Tag Archives: quality

March 19, 2015 · 7:22 pm

Ellipses/Lacunae of Knowing, Feeling, Fact, and Time in Alice Munro’s stories in “Too Much Happiness”

Both Doris Grumbach, writing of God, and Mahmoud Darwish writing poetically of things and people he has lost have used the phrase “the presence of absence.”  Without explicit reference to either of their works per se, I would like to use that phrase, “the presence of absence,” to refer to the overwhelming sense of importance we derive from the ellipses or lacunae in the stories Alice Munro chose to put in her collection titled after the last of the stories in the group, Too Much Happiness.  Quite simply, in every story, there are things that the author in the case chooses to omit, to gloss over, or to mention only in passing.  My contention is that these ellipses or lacunae of knowing, feeling, fact, or time in Munro’s collection stand out from those of the usual method of omission in the sense that they are key and crucial to the meaning of the stories, and are not merely structural conveniences for moving the story along.

In the first story of the ten, “Dimensions,” the facts we receive are delivered from the wife Doree’s emotional stance until almost the very end, and we have three interwoven strands of encounter amongst characters.  There is the strand of story in which Doree goes to visit her criminally insane husband Lloyd, who in a fit of rage with her murdered their three children; there is the portion of the story taken up with Doree’s new life under her middle name “Fleur”; and there is the set of conversations she is shown as having with her therapist, Mrs. Sands.  In none of these strands, however, do we sense the introduction of a synthesizing voice, as if the shattering of Doree’s life has left these three strands only loosely entwined. The husband is spoken of as a ghost, and he insists at a key point in the story that he has seen the children in another dimension.  It is almost as if the story is “under-written,” though it is proficient and completely artistic as it is.  Only at the ending of the story, in which Doree is desperately and effectively engaged in trying to save the life of an entirely unconnected person does the perfect resolution occur–and of course the “message” if one must have one is that no life is unconnected to the rest.  Here it is that a synthesizing voice speaks, in a sense, because we are told that she has learned CPR from Lloyd before their children were dead, and then we feel the lacuna between a reasonable amount of give and take between them and the total disaster that their life together later became.  “At what point did such and such a thing manifest itself?” is a futile question, but we can sense the gap itself, the presence of the absence of married charity.

In “Fiction,” the second story of this volume, the unfilled spaces are both of time and suggested plot.  A woman encounters a younger woman, someone previously known to her as a child, now a young writer, who has written a story about people they know in common, including the older woman herself at an earlier stage, fictionalized.  Not only has the young writer’s life since they fist knew each other taken place during an ellipsis, she doesn’t recognize the older woman in the present tense section of the story.  There is also a hint in what the older woman expects to find in the writer’s fiction that she herself has victimized the younger woman, but this clearly is not in the fiction the younger woman writes, so there is a lacuna here, if in fact the tale is supposed to be based on her own experience, as the older woman expects.  Naming the story “Fiction” of course highlights the fact that the young woman’s writing is perhaps more artistic than the older woman expects, because in writing of one’s own life, one is free to use blanks and spaces and absences of fact and time and sequence.

“Wenlock Edge” is named for a portion of poetry by A. E. Housman from A Shropshire Lad, and here there is a presence of absence in that the character’s feelings are only sketched out, but the poem itself is left to fill in a lot of territory, especially in the quoted sections.  The narrator’s roommate Nina, not a serious student like the narrator, but a sort of Holly Golightly of the academic world and beyond, has some sort of undeclared (and therefore elliptical) relationship with an old man named Mr. Purvis, who at one point when Nina is ill asks the narrator to come to his house for dinner instead.  Later, Nina gets together with a relative of the narrator’s, who has taken the narrator out to eat many times in a sort of older-cousin way.  The lacunae come in when the two girls change places, because of what Mr. Purvis asks the narrator to do, what Nina does with the narrator’s cousin, and finally what the narrator does to “get even” with Nina and the fates for the shame she feels.  The two men are two different kinds of bachelors, and the various points at which the narrator is left in ignorance or “guesses” about things make for an exciting and ironic story:  after all, Nina has told the narrator’s male relative that Mr. Purvis is her own uncle:  what if, perhaps, he is only an uncle and not the old pervert that the narrator has always assumed he was, even before she met him?  Doesn’t that make the two girls the same, or very similar?  But these sorts of thoughts are ones left to the reader to intuit, the narrator’s elliptical remarks don’t make them explicit.

The next story, “Deep-Holes,” has as a major “presence of absence” theme the way in which early suffering leaves its mark on a young man, a mark which his own mother is not fully aware of until she meets up with him again, years later, after much searching.  Though she knows a few characteristics of his early personality which are predictive of his later ones, yet there is a huge ellipsis between the child and the suffering man during which his mother has not played a part.

“Free Radicals” is a story in which a woman whose husband recently predeceased her in spite of the fact that she has terminal cancer comes to terms with how much she still wants to live.  When a threatening drifter comes to rob her and possibly kill her (she cannot be sure of his intentions), she has to attempt to deal not only with death, but with the life she manipulated others to get.  Her sharing of a bottle of red wine with the drifter (and her remark that she cannot remember whether it kills free radicals or promotes them) has a symbolic connection to the end of the story and the drifter’s destiny, but there is a sort of blanking out of the obviousness of the symbol because of the sheer vitality and importance of the plot and dialogue as she lures him in line by line, still afraid for her life.  She also shows a sense of guilt for an episode in which she was the “free radical” to someone else’s happiness, and attempts to make up for the past as well as affecting the future with a bit of fiction of her own; of course, the past cannot be reversed.  The last words of the story, “Never know,” marks the lacuna that has ruled the plot.

In this story, “Face,” there is an ellipsis of memory between the evidence of the boy’s strawberry birthmark on his face, and having “face” or daring, as the young girl his playmate in the story does later, approaching his bedside when he is in the hospital and reading poetry to him without identifying who she is.  He is a minor celebrity in adulthood, so he is known to her, though he does not at first know her.  The lacunae also occur between the years in the story when they have encountered each other.

In the story “Some Women,” the ellipsis contains the significance of the title, which is different from the point of view of each of the story’s female characters.  As Old Mrs. Crozier would say of her daughter-in-law Sylvia “Some women take the joy out of life.”  As the narrator would say of the masseuse and attendant Roxanne “Some women are no better than they ought to be.”  As   As Sylvia would more evasively put it about Roxanne when Sylvia finally wins in a tug of war over her dying husband Bruce’s affections, “Some women are not aware of how they should approach the dying.”  Finally, when Bruce’s mother Old Mrs. Crozier intuits that her son has set aside his flirtation with Roxanne for his wife, she outright says something to Roxanne about leaving, and it’s obvious that she has switched her opinion and thinks some women get way above themselves, and above their place.  Bruce himself is in a way the location of the lacuna, amidst so much female activity and plotting.

The next story, story number eight, is called “Child’s Play.”  In it, two girls named Marlene and Charlene, who joke at camp about being twins but who are widely different in some respects both as children and as adults, conspire to do something quite horrible but described in everyday terms to a third girl, Verna, a developmentally disabled child.  But this event, which is the central event in the story, is held until the end, and almost is left out altogether; there is a lacuna or an ellipsis in the place where the narrator’s human compassion should be, though it’s obvious by the avoidance tactics in the narrative that  she now knows what she did, and how it should be morally assessed.  It’s the actual moral assessment which is missing, really, though the narrator remembers, finally, or imagines, what must have happened after she and Charlene left the other girl.  Thus, the repressed memory and the imagined results only come together at the very end, and it’s the overt sense of guilt which is also repressed, though clearly it has had a major effect on the narrator’s choices in life.

