Caravaggio's Judith

Judith is a beautiful but troubled young woman. She is engaged in something rather nasty, but God approves, more or less: the light says so.

The subject of this painting proves an excellent study for Caravaggio: the gory extremes suited his emergent mature style. Judith Beheading Holofernes is dated, according to my art book, at 1598, and the figures in the painting present in greater detail than those from some of Caravaggio's earlier works, the features more precisely rendered. The sensual boys of earlier paintings boasted little in the way of wrinkles, their frowns more pouty than anything else, their signature look one of indolence and the ennui that is born of it. Judith is lush, no doubt, and just as sensual, but what makes her alive--more so to me than the musicians of the earlier works--is the frown, the wrinkle of worry that troubles her brow, the upper lip slightly pulled back in distaste. These temporary blemishes in an otherwise blandly perfect face reveal a different kind of study: a figure engaged in process. Something is happening here.

The Sick Bacchus presents a touchstone for the study of Judith. The Sick Bacchus speaks of earthly discomfort, a clear sense of unease emanating from his expression, but he is posed, almost self-consciously so. Judith, by contrast, is in the midst of action. This Bacchus holds the bunch of grapes as though he does not know what to do with them, almost as though Caravaggio were trying to capture not Bacchus himself but rather the model posed as Bacchus--it's almost a meta-painting, from this perspective. What on earth do you expect me to do with these grapes? The question seems to weigh on the Bacchus model like an existential burden. The displeasure in the Bacchus model's expression seems as though it were a response to the situation he finds himself in: I'm sick of you, Caravaggio, and your relentless looking at me, and I just want you to leave me alone. The fact that some scholars believe the Sick Bacchus to be a self-portrait complicates but does not fully undermine this reading of the painting. Who can say that Caravaggio himself -- a licentious, easily provoked brawler with a sensitive heart, it would seem -- was not sick of himself?



Judith Beheading Holofernes takes the unease that defines the Sick Bacchus and adds further dimensions to it. If Sick Bacchus is autobiographical, Judith represents the exploration of the consciousness of the other. Judith, engaged in some dirty work, is in recoil, distancing herself from the action that her hands are accomplishing. In the midst of her righteous killing, the heroine grips her sword with a kind of awkwardness similar to that with which Bacchus holds his grapes. Judith holds the sword in her right hand, at the furthest remove from her body, as though she were merely in the act of dropping something repulsive and not as though she were in the midst of using this weapon to remove the head of a man who is still somehow (with half his head sawed off) fully alive, twisting his body around in the final moment before that vitality is extinguished. Judith is, despite the intensity of Holofernes' writhing, the clear subject of the painting: to her belongs the key action, the key movement. In the left hand, she holds the half-severed head at arm's length as well, though she does not seem nearly as uncomfortable with the head as she does with the sword.

Even at a glance, it is easy to see that the physics of motion do not seem to agree here; the details do not match up. We may never have witnessed a beheading ourselves, but we can extrapolate from our experiences of the physical world, and something does not seem right. It does not seem possible that the gentle sawing motion we seem to be seeing with the sword, like slicing into a roast chicken, could result in a beheading. Nor does the expression on Judith's face seem to possess the resolve, the fortitude, the emotional intensity required for her to commit such an act as the one she is presumably dedicating herself, body and soul, to committing. Perhaps Caravaggio--famous for pulling his models in off the streets, his Madonnas famously identified as real-life common prostitutes--took a kitchen girl for his model; it is as though he captured her in the act of pulling a drowned mouse from a pan of dirty dishwater. Imagine such a moment, and you have the look on Judith's face.

There are other things at work here--most noteably, most disconcertingly, and most bafflingly--the erotic undertone of the painting. Despite the look of distaste, of concern, on Judith's face, her nipples are unmistakeably erect beneath her thin, white blouse. Before you accuse me of perversion, take a look at the painting: even with a casual glance, the truth of what I say is clear as day. Even with a frown and her hair pulled back (she is in action mode, after all), Judith is not only a figure of beauty but also one with a clear sexual charge. Her beauty is not of the radiant, otherworldly kind, but of the here and now. Is Caravaggio trying to relay some kind of message about gender roles and sexuality? If so, that message is uncertain, and I don't think any other Caravaggios clarify the matter any. Maybe the idea is to establish a connection between violence and sex, two extremes of passionate action--but then again, the look on Judith's face is hardly one of passion. Rather, it is one of fulfilling a nasty obligation.

In case we doubt the kind of beauty Judith personifies, though, we have the old crone who stands beside her. Her ugliness is, beyond the effects of age, a true ugliness, born of the grotesque; it is just as physical, just as sensual (along the lines of evoking the sensory experience of the body) as Judith's beauty. The old woman stands rigid beside Judith, a bag in hand, ready to take the head of Holofernes before it drops. The contrast is not merely between youth and age, between the beautiful and the grotesque, but primarily between two opposing attitudes to what takes place in this scene: the old woman is eager, hard-eyed: that son-of-a-bitch has been a long time deserving his come-uppance. She is ready to take the head, although Judith is reluctant (but willing) to oblige in the preliminary beheading that is necessary for that to happen. Perhaps this is part of the definition of a hero, Caravaggio is saying: a hero (or heroine) engages in violence reluctantly, out of necessity, but a hero does what a hero has to do; the commoner searching roughly for justice just wants to take heads. Caravaggio himself, it seems, based on the police reports, tended toward the latter mode of behavior.

