices who speak truly of life’s tribulations, though he disguises them ever so well as simple learning exercises, perhaps so that we can learn to resist discouragement as well as his character Santiago did, and as he himself obviously had to do.  This book, though, is a delight as a literary experience as well, with its simple style and clear explanations of complicated states of mind.  I predict that it is the fate of Santiago the shepherd boy in The Alchemist to continue to please readers for many years to come.

4 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as , ,

October 16, 2012 · 3:01 pm

Anticipation and longing in Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Traveler”

In the middle of November, I will be travelling to Canada by train to attend my graduation for my Ph.D.  While there, I will stay with some dear friends, a man and woman who have helped me over many a hurdle by their concerted force and welcoming ways.  So, it was only fitting that some days ago when I happened to read Italo Calvino’s “The Adventure of a Traveler” I immediately understood the notions and laughable moments he set forth therein:  anticipation and longing are an arrival of their own, an arrival at the state of appreciation for one’s eventual destination.  The glow cast over the trip itself is something which comes from one’s expected activities:  for me fellowship, laughter, and good times, for Federico V. in the story a regularly appointed rendevous with his lover, Cinzia U., “a resident of Rome” who also lives at the end of a train journey.

The whole of the story, a ten page short story, is taken up with describing Federico’s activities as he looks forward to the train journey, calculates just where on the train to sit and how best to get a compartment as much as possible to himself, plans the details of his trip ahead of time, and gets a “token” of his whole trip, an actual telephone token with which he will call Cinzia once he arrives.  It is significant that he only supplies himself with one, when he could easily even on his apparently middle class budget afford to supply himself with several, in case of loss or error on the phone line.  This token is in a sense the last bar that stands between him and his lover, and is simultaneously the last thing he has to do to meet her and the first contact he will have with her each time he travels.  As the text says, “Everything seemed to be there to encourage him, to give a spring to his steps like the rubberized pavement of the station, and even the obstacles–the wait, his minutes numbered, at the last ticket window still open, the difficulty of breaking a large bill, the lack of small change at the newsstand–seemed to exist for his pleasure in confronting and overcoming them.”

The whole trip is filled with things Federico already knows well from past experience:  how to keep other people at bay and mostly out of his compartment by closing the curtains; how to borrow a paper from someone who’s finished reading it; how to start out in a second class car perhaps to switch to first later in the trip; how to arrange his clothes for sleeping so that he does not wrinkle his overcoat, which he uses as a blanket; how to adjust the heat and cold to keep himself comfortable without too much resistance from other passengers; in short, how to organize each and every moment of the trip so that nothing goes wrong and he gets to where he is going with the greatest ease possible.  And yet, how can it be the greatest ease possible, when he has planned everything out with the careful consideration of an obsessive-compulsive person who has never been on the trip before?

When he is finally on the train and having his “adventure,” which to some people would be simply a rather pedestrian and necessary trip (though of course they are not travelling presumably for the same reason as he), snatches of a French love song he seems to be making up in his head flow through the text, and one wonders if he’s finally thinking of Cinzia as something other than an abstract goal.  But the fragments of the song (“Je voyage en volupté,” “Je voyage toujours…l’hiver et l’été,” “du voyage, je sais tout,” “J’arrive avec le train,” and so forth) are more about the trip itself than about his lover Cinzia, love in the wonderful city of Rome, or anything more usual that a man travelling for love might be expected to be thinking of.

When the old pillow merchant comes by out on the platform, there is even a bit of Calvino’s fantastic imagination:  “The pillow now was in Federico’s arms, square, flat, just like an envelope, and, what’s more, covered with postmarks:  it was the daily letter to Cinzia, also departing this evening, and instead of the page of eager scrawl there was Federico in person to take the invisible path of the night mail, through the hand of the old winter messenger….indeed the very fact of departing, the hiring of the cushion, was a form of enjoying [later comforts, later intimacy, later sweetnesses], a way of entering the dimension where Cinzia reigned, the circle enclosed by her soft arms.”

The comedy of the story and the gentle pathos is typical Calvino, for when he calls Cinzia up on the telephone, she is still drowsy from sleep, “and he was already in the tension of their days together, in the desperate battle against the hours; and he realized he would never manage to tell her anything of the significance of that night, which he now sensed was fading, like every perfect night of love, at the cruel explosion of day.”  On the surface, of course, the “perfect night of love” is the night he will actually spend with Cinzia; still, since they have “days” together they presumably may have also more than one night, and the “perfect night of love” about which he will never be able to tell Cinzia the significance is also the night he has spent on the train, on his great “adventure,” a modern day knight-errant struggling against modern day challenges to reach his lady.

Thus, though Calvino is never heavily ironic nor heavy-handed either, this stands as a mild cautionary tale about letting anticipation and longing build and find their natural release in an ordinary way, instead of frittering away the strength of one’s feelings through petty details and obsessive habits.  It certainly was an eyeopener of a tale for me, because ever since my trip was planned, I have been notifying my friends of every minor detail of my arrival and departure and have tried to make my plans foolproof from this end as well.  Now that I know what one of my favorite authors has to say on the subject, I will try to conduct myself with a more becoming gravitas, and save my feelings for my friends rather than for the displacement activity of hogging the seats on the train!