In “Wood,” we quite literally have the case of a man, an amateur logger, who cannot see the forest for the trees.  He is given numerous small contracts to log wood from various farms, and does so.  When a local ne’er-do-well gossips to him that he is not the only person with a contract on a prized piece of land, however, he loses his composure and tries to beat the competition, with the result that he gets injured, almost without knowing how it happened.  Though the story has a happy ending in a sense (at the same time having passages reminiscent of “To Build A Fire” by Jack London), the lacunae or ellipses center around what the truth actually is about the contract (never known) and the man’s realization that it is not only wood,for humankind’s use, but also has a life of its own as a mysterious and deeply silent living thing.  The wood has previously only spoken to him as something to sell; now, it speaks to him out of its own deep “presence as absence,” its enigma of the world before or without humankind.

The title story, “Too Much Happiness,” doesn’t seem to follow the same patterns as the other stories, in having lacunae or ellipses of knowing or feeling or fact, though the time scheme is transient, partial, and elliptical.  This story is a brief account of the significance and the ending days of Sophia Kovalesky, a Russian mathematician.  As Munro notes, “I have limited my story to the days leading up to Sophia’s death, with flashbacks to her earlier life.”  Munro recommends Don and Nina Kennedy’s book on Kovalesky for those interested in reading more.

As a whole, Munro’s book reminds us of Henry James’s edict that if a work is well-imagined, that the reader will be the one to do a good proportion of the work in responding imaginatively to the writer’s words.  Certainly in Munro’s case, there is much for the reader to respond to, without anyone being likely to get the sense that the work is not complete.  In fact, in calling the “blanks,” ellipses, and lacunae instances of “the presence of absence,” I intend to indicate the same sort of artistic choice as may pertain to the white spaces on an otherwise brightly-painted canvas:  they are an integral and vital part of the whole, and call for something from the observer, an act of responsive mimicry which makes the “filled-in” described portion itself all that much more sensitive and profound.

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March 7, 2015 · 2:34 am

Fay Weldon’s “Watching Me, Watching You” and the Gnostic “Gospel of Thomas”

Has anyone ever said to you “Everything happens for a reason”?  Or, perhaps, like Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, “There is no such thing as coincidence”?  We smile and nod, and pass by the cues to a better understanding of such notions of Jung’s synchronicity.  But today, while reading from two supposedly widely different texts on two different library websites, I ran “smack-dab”–as people from my part of the world say–into a lovely coincidence about meanings and situations which I’d like to share with you.  On one website, I was starting to read from the Nag Hammadi scriptures, the Gnostic scriptures which were suppressed from the canon of allowed Christian texts by clerics who called them “heretical.”  They have now surfaced again, and have been translated from the Greek and the Coptic into English, and have stirred my curiosity.  On the other website, I was finishing up a reading of Fay Weldon’s book of short stories called Watching Me, Watching You, which was named after one of the stories.  And then, it hit me:  the whole of Weldon’s book bore an intimate relation in its themes and structures to something quoted from one of the Gnostic texts, the Gospel of Thomas.  And here’s what it was:

“Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.  For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.”  Ever hear someone say to someone else “It’s as plain as the nose on your face”?  But then, in order to get a proper view of one’s own nose, one needs a reflective surface in front of one, and Fay Weldon’s short stories, with their scalpel-sharp ironies and desperate comic turns, are that reflective surface of what often goes on in front of us, but which we chose to ignore, or cannot master the trick of deciphering, simple as it might seem to others watching.  The book is dated in some respects, having been a collection of stories from the 7o’s and published as a whole in 1981, and yet the situations that make up the action in them still occur today, in actuality or in shadows of actions.  I would like here to give a brief summary or synopsis (not so brief, in the first instance) of each story, just to whet the readers’ appetites, and then without spoiling the adventure, go on to final comment.

1.  “Christmas Tree”–A writer gradually becoming successful for his counterculture writings allows his personal life to affect his career.  An old story, but told with refreshing clarity here.  As Weldon writes about her character, “Writers tend to undervalue those who praise them, or complain that praise is patronising; whilst at the same time feel aggrieved if they are not praised.  They never win the battle with themselves, which is why, perhaps, they go on writing.”  With this writer, his first wife left him taking with her their small daughter, when he cheated on her, starting him on a lifetime of going from woman to woman.  In this case, however, the womanizer finally becomes the victim of his habit, and is deceived and taken advantage of by a much younger woman who gets him to marry her because he believes she is “pure” and virginal.  As he says of her before he marries her:  “I’m glad she’s a waitress….I’m finally back where I belong.  Amongst real people, who do real things, and live simple, honest hard-working lives.”  When he finds himself amongst her whole family of small-time grifters, he is instead of being realistically downcast about it (as his art would suggest) ironically overjoyed.  “He had bound himself by accident to a monstrous family in a monstrous place and had discovered by accident what he felt to be the truth, long evident, long evaded.  It was that human nature was irredeemable….All aspirations and ambition had been burned away:  all wounds cauterised with so sudden and horrific a knife as to leave him properly cleansed and purified.”  This is a funny way to describe total failure and withdrawal from one’s own creative sphere, but thus it is, and we see it as he does not, for he is like the Christmas tree that his own family used to replant year after year, only now his “roots” have been “cauterized” as his new family does when they steal trees to sell off someone else’s land:  his roots have been boiled, and he seems not to mind his fate at all.

Breakages–In this very innovative story, a clerical wife is “haunted” by a ghost who gets even with her husband for his unfair treatment of her by breaking his things.  This only happens when he is in church preaching or is elsewhere occupied and she is alone, at least in the beginning of the story.  The bitter issue between them of whose fault it is that they have no children comes to a head, however, and then the husband too is confronted by the “ghost,” though he funnily enough persists in blaming the wife for the noises and moving furniture up in the attic, even while she is in the same room downstairs with him.  Against all the reader’s expectations as they are established by the story thus far, when the two characters finally get around to speaking to each other about their “guest,” even though they are still deluding themselves about some things, they are visited by a happy ending, which yet is not free of whimsical irony.  This is thus another story in which something is obvious, yet needs to be confronted before the apotheosis can take place.

Alopecia–The topic is “sisterhood” or the lack thereof, amongst a group of women, and the lovely reversal at the end that takes place when the least sisterly of the women is suddenly put in the same position as a woman known to them all whom she has maliciously gossiped about for years.  Once again, the quote from the Gnostic gospels rings true, because she has willfully ignored for years what has been right in front of her, which has been going on between the woman and her husband, blaming the wife for everything and seeming deliberately to cause hatred and suspicion to surround her.  The term “alopecia,” which is a kind of diseased hair loss, stands in as a subject-replacement for the actual “bald” cruelty of the other woman’s husband, who among other brutalities has made a habit of pulling her hair out by handfuls.  When the situation is reversed between the two women, the woman in the previously superior place derives the full benefit of a hateful kind of achieved wisdom, too late.

Man With No Eyes–This is another “ghost story,” featuring “the man with no eyes,” a sort of bugaboo from an Eastern culture, who seems to visit a family purporting to be a happy one in which the husband, however, is always demanding much, giving little, and constantly and apparently deliberately misjudging his wife.  He is another one not seeing what is before his eyes.  It seems likely that at this point the general drift of the stories of Weldon’s labelled (and sometimes marketed) as “ghost stories” must be obvious to my readers:  a number of her stories, though they all contain ironic reversals or heapings-on of fated happenings, are clearly not the cheap and simple ghost story per se (fun as that can be).  Several of them, however, were in the 70’s and 80’s published in magazines and volumes which purported to be ghost story-oriented.

