Those first ones to get it down on wax, what they produced is to popular music what Genesis is to the written word. They didn't have any antecedents, not any that we would ever be privy to, at least. Theirs is the original tale, and we can never do what they did. No pretense to authenticity on our part could ever suffice. All we can do is to riff on the lines they created, the handful of earthy metaphors. No one could ever create music now that is free of the influence of the commercial recording industry in the way that they did when they started it all, that influence for them being limited to the immediate phenomenon of the live bodies making the deals and cutting it all down to the wax.
There is no such thing as folk music now, in the true sense of the term.
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Summer Reading
The titles I have recently read deserve a bit more time and attention than I can give to them right now, but here's a quick overview of my reactions to what I've read lately.
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace: I suppose I should have read Infinite Jest first, but I never managed to get around to it. The idea of a novel centering on the lives of IRS employees, though, just seemed too remarkable to pass up. TPK may be an unfinished, posthumously published novel, but it still forthrightly presents the work of a visionary. Of course, the final product here is somewhat uneven at times, a little messy, but in a way it's better like that: there's a fuzziness that surrounds things in a way that suits Wallace's style and tone. The posthumously published unfinished novel ought to be a standard trope in the postmodern repertoire.
Two long chapters, in particular, stand out as tours de force. The first depicts firsthand a conversion experience faced by an IRS employee, the moment when an oft-stoned self-described "wastoid" (who is also, you realize eventually, a savant with numbers) finds focus and vision in his life through a single lecture given by a substitute Jesuit tax accounting professor. That vision is what soon leads him to the IRS. The second depicts the barroom encounter between a very odd but also oddly talented auditor, who might be both autistic and in possession of a supernatural ability to levitate, and one of his co-workers, the office beauty who is heavily burdened with emotional baggage and has a long, drawn-out story to tell. Suffice it to say that she knows a good target when she sees one: someone who will listen to the whole, slightly unreliable tale until it's all over.
With this novel, Wallace gave us something that will have to be considered the postmodern equivalent of an epic, something expansive and vast that gets to the heart of weighty matters. Instead of the Trojan War, we have tax return processing. The contrast between the two is beyond anything James Joyce could have imagined.
The Long Ships by Frans Bengstrom: I saw an ad for this in the New York Review of Books (it's an NYRB title), and I felt compelled to acquire a copy. Here's a novel, originally published in Swedish in 1940, that is, quite simply, a classic adventure that could be enjoyed equally by a 10-year-old, a 40-year-old, or an 80-year-old. TLS tells the life story of Red Orm, a Viking from the late 10th/early 11th centuries, and the prose -- simple and direct -- reads like Tolkien without all of the supernatural stuff. There's an airy current of playful irony that runs through the novel, and the pace of the narrative is brisk and jaunty. Orm lives the life of a slave and then that of a great lord and chieftain. He travels from Scandinavia to Spain, to Ireland and England, back home again, then eventually to a final adventure in the rough terrains of central Europe. His fortunes are good, overall, and despite his rough and oft-violent inclinations, we recognize that what makes him a hero is, more than his strength or his prowess with arms, his basic human decency -- his sense of fairness and his willingness to give others their due, qualities that get drawn out perhaps a bit further when he converts to Christianity, but which were already with him before that. Orm catches the world on the cusp, at a moment when it begins to transform from something alien to us to something that, if not recognizably modern, at least bears the earliest seeds of something modern. A fantastic read -- fun and entertaining but not insulting to the intelligence.
Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer: I happened to be reading this in the midst of a trek through Mormon country. As my wife drove, I looked up between pages to gaze at the mirages of the Great Salt Lake Desert, mountains floating on waves of heat off in the distance. I had never been curious about Mormonism before, but now I find myself fascinated and, to be honest, somewhat appalled. Although most Mormons are not, I suspect, any more outlandish than mainstream Christians, there are some deeply ingrained issues in the LDS church that I find disturbing: the blatant racism and sexism, the history of deception and the unwillingness to face facts about church history, and the reluctance to acknowledge a separation between church and state, in particular. Krakauer's prose is not brilliant, but it's always clear and compelling. He ranges far and wide, as usual, in sourcing background information, drawing on Wallace Stegner, Harold Bloom, and others, including a lot of Mormon historians and even Joseph Smith himself. What he really gets at here is an examination of the differences between those who seek after/those who believe in revelations and those who don't. He follows through on the ramifications of what it means to believe in personal revelation, and in doing so manages (despite his attempts at fairmindedness) to make a pretty solid case for the potentially catastrophic discrepency between such belief and the values of a modern secular society.
Open City by Teju Cole: The idea of the book sold me on it: a young professional wanders through New York on foot in his spare time, commenting on what he sees. I am an avid walker myself, and I sense in Cole's narrator something of a kindred spirit, though on the surface I don't seem to bear much in common with Julius, a young and unattached psychiatrist from Nigeria. Walkers are all alike, though, in that we value: seeing and experiencing the new, and revisioning and rediscovering the familiar. Cole's novel successfully evokes what the habitual walker always seeks to achieve: a simultaneous connection to and distance from one's environs. The walker is always an observer and disdains participation, unless it be that most banal of interactions: the casual but revealing sidewalk conversation with someone you just happen to run into, of which there are many in this novel.
Early on, a reader might be forgiven for thinking that the course of the novel will be as aimless as Julius' wanderings, but patterns soon emerge. Julius' many asides on history, art, and literature sometimes begin to verge on the stale prose quality of a typical Wikipedia entry, but Cole always turns them around by the end, and they end up providing useful insights into Julius' character. Eventually, we see what Julius is reluctant to admit or perhaps does not himself realize: that he is, if not misanthropic, at least anti-social to some significant degree. He lives too much in his head. He keeps people, most people, at a distance, and thus emerges as the archetypal inhabitant of the modern open city.
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace: I suppose I should have read Infinite Jest first, but I never managed to get around to it. The idea of a novel centering on the lives of IRS employees, though, just seemed too remarkable to pass up. TPK may be an unfinished, posthumously published novel, but it still forthrightly presents the work of a visionary. Of course, the final product here is somewhat uneven at times, a little messy, but in a way it's better like that: there's a fuzziness that surrounds things in a way that suits Wallace's style and tone. The posthumously published unfinished novel ought to be a standard trope in the postmodern repertoire.
Two long chapters, in particular, stand out as tours de force. The first depicts firsthand a conversion experience faced by an IRS employee, the moment when an oft-stoned self-described "wastoid" (who is also, you realize eventually, a savant with numbers) finds focus and vision in his life through a single lecture given by a substitute Jesuit tax accounting professor. That vision is what soon leads him to the IRS. The second depicts the barroom encounter between a very odd but also oddly talented auditor, who might be both autistic and in possession of a supernatural ability to levitate, and one of his co-workers, the office beauty who is heavily burdened with emotional baggage and has a long, drawn-out story to tell. Suffice it to say that she knows a good target when she sees one: someone who will listen to the whole, slightly unreliable tale until it's all over.
With this novel, Wallace gave us something that will have to be considered the postmodern equivalent of an epic, something expansive and vast that gets to the heart of weighty matters. Instead of the Trojan War, we have tax return processing. The contrast between the two is beyond anything James Joyce could have imagined.
The Long Ships by Frans Bengstrom: I saw an ad for this in the New York Review of Books (it's an NYRB title), and I felt compelled to acquire a copy. Here's a novel, originally published in Swedish in 1940, that is, quite simply, a classic adventure that could be enjoyed equally by a 10-year-old, a 40-year-old, or an 80-year-old. TLS tells the life story of Red Orm, a Viking from the late 10th/early 11th centuries, and the prose -- simple and direct -- reads like Tolkien without all of the supernatural stuff. There's an airy current of playful irony that runs through the novel, and the pace of the narrative is brisk and jaunty. Orm lives the life of a slave and then that of a great lord and chieftain. He travels from Scandinavia to Spain, to Ireland and England, back home again, then eventually to a final adventure in the rough terrains of central Europe. His fortunes are good, overall, and despite his rough and oft-violent inclinations, we recognize that what makes him a hero is, more than his strength or his prowess with arms, his basic human decency -- his sense of fairness and his willingness to give others their due, qualities that get drawn out perhaps a bit further when he converts to Christianity, but which were already with him before that. Orm catches the world on the cusp, at a moment when it begins to transform from something alien to us to something that, if not recognizably modern, at least bears the earliest seeds of something modern. A fantastic read -- fun and entertaining but not insulting to the intelligence.
Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer: I happened to be reading this in the midst of a trek through Mormon country. As my wife drove, I looked up between pages to gaze at the mirages of the Great Salt Lake Desert, mountains floating on waves of heat off in the distance. I had never been curious about Mormonism before, but now I find myself fascinated and, to be honest, somewhat appalled. Although most Mormons are not, I suspect, any more outlandish than mainstream Christians, there are some deeply ingrained issues in the LDS church that I find disturbing: the blatant racism and sexism, the history of deception and the unwillingness to face facts about church history, and the reluctance to acknowledge a separation between church and state, in particular. Krakauer's prose is not brilliant, but it's always clear and compelling. He ranges far and wide, as usual, in sourcing background information, drawing on Wallace Stegner, Harold Bloom, and others, including a lot of Mormon historians and even Joseph Smith himself. What he really gets at here is an examination of the differences between those who seek after/those who believe in revelations and those who don't. He follows through on the ramifications of what it means to believe in personal revelation, and in doing so manages (despite his attempts at fairmindedness) to make a pretty solid case for the potentially catastrophic discrepency between such belief and the values of a modern secular society.
Open City by Teju Cole: The idea of the book sold me on it: a young professional wanders through New York on foot in his spare time, commenting on what he sees. I am an avid walker myself, and I sense in Cole's narrator something of a kindred spirit, though on the surface I don't seem to bear much in common with Julius, a young and unattached psychiatrist from Nigeria. Walkers are all alike, though, in that we value: seeing and experiencing the new, and revisioning and rediscovering the familiar. Cole's novel successfully evokes what the habitual walker always seeks to achieve: a simultaneous connection to and distance from one's environs. The walker is always an observer and disdains participation, unless it be that most banal of interactions: the casual but revealing sidewalk conversation with someone you just happen to run into, of which there are many in this novel.
Early on, a reader might be forgiven for thinking that the course of the novel will be as aimless as Julius' wanderings, but patterns soon emerge. Julius' many asides on history, art, and literature sometimes begin to verge on the stale prose quality of a typical Wikipedia entry, but Cole always turns them around by the end, and they end up providing useful insights into Julius' character. Eventually, we see what Julius is reluctant to admit or perhaps does not himself realize: that he is, if not misanthropic, at least anti-social to some significant degree. He lives too much in his head. He keeps people, most people, at a distance, and thus emerges as the archetypal inhabitant of the modern open city.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Bring Up the Bodies
Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies -- the second in a series that began with Wolf Hall -- is a lithe display of the author's craft. The narrative moves with an easy, sinuous quality -- present tense, in and out of perspectives, tones, moods. If it is sometimes difficult to figure out who's talking, just remember that an ambiguous "he" always refers to the protagonist of the novel, Thomas Cromwell.
In the New Yorker, James Wood noted that what Mantel does basically is to put period details into what is otherwise a modern narrative, and there is certainly some truth to this. What is so shockingly good about this novel and its predecessor is precisely this quality: it satisfies our desire to see the Renaissance as the Early Modern period, the historical era in which we emerged out of the past and into a world that is recognizably our own. Mantel makes a very convincing argument along these lines.
In Mantel's estimation, Cromwell is part Machiavelli, part Montaigne, part something more modern altogether. He's practical, reform-minded, thoughtful, and ruthless. He's Lyndon Johnson, basically, except we're not yet in that age at which a Johnson could rise to the highest position of authority in the land. Cromwell was, like Johnson, not to the manor born, but it wasn't until a much later era that one could rise from the masses to rule them all. If we take Hilary Mantel's version of things, though, what we find is that Cromwell was the one who served as the heretofore unsung architect who modeled the plans upon which that era was built. The modern world sprang up in his wake. Again like Johnson, Cromwell is calculating and cold, but the potential good of the common masses is never far from his heart. Consider:
"Men have died, the track giving way under their feet. England needs better roads, and bridges that don't collapse. He is preparing a bill for Parliament to give emplyment to men without work, to get them waged and out mending the roads, making the harbours, building walls against the Emperor or any other opportunist. We could pay them, he calculated, if we levied an income tax on the rich; we could provide shelter, doctors if they needed them, their subsistence; we would all have the fruits of their work, and their employment would keep them from becoming bawds or pickpockets or highway robbers, all of which men will do if they see no other way to eat."
Taken out of context, this passage does seem a little easy, a little too consistent with the kind of contemporary Hamiltonian big government stimulus that we have heard much of in the news of late. In context, though, it fits with Mantel's project, which is to give us a Cromwell who is, essentially, a modern character stuck in a world that has not quite caught up with him. When Cromwell does seem cold, it's generally because he has little symphathy for political players who mismanage their moves and thus end up in precarious places. He is engaged in a game of chess that offers only more moves, never a final checkmate. The penultimate move is, it seems, never the penultimate move -- but rather what turns out to be the first move of a new match. Readers will know from the start what Cromwell himself is coming increasingly to see: that it's only a matter of time before he makes his own fatal move, finds himself mated as a consequence of his own turns, and the match will be someone else's -- for a while.
In his New Yorker review, Wood also compares Mantel's Cromwell with George Orwell's O'Brien, from 1984, and this assessment is one that I find not so apt. The two have method in common: both are masterful interrogators who speak much but betray little, revealing only what they want to reveal, and both have the skill of getting others to spill their secrets as easily as you may. Both have cultivated patience as an art. They can work with you as long as they need to to get what they want out of you. Both have the power to spin what we call "reality" (the nebulous and to some extent ungraspable events that occur in real time) into whatever semi-real fiction suits their purposes: they can convince you that their version of the truth is the one that matters because it is the one that history will tell. Beyond these features, though, there is a fundamental difference of motivation. With Cromwell, the ends and the means may get confused, and indeed part of what make both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies seem so modern is that the ends and the means are so hard to sort out at times, the truth of any behind-closed-doors situation being slippery in the extreme (1).