In short, there is much here that complicates Judith's act of heroism, such a mingling of various elements that they cannot be resolved. This painting is definitively imperfect, then, because of the awkwardness of these unresolved dimensions of meaning, but such imperfection seems to be precisely the point when it comes to Caravaggio, who painted human beings as he saw them, dirty fingernails and all. Somehow, though, despite the incongruity of Judith's expression and other near absurdities, this painting is as compelling as anything I have ever seen. Every time I open the art book, it is the scene that I end up resting on after flipping through many other pages, and it is the image to which I compare other works. To me, there is art before this painting, and there is art after this painting. I don't exactly know what the painter was up to, and I don't exactly want to know. There are, after all, some matters that even the light of truth leaves willfully obscure.

On the Late Christopher Hitchens' Atheism

Over the years, I have read his articles with both admiration and outrage, usually depending on the subject, but I have to admit that the admiration won out in the end. Of all the defenders of recent political policies that I have vehemently disagreed with, he is perhaps the only one I respect.

I expected plenty of appreciations to appear upon Christopher Hitchens' death, but it is with some incredulousness that I read Ross Douthat's piece on Hitchens in today's New York Times. It's not the fact that Douthat wrote such an appreciation -- it was almost expected -- but rather the audacity and anti-Hitchensian quality of what he had to say, which appeared in the guise of a tribute.

Douthat is in many ways the anti-Hitchens. Hitchens' cynicism was hard purchased over the years. Douthat's cynicism seems to serve one purpose only, which is to further his conservative agenda. Hitchens was not afraid to break with the party line--he saw what he saw.  Douthat always seems to see what he wants to see in a case. I have little respect for him as a writer or as a thinker.

Douthat's column on Hitchens explores the affinity that, according to Douthat, so many religious believers had for the devout atheist and self-declared Enemy of God. Without propounding any counter-theories of my own, I will say that it appears that Douthat is trying to claim Hitchens as one of his own, to make a holy pagan out of him, like Aquinas did with Aristotle -- a "Believer's Atheist," as the title of the column suggests.

Hitchens is reputed to be the kind of gregarious fellow who would sit down to a drink with his worst enemy, Mother Theresa, for instance. I don't know how he would feel at being labelled a "Believer's Atheist," but I suspect that the man who so adamantly and publicly refused requests from religious-minded individuals for a deathbed conversion during his long and public struggle with cancer might have taken issue with the epithet. What Douthat ends up claiming is a misreading of atheism -- Hitchensonian as well as the other varieties. Here's what he said at the end of his piece:

When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.

Atheist intellectuals of the Hitchens variety rarely talk about atheism as a font of despair. They are generally at peace with the world, with the universe, when they talk about their beliefs. The "wasting shadow" here is not Hitchens' or any other contemporary atheist intellectual's, for that matter -- it is Douthat's, because he is too limited in his worldview to appreciate the fact that people can lead fulfilling lives, even lives absent of despair and existential angst, without a belief in the afterlife. Thus, to say that Hitchens was not the kind of man to give in to despair is not to say that he was a man whose beliefs were all that similar to those of the believers. What we see here is Douthat's inflexible inability to inhabit the perspective of someone like Hitchens -- of someone with beliefs counter to his own.

Agnostics, also, such as this writer, can live content with mystery and uncertainty. I don't know what to expect after I die. I don't expect much, but I will be satisfied with whatever I get, and in the meantime I will focus on doing what little good I can in this world and trying the best I can to extract meaning from my experiences and from those of others. As for the "Marxist fairy tales" and "techno-utopian happy talk," I can only conjecture as to what Douthat might mean. I suspect he's just getting a stab at some enemies while he has the chance.

Douthat ends his column thusly, imediately following the previous quotation:

My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why.

That "why" is why it's "completely wrong to give in to despair." Can there be no other reason besides God and the afterlife? Is a belief in humankind, the universe, and electro-magnetism not enough?

As we have seen before, when Hitchens first publicly announced that he had terminal cancer, we see here the believer's desperate hopes for the non-believer. It's a nice sentiment, I suppose, but it misses the mark because it refuses to demonstrate a decent respect for the non-believer's beliefs.

Claudius Reconsidered

Taking a cue from Harold Bloom, I'd always thought of Claudius as a weak villain. It's true that Claudius is certainly no Iago, but it's not Iago that this play needs.* Claudius' gift as a villain is his wit and, as Hamlet points out in 1.5, his charm: "one may smile, and smile, and be a villain." Hamlet, of course, can see through the false charm, the false mourning of Claudius' opening speech in 1.2, but the rest of Denmark does not -- and Hamlet's mother does not. As such, Claudius is a perfectly fitting villain to oppose Hamlet. Claudius boasts the power to manipulate language, to make falseness seem genuine, while Hamlet himself has "that within which passeth show." False words, false personas: these are antithetical to Hamlet.