Threnody–This is the most mysterious, in its way, of all the stories.  A female character who is seeing a therapist, another woman whose words we know only through those that the first character repeats aloud, changes her story repeatedly, ready to take anyone’s view of her as the true one.  She seems to have no sense of self, but one after the other, follows other people’s views of what she is “like.”  We as readers are frustrated in some ways in trying to get to know this character, because we cannot really be sure of what the truth is about what these other characters say and do to and with her.  Thus, this story is in a sense a sort of defeat of the Gospel of Thomas notion that it is possible to know what is in front of your face, because as another more famous Biblical quote says, we are seeing her “through a glass, darkly.”

Angel, All Innocence–Yet another young woman, an expectant mother this time, who becomes aware of “ghosts” in the attic, hears a tale of former tenants from the kindly village doctor who treats her and senses her husband’s casual emotional cruelty and indifference.  She makes a decision which is not logical at all in ordinary human terms, but which the ghost from the attic (whom she thinks she sees one day upon the stair) would understand completely.  She is the character par excellence among these in the book who, though “all innocence,” yet is worldly enough in spiritual terms of a good sort to know what to do to save herself and her child.

Spirit of the House–The predominance of the characters in this story do not see what is in front of them, an abusive nanny.  One character does, and must strive for justice.

Watching Me, Watching You–Cyclic wives and lovers, and a ghost who sleepily observes them all, as they take perspectives on each other, and history repeats itself.  One could even argue that it’s the accumulation of repetitions through history that has made the ghost so “knowing,” that this is in fact the spirit of all the tales in the book.

Geoffrey and the Eskimo Child–This is the bittersweet story of a man who for years is a sort of feminist’s ideal man, at least on the surface, a feminist himself, and a good socialist and humanist at the same time, who yet presents his wife with a final shocking conundrum and doesn’t help her to solve it.  The question is, why is the view occluded for her, his closest, and why is it likewise obscure to others on the outside?  One might almost suspect Weldon of attempting to suggest that such model behavior is too hard for any man (as opposed to the women whom she celebrates in her stories), did he not have a certain charm and resilience as a character, even though he may have just a bit of feet of clay.

Weekend–This is a final picture in the book of a condensation of a family’s whole way of life into how their lives are arranged for a single weekend (one of many, a pattern) in their country home.  No words are wasted; every single thing that happens means something, amounts to something, counts for something, to the characters living through it nearly as much as for the reader.  Though the two creative works are so very different, and the character of the mother in this work is gentle and constantly striving to please, very different from Elizabeth Taylor’s character in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, yet the economy of the wording and the ferocious amount of energy that is released from it reminds me of that in the famous play by Edward Albee.

Fay Weldon, whom I have never read before but whose works I now intend to become more familiar with, was awarded the CBE in Britain, and is the author of the pilot for the famous PBS series Upstairs, Downstairs.  She has written many novels and scripts and plays and books of short stories, and given my acquaintance with her merely through this one work I’ve written on today, I think she would well repay serious attention.  It’s quite clear that though in this book the plight of women is one of her chief concerns, or at least was in 1981 when she published this work (and I can’t imagine such a devoted advocate changing her mind), she is well able to see more than just the contemporary injustice and look behind it for the historical one.  As well, her male characters are not straw men, easy to knock down, but believable even when culpable or villainous.  I hope to run across something else by her again soon, perhaps something a little more recent and topical.  For the meantime, I hope you haven’t been totally exhausted by this long post, and welcome any comments you may have to make.

 

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February 27, 2015 · 6:00 pm

A reversal of expectations for characters and readers alike–Juan Bosch’s “The Beautiful Soul of Don Damian”

Readers in the English-speaking world are familiar with the word “expectations” (in its sense of having something to inherit) from its usage in Charles Dickens’s famous novel Great Expectations.  Readers in the Dominican Republic, however, are surely more familiar with the ironic and witty tale of reversed expectations in Juan Bosch’s short tale “The Beautiful Soul of Don Damian,” which has some plot twist surprises for the reader as well.  The tale goes thusly:

Don Damian’s soul, which in passing is shown to be hosted in the body of a miserly and greedy and unscrupulous rich old man, is just preparing to make its final withdrawal from the world and the body as the story opens.  It is described as having tentacles, which it is slowly retracting because the temperature of the body in a coma is too hot for it to stand much longer.  As it is withdrawing, the nurse becomes alarmed and sends for the doctor and gives an injection, but to no avail, apparently:  “At the precise moment that the needle punctured Don Damian’s forearm, the soul drew its last tentacles out of his mouth, reflecting as it did so that the injection would be a waste of money.”

As the body becomes cold and yellowish, the soul flies up to a Bohemian glass lamp in the middle of the ceiling and looks down on the scene below, watching who mourns and who hesitates, meanwhile able to be aware of all their secret thoughts and feelings.  The housemaid mourns sincerely; she has served Don Damian “for more than forty years,” and she weeps and wails, and as the priest arrives to give last rites (which he should’ve done the night before, only he was preoccupied with trying to get money for a new church from Don Damian), she says that it doesn’t matter whether Don Damian is shriven or not, because he has a “beautiful soul.”  In the meantime, the beautiful but unfaithful young wife and the mother-in-law are crying crocodile tears in order to deceive everyone into thinking that the wife (who has a lover) truly grieves her husband.

Two things happen almost simultaneously, though in the course of the story they are related one at a time–the hypocritical mother-in-law, wife, and priest take up the housemaid’s cry of “beautiful soul” and start to ring changes upon it to prove that they too mourn the passing, and the soul, hearing how beautiful it is from all sides, decides to have a look at itself in the bathroom mirror, to be able to visualize its own beauty.  Both sides are in for a shock, however, the soul first:  “But good God, what had happened?  In the first place, it had been accustomed, during more than sixty years, to look out through the eyes of Don Damian, and those eyes were over five feet from the ground; also, it was accustomed to seeing his lively face, his clear eyes, his shining gray hair, the arrogance that puffed out his chest and lifted his head, the expensive clothes in which he dressed.  What it saw now was nothing at all like that, but a strange figure hardly a foot tall, pale, cloud-gray, with no definite form.  Where it should have had two legs and two feet like the body of Don Damian, it was a hideous cluster of tentacles like those of an octopus, but irregular, some shorter than others, some thinner, and all of them seemingly made of dirty smoke, of some impalpable mud that looked transparent but was not; they were limp and drooping and powerless, and stupendously ugly….It had no waist.  In fact, it had no body, no neck, nothing:  where the tentacles joined there was merely a sort of ear sticking out on one side, looking like a bit of rotten apple peel, and a clump of rough hairs on the other side, some twisted, some straight.  But that was not the worst, and neither was the strange grayish-yellow light it gave off:  the worst was the fact that its mouth was a shapeless cavity like a hole poked in a rotten fruit, a horrible and sickening thing…and in the depths of this hole an eye shone, its only eye, staring out of the shadows with an expression of terror and treachery!”  Don Damian’s soul thus has its own expectations reversed when it sees itself truly.  Not realizing that it is invisible to others, the soul wonders how it can go out into the street appearing thus, and just as the doctor rings at the front door, it reverses the expectations of the mourners by making a mad jump back into the ice-cold mouth of the body of Don Damian.