But Cromwell's ends are generally good ones, unlike O'Brien's: he wants to strengthen the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty, thereby securing peace in a kingdom that has been fraught with violent conflicts over the crown for many generations; he wants the people to have a religion that is, relatively speaking, free of abuses and corruption and free of foreign influences that seek to take advantage of the people, as well as promulgated in a language that is sensible; he wants to improve the lives of the common people through the means already identified and through other opportunities for reform; and finally, he wants to serve his master well and, indeed, to grow in wealth and status by doing so. And is this last not what we moderns seek in our own lives? Who can begrudge a man who wants his employer to keep him on for another term? Cromwell always takes pride in a job well done, even if it does leave him with some moral qualms. The games he plays are high stakes, and all the contestants are aware of this. O'Brien, by contast, has nothing noble in his ends or his means, and he picks on the already weak and powerless. He wants power, pure and simple, for himself and (if they even exist) for his equals or superiors. He delights in and achieves a supreme sense of accomplishment in crushing others, obliterating their sense of self, robbing them of their innermost senses of self.
Cromwell has no such interest. He is happy to let others think what they wish, as long as the outward shows match up with what is expedient to his interests and to those of his God, his king, and his people.
-------------------------
(1) These novels ask: What is the truth, anyway? Making an ethical decision involves assessments of truth, the knowledge of facts, but what do you do when you cannot know truth, and what do you do when the facts seem to contradict each other? How do you make good out of that?
In the New Yorker, James Wood noted that what Mantel does basically is to put period details into what is otherwise a modern narrative, and there is certainly some truth to this. What is so shockingly good about this novel and its predecessor is precisely this quality: it satisfies our desire to see the Renaissance as the Early Modern period, the historical era in which we emerged out of the past and into a world that is recognizably our own. Mantel makes a very convincing argument along these lines.
In Mantel's estimation, Cromwell is part Machiavelli, part Montaigne, part something more modern altogether. He's practical, reform-minded, thoughtful, and ruthless. He's Lyndon Johnson, basically, except we're not yet in that age at which a Johnson could rise to the highest position of authority in the land. Cromwell was, like Johnson, not to the manor born, but it wasn't until a much later era that one could rise from the masses to rule them all. If we take Hilary Mantel's version of things, though, what we find is that Cromwell was the one who served as the heretofore unsung architect who modeled the plans upon which that era was built. The modern world sprang up in his wake. Again like Johnson, Cromwell is calculating and cold, but the potential good of the common masses is never far from his heart. Consider:
"Men have died, the track giving way under their feet. England needs better roads, and bridges that don't collapse. He is preparing a bill for Parliament to give emplyment to men without work, to get them waged and out mending the roads, making the harbours, building walls against the Emperor or any other opportunist. We could pay them, he calculated, if we levied an income tax on the rich; we could provide shelter, doctors if they needed them, their subsistence; we would all have the fruits of their work, and their employment would keep them from becoming bawds or pickpockets or highway robbers, all of which men will do if they see no other way to eat."
Taken out of context, this passage does seem a little easy, a little too consistent with the kind of contemporary Hamiltonian big government stimulus that we have heard much of in the news of late. In context, though, it fits with Mantel's project, which is to give us a Cromwell who is, essentially, a modern character stuck in a world that has not quite caught up with him. When Cromwell does seem cold, it's generally because he has little symphathy for political players who mismanage their moves and thus end up in precarious places. He is engaged in a game of chess that offers only more moves, never a final checkmate. The penultimate move is, it seems, never the penultimate move -- but rather what turns out to be the first move of a new match. Readers will know from the start what Cromwell himself is coming increasingly to see: that it's only a matter of time before he makes his own fatal move, finds himself mated as a consequence of his own turns, and the match will be someone else's -- for a while.
In his New Yorker review, Wood also compares Mantel's Cromwell with George Orwell's O'Brien, from 1984, and this assessment is one that I find not so apt. The two have method in common: both are masterful interrogators who speak much but betray little, revealing only what they want to reveal, and both have the skill of getting others to spill their secrets as easily as you may. Both have cultivated patience as an art. They can work with you as long as they need to to get what they want out of you. Both have the power to spin what we call "reality" (the nebulous and to some extent ungraspable events that occur in real time) into whatever semi-real fiction suits their purposes: they can convince you that their version of the truth is the one that matters because it is the one that history will tell. Beyond these features, though, there is a fundamental difference of motivation. With Cromwell, the ends and the means may get confused, and indeed part of what make both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies seem so modern is that the ends and the means are so hard to sort out at times, the truth of any behind-closed-doors situation being slippery in the extreme (1).
But Cromwell's ends are generally good ones, unlike O'Brien's: he wants to strengthen the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty, thereby securing peace in a kingdom that has been fraught with violent conflicts over the crown for many generations; he wants the people to have a religion that is, relatively speaking, free of abuses and corruption and free of foreign influences that seek to take advantage of the people, as well as promulgated in a language that is sensible; he wants to improve the lives of the common people through the means already identified and through other opportunities for reform; and finally, he wants to serve his master well and, indeed, to grow in wealth and status by doing so. And is this last not what we moderns seek in our own lives? Who can begrudge a man who wants his employer to keep him on for another term? Cromwell always takes pride in a job well done, even if it does leave him with some moral qualms. The games he plays are high stakes, and all the contestants are aware of this. O'Brien, by contast, has nothing noble in his ends or his means, and he picks on the already weak and powerless. He wants power, pure and simple, for himself and (if they even exist) for his equals or superiors. He delights in and achieves a supreme sense of accomplishment in crushing others, obliterating their sense of self, robbing them of their innermost senses of self.
Cromwell has no such interest. He is happy to let others think what they wish, as long as the outward shows match up with what is expedient to his interests and to those of his God, his king, and his people.
-------------------------
(1) These novels ask: What is the truth, anyway? Making an ethical decision involves assessments of truth, the knowledge of facts, but what do you do when you cannot know truth, and what do you do when the facts seem to contradict each other? How do you make good out of that?
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Faulkner v. Hemingway
E.L. Doctorow's recent essay on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying has set me to thinking about the two big American writers of the modern period: Faulkner and Hemingway. Doctorow begins his essay, which appeared in the New York Review of Books, with a brief and inconclusive comparison of the two rivals. Though Faulkner and Hemingway are opposites in so many ways, I've always seen them as going together: the two sides of the coin that, together, mark the currency of the American literary culture of the first half of the twentieth century.
Hemingway, of course, took the global view, his settings ranging from Michigan and Montana to Europe and Africa, but his characters almost inevitably assess the role that the American individual plays in these places. Faulkner, by contrast, famously and deliberately limited his range, with a few odd exceptions, to the borders of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, his own "native postage stamp of soil." Whereas Hemingway's protagonists, with the partial exception, perhaps, of the old man Santiago, seem like circumstantially distinct iterations of the same principle of identity (each an alternate version of Nick Adams, himself an alternate version of the writer himself), Faulkner's novels are so variously plotted that they often lack a single protagonist, and the characters are diverse and far-reaching, though most always Southerners: various Snopeses, Bundrens, Compsons, among many others, including both masculine and feminine, both black and white (and the potentially black and white Joe Christmas). That Faulkner dared to write seventy-some odd pages from the perspective of a mentally retarded narrator says much about the distinctive plurality of Faulkner's narrative vision.