My turn-around in assessing Claudius is inspired by Marjorie Garber, who, in her Hamlet chapter in Shakespeare After All, says of Claudius that "he is in control of language, making it jump through hoops, cease to mean what it should," citing his initial speech in 1.2 as evidence. Garber makes Claudius' use of language analogous to his use of poison: "the dangerous poison of words, words, words." The serial poisoner uses guile, secrecy, charm, and wit to work his vile purposes, and it is fitting that in the end he is done in, in part at least, by poison.

Hamlet may see right through Claudius, but that does not mean that Hamlet can easily and handily dispatch the villain without consequences. It is true, ultimately, that Hamlet is far more clever and more skilled than Claudius is, but to kill a king, even a false one, is no simple task, and Claudius' particular strength, his underhanded control of appearances, is to Hamlet what Kryptonite is to Superman. And certainly Hamlet does have his own issues to work out before he can rid the world of his foe.
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* One might wonder what a Hamlet v. Iago showdown might look like. I'd lay my money on Hamlet, who seems unlikely to fall prey to the kind of schemes that laid Othello low. Hamlet, for instance, knows how to discern a true friend (Horatio) from false ones (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern).

Ten Years Ago

I went to bed on the night of September 10, 2001, with Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad on my bedside table, and all night long the idea of 40,000 dead on the first day of the city's bombardment rattled around inside my head.

My wife woke up in the morning from a terrible dream. Something really bad was happening, she said, but in the car, listening to the radio on our commute to work, we found out that nothing bad was happening yet.

I didn't have class that morning, so I sat at a table at Cafe le France in Bristol, Rhode Island, grading papers. I overheard someone nearby saying that a plane had smashed into the World Trade Center. My first thought was that one of the more extreme types I had worked with at the natural foods co-op a few years ago had become completely unhinged and, enraged with capitalist exploitation, rammed a little Cessna into the epicenter of world finance. Before long, I found out I was wrong.

I sat in the car all the rest of the morning, listening to the news as, step by step, events unfolded and were reported. New York was 195 miles away by highway, closer as the crow flies. It seemed very close. Classes were cancelled, and we drove home, glued ourselves to the television. In days to come, I would talk with students who had family and friends in Manhattan or at the Pentagon. One student's brother worked in the World Trade Center. He survived the assault, but spent the next few days wandering the city in a daze. It was several days before he checked in with his family. They all thought he was dead.

I remember driving past New York on the way to DC, later in the month, at night, seeing lights shining all over the site. I don't know if we could legitimately see smoke and dust from I-95, but it seemed like we could, and I remember it that way, see it in my mind's eye that way. On subsequent visits to the city over the next couple of years, we stayed away from the site. We felt that we had studied it enough via television, radio, the papers.

Washington, DC, was full of helicopters. We were planning a move there and visited often. The morning after we moved into our apartment on Columbia Road, in June of 2002, was a Sunday morning that started off quietly enough. I was in the shower when screaming and shouting erupted outside. I ran to the window dressed in a towel, looked down to see hordes of soccer fans out on the streets waving the Brazilian flag. Brazil had just won the World Cup, I found out later that morning. Thankfully, it was the closest I came to being a victim of terrorism. It was much later, 2003, I think, when I noticed one day that the helicopters that had been ubiquitous were gone. They had been a part of life for a while, but then they went away.

I still think about Stalingrad, and I think about that morning when everything changed, but then it didn't.

More on Macbeth

Having seen the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival's production of Macbeth the other night, I have a few points to hash out, or perhaps rehash, as the case may be.

*For a production of Macbeth to work, the audience must have sufficient points of access to Macbeth's character -- and to Lady Macbeth's. That is, first of all, we must develop an understanding of Macbeth's prowess as a warrior, his courage, and his seeming-steadfast loyalty (which quickly dissipates in the wake of the witches' prophecies). All of this is established in Act I, through the Captain's report ("doubtful it stood ...") and then through the explicit contrast (primarily in Duncan's speech) between Macbeth and the traitor Macdonwald. Macbeth, like Othello, is the story of a fall from grace, of a good man gone bad because of the weaknesses in his character, whereby his strengths become perverted. The tragic arc of the story is rendered insensible if we do not at the start see Macbeth as the valiant, noble, and, indeed, loyal thane.