The doctor, taking the wrist of Don Damian, grows excited and then opens his bag, taking out a stethoscope and a syringe.  He too avows that Don Damian has a beautiful soul, and that he must try to save him.  While the simple housemaid rejoices in the next few minutes that Don Damian has been returned to life, the doctor and the priest both plan secretly what they are going to be receiving from him, while the wife and mother-in-law make the best they can of a bad situation, and evidently pretend to be elated.  “The soul of Don Damian, tired of so many lies, decided to sleep.  A moment later, Don Damian sighed weakly and moved his head on the pillow.  “‘He’ll sleep for hours now,’ the doctor said.  ‘He must have absolute quiet.’  And to set a good example, he tiptoed out of the room.”

Amid the reversals in the story, the readers’ expectations too may be reversed, especially if they are anticipating a typical “and I felt myself flying toward the white light” sort of tale.  The soul not only does not see a white light, but perches on the Bohemian lamp and finds it as much too warm as the body with its fever was.  As well, despite the fact that all proclaim the soul as beautiful, the soul when it confronts a mirror sees itself as it truly is, and flies back into the body so as to have the countenance (literal as well as figurative) of the body.  This is yet another reversal, because usually when people are physically ugly, some well-meaning sort will come along and say something like “Yes, but I think he/she must have a beautiful soul.”  In this story, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray, a sleek and attractive physique hides an ugly soul.

The author of this story, Juan Bosch, was born of educated farmers in the Dominican Republic, but at one stage of his life attained the office of President.  When he was deposed, he turned to teaching, and then began to concentrate on nonfiction as the best way to expose the problems of human existence.  Though the tale we have looked at today is necessarily fictional because we cannot know in actuality what happens to the soul after death, the farcical elements yet have a reality of their own, which makes the story persuasive and compelling just as it is.  And certainly what some regard as the soul but which could also be seen as the sum total of a person’s actions and emotions in life is part of the human experience, along with its eventual destiny.  Thus Bosch’s light touch and gift of humor give to Don Damian’s “death scene” an enduring significance which puts it among the best of the tableaux of this sort, and an ability to affect its readers not only with a smile and a rueful shake of the head, but with some moments of serious thought as well:  what will all our souls look like when we no longer have bodies to hide them?  Two apposite quotes spring to mind, one from the cynical and witty La Rochefoucauld and one from a medieval nun:  La Rochefoucauld said, “Our words are given us to hide our thoughts.”  The only person in the story “The Beautiful Soul of Don Damian” who is sincere in her appraisal of his goodness (though mistaken, as it turns out) is the housemaid, who perhaps has not the realistic view we see of the soul, but something even beyond that.  The medieval nun said:  “God sees us not as we see ourselves, nor as others see us, nor yet as we are, but as we would be.”  One can only surmise that when the housemaid sees Don Damian from the point of view of a long-time employee and household dependent, that she is looking with the eyes of God, and that somewhere, sometime, in some way, Don Damian has wanted to be better than he is!

 

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February 8, 2015 · 8:48 pm

Agony and a Painter’s Eye: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge”

Today’s post is about one of the most frequently taught poems of the early Victorian era, one which has perplexed many an undergraduate (including me, at the time) and even more seasoned readers, I think primarily because they are waiting for it to tell a story, or give an explanation, of however attenuated a kind.  And it does both of these things in its own way, except that its own way is not that of the usual lyric poem; rather, it is an encapsulation of a lyric moment caught by the “eye” of a painter who was also a poet.  This multi-talented individual was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists and writers.

The poem is “The Woodspurge,” a modest title in line with the mostly restrained and simple words used.  The overall effect, however, is anything but simple.  Here is the poem in its entirety, all four four-line stanzas, which have been quoted elsewhere on the Internet previously as well:

“The wind flapped loose, the wind was still,/Shaken out dead from tree and hill;/I had walked on at the wind’s will–/I sat now, for the wind was still./Between my knees my forehead was–/My lips, drawn in, said not Alas!/My hair was over in the grass,/My naked ears heard the day pass./My eyes, wide open, had the run/Of some ten weeds to fix upon;/Among those few, out of the sun,/The woodspurge flowered, three cups in one./From perfect grief there need not be/Wisdom or even memory;/One thing then learned remains to me–/The woodspurge has a cup of three.”

Now to embark upon an interpretation, which is of course only one among many possible, but which I believe has some points to recommend it, such as its close reliance upon the items found in the poem, without adding possibly spurious additional material.

The first stanza begins by stressing that even when the speaker is in motion, as when walking, he is passively affected in the main:  when the wind pushes him along, he walks; when the wind ceases, he sits.  The wind is said to be “shaken out dead,” and indeed he is deathlike and still, or at least motionless, when the wind dies down.

Though many people think that the arcania of rhetorical figuration is mainly limited to such figures as similes, metaphors, apostrophes, and other such figures more common to poetry, it is a fact that in this poem Rossetti uses both paralipsis and litotes (in the second and third stanzas respectively), which perhaps occur less often in poetic circumstances.  Here in the second stanza, the speaker “paints a picture” of himself with head hanging low, and says that his lips did not say “alas.”  Well, why should they?  We don’t know, but by saying that he did not say something he is in fact saying, the poet is using the figure of paralipsis, which is denying that one is making a statement while in fact making it.  He speaks of his naked ears, and here the word “naked” is like the word “dead” in the first stanza, in that it is a powerful and evocative word that stands out as unusual; there is a sense that he is unprotected; there is a sense of vulnerability.

In the third stanza, this same sense of vulnerability occurs when we are told that his eyes are “wide open,” and therefore exposed.  At first we think that they are not exposed to much, it is true, as his head is hanging between his knees, but this seems to be a case of much from little.  Using the figure of litotes, or understatement, he says that he can see “ten weeds,” which is surely not all he can see even given his restricted field of vision.  Weeds and grass grow thickly, after all.  This figure of understatement produces a sense of lowness (as does his crouch), and depression.  Among these weeds, he focuses on the woodspurge because is it different and isolated, as he the speaker too is isolated, even among natural things and nature, though in poetry these are very often seen as potentially sympathetic, even sometimes to the extreme of using the “pathetic fallacy,” in which a speaker’s or character’s emotions are said to be experienced by a natural force or being.  The woodspurge is “out of the sun” literally because it is overshadowed by the speaker’s limbs and head hanging; the speaker himself is “out” of a sort of shining grace, of happiness.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker brings up “perfect grief,” and suggests that there is no wisdom which comes from it or memory which can resolve it.  Though the reader may experience a sense of shock at this sudden introduction of intense emotion as a subject, yet there is something about it which shows fittingness as well.  Even though it “ups the ante” in a sudden way, it’s appropriate because we know that all this so far has been adding up to something, some climax.  The last two lines contain a living crystallization of a moment of pain and suffering, the sense of “perfect grief” as embodied in the totally a-historical symbol of the woodspurge.  That is, before Rossetti wrote his poem, there was no necessary connection between the tiny weed/flower and sorrow; since his poem, I doubt that anyone aware of the poem, either seeing the poem and/or seeing the woodspurge knowingly, could help but think of the emotional connection.

This poem “The Woodspurge” is an excellent introduction to the Pre-Raphaelite notion that a poem (or a painting) can be about a moment of intense emotion without a history in words of the cause (though of course many of the paintings were of characters from literature or myth).  As well, to anyone themselves subject to the feelings recorded in the poem, “The Woodspurge” itself is a woodspurge-in-words which can capture their own emotions, again without an actual historical rehearsing of the cause of the emotions.  Thus the vagueness of the “backstory,” as it’s called now, makes the poem itself more universal and accessible to more people.  The statement that “One thing then learned remains to me–/The woodspurge has a cup of three” betrays the lastingness of the grief and the simultaneous poverty and wealth of sorrow:  sorrow is full and overflowing, so full that the speaker cannot say more than he does, yet it leaves him empty of all but the final awareness of the association between his emotion and what he sees at the extreme moment of its intensity.

