What Year Is It?

Nonsense? It would have been far easier to give us eighteen hours of nonsense.  Given David Lynch's prodigious talents as a director, some of that nonsense might even have been brilliant.  Instead, in Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch gives us eighteen hours of material that challenges us to the very core as lovers of narrative art. He leads us to believe, despite our past experiences with Lynchian dream-logic, that we are progressing toward the gratifying conclusion that we expect (and that we feel we deserve). He can only pull this off by satisfying -- intermittently, at least -- the expectations of genre that we have encoded into ourselves by our years of TV viewing. Then, in what might be taken for an act of cruelty, he completely annihilates our expectations just at the moment when they finally seem to be on the verge of being fulfilled.  

--

In Twin Peaks, as in any narrative, character is the mechanism upon which everything depends. Plot unfolds naturally from well-crafted characters, and Lynch gives us an array of compelling ones in whom we invest ourselves emotionally, though none compare, of course, with Special Agent Dale Cooper, who embodies everything that we expect to see in "the good guy" -- he's handsome, clever, smart, kind, skilled, judicious, etc. -- and yet he's convincing.  He's impossible not to like. Nevertheless, the show has been asking since the end of season two (twenty-five years ago): Who is this man?  What is he?  Can anyone really be so good?  And will anything come out of the good that he so doggedly and earnestly pursues?

Buddhism teaches us to detach from the self because the self is impermanent.  It's not that there's no such thing as the self, but rather that the self is temporary, ephemeral, soon replaced by something else.  You can also learn this lesson from a TV or film character -- especially if it's a character in something by Lynch, who creates a sense of self for each of his best characters and then systematically robs them of their identities.  He does this over and over again.  We should have expected it this time, as well.

So, who is this man? -- Cooper is, first and foremost, really a character in a TV show.  Lynch seems to be aware, in a way that other directors are not, that this means the usual rule of impermanence of self is amplified. In Twin Peaks: The Return, Cooper spends much of the series wandering around, not knowing who he is, and wondering what is happening around him, which is the same experience the viewer has.  At one moment in the new series, we see David Lynch himself as FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole wondering in like fashion, and we gasp at the realization that no one seems to be in control here.  The story hangs on and marginally remains a story by the barest of threads.  In the lead-up to the show finale, we see, for the better part of two episodes, the original Cooper make a return.  In the final episode, he's gone again.  Will he ever come back?  Did he ever really exist?

--

There are elements of every television genre at work in the original series, and Lynch plays masterfully with them all: soap opera, suspense, horror, comedy, sci-fi -- and, of course, the detective procedural. Lynch revisits most of these genres in Twin Peaks: The Return.  The feel of the new series is different, though, the most conspicuous change being the absence of soap opera in the new series, which seems like a completely appropriate change, since soap operas are no longer the dominant genre that they once were.  In a series that is so self-consciously a TV show, from a director who seems to deliberately anticipate and then confound the expectations of his viewers, it wouldn't be right to linger on a deflated genre. Nevertheless, the show strings us along by adhering just enough to conventions until the end, when it denies us the satisfaction of a conclusion that can be interpreted in anything like a sensible way.  As one reviewer pointed out, there are scenes that could have taken place in a classic film noir.  There are also scenes that could occur in nothing else but a David Lynch production.  

Of the many genres the show employs, though, the dominant one in the end is horror, which we might say, by definition, is the embodiment of the fear that supernatural forces can visit evil upon us at will.  There is no self so strong or so good that it can resist the power of possession, and there is no self that can rescue us from it.  That is the resonant theme at the end of season two of the original series and perhaps at the end of the new series, as well.  Horror is also the genre that is least likely to embrace resolution. That corpse just keeps popping out of the grave. In the end, it may be that not only did Cooper's efforts to undermine and reverse a tragedy come to naught; they may have made things worse -- though neither of those conclusions can be made with any certainty.


--

Thematically, the question that Twin Peaks, taken as a whole, answers is not whether good and evil exist -- not whether they are transcendentally signified.  Rather, the question is: What do good and evil mean to us?  I think that David Lynch is asking himself: How do you tell a story about good and evil with integrity?  We all long for the triumph of good over evil, but is that the real story?  If you tell the story right, the show insists, there won't be any definitive answers.  Each ending is just a temporary stay in a series of ongoing narratives. Maybe it's dishonest to say that a story ever ends.


The real world is fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty. The classic hero of modern memory, though, inhabits a world in which that ambiguity is erased. The hero's actions are decisive and just.  Cooper initially convinces us that this is so, and it is only as the machinations of plot draw toward their conclusion that we realize Cooper also inhabits a world in which there is no good act without its corresponding evil twin of an act. The fantasy of unambiguous good is ultimately dissolved.

--


Throughout both the original run and the new series, Lynch plays brilliantly with the old binaries.  As the title makes clear, twins are always thematically present, though the series eschews literal biological twins, identical or fraternal. Doppelgängers abound, as do binary archetypes: male and female, black and white, this world and the other one, and, of course, the aforementioned good and evil.  But Lynch is no mere traditionalist; he's a post-modernist.  Or, rather, he's both a traditionalist and a post-modernist, but the post-modern strains win out in the end.  From the start, the series has been both retro and avant-garde.  He plays relentlessly with these binaries and archetypes, slowly, meticulously, methodically, until suddenly they are no longer recognizable as such.  It's disorienting, but it also ultimately enables the viewer to understand the truths underlying these archetypes more truly.  

With his mastery of traditional conventions, Lynch comes across, despite his many diversions from convention, as a connoisseur of generic traditions, but he is ultimately a post-modernist because he denies us the satisfaction of resolution.  But it is his particular genius that he can lead us to expect one, that he can give us enough to go on that we long for one (as surely he must himself, right?), that he drives us toward one, only to strand us alone at night on that dark highway that is such a quintessentially Lynchian image.


--

The end of Twin Peaks: The Return gives us a Cooper who is utterly confused.  (He may not even be Cooper anymore, but rather someone in an alternate reality named Richard. But let's just continue to call him Cooper, because that's who he is to us.) The FBI man, confident in his pursuit of right, is disoriented.  "What year is it?" Cooper asks, only moments from the end credits.  This question is a stand-in for the larger question: "What just happened, when did it happen, and what happens next?"  Both Cooper and the viewer are in utter disarray.  Maybe Lynch is trying to say that there isn't a narrative of integrity that can sustain a character like Cooper.  He can only be an imaginary character, and when the line of thought that animates him runs out, there can only be this: a character in the dark who can only ask the most basic of questions about the situation he finds himself in. (Just like the viewer when the screen goes dark.)

The return referred to in the title is certainly that of Agent Cooper -- to himself, and to the town of Twin Peaks.  The return, though, is ultimately no less Laura Palmer's, as well.  Not only does Laura Palmer return to Twin Peaks; she also returns to her memory of her self, to the knowledge that she was murdered, horribly, without mercy.  This is the crushing resolution, which is also not a resolution.

It's fitting that we have Cooper and Laura Palmer together at the end -- together, they form the x-y axis that the show’s story arc is graphed upon.  Cooper's original project was to solve the murder -- to find out who killed Laura Palmer.  We realize only at the end that the project gained much greater significance along the way.  Cooper was trying to negate the murder, to neutralize it, and thus to do the impossible: to bring Laura Palmer back from the dead.  And maybe he did, only to find out that she was doomed to suffer the same fate once more.  What was the project that the Arm and the Fireman had given him?  Did they trick him?  Did he fail?  Will he have another shot at it?  Are things caught in a cycle of repetition, stuck in a loop, like the electrical circuits that figure largely in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and as the central motif of the new series?

We can hope, certainly, that there is still a good Cooper out there.  What I was really hoping for was that Cooper would walk through the door to Room 315 and simply disappear.  He could enter the Black Lodge and remain there, like Mike/Philip Gerard, as a guide or mentor for others who find their way to this other dimension.  However, Lynch chooses to end with a Cooper who is not superhuman, but only human.  He has become unmoored in time -- "What year is it?" -- and place -- given that it seems that he no longer inhabits the same reality he (and we) thought he inhabited.

I'd like to answer Cooper's final question.  I'd like to tell him what year it is, but I find that when he asks the question it turns out that I don't know the answer myself.

--

In the end, I have only two complaints about the new series.

One is the absence of Annie Blackburn.  She was, if not the ultimate, at least the proximate cause of Cooper's entry into the Black Lodge in the original series.  Her brief appearance in Fire Walk With Me indicates that she remained in the Black Lodge with the good Cooper -- and this appearance in the film is one of the keys to understanding the entire series.  But she's virtually nowhere in the new series.  Aside from the quotation from the missing pages of Laura Palmer's diary, she's hardly mentioned.  I wouldn't expect closure at this point, of course, but an acknowledgement of her role seems sensible at the least.  Unlike, say, Donna Hayward, whose non-appearance in the new series can be explained perfectly (she left Twin Peaks, she started a new life elsewhere), Annie Blackburn's absence makes little sense.

My other complaint is the discrepancy between Laura Palmer's story from Fire Walk With Me and that in the The Return.  At the end of Fire Walk with Me, we see Laura Palmer surrounded by angels, free from pain.  It is a triumphal moment: she escaped BOB by embracing fate and death, and her reward is perhaps not heaven but the Lynchian equivalent.  In The Return, to see her suffering after-death agony both in the Black Lodge (when she disappears with a scream) and again in the show's final moment (in the form of Carry Page, who perhaps at that moment realizes she is Laura Palmer, and who suddenly understands her fate, and who then disappears with a scream) seems to be at odds with what seemed to be a longed-for (but seemingly impossible) positive resolution.  This comes across to me as less an example of the skewed realities of Lynchian dream-logic and more a lapse in the narrative design.  These two examples bother me more than the many other ambiguities and uncertainties of the series because they seem least consistent with the internal logic of the entire project.

--

As for the other characters and their story arcs -- or the lack thereof -- I acquit Lynch on all accounts.  He gave us a few good endings here: Norma and Ed, the bittersweet passing of the Log Lady, Dougie and Janie-E.  That last one I found particularly poignant.  As vacuous as Dougie and Janey-E are, there is something endearing about them both.  And Sonny Jim has his dad back.

One of my favorite characters from the original series was Audrey Horne.  As for her return, I can say that I’m fine with the mystery.  It was worth it just to see her dance again.

I found two other moments in the new series to be profound and powerful. When Special Agent Dale Cooper first returns in body and in self and delivers his unforgettable line -- "I am the FBI" -- no amount of subsequent disillusionment can negate the thrill of that moment. We got our hero back, even if only for an episode and a half.

The other moment that I simply cannot forget involves the completely unexpected appearance of Monica Bellucci -- as Monica Bellucci. Or, rather, as a version of Monica Belucci that Gordon Cole dreams into being. In Cole's dream, Bellucci gives us one of the great lines of the series: "We are like the dreamer, who dreams and then lives inside the dream .... But who is the dreamer?" It's a summary of the whole experience of watching Twin Peaks from the beginning to the end. The primary dreamer is David Lynch, and it is his dream-logic that animates the show. And if we are honest with ourselves, we have to realize that his dreams are at times frighteningly similar to our own.

BBC'S WOLF HALL

A few minutes into the first episode of the BBC serialization of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, I'd forgiven British actor Mark Rylance his ridiculous and offensive anti-Stratfordianism--and every other sin he might have committed.  Within a handful of scenes, he has reminded me why I so loved the way Mantel portrayed Thomas Cromwell in her novels.  To say that Cromwell (the fictional character--who knows about the real man?) is simply an emblem of Realpolitik or Machiavellianism would be a rank error.  The screenwriter who adapted the script from Mantel's novels knew what he was doing: by the end of Cromwell's first scene with his beloved wife, Liz, we have a real live human being before us, one of considerable intelligence, resourcefulness, and foresight; a pragmatic man who wants not only what is best for himself but equally so (perhaps more so) what is good for the kingdom he serves--which means not only its monarch (or not especially its monarch) but also the people who, Cromwell believes, deserve the bloody chance to read (or hear) their religion's holy book in a language that they can actually understand.  This Cromwell is a man who wants to cut through whatever bullshit (there's simply no other word for it, though we could never imagine the man himself employing such an indelicate phrase) that can reasonably be cut through to find the pith and marrow of any matter.

Seeing the drama unfold is a different experience from reading it--a complementary experience.  Seeing the story makes clearer the tragedy of it.  Cromwell is not simply an admirable man; he's an admirable man with flaws that prove his undoing.  Thomas More is not simply the stick-in-the-mud religious extremist that he initially presents.  He is that, but there's more to him, and Rylance makes us feel Cromwell's genuine dismay and frustration at the demise of his sometime rival.  Working largely through meaningful silences, Rylance makes us feel what Cromwell feels: that even his triumphs are attended with melancholy, that in politics (if not in business) every deal (however necessary) is struck at an unreasonable price.  More and more, as he gains King Henry's favor, Cromwell pays at higher costs to himself, and you can see it toll on him.  Nothing, however, seems to cost the king a thing.

If Rylance is good, much of it has to do simply with the gravity, the reserved and subtle feeling, that he brings to his Cromwell, whose utterances are comparatively few considering the amount of time the camera expends upon him.  (The show does a remarkable job of translating Mantel's narrative technique -- focused so much upon the run of Cromwell's thoughts, on his perspective -- into a kind of functional reverse perspective: we see Cromwell instead of seeing what he sees.  But it works -- it achieves largely the same effect.)  Damian Lewis, as Henry VIII, and Claire Foy, as Anne Boylen, are fully Rylance's matches, though, and their characters experience no such compunction when it comes to speaking their minds.  Lewis, who riveted us so with his virtue in Band of Brothers, who made us to feel that the good fight could be fought and that decent men may be behind it, gives us an altogether different beast here: a lion, as Cromwell acknowledges, whose claws are always at the ready.  Lions do not make for good friends, and yet, Cromwell himself notes, Henry is his only friend.  (It's hard to have any other friends under the circumstances.)  In one remarkable scene that takes place late in the series, fickle Henry reveals the capriciousness of his own nature by undertaking a series of turns that result in what is, more or less, a casually issued death warrant for his current wife.  The look on Cromwell's face tells us two things: one, that he is aghast at the prospect of having the queen executed, and two, that he foresees his own fate.  If the mercurial king can turn his claws upon one former darling just-like-that, he will still have plenty of claw left for another.  Lewis captures Henry's sense of entitlement--one that knows no bounds, one in which everything can be justified as a manifestation of his kingly will--and yet we have already conceded to Cromwell's perspective, which is that if any good is to come to the British people--to the common people--it is only through this man and his might.  There is simply no way of reconciling oneself to this situation.

Foy's Anne Boylen bears the requisite stamp of haughtiness and imperiousness, but she has more than that.  She has a shrewd but limited intelligence, as well as a sense of entitlement that rivals only that of her consort, but which is all the more daring as it comes from the lower rungs.  When the time comes and aloofness and anger no longer serve any purpose, Anne never reveals any more weakness or fear than is necessary.  There's a respectable dignity about her.  You feel sorry for her.  Cromwell watches on from the crowd below and, in a touching gesture, holds his hand upon his adolescent son's arm when the moment comes.  It's a telling moment.  He's the architect of her demise, but he feels sorry for her, too.  Plus, he's watching his own throat now.  There are all sorts of catharsis going on here.

Tragedy, as Aristotle would have it, ends with the moral ruination or death of the tragic hero.  We have a well-realized sense of moral ruination here, and we know how the story will end.  Cromwell does, too, I would imagine.  Though I have truly enjoyed Mantel's novels and the BBC series, part of me thinks that the story should end here with Anne Boylen's death.  We should have no trouble extrapolating the rest.

WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH MOBY-DICK?

Moby-Dick is, to some extent, a 600-page penis joke without a punchline -- unless being rammed to death by a massive creature that roughly resembles a detached, mobile, and sentient phallus counts as a punchline.  Of humor, though, there is none at the end.  Ishmael himself is a superior punster, but he is largely absent from the ending -- until his obligatory appearance in the epilogue.  One wonders: was Melville himself aware of how phallic and, at times, homoerotic the imagery in the novel is?  Perhaps some of it can be chalked up to the times: the fact that homophobia was generally unknown (because homosexual behavior was so thoroughly closeted as to be out of public scrutiny, and because, as a result of the previous fact and because of practical necessity, men could, for instance, cuddle up together in the same bed with no hint of impropriety) and therefore no one would accuse the narrative of anything untowardly.

If the phallic joke is a locker-room staple, then the Pequod is something like the ultimate locker-room: thirty men alone together for a voyage potentially spanning years with no literal female presence to balance things out, engaged in the manly pursuit of subduing nature and, in essence, subverting it to human ends.  The men deal in sperm oil, for God's sake!  An entire chapter is devoted to the "squeezing" of the sperm and the immense satisfaction to be had from doing so with your bosom companions -- all of whom are male.  The closest thing to female companionship during the voyage is the saving grace of the Rachel, wandering about toward the novel's end and searching out -- literally and figuratively -- her lost children.  She finds only Ishmael -- whose namesake was famously abandoned by his father.  If there is a homosexual undercurrent to the novel, it's a rather abysmal one.  This is a novel of men doing manly things, but doing them as though they live in a world in which there are no women.  It's roughly an opposite masculine inversion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's radical feminist utopia imagined some fifty years later in Herland.  Well, whatever: Ishmael seems to be having a good time.

And Ishmael is, in a way, the novel's mainstay and security but also its great flaw.  He holds everything together, but he doesn't quite fit in a way, and his curious absence at the end diminishes the cohesiveness of the narrative somewhat.  The novel is messy and flawed, as perhaps all great works of literature must be.  (Show me something that is perfect, note for note, beginning to end, that is longer than a sonnet.  I don't think you can.)  At times, it is even somewhat dull and unedifying.  But it is appropriately vast, meaningfully broad, expansive by design and by necessity.  It is about the very concept of greatness -- not greatness as in Alexander or Gatsby, not greatness as in a full measure of admirability in character or quality, but greatness as a measurement of sheer significance, the ability to carry meaning.  Nothing else quite like it has ever been accomplished.   

Like that other great American measure of greatness -- The Great Gatsby -- the question is whether the protagonist is essentially the narrator or that other character whom the narrator fixates upon.  In other words, are these novels about Ishmael/Nick Carraway, or are they about Gatsby/Ahab?  Gatsby and Ahab are the characters whose obsessions (the white whale/Daisy -- what's the difference?) dominate the stories and drive the narratives, but perhaps more significant is the fact that the narrators find significance in their obsessions.  In other words, if a tree falls in the forest ....  Had Ishmael not survived to tell the tale, there would be no tale to tell.  Had Nick not puzzled at length over the inscrutability of his summer acquaintance, that novel would be bust as well.  Every story requires a storyteller.  It has to be one of the primal laws associated with the articulation of human speech.  "I met a traveller from an antique land / Who said ...."  As for Ahab, his apostrophe to the head of the decapitated whale in Chapter 70 is both sublime and surreal -- but also comic, gross, and revolting.  It stands out as a singular episode in American literary history.  Once Ahab does wrest the narrative from the narrator himself, he does so forcefully.  The forging of his harpoon, the deliberate destruction of the quadrant, his taking up of little Pip -- these things come one after another toward the end of the novel, reminding us that Ahab's obsession is what drives the novel. 

And, finally, regarding the whale, there comes a development that Melville might never have considered, which is that the modern audience might be prone to sympathize more with the poor, maligned whale than with those who would destroy it.  The power of the novel, though, can only be enforced by this, the dramatic tension rendered more taut by it, the madness of Ahab enhanced by it.

So, what does make Moby-Dick one of the primary candidates for the title of Great American Novel?  A vast majority of the novel doesn't even take place in anything that could legitimately be called "America."  But America is somehow there in the same way that it was there when the Stars and Stripes were planted firmly in lunar soil.  With the westward expansion nearly complete, the oceans of the world became the next frontier -- the next fresh, unspoiled place for men to spoil, the utter imaginable limits of the empire.

A WALK IN AUTUMN WOODS

At what point does the lake--dammed up as it is--cease to be something artificial and become a part of nature?  At what point do I?  I'm reminded of a tumble-down barn out by the city limits, residing on one of the last lots before the town gives way to open ground.  The walls veer at odd angles in the throes of an extended stop-motion collapse, and the foundation is sunk into the ground, the grasses sprawling tall and unwieldy around it.  In terms of willpower, it has given up its fight against gravity and the other forces that conspire against it.  It's more than halfway toward inhabiting a natural state.  

Maybe the lake won't go that way until we're no longer here to enjoy it.  In the meantime, the woods sprawl up wild along its banks.

*

Emerson has much to say about the "plastic power" of the eye.  But there's also the plastic power of what is to be seen.  A single landscape at different times of year--different times of day, even--takes on vastly different qualities.  Then there are the sounds, or the lack thereof, also mutable.

Before the first hard frost, the woods are still thick, almost impenetrable, but opening up.  I went out on a morning unusually thick with mist, dew-spangled spiderwebs scattered through the grasses.  The air was still, cool but heavy, and the woods were still but for the falling of a yellow leaf, the sound of which is the only sound I hear--besides the clumsy noise of my own steps.  It's a curious sound, that of the leaf falling: the tiny rustle of detachment, a gap of considerable silence, then the slight clattering as the papery dry leaf takes its place on the forest floor.  My feet, by contrast, can't help but intrude upon the woods with their own immense clatter.

Day by day, the landscape reads dramatic because we see in it that most fundamental of struggles, the ongoing one that, as we imagine, started the universe: that of light imposing itself on the darkness.  It's a struggle that reflects our own struggle between vision and obscurity, between what we know and what we will never know.  There are, after all, lights and colors that we cannot even see.

The light we can see breaks through the tree tops, pierces through the mist, illuminates little droplets of moisture seemingly suspended in the air.  The sun climbs higher still, and eventually the fog disperses entirely.  

*

Then there's that other struggle, also present at the beginning, between gravity and all those things that would defy it: trees, leaves, ourselves--because one day we will abandon the upright vertical posture with which we stride along the landscape and begin our permanent residence below the surface of and parallel to the horizontal plane, in that final sleep that our little daily ones prepare us for (as Hamlet would have it: "to die, to sleep"--and Prospero: "... our little life is rounded with a sleep").  

The universe itself seems to be defined by its opposition to gravity, its relentless struggle not to collapse, not to give inward and fall in on itself.  Will the momentum created by the initial grand propulsion of matter eventually give way, or will that momentum win out against gravity and continue to disperse itself--ever more thinly--on and on forever?  Which end do we find preferable?

The answer is obscure, and it has no bearing on the moment.  Because in the meantime, trees have fallen down since last I walked these woods, and some have fallen across the path.  A particularly large trunk blocks my way, so I decide to go up the pass, where a field of tall grass, burnished red by the old season of sunlight that formerly inhabited this place, opens up, and an elders chorus of crickets sounds out loud enough to dominate the aural landscape.  I walk the edge of the field, thinking of Keats's hedge-crickets, then follow the next path back down into the woods, where once again I am the loudest thing there is, and therefore the most out of place.

*

On seeing: There is too much to see.  I see very little.  I suspect that I am simply oblivious to most of what's around me.

Whatever resides here is aware of my presence long before I am aware of its.  The first sign of a wild turkey is the crash of its wings against the undergrowth as it seeks to distance itself from me.  I scan the tree branches for owls, see none.  A few crows announce my presence and their own.  In winter, there is the creak and sway of tree branches in the wind, but the air is still today and for minutes at a time I am the only sound there is to hear.

*

Solitude is inevitably what we seek in the woods, but it's hard to walk the American woods alone.  Emerson and Thoreau are with me, too, and I couldn't shake them even if I wanted to.  All that I experience here in these woods, I experience with a nod in their direction.  

Thoreau, in particular, is with me today, making me self-conscious because of the pedometer I have with me.  I keep checking it to see how many miles I have traversed.  The numbers matter too much to me, I fear.  What do I gain from this knowledge?  What's behind my desire to quantify the nature of my experience here?  I imagine Henry David admonishing me.  His Realometer chides me.

Regardless, the pedometer continues to tally up the miles, the fractions of miles--even though, in fact, I am unwinding them, having looped around on the trail, making my way inevitably back to where I started.

John Williams's Stoner

Any novel whose primary setting is academia ought, by all accounts, to be an utterly atrocious affair.  Campus politics, bureaucracy, careerism, the jargon of each minutely specialized discipline creating its own little dialect incomprehensible to those outside (and sometimes those within) its little sphere--such things may arguably be necessary for the university to function, but they make for tedious reading.  John Williams's Stoner, which takes place almost entirely on a fictionalized version of the University of Missouri's campus in the early to middle twentieth century, is, however, a lucid and subtly brilliant novel.

The protagonist of the novel, the eponymous William Stoner, is a well-chiseled everyman of academia.  Having fled the university long ago, I had forgotten that such a character could exist; the professors had all dwindled into shadowy stereotypes in my mind, and they had lost their humanity in my remembrances.  Stoner is fully human, though, and any English major will see himself or herself reflected to some extent in Stoner's sensibilities.  Indeed, the shock of Stoner's first epiphany--the one that changes him, suddenly and irrevocably, less like a proverbial bolt of lightning than like a jolt of electroshock therapy--from a studious but uninspired agriculture student to an English major, and which eventually sets him on the track to professorship, will sting in a familiar way to many of us.  Here, the mechanism is a Shakespearean sonnet, the sturdy and familiar number 73, the meaning of which utterly eludes Stoner.  Rather than the meaning being transmitted in some kind of powerful way, it is the simple profundity of the speech act itself that impresses Stoner--that someone, centuries ago, would see fit to reach out to him, to speak to him, to try to say something at all.  The voice may be incoherent to Stoner, but he hears it, and it changes him.  It's as though he suffers a stroke in the middle of class and then refuses to tell anyone about it.

From this moment, Williams follows Stoner's life through his marriage, through the modest peaks and petty vales of his career, through fatherhood, to his final days.  Throughout it all, the key aspect of the somewhat Prufrockian Stoner's character is the discrepancy--the vast gulf, really--separating what he knows and experiences in his mind from what he is able to express.  This is also what gives the novel its poignancy.  Stoner's life is, in the end, generally insignificant, but simultaneously worthwhile.  Stoner is affecting for the subtle revelation of humanity that it offers carefully and quietly to the reader.

Shakespeare's First Tetralogy

It's simply not disputed that the second tetralogy (considered in terms of composition, not historical chronology) is stronger than the first, but the first -- Parts 1, 2, and 3 of Henry VI and Richard III -- is not without great merit.  The three parts of Henry VI -- of which Part 1 may actually have been composed last -- are sloppy, sprawling, and glorious.  They are, to my mind, among the most purely entertaining of Shakespeare's plays.  The winner at the end of Part 3 -- only a temporary winner, as the play makes quite clear -- is King Edward of the Yorkist faction, and upon his triumph he sums up the long list of the defeated quite well:

          What valiant foemen, like to autumn's corn
          Have we mown down in tops of all their pride!
          Three dukes of Somerset, threefold renowned
          ... Two Cliffords, as the father and the son;
          And two Northumberlands; two braver men
          Ne'er spurred their coursers at the trumpet's sound.  (5.7.3-9)

This is just a partial list, of course, of defeated Lancastrians -- just the names that have come in multiples.  There's also murdered King Henry and his murdered son, Prince Edward, who is not to be confused with Edward of York (now king), and who may or may not be King Henry's son, anyway, given good Queen Margaret's long-term love for the Duke of Suffolk (who is also dead now).  We have seen multiple Gloucesters, who stand out in sharpest contrast.  Take good but ill-fated Humphrey, brother of the late Henry V and one of the very few characters in this series who can simply, unequivocally be called good.  Then take, by contrast, that other Gloucester: crookback Dickie, who slashes his way to the throne in the last title in the tetralogy, the one that bears his name.

Richard III is often cited as Shakespeare's first great creation, and it is true that he bears a certain charisma.  More and more, he comes to dominate 3 Henry VI, making him inevitably the focus of its sequel.  Is Richard the first likeable slasher in the history of literature?  We know he's evil, but he's got such a charm about him in knowing who he is.  In an odd way, he is honest in his dishonesty, in the sense that he is true to himself.  And he is true to us, to his audience, speaking to us so frankly in his soliloquies, delightfully sharing with us his plans to murder anyone who comes between him and the crown, be they the bearers of his own family's blood or no.  We've seen killers, murderers, rapists, raving warriors before, but Richard might be our first true psychopath in all of literature.  He has no remorse, little feeling, nothing that resembles what we call conscience, until it comes to him in a dream near the very end.  He seems eerily, frighteningly real, nonetheless, frighteningly human.  He's not the bogeyman; rather, his humanity, as limited as it is, is on full display.  Richard is the medieval vice character, but with a depth that makes him more than just a prop or a walking idea.  In that respect, the invention of his character is utterly brilliant.  If Richard II was the poet-king, elegist for a vanquished sense of national unity, Richard III is the actor-king, one who can play any part that it takes to get to the top: the victim, the lover, the loving brother and uncle, the wounded soul, but above all the killer.  His seduction of Lady Anne is masterful, an achievement that would be worthy of even Iago's admiration, and I wonder if perhaps Richard isn't the slicker and more subtle of the two.  Richard's post-nightmare soliloquy in Act 5 is another achievement on Shakespeare's part.  Is Shakespeare telling us that there is not a man alive, no matter how vile, who cannot feel the stab of remorse?  Here we have Richard talking to himself, a fragmented conscience.  This final soliloquy is not directed at us, but rather at himself.  It's a remarkable innovation, with language that is blurred and elliptical to match his state of consciousness.  Richard is never more alive than in this penultimate moment.

In the final analysis, however, Richard is unequivocally evil, but other characters tend to fall into a grayer moral domain -- or at least they weave in and out between the audience's moral censure and the audience's sympathy.  We side first with one character, then with another.  Richard of York (father of Edward, his eldest son who becomes king, and of crookback Richard, younger son but nonetheless the father's namesake) is despicable at times, such as when he contributes to the plot against Humphrey of Gloucester in Part 2, but admirable at other times, and never more so than when he falls victim first to Queen Margaret's scorn in Part 2, and then to her blade.  As 'tis said multiple times in the series, the manner of his dying, the tears he sheds at the news of his youngest son Rutland's death, the wicked way that Queen Margaret and Lord Clifford rub -- literally -- Rutland's blood into him, all of that is enough to bring his own enemies, such as that Northumberland who is present, to tears. 

That is, it will bring any enemies who have human hearts to tears -- Clifford seems to have lost his own heart in revenging his father's death, and Margaret's heart may well be less than fully human.  Queen Margaret is one of Shakespeare's boldest, most audacious women, and famously the cause of the writer's first notoriety -- earning him a mention in Greene's Groats-worth of Wit (1592).  York, in his final moments of defiance before he is slain, effectively sums up her character: "tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" (1.4.140).  As a character who appears in four separate plays, Margaret is distinctive in the Shakespearean canon.  It's hard to find much sympathy for Margaret -- she borders on psychopathic herself -- but for the general fact that this life as queen was not one she chose for herself.  Had her husband made a stronger king, she might not have to go to such lengths she goes to in order to secure his throne and to secure a royal future for her son.  Unlike Queen Elizabeth, who made a battlefield appearance at Tilbury as a motivational gesture, Queen Margaret actually leads her army into battle, wielding a true sword.  One cannot help but be fascinated by her character, whether you can find any cause to admire her or no -- rather, it's simply the idea of it, that a woman could be so remorselessly bad -- and so bold.  In battle, she's more a man than her husband, whose effeminate nature brands him incompetent to rule, and who sits by haplessly, disinclined to join the fray. 

How could that paragon of virtue, King Henry V, have borne such a son, so unfit to govern that he loses the English territories in France, sees the nation divided to its very core, and ultimately loses his own kingship (multiple times)?  Hapless and hopeless, Henry himself makes clear to us throughout the plays that bear his name that he would make a better tender of sheep -- that is, real, live, bleating, wool-bearing sheep -- than he makes tender of the imperial flock.  His weakness is in no small part the cause of the whole bloody debacle here.  Yet he bears a meekness, a mildness, a gentleness of character that sometimes wins us over.  He is too good to be king, perhaps, but he would have made a right honest clergyman.  His death is positively Christ-like.  And he is, after all, the king, for those who still believe in that sort of thing.

The quality of writing throughout this tetralogy varies widely, and most scholars agree that Shakespeare was not likely to have been the sole author of 1 Henry VI, which is particularly inconsistent.  Whether Shakespeare revised someone else's work or collaborated, we cannot know.  I myself am not past the idea that Shakespeare, a newly minted writer at this point, simply had not mastered the art of consistency yet.  I have no doubt that Shakespeare could have written the weakly developed Act Five of 1 Henry VI.  Maybe his boss just said to him, "Hey, kid, I like the material, but this Joan of Arc chick, she's gotta be bad in the end.  Real bad, I mean.  For Chrissakes, you gotta give us a reason to burn her at the stake."  And sure enough, Shakespeare does just that.  We have a conjuration of demons and Joan's own damning self-indictments to assure audiences that she is a witch and no maid by far.  (She tells the English that they cannot burn her at the stake because she is pregnant, though with whose child she cannot offer an answer with any certainty.  They burn her anyway.  They are English, after all.)  What had been a compelling and complex character study deflates in seconds flat. 

Nevertheless, it's all quite entertaining, even Joan's conjuration of demons.  It could give The Tudors a run for its money.  Imagine -- a historical soap opera with the requisite HBO-ready "boobs and blood" that go along with the genre -- but with good dialogue.  I'd pay to see it.

Richard III is sometimes considered Shakespeare's first great work of literature.  True, it's ultimately the best of these plays, but it's also so clearly a continuation of them, almost a Part 4 to the Henry VI plays, which are not without their charms, primarily the fact that they are so brisk and entertaining, but also the sense that they convey a world that rings true politically and characters who generally possess a realistic depth.  Together, these plays constitute a dramatically thrilling but politically demoralizing chapter in British history, a time when the political system had failed and English identity itself was at stake.  True, in the end you can't remember the difference between the first Somerset and the second one, but the sense of movement still sweeps you along.  This is exciting stuff to read.  Whether he wrote it all or not, it's still Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's Tetralogies

Of course, Shakespeare never intended for anyone to read the two tetralogies straight through in chronological order -- he may never have intended anyone to read them at all.  But that doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile exercise to try them out in historical order, from Richard II straight through to Richard III.  The effect of doing so is rather curious, and it presents a compelling insight into what Shakespeare might have meant by his notion of history. 

History, at the time, was a literary art that had little concern for factual detail, and drama had in the eras preceding Shakespeare always been the stuff of moral pageantry.  Combining the two together as Shakespeare did was a new invention being pioneered in his time.  Indeed, Shakespeare has been said to have invented the history play himself, though to argue so might be to slight some of the efforts of his contemporaries.  Certainly, though, the history play was a new thing, and Shakespeare proved himself adept at unlocking its potential.  The result is that the moral certitude that provided the backbone of the medieval morality play was vanquished.  Even that walking vice, Richard of Gloucester, is a curious character, one with dimension, and not the flat emblem at work in plays of past eras.  Enter a world of moral complexity, of something altogether more real and more recognizably human.

As for the notion of history, the insight that Shakespeare seems to offer here is that it moves.  I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln's famous statement, in his Second Inaugural, about the coming of the US Civil War.  After a brief but far-reaching account of the circumstances leading up the war, Lincoln simply states, "And the war came."  Ultimately, the mechanisms and motives of history are lost somewhere in the details, and we are left with a series of moving images attached to a result.  From the perspective of the present, the events of the past always seem inevitable -- because we have no other past to take its place.  Eventually, the names of individuals characters blur and become indistinct, and we are left merely with a sense of the inexorable sweep of it all.

Reading the two tetralogies from start to finish, I realized that the chronological approach captures the sweep of history, but it doesn't make for the dramatic arc that formed as Shakespeare wrote the plays.  To end with the first tetralogy is to see England at its worst -- that is, history at it its worst, because Shakespeare's England is a stand-in for the bigger world and its history.  In the first tetralogy, we see a nation taken to the brink of failure.  That it is redeemed by the first triumph of the Tudor dynasty in the final pages of text does little to dispel the sense of collapse that dominates the series, which shakes the foundations of the notion of kingship and threatens to call the whole thing out as a fiction.  We wonder how the puissant seed of glorious Henry V could produce such a milksop as Henry VI.  If that's the case, then all indeed is vanity. 

To build up, then, to Henry V, to end his long run of history plays on that note of rousing national unity, may seem a little cheap, but it works.  This sequence re-establishes the myth of kingship, restores the political enterprise of the nation, gives the people what they want: a glimmering, shining moment of common purpose and shared glory.  Of course, it was all probably an accident of his career (possibly a result of the fact that there was, purportedly, already a play about Henry V written in the early 1590s), but by disposing of Henry VI early on, Shakespeare freed himself up to end the story on a flourish of triumph.  Revisionist history, as history generally is.