For the rest of the play, beyond Act I, to work, we need to see a suffering Macbeth, not merely a merciless tyrant (though he is, certainly, that, too--or he becomes it by the middle of Act IV). We need to see a Macbeth who is devoted to his wife, who does what he does in no small measure out of love for her. We need to see a falling hero who is tormented by phantasmagorical images, who recoils with horror at his own deeds, who feels powerless to stop the procession of bloody deeds that he himself enacts, until he becomes largely numb to them, or even embraces them, until Macbeth concludes that he has supped so much on horror that it frights him no longer. (Of course, he realizes that he is wrong, and therein we find the most complete, the most powerful expression of humanity in the play -- that no matter how bloody, how awful the tyrant, he is still capable of grief, depths of sadness.) When Macbeth envisions the bloody dagger, we have to understand the horrific charge of this hallucination: the dagger is covered in blood--not the blood of his own impending fate (could he meet any other fate, given the processional of bloody deeds that begins the play?), but the blood of the innocents he will murder. As penalty, Macbeth will "sleep no more," and his wife will achieve only a sleep without rest, one tormented by somnambulatory recreations of her guilt. Once Macbeth's sense of humanity has been utterly drained, as it is after he expends his last heartfelt sentiments at the news of his wife's demise, it is time for him to enter fully the identity of the heartless villain, and thus it is time for him to pay for his crimes with his very life.

In the meantime, the Macbeths suffer greatly, are racked (in the Early Modern sense of "rack") by guilt, and the effect on us as audience is that we feel their guilt, their suffering, their horror, the fruitlessness of their ambitions, their powerlessness to stop the procession of bloody deeds once they begin. The guilt that they feel is the stuff of our own nightmares, our worst twinges of conscience, only amplified. You walk away thinking that there is something, just a hint, perhaps, of yourself in Macbeth or in Lady Macbeth, and thus the play offers one of the most powerful experiences of catharsis of any Shakespearean play.

*Regarding the theme of sleep, Macbeth provides a nightmarish Jacobean counterpoint to the far gentler Elizabethan sleep-comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sleep and dreams -- "to sleep, perchance to dream" -- are clearly significant thematic elements in Shakespeare.

*The issue of agency is perhaps the most perplexing issue in Macbeth, presenting a problem without an answer: to what extent is Macbeth himself responsible for his own deeds? Is he a victim of "supernatural soliciting" via the witches and the shadowy master with whom they communicate via their cauldron? Or do the witches' words merely unloose the "vaulting ambition" that is latent in Macbeth? Beyond these questions, is the outcome of the play merely a function of the innate character Macbeth possesses, or does he create this character through words and deeds that are deliberative?

This is the great ambiguity of the play that makes it another poignant iteration of what is perhaps he greatest theme of the Shakespearean canon: the nature of character and identity. Character is destiny in Shakespeare, but how much of character is our own?

Faced with a set of conditions -- an opportunity for advancement, a murder to be avenged, slings and arrows, etc. -- what do you do? Shakespeare's characters are at once classical and modern, with one foot in the past, the other in a present that is hurtling toward the future. Macbeth himself is either a testament to the enduring mystery of fate or he is one who forges his own fate in the existential void of the untethered self. Hamlet is, of course, the greatest monument to self in Shakespeare, but others -- Othello, Prospero, Brutus, and, Harold Bloom would say, Falstaff -- bear the same burden of character.

*I was impressed the other night with a sense of the great importance of Macduff in the play, partly as a contrast to Macbeth but also as a warrior with great similarity to Macbeth. Both are formidable practitioners of the art of war, but -- partly through chance and circumstance -- Macduff is the vehicle of good and the achiever of a Pyrrhic victory, and Macbeth ultimately the defeated villain.

The emotional anchor of Act IV is Macduff's response to the news that Macbeth has slain his family. The situation prompts all manner of questions. Why did Macduff leave his family unprotected? Was it a matter of loyalty to the state versus loyalty to family -- protecting the common interest versus protecting one's own? Or was it simply a failure on Macduff's part to thoughtfully anticipate the outcome of his actions, which his wife subsequently interprets as an act of desertion? Macduff is none too great a thinker, it seems, and he operates at his best when fueled by raw emotion. And the emotion of Macduff's response is precisely the issue: he must "dispute it like a man." I have a lot more to say about this scene, which does a lot with gender themes and the nature of true manhood, but that is perhaps a matter for another time.

Macduff's wife brands him a traitor, and though Macbeth is certainly the greater traitor of the two by far, it invites comparison and contrast between the two warriors. When Macbeth battles Macduff, he is, essentially, battling his own best self of his former life. The two are in many ways more alike than they are different.

*Macbeth is, in all, I think, the most efficient play Shakespeare wrote, word for word. It's an impressive achievement, prompted by a desire to please a patron, no doubt -- King James, whose reputed short attention span explains in part the efficiency of the play -- but there's hardly a wasted line in the entirety of its five acts. This is not to say that Macbeth is necessarily Shakespeare's "best" play, but it is one that never fails to yield rich new meanings with each experience of it, and that, I believe, is what keeps us coming back to Shakespeare again and again.

Problems In All's Well

Whether we classify All's Well That Ends Well as a "problem play" or not, it's certainly a play with problems. Rather, there is one central problem, and his name is Bertram.

On the page, Bertram is as unlovable a love interest as you might find anywhere. On stage, he has to be extremely handsome. That's the best way to explain why such a virtuous--but poor, and also very determined, very clever--maid such as Helen would fall so hard for him. She doesn't seem to be in it for the title or for the money; if she is, Shakespeare doesn't seem to hint at it. And though it's true that you can't choose with whom you fall in love, there has to be some draw. So, it would have to be looks.

Let's take a glance at Bertram's character.

1. He allows himself to fall under the sway of his utterly irredeemable companion, Parolles. As Lafew aptly puts it, "the soul of this man is his clothes." That Bertram would choose such a fellow as his bosom friend reflects very poorly on him. Your parents were right: the friends you choose do say a lot about you.

Bertram cannot be excused on the grounds of having been deceived by a seeming-worthy friend, as Othello can be to some extent. There is simply no valid reason for Bertram to choose Parolles for his chief hanger-on. Parolles merely panders to Bertram's own hedonism and depravity. Bertram only rejects Parolles when his peers make Parolles the object of their derisive scheme to make this foppish dandy's true nature public. At that point, to stick with Parolles would be to suffer like indignity through association.

In this regard, Bertram is a wanton youth who needs to be molded. His social equals kindly give him direction rather than making him, too, the object of their scorn. Perhaps they see potential in him. His wife will do them one better.

2. Bertram enters the King's court then foolishly balks at fulfilling the King's request to marry Helen. That Helen is beneath Bertram is certainly true, and the consideration of rank is admittedly a major issue for anyone of the time. But the King's promise to make good the difference through his graces is hard to ignore. Bertram is a fool to spurn the King's favor as he does first by denying Helen. A legitimate reluctance to follow a king is, in Shakespeare, often worthy of admiration. There is no hint here, however, at anything other than goodness in the King, and Bertram's minor rebellions seem like nothing but petulance and brattiness.

3. Most significantly, Bertram is an out and out cad. He tries to seduce an innocent young maiden--while his unconsummated bride presumably awaits him at home. Further, he seeks his own pleasure at what would be great cost to Diana were she to accept his advances--not uncommon masculine behavior, but still not excusable, and not behavior worthy of other Shakespearean lovers.

4. Bertram, however, proves himself admirably well in battle, which greatly complicates our view of him as a figure completely lacking in virtue. If Bertram were a coward, then the portrait would be complete. We would simply have a more nobly born, less audacious Parolles. Now we have inconsistency, and this poses a problem for understanding the true nature of Bertram's character. Bertram's one good grace makes it hard to understand the other, lesser qualities he boasts. His character is as inconstant as his desire to adhere to his wedding vows. This problem of character suggests the possibility that Shakespeare was lax in presenting Bertram's character, that he did not have a complete and consistent notion of who this man is supposed to be.

5. When granted a chance to even things out in Act 5, Bertram tries to lie his way out of the situation, only to dig himself deeper into the trap that his wife lays for him. Essentially, Helen arrives on the scene to save Bertram's neck -- literally, at this point, since the King has accused him of murdering his wife.

6. Bertram has been so dishonest in Act 5 that we are tempted to doubt his sincerity when he finally succumbs to his wife's scheme and declares his devotion to her. But Helen's plan has been so meticulously and so ingeniously executed that it is not implausible that his affirmation of his fidelity to her is genuine--he knows he doesn't stand a chance against her. She's got him beat, to put it bluntly. She has redeemed him, in a technical sense, at least, and he owes her his life in the same way that the King does. He might as well give in at this point.

Despite these points, the issue of Helen's love for Bertram can still be explained away as the vagaries of love. Helen invokes the power of the stars in this play, and such stars could certainly drive not only her fortune in life but in love as well.

As clear as it is that this play participates to no little extent in sharing its creator's genius, it is also clear here as elsewhere that Shakespeare's plays are not perfect creations. They were composed with great rapidity to meet a demanding performance schedule. Shakespeare likely concerned himself most with the audience's reaction to what they saw on stage. It could be taken as a given that a young woman of gentle but otherwise indistinctive birth would be susceptible to the charms of a man superior to her in station, that there is some unmistakeable aura of attraction to Bertram. Unwise such a love may be on Helen's part, but not improbable. This would be enough to give the crowd what they wanted, down to the pennystinkers. But on the page, we expect more from our characters.

This leaves us with two possibilities: First, that Shakespeare did not satisfactorily develop the character of Bertram because he did not think that to do so would be a worthy investment of his time and energy. Second, that Shakespeare left Bertram underdeveloped deliberately in order to emphasize Helen's character and, in particular, to highlight her plucky resolve, her bravado in capturing a man who is unworthy of her in all but his title, but whom she loves. Love is a strange and fickle beast--here and elsewhere in Shakespeare. Why does Helena love Demetrius and Demetrius Hermia? Why shouldn't Titania love an ass?

Picture Bertram with a wide, flashy smile and great hair. He looks good in tights. Sometimes, for love, that's enough.

Richard Wright, Bigger Thomas, and the "Habit of Reflection"

Off and on for several years, I have taught Richard Wright's auotbiography, Black Boy, which is a book that an English teacher can easily grow to love: it's about the power of words, thoughts, language, ideas--the ability of these things to bring a human being up out of the misery and squalor that life presents to him and give him a sense of self. Feeling the need for a change, though, I decided to teach Native Son instead this year. As much as I love Black Boy, I don't think I'll be going back to it soon.