At the risk myself of having made much of a little thing, I have written this analysis of one of Rossetti’s most famous poems, maybe the most well-known, because it is so perfect of its kind.  I hope that you too will find it answers to your notion of a fine work of art, and will remember its beauty at any time when you feel that the world’s beauty has deserted you:  the woodspurge may be a simple flower, but it is a deceptively simple poem, and one which has much to offer to those who would notice.

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January 6, 2015 · 9:23 pm

China Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station”–Reading the first item in a trilogy as a prequel

After waiting for a considerable while for China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station to become available at my local library, long after I’d already read his loosely (very loosely) connected second and third books pertaining to the same world (The Scar and Iron Council), I was ready to write a post.  Nevertheless, it was the middle of the Christmas-New Year’s holiday break, and so I gave myself a few weeks off to do what people do during the holidays, at least partially due to the grim nature of the first book, which since I read it last functioned as a sort of prequel, willy-nilly.  Somehow, it was so masterful that I wanted to comment upon it, but so dour and again “grim” that I couldn’t bring myself to put a blight on the holidays by focusing on it.

Now, however, the New Year has begun, and it’s time to face realities, so since my New Year’s resolution, such as it is, is to get back to a more regular posting schedule, it’s time to face Perdido Street Station head-on.  First let me say that the book begins at the beginning in the sense of building the world of New Crobuzon, a city which reminds me very much of a world-class city like London (the city of which Miéville is a citizen).  It’s in the first book thus that we get hints of themes and types of characters developed in all three of the books.  For example, the government and the militia are overwhelmingly strong and overbearing, putting their fingers not only in every legal “pie” going, but also in most of the illegal ones, whatever will turn a profit for the individuals in power.  As well, there are drugs and illicit activities abounding in the society at large, which the government polices on the one hand and attempts to regulate for their own use on the other.  Challenging the nature of this corruption are such bodies as the outlawed rebel presses, one of which publishes the forbidden newspaper Runagate Rampant, and folk heroes such as Jack Half-a-Prayer, a rebel who helps from the shadows to set things right in whatever way he can.  Caught in between are natives of many races, like the khepri (semi-human semi-beetles) and the vodyanoi (frog-like characters capable of controlling water power), and cactacae (cactus people), who must choose sides and duck prejudice and unfairness.

The main character of this book is a scientist-cum-renegade named Isaac Grimnebulin, who is approached by a member of a humanoid bird race from the desert, called a garuda.  This garuda asks him to rebuild or restore his wings, which have been removed as a punishment for a crime against another garuda.  The garuda claims that he is unable to explain the crime in the language that a human would comprehend, but it involved depriving another garuda of choice in one of his/her life decisions.  They become friends, and in the process of trying to study flying things in order to know how to use aerodynamics and his special study of crisis technology, Isaac unintentionally becomes involved in a massive plot which brings danger to the whole city, and which he and his friends must correct.

At the center of the conspiracy is a costly drug known as “dreamshit,” a substance which not only the government but also any number of criminals are trying to control the distribution of.  This substance comes from a phenomenally powerful and dangerous creature known as a slake-moth, a huge flying being whose larvae are fed on the dreamshit which humans steal and take as a drug.  When Isaac unknowingly raises a caterpillar that becomes a slake-moth and breaks free, freeing as well its brothers and sisters from a laboratory where they are kept, all hell breaks loose, to put it mildly.  The government is hunting Isaac and his friends for even ever having had the slake-moth, and for interfering in their plans to sell them to a gangster.  And in ignorance of this conspiracy between the government and the gangster, Mr. Motley, Isaac’s khepri lover Lin accepts a job from the gangster which she thinks is simple because it seems only to involve making a statue of him.

The book is involved, painful, and full of incident; it is as full of harsh events and no-way-out circumstances as any realistic novel.  There is no way that this book could bear the typical label of science fiction/fantasy, “escape literature,” because the creatures, characters, events, and symbols of everyday life are all paralleled by what is actually in our world, regardless of how unrealistic they at first seem.  Note, however, that I am not calling it a bad book; on the contrary, it’s a real gem of a book to read and think about, and I’m even glad that I read it last, because I think it’s no less substantial than the other two books and even surpasses them in the sense that it initiates the reader into a new kind of fiction which while fantastic in specifics is full of humanism and moral pointedness in its generalities and themes.  Don’t go here if you are looking for an escape; but go here if you are in search of a finely-crafted, highly artistic literary experience that fulfills most reasonable expectations of surprising you and rewarding you and confirming your experiences and intuitions of how living beings should and should not treat each other.  You will certainly find what you seek in this book by China Miéville.

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November 25, 2014 · 8:10 pm

“The Kraken”–The overflow of the gratuitous magical, and its redress

Yes, I’ve just read another of China Miéville’s book, this one entitled The Kraken, in which the legendary sea monster the kraken is a giant squid, namely one that is preserved in a glass tank in London’s Natural History Museum and Darwin Centre, both real places about which the author has chosen to spin fantasy.  This book is so complicated, so involved, with so many different characters and so many various changes of direction in the plot and the nefarious fictional plots some of the villains dream up, that it is hard to center a discussion on any one aspect of the story.

The main protagonist, Billy Harrow, works at the Darwin Centre as the person who has been responsible for preserving the giant squid in its tank, and he has also had the job of acting as tour guide for some of the tours of the center; the main spectacle that many of his patrons come to see, impatiently waiting through the other items of the tour, is, of course, the squid.  So imagine Billy’s surprise when one day he leads the tour group in only to find that the squid is missing!  Someone has purloined something from under his care, and he himself becomes one of the suspects.

Little by little, various “facts” come to light, such as that there is a private society, a religious group, which worships the squid, and one of Billy’s fellow employees turns out to be a follower.  As the two of them team up together as at first unwilling companions and gradually loyal friends, they discover together the seamy side of London’s magical world, and do battle with many different villains with many different agendas, but all of them seeming to have to do something with the squid.  There is even a special police squad devoted to policing the magical world and keeping its denizens in a kind of order, and Billy and his friend must not only hide from and try to outwit the villains, but also hide from and outwit the special police squad, which suspects them of having taken the squid.

London itself is a character in this book, and supports many different kinds of “knacking,” or witchery.  There are those who hunt down others like Billy and his friend Dane, there are key villains like the Tattoo, a face inked on a man’s back, who not only controls the man but controls a criminal empire of such subordinates as people half-made into devices, and gunfarmers, whose bullets when wedged in flesh grow little guns, like maggot eggs.  Then, there’s Grisamentum, a villain supposedly dead, who yet lives on in his employee’s fervor and comes back to life in odd ways which I won’t ruin the surprise by describing.  There are familiars who go on strike and refuse to work, memory angels in the museums and libraries who defend the magic stores therein, and many twists and turns of loyalties and subplots to keep the avid reader busy.