5 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews

Tagged as ,

October 11, 2012 · 2:26 pm

When wicked bureaucracy and monstrous evil conjoin–“The Cabin in the Woods”

My last post kicked off the Halloween season with what I regarded as an appropriately frightening tale, A. S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest.”  Nevertheless, a friend of mine said, “Yes, it’s a good post, but it’s not about something like a true horror book or movie.  Why don’t you let your hair down and write about something that’s just-for-fun scary and not about so serious a set of moral points?”  So, warning my readers ahead of time with a “spoiler alert” (I will be giving away the end of the movie), I’ve undertaken to write a shorter post than usual on “The Cabin in the Woods.”

This post is probably going to be one of the shortest I’ve ever written, for the simple reason that though I am moderately well-trained in other areas of theater, I’ve never taken a film course or been more than a casual film buff.  Generally, I respond to movies through their plot devices, character sketches, and most obvious symbolism, as if they were stories written down on the page.  Thus, I claim no special status in my remarks about a recent horror-film-with-a-difference which I’ve seen, though I’m proud of myself for even attempting to write down a few observations on the movie.

When a friend of mine who is as clueless as I am about horror films read the blurb on the back of the DVD, she was persuaded that this was a genuinely funny movie, one which two horror film cowards could view with the assurance that they would laugh their way through whatever silly shadows cast by ghostly hands might appear.  After all, the blurb said something about a group of producers/directors who are behind the scenes of a scary encounter in a “haunted” house, set up apparently to pull a joke on unsuspecting visitors to/buyers of the property.  This, we felt, was going to be good.

Once we started actually watching, there were a few moments of mild humor of a sophomoric sort,  but the wittiest rejoinders were always delivered by an engaging pothead who was one of a group of five young people on their way to the cabin for a vacation in the woods.  If there had been enough humor in the movie, it would’ve worked better, or if the pothead had had more lines and been less in the shadows of the action, it might’ve been a better movie.  Or maybe given my rank amateur status as a viewer of this kind of film, I have no right to complain.  But I have seen movies which were both scary and extremely clever and artistic with their humor, such as “The Shining” (“Hi, honey, I’m home!”) and “An American Werewolf in London” (the dialogues with the friend who comes back from the dead, and the main character waking up in the wolves’ cage at the zoo) and I was perhaps spoiled for something as full of the one-trick pony joke as “The Cabin in the Woods” from the start.  The joke appears to be that while the adventurous, heroic characters are to be killed off, the inaptly named “virgin” and the pothead are meant to survive, at least to the end of the film, after having been apparently killed off more than once.  (I’ve commented on humor plus horror as a workable combination in plays, films, and books before, in my post of August 20, 2012 entitled “‘What beck’ning ghost, along the moonlight shade/Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?’–Alexander Pope”.)

The best dramatic parts of the film are the sections when the producers/directors of the putative “reality tv show” appear, as it gradually becomes apparent that they are more than they seem:  the dramatic tension, such as it is, builds and is invested in watching them trying to kill off the characters.  But a large part of the dramatic tension is lost when it becomes apparent that they really are “out for blood,” and suddenly the movie becomes just another horror film in a list of many, and one feels it’s probably not one of the best.

One of the most effective qualities of the filming which I feel I can responsibly comment on (as a person largely disinclined to watch horror films) is the extreme darkness of the scenes.  It’s effective in the scenes shot in the woods at night and in the cabin not solely because of any obligation to a supposed realism, but because as Henry James reminded us in writing about his “potboiler” “The Turn of the Screw,” using the reader’s (or viewer’s) mind to half-invent the horrors you want to portray is at least half the battle.  The zombies are very bumpy and reddish-black and messy and not backlit, which helps more than actual pale faces and drooping, stained features would have.  And by the time “all hell breaks loose” and all the other fantastic monsters and so forth appear, one is more or less preoccupied solely with watching the two surviving characters try to keep their heads above water (and there is a water scene) amidst what seem like incredible odds.

The end of the movie, with the two surviving characters sharing a joint while the world ends, is engaging, but not really believable on some subconscious “okay, I’ve seen all this horror, now deliver the chilling punchline about how some trace of evil has managed to survive” or conversely “now everything’s all right again and we can all draw a sigh of relief” level.  As noted before, I’m not an expert on horror films, but the utter devastation in the final scene and the sort of shoulder shrug response of “oh well, let’s just get high and forget about it” is mysteriously unsatisfying, though certainly one has to admit there is a certain justice in the two characters quietly enjoying a joint and accepting that the challenge has been too much for them.

This is about where I stand on the movie “The Cabin in the Woods,” though I am interested in hearing what those with either more film experience or more experience of horror films in particular have to say:  basically, I think the most innovative and creative part of the whole movie is its premise, its main idea, that is, that some group of competitive, driven button pushers somewhere is sitting on the powder keg of hell and keeping it under control, and yet that they have constantly to function within the idea of an “acceptable loss margin,” which consists of other people.  Have you seen the movie?  What do you think?

10 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews, Other than literary days....

Tagged as