In Black Boy, Wright at one point refers to having developed the "habit of reflection"--I have often indicated to my students that I think this one phrase can almost in itself explain how Wright rises above the limitations placed on him. The habit of reflection ultimately gives him an understanding not only of himself but of the society that he lives in. It gives him a measure of control over his life. If there is anything like free will in our lives, it comes from this habit: from our ability, our power, to think deliberately about our own lives.

Native Son presents something different. There are glimpses of Bigger Thomas in Wright himself -- when he feels violent impulses welling up in him, when he bangs up against the limitations of the world he is in, when he writes that he knows he has to get out of the South because if he stays there he knows he will end up dead. But Wright, through the habit of reflection, escapes. Bigger does not. Wright's life story is bittersweet, poignant; Bigger's is shocking, incomprehensible. Wright finds the community he has always sought with the Communists he meets in Chicago and then is expelled from their midst, but Bigger never even gets that far, alien and alone. What strikes me most now about Native Son is the misery of Bigger's utter aloneness. It is parallel to the feelings Wright holds after his falling out with the Communists in Chicago, but the outcomes are vastly different: we are amazed that Wright manages not only to survive but to rise above the squalor of his environment, but it's no surprise that Bigger sinks to the depths.

"It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" and the Death of the Train Song

No doubt anyone reading this can instantly conjure up the mental image--sound effects and all--of a steam train leaving the station: the heavy sideways barrel of the big iron engine, the thick black smoke coiling out of the stack, the churning of the wheels, the sound of the whole massive device as it picks up speed, slowly at first, then steady, even, steel grinding steel. Though the steam engine was common over most of the world, this is an archetypal American image, at least for those of us who grew up in the U.S. within proximity of a television set. The chugging of the train is the very soundtrack of Manifest Destiny, the rude chorus of American mythology. I'm racking my brain, trying to determine if I've ever actually seen a real live steam-powered train in action. I can't say for sure that I have, but the image is so natural to me that it seems as though I must have seen it a thousand times, not just on TV.

Before television--and even after it, for some time--we had the train song. In the popular tradition, folk songs about trains go back to long before the concept of authorship mattered in songwriting. Among scores of others, the list includes "The Wreck of the Old 97," "The FFV," "Rock Island Line," and even "In the Pines," with its image of "the longest train I ever saw" that carried away the only girl that the speaker ever loved. I think especially, though, of Johnny Cash's version of "Orange Blossom Special," not only because of its use of a chugging acoustic guitar and snare drum rhythm that approximates the sound of a train in motion but also because it features the harmonica instead of the fiddle, which dominates most other versions of the song. There is something about the sound of the harmonica that goes with train songs, that mimics the sound of the speeding object itself.

In 1965, Bob Dylan unofficially heralded what I like to call the Death of Folk Music. Symbolically, the moment of this announcement might be considered Dylan's performance at the Newpoert Folk Festival on July 25, when he appeared on stage with an electric guitar and an electrified backing band. Dylan himself may not have intended any grand pronouncement at the time on the viability of folk music; indeed, the following year, Dylan stated in an interview for Playboy that folk songs "are not going to die." The songs themselves may never die, but the people who sing them do, unfortunately, and the ranks of those who qualify as authentic folk musicians have grown thinner and thinner from one decade to the next.

In its purest form, folk music might be defined as music that emerges spontaneously from among the populace--generally from non-professionals--and is by and large free of the influences of the commercial recording media. It could be argued whether "folk" music that does not fit these criteria is even folk music at all. To be recorded, folk musicians generally have to be sought out by ethnomusicologists. If such a thing as pure folk music still exists in the U.S., it does so in miniscule pockets isolated throughout rural regions of the country. Of course, there are traditions in music--blues (especially Delta blues), country, and bluegrass--that have very strong, close ties to folk music, but the terms of these idioms are decidedly different because of the influence commercial interstests have had on them.

By 1960, the existence of pure folk had become quite perilous because of the pervasive influence of commercial recording and because of broad-scale changes in society that meant that few people lived outside of such influence. That year, Bob Dylan set out to New York (of all places) to become a folk singer. He failed to do so, in a way, because the very act of aspiring to become a professional folk singer is an impossibility, or at least a contradiction in terms (Dylan's idol, Woody Guthrie, notwithstanding), and I think that it was Dylan's increasing awareness of this situation--whether consciously or below the surface of his thought--that caused him in 1965 to radically alter his approach to writing and performing his music. The more blatant change in his music was in the transition to the electric guitar (which, it must be noted, did not entirely push out the acoustic guitar, especially on rhythm tracks). The other change--less noticeable at first, but ultimately perhaps more profound--was in the lyrics, which were more abstract and dreamlike on 1965's Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan's first album that featured the electric guitar (which was dominant on all but the last four tracks on the album), but pervaded increasingly by irony, even cynicism, on the follow-up album, Highway 61 Revisited, which also appeared in 1965. Dylan had begun increasingly to hide himself behind the veneer of irony in both his lyrics and in interviews--to the point that the irony that had at first seemed persona had become part of his identity, it seemed.