So complex is this book that I feel I should stop reviewing it at this point, and leave you to follow up on it for yourself, only making the further remark that no one in the book with the exception of Billy’s non-knacking friend Leon, who meets with a sad end, is who or what they first seem, not even Billy, who is surprised to discover some odd and totally unexpected talents in himself as he is exposed more and more to the magical world.  Let’s leave it at this:  this book celebrates cityscape, London’s in particular, and yet does so by exploring it as a magical land full of strange omissions, missions, and contradictions.  It’s one of the books I had intended to offer as a Halloween treat, only I had problems getting a copy of it to finish reading at that time.  Suffice it to say that there are campy comical passages which will simultaneously chill your blood and make you laugh aloud with the shiver, while also requiring a careful attention to your own particular memory angel in order to keep track of what’s happening.  So read this book, won’t you, and enjoy yet another of this phenomenal author’s gifted output:  I can promise you won’t regret taking the time to peruse this exploration of godhood, the end of time, schemes, dreams, and patched-together tactics, and the joyous good humor behind it all, which drops both dated and more contemporary references side by side, in a romp through what could be London’s magical history, if anyone had been keeping track.

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November 16, 2014 · 8:37 pm

Anatomy of a Revolution–China Mieville’s “Iron Council”

I’ve reviewed two or three of China Miéville’s books before, and it’s important to say that each one, even those taking place in the same imaginative world, are all unique from each other.  Perdido Street Station, the first of three books about New Crobuzon, a world-class city state of Bas-Lag, was not available from the library when I first started, so I picked up with the second book, The Scar, read and reviewed it, and now I’ve finished the third book, Iron Council, and have some remarks which I hope are pertinent to make about it.  By the time I get to the original book, Perdido Street Station, I should be able to read it as a sort of prequel, and I’m sure I will still enjoy it.  But on with Iron Council.

Whereas The Scar took place on the sea and was in a sort of middle-time, with its emphasis on New Crobuzon as a world sea power, Iron Council shows the city many years later torn apart from without and within by a war with the powerful Tesh sea-lords and thaumaturges, and by the anarchy and rebellion of its disadvantaged and dissenting citizens.  The so-called Iron Council is a group of rebels who have taken over a train which was supposed to cross the continent to the “greater glory” of New Crobuzon.  But instead of building a railway from the East to the West, as was the mission of the man in charge, a mad visionary named Weather Wrightby, the Iron Councillors–composed of the free people, the enslaved “Remade” peoples (who have been physically altered with animal and machine parts by the government of New Crobuzon to punish them for offenses), and the peoples of other kinds of life forms who have been maltreated by the government–have taken off with the train across continent by laying down tracks and then taking them up behind as the train passes.  They then re-use the ties and rails in front of the train again, and continue repeating the process, making it difficult for the government militia to follow them.

Meanwhile, back in New Crobuzon, the many different factions in rebellion who are loosely loyal to a central Caucus of rebels, yet often can’t agree among themselves about goals and resources, take inspiration from the tales they hear at a distance about the Iron Council, and sporadically there are citizens going back and forth from one group to the other, carrying messages and forming alliances.  Each group has its difficulties and trials, and the book shows these in detail:  for the Iron Councillors and their followers, it’s a matter of staying alive through a rough journey across an unknown continent with dangers such as smokestone (smoke which rises unpredictably from the earth like a geyser and creates a stone figure from whatever it touches) and the cacotopic stain, a portion of the land wherein everything flows and slides, including the landscape and the strange beasts that emerge from it.  The travellers themselves are sometimes suddenly made to shift shape and die horrible deaths in the peculiar effluvia of the terrain, and yet they manage to emerge and sow in their path villages and homesteads by the train’s road.

But as dreadful visitations from the magicians of Tesh act upon the city of New Crobuzon, so at the same time the government sees an opportunity to crack the whip again over its escapees; the militia has circled the continent by water, and approached from the West to get at the Iron Councillors, hoping to end their ability to inspire revolution amongst the Caucus and revolutionaries at home in the city.  The book is bifurcated, with some chapters telling the tale of Ori, a young revolutionary in the city, and the friends and cohorts he finds, and other chapters telling the tale of Cutter and Judah Low (a golem-maker of rare quality) and their friends and associates.  As the book works toward its close, representatives of the two groups come together in the city and try to fight the government as one, yet the many factions, the uncertain information, and the massive effort aimed against them keep them constantly off-balance.  This picture that Miéville paints is fantastic in some of its specifics, such as the otherworldly monsters and thaumaturgy that invest the story with its horrific aspects, yet the picture is highly true-to-life in its portrait of the interactions of people fighting and trying to win through together.  It is everyman’s story of a revolution, and in the middle of it is the tender and frustrated love of Cutter for Judah Low, an inner story which takes place almost certainly in every revolt where people are close and must trust each other with their lives.

As I have said, the verisimilitude of the book when it comes to the interactions that guide peoples’ allegiances and loyalties in a revolution is spot-on; even those who have never as much as read a factual book about mutiny or rebellion will recognize the players in the drama in the book as they attempt to forge bonds or break ties or achieve their goals.  After all, these faces are those of the real-life heroes and villains we see every day as we listen to the news, gossip about celebrities and political figures, and vote someone into or out of office.  Granted, the book is fiction and is about an extreme season in a country’s history; yet I believe you too will begin to feel that the characters in this book remind you of someone you have heard about from the daily news, some rebel or warlord or senator.  In China Miéville’s fantasy/science fiction, we constantly deal with the real, and see the shadows of a past, present, and perhaps of a future familiar to us.  I won’t give away the book’s ending, but I will say that it is “lyrical,” as the blurb writer on the cover says, and is in some ways the only possible ending which could walk evenly between euphoria and despair; give the book a read sometime soon, and I predict that you too will be impressed with this author’s outstanding ability to provoke, entertain, and teach with a new voice.

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November 9, 2014 · 8:23 pm

When is a cicatrix a metaphor, and when is it actual?–China Mieville’s “The Scar”

A scar, or a cicatrix, or a series of scars, appears pertinently in three or four places in the book The Scar by China Miéville.  It is the second of his three books about the world of New Crobuzon and its denizens, the first being Perdido Street Station and the third being Iron Council.  The books are loosely connected and feature a world of cityscapes, seascapes, hard laws, and maritime justice.  This book, The Scar, happens to be the one I picked up first, and so I’m making my post on it first, not having read Perdido Street Station yet.  The Scar itself embodies a scar across the face of New Crobuzon, taking place mostly on the imaginary world of Bas-Lag’s oceans and seas in a piratical kingdom known as Armada, one opposed to New Crobuzon’s rule of the easily known parts of the world’s waters, and subsisting on what it can steal and rob from others.

But I should start at the beginning.  The main protagonist, a woman named Bellis Coldwine, is fleeing her beloved New Crobuzon in a ship bound for colonies in Nova Esperium because she is afraid of being questioned by authorities for her possible connections with a scientist known as Isaac, a man having something to do with a contagion in New Crobuzon.  She has done nothing, but has a strong feeling that this will not help her to maintain her own rights and freedom from imprisonment.  In fact, she uses her abilities as a translator of arcane languages to win her a berth aboard the Terpsichoria, a ship which also contains in its hull a number of prisoners with their own kinds of actual scars.  Their scars are the physical ones of the “Remade,” people whose bodies have been fitted with odd and outlandish limbs and gadgets to punish them for some infraction or other.  Her logic that outlaws are more comfortable in the colonies is fine, as far as it goes; that is, until the New Crobuzoner ship reaches the land of some of its allies, the cray people, only to find that one of its own three drilling towers maintained on the cray people’s harbor is missing!

At this point, things begin to destabilize around Bellis, and because of decisions taken by others, over which she has no control, she finds herself prisoner in a casual way aboard a pirate vessel which absorbs the ship she is on and adds it to a floating pirate city farther away in the waters, a city made up not only of its own native citizens, but far more of a community of freed Remade (or fRemade) peoples, people who have accepted a change in allegiance in exchange for their lives, and odd people from here and there across the face of the world who have lost their homes to the pirates or to chance.