Each writer was a great stylist, each a purveyor of his own particular and peculiar idiom, often imitated (and parodied) but never successfully copied. Both started from the same place: late 19th-/early 20th-century American realism: Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson, among others, with their emphasis on regional life, on vernacular, on stories that seek to capture realities of the human experience. Hemingway would take this realist approach (more in the mode of Anderson than of Twain) through a brief tour of the Michigan peninsula before steaming off to Europe, to the wars that defined the time. Hemingway would make the terse prose of realism more terse, testing the boundaries of a certain kind of experimental minimalism, excluding everything that could be excluded to create a prose style that is eminently distinctive, that always keeps its reader thinking and guessing, looking over the text to find out who is speaking, to find out what has happened, to find out what it means. The result is that we pay attention to Hemingway's words. Joan Didion's 1998 essay in the New Yorker, marking (and, in Didion's own gradual and skillful way, condemning) the publication of the posthumous "Hemingway" novel True at First Light, will always seem to me the defining assessment of Hemingway's prose style, of his eminent skill as a crafstman (that is, to those who still believe there is something to be gained from literature, as an artist). Didion defines two kinds of writers, or perhaps two kinds of people: those who care about words and those who don't. She sets (again in a subtle and skillful way) Hemingway very significantly among those who do. That Hemingway's prose style seems to us less novel, less experimental, less adventurous to us than Faulkner's does is to some extent a sign of the tremendous influence Hemingway has had on the craft of prose writing -- both in fiction and in nonfiction. We are writing and reading everywhere, whether we like it or not, in the shadow of this giant. In the end, I assume that Hemingway's style required more labor than Faulkner's. The process of trimming, of scrutinizing each word and assessing its necessity, its relationaship to every other word in the text, must have been part of what drove the author literally to the point of ill mental health.
Faulkner took the realist approach (varying between the modes of Twain and Anderson, though it is Melville who rings in most clearly in Faulkner's prose stylings) in the opposite direction: he made it more real by making it more strange(1). Whereas Hemingway cut things, Faulkner added them. Faulkner magnified the focus on place till he had honed in with cartographical precision on one particular and discrete place, and then he examined every character, every situation, every detail, from every possible angle (and from a few impossible angles, as well) until the reader gains a kind of fly's eye perspective on things: several images coming together not in stereoscopic clarity but in juxtaposition to each other, in collage. This approach is most evident in The Sound and the Fury, with its four different narrators, and in As I Lay Dying, with so many narrators I had to take the book from the shelf and count them out before I'd venture to offer a number (which is fifteen, it turns out).
Hemingway looked for the one way to say something; Faulkner looked for the many ways to say something, but he typically chose the most complex and convoluted approach to saying it. That Faulkner used big multisyllabic words and a more Latinate diction, that he played so relentlessly with perspectives, does not necessarily make his work more difficult or more experimental(2). Try teaching The Sun Also Rises or "Hills Like White Elephants" to a group of high school students, and you'll know what I mean. Certain key elements in Hemingway do not emerge as self-evident. Not that Faulkner is by any means easier than his reputation purports him to be -- it's just that Hemingway is not as easy as his reputation purports him to be.
It is quite clear that Faulkner cared about words as well, but with a difference: Faulkner unmistakeably loved words, so much so that one suspects that in any particular work he would have used them all if he could have, some of them more than once. Thus Hemingway emerges from the journalistic tradition, which has for its foundation the strict necessity of words in the conveyance of information, while Faulkner emerges from the poetic tradition, which has for its foundation the aesthetic potential of words. This is not say that Hemingway could not be poetical or that (once you dig through the layers of narrative detail) Faulkner could not be a journalistic presenter of story, but this difference captures the essential trajectory of each writer. Faulkner's prose is magisterial but heavily freighted; Hemingway's, by contrast, is always in a low, even register, so light that it sometimes seems to blow away before you've fully felt it.
Finally, both men do, in a way, bring their individual concerns and preoccupations to bear in their work. Hemingway does so in a blunt and well-celebrated and equally well-derided way: most of his stories and novels are about parallel-universe iterations of the life he lived. All of Hemingway's personal neuroses are on display in rather blunt fashion in his work(3). Hemingway's obsession with the stereotypically masculine behavior of his times is probably what made him so popular in the man's world the living man inhabited, but which threatens to derail his legacy completely in our times, alienating a contemporary audience comprising individuals who have either moved past all that dated he-man stuff or have traded in the machismo of the author's time for a more contemporary brand of the same thing. Hemingway's sexism -- his shallow, innaccurate, incomplete, or just plain odd portrayal of women characters in his stories and novels -- has succeeded in alienating (Didion notwithstanding) a sizeable chunk of the human population. For his ideas, Hemingway might just not seem very relevant anymore. We don't see the giant anymore -- we can't; we only see his shadow. What we have to do with that shadow, though, is to extrapolate back to the giant himself, to see what he meant in his time and place.
What are Faulkner's neuroses? Perhaps they are more typical, less the result of ingrained psychological wounds than they are the result of the situations of the man's life: poor success in pursuing his romantic ambitions (followed up by a qualified success in the second act, when he eventually succeeded in his courtship of Estelle Oldham, the married woman he had pursued for over a decade), struggles with money, alcoholism(4). Faulkner also struggled to define his place in the world, wanting initially to live the kind of life Hemingway lived -- a life abroad -- instead of what he ultimately embraced: a kind of panoramic and self-aware provincialism. Faulkner relentlessly explores the issue of what the South means. His body of work might be seen even as a set of theories on the meaning of the American South.
All of this leaves us with the question of which writer is more relevant to the literary present, to the literary future. Again, we have two sides of one coin. You cannot understand the culture of American literary modernism without reading -- and reading deeply -- both authors. Hemingway may give us an outmoded way of seeing the world, but it was still a profoundly influential way of seeing the world. Thus Hemingway is no longer modern as we are modern --just as Shakespeare and Dickens are no longer modern. In the time, just over half a century, since his death, the world has inevitably changed. We see, on the surface, a Hemingway no longer relevant, but underneath a Hemingway who is no less fascinating, or perhaps more so because now we can see him for what he truly was, one who struggled with a sense of uncertainty, who felt always the need to prove himself, who embodied certain experiences of the era in which he lived. Maybe we don't merely see the shadow, after all. I think that we may, in fact, be able to understand Hemingway from a privileged perspective now, one that people in his own time could not. In Faulkner, we have a figure more in tune with the great overarching 20th century concerns of American society: race, class, and gender. We look through a window, a window of a singular gothic house rising out the swamp, and a scene bespeaking these concerns unfolds. Thus, again, we have the drama of the individual and the social drama. Both are part of the American psychology, and you can't understand one without the other.
-----------------------------
(1) Consider what music critic Greil Marcus had to say about traditional American folk music: that it was evidence of "the old, weird America." Along these lines, Hemingway might be said to explore the psychology of the individual -- an individual whose consciousness is inevitably modeled after his own -- whereas Faulkner plumbs the collective consciousness of American identity. What Faulkner finds is a truer, weirder America than any of us suspected was there.
(2) By calling both writers "experimental," I mean essentially that they were great stylists, great self-editors who considered the varying potentials of different vocabularies, different syntactical structures, different architectonics. To a lesser or greater extent, all writers do this, but rarely in so deliberately and self-consciously a way as Hemingway and Faulker did.
(3) Perhaps not all. As the man grew older, his work could not keep pace with the number and intensity of his problems.
(4) Faulkner certainly shared alcoholism in common with his literary nemesis, but with this crucial difference: Hemingway's work always revolves around the drinking habits of his characters, whereas Faulkner's does occasionally. I wonder, though, the extent to which alcohol truly contributed to Hemingway's troubled life story. Once you get past the prominent role the props of alcoholic behavior play in the fiction, other problems dominate the scene. Alcoholism may have been more a symptom of disease than the disease itself. By contrast, alcohol played a very direct role in Faulkner's demise: he is reported to have been plastered drunk during the riding incident that resulted in his death. In terms of money, Hemingway never seemed to be at much of a lack of it, and neither did most of his "code heroes." The typical Hemingway protagonist seems never to be worried about money: he can always get more from a grandfather somewhere who will send him sight drafts. Faulkner always seemed to be in need of money, by contrast, and many of his characters who have it know only how to lose it.
Hemingway, of course, took the global view, his settings ranging from Michigan and Montana to Europe and Africa, but his characters almost inevitably assess the role that the American individual plays in these places. Faulkner, by contrast, famously and deliberately limited his range, with a few odd exceptions, to the borders of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, his own "native postage stamp of soil." Whereas Hemingway's protagonists, with the partial exception, perhaps, of the old man Santiago, seem like circumstantially distinct iterations of the same principle of identity (each an alternate version of Nick Adams, himself an alternate version of the writer himself), Faulkner's novels are so variously plotted that they often lack a single protagonist, and the characters are diverse and far-reaching, though most always Southerners: various Snopeses, Bundrens, Compsons, among many others, including both masculine and feminine, both black and white (and the potentially black and white Joe Christmas). That Faulkner dared to write seventy-some odd pages from the perspective of a mentally retarded narrator says much about the distinctive plurality of Faulkner's narrative vision.
Each writer was a great stylist, each a purveyor of his own particular and peculiar idiom, often imitated (and parodied) but never successfully copied. Both started from the same place: late 19th-/early 20th-century American realism: Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson, among others, with their emphasis on regional life, on vernacular, on stories that seek to capture realities of the human experience. Hemingway would take this realist approach (more in the mode of Anderson than of Twain) through a brief tour of the Michigan peninsula before steaming off to Europe, to the wars that defined the time. Hemingway would make the terse prose of realism more terse, testing the boundaries of a certain kind of experimental minimalism, excluding everything that could be excluded to create a prose style that is eminently distinctive, that always keeps its reader thinking and guessing, looking over the text to find out who is speaking, to find out what has happened, to find out what it means. The result is that we pay attention to Hemingway's words. Joan Didion's 1998 essay in the New Yorker, marking (and, in Didion's own gradual and skillful way, condemning) the publication of the posthumous "Hemingway" novel True at First Light, will always seem to me the defining assessment of Hemingway's prose style, of his eminent skill as a crafstman (that is, to those who still believe there is something to be gained from literature, as an artist). Didion defines two kinds of writers, or perhaps two kinds of people: those who care about words and those who don't. She sets (again in a subtle and skillful way) Hemingway very significantly among those who do. That Hemingway's prose style seems to us less novel, less experimental, less adventurous to us than Faulkner's does is to some extent a sign of the tremendous influence Hemingway has had on the craft of prose writing -- both in fiction and in nonfiction. We are writing and reading everywhere, whether we like it or not, in the shadow of this giant. In the end, I assume that Hemingway's style required more labor than Faulkner's. The process of trimming, of scrutinizing each word and assessing its necessity, its relationaship to every other word in the text, must have been part of what drove the author literally to the point of ill mental health.
Faulkner took the realist approach (varying between the modes of Twain and Anderson, though it is Melville who rings in most clearly in Faulkner's prose stylings) in the opposite direction: he made it more real by making it more strange(1). Whereas Hemingway cut things, Faulkner added them. Faulkner magnified the focus on place till he had honed in with cartographical precision on one particular and discrete place, and then he examined every character, every situation, every detail, from every possible angle (and from a few impossible angles, as well) until the reader gains a kind of fly's eye perspective on things: several images coming together not in stereoscopic clarity but in juxtaposition to each other, in collage. This approach is most evident in The Sound and the Fury, with its four different narrators, and in As I Lay Dying, with so many narrators I had to take the book from the shelf and count them out before I'd venture to offer a number (which is fifteen, it turns out).
Hemingway looked for the one way to say something; Faulkner looked for the many ways to say something, but he typically chose the most complex and convoluted approach to saying it. That Faulkner used big multisyllabic words and a more Latinate diction, that he played so relentlessly with perspectives, does not necessarily make his work more difficult or more experimental(2). Try teaching The Sun Also Rises or "Hills Like White Elephants" to a group of high school students, and you'll know what I mean. Certain key elements in Hemingway do not emerge as self-evident. Not that Faulkner is by any means easier than his reputation purports him to be -- it's just that Hemingway is not as easy as his reputation purports him to be.
It is quite clear that Faulkner cared about words as well, but with a difference: Faulkner unmistakeably loved words, so much so that one suspects that in any particular work he would have used them all if he could have, some of them more than once. Thus Hemingway emerges from the journalistic tradition, which has for its foundation the strict necessity of words in the conveyance of information, while Faulkner emerges from the poetic tradition, which has for its foundation the aesthetic potential of words. This is not say that Hemingway could not be poetical or that (once you dig through the layers of narrative detail) Faulkner could not be a journalistic presenter of story, but this difference captures the essential trajectory of each writer. Faulkner's prose is magisterial but heavily freighted; Hemingway's, by contrast, is always in a low, even register, so light that it sometimes seems to blow away before you've fully felt it.
Finally, both men do, in a way, bring their individual concerns and preoccupations to bear in their work. Hemingway does so in a blunt and well-celebrated and equally well-derided way: most of his stories and novels are about parallel-universe iterations of the life he lived. All of Hemingway's personal neuroses are on display in rather blunt fashion in his work(3). Hemingway's obsession with the stereotypically masculine behavior of his times is probably what made him so popular in the man's world the living man inhabited, but which threatens to derail his legacy completely in our times, alienating a contemporary audience comprising individuals who have either moved past all that dated he-man stuff or have traded in the machismo of the author's time for a more contemporary brand of the same thing. Hemingway's sexism -- his shallow, innaccurate, incomplete, or just plain odd portrayal of women characters in his stories and novels -- has succeeded in alienating (Didion notwithstanding) a sizeable chunk of the human population. For his ideas, Hemingway might just not seem very relevant anymore. We don't see the giant anymore -- we can't; we only see his shadow. What we have to do with that shadow, though, is to extrapolate back to the giant himself, to see what he meant in his time and place.
What are Faulkner's neuroses? Perhaps they are more typical, less the result of ingrained psychological wounds than they are the result of the situations of the man's life: poor success in pursuing his romantic ambitions (followed up by a qualified success in the second act, when he eventually succeeded in his courtship of Estelle Oldham, the married woman he had pursued for over a decade), struggles with money, alcoholism(4). Faulkner also struggled to define his place in the world, wanting initially to live the kind of life Hemingway lived -- a life abroad -- instead of what he ultimately embraced: a kind of panoramic and self-aware provincialism. Faulkner relentlessly explores the issue of what the South means. His body of work might be seen even as a set of theories on the meaning of the American South.
All of this leaves us with the question of which writer is more relevant to the literary present, to the literary future. Again, we have two sides of one coin. You cannot understand the culture of American literary modernism without reading -- and reading deeply -- both authors. Hemingway may give us an outmoded way of seeing the world, but it was still a profoundly influential way of seeing the world. Thus Hemingway is no longer modern as we are modern --just as Shakespeare and Dickens are no longer modern. In the time, just over half a century, since his death, the world has inevitably changed. We see, on the surface, a Hemingway no longer relevant, but underneath a Hemingway who is no less fascinating, or perhaps more so because now we can see him for what he truly was, one who struggled with a sense of uncertainty, who felt always the need to prove himself, who embodied certain experiences of the era in which he lived. Maybe we don't merely see the shadow, after all. I think that we may, in fact, be able to understand Hemingway from a privileged perspective now, one that people in his own time could not. In Faulkner, we have a figure more in tune with the great overarching 20th century concerns of American society: race, class, and gender. We look through a window, a window of a singular gothic house rising out the swamp, and a scene bespeaking these concerns unfolds. Thus, again, we have the drama of the individual and the social drama. Both are part of the American psychology, and you can't understand one without the other.
-----------------------------
(1) Consider what music critic Greil Marcus had to say about traditional American folk music: that it was evidence of "the old, weird America." Along these lines, Hemingway might be said to explore the psychology of the individual -- an individual whose consciousness is inevitably modeled after his own -- whereas Faulkner plumbs the collective consciousness of American identity. What Faulkner finds is a truer, weirder America than any of us suspected was there.
(2) By calling both writers "experimental," I mean essentially that they were great stylists, great self-editors who considered the varying potentials of different vocabularies, different syntactical structures, different architectonics. To a lesser or greater extent, all writers do this, but rarely in so deliberately and self-consciously a way as Hemingway and Faulker did.
(3) Perhaps not all. As the man grew older, his work could not keep pace with the number and intensity of his problems.
(4) Faulkner certainly shared alcoholism in common with his literary nemesis, but with this crucial difference: Hemingway's work always revolves around the drinking habits of his characters, whereas Faulkner's does occasionally. I wonder, though, the extent to which alcohol truly contributed to Hemingway's troubled life story. Once you get past the prominent role the props of alcoholic behavior play in the fiction, other problems dominate the scene. Alcoholism may have been more a symptom of disease than the disease itself. By contrast, alcohol played a very direct role in Faulkner's demise: he is reported to have been plastered drunk during the riding incident that resulted in his death. In terms of money, Hemingway never seemed to be at much of a lack of it, and neither did most of his "code heroes." The typical Hemingway protagonist seems never to be worried about money: he can always get more from a grandfather somewhere who will send him sight drafts. Faulkner always seemed to be in need of money, by contrast, and many of his characters who have it know only how to lose it.
Monday, March 26, 2012
'Tis Pity She's a Whore
Initially, the primary appeal (to its original 17th century audience as well as to our own) of John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore is the shock value of it. Once this appeal is satisfied, however, the play does still have more to offer.
At the start of the play, Giovanni, our protagonist, confesses his intense love for his own sister to the Friar, his tutor and mentor. What is striking about Giovanni's character at first is his sensitivity. We feel certain of the genuine nature of his feelings, the earnestness of his appeals to the Friar. Giovanni believes in the truth of his own arguments, which are based on a principle not unlike the primary one of the Metaphysical poets: the idea that earthly love is the closest we can come to knowing heavenly love, and therefore the closest we can come to knowing God. Giovanni is not a deliberate blasphemer. His love for his sister, so his argument goes, adds the familial love of brother and sister to the romantic love of intense passion, thus taking the degree of feeling to an unprecendented height. The Friar can only respond that incest is wrong because God abhors it and by saying that Giovanni will surely be damned for his sins. It's the equivalent of a parent telling a child because I said so as sole answer to the question why. Such reasoning often stops the child: an authority figure is an authority figure, after all, and the threat of punishment remains a powerful sway. Not for Giovanni, though, whose passion represents the kind of intense depth of feeling that Renaissance dramatists sought to instill in their characters.
At the same time that we develop a sympathy for Giovanni, we have to question the legitimacy of his enterprise, knowing as we do that ill fates are certain to befall both him and and his sister, whose feelings are equal to (or almost equal to?) Giovanni's own. By drawing us toward an incestuous pair of lovers, whose power to evoke sympathy is rivalled only by their power to evoke horror and disgust, Ford brilliantly leads us in to an examination of the incest taboo, one of the most universally shared taboos in all of human history (and in prehistory, no doubt). Without going into the discussion here, let us say that it is impossible to read (or, I imagine, to witness) this play without going over the arguments in your own head. What Ford gives us is the awful -- the truly grisly -- fate of his characters as admonition against breaking the taboo. This is what happens to you, he seems to be saying, if you engage in this sort of behavior. So the shock value of the play eventually gives way to a very conventional take on morality. That's certainly the only way to get it past the censors, but I also doubt that Ford ever had any intentions of truly questioning the universal moral sensitivities of civilized cultures. With Renaissance dramatists, I generally assume that their primary motivation in writing a particular play is to bring as many bodies into the theatre as they possibly can. They do that by offering lyrical insights into characters whose depths of feeling transcend everyday experience, transcend mere morality.
Though 'Tis Pity offers few speeches of great grace or depth, Giovanni does present to us a compelling and dynamic character. By the end of the play, we have born witness to a sense of moral ruination so complete that we can only agree with Brian Morris (editor of the New Mermaids edition of the text) that Giovanni has become a full-bore psychopath as a result of the alienation engendered by his actions. Passion gives way to insanity, and we lose our sympathy for Giovanni. Thus Giovanni comes closer, in the end, to Tamburlane or Macbeth than he does to Romeo. Perhaps this is the cost of his particular crime: for Annabella, the cost is her life, for Giovanni, his sanity and his moral bearing. 'Tis Pity does not attain the sophistication of Shakespearean language, but it does boast a complexity of character and theme. The action of the play is straightforward and brisk. It's hard to believe that Ford could get away with this sort of thing in the 17th century, so near to the inaugural of the Puritan interregnum, but maybe this play is exactly why the Puritans shut the theatres down. In any case, the moral message ends up being a pat one, after all. This is not the kind of behavior you should be engaging in if you want to lead a fruitful or a happy life.
At the start of the play, Giovanni, our protagonist, confesses his intense love for his own sister to the Friar, his tutor and mentor. What is striking about Giovanni's character at first is his sensitivity. We feel certain of the genuine nature of his feelings, the earnestness of his appeals to the Friar. Giovanni believes in the truth of his own arguments, which are based on a principle not unlike the primary one of the Metaphysical poets: the idea that earthly love is the closest we can come to knowing heavenly love, and therefore the closest we can come to knowing God. Giovanni is not a deliberate blasphemer. His love for his sister, so his argument goes, adds the familial love of brother and sister to the romantic love of intense passion, thus taking the degree of feeling to an unprecendented height. The Friar can only respond that incest is wrong because God abhors it and by saying that Giovanni will surely be damned for his sins. It's the equivalent of a parent telling a child because I said so as sole answer to the question why. Such reasoning often stops the child: an authority figure is an authority figure, after all, and the threat of punishment remains a powerful sway. Not for Giovanni, though, whose passion represents the kind of intense depth of feeling that Renaissance dramatists sought to instill in their characters.
At the same time that we develop a sympathy for Giovanni, we have to question the legitimacy of his enterprise, knowing as we do that ill fates are certain to befall both him and and his sister, whose feelings are equal to (or almost equal to?) Giovanni's own. By drawing us toward an incestuous pair of lovers, whose power to evoke sympathy is rivalled only by their power to evoke horror and disgust, Ford brilliantly leads us in to an examination of the incest taboo, one of the most universally shared taboos in all of human history (and in prehistory, no doubt). Without going into the discussion here, let us say that it is impossible to read (or, I imagine, to witness) this play without going over the arguments in your own head. What Ford gives us is the awful -- the truly grisly -- fate of his characters as admonition against breaking the taboo. This is what happens to you, he seems to be saying, if you engage in this sort of behavior. So the shock value of the play eventually gives way to a very conventional take on morality. That's certainly the only way to get it past the censors, but I also doubt that Ford ever had any intentions of truly questioning the universal moral sensitivities of civilized cultures. With Renaissance dramatists, I generally assume that their primary motivation in writing a particular play is to bring as many bodies into the theatre as they possibly can. They do that by offering lyrical insights into characters whose depths of feeling transcend everyday experience, transcend mere morality.
Though 'Tis Pity offers few speeches of great grace or depth, Giovanni does present to us a compelling and dynamic character. By the end of the play, we have born witness to a sense of moral ruination so complete that we can only agree with Brian Morris (editor of the New Mermaids edition of the text) that Giovanni has become a full-bore psychopath as a result of the alienation engendered by his actions. Passion gives way to insanity, and we lose our sympathy for Giovanni. Thus Giovanni comes closer, in the end, to Tamburlane or Macbeth than he does to Romeo. Perhaps this is the cost of his particular crime: for Annabella, the cost is her life, for Giovanni, his sanity and his moral bearing. 'Tis Pity does not attain the sophistication of Shakespearean language, but it does boast a complexity of character and theme. The action of the play is straightforward and brisk. It's hard to believe that Ford could get away with this sort of thing in the 17th century, so near to the inaugural of the Puritan interregnum, but maybe this play is exactly why the Puritans shut the theatres down. In any case, the moral message ends up being a pat one, after all. This is not the kind of behavior you should be engaging in if you want to lead a fruitful or a happy life.
Shakespeare's Coriolanus
In ways, Coriolanus is an underrated tragedy. It's easy to see, however, why it's not so famous as some of the others in the Shakespearean canon.
What Coriolanus lacks, as critics have noted, is the interiority of Shakespeare's most famous works. In the later years of his career, Shakespeare made at least a partial movement away from the innovations that he pioneered in his earlier plays, which culminated in the intense interiority of Hamlet. Late plays such as The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline shy away from a developed sense of interiority, but others such as The Tempest at least partly embrace it in a way more in keeping with the old (new) fashion. After reading Coriolanus, what really strikes me about Shakespeare is that he must have been interested in exploring different ways of revolutioning our understanding of depth of character; he offers us unprecedented insights into the internal lives of his characters not only through soliloquies and other revealing speech acts but through other experimental methods as well. He looked at character from every angle, and indeed some plays, including both Hamlet and Coriolanus, can almost seem like exercises in methods of character development. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare develops his hero's character by examination of act and externally-directed gesture. Coriolanus gives us another way of demonstrating character, the opposite of the method Hamlet uses. Coriolanus' character is developed precisely by his not speaking.
For this to work, Shakespeare has to make it clear that he is giving us another kind of character completely. The title character simply does not possess an internal life that is not represented clearly and accurately by his words and deeds. Coriolanus' most defining trait, outside of his absolute superiority as soldier and general, is his absolute forthrightness in word and attitude. He may be capable of irony -- particularly sarcasm, directed to the plebeians and their tribunes -- but he is incapable of dishonesty, of dissembling. What good would a soliloquy do for such a man? Nothing he could say in private to himself would tell us any more about him than what he says in public does. There's nothing he feels that he doesn't say before all. If Coriolanus were a novel, it would have to be in a very detached third person.
Coriolanus stands out among Shakespeare's Romans -- he's no Brutus, with his deep internal agonies, and not a Mark Antony, either, with his many brooding contradictions or slippery sense of character. It's not until the very end that Coriolanus ever feels a conflicted sense of duty. Before that, when exiled from Rome by the tribunes and their followers, he simply joins the side of Rome's enemies. It's less a matter of revenge and more a sensible career move: he's a soldier, and he needs to find work. Today, we think little of the ousted C.E.O. who moves on to head another company, or of the professional athlete who moves from one city's team to another's. Coriolanus doesn't agonize over the decision or the act. He just does what it is in his nature to do. If he can't fight for the Romans, he will simply have to fight for their enemies.
Coriolanus also stands out among Shakespeare's warriors -- he's no Macbeth or Othello, either, with their respective internal agonies. Unlike Macbeth, Coriolanus is incorruptible; his strict and militaristic sense of duty prevails without question. Unlike Othello, Coriolanus does not allow himself emotional luxuries like love. The one emotion he feels is anger, but even then his anger seems a very distant second to his stoical observeance of his sense of duty. When he does allow something else to enter in -- his feelings of pity for his mother, who to this point proves as warlike in her attitude as her son is in his deed -- it enters in swiftly, like a dagger. What affects Coriolanus is at least in part the fact that his mother bowing before him (instead of his bowing to her) violates his sense of order, his sense of right as it is supposed to be practiced. "The gods look down, at this unnatural scene / They laugh at." Before his mother kneels to Coriolanus, not even the thought of his wife and child's destruction can move him. To see his warlike mother cowed, however, unmans the warrior.
Coriolanus does possess a fascinating sense of character, one that we associate archetypally with the soldier. Coriolanus is the most ancient of Shakespeare's Romans, but his portrait also seems eerily like that of the soldier of today.
What Coriolanus lacks, as critics have noted, is the interiority of Shakespeare's most famous works. In the later years of his career, Shakespeare made at least a partial movement away from the innovations that he pioneered in his earlier plays, which culminated in the intense interiority of Hamlet. Late plays such as The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline shy away from a developed sense of interiority, but others such as The Tempest at least partly embrace it in a way more in keeping with the old (new) fashion. After reading Coriolanus, what really strikes me about Shakespeare is that he must have been interested in exploring different ways of revolutioning our understanding of depth of character; he offers us unprecedented insights into the internal lives of his characters not only through soliloquies and other revealing speech acts but through other experimental methods as well. He looked at character from every angle, and indeed some plays, including both Hamlet and Coriolanus, can almost seem like exercises in methods of character development. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare develops his hero's character by examination of act and externally-directed gesture. Coriolanus gives us another way of demonstrating character, the opposite of the method Hamlet uses. Coriolanus' character is developed precisely by his not speaking.
For this to work, Shakespeare has to make it clear that he is giving us another kind of character completely. The title character simply does not possess an internal life that is not represented clearly and accurately by his words and deeds. Coriolanus' most defining trait, outside of his absolute superiority as soldier and general, is his absolute forthrightness in word and attitude. He may be capable of irony -- particularly sarcasm, directed to the plebeians and their tribunes -- but he is incapable of dishonesty, of dissembling. What good would a soliloquy do for such a man? Nothing he could say in private to himself would tell us any more about him than what he says in public does. There's nothing he feels that he doesn't say before all. If Coriolanus were a novel, it would have to be in a very detached third person.
Coriolanus stands out among Shakespeare's Romans -- he's no Brutus, with his deep internal agonies, and not a Mark Antony, either, with his many brooding contradictions or slippery sense of character. It's not until the very end that Coriolanus ever feels a conflicted sense of duty. Before that, when exiled from Rome by the tribunes and their followers, he simply joins the side of Rome's enemies. It's less a matter of revenge and more a sensible career move: he's a soldier, and he needs to find work. Today, we think little of the ousted C.E.O. who moves on to head another company, or of the professional athlete who moves from one city's team to another's. Coriolanus doesn't agonize over the decision or the act. He just does what it is in his nature to do. If he can't fight for the Romans, he will simply have to fight for their enemies.
Coriolanus also stands out among Shakespeare's warriors -- he's no Macbeth or Othello, either, with their respective internal agonies. Unlike Macbeth, Coriolanus is incorruptible; his strict and militaristic sense of duty prevails without question. Unlike Othello, Coriolanus does not allow himself emotional luxuries like love. The one emotion he feels is anger, but even then his anger seems a very distant second to his stoical observeance of his sense of duty. When he does allow something else to enter in -- his feelings of pity for his mother, who to this point proves as warlike in her attitude as her son is in his deed -- it enters in swiftly, like a dagger. What affects Coriolanus is at least in part the fact that his mother bowing before him (instead of his bowing to her) violates his sense of order, his sense of right as it is supposed to be practiced. "The gods look down, at this unnatural scene / They laugh at." Before his mother kneels to Coriolanus, not even the thought of his wife and child's destruction can move him. To see his warlike mother cowed, however, unmans the warrior.
Coriolanus does possess a fascinating sense of character, one that we associate archetypally with the soldier. Coriolanus is the most ancient of Shakespeare's Romans, but his portrait also seems eerily like that of the soldier of today.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
The Odyssey Reconsidered
Questions abound regarding the authorship of this most famous of clasical texts. What strikes me most immediately, having just read The Odyssey for the first time in nearly twenty years, is the deliberate artfulness at work in the narrative framework of the story, which seems instinctively to me to be the handiwork of a single visionary poet. "Homer," I would guess, is not just a concept, but a real person who once lived and breathed as you and I do. Whether his name was really Homer and whether he was really blind -- those issues may be uncertain, but they are also more or less irrelevant. What we have here is a fine display of the poetic craft, and poetry is written by a poet.
My own relatively uneducated guess (I haven't read up on this topic) would be that Odysseus' recounting of his travels in Books 9 to 12 -- the most famous stuff, about the Cyclopes and the Sirens and dreadful Scylla and Charybdis -- is lifted pretty straight from the oral tradition. Much of the narrative is clipped and lacking in the rich descriptive detail that characterizes the rest of the poem. It's especially interesting to note that the episode with the Sirens is given a few brief and relatively straightforward stanzas. The destruction of three-fourths of Odysseus' men at the hands of the Laestrygonians occurs in the blink of a poetic eye.
Perhaps, then, the project that Homer engaged himself in was that of constructing an elaborate framework to embellish the meaning of the pre-existing text, which was perhaps an oral and never, to this point, a written text. Another possibility is that someone else added the material in books 9 to 12 after Homer had written the rest, with the goal of making sure that the popular elements of the story left out by the poet made their way into the text. We can never know, but it is certainly true that the style is flattened out greatly in this section of the poem, and there is little of the distinguishing genius of the rest of the story at work here, a lesser expenditure of poetic energy. What is present, however, is archetypal story material with a tremendously enduring appeal. Maybe the events recounted have enough to them to speak for themselves.
Other epics begin in medias res, but The Odyssey takes things a step beyond that by giving us the Telemachiad and then, after Odysseus' return, the lengthy matter of our hero reclaiming his wife and his home. The most powerful literary element of this epic, though, is the constant presence of Agamemnon -- in flashback, or as a ghost -- to remind us of what is at stake for Odysseus. Agamemnon is a richly developed foil for Odysseus, and among the highlights of The Odyssey are Odysseus' encounter with Agamemnon in Hades and the conversation between Agamemnon and the ghosts of the dead suitors in Hades. Agamemnon's tragedy highlights the poignancy of Odysseus' comedy and gives it a greater sense of dimension.
The soldier coming home, we are well aware now, faces challenges of all kinds in readjusting to life at home. Things have changed while the warrior was away. What is moving to me about the story of wily Odysseus is the nature of his quest. Other options -- including immortality -- present themselves to him, but all he wants is to return home, to his family, to his people -- to his birthright, his identity. There's a timeless appeal to this notion, which is at the heart of all adventures.
My own relatively uneducated guess (I haven't read up on this topic) would be that Odysseus' recounting of his travels in Books 9 to 12 -- the most famous stuff, about the Cyclopes and the Sirens and dreadful Scylla and Charybdis -- is lifted pretty straight from the oral tradition. Much of the narrative is clipped and lacking in the rich descriptive detail that characterizes the rest of the poem. It's especially interesting to note that the episode with the Sirens is given a few brief and relatively straightforward stanzas. The destruction of three-fourths of Odysseus' men at the hands of the Laestrygonians occurs in the blink of a poetic eye.
Perhaps, then, the project that Homer engaged himself in was that of constructing an elaborate framework to embellish the meaning of the pre-existing text, which was perhaps an oral and never, to this point, a written text. Another possibility is that someone else added the material in books 9 to 12 after Homer had written the rest, with the goal of making sure that the popular elements of the story left out by the poet made their way into the text. We can never know, but it is certainly true that the style is flattened out greatly in this section of the poem, and there is little of the distinguishing genius of the rest of the story at work here, a lesser expenditure of poetic energy. What is present, however, is archetypal story material with a tremendously enduring appeal. Maybe the events recounted have enough to them to speak for themselves.
Other epics begin in medias res, but The Odyssey takes things a step beyond that by giving us the Telemachiad and then, after Odysseus' return, the lengthy matter of our hero reclaiming his wife and his home. The most powerful literary element of this epic, though, is the constant presence of Agamemnon -- in flashback, or as a ghost -- to remind us of what is at stake for Odysseus. Agamemnon is a richly developed foil for Odysseus, and among the highlights of The Odyssey are Odysseus' encounter with Agamemnon in Hades and the conversation between Agamemnon and the ghosts of the dead suitors in Hades. Agamemnon's tragedy highlights the poignancy of Odysseus' comedy and gives it a greater sense of dimension.
The soldier coming home, we are well aware now, faces challenges of all kinds in readjusting to life at home. Things have changed while the warrior was away. What is moving to me about the story of wily Odysseus is the nature of his quest. Other options -- including immortality -- present themselves to him, but all he wants is to return home, to his family, to his people -- to his birthright, his identity. There's a timeless appeal to this notion, which is at the heart of all adventures.
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