If Highway 61 Revisited is part of the Death of Folk Music, Dylan's version of the train song that appears on this album, "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," is nothing less than the Death of the Train Song. It's a meta-train song that borrows some floaters from songs gone by, but it is also, to some extent, a song about the inability to write a true and authentic train song. The train song is a kind of song that's impossible to write now, at least not with the same genuine sense of earnestness that pervaded those earlier takes.

As I write this, I can hear the whistle of a freight train off in the distance. It's a diesel engine, of course, but the whistle, I think, must sound the same. I can't imagine it taking my baby away, it's not the soundtrack to my own sorrows, but it is, as Hank Williams and so many others had it, lonesome indeed.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet/Mattherhorn

I had to write some book reviews for a couple of titles that I contributed to an auction. Despite the pervasive use of blurb-speak here, I thought it might be worthwhile to preserve these reviews here for posterity ....

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell

David Mitchell is known for delivering intricate and very clever tales rendered in sometimes dizzying postmodern fashion. His novels turn themselves inside out, move forwards and backwards at the same time, and at the end you are likely left wondering exactly what happened. With his most recent novel, however, Mitchell opts for a more straightforward narrative style—but without losing his masterful command of technique. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is Mitchell’s most accessible novel yet and perhaps his strongest. The story Mitchell tells here is that of Jacob de Zoet, a young clerk in the Dutch East India Company circa 1799. De Zoet finds himself stationed on the artificial island of Dejima, built in Nagasaki harbor as a trading center because the Japanese Shogunate does not allow Westerners to set foot on Japanese soil. Mitchell has chosen an utterly fascinating historical time and place in which to set de Zoet’s story.

The Westerners bring with them new developments in science and medicine, as well as a rapidly emerging capitalist ethos, but the gate remains quite literally closed to them. Stranded in the harbor, de Zoet finds himself involved in a struggle for power and wealth as different factions among the Dutch spar for advantage with the reluctant and very cautious Japanese. Things get more complicated when de Zoet finds himself falling in love with a Japanese woman eager to learn more about Western medicine. Though the global hotspots may have changed, the clash of cultures that ensues seems eerily relevant today, and readers are reminded that the origins of globalism go back centuries. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet offers a love story as well as a study of culture and character, and as the plot evolves you will find this novel to offer as compelling a story of adventure and intrigue as you are likely to find anywhere.

Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes

Matterhorn is, quite simply, the best war novel I have ever read. It certainly ranks favorably beside such classics as A Farewell to Arms, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Things They Carried. Matterhorn takes place in Vietnam during what is known there as the American War, and from the very first page the reader is thrust into a military, political, and personal quagmire that is reflected in nearly every aspect of the experiences of the novel’s protagonist, Lt. Waino Mellas, an Ivy League graduate who finds himself in Vietnam without truly knowing why he is there. Matterhorn is gripping, compelling, gritty, and sometimes grisly, and there is hardly a wasted syllable in the novel’s 690 pages. The narrative style is sharp, taut, and yet richly detailed. There is no lack of realism here, and the themes that emerge related to the camaraderie of warriors resonate as utterly genuine, never jingoistic or merely sentimental. Mellas and his fellow Marines battle hunger, thirst, leeches, and malaria, not to mention the North Vietnamese Army; they live and die in the muck of the jungle and even somehow ultimately find their humanity in the midst of its twisted vines and its promises of death. Matterhorn is not a political novel; this is a novel worth reading regardless of your perspective on the war, and it is told in such a way that only a combat veteran could tell it. Published in 2010, Mattherhorn is, in fact, Marlantes’ first novel, and he has literally been working on it ever since he was discharged from the Marine Corps after his stint in Vietnam. For the readers of this novel, it is well worth every moment of that nearly forty-year wait. Marlantes has delivered a true classic of the genre, and though it sounds like hyperbole, it would not be out of place in a spot next to Homer on the bookshelf.

Bloom on Satan and Hamlet

Harold Bloom hinted at this in his Shakespeare book, and it's hard not to see the point here, which he has elaborated on in his new book:

"It does not matter that Satan is an obsessed theist and Hamlet is not .... Two angelic intellects inhabit a common abyss: the post-Enlightenment ever-augmenting inner self, of which Hamlet is a precursor ...."

--from The Anatomy of Influence, as quoted in the New York Times Book Review

What Bloom might add here is that Montaigne is the to some extent the real-life antecedent to both of these characters.

It is easy, perhaps, to dismiss Bloom as pompous and bombastic, but it is not easy to dismiss the pull of his ideas, and I cannot help but feel that more often than not there is the ring of something valid in what he has to say.

Trappings and Suits of Woe

There's a moment--in poetry, in culture--when melancholy, the traditional form of sadness, gives way to depression of a more modern and clinical sort. It wasn't Freud, really, but the aftermath of Freud, something in the ever more specialized post-war culture, that signified the shift. Freud was still grounded enough in the classics--he wasn't really a social scientist--and there is something relentlessly romantic about the notion that one's psychological suffering can be identified by its classification via mythology. To see your own anguish in terms of that of Oedipus or Electra is to give a certain dignity and gravity to it that would defy the effects of prescription medication. This is psychological afflication as fate. The shift from sadness as melancholy (grounded either in fate or in a Galenic humor, to be treated historically by bleeding, then by Freud through a cure that is verbal if not essentially literary) to sadness as clinical depression (to be treated--ineffectively, as it most often turns out to the poet--by therapy) occurs with the confessional poets, and at this point I wonder if one could ever go back to the way things were. (We have since made the shift from therapy to drugs, but that is not relevant to the poets I am thinking of--Plath, Sexton, Berryman--who succumbed in the pre-drug era.)

Melancholy is primarily, though not exclusively, a British phenomenon in English-language poetry. We Yankees have been too busy carving out a home in the wilderness--or to wrought in our siamese-twin national obsessions, religion and capitalism--to feel the weight of our sadnesses, and neither Hawthorne's frequent gloominess nor Poe's rabid mania qualify as melancholy. Consider, by contrast, the moodiness of Hamlet, which either stems from a temporary imbalance of the humors (that is, it is situational, resulting from his father's untimely death) or emerges naturally as an innate aspect of his character (which is also his fate, the two terms being nearly synonymous, most of the time, for Shakespeare*). Cranky old Coleridge was not unfamiliar with melancholy, and of course Keats, staring his own mortality in the eyes, knew it intimately. Byron's bravado bears a trace of it. W. H. Auden might be said to be a 20th century inheritor of it, but then he had those religious longings that sidetracked him. Going back, though, even the Beowulf poet, with his grim fatalism, knew it: with every monster defeated, another one sprang up with bloody claws in its wake, and then what do you have? Thus the meadhalls full of warriors sad in their cups, and the keaning laments of the women that so pervade the poem.

As for Americans, we can take as an example of the pre-clinical culture of sadness Robert Frost, a poet whose sober, earthy groundedness sometimes (when he is at his best, I think) gives way to melancholy of a traditional sort. "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening" is perhaps the best instance of Frost's melancholy. Reading this poem as a sort of thinly veiled death wish does, I believe, overshoot the mark. It is not death per se that the speaker is longing for as much as it is a communion with nature that he can only have through death. The speaker is the inheritor not of the British tradition of melancholy (though he possesses melancholy, which we might define as a pervasive sadness, or sadness as a state of being) but rather of an opposite tradition: New England Transcendentalism. His melancholy presents itself in spite of this inheritance, but also because of it. It is worth noting that the Romantic poets in England exulted in nature but were stung by the ephemeral qualities of human experience, by the passage of time and by the inevitability of death. American Romantics--the Transcendentalists--gave us "Thanatopsis" instead--the triumph over death through a communion with nature. Frost is a displaced Thoreau, really, who took a different path in that yellow wood, and in this poem the speaker seems to be lamenting the fact that he cannot be Thoreau in practice. Melancholy then emanates from the poem because it describes a condition of being that cannot be resolved favorably and a pervasive disappointment that results. It also describes--"miles to go before I sleep"--the speaker's resolution to endure this state of being, and this, too, is essential to melancholy. The speaker is not suicidal; he knows how to endure a disappointment, and that is perhaps the very definition of melancholy.

Lowell, Plath, Berryman, Sexton, Bishop--theirs is the poetry of a more modern depressive state. Despite their best efforts to fight it, their sadnesses (and their manic dispositions) drove them mad. The suicide rate alone for the five poets above tells a story: 60%. What kept Lowell and Bishop from joining the others is a tale for someone who knows them better than I do. Perhaps they were better at self-medication. The difference between the melancholics and the depressives clearly emerges from a cultural disposition, not just in the way we treat the sad see themselves or how we treat the sad in our midst but in how we define attitudes toward life. Life, we take it for granted now, is something to be enjoyed. Life in the past was so often something to be guarded or perhaps simply endured: tuberculosis, plague, high infant mortality rates, malnutrition, chimney sweeps who rarely made it to the age of ten. There was plenty to be unhappy about it in the past, but here and now in the land of plenty we feel that if we are not happy, there is something wrong with us. In a modern, industrialized nation, we often feel that there is nothing to separate us from our own unhappiness except for ourselves.

What most separates confessional poetry, though, from its antecedents is the intense awareness on the part of these poets that what they are facing is a clinical condition--and the accompanying notion that poetry itself just might be the therapy they need. This is most clearly the case for Sexton, who literally began writing poetry as therapy. Then there was the realization, for Plath and Sexton at least, that poetry couldn't do it--it couldn't save their lives--and their subsequent suicides.

Consider, by contrast, Keats' treatment of melancholy in his Ode to it. There is joy in life, but it is ephemeral, and its satisfactions leave you dissatisfied with what ensues. A cheap summary of the poem, no doubt, but it gets the central point across: that melancholy is something to be endured. That suicidal despression may be impossible to endure is the subject of another time and another poet.

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* Incidentally, from a modern, deterministic perspective, we could also see character as fate today--product of a biological, genetic, or psychological determination, rather than something astrological, but fate nonetheless.