Bellis never gives up hope of getting back home to New Crubuzon, where she hopes she will be able to return when she is no longer being sought.  But before this can happen, she goes through a scarring and self-changing life experience in the pirate city.  The city is divided into ridings ruled by powerful sea-lords, not excluding one called the Brucolac (a vampir), who has a “cadre” of vampirs working with him.  Another riding, or city section, is ruled by a man and woman called “the Lovers,” who have a strange history which Bellis Coldwine gradually susses out with the mysteriously inclined help of their henchman, one Uther Doul, a mercenary fighter who controls a mysterious Possible Sword, which makes several different possibilities happen at once when he fights.  Bellis is appalled by the way the lovers join, by making mirror image cuts on themselves and the other as an act of twisted love; they, of course, have scars, but more scarring still is the experience they foist upon the city, the experience of seeking a mysterious rift in the world called “The Scar,” where all things and all possibilities exist at once.

When Bellis and a man whom she thinks of as a sort of ally, one New Crobuzon spy named Silas Fennec (or Simon Fench) plot to sneak a message back to New Crobuzon about a supposedly eager-to-invade people named the grindylows, and involve a loyal fRemade man named Tanner Sack in their plot, Bellis finds out too late that she has been played by Silas Fennec, as has Tanner Sack, and there is actually much more than meets the eye to this spy who supposedly had only escape at heart.  She and Tanner Sack both are punished with lashes on the back, and thus she painfully and in agony acquires her own scars in this world, where the scars are both physical and psychic, but seemingly in equal measure hurtful.  But Silas Fennec has much more to suffer than they, not only from the pirate’s sense of justice, but also from the grindylows, who skulk along the bottom of the oceans until their time to strike comes.

There is a lot of wounding in this book, many weeping cuts and hacks and numerous psychological and physical bruises, and a lot of blood.  Throughout the book, Bellis is writing a letter to a friend at home, which is interspersed with the narrative sections written in third person about her, as well as sections told in first person from several others’ points of view.  Both Bellis’s letter and her narrative sections as well as those of the others startle and shock with their grisly details; this is not a book for someone with a weak stomach.

Still, this book is consistent in several major ways with other books I’ve read by Miéville:  it is full of unexpected twists and turns; alliances change and merge as the book progresses; the book is an intellectual delight at the same time as it is a visceral nightmare; and one makes it through the nightmare by following the patterns of thought traced by a main figure who thinks and feels his or her way through the bloody images and happenings, to a resolution that strikes one as being a sort of “settling” for the best that can happen, under adverse circumstances.  This resolution pattern is what gives the books a strong sense of reality which makes the fantasy/science fiction elements more believable.  And Miéville never once condescends to his readers, in fact he imposes stresses and strains on his readers’ ability to understand by insisting on not offering translations and explanations of terminology, but by instead merely presenting items of lexicon and interpretation simply and making the reader progress ahead with an imperfect sense of what exactly is meant, which of course is mimetic of the experience the characters are going through.  Above all, no one character knows everything:  there’s no final sense of authority to appeal to.  All rules are conditioned by circumstances of conjecture and hypothesis, until the truth, at least the probable truth, becomes clear to main characters and thus to the reader.  Most things, by the end, are simply a matter of personal choice, but not free choice unconditioned by life’s circumstances, rather by acceptance that there are limited moves available left on the chess board, and one must take oneself in hand and choose one’s own outcome.  And this is what makes Miéville’s work so exciting–the combination of outrageous fantasy with hard choices and realistic character traits.  But don’t take my word for it–read one of his works soon, and see for yourself.  Chances are, he will leave a creative cicatrix on your imagination, he will leave his mark on you.  One thing is certain, whether you like what you are able to visualize from his word pictures or not, you will certainly “see” them, in all their vivid (and sometimes gory) vitality, and my prediction is that you will be eager to read him again and again.

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October 23, 2014 · 7:24 pm

Picture this tale for Halloween….

In the play Hamlet, Hamlet’s father’s ghost tells the young prince “But that I am forbid/To tell the secrets of my prison-house,/I could a tale unfold whose lightest word/Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,/Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,/Thy knotted and combined locks to part,/And each particular hair to stand an end,/Like quills upon the fearful porpentine.”  This is, of course, what every good Halloween story tries to do, and so today I’m going to put before you, readers, a supposititious summary of a tale and see if you think you might like to read it.  If so, then I can tell you where to find it.  Here goes:

Picture a tale in which the characters range from extreme youth to old age, and in which a highly imaginative and susceptible child is sometimes treated like a mere encumbrance and even worse, locked up in fearsome places by itself without food or water, where a ghost is thought to roam.  Feature strange lights coming and going in this place, which the child cannot translate into any portion of its known experience.  Imagine next that this child tries to escape this punishing system, only to be put in another wherein children are treated as a matter of course in somewhat the same way by some adults, receiving random kindnesses from other adults, but with no asssurance that this kindness will be available when most necessary, due to the interference of more powerful adults who are mean and petty.  Next, figure to yourself (as the French say) that the child’s best friend dies of a lingering and contagious illness, and that many of the other children around are stricken with another illness due to bad sanitation and poor victuals.  But if the central child of the tale died at this point, the story couldn’t continue, so you must allow in your imagination for the child’s survival.

Say that we are given some improvements to the main character’s state to up the ante, and then the character begins again to experience more mysterious events, such as hearing dragging sounds, animals snarls, and strange unholy laughter in the nighttime as she is trying to sleep.  The child is now a young adult, and is sharing an old and seemingly haunted manor house with another child, servants who are friendly but keep close-mouthed about the nighttime disturbances, and a saturnine, ironical, and equally mysterious male owner, who deceives her about the sum total of the house’s occupants.

Think next about what the main character experiences when the male owner seems to be responsible for a frightening fire in the middle of the night, and when bedroom doors must be locked at night to prevent strange and unknown dangers from approaching.  And of course we have a seemingly happy interlude to take us off our guard:  guests come to the house, there is festivity and enjoyment, and we unwisely relax and think things are improving.  But then, an ancient and gnarled Gypsy woman appears, who, though she predicts eventual happiness for the central character, is not equally as generous in her predictions towards all the party.  And that very same night, there are blood-curdling screams in the night, animal growls, and one of the guests is stabbed; it would seem to be time for the house’s owner, something like an animal himself in some particulars of appearance, to be more forthcoming with the protagonist,  yet his responses to what has happened are still dark and quizzical, and he only is able to satisfy her fears and curiosity in part.

Now participate in the vision of the protagonist agreeing to marry the owner, only to find at the inception of her new relationship that her own clothes have been vandalized by a hideous vision who wakes her in the night, having somehow gained entrance to her sleeping chamber.  The owner tells her that she must have imagined it, or that it is a servant, and yet this only temporarily solves the manifold problems, one of which is that for some time past, all the frightening incidents in the night and mysteries in the day have caused the main character to have nightmares about crying infants whom it’s impossible to soothe.  With short surcease for joy, the prospective marital pair approach the altar, where the ceremony is stopped and the protagonist finds out that a madwoman locked in the attic of the old manor is not only the source of all the chaos in the house, but that the lunatic is also the homicidal first wife of the erstwhile bridegroom, and is still living!

Is this sounding strangely familiar?  By now it should–it’s the story, re-told with a slight emphasis on its fantastical and seemingly supernatural side, of Charlotte Brontë’s famous novel Jane Eyre.  The rest of the novel focuses, as you may already know, on the year Jane spends apart from her male lead, Mr. Rochester, her receipt of another proposal from someone she cannot bring herself to love, and her eventual return to the old manor house, Thornfield, when she learns that the mad wife is dead, having burned the house to the ground and incidentally maimed Mr. Rochester in the process.  There is only one real supernatural feature of this portion of the novel, and that occurs just before Jane returns, when she is thinking about whether or not to marry “the other guy,” and has a sort of auditory hallucination of Mr. Rochester calling out to her in grief and misery.  It is later when she sees him again that she hears from his own lips that he was in fact calling out to her that very night at that time.  And then, of course, we have our requisite moderately happy ending, charming and no doubt satisfying to Charlotte Brontë in its moral aspects (which I have largely suppressed in order to make the point that this novel resembles a standard Gothic in many of its characteristics).

So there you have it:  a good, suspenseful read for Halloween, which neither neglects the necessary chill in the blood nor disallows that a woman may love a man whom both the more squeamish moralist and the self-appointed judge of male beauty might scorn, a sort of precursor to the love of “monsters” in contemporary horror cult classics.  Why did I deceive you and say “picture this tale”?  Because this novel first reached me (when I was nine or ten) in the Classics Illustrated comic book edition, my generation’s version of the graphic novel. This post represents my third time through the “real thing.”  Now, it’s your turn to have another look at this “bootiful” novel.

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October 4, 2014 · 5:06 pm

William Gaddis’s monumental book “The Recognitions”–Faith, fraud, belief, and “cross questions and silly answers”

Finally, I have finished reading William Gaddis’s 956 page novel The Recognitions and have to report that it, like David Foster Wallace’s book Infinite Jest (which is even longer) is another satiric group of novels-within-a-novel.  There are several sets of characters cross-relating and interacting in Gaddis’s novel, but even though the ends are more neatly tied up than in Wallace’s book, there’s the same tendency to switch from protagonist to protagonist (and even to the occasional anti-hero) and back again.

The main protagonist for much of the book is Wyatt Gwyon, whose father is a Protestant minister of a strict sect.  But unlike most such ministers, Reverend Gwyon has a wide and varied education about other religions and especially seems to prefer those considered pagan by most Christians.  As time goes on, he becomes more and more wound up in such subjects as animal and human sacrifice, and as a sort of side note to all the other things going on in the novel, ends his days in an asylum.  His son is another case.  Wyatt is an accomplished artist from early on, but his Aunt May has shamed him about “taking the Lord’s works in vain” by presuming to copy them artistically to such an extent that it has affected his sanity too, to satirical and humorous ends.  Here’s an early section of the novel in which Aunt May, his only living female relative, expounds upon her beliefs and scolds him:

“–Don’t you love our Lord Jesus, after all?  He said he did.  –Then why do you try to take His place?  Our Lord is the only true creator, and only sinful people try to emulate Him, she went on, her voice sinking to that patient tone it assumed when it promised most danger.  –Do you remember Lucifer?  who Lucifer is?  –Lucifer is the morning star, he began hopefully, –Father says…  –Father says!…her voice cut him through.  –Lucifer was the archangel who refused to serve Our Lord.  To sin is to falsify something in the Divine Order, and that is what Lucifer did.  His name means Bringer of Light but he was not satisfied to bring the light of Our Lord to man, he tried to steal the power of Our Lord and to bring his own light to man.  He tried to become original, she pronounced malignantly, shaping that word round the whole structure of damnation, repeating it, crumpling the drawing of the robin in her hand, –original, to steal Our Lord’s authority, to command his own destiny, to bear his own light!  That is why Satan is the Fallen Angel, for he rebelled when he tried to emulate Our Lord Jesus.  And he won his own dominion, didn’t he.  Didn’t he!  And his own light is the light of the fires of Hell!  Is that what you want?  Is that what you want?  Is that what you want?  There may have been, by now, many things that Wyatt wanted to do to Jesus:  emulate was not one of them.”

The punctuation is a trifle difficult to follow, since Gaddis uses dashes and not quotation marks, and often runs sentences into each other which rightly belong in separate paragraphs.  Still, I think it’s easy to grasp the dark satiric humor of Aunt May’s homily and its reaction on the timid though artistically gifted boy Wyatt, as he grows up.  He matures convinced that he is damned, but still unable to stop drawing.  The upshot of it all, however, is that he is very inept at completing his own original pictures, but instead only feels at home when creating fradulent pictures.  He is original in spite of himself, however:  he doesn’t facsimilate already existing pictures and sell these fake copies.  Instead, he paints “new” and “original” pictures never before seen and passes them off as the works of famous artists which have only recently “surfaced.”  Thus, his psyche manages to have it both ways.

From the topic of Wyatt, the topic switches to all sorts of social and societal frauds going on in his immediate circle of friends, a real bohemian crowd with no actual artistic pretentions to support or excuse their lifestyles.  There is the further question of spiritual belief as it affects a man named Stanley, a devout man who wants to lead to God a worldly woman called Agnes Deigh (a pun on “Agnes Dei,” “Lamb of God”).  His continual misadventures with her as they discuss their beliefs back and forth and he gets her to go on a pilgrimage with him to Europe to see the canonization of a young female saint are fraught with a different set of religious traditions and questions, as Stanley is a Catholic.  But one very funny element in all this is the presence of a Mister Sinisterra, a forger who also regards himself as an artist.  In a very amusing crosstalk act of “cross questions and silly answers” which happens as a matter of mistaken identity when he passes forged notes for distribution to a man named Otto, an acquaintance of Wyatt’s, he gets involved in going to Europe as well, and tries to “forge” a mummy out of Wyatt’s mother Camilla’s bones (which ironically and highly coincidentally were interred next to those of the young female saint aforementioned, in San Zwingli, Spain).  Instead, he causes the mother’s bones to get mistaken by the celebrants of the canonization as the young girl’s, and he himself drags the young girl’s corpse around all over the place disguised as an old woman in heavy dress and a mantilla.  Much comedy ensues, though of a highly equivocal nature.

There are several other cases of mistaken identity or mistaken intent in the book, and the slowest portions are in fact those about the lurid parties of the group of Wyatt’s one-time associates, as they party across New York City and other world cities.  Wyatt dies well before the end of the book, so it’s not a book tied to one protagonist.  The book in fact ends with Stanley’s demise, as he finally achieves his ambition of playing his organ works on a famous old organ in Italy.  But due to the fact that he is unable to understand Italian, he doesn’t understand what the sacristan of the church has tried to tell him, which is to leave out the bass notes, as the building is too old to stand up under the reverberations of the bass as well as treble.  After the sacristan leaves, Stanley performs his of course genuine works (in opposition to all the fake things and people there have been in the book), complete of course with the bass notes.  The building falls on him, supplying the ironic ending:  faking is a way of contemptuously or wryly or in some state of disbelief withstanding the world; the genuine and sincere end up getting the short end of the stick.

There are many, many incidents in the book and not a few characters that I haven’t described, but the book is so rich and so long that I fear I will have to leave you to read it for yourself.  It’s another one of those books that you may find you want to read slowly and live with for a while; you’ll find many a dark and sardonic laugh inside, I can guarantee you that much.  Also, I at least found many passages, such as the incidents when characters were mistaking someone else’s identity and no one discovered the mistake until much later, which just tickled my funny bone enough to make me laugh aloud, repeatedly.  I hope you too will find this book to your liking, and I recommend it highly, though again wanting to point out that Gaddis’s form of notating his conversations and enclosing paragraphs is irregular, and so will probably provide a challenge.  No matter, though:  at least no one can say it isn’t genuine and original!

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