"By Divers Meanes Men Come Unto a Like End"

"Surely, man is a wonderfull, vaine, divers, and wavering subject: it is very hard to ground any directly-constant and uniforme judgement upon him."

--Montaigne

No Country for Old Men

One thing is apparent from the start of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men: the pace of the book is rapid-fire, and it won't take long to burn through it. There is certainly an entertainment value to No Country for Old Men that is undeniable, even if the novel is not without its flaws.

McCarthy is our nation's foremost living chronicler of the violence and depravity of the American West. Set in 1980, No Country for Old Men draws on the themes from McCarthy's Old West novels but animates them with a more contemporary crime-drama aesthetic. The disregard for human life that accompanied the westward expansion has become in this novel the disregard for human life that accompanies the drug trade from Mexico, and the action of the novel recounts Llewelynn Moss's tragic attempt to get away with a briefcase full of somebody else's money. (Who exactly the money, orphaned after a drug deal gone awry, belongs to is a question that cannot be answered in any simple terms.) As Moss's unstoppable pursuer, Anton Chigurh is another embodiment of McCarthy's The Judge, from 1985's Blood Meridian, still McCarthy's best (and most disturbing) novel. Chigurh is perhaps more human than the quasi-mystical Judge, but both characters relentlessly pursue an ethic of violence that McCarthy uses to convey an Old Testament message that is central to his work: that violence is one of the mechanisms that animates the world, that no matter how civilized we may become the specter of it will always pursue us.

Ultimately, what is most appealing about the novel is the off-center dynamic between the characters. Moss may be at the center of the action here, but what really gives the novel shape is the character of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who stands at the periphery of events throughout the novel, but who is rattled by them as surely as the reader is. In this way, McCarthy uses Bell as a stand-in for the reader. Just as we bear witness to this story of harrowing bloodshed, so does Bell, whose faith in simple goodness is sorely abused by what he sees. McCarthy might be suggesting that we are as powerless to stop the violence of the world as Bell is to stop the violence that takes place in his Texas border county. There is a certain conservatism, perhaps apolitical in nature, that pervades McCarthy's work. In McCarthy's view of the universe, nothing ever really changes. We're still taking scalps; we just don't put them on display anymore.

Most poignantly, Bell, a representative of law, order, and civilization, comes to realize that the only reason he makes it out of this situation alive is that he is utterly ineffectual to stop any of this violence. He doesn't register even as a blip on the bad guys' radar screen. The life and death drama might as well take place out of the law's jurisdiction; the citizens Bell is elected and paid to protect die on his watch. McCarthy presents Bell to us as the pinnacle of what we might call "decency" -- honesty, simplicity, earnestness, fortitude -- but he is ineffectual in the wake of this evil. Thus the title phrase, lifted from Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium," takes on new meaning in the context of Bell's internal crisis. Is there any country anywhere that can serve as a fit and proper home for a man who hopes to cling to a vision of decency that he suddenly realizes is obsolete? Obsolete perhaps because it was only an illusion to begin with.

There's much to admire in this novel, but there are also some moments that are cringe-worthy. The prose in the third-person narrative segments is strong: the images are leaner than those of other McCarthy novels, the action more streamlined, the dialogue more fluent much of the time, but as the novel progresses some of the dialogue becomes too heavily freighted with the kind of pseudo-philosophical rambling that bogged down No Country's predecessors, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. The third-person chapters in the novel are punctuated by shorter italicized first-person segments, told from Bell's perspective. Some of Bell's passages devolve into a kind of aw-shucks cornpone that clashes jarringly with the rest of the narrative. Many of these segments could have been excised, the result being a stronger novel.

As is, No Country for Old Men is a good novel, but cutting a few dozen pages would have made it great.

The Life of Marcus Antonius

He's a puzzling character, Mark Antony, but I've got at least one thing figured out: he's a general, not a politician. Sure, he ends up in control of a third of the Roman empire -- and he has, for a moment at least, a shot at the whole thing, though it seems doubtful that he would know what to do with it or even want it if he had gotten it. What can we say with certainty about Antony?

First of all, Antony has a great capacity for loyalty, though his own sense of allegiance may not always correspond directly with his sworn word. He stays loyal to Julius Caesar, even after Caesar's murder, when it seems that the conspirators clearly have the upper hand and there could be no advantage in remaining loyal to Caesar. He stays loyal to Cleopatra, even though he is married to another woman at the time -- the true bond is to his mistress, not to his wife. Along similar lines, he pledges himself to Octavius Caesar, then without delay breaks his word because he desires to go back to Cleopatra. His loyalty to her trumps his loyalty to Octavius Caesar.

Second, Antony uses rhetoric to advance his cause after Caesar's assassination, this cause being not so much to develop his own claim to power (he makes no such claim) but to undermine the claim to power of the conspirators.

Third, Antony bears a fondness -- a weakness, perhaps -- for revelry (referred to but not seen in Julius Caesar, but playing a stronger role in Antony and Cleopatra). He is a man of war -- a leader of men, certainly -- but a solider, not a statesman. When on the battlefield, he commands; when off the battlefield, he succumbs to simple pleasures.

Fourth, Antony is not a man without feeling, witnessed in his reaction to Julius Caesar's assassination and in his love for Cleopatra, which is fully in keeping with pre-modern/classical notions of romantic love as an all-consuming passion.

Finally, for all of these reasons Antony is out of place as a triumvir. It is the sum of these qualities -- not merely his love for Cleopatra -- that is the true cause of his eventual downfall.

It seems almost, at first, that the Antony of Julius Caesar is not the same as that of Antony and Cleopatra, that Shakespeare might have intended the two plays to stand independent of each other, but before too long it becomes clear that we are dealing with the same character in both plays. The Antony of JC responds to one set of circumstances that he faces, and the Antony of A&C -- a little older, a little more wearied of politics -- responds to another set of them.

In summarizing Antony's character, it's hard not to think of Brando as the perfect embodiment of him. It's been a few years since I've seen that 1950s version of Julius Caesar, and truth be told I can't remember how well Brando portrayed Antony, but the idea of Brando is right for it: tough, muscular (as Brando was at the time), instinctive but also calculating, brutish but also intelligent, masculine yet not without sensitivity. In short, Antony is a typically compelling Shakespearean figure, complex and ambiguous, sometimes self-contradictory, but altogether human. The fact that he bows out of his own tragedy in Act IV and leaves it to Cleopatra to carry on is a stroke of genius on Shakespeare's part: we come to understand in Act V the spirit of the Queen, the spirit that moves Antony to love her, and through her defiance of Octavius Caesar she becomes one of the strongest woman characters to ever carry a fifth act.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Dathan Hooper plays the title role in the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival's version of Macbeth. Note the witches in the background.

Everybody knows that the famous speech at the end of Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's finest moments. Nobody seems to know, however, what to do with it on the stage.

The delivery of this speech--tossed off altogether too casually, as though Macbeth, preparing for battle, were merely noting with a mildly bemused cynicism the irony of his wife's death--is one of the few flaws from an otherwise very strong version of Macbeth that I saw at the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. Why is it that no one gets this speech right?

The irony here ought to be of crushing intensity. The Macbeths suffer greatly for their ambitions; they become victims of their own terror, suffering from sleeplessness, hysteria, racking pangs of guilt, and a paranoia so pervasive that it unhinges Lady Macbeth entirely, severs her from reality and casts her into a sort of hell on earth that proves to the audience that she has suffered all the torments she need suffer for her sins. All of the bloodshed and horror that Macbeth endures he endures less for himself than for his wife, to satisfy her, to win her love and admiration, to comfort her, perhaps, for the loss of a child or for their inability to conceive. ("I have given suck," Lady Macbeth claims, but we have no evidence of a living child who might further the Macbeths' family line.) When Macbeth is told that his queen has ended her torments by taking her own life, the misbegotten usurper king comes to a sudden stinging realization of the futility of everything he has done. The extent of his nihilism is profound. The passage itself transitions from stunned sorrow to explosive rