Comparing Thee to a Summer's Day

A writer named Clinton Heylin was on NPR the other day discussing his new book, So Long as Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Despite Heylin's best efforts, however, the untold story referred to here is not one that anyone can ever tell with any degree of certainty. Absent any biographical detail directly related to the composition of the sonnets, anything one might say about their relevance to the poet's personal life is purely speculative.

Heylin is likely correct in suggesting that the sonnets published in 1609 were bootlegs, their printing not authorized by Shakespeaere himself but rather by someone who came into possession of the poems and, the enforcement of copywright law at the time being about as effective as Canal Street crackdowns on pirated DVDs, had them printed simply to make a few bucks for himself. The sonnets had been around for awhile, having been praised in writing by Shakespeare's contemporaries as early as 1598, and with public demand for Shakespeare's work very robust they must have sold well.

Heylin's explanation for why Shakespeare did not publish the sonnets himself is suspect, though, and his ideas hinge upon the assumption that these poems are of an intensely personal nature. As many others have speculated, Heylin finds in the sonnets evidence of the poet's presumed homosexuality. Anti-homosexual sentiment in the Early Modern era makes Proposition 8 seem kindly by comparison (but only by comparison!), so it is natural that if the sonnets were private poems detailing Shakespeare's love for another man he would want to keep them private.

A great number of the sonnets are addressed to a "fair youth," a young man who is praised extensively for his beauty and for whom the poet vociferously declares his love. I would say "profound and abiding" love, except that the love expressed here often bears with it a strained sense of hyperbolic exaggeration--that kind of excessive flattery reflective of what we might call brown-nosery today. In other words, I find many of these sonnets unconvincing as works of art, and the theory that Shakespeare wrote them as an attempt to secure patronage is as sensible an explanation as any--at least as sensible as the assumption that Shakespeare wrote the sonnets for the purpose of expressing his genuine feelings toward the fair youth. The fair youth in question here may well have been Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, a handsome enough fellow, to judge by his portrait.

Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece (both book-length poems) to Wriothesley, and many scholars have reasonably suggested that Shakespeare relied on Wriothesley's patronage at a time when London theatres were closed due to an outbreak of the plague. Because many of the sonnets concern themselves with attempting to persuade the fair youth to marry and thus make copies of himself, it is also possible that Shakespeaere may have been hired out by the young man's family members, who presumably wanted the very narcissistic Wriothesley to marry and who were willing to resort to employing a hired poetic gun in their attempts to persuade the young Earl to not be so stuck on himself. The notion, as expressed in the sonnets, is that the fair youth has such intense beauty that it were mere selfishness to keep it to himself and not share it with all the world by producing significantly beautiful offpsring that bear his very own features.

Is this the argument of a gay lover, or even of a would-be gay lover? It is possible, but if so we are dealing with a defeated lover here, one who knows that the odds are not good. Add to this the fact that a sizeable portion of the sonnets are addressed to a "dark lady" and involve a high degree of complex (but often crude) male-female sexual imagery, and the responsible reader can, in sum, come to only one conclusion: we simply cannot rely on the sonnets in our attempts to paint a single, clear, and consistent portrait revealing who Shakespeare really was. If these poems are personal and not persona-driven or written in hopes of securing patronage, we have no power to prove it today. We have to look elsewhere to find out about Shakespeare himself, but the trouble with doing so is that there is nowhere else to look. Shakespeare, for all of his many pretty words, is a cipher to us. Is this necessarily a bad thing? It forces us to look very carefully at those words themselves because the author himself gives few clues as to what they mean.

If the sonnets are works of genuine self-expression on Shakespeare's part, they are clumsily so. One comment made by a scholar during a program I attended at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, has stuck with me over the last several years: if these poems had been written by anyone other than Shakespeare, we would not be reading and discussing them today, or, if so, we would consider them the work of a minor poet. Despite a few utterly brilliant moments in this lengthy collection of poems, the sonnets are not Shakespeare's best work.

Aside from the somewhat unconvincing emotional content of many of the sonnets, Heylin's claims are further complicated by another key aspect of the sonnets' context: namely that, despite the pervasive anti-homosexual sentiment of the time, men in Shakespeare's era could express love for their male friends without generating anything like a scandal. Renaissance society was not strictly "homophobic" in the sense that we understand the term; homophobia requires a consciousness of homosexuality and its presence in society, whereas homosexuality simply did not seem to be on the cultural radar screens of Early Modern. Men at this time could and did refer to their male friends as "lovers" without evoking suspicions of behavior that was at the time legally punishable by death. We forget that living in an age of relative openness regarding sexuality has changed the way people talk to each other about love; the downside of this new openness is that expressions of other kinds of love can be confused for expressions of romantic love, and, given that expressions of male-male closeness are often derisely labaled as gay behavior, this has diminished the options for male emotional expressiveness. A pervasive homophobia has been part of our culture for so long that the Elizabethan context of male relationships does not make sense to those of us who are conditioned to assume that only gay men would ever express love for each other. We cannot apply modern-day sensibilities to four-hundred-year-old texts and come up with valid readings, yet Heylin's argument seems to depend upon doing exactly this.

Furthermore, the fact that Shakespeaere did not authorize the publication of the sonnets is not so especially compelling in context. Shakespeare seems to have had no interest in publishing anything that he wrote, and Heylin's explanation that Shakespeare did not publish the sonnets because he had something to hide loses some momentum with this consideration. Other playwrights and poets of the era (cf. Shakespeare's university-trained, academically minded competitors, the "university wits") did desire to see their work in print. Their motives perhaps included the prestige of publication, the highest payoff in the social milieu of academics. Shakespeare was a businessman and a professional who likely never spent a day at the university except to put on a performance there, and publications of his work during his lifetime were almost entirely bootlegs. In withholding his works from publication, Shakespeare probably wanted to protect his work and to keep his words away from rival theatre companies, who could use them to stage their own productions of Shakespeare's plays and thus draw revenues away from the Globe. In the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, once a writer's words got printed, they were easy prey for a host of shameless opportunists, such as Thomas Thorpe, the publisher of the sonnets. Shakespeare might have had other motives to suppress the publication of his own works. Ultimately, though, any theory on why Shakespeare did not want his sonnets published is, like so many contextual details of Shakespeare's life and work, speculative.

I do not mean to suggest here that we should rule out Heylin's argument as an impossibility. It's quite possible that Shakespeare was gay, but if he was we will never know. Stephen Booth, the UC Berkely professor who edited the Yale edition of the sonnets (1977), remarks with acerbic wit in his appendix that "William Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. The sonnets provide no evidence on the matter." Booth also reasonably suggests that the sonnets "probably reflect a lot that is true about their author, but I do not know what that is." This I consider to be responsible scholarship. Once we get all of that business out of the way, we can go on to readings the poems and the plays, concentrating on what they have to say. Although I'm not a big fan of the Death of the Author approach to literature, I do have to say that this situation highlights the limitations of relying too much on the author's intentions in interpreting literary texts. In Shakespeare's case, we have no ideas what his intentions were. We have to look primarily at the texts, making reasoned observations based on what is there and based on what we know to be influences that led to the production of the words printed on the page.

It is a suspect enterprise to determine readings of the text based on rank guesswork, and yet there is a whole industry devoted to this kind of thing these days. Really, we just don't know, but addicts that we are of Shaekspeareana we cannot stop ourselves from hashing over the latest theories in a centuries-long tradition of making up stories about the man. Witness the recent to-do over the unveiling of a portrait that may--or may not--be the only portrait done of Shakespeare during his lifetime. The evidence for the man in the portrait being Shakespeare himself is so slim, so coincidental as to be almost ludicrous, and yet the portrait garnered a vast array of headlines when it hit the press. Regardless, I suspect that most people will continue to hold dear to the Martin Droeshout engraving that adorns the title page of the First Folio, the famous bald-topped gent whose detached-seeming head hovers (like one of the witches' apparitions in Macbeth) over a starchy Elizabethan collar.

And there we have him, the mysterious figure in the Droeshout portrait (itself a document of questionable validity!--a theme emerges ...) who, like Mona Lisa's cousin, bears a hint of a smirk on his face. What was the man thinking? Read the sonnets; see if you can figure it out yourself.

A Handful of Dust

The consensus seems to be that Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's best novel, but I simply cannot figure that one out. Waugh was at his best as a satirist--and the more acidic and pervasive his cynicism, the sharper and more humorous his satire was. He never wrote satire more finely pointed and more wickedly barbed than he did in A Handful of Dust.

This novel also bears with it a cultural relevance that surpasses that of Waugh's other novels. Given its affinities with (and numerous allusions to) T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, A Handful of Dust is the most modern of Waugh's novels. In fact, the title is taken from the first section of The Waste Land, and bears with it echoes of Biblical significance: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The yearning for genuine spiritual meaning--and the profound absence of it in modern culture--is the grounding idea of both works. We see this spiritual lack in all aspects of the British society depicted in A Handful of Dust, but to most direct (and most humorous) effect in the portrait of the vicar of Hetton, who has been recycling sermons since his days as a garrison chaplain in India. With his dated references to Queen Victoria and the golden age of British imperialism, his Christmas-time references to the unceasing heat, and his frequent mention of camels and tigers, his sermons are utterly irrelevant to his parishioners--and yet he "had a noble and sonorous voice and was reckoned the best preacher for many miles around." At one point, Tony Last, the novel's aptly-named protagonist, thinks of renovating the bathrooms in his Gothic mansion during the vicar's sermon.

And yet Tony (with the exception of his smart-alecky but endearing young son) is just about the most sympathetic thing going in this novel. He is hapless and bumbling, but at least he quests for something. It may be a fool's errand he sends himself on, but he at least realizes that something is missing, even if he cannot himself restore it to the world he lives in. At many points, the novel verges on mean-spirited; Waugh does some awful things to his characters. But this mean-spiritedness may simply be an essential element of satire, which to some extent requires grotesquerie and violence in order to make its point. Satire that does not sting is merely humor, like a late-night talk-show host who makes fun of whoever is in office because it is part of the job description. In the most famous satire of all time, Swift told us to eat babies. Waugh does not go quite that far, but there is some untowardly violence here. He makes his point.

Middle Cyclone

The first impression made by Middle Cyclone, Neko Case's new album, is a little misleading. There are enough mid-tempo numbers, enough lilting melodies with finger-picked guitar, that the songs seem at first to bear a limited variety. Unlike previous Neko Case albums, Middle Cyclone boasts few moments at which one instrument or another (usually an electric guitar) stands out in a spotlight-stealing way. Sure, there are plenty of top-notch musicians at work in these songs, but never before has it sounded so much as though the axes-for-hire are playing entirely to support her. The end result is that after a few listens you come to the realization of what this album is all about. It's about the voice--and it's a good thing that it is so.

It seems odd, at first, that a voice like Case's would benefit from such intensive musical support, but it makes sense in the end. Everywhere you look (The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Pitchfork), writers are calling Case's voice a "force of nature." That it is, and it is especially apt here, given the nature-themed songs that populate this album. But Case, whose ear for sound design is as precisely tuned as her voice, understands that if her voice unadorned is a force of nature, it will sound otherworldly--positively celestial--given the right accompaniment. That accompaniment comes not only from all those great guitarists (just to list the guitar players on her last few albums: Dallas and Travis Good of The Sadies, Joey Burns of Calexico, M. Ward, and the often understated but very talented Paul Rigby of Case's touring band) but also from piano and keyboards played by Garth Hudson of The Band and Howe Gelb of Giant Sand and background vocals by Kelly Hogan and a host of others (including Case's own overdubbed harmonies). In addition, Case, who has co-produced her recent albums, wields spring reverb like a weapon; in her studio recordings, it has become an instrument of its own--not quite the complete washing that it sometimes is on My Morning Jacket albums, but generously present, enough to vault things up into the stratosphere.

A good way to put Case's sound in perspective is to watch the stripped-down readings of several songs from Middle Cyclone via a recent podcast on The Interface. Accompanied only by Paul Rigby playing six-string acoustic guitar and Kelly Hogan singing harmonies, Case sounds spectacular. Here is her voice with minimal adornment, and it leaves you no doubt of its natural power. You also get a sense, however, of how much the full-band sound and the studio treatment add to these songs. Case did not write and arrange them for solo troubadour performance. Case's voice has a natural luster and lushness, and the studio arrangements are done precisely to enhance these qualities. The final product is an eminently appealing one--the most fully Neko Case of Neko Case albums so far.

Case has certainly found herself more truly and more strange on this album, but more and more in her songwriting you have to ask where exactly she is in the midst of these swirling words. The lyrics of many of these songs employ shifting personas, slippery voices that can at best be only partial reflections of Case herself. "I'm not the man you thought I was," she sings on "Vengeance Is Sleeping"--fair enough. "Prison Girls," one of the best songs of Case's career thus far, unfolds with a hallucinatory dream-logic all its own. In the interview from the Interface podcast, Case attributes the origin of this song (and that of "This Tornado Loves You") to a dream. Ostensibly, there is something about touring or at least travel involved in "Prison Girls"; the events described seemingly take place in a hotel. And a song about women inmates inescapably evokes the familar Case theme of gender roles in the postfeminist era (cp. "Pretty Girls" from 2002's Blacklisted). But it's the dream quality that sticks with the listener. The imagery in the song is hallucinatory but not psychedelic, Freudian in the truest, weirdest sense. It bears a remote kinship with the fever-dream quality of Howlin' Wolf's "Moanin' at Midnight." What distinguishes the tones of these two songs, though, is that while "Moanin' at Midnight" is shot through with paranoia, "Prison Girls" features a world-weary attitude of mildly bemused cynicism. When the persona sings to the mind's-eye prison girls (imagine a troop of them straight out of a low-grade '50s cult flick, then merge them with an equivalent number of motel cleaning ladies) that she "loves your long shadows and your gunpowder eyes," she discovers: "The prison girls are not impressed / The ones who have to clean this mess / They've traded more for cigarettes than I have managed to express." The harmonies and the plucked cello push this song into the sublime.

Elsewhere on the album, Case sings about wanting to be loved and about the failure of love with the kind of directness she has used before (cp. "Outro with Bees" and "I Missed the Point" from Blacklisted) but with a new level of maturity and a startlingly frank brand of self-examination. On the title track, Case sings: "I can't give up acting tough / It's all that I'm made of / Can't scrape together quite enough / To ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact / That I need love." The prime mover of the album, though--from the tornado-themed imagery of the opening track to the zoo animals gone berserk of the first single ("People Got a Lotta Nerve") and beyond--is Case's attitude toward kingdom animalia. This theme and others on the album climax in "I'm an Animal"--subtly but undeniably the most rocking song on Middle Cyclone. "I'm an Animal" is about the kind of certainty that comes only from instinct; it's about love as action. And it serves as a reminder that if we don't follow those instincts sometimes we ourselves end up not so different from the caged tiger that finally cracks. When we remember (happy birthday, Darwin) that we are animals, too, we lose some of our purchase on this place we inhabit. We become just another migrant species in the evolutionary chain, but, unexpectedly perhaps, we also become more connected to where we are in the world. All of this is implicit in these songs. The role of nature carries over into the overall sound of the album--and not just in the closing track--a thirty-plus minute field recording called "Marais la Nuit," which consists enitrely of frogs singing from a pond outside Case's rural Vermont home. You won't find yourself listening to this track all the way through very often, but at the same time you won't really mind its being there. It reinforces the major theme at work here, but also reminds us that Case is at the point in her career when her albums are wholly her own.

Case's ear for sound idiom has transposed steadily from a particularly fiery brand of alt-country to a more contemporary baroque indie-pop, but it still somehow maintains the earnestness and immediacy of the analog garage-band aesthetic. Middle Cyclone maintains a layered but organic sound, not decadent with manufactured tones. Still, it's all about the vox. Case refers to herself as the "horn section" of any band she is in, but what she means--self-deprecatingly describing herself as brassy and blaring--doesn't capture the truth of this statement. Listening to Case sing, you are made aware (through the sheer volume she musters, a quality that no amount of studio compression can disguise) of what an intensely physical event singing can be. There's no point singing along to these songs; even for the shower or a country drive, you can't do them justice. But there is a useful exercise in breathing along with Case as she sings. You realize that there's a lot of air being pushed through those pipes. You get a feel for the effort that's involved here, one that starts somewhere in the middle and breathes outward like heaves of storm.

Flannery O'Connor Revisited

She was strictly and devoutly Catholic in word and deed, and she considered this the defining quality of her work. By all accounts, the woman was parochial, provincial, a reactionary of sorts, one whose gaze was--against the grain--retrospective at the dawn of the postmodern era. In short, it seems that she was the kind of person whose insight into the lives of others must of necessity be circumscribed by the limitations of her own experience and attitudes. How remarkable, then, that Flannery O'Connor produced a body of work that is so powerful, so compelling to a broad literary audience, so recognizably full of grace in so many ways.

With the publication of Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, the details of O'Connor's life and work have been thrust into the spotlight. What's going on is not so much a reassessment as it is a pronouncement in the popular press of O'Connor's status as a canonical figure. Joy Williams and Joyce Carol Oates have both written reviews of Gooch's book, in The New York Times Book Review and in The New York Review of Books, respectively, and though each takes a different tack in approaching the subject, their common admiration for O'Connor overtakes in each case what the reviewer has to say about Gooch's work.

For me, there is no doubt of O'Connor's greatness. The question is, what makes her great? How to qualify that greatness in the face of her many limitations?

To some extent, O'Connor boasts the appeal of the idiosyncratic. Hers was a vision complete in and of itself, reliant on no one else's. There is the quirkiness of her prose, of her characters. Consider, for instance, this description of Hazel Motes, the protagonist of O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood, as he sits perched behind the wheel of his beat-up fifty-dollar car:

"His face behind the windshield was sour and frog-like; it looked as if it had a shout closed up in it; it looked like one of those closet doors in gangster pictures where someone is tied to a chair behind it with a towel in his mouth."

The three-part visual description grows increasingly complex as it goes along, ending on a less-certain note than the one with which it begins. The last part seems a little clumsy at first--a face being compared with a door and not with the face behind the door--but in the context of O'Connor's writing it works somehow. The phrasing resembles something one of her characters might have said, especially the colloquial "where" instead of the more formal "in which." This last description also follows through on the notion of "closed up," and it is striking for the way it adds a notion of powerlessness to our understanding of Hazel Motes' character. There is a sense that there is someone else tied up inside of Hazel Motes, trying to get out. Here's a guy who is struggling to control himself, struggling to shake the ragged, bumming Christ that rattles around in the back of his head. He can't do it, though. In this particular instance, the Jesus that Hazel Motes sees is less stubborn revenant (as described as elsewhere in the novel) than he is two-bit gangster thug. Not that O'Connor would have agreed.

An offhand-seeming description of some roadside trees early on in O'Connor's famous short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" provides, for me, the most memorable example of O'Connor's skill as a writer: "The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled." This line takes on a powerful resonance later on, when we find out that this story is precisely about how the meanest of things bears the hope of redemption.

This last point demands some further consideration along thematic lines. O'Connor ought, on the surface, to appeal only to her fellow Catholics. What about those of us who do not subscribe to O'Connor's narrowly-defined but pervasive notion of spiritual salvation? What redeems O'Connor as a writer is the ability of her stories and novels-and even some of her nonfiction--to withstand secular readings. The finely-honed details of her prose are perhaps the primary component here, along with the saving grace that, though the stories develop Catholic spiritual themes, O'Connor's characters are almost exclusively Protestant--specifically, God-haunted borderline-lunatic Southern Protestants. There is in her writing always a certain distance between the keenly perceptive but far-away third-person objective narrator O'Connor typically employed and the characters themselves.* Together, these factors create enough gaps--between the author's attitude and the story itself, between the story and the characters--that one can creep into the reading with another perspective. Based on the growing critical response to her work (Oates cites statistics such as the number of dissertations on O'Connor registered by the Library of Congress), the consensus seems to be that O'Connor's work does withstand a secular approach. O'Connor transcends herself. She would, it seems, based on her nonfiction writings and her biography, not be so happy herself to know that. When she talked Jesus, she meant it; she aimed at a narrow readership.

Beyond all of this, there is something else at work, something about the notion of salvation that bears a strong inherent appeal to a broad audience, religious and secular alike. Just as early strains of evangelicalism in America morphed into Transcendentalism, the notion of personal salvation--an inward transformation to a better self--has writ large become a deeply entrenched component of modern culture (cf. Oprah and Tyra Banks for the latest pop-culture incarnations of this phenomenon). I think it safe to say that it requires a jaded and cynical person to take no stock in any concept of redemption or salvation at any level--not even a wholly secular conception of these notions. O'Connor's idea of grace, represented most effectively in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by the grandmother in her final moments, bears with it a semi-universal appeal that O'Connor herself did not quite intend. Who would not like to believe that in the last seconds of your life, you could be transformed into a figure of goodness? Don't we imperfect humans deserve such a chance? O'Connor's stories give this chance to us.

The other category of limitations that falls on O'Connor has to do with her intense Southern-ness. It is disappointing to find out that O'Connor was no more progressive in her racial attitudes than most other Southerners of her time--but then again, it may well be the gravest of mistakes to look to writers and artists for lessons in morality, and the fact of O'Connor's unsurprising racial insensitivity has little bearing on what we see in her writing. Her characters prove to be almost without exception racist, but what else would we expect of characters whose primary feature is most often their mean-spiritedness--"mean" in every sense: not just cruel, full of anger and outrage, but little and weak, in need of a moment of grace.

Unlike William Faulkner, whose shadow she self-consciously labored in, O'Connor never seemed to espouse a sense of the mythic qualities of the Southern Gothic--her native postage stamp of soil was to her precisely that, and not some ahistorical microcosm of the larger world--not, like Shakespeare's stage, a timeless place that speaks of the universal. Her vision was precise and wedded to the soil. And yet we have as a culture always identified with the South as a bedrock of American culture, especially in terms of popular music, most all American forms of which originate in the South. Perhaps the South, in O'Connor and in American culture at large, serves as a kind of exaggeration of the landscape the rest of us live in. The South is America, only more so. It's problems are our own problems amplified: poverty, racism, a struggle to overcome the past, a complicated religious heritage.

Finally, we must consider O'Connor's deliberate use of caricature and the grotesque. O'Connor's most famous statement about her own work is on the nature of the grotesque: "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." Thus the sometimes stunning violence and depravity of her writing, and thus Oates' description of O'Connor as most-gifted of cartoon artists. For O'Connor, the modern audience is hard of hearing to the Word and nearly blind to the truth--she would do anything to catch our eyes. Seeing and blindness, in fact, figure prominently as symbols in Wise Blood. Sabbath Hawks, the daughter of a preacher who pretends to be blind in order to establish ethos with his audience, says of Hazel Motes, "I like his eyes ... They don't look like they see what he's looking at but they keep on looking." Hazel Motes (whose very name evokes the image of eyes, hazel being an eye color and a mote being something that, according to Hamlet, troubles "the mind's eye") seeks to look beyond, and to do so is to recognize the paucity of literal sight; in effect it means to have an inward-looking eye. Motes seeks to establish the truth in his own mind, and he literally blinds himself in an attempt to achieve this.

Ultimately, these stories and novels work because O'Connor was, perhaps without her realizing it herself, a kind of neo-Platonist. By calling her a neo-Platonist, I mean specifically that she believed that the truth--for O'Connor, a religious truth--exists somewhere beyond the grasp of our senses, and that it is only through an inward experience that one comes to know somehow of this truth. For Plato, this inward experience was the true philosopher's use of reason; for O'Connor, as for Jonathan Edwards and every evangelical since, it was the spiritual transfiguration--to be inhabited by grace, to be born again.

O'Connor also believed in mystery in the Catholic sense, though, which is epistemological uncertainty in the philosophical sense, and which many American Protestants don't seem to be especially susceptible to today. What any Platonist gives us, in the end, is images--appearances--and not reality, for it is only through applying the power of the mind to these images that we can establish the truths that lie beyond them; it is only through the imperfections that surround us that we can come to understand these same things elsewhere in their perfect form. No one can give us truth; we must find it ourselves. Thus images are the essence of artistry. The reality that O'Connor believed in contains moral truths, but these are not what she gives us in her writing because art--despite every contrary intention of the artist--will continue to have nothing to do with such things.

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*O'Connor herself claimed a bit of powerlessness here, speaking of how her characters were always off and getting themselves killed as though she could do nothing about it.

Netherland

Joseph O'Neill's Netherland does something remarkable and peculiar -- it gives us an up-to-date version of the archetypal American novel without any archetypal Americans.

At least not any archetypal Americans of the kind that the literature of the 20th century has made recognizable to us as such. The Americans here are all recent transplants, some of them temporary, from England or Trinidad or places unidentified, and in this regard Netherland signals the literary equivalent of the great call to make-way that seems to be booming everywhere around us -- that these transplants are rapidly becoming the new archetype. In the narrator, however, a Dutchman-by-way-of-London named Hans, we see that this new archetype is in fact merely a remixed version of the old one; Hans' unlikely Trinidadian friend, Chuck Ramkissoon, reminds the transplanted Dutchman at one point that he is "a member of the first tribe of New York, excepting of course the Red Indians."

Hans' background brilliantly serves to justify the somewhat un-contemporary sound of the novel's prose, which is generally too formal to capture the rhythm of things today, but which would not have been out of place a hundred years ago -- and which is believable, coming from a financial analyst who learns English as a second language in England. And the truth is that the sound of this prose is Netherland's most immediately engaging quality. Reviews comparing Netherland to The Great Gatsby abound, and not without good cause. We are reminded of Nick Carraway almost instantly -- the trustworthy narrator, one who, we are certain, is telling us the truth because he does not go out of his way to make himself look good to the reader. Fluid, graceful, and finely-crafted -- we thought that these qualities no longer had a home in the contemporary novel. How gratifying it is to see these attributes in action on the page -- even if we suspect that no one, not even O'Neill, will ever be able to pull it off again. Consider Hans' knowing observations when he and Chuck navigate their way through the city:

We made our way through animated hordes of men. At a certain point, Chuck grabbed my arm and said, "Let's cross now," and he trotted quickly across the avenue as a surge of traffic came roaring up. He had, I realized, waited for a moment when the pedestrian light showed the fierce red hand, and then taken his chance. Evidently he felt this gave him an edge--and it did, because it meant that, walking on down Sixth Avenue, he and I were signaled forward at every cross street by the purposeful white-glowing pedestrian whose missionary stride was plainly conceived as an example to all (and whom I cannot help contrasting with his London counterpart, a green gentleman undoubtedly rambling with an unseen golden retriever).

There is a whimsical quality (of the sort that we sometimes see in Hans' Fitzgeraldian precedent) to the descriptions of the walk icons. But this paragraph also sharply reveals Chuck's cunning, his knack for strategy in competitive environs, as well as Hans' quick ability to discern what his friend is up to. The comparison of the walking figures is telling as well -- the archetypal purposefulness of the genericized American contrasted with the mannerliness of his British equivalent. This kind of easy symbolism -- at once both effective and readily grasped by the reader -- pervades the whole of the novel. We see such symbolism throughout the novel not only in discussions of cricket -- which is what brings Hans and Chuck together -- but also in Hans' frequent lyrical descriptions of the clouds and sky, both as they appear to him in Manhattan and in other locales throughout the world -- everywhere Hans has been. (For a more thorough treatment of this subject, see James Woods' review of Netherland from The New Yorker.)

Netherland sometimes starts to fall flat when it comes to dialogue featuring Hans' co-workers and other born-and-bred Americans. It's not that the dialogue is poorly done; it's just that it sounds so jarring alongside the narration that the discord threatens temporarily to undermine the whole enterprise. These moments remind the reader of the improbability of a voice like the one Hans displays here, but they also serve as placeholders, in a way, marking off instances where we might find insight into the big idea that animates this novel. We have to be reminded that this in not a story about typical Americans in the old-fashioned sense.

In keeping with the novel's examination of a new American internationalism -- something that is less sought out by than it is thrust upon the nation -- O'Neill's characters have involved themselves to varying degrees in an attempt to replace our current (fading) national pastime with the promise of a new international one -- cricket, the sport favored by this burgeoning population of new Americans. Hans and Chuck are keenly aware of the far-reaching symbolic resonance of their sport and its ability to bring together people from different cultures -- everyone except for the Yanks, it seems. Chuck in all earnestness describes cricket as possessing a democratizing influence, helping to spread law, order, and civility throughout the world, and a more cautious but still somewhat dreamy Hans tells us, "I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice."

In this respect we come to find out what Netherland is really all about: personal lives adrift in the wake of policies of American exceptionalism in the early 21st century -- the personal up against the political once again -- only the politics here are more wrapped up in Chuck's attempt to achieve his grandiose dream, a world-class cricket field in New York, than they are with the about-to-erupt war in Iraq. Netherland is very bluntly a post-9/11 novel set in New York -- something that nobody has seemed to want to read until this book came out -- something that seemed impossible to pull off because of the weightiness of the subject. Despite its big themes, Netherland manages to avoid collapsing under its own weight. A few years ago, Don DeLillo's Falling Man started off with a powerful and compelling first chapter, then fizzled into a tepid drone. It took O'Neill's skewed outsider-insider perspective to make the post-9/11 novel work.

And in all, Netherland does work, though there are gaps in the story it tells that, like the patchy American dialogues, threaten to do harm to the potential long-term reputation of this book. The tidiness of the narration and the lyrical brilliance of the prose cannot disguise the fact that this is a sometimes messy novel, one in which the narrative core sometimes disappears, turning the novel into a series of riffs with no discernible rhythm. The problems are twofold: one has to do with Hans' estrangement from his wife, Rachel--an estrangement that for most of the novel seems predicated on narrative convenience rather than sprung from the characters' own devices; the second involves the supposed occasion for the novel, Chuck's cricket-field dream.

Chuck, whom Hans once describes as "a man cheerfully operating in the subjunctive mood," is the Gatsby to Hans' Nick, but the sliders of wealth and class have been tampered with, and O'Neill adds into the mix the inevitable intricacies of race dynamics. Chuck is still the relentless outsider trying to crack into a world of prosperity, but he has not gotten as far as Gatsby in terms of his grand ambitions, and we are aware from the start that he never will. And he has no Daisy -- just the figurative green light of aspiration, given over here to the more expansive and less pointed green turf of a cricket field. Chuck is also throughout much of the narrative less central to this novel than Gatsby is to his, and that is a discernible flaw here. The problem begins when we start to wonder what happens to Chuck -- not his ultimate fate, mysterious as that is, but rather his absence from the narrative at times, leaving us alone with the sometimes overly thoughtful, overly lyrical, and occasionally insubstantial Hans. Hans the character needs Chuck to give ballast to his life just as Hans the narrative creation needs Chuck to give ballast to the narrative. When Chuck is not there, we wonder where he is and why Hans has forgotten about him. It all makes Hans seem self-centered sometimes.

Ultimately, though, Hans serves us well as a substitute for Nick Carraway, though the two are different enough. Whereas Nick turns out not to have a mind for the world of finance, it's second-nature to Hans. Still, Hans claims, "I've never been open to the fantastical aspect of business. I'm an analyst--a bystander"--in other words, just what we need in a narrator. Nick seems nearly sexless in Gatsby, and oddly enough, for all of his inelegant talk about "f-cking" (which does seem tonally out of place at times--even though it is the 21st century), Hans is nearly sexless as well -- at least free of any overpowering desires. Perhaps we need the narrator of such a novel, though, to be free from such passion. Hans' Jordan Baker appears in the form of his estranged wife, Rachel, who has gone back to London after the terrorist attacks while Hans stays behind in a rented room at the Chelsea Hotel. We can tell from the start that Hans, like Nick, will not be a New Yorker for long, that he will end up going back from whence he came, and from the perspective he gains there tell us the story of his time in the city in retrospect.

Which brings me to one final thing that Netherland does for the reader: it helps to put the nature of the City in perspective. We need this kind of thing now and then, a reminder of the thrill of being in New York, of what it means to be there, whether just visiting or on a permanent basis. Apparently, to O'Neill (himself a New Yorker by way of several countries: Ireland, Holland, and England), the City means nothing less than civilization itself. Of the many post-9/11 New York incidents that illuminated the true nature of the city, we have the 2003 blackout, an incident that Hans rides out on the roof of the Chelsea. At first, there is gloom and doom in the forecast; to one resident, the blackout is nothing less than the utter collapse of civilization: "Basically we're going back to a time before artificial light. Every nut out there is going to be acting under cover of darkness. ... Turn off the lights, people turn into wolves." Before too long, though, a party is under way on the rooftop. Things get a little harried at the Chelsea that night (in the novel, at least), but essentially the message is that people recover from a catastrophe pretty readily. They do so because they have to. Maybe it is not so easy to fling something as evolved and complex as civilization -- or a marriage, for that matter -- into the wastebasket. Who knows -- civilization might even continue to thrive without cricket.

Upon reading Netherland, one has to wonder: is this the first great American novel of the 21st century? Will it, despite its flaws, be a work that endures? Of course, future generations will have to decide how relevant it is to them. In the meantime, I can posit for you an image that seems more than just a little bit likely: the stacks of undergraduate theses comparing Netherland to The Great Gatsby. Would it be too much of a stretch to say that civilization demands such things?

Milton and Shakespeare

Someone named Nigel Terry recently wrote a book entitled Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?

One is tempted to respond by saying that "comparisons are odorous," but the fact is that Shakespeare is clearly better--or better at the things that matter most.

Milton, for all of his considerable poetic brilliance, did not have the faintest idea of how to develop character. As testament to this, we have the Romantic poets' deliberate misreadings of Milton's Satan. (That they could be so successful in promoting this misreading is ample evidence of Milton's shortcoming in this regard.) Shelley saw Satan as a hero possessing "magnificence" and a moral superiority over Milton's God, who is, as I have stated before, a real flat bore, and--as Shelley claims--vindictive to boot.

The real attraction of Milton is the quality of his verse--once you manage to untangle it. His sentences are convoluted to the extreme, and they make no pretense of accessibility. But they are grand, powerful, graceful--sometimes stunningly so. I'll take with me to my grave Milton's evocation of Satan's shield--massive and round like the moon viewed through the "Tuscan astronomer's" (Galileo's) lens, and his spear taller than the tallest pines of Norway. There's something about reading the epic simile rendered in one's own native language that is powerfully stirring, more so to me than when I read a like example translated from Greek. Part of the effect here is that the figure of Satan is so completely familiar to us that it is only through this new rendering of him that we find ourselves enabled to reconceive the figure itself. This was very much part of Milton's project--to enable us to see these figures recast, to behold new dimensions of meaning in the familiar narrative.

In Paradise Lost, Milton tosses out some heavy questions--most of which he can't answer successfully, but that doesn't make them any less compelling. His attempt to "justify the ways of God to man" is in effect nothing less than a theologically-based attempt at tackling what we now call the problem of evil. The attempt fails to suffice for a modern audience, but it's such a noble and fascinating attempt that it still bears consideration. It may indeed be true that no one has ever wished that Paradise Lost were longer, but that doesn't mean that we aren't glad (some of us, at least) that it exists.

Shakespeare, by contrast, reflects the Elizabethan universalist's skepticism of absolutes, and that is why he is ultimately the stronger and more appealing writer--because those of us out here in the real world are swimming in ambiguity. Milton's era was a time for taking sides--supporting the Puritans or supporting the king--while Shakespeare's era, just a few decades earlier, was a time for laying low, keeping your opinions to yourself--or perhaps even eschewing opinion altogether, seeing as how having one was likely to get you eviscerated and then beheaded. As Zadie Smith recently said of Shakespeare, "even more than for his wordplay we cherish him for his lack of allegiance. Our Shakespeare sees always both sides of a thing." In that regard, Shakespeare traffics in the mysteries of human character, and all ideas and ideologies are sifted so finely that in the end they blow away to insubstantiality. Take the running critique of stoicism that spans the first four acts of Hamlet. Polonius--subjected as he is to our scorn--embraces stoical precepts and by association renders them susceptible to our ridicule. Hamlet tries to embrace similar stoical attitudes, but they fail him--until the fifth act, when Hamlet's stoical acceptance of fate enables him to finally triumph in his project of avenging his father's murder. The end result for the audience, however, is that we are left not knowing what exactly it is that Shakespeare is saying about stoicism. Is he telling us that stoical precepts, used properly, are the means of transcending those infamous "slings and arrows"? Or does stoicism merely serve as a convenient means of finding the resolution to a plot that is going nowhere and taking its own sweet time to get there?* We will never be able to say with any degree of certainty: throughout his canon, Shakespeare gives us uncertainty instead of ideology. We are left not with ideas about the world, but with real-seeming characters who live in that world.

In the process, Shakespeare gives us some amazing lines. Sometimes his metaphors merge on the mixed variety, and sometimes his lines lack the intricacy of Milton's, but Shakespeare's greater appeal is deserved. Sometimes, though, I genuinely don't know which to prefer, the words of Hamlet:

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

Or the words of his successor, Satan:

"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."

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* Four acts of going nowhere is just fine in this context, but I suspect that W.S. may have sensed the need to resolve things before the audience caught wise to the fact that essentially very little has happened in the preceding 4000 or so lines.

Zadie Smith in NYRB

I just finished reading the transcript of a beautiful, brilliant lecture by Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books. Her comments, ultimately about Barack Obama's ability to "speak in tongues," address everything from her own personal experience to Pygmalion to Shakespeare, including Cary Grant and Frank O'Hara along the way. Here is the link:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22334