Tag Archives: quality

October 9, 2012 · 7:59 pm

A humanly chilling tale for Halloween–A. S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest”

A. S. Byatt’s tale “The Thing in the Forest” from Little Black Book of Stories is a deceptively docile story about perspective, childhood, and nightmare (both the everyday and the fantastic kinds).  By and large, what produces the at least initially docile tone is the series of simple declarative sentences, often beginning with “the” or “there” as in any children’s well-told story with its fiats and “there once was.”  Defying the conventional writers’ wisdom about varying sentence structure, for a lot of the story these sentences march in order, simply telling what was the case without apology or intricacy, though there is intricacy in the implications attendant on the “simple” facts so posed.  This means of telling reinforces the factuality from a childlike perspective, at the same time as it heightens the mystery of “the thing in the forest.”  Just as the two little girls who are the main characters wonder if their WWII evacuation to the countryside is a punishment or a treat–and many children in England were sent into the country at the time to keep them safe–so a sense of uncertainty about the terror itself causes them to separate willingly after they “see” the thing in the forest attached to the countryhouse where they are staying.

The “thing” too is simply described, with only a gentle introduction and a slight variation from the previously repetitive sentence structure:  “Did they hear it first or smell it first?  Both sound and scent were at first infinitesimal and dispersed.  Both gave the impression of moving in–in waves–from the whole perimeter of the forest.  Both increased very slowly in volume, and both were mixed, a sound and a smell fabricated of many disparate sounds and smells.”  In the rest of the description, which tells what smells exactly and sounds precisely the thing is composed of, the fantastic is at war with the flowing pace of the language, not elevated or unusual, but causing a concatenation of images for the reader to be appalled by.  The “thing” is apparently not aware of or not after the two main characters, but at first seems simply to inhabit that time, place, and set of conditions.

When the characters become two grownup women, vacationing after the deaths of their mothers within a week of each other, they happen to meet up in the house again, in front of a “medieval-looking illustrated book” which is on display at the house in the room where they had previously eaten as children there, though there is in the present time no record of any of the children having visited.  Other war time events that took place in the great house are extensively commemorated, they find.  Thus, there is a reversal:  in the original encounter, they had no previous warning of “the thing in the forest,” though both of them were on record as being there, since they were later returned to their mothers, who unlike their fathers survived the war; now, there is no indication that the two main characters were there, whereas there is the illustrated book about family legends regarding the “thing.”  The “thing” can clearly take over places and people in at least this sense of memory.

In the book, the “thing” is spoken of as the “Loathly Worm,” not a dragon with wings but an “English worm,” and is described as having been killed several times by the “scions” of the house (it needs periodically to be “re-killed” because like the earthworm it is compared to, it can grow new heads).

One important feature of the story is that though Penny, the tall thin little girl, now a trained child psychologist, and Primrose, the short plump blonde child, a babysitting storyteller for children, are so different in other respects, the episode has clearly been a major force in both their lives in different ways, as their “vocations” attest, since both have wound up caring for children.

As the two women converse over tea, they finally agree that they both “saw” the Loathly Worm and that it has continued to affect them.  As Penny says, “….I think that there are things that are real–more real than we are–but mostly we don’t cross their paths or they don’t cross ours.  Maybe at very bad times we get into their world, or notice what they are doing in ours.”  For the first time, they admit that maybe the monster disposed of a little girl named Alys whom they had refused to let play with them:  “There had been a mess, a disgusting mess, they remembered, but no particular sign of anything that might have been, or been part of, or belonged to, a persistent little girl called Alys.”  The two women agree to meet up again, but when the time comes, both of them sit alone in separate B & Bs, as if paralyzed by the fear they once felt.  Something peculiar affects them and keeps them apart.

Primrose decides the next day to go back to the forest, while Penny walks off in the opposite direction.  This is characteristic of their personalities as adults:  while Primrose the fairy tale teller is practical and down-to-earth, Penny, the “rationcinative” is impractical and given to avoidance.  Primrose takes a different path into the wood than they had taken the first time.  She enjoys the flowers at first, and the birds and small animals.  We see her as a child in retrospect, loved and protected by a mother who creatively made her some toy stuffed animals each Christmas.  Her view as a developing child is a touching one.  “She told herself stories at night about a girl-woman, an enchantress in a fairy wood, loved and protected by an army of wise and gentle creatures.  She slept banked in by stuffed creatures, as the house in the blitz was banked in by inadequate sandbags.”  She reasons to herself in the present that she should get to the center of the “forest” and Byatt uses a sentence in quotation marks to show that Primrose is the heroine of her own story, thinking of it as a different story she might tell to the children she tends:  “‘She came to the centre and sat on the mossy chair.'”  We are told that normally she does not frighten the children with this particular story of the Loathly Worm from her past.  “She frightened them with slimy things that came up the plughole, or swarmed out of the U-bend in the lavatory, or tapped on windows at night, and were despatched by bravery and magic.  There were waiting goblins in urban dumps beyond the streetlights.  But the woods in her tales were sources of glamour, of rich colours and unseen hidden life, flower fairies and more magical beings.  They were places where you used words like spangles and sequins for real dewdrops on real dock leaves.”  When Primrose has sat a while, she becomes prey to warring desires, the one to go home and the other to stay exactly where she is, questioning if she ever had a home.

Though Penny has taken an apparently opposite route, she too winds up on one side of the wood, so that (as in many a fairy tale) the wood becomes that magical place that all of the champions against it must face.  “She had wagered on freedom and walked away, and walking away had brought her here, as she had known it would.”  She begins to move “as if she were hunted or hunting.”  Since she is apparently looking for the monster, she quite logically begins to trail its scat:  “She found things she remembered, threadworms of knitting wool, unravelled dishcloth cotton, clinging newsprint.  She found odd sausage-shaped tubed of membrane, containing fragments of hair and bone and other inanimate stuffs.  They were like monstrous owl-pellets, or the gut-shaped hair-balls vomited by cats….It had been here, but how long ago?”  She comes out at a place she suddenly recognizes, and finds some “small bones” and a tortoiseshell hairslide, and suddenly the reader begins to speculate again about the child Alys.  Is this a fantasy tale, or a tale about a reality too horrible to relate?  Did the two girls perhaps do something to Alys to make her stop following them through the wood?  Is there a real monster?  In the past, are they seeing a bomb fall, or perhaps seeing the results on the ground of a bomb that has already fallen?   At this point present and past become one for a moment, because the traces of human death are still there.  Penny thinks for a moment of bringing the bones together and burying them, but does not do so.

Primrose enters the forest in the morning of this day in the present of the story; by the time Penny sees “the full moon” and is “released” by the forest, night has clearly come.  Now what do our two main characters do?  Whereas Primrose had previously made up a better type of forest to tell children about, and as Penny had specialized in dreams as a child psychologist, so they both take their own way out again.  They end up going back to town in the same train, but both remembering the expression of misery on the face of the monster, they avoid each other on the platform.  “They saw each other through that black imagined veil which grief, or pain, or despair hangs over the visible world.  They saw each other’s face and thought of the unforgettable misery of the face they had seen in the forest.  Each thought that the other was the witness, who made the thing certainly real, who prevented her from slipping into the comfort of believing she had imagined it or made it up.”

Penny is haunted, and after returning to town, goes back later to the original entrance they’d come in by, wanting to see the monster face to face.  Her story ends with her hearing and smelling its approach.  Primrose overcomes it by telling her children’s group at a mall about it in fairy tale form.  These are two characteristic choices again, but now it is Penny who is facing what she previously avoided and Primrose avoiding ever so delicately what she previously faced, trying to envelope the “Loathly Worm” in a net of fiction.  Byatt’s choice of her subject, however, is characteristic of both, for as readers we are encouraged not only to believe in the monster on a fantastic level, but also to look beyond it, to a harsh reality, the facts of war, death, decay.  And we see, as I believe Byatt wants us to see, that in our century, war is not about a man’s heroic contest with a Loathly Worm, nor perhaps was it ever so simple a thing, even symbolically.  It’s about the quotidian level of destruction which goes on daily through the deliquescence of all uncomplicated daily things which are eliminated in their simple nature during wars and which become so much detritus, trailing mournfully and sluggishly and stinking thorough a “forest,” which bears a mute resemblance to Dante’s “dark forest” also.  Unless we see the conglomeration of all the tiny emblems of our lives which war engulfs, we are unable to track it down; it is we ourselves who are gone and forgotten and left in pieces.

Yet, when this ghastly tale is done, the tale is not after all the worst there is:  for, forgetting would be the worst, and we remember in tales like this one, too.  Whether writing in deadly earnest factual prose or writing a supple and light prose of great poetic and fairy tale beauty, writers like A. S. Byatt don’t forget, nor do they allow us to do so.

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October 5, 2012 · 4:24 pm

“Why I Transformed Myself Into a Nightingale”–Wolfgang Hildesheimer and choice of form

At first reading, “Why I Transformed Myself Into a Nightingale” is a light, frivolous, playful short story featuring a fantastic tale of episodes in the life of a magician.  The first paragraph which begins the story is even fantastic while it sounds rather dry and factual in form, because the “magician” is telling the story after the transformation has taken place, when (presumably) all he can do is sing.  We therefore are entering his fantastic world from the first moment, because it would seem (from his bothering to explain to us his choice) that we can understand the nightingale’s “words” in his song:  “Acting on the strength of my convictions, I transformed myself into a nightingale.  Since neither the reason nor the resolve necessary for this sort of action lies within the realm of the ordinary, I think the story of this metamorphosis is worth telling.”  Yet, as will emerge, both the “reason” and the “resolve” are a great deal more easily understandable for readers than what the narrative voice asks us to believe, which is that he mastered the art of turning people into animals.  We are asked to accept the totally fantastic in addition to a tale of a man being in a rather ordinary though selfish frame of mind, or at least one which is ordinary by comparison.

The speaker begins by telling us about his parents, his father being a zoologist, his mother an actress.  It is almost as if the practical and the (aesthetically) magical meet in his family history and descent thus.  He describes the magic kit they give him to amuse himself with, which he soon masters and discards when he reads the condescending legend on it, “The Little Magician.”  Later, he asks for regular magic lessons and is caught up in giving performances for those who know him well.  A noticeable change comes about in the magician’s attitude toward what he does, however, as he grows up:  “I outgrew my teacher and began experimenting on my own.  I didn’t neglect my academic education, though.  I read a lot and went around with school friends whose patterns of development I observed.  One friend who had been given an electric train in his childhood was preparing for a career with the railroad; another who had played with tin soldiers decided on a career as a military officer.  In this way, the work force was regulated by early influences.”  Nevertheless, the magician is at least convinced that he himself is not influenced by early training, though it becomes obvious through his later “choice of form” that he is deceiving himself.

As he tries to select a career, a very telling notion occurs to him, which shows that as a person he is on the surface more concerned with ethics than others of his age.  Yet, he too ends up making “ethical” choices which clearly show in a fantastic way that he has not entirely escaped “interference” in the lives of others, which he says he is trying to avoid:  “[I had a] growing awareness that I couldn’t select a conventional, bourgeois profession without in some way interfering with other people’s lives….When I came to this realization, I came to yet another, namely that only the momentary state of things can be perceived, that it is merely idle speculation to try to draw conclusions or gather knowledge from experience.  I decided to spend my life in leisure and contemplate nothing.  I got two turtles, sat down on a lounge chair, and watched the birds above me and the turtles beneath me.  I had given up magic because my art had reached a state of perfection.  I felt that I was able to change people into animals [emphasis mine].  I didn’t make use of this ability, though, because I believed that this sort of interference into another person’s life was completely unjustifiable.”  Yet at the same time, the narrator reports that he himself has a strong desire to become a bird, because it leads what he calls a “pure existence.”  He is thinking on one level that he cannot interfere with anyone else, yet he is thinking on another that “I need[] only a test of my art” to know for sure if he can change people into animals!

As with every story of temptation, once he imagines the possibility, an “opportunity” comes along to test his powers.  A friend, Mr. Werhahn, comes to visit, and is full of complaints about the journalists whom he manages as an editor.  He happens in the midst of his complaints to catch sight of the speaker’s turtles and desolately remarks that he would like to be a turtle.  And, it’s no sooner said than done, though if our speaker had really meant what he says about non-interference, of course, he wouldn’t so readily have interpreted the remark as a factual, genuine expression of desire to be transformed.  Upon the instant, he has three turtles, though offering the reader a sop, he says, “(Just for the record, I’d like to assure you that I purchased the other two animals as such.)”  This is a very comical version of the sort of thing people say when they are making excuses for other excesses.

Next, “I used my art one other time before my own metamorphosis.”  In this case, however, the magician feels some degree of compunction, symbolically because it has to do with music, an art form in which one, while singing lyrics, may express many emotions which are contrary-to-fact.  This second case also has to do with birds, living as which may not appeal to others as it does to the speaker (to enter for a moment into his odd world).  He is sitting at an inn under a tree drinking apple cider, when five young girls come along and start singing a song, in which a speaker expresses a desire to be a sparrow.  The narrator is annoyed by their sounds, and so takes their words as factual:  he changes them into sparrows.  Though the reader may see no real difference in the two cases of transformation so far described, the narrator says that his worry is because “I had the feeling that I had acted emotionally, under the influence of my (certainly justified) irritation.  I thought that this wasn’t worthy of me, so I decided not to delay my own metamorphosis any longer.”  He assures us that he is not afraid of prosecution, because of course he could change his pursuers into “toy fox terriers!  It was more the certainty that, for technical reasons, I would never find the unspoiled peace I needed for the pure enjoyment of things, undisturbed by the will.  Somewhere a dog would always bark, a child scream, or a young girl sing.”

He decides to change himself into a nightingale because he likes the idea of flight from place to place and ironically enough “I wanted to sing because I love music.  The thought that I would interfere in the life of someone else whose sleep I might disturb did occur to me.  But now that I am no longer human, I have put away my human thoughts and interests.  My ethic is now the ethic of a nightingale.”  The real question here is whether he ever really had a human ethic, a human relationship to others, which would enable him to see their point of view.

Thus, this story about a choice of form is a meditation upon what it is really to enter into the pains and sufferings and also the joys of other human beings without wanting to change them.  Many serious ethical world texts express the idea that we cannot change the world, only ourselves.  But the ultimately selfish, egotistical/egoistical narrator comes to this belief only from a limited point of view, not because he wants to master and control his own worst impulses, but with regret because he cannot have total control over what is going on around him.  Yet, Hildesheimer is always light of touch, and we can see that this story is not only about a choice the narrator has made, to be a beautifully trilling bird perched on a branch in the dark night singing, but a choice the author has made likewise, to be a storyteller who gets across singingly in few words some of the same points that a long, anguished, and argumentative treatise on ethics might do.  We may of course remember that magic is also known as “legerdemain,” or lightness of hand.  The story is written almost as a parody of the sort of speech, partly cautionary and partly leadership-oriented, that an important public figure might be expected to give to students who are trying to choose a career, and this is where the author’s appeal is especially notable.  Is it a case of “don’t do what I did,” or is it a case of “this is what makes me particularly suited to stand before you today”?  The story almost seems to suggest that all along the character is deficient of human moral considerations, and thus is better off as a nightingale, with “the ethics of a nightingale,” those which he seemed to start out with.  Yet, the whole piece is one which a reader may be enchanted by, and may read through with whimsy, almost without noticing the seriousness of it.  As the narrator says finally, “Now it is May.  It is dusk, and soon it will be dark.  Then I begin to sing, or, as humans say, strike up my song.”

I have given some long quotes from this story, and more or less summed up the action, yet there is still a great deal to be gotten from it, and those interested in what I’ve written should certainly read it for themselves.  For one thing, there’s the moral/magical question of why, when most magic tricks involve the restoration of order once the “trick” is done (the egg is put back together somehow, the assistant is shown to be still in one piece), the narrator cannot change his friend back from a turtle to a human, or why the girls cannot be changed back from sparrows?  And who exactly is the public speaker/nightingale voice narrating?  What do you think?  A truely magical story, wouldn’t you say?

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September 29, 2012 · 7:22 pm

“When he hath tried me I shall come forth as gold.”–Job, Kurt Vonnegut, and “Breakfast of Champions”

To start with the boring stuff and get it out of the way first, here’s what I had for breakfast today.  I have it for breakfast six days a week, and on the seventh, I have some version of scrambled eggs (or fried eggs) and toast:

1 cup fat-free plain yoghurt, 5 strawberries sliced, 1/2 banana sliced, 1 Tablespoon peanut butter, cinnamon, 2 packets Splenda, 1 cup sugar free Langer’s pomegranate juice.

Here’s what I usually have for lunch, unless it’s a day when we haven’t cooked beans, in which case I have some sort of sandwich (an egg sandwich if I didn’t have eggs for breakfast):

2 scoops of beans, cooked with fragments of red and green bell peppers or carrots, and onions.  4-6 wheat crackers.  Water.  (Alternate days are sometimes big chef salad and croissant days, rarely).

For dinner, I have various things, no red meat usually:

1 green vegetable, steamed without sauce but with some salt added after cooking, 1 yellow or white vegetable with margarine or 1 cup pasta with red sauce, 1 3-4 oz. serving of fish, chicken, or turkey.  (On alternate weekends, I have one pizza with veggies meal.)

After dinner:  1 apple or orange, average size.

My constant struggle:  to avoid salty snacks and to try to limit desserts with meals.

That was the boring part, and now it’s over.  But is it?  Kurt Vonnegut and his spokesman Kilgore Trout from Breakfast of Champions say “No.”  I picked up the book today to look for the section which has stuck in my mind all these years (and I won’t say exactly how many) since I first read the book at 21.  The section of the book I’m referring to is the section in which Kilgore Trout is sitting in a pornographic film theater and he imagines the subject of a new book while he is sitting.

The story he imagines takes place on “a planet where all the animal and plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids.  The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.”  When a human astronaut comes to this planet, they give him a big feast, but of course the food is execrable.  Their dinner table conversation is about censorship, of all things.  Their whole city is innundated with “dirty movie” houses.  The residents of the planet want to put the theaters out of business without limiting free speech.  So far, it sounds like a real-life script we’re familiar with.

But when the astronaut goes with his hosts to see a movie presentation “As dirty as movies could get” on his own home planet, Earth, what he sees is something he would never have predicted.  I quote at length:

“So the theatre went dark and the curtains opened.  At first there wasn’t any picture.  There were slurps and moans from loudspeakers.  Then the film itself appeared.  It was a high quality film of a male humanoid eating what looked like a pear.  The camera zoomed in on his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva.  He took his time about eating the pear.  When the last of it had disappeared into his slurpy mouth, the camera focused on his Adam’s apple.  His Adam’s apple bobbed obscenely.  He belched contentedly, and then these words appeared on the screen, but in the language of the planet:  The End.”

“It was all faked, of course.  There weren’t any pears anymore.  And the eating of a pear wasn’t the main event of the evening anyway.  It was a short subject, which gave the members of the audience time to settle down.”

“Then the main feature began.  It was about a male and a female and their two children, and their dog and their cat.  They ate steadily for an hour and a half–soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie.  The camera rarely strayed more that a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam’s apples.  And then the father put the cat and dog on the table, so they could take part in the orgy, too.”

“After a while, the actors couldn’t eat anymore.  They were so stuffed that they were goggle-eyed.  They could hardly move.  They said they didn’t think they could eat again for a week, and so on.  They clearred the table slowly.  They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.”

“The audience went wild.”

The astronaut, Don, goes outside only to find food whores on the sidewalk, who offer real food goods that aren’t actually obtainable on that planet.  The “humanoids” say that a whore could take him home and cook expensive petroleum and coal products for his consumption, “[a]nd then while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.”

Though every blurb on the book and every reviewer I’ve run across mentions Vonnegut’s great satirical and comic status, what really stuck in my mind about this particular part of Breakfast of Champions was how painfully close it is to a future we are really threatened by, and it’s close on several levels.  Firstly, the point about pollution is even more well-taken now than it was when Vonnegut published this book, back in the early 70s.  Secondly, we are exploiting all of our natural resources at such an alarming rate that it has finally become a real issue in a presidential election coming up this fall, and though it has been mentioned in previous years, now it is serious as it has never been before.  We have invented so many of the necessities of our lives from petroleum and coal that we can almost imagine an earth fated to subsist on them entirely.  We no longer have the illusion that our earthly goods are unlimited.  Thirdly, we are in a season of despair and frenetic groping after the subject of love itself–not only do we look to movies, television shows, and various kinds of shrieking publicity to obtain our love from others, both “brotherly” love and sexual/passionate love, but we are involved in intricate dances of love and hate with figures in the public eye through various media outlets.  Finally, and perhaps most tellingly for Vonnegut’s satire, much of the world is starving right now, in their own countries from famine and drought, in other countries in refugee camps, and in all sorts of bad weather conditions which have, in turn, caused the food shortages we are suffering from.  So, through global warming the satire circles back upon itself here.

My point about Vonnegut’s book, if anything, is that even just that one part of his satire which I am claiming for my inspiration today–and the whole book is full of such moments of self-recognition with only a slight wry twist for fantasy’s sake–is more than enough to ensure that though Vonnegut died a few years back on April 11, 2007 and before that lived an event- and trauma-filled life, he can justifiably say, with Job, “When he hath tried me I shall come forth as gold.”  The quote from Job appears at the beginning of Breakfast of Champions.

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September 27, 2012 · 4:14 pm

“We all have the strength to endure the misfortunes of others.”–La Rochefoucauld

In a general way, the short story I will be writing about today, Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson,” is about the reverse side of “endur[ing] the misfortunes of others,” which is what the mostly unseen rich white people in the story do; it is about learning to think beyond one’s own advantage and gain the ability to form strong bonds with others for political and social purposes.  Yet, grouped around the main adult figure in the story (a college-educated, “properly” taught member of the African American community named “Miss Moore”), the children in the story compete, and riotously and in laughter bring about the minor misfortunes of the other children, their friends, by jeering at them, engaging in physical displays of hostility, taking things away from them and so on and so forth.  Which is to say, they are acting like many a child in many a place and time.  But their time and place happens to be New York City, in some place near or like Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant (where Bambara herself grew up), and they are bored, antagonized, and sometimes puzzled by the class and ethnic consciousness which Miss Moore is trying to teach them.

Miss Moore does not give many lessons an outright exegesis, of course; rather, she confronts the children with the situation as it is and allows them to draw their own conclusions.  As children, they often are sidetracked by side issues and unimportant details, or at least by non-essential features of the scene.  And yet, when she takes them to view the large toystore F. A. O. Schwarz on Fifth Avenue, they all seem to understand the lesson, even when its main outcome is that they are frustrated by what they learn:  the cost of a simple model sailboat at this elite toystore is enough to allow their families many necessary items of daily existence.

Though the children are allowed to give the five dollars to the cab driver and retrieve the change (which Miss Moore never asks them for) and two of them keep it defiantly after she has had her chance at impressing them with what they need to overcome to be equal citizens, it is in fact possibly this defiance itself–though wrong-headed in this instance, since it is aimed at Miss Moore, who is their mentor and wants them to succeed–which will give them the energy and knowledge and strength to defy what is oppressing them.  Sugar, when asked for her conclusions about the toystore, comes out with the knowledge of what they’ve seen, which causes her to say “‘[T]his is not much of a democracy if you ask me.  Equal chance to pursue happiness means an equal crack at the dough, don’t it?'”  Sylvia, the main character, is just as cognizant of the lesson implied, but she spends her time trying to impede Sugar from articulating the truth by standing on Sugar’s foot while Sugar attempts to answer Miss Moore.  She even ends by rejecting Sugar’s peace offering to share the extra cab money they’ve scored by refusing to make friends again.  Still, her energy and strength are the two other components I’ve enumerated which can help the children, and she races away from Miss Moore and Sugar and thinks to herself, “‘[A]in’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin.'”  Thus, she too has absorbed “the lesson,” though her reaction to it is not to take the rest of the money and derive what small advantage the day allows.  Instead, she proposes to go “to the West End and then over to the Drive to think this day through.”

We see therefore that Sugar, who has the correct intellectual answer to the problem, yet decides to take the rest of the day as a sort of holiday from further thought about the situation while enjoying the benefits of the money she so seldom has at her disposal, while Sylvia is planning for the future, though at first she was not willing to be cooperative with Miss Moore to the point of answering her intelligently.  She may or may not be partially right to suspect the path of learning Miss Moore has taken, yet it is from Miss Moore’s perspective the right thing to do for her to help out her own community by making things for them, doing things for them, and going about enlightening their children about the “something better” which nearly every human soul not especially blessed by fate and fortune wishes for.  The misdirected hostility of the children towards her “lessons” is in fact possibly derived from a suspicion of lessons which others, seemingly built on the same model as Miss Moore (though perhaps whites or consdescending fellow African Americans), may have articulated.  The children must thus decide for themselves which models are true to the heart and which are “false leaders.”  Toni Cade Bambara is quoted by Ann Charters as saying of herself, “While my heart is a laughing gland and my favorite thing to be doing is laughing so hard I have to lower myself on the wall to keep from falling down, near that chamber is a blast furnace where a rifle pokes from the ribs.”  In this story, we see both the laughter of the children and their rough play with one another, and the “blast furnace” and “rifle” which are at the source of their reactions.

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September 19, 2012 · 9:15 pm

“Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.”–Franklin P. Jones

In other words, as the quip above suggests, honest criticism can be hard to take from anyone.  Luckily for me, the sites I follow usually have something worthwhile, challenging, beautiful, or just plain interesting (that so totally non-descriptive word which is nonetheless accurate in this case)  to follow.  Today, I’m going to take the opportunity to mention six more sites which I enjoy, not all for the same reason and not all in the same way (i.e., some of them are more visual and others more wordsmithy).

djkeyserv140– http://djkeyserv140.wordpress.com/ .  This blogger prefers mystery, for the time being at least.  He or she is working on a fantasy/science fiction/RPG type novel, and periodically publishes posts on the actual construction and how it’s coming along, without however revealing the characters’ names or the specific content of the novel itself.  We must respond to a structural analysis appeal here.  These hints and glimpses are very tantalizing, combined with some of the remarks the blogger makes on other people’s sites about the practice of fiction.  I can’t wait until the final planned-for novel comes to light and I can actually read it.  I wait most impatiently.

Stephen Kelly Creative– http://stephenkellycreative.wordpress.com/ .  First of all, Stephen is a photographer based in San Francisco who has posted a whole series of wonderful slide shows of different surrealist and pop-surrealist painters, which are worth going to his site for even were there nothing else on the site.  He has featured Sergio Mora, Hsiao-Ron Cheng, Paul Barnes, Leonora Carrington, and Robert Deyber.  But that’s not all he has on his site.  There is also a Weekly Photo Challenge, an A-Z Challenge (in which the subject of the photo is initialized with a certain letter of the alphabet), and usually a few shots from another blog called “Ailsa’s Weekly Travel Theme” from Where’s My Backpack.  All photos are outstandingly beautiful and striking, while some are also just plain fun.  Stephen is appreciative of beauty, but not solemn or overawed in his attitude towards it.  On the blog as well is a copy of his resumé, which proves him to be a highly centered and creative individual in addition to his photographic skills.  He also writes columns for a couple of magazines.  Finally, he is currently participating in the Post-a-Day contest on WordPress.com for 2012.  As it looks now, not only will he keep the record, but he’ll do so thoughtfully, beautifully, and well.

The Saturday Morning Post– http://joeponepinto.com/ .  Joe Ponepinto, or Jpon as he signs himself, is a Book Review Editor for the Los Angeles Review who publishes a blogpost known as The Saturday Morning Post once a week (on–you guessed it–Saturday).  In it, he takes up stimulating and sometimes quandary-filled issues made to appeal to writers and considering their interests and concerns.  There is always a vital and informative discussion between him and his post readers, and one can learn much about everything from publishing to entering writing contests, to avoiding bogus book reviews, to how criticism itself is made and furthered.  He also has a companion site known as “Third Reader” where he offers editing and tutoring services.  This blog is one well worth one’s time and attention, as it is not only highly intelligent, but offers readers a sort of “insider’s track” to the publishing world.

Londoner’s Musings– http://scribedoll.wordpress.com/ .  This is a blog written by an erstwhile theatrical agent who has kept alive her literary contacts within the theater world, and has a lot to say on other literary issues and societal issues as well.  The first post of hers that I read was a delicately imagined and delightful piece on maintaining the cursive handwriting with pen (preferably with ink-dipped nibs); she herself has a neat script hand.  She has also covered issues such as “female solidarity,” the lovely tradition of church bells ringing in a town, and the sad passing of such places as “Dress Circle,” “a famous musical theatre shop” in Covent Garden.  Her category archives contain such headings as “Words and Civilization,” “Double Standards,” “Pet Hates,” “Odds and Ends,” and “Travel.”  She has a direct and decisive, no-nonsense voice, and yet can be very poetic in her musings.  Her site is definitely worth spending some time on.

Bertram’s Blog– http://ptbertram.wordpress.com/ Pat Bertram is a five-time author whose books (Light Bringer, Daughter Am I, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Grief:  The Great Yearning) are published by Second Wind Publishing.  Yet her site is far more than merely a forum for her book sales.  She writes about all aspects of the writerly challenge, from finding time to write to achieving discipline in one’s writing, to using Facebook and Twitter correctly, to one’s inner emotional relationship to one’s writing.  Pat has sadly lost her life partner within the last three years, and often mentions this without apology for the deflection into the personal tone, yet her matter-of-fact grief and acceptance of going forward are inspiring in themselves for others who grieve, for whatever reason.  This site is chockful of writerly topics, and offers a place where Pat’s readers can comment and compare notes on all the issues I’ve mentioned above, and then some.  Check out her site for all of these many features and reasons.

Emma McCoy’s Blog– http://emmamccoy.wordpress.com/ .  This is simply one of the most exciting sites I’ve come across in a while, and it’s mainly because of a complete eighty-five chapter novel of suspense and mystery called Saving Angels which is post in its entirety there.  At first, I was merely following the story along, but then signed up to follow the site, as it is also one on which intriguing short posts are stored.  Some of the posts are:  the importance of daydreaming to our creative minds; a movie review of a movie which seems rather chilling; some descriptions of what it’s like to write various stages of a book like Saving Angels; and lovely and evocative nature pictures.  Emma is shortly planning to publish her first novel on Amazon Kindle, but also she is engaged in experimenting with the finished first draft of a new book about a counselor who begins a relationship with a client.  Quite logically, it is titled Unethical.  I dont know about others following this site, though I have seen a few enthralled remarks from other readers, but I can hardly wait to read the second novel too.  Kudos, Emma!

These are the latest sites I’ve followed, and while some of them have been Freshly Pressed, not all of them have.  But each and every one fulfills some part of what I look to other sites for, whether it’s the analysis of the way literature works, what we live for, what we draw from experience for our works, or the lovely or funny things we see around us every day.  I hope that you will enjoy these sites too, and will visit them often.

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September 15, 2012 · 5:24 pm

“Where, oh where have the heroines gone?”

Today’s post is not so much about a specific story or stories as about a now 14 year old collection of stories about heroines from around the world collected by Kathleen Ragan, with a foreword by Jane Yolen.  The collection is entitled, Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters:  Heroines in Folktales from Around the World.  These folktales are not, however, so-called “chick lit,” and are opposed in every way to that concept.  They do not deal with women in reference to men, except as it is necessary not to leave out the other half of the human race:  the women are not gossipy gal pals seeking for husbands or passive ladies in castles waiting to be rescued, but are instead active instigators of their own future actions and constructors of their own fates.

As Jane Yolen points out in the “Foreword”:  “Hero is a masculine noun.  It means an illustrious warrior, a man admired for his achievements and qualities, the central male figure in a great epic or drama.  A heroine, on the other hand, is the female equivalent.  Or is she really his equal…?  We might as well have called her a hero-ess or a hero-ette, some kind of diminuitive subset of real heroes….Or so the Victorian folk tale anthologists would have had us believe.  They regularly subverted and subsumed the stories that starred strong and illustrious female heroes, promoting instead those stories that showed women as weak or witless or, at the very best, waiting prettily and with infinite patience to be rescued.  And the bowdlerizers did it for all the very best of reasons–for the edification and moral education of their presumed audiences.”  The enduring yet submissive model of womankind was of course the Victorian ideal, one which demanded that women leave to men all the decisive action.  These versions of womankind were passed down to women even as late as the 1950’s, when they appeared in some Disney cartoons in which the main drift of the heroine’s effort–and I use the word “drift” deliberately here– was to be rescued from a victimized status and fall into the arms of the rescuing prince.

In the “Introduction,” Kathleen Ragan tells how her search for books for her young daughter which featured true female heroes went (and in some quarters the term “heroine” has gone the way of “stewardess” and other words which are deemed antiquated).  They were reading a lot of Dr. Seuss at the time, but disturbingly in this great author’s works for children, Ragan began to find that there were almost no female role models, or at least none which were positive in nature.  She started by changing the pronouns when reading to her daughter, but this presented problems of its own, because with the astounding memory of children her daughter caught every mistake and slip-up.

Ragan then resorted to her local library, but had trouble there, too.  As she relates, “Although there were five to ten editions of ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ‘Snow White,’ and ‘Cinderella,’ each illustrated by a different person, there was a very limited depth to the stock of heroines in the library picture book collection….The current selection of fairy tales presented to children makes a sharp differentiation in the treatment of boys and girls.  The female role models are beautiful, passive, and helpless victims….Male role models include a range of active characteristics:  adventurous Jack the Giant Killer, resourceful Puss in Boots, the underestimated third son who makes the princess laugh, and the gallant knight who rides up the glass mountain.”  And when she did resort to anthologies of folktales, she found that “many of the women were negative characters:  a nagging mother-in-law who makes life intolerable even for the devil, a woman who personifies the misery in the world, or women who allow themselves to be mutilated by loved ones.”  There were also wicked witches and wicked stepmothers.  Ragan, taking her mission quite seriously, considered that it was time to fulfill a need, “the need for an anthology of folktales with positive women as the main characters.”

Ragan reviewed over 30,000 stories, and found positive heroines in tales from all over the world.  They had just become submerged.  “These forgotten heroines are courageous mothers, clever young girls, and warrior women; they rescue their villages from monsters, rule wisely over kingdoms, and outwit judges, thieves, and tigers….[A] female Prometheus brings navigation to Micronesia.  Seven Thai women, after severing the head of a monster, carry it for seven years to free their country of the monster’s curse.  A Cheyenne woman gallops into the thick of battle to rescue her brother.”  Ragan also mentions the original German edition of Grimms’ fairy tales (Kinder und Hausmärchen, published in 1812).  Among the tales in this collection, there is a Little Red Riding Hood who goes through the woods another time, encounters a second wolf, and “vanquishes this wolf herself.”

Ragan recounts how some people argue that gender doesn’t matter in a story, because the child reader will empathize with the hero or heroine.  But her anecdotal research suggested that the case was far otherwise:  regardless how gripping the story, both girls and boys identified with characters of their own sexes, no matter how miniscule a part that character or characters played in the action.  So, she kept up her search, assigning fairy tales a key role in her adult reading too, “because I felt that somehow they were meant to answer questions and fulfill a need.”  After reading through story after story, she finally concluded that characters didn’t have to be perfect in order the meet the readers’ empathetic needs:  “[I]t seemed to me that the heroines I chose no longer had to be perfect.  I found I could smile at a cantankerous character and admire her perseverance….I could even forgive myself for not becoming as patient or as beautiful as Cinderella.”

In choosing the tales, Ragan went for “source books” that were in English or had been translated into English.  This automatically meant that there were more stories available from countries that either still have or at some time in the past have had connections colonial or otherwise with England or North America.  She notes a certain “dearth” thus among the stories collected from “South American Indian” stories.  Nevertheless, the overall drive of the collection was to go for multiculturalism in the stories.  She has also tried to stick closely to the oral form the stories take, following the words and word choices of their tellers rather than tidying them up for a literary audience.  She followed several criteria relating to the choice of the stories themselves, one of which was quite interesting from a “victorious heroine” point of view:  her eldest daughter begged her not to include any stories in this collection in which the heroine dies at the end of the tale.  Though this may seem at first like an unfair limitation, ask yourself just how many heroes’ tales end with the hero dying without his subsequent being going on to grace the heavens, or figure as some important element in the biosphere, atmosphere, or other “heavenly” location, and chances are you won’t be able to think of many.

Ragan started out by observing heroines for a standard who were parallel in qualities to heroes, but soon at least some of her emphasis had changed.  “[A] whole new class of heroines emerged.  Some ‘heroines’ did things that resonated with my innermost feelings but that refused to be classified as heroic:  a woman who sensed the importance of an insignificant looking coin, a girl who loved to dance, or a woman who told a story.  A simple conversation between two women when taken at face value could elicit a shrug of the shoulders.  Yet underneath this ordinary conversation, the effort that women make to keep relationships alive in a family or community swells like the incoming tide.”

In quoting so extensively from this book’s “Foreword” and “Introduction,” I realize that I’ve done a lot for you of what you are perfectly capable of doing for yourself, assuming you have the book in hand.  Yet because it has been out since 1998 (published by W. W. Norton and Co.), and there is still sometimes a noticeable dearth of good collections of stories featuring strong women and girls as role models, I feel it’s important to let as wide an audience as possible know of this valuable effort in folklore research.  True, in the field of children’s books there has been a boom since 2000 in the more gender-free language and roles assigned characters in books, so that it’s easier for boys to admire girl characters as well as the tough-guy heroes they historically have admired; there are also more leading female and male role models which girls can imitate and still “feel like Mommy,” and thus not odd in any way (I’ve often thought that though children are credited usually with being highly creative and innovative, which they are, they are also nature’s conservatives in their views of which parent they want to imitate, and in a certain sense of individuals perhaps this is right, but in some ways it’s a shame.  A girl with an admirable, strong, outgoing father figure should be as free to imitate him as to imitate her shyer more reclusive mother; likewise, a boy who likes to tidy house or cook should be free to imitate whichever parent does this the most, without feeling peculiar).

You may wonder–or you may not, but I’m going to tell you anyway, I hope you won’t mind–which folktale was my favorite as I was growing up.  It was “Clever Gretel,” I think from the Grimms’ Brothers collection, though I’m not entirely sure.  It’s the story in which a servant girl manages not only to eat portions from the chicken her master, due to arrive any moment, is saving for a guest, but manages to persuade the guest due to the continuing of an initial misunderstanding that the host is going to chop off his limbs (she does this as she trims off each limb of the bird and eats it in the kitchen).  When the master comes home, she cleverly lets him think that the guest stole the bird, whereupon the master begins to pursue the already terrified and fleeing guest, and Gretel settles herself in the kitchen and finishes off the bird.  Another thing about children–their moral sense is still in development, so Gretel’s cleverness is far more appealing than her dishonesty is significant.  And another thing about me–I still consider the story my favorite!

Do you have a favorite folktale, about hero or heroine?  Feel free to mention it here, I’m not prejudiced!

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September 8, 2012 · 9:00 pm

Thomas Hardy’s underrated short stories and their connection to his Wessex country picture

Though not as well-known as Thomas Hardy’s novels and poetry, his short stories are just as good, and while simple, they add a lot to his picture of the fictional Wessex country he usually portrays.  Today, I would like to write about three of the stories, “The Three Strangers,” “The Distracted Preacher, ” and “The Fiddler of the Reels.”

As even any fledgling student of literature, fiction, myth, and literary symbolism knows, events, objects, and symbolic ideas occur very often in groups of three in fables and parables and legends.  It is the same in the short story “The Three Strangers,” except that the series of three is less symbolic than in the average fable or parable.  The series occurs against the background of the Wessex country and the homestead of Higher Crowstairs.  When one first encounters the notion in the story of a birth and a christening as the reason for a celebration in a shepherd’s hut where three strangers attend, one wonders if perhaps Hardy is preparing to re-do the New Testament story of the birth of Christ and the visit of the three wise men; but here, the “wise” men who arrive, if they are to be considered truly “wise” in any way, are simply all part of the same secret that the rest of the people at the shepherd’s celebration are not in on.  And one of the three wise men becomes a dupe, not only of the other two, but as we are told at the end of the tale, of the countryside at large.  The story is set back in time, and is not a symbolic tale at all as the birth and christening of the shepherd’s child seems at first to suggest, yet it has the very resonance of a country legend because of what happens to the three strangers and the people there with whom they become involved.

In the second story, “The Distracted Preacher,” a Wesleyan clergyman in the midst of a town full of parishioners who divide their loyalties rather equally between the Anglican church and the Methodist chapel would seem to have enough to do trying to gain the total allegiance of his flock.  Mr. Stockdale, however, has an additional challenge to his equanimity in the form of his landlady, a young and attractive widow named Lizzy Newberry.  When the preacher develops a bad cold, Lizzy takes him to a secret place in the singing-gallery of the church, where smuggled barrels of alcohol are to be found, in order to get him some alchohol for a punch remedy.  She encourages him to trust his cold with this, and Stockdale, quickly falling in love with her, does so, though he is deprived of the sight of her for a day or two after this because, according to the servant Martha Sarah, she is mysteriously “busy.”  Though he knows he’s only temporary in his current position, he vows to come back and ask her to marry him when his two year probation is over.  He continues to be puzzled, however, by her sudden appearances and attentions to him and her equally unpredictable absences, and adopts the stratagem of continuing to take cold-producing walks in the weather.  As it soon appears, and as has been fairly obvious to the reader since the combination of the landlady’s strangely-kept hours and the subject of smuggling coincided in the text, Lizzy herself is deeply involved in the smuggling operations.  After a series of adventures and misadventures with the excise men (the Government tax collectors), all of which encounters are at least very human and partially comic, Lizzy and Stockdale unhappily place themselves at the ultimatum stage of their relationship.  The story is given two endings by Hardy, one of which he insists is based on fact, the other of which he seems to suggest is a sop for his readers.  The story is particularly light in touch and thoroughly delightful either way, as I leave the reader to find out.

“The Fiddler of the Reels” is the shortest of the three stories in my edition, a fairly simple character sketch at first of a “woman’s man,” a dandy who also happens to be a veterinarian and a fiddler, Wat Ollamoor, known as “Mop” because of his long locks.  He is said never to have been a church musician as others in the area have been, or perhaps never to have been inside a church at all; as we are told, “all were devil’s tunes in his repertory.”  A young woman of all young women of the area who is the most enchanted even apparently against her will by his music, enchanted into dancing even unto her own exhaustion and beyond, is one Car’line Aspent; but Hardy doesn’t take the easy way out of the story by grouping it alongside myriad other tales in British and Continental folk literature about demonic musicians:  instead, he says that it would take a “neurologist” to explain Car’line’s fixation on the music.  This too thus seems to be another tale from which one can take one’s own meaning.  Car’line has another suitor, a well-meaning young man named Ned Hipcroft.  In the remainder of the story, Hardy spends some time sketching out Car’line’s obsession, her breaking things off with Ned (who promptly goes to London and busies himself with work in the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851, maintaining a bachelor residence), and their eventual reacquaintance when Car’line writes to him and asks for forgiveness, and for his reconsideration of her past rejection.  When she shows up with a three or four year old child in tow, Ned at first tries to talk himself out of taking them in, but finally Ned and Car’line marry.  No exhibition lasts forever, however, and the good resolves Car’line has made are endangered when they return to their native Wessex township, and she sees Mop again, or hears his playing.  As with any demon fiddler tale, however much neurologists may have been mentioned as an ameliorative in the beginning of the story, the fiddler in the end makes off with something very precious indeed.  Once again, I’m not going to be specific, for as with any good literature, grasping the true spell of the work requires that you read it yourself; you can know the plot, but until you’ve read the work, you don’t actually take part in the magic.  But I won’t create a “spoiler” anyway.

In all three of these tales, older tales abide in the background.  In Hardy’s fictional Wessex, which was supposed to indicate some of the counties of England, there are thus tales told of trickery of Government men, both of the punitive and of the excise-collecting sort, and tales of the country people banding together to deal with what comes at them from more official quarters.  As the last tale of the three has proved, there are still tales that take place concerning the social witchery of dancing and listening to music in the midst of a crowd of performing friends and neighbors.  The country bonds are seen as tight between people, yet there are more or less clearly defined limits, as some of the characters find out.  All in all, Hardy has crafted a skilled picture of the “Wessex” countryside and characters, and unusually for him, without much pessimism and darkness at all.  I encourage you to read these stories because too often, due to works like Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy’s essential humor and humanity about his rustic characters is forgotten in the consideration of his sometimes painful heavy-handedness with tragic circumstances and his often reductive view of women, who are treated a little more evenly with the men in some of his country tales than they are in the novels.  Have a good read!

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September 6, 2012 · 1:27 am

Why can’t we take the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy seriously (for a change) and see how it works (or doesn’t)?

Yes, I confess, I’m one of those people who don’t hear about a publishing sensation until most of the public excitement and in this case notoriety is over; I don’t get to read most books until the library carries them, since my book budget is growing smaller and smaller these days.  So, though I did hear about Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels, I heard about it in a murmurous brook-like current, far away from the great hue and cry of the reading mainstream.  Once I knew just what the debate was all about, I thought to myself, “Well, it sounds like absolute garbage and malarkey, but you should never condemn anything you haven’t read, at least not without giving it a cursory glance.”  I’m glad I did read the first book.  Not because I found it good, however, but because I gave it a fair shot.  I had to persuade myself to continue reading after that, having already assured everyone whose opinion I respect in the literary field that I probably wasn’t going to continue with the second and third volumes.  Having done so anyway, I now can say that there’s no need to take it down with the sort of overwrought negative hype which is diametrically opposed to the positive hype of the advertisers; all you have to do is attempt to take the book seriously, and that in itself dispels it as any sort of major contender for lengthy spans of attention.

First, let’s take the characters and ethos/psychology.  The greatest amount of the time spent in all three novels (Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed) is spent in steamy sex scenes between the two main characters, Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey.  This is true despite the fact that the female character enters the novel as a sort of maladept Keystone Kop, full of slapstick awkwardness and social incapacity.  Though there’s a certain way in which she is a true-to-life girlish, giggling, virginal walking orgasm in the making, the amount of intentional or unintentional humor directed at her in the first 25-35 pages or so makes it hard to take her as a serious contender for the passion of a darkly threatening, sophisticated, rich, mysterious male lead, though this is not a fault of these books alone but one which they share with the modern romance genre in general.  It does make it harder to believe, perhaps, that Christian Grey is a dominant male, or Dom, in a BDSM sort of preferred role, inasmuch as even someone who likes to encounter submissives, or Subs, must surely find such a dishrag as Anastasia Steele no challenge to his imagination.  The text, of course, makes the point again and again of telling us that she is subverting his power and challenging him in ways in which he has never been challenged by anyone else, and they are constantly celebrating a series of “firsts” with each other.  For he too is trying to change her, and it’s here that the characterization isn’t really strong enough to sustain the claims of the plot:  they are both trying and hoping to change the other to some extent, certainly in the first book, and to a certain extent in the other two as well.  And as we have been often told by professionals such as psychologists, marriage counselors, and statisticians, not to mention novelists, relationships don’t survive well in which people go in expecting to be able to change the other person from whom they were when they met each other.  Furthermore, we are asked to believe that Grey’s development of self-awareness comes from the interaction not only with his therapist, but also with Anastasia; but the facts of therapy and relationships, as we have often heard, are that we must not only want to make changes ourselves, but must take it upon ourselves to make these changes, no matter how we are accompanied.  Yet over and over again, Grey shows himself to be recalcitrant and difficult, in fact as if he really does have a split personality, a diagnosis word which E. L. James throws off casually without fulfilling the adequate terms of the diagnosis.  As to the BDSM going on in the novel, I’m not going to pretend either that I am competent to judge it or that I am shocked by it:  though I doubt that it would convince aficionados of that sort of relationship, there is enough petty meanness in most of us that we can at least imagine being a dominant, bossy, demanding individual, and enough pusillanmity that we can at least imagine what it is to bow to someone else’s will constantly.  I also doubt that it is a fantasy romance meant to appeal to BDSM experts, but rather think it is meant to titillate the more adventurous of ordinary readers.  A few posts here and there have spoken to this fact, and I bow (figuratively speaking) to superior experience and knowledge.  The other characters fill the roles of friends, friends who have mirroring romances, jealous and envious enemies, and supernumeraries.  Perhaps the most interesting negative character is the aptly named Jack Hyde, though he is a standard suspense-novel villain strayed into the romance genre.  There’s never really any doubt that he will get his, though the “his” is not the one he was striving for; first of all, he’s totally outmanned and outgunned by Grey’s “troops” and Anastasia’s late-but-at-last-arriving good sense, and he turns out to have an interesting connection with the past.  This suspense element is what actually helps drive the rather tired third novel, and is the main thing that keeps what interest it has going, since any reader who’s still speculating about what Anastasia and Christian will get up to on any occasion when they are alone in a room for more than one minute–or, in fact, when they are in public and are not the immediate focus of attention–has a seriously lagging imagination.  Also interesting is the late introduction of Hyde’s female accomplice, a not totally convincing but still more intriguing than not plot development.  What’s somewhat distressing in the series is that in opposition to an abusive male figure in Christian’s past and the character Jack Hyde in Anastasia’s and Christian’s present, there is no counterbalance of good except Anastasia herself.  As she says at one point, she wants to be Christian’s “Alpha and Omega.”  This is to say, in quite literal Biblical terms, that she wants to be God.  Though I don’t mean to suggest that the book necessarily needs a god or gods (though she has an “inner goddess” and a “subconscious” both mentioned overtly and constantly throughout the book), it seems somewhat impious even from an agnostic’s point of view to suggest that one human being can play this role for another.  She is, in fact, wanting to be dominant in an overweening way herself if this is to be taken seriously.

Next, I would like to comment on the language in the novels, which has amused and bemused more commentators on the book than one.  Put in simple terms, the books are very badly written, and need a good editing job from several different perspectives.  The simplest criticism one can make has been made by a number of people before now:  that is, that James does not distinguish between the slang terminology of America, where the action of the novels largely takes place, and the slang of England, which is often used instead.  “Packages” are therefore “parcels” and “strollers” or “baby buggies” are “prams,” among the least confusing things.  Far more serious, however, is the bad grammar and style.  This also kept me laughing irreverently from page to page here and there.  The constant repetition of words and phrases to convey emotions and actions which were repetitive but which good writing would have portrayed with varied language was part of the problem.  For example, when aroused, the female character very often thinks to herself “Oh my” in italics.  When she’s being approached sexually in a way unfamiliar to her, she acts almost as if shocked and indicates the area of touch concerned as “down there.”  She’s constantly either “biting her lip” or “flushing crimson.”  And the male character after a certain point in the action in which he has spanked her is said to have a “twitchy hand”; he also “pouts” at her in a corresponding attention-grabbing way to her lip-biting.  Thus, the characters don’t really develop, despite indications in the outright story to the contrary:  they simply follow a series of repetitious prompts, a code of sorts to let the reader know what’s coming (so to speak).  The bad grammar is much more obtrusive, however, and of that the dangling and misplaced modifiers in phrases and clauses are the most offensive.  To take one example from the second book, when the two characters are on the man’s catamaran and he is enjoying strapping her into a life vest, we read a sentence something like this (bear with me as I try to reconstruct it, the book has already been returned to the library):  “Being secured, he grinned and patted her arm” or whatever.  The problem there is that “being secured” modifies (reflects meaning on) “he,” not on her or her vest, not mentioned in the sentence in question.  And it does no good grammatically speaking to say “you know what she means, though,” because good grammar and good writing depends not on these kinds of contraband understandings, but upon obvious accuracy.  What this sentence in fact says is perhaps accurate to what some people think of the books as a whole, that the character Christian Grey would be better off to himself and everyone else were he restrained in a tight straitjacket (never mind the even more amusing question of how, once restrained, he managed to pat anything, however much he might be grinning maniacally.)  An even more ridiculous example which I’ve racked my brains to recollect exactly but which escapes me at the moment occurs when the misplaced modifier tells us that Christian’s erection is doing something that an erection unequipped with additional limbs simply could not do.  Inanimate objects as well sometimes take on the characteristics which almost certainly are meant to apply to the characters themselves.

Now as to the modern romantic novel tradition that the book is written in, I think that using the higher number of openly sexual scenes, the book does a reasonable job of making overtly physical the mostly emotional sadomasochistic tendencies of the average romance novel.  Teasing the reader is of course the game not only in romances but in suspense and mystery novels, and there are wee portions of the latter two in this romance as well, concerning the mystery of Christian’s past, the suspense of what will happen when Jack Hyde has the upper hand of the main characters, et cetera.  But it’s not just a matter of teasing the reader with the typical reversals and re-reversals of fortune that occur in almost any novel, popular or not:  the usual romance novel in fact plays off a sort of emotional sadomasochism which often subsists in the relationships between women and men.  Sometimes, it’s the sufferings of the boy-next-door who finally gets angry at the girl for momentarily preferring an apparently more vigorous lover, sometimes it’s the girl-next-door who, like Anastasia Steele, is deeply in love with a richer, more sophisticated man who doesn’t treat her in an easily understandable way.  Whichever variation on the forms it is, there is a certain amount of cruelty in the characters’ relationships, a degree of deliberate melodrama and perversity, which governs the way the plot unfolds.  All I’m suggesting is that this trilogy of novels makes these things into overt sexual acts, however well or badly they are portrayed, however realistically or not.

Lastly, you may wonder about my qualifications for making judgements concerning a novel series of this kind, considering that I have heretofore prided myself on writing about already acclaimed and worthy works of literature about which there has on that matter been little contest.  Let’s just say that I read a fair amount of mindless modern romantic drivel in my adolescence, and these three novels, though catering to that same impulse only for an at least slightly older demographic, isn’t the worst I’ve read, which tells you yes, these things can get pretty bad before they exhaust the patience of addicted readers.  This has in fact been an odd sort of holiday for me from the serious literature I generally cover; now, however, I look forward to rejoining the works of critical merit and worth which render so much more in the way of valuable reading experiences.  Here’s to all you readers of quality works who’ve occasionally stepped off the straight and narrow and felt embarrassed, but not known where to look about your guilty secret–since E. L. James stepped on the scene, the opportunity to read something literarily neglectful, occasionally boring, and sometimes just plain bad has increased exponentially:  I leave the knowledge, I feel safely, in your competent hands.

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September 5, 2012 · 4:51 pm

“Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”–Louis Dembitz Brandeis

When I was about twenty-one or twenty-two, I happened to see a production on television of the playwright Christopher Fry’s 1949 play “The Lady’s Not for Burning.”  The experience stayed with me for quite some time, and is still one of my fondest theatrical experiences.  Yet not much is heard about the play these days, and for many people Fry seems old-fashioned and full of sentiment.  I remember mentioning the play with fond affection to a theater instructor, who informed me that I had bad taste:  a taste for Fry in the theater, he said, was as bad as having a taste for the horribly purple prose of Thomas Wolfe in fiction.  Since at the time I rather liked You Can’t Go Home Again and Look Homeward, Angel as well, I shut up, convinced that I wasn’t sufficiently sophisticated, or cognizant of what I should know, or just plain intelligent enough to see the differences he was talking about.  Yet all these years later, in spite of having lost my interest in and taste for Thomas Wolfe’s fiction, I still retain a fond affection for the plays of Christopher Fry that I’ve read and seen (I’ve only the experience of two, “The Lady’s Not for Burning” and “A Phoenix Too Frequent,” though at one point Fry was quite popular in the theater and there are a number of other plays by him as well).  Today, I wanted to write a little about the first play I mention above, “The Lady’s Not for Burning,” in the hope, I suppose, of encouraging other readers and enthusiasts of verse plays to read him, and maybe even of spurring some interest in putting his plays on again, who knows?  One thought has a million paths in the outside world, after all.

The play is set in a “small market-town” called Cool Clary around 1400, at a time when witches were still being burnt and a war in Flanders was still recent.  The action centers around a dual problem which presents itself in the home of Hebble Tyson, an officious and by-the-book Mayor of the town; this problem is that at one and the same time a young woman comes to his house for shelter, being designated a witch by the townspeople, and in an at first unrelated case, a man, Thomas Mendip, comes in requesting to be hanged.  Thus, the “right of free assembly” in a time and place where such rights were not matter of course is being exercise willy nilly by an unruly mob, and not to gain other legitimate rights, but in fact to deprive a young woman, Jennet Jourdemayne, of her life and property.

In this case, it’s the language of Thomas Mendip which attempts, if not to “free men from the bondage of irrational fears,” to mislead the accusers and focus on him, because, according to him, he sees no point in continuing life.  His speeches are full of the excesses of existential bombast of our own day except in verse:  for example, when one of the other characters says she hears a cuckoo singing in the spring air of April, he responds:  “By God, a cuckoo!  Grief and God,/A canting cuckoo, that laughs with no smile!/A world unable to die sits on and on/In spring sunlight, hatching egg after egg,/Hoping against hope that out of one of them/Will come the reason for it all; and always/Out pops the arid chuckle and centuries/Of cuckoo-spit.”  Thomas Mendip steps into a situation already full of tension, because the young heir of Tyson, his nephew, Humphrey Devize, is awaiting the arrival of his bride-to-be, Alizon Eliot; Humphrey’s brother, Nicholas Devize, is locked in a sort of sibling rivalry with his brother Humphrey, and naturally wants whatever his brother wants, or whomever.  At first the brothers are competing over Alizon, but when Jennet comes into the picture, they both start to compete over her, even though she is doomed to be burned the next day.  It is her language which, due to her scientific upbringing and background, tries to “free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”

Each character has comic lines more than sufficient fully to paint their characters.  To take a case in point, Tyson is always saying things like “Dear sir, I haven’t yet been notified of your existence”;”Out of the question./It’s a most immodest suggestion, which I know/Of no precedent for.  Cannot be entertained.”;”I will not be the toy of irresponsible events”; and the like.  He’s clearly an official’s official.  The Justice Edward Tappercoom is another such case, though he is less interested in the matter of Jennet’s soul and her possible hexings of others than he is eager to confiscate and enjoy her property by the law of the time after she’s dead.  The mother of the two competing brothers, Margaret Devize (the Mayor’s sister) is more sketchily filled in, though she too has her moments:  when asked by Thomas to concern herself with the mob outside, which may soon be stoning or in some way harming a woman accused of witchcraft, Margaret replies, “At the moment, as you know,/I’m trying hard to be patient with my sons./You really mustn’t expect me to be Christian/In two directions at once.”  This quite effectively states her interests and obsessions for the length of the play, though she has many other lines–she is just the good mother and housekeeper who concerns herself purely with the domestic arrangements, and keeps herself to herself when it comes to public controversy.  Even a drunk, old Skipps, the man whom the “witch” has been accused of turning into a dog, turns up at the end to confound the judgement, and does so “poetically.”  He has been located by the parish clerk Richard, who has earlier run away with the bride-to-be, Alizon, and they have turned back to reveal the truth of Skipp’s existence, so that justice will be served.  Skipps, not knowing what he may be accused of, responds in a masterly joining of Biblical poetry and doggerel:  “Who give me that name?…Baptized I blaming was, and I says to youse, baptized I am…wiv holy weeping and washing of teeth.  And immersion upon us miserable offenders.  Miserable offenders all–no offence meant….Peace on earth and good tall women.  And give us our trespassers as trespassers will be prosecuted for us…” et cetera.

The majority of the truly poetic lines, however, are given to Thomas Mendip and Jennet Jourdemayne, as they are the two main characters, she trying to persuade the audience in the Mayor’s house that she is not a witch, while Mendip tries to persuade them to hang him as the murderer of two men he says he killed, old Skipps and another man, which facts they all dispute without certain knowledge because they can’t believe any man would willingly come to have himself hanged.  As he says of his military service, however, “I’ve been unidentifiably/Floundering in Flanders for the past seven years,/Prising open ribs to let men go/On the indefinite leave which needs no pass./And now all roads are uncommonly flat, and all hair/Stands on end.”  Thus, he knows what it is to kill, and perhaps (if an actor were trying to find additional character motivation for why the character so persistently tries to focus deadly attention on himself) he is feeling, like Hamlet, “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world,” or something of that kind.

When Jennet, conversely, tries to use reason and logic with Tyson, she says, “Asking to be punished?  Why, no, I have come/Here to have the protection of your laughter./They accuse me of such a brainstorm of absurdities/That all my fear dissolves in the humour of it./If I could perform what they say I can perform/I should have got safely away from here/As fast as you bat your eyelid.”  Tyson, unfortunately, takes this remark as a partial confession.  She goes on, “They tell one tale, that once, when the moon/Was gibbous and in a high dazed state/Of nimbus love, I shook a jonquil’s dew/On to a pearl and let a cricket chirp/Three times, thinking of pale Peter:/And there Titania was, vexed by a cloud/Of pollen, using the sting of a bee to clean/Her nails and singing, as drearily as a gnat,/’Why try to keep clean?'”  The two, Jennet and Thomas, go on with their fantasy of talk, vying with each other but with different motives, until Thomas says he has “bedlam” under his hat, and “the battlefield/Uncle Adam died on.  He was shot/To bits with the core of an apple/Which some fool of a serpent in the artillery/Had shoved into God’s cannon.”  To this exchange of two souls who seem immediately to understand each other, Tyson responds in his totally uncomprehending way, “That’s enough/Terrible frivolity, terrible blasphemy,/Awful unorthodoxy.  I can’t understand/Anything that is being said.  Fetch a constable./The woman’s tongue clearly knows the flavour/ Of spiritu maligno.  The man must be/Drummed out of town.”  After a few minutes of this, Thomas loses his patience with Tyson and says, “You bubble-mouthing, fog-blathering,/Chin-chuntering, chap-flapping, liturgical,/Turgidical, base old man!  What about my murders?/And what goes round in your head,/What funny little murders and fornications/Chatting up and down in three-four time/Afraid to come out?  What bliss to sin by proxy/And do penance by way of someone else!”

The matter doesn’t become any clearer for the officials, and as to the ostensible wedding party, they are in a regular chaos and disorder because guests to celebrate are expected that night.  Finally, the officials decide to let the two erstwhile “convicts” spend their last night in company, she as her last night on earth, he as one who needs to be cheered up and sent on his way.

The unraveling of the somewhat complicated plot involves a party going on in the background offstage, an initially frustrated elopement of the clerk Richard and the girl Alizon Eliot, and the further fighting of the two brothers.  In the midst of this disorder, however, Thomas and Jennet are also falling in love with each other.  In a sense, this is an existential romantic comedy told backwards to dilute the potential sentimentality of the romance itself.  For example, as Jennet suggests about Thomas’s claims to have killed old Skipps and another man, “There was a soldier,/Discharged and centreless, with a towering pride/In his sensibility, and an endearing/Disposition to be a hero, who wanted/To make an example of himself to all/Erring mankind, and falling in with a witch-hunt/His good heart took the opportunity/Of providing a diversion.  O Thomas,/It was very theatrical of you to choose the gallows.”  When I say “an existential comedy told backwards,” I mean that the action of the play begins not at the beginning, nor really in the middle (as in medias res would dictate for an epic or novel), but nearly at the postulated end of the woman being accused and in the process of undergoing imprisonment and trial.  Instead, however, Frye whips the rug out from under the feet of his oppressing (or as with some like Margaret the mother, just indifferent) characters, and resurrects old Skipps.

That this is an existential play and not a simple romantic comedy, however, becomes quite clear in the end, in the alternatives to go or stay which are presented to Jennet and Thomas, and in the conditions under which they will have to leave or stay.  That is, to stay is deadly, but to go has its risks and forfeits as well.  And all the risks and forfeits of life itself have been gone through in the magnificent poetic excursions of language, especially from these two characters.  The choices they make, including the loss of the fear of loving, show that they carry existential baggage despite their apparently greater dedication to reason than the superstitious characters around them, because they only overcome the fear slowly, at least in dramatic terms on stage.

What does this have to do with freedom of speech, you ask?  Well, for one thing, the officials in the play are all constrained by fear of exceeding certain careful limits, not only from freedom of speech, but even from freedom of thought.  Their minds run in carefully cut grooves, and never get out of the ruts.  Even when Tappercoom offers to let Thomas and Jennet go at the end, it’s not because he sees their points of view; it’s only so that he can get Jennet’s property now that she is less demonstrably witch-like.  Only Richard the clerk frees himself from his parish role enough to run away with the woman he loves from the loveless marriage which threatens her.  The brothers and Margaret their mother do not change from having the initial concerns they had at the beginning of the play.  They are a little freer in their speech, but they too do not have any real freedom of mind to go along with it, the brothers sunk in lechery and competition, the mother in her household concerns.  It is only Jennet and Thomas who represent the forces of freedom, she in having the courage to go along with him into the night without knowing where they will go, he in getting over his “irrational fears” of closeness and love.  But this comes out sounding far more schmaltzy and sentimental than it does in the play, particularly if you see a powerful performance of it as I did.  Perhaps it would help readers to know that Richard Burton, John Gielgud, and Claire Bloom among others worthy of note were in one of the first productions of the play–maybe it’s possible to visualize it just a bit more accurately when you can see fine dramatic actors in your mind’s eye.

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September 1, 2012 · 10:56 pm

Two beautiful poems about outer (and inner) space–by John Masefield and Conrad Aiken

In discussing the first poem I’ve selected today, John Masefield’s “I Could Not Sleep for Thinking of the Sky,” I want to illustrate some of what I think draws us into the subject of outer space, which is often a metaphor in poetry for our inner space, our reachings toward infinity in an interior direction.  What I am suggesting in fact is that in Masefield’s poem, the “sky,” “The unending sky, with all its million suns” is in fact an example of T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative.”  For, as Masefield continues, we see a place where the poet watches “the fire-haired comet run[],” and “a point of gloss/Burn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing.”  He tries to imagine what it would be like if he could “sail that nothing,” if he could “proceed” and see a sun’s “last light upon his last moon’s granites/Die to a dark that would be night indeed.”  That his poem is a masterful exposition about death itself becomes more obvious in his last lines, when he says he might experience “Night where [his] soul might sail a million years/In nothing, not even Death, not even tears.”  Thus, though the poem is concerned with the birth and death of solar systems, which take up ever so much more time than humans to die, he can imagine himself living a kind of immortality almost like that of a god in heaven, but in a literal heaven of planets, stars, suns, moons and the like.  In form, the poem is a sonnet, first eight lines, then six, and the set pattern of the form enforces a sort of masterful containment of emotion, a condensation of intensity and meaning which sets up parallels between the wide and limitless-seeming sleepless night, the dark sky above with isolated bright spots, and the final and eventual and otherwise unimaginable experience of Death with a capital D, the final death of an individual seeming so small beside the deaths of galaxies and universes.  Yet it is this supposedly limited human intelligence, this small and insignificant human being, who is having this vast experience of the heavens.  In small space and time, two very indicative words here, Masefield has painted both an exterior and an interior notion of vastness and illimitable places.

Conrad Aiken’s poem, “Morning Song of Senlin,” is both longer and more filled with comic ironies.  Yet, it too is about shooting through space.  Aiken’s poetic voice, however, does not see the experience of going through space at top speed as something he could or would or might do were it possible, but in fact seems to treat the inner space of his private existence as a foil and in counterpoint to the experience of travelling on planet Earth through the universe.  Yet the two experiences in this poem are intimately connected.  The poem begins, “It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning/When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,/I arise, I face the sunrise,/And do the things my fathers learned to do.”  It might be remarked that the name “Senlin” was said by Aiken to mean “little old man,” and so it is that we can imagine so easily the daily ablutions and activities of a precise, neat, circumspect senior citizen, whose unbounded if somewhat humorously ironical remarks about travelling through space as he completes his daily brushing and combing activities could easily take our own breaths away as we imagine them.  He seems so very smug and self-satisfied.  The first stanza ends, “And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet/Stand before a glass and tie my tie.”  The chorus occurs periodically throughout the poem and reinforces the sense of a very small and insular even if natural world on the Earth around Senlin:  “Vine leaves tap my window,/Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,/The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree/Repeating three clear tones.”  In the second stanza, we get again the repetition of the little old man looking in the mirror, tying his tie, combing his hair, but in this case the heavenly accompaniment to this activity is: “The green earth tilts through a sphere of air/And bathes in a flame of space.”

In the next stanza, final things are thought of, but again rather comically, as if in the attitude of a member of a boys’ club who has a special understanding with the club president:  “It is morning…Should I not pause in the light to remember god?/Upright and firm I stand on a star unstable,/He is immense and lonely as a cloud./I will dedicate this moment before my mirror/To him alone, for him I will comb my hair,/Accept these humble offerings, cloud of silence!/I will think of you as I descend the stair.”

The poem mentions, of course, that “The walls are about me still as in the evening,/I am the same, and the same name still I keep.”  Yet, this seems an odd sort of reassurance to juxtapose with the next of the travelling-at-high-speed-through-an-unknown-firmament passages, which reads, “In a whistling void I stand before my mirror,/Unconcerned, and tie my tie.”  The next morning comes and is related in similar form, in this fashion:  “It is morning.  I stand by the mirror/And surprise my soul once more;/The blue air rushes above my ceiling,/There are suns beneath my floor…”  We continue with the alternation back and forth through the rest of the poem of Senlin getting ready in the morning with such images from his mind as “I ascend from darkness/And depart on the winds of space for I know not where….”  The last we actually hear of Senlin’s voice, we hear “There are shadows across the windows…And a god among the stars;and I will go/Thinking of him as I might think of daybreak/And humming a tune I know…”  We get one final repetition of the natural earth-bound images in the chorus with slight variation, and thus the poem ends.

But what has Senlin actually said, when it’s taken all together?  There seem to be four main lines of monologue going on in this mind we are listening to:  one is that he’s abstracted with getting ready for his day, and his daily routine.  The second is that after all, there are daily images outside his window as well which can be seen as being nearly as reassuring as the routine itself.  The third and most terrifying set of images are associated with the fact that yes, he is on a “swiftly tilting planet,” and these images open the door to startling and frightening possibilities of collision, not so much of planets with each other, but of the quotidian with the unearthly and heavenly.  Yet, for Senlin’s convenience, in the fourth set of images he has imagined himself a god who, though “immense and lonely as a cloud” may still be appeased by someone going through his daily cycle, minding his own business, and giving a polite if highly conventional tip of the hat to the notion of god itself.  This is a strangely and hilariously apt picture of a man keeping his balance in ways which most of us practice from time to time, as we note that scary things do happen (but of course, not to us!).  And this is what makes this poem of universal interest to all of us, even those of us who are not getting on in years and able only to make the best of things in this way.

These two poems seems opposed in another way in the sense that Masefield’s poem takes place at night, and incorporates a sense of the sheer vastness of a life experience when it is filled with a notion of the unearthly and wide expanses of eternity.  And Aiken’s poem takes place in the morning, in a calm and domesticated setting, where the “wild” element is introduced by the thoughtful though somewhat dismissive acceptance of outer space and the earth’s place in it by the composed and superior-to-the-experience attitude of Senlin.  The first poem has somber and tragic tonalities; the second has counterpoint and comic irony.  Yet, both are about our place in the universe and how we face it.  For this reason, I’ve always loved these two poems, and found comfort, complexity, and amusement during the many times I’ve read them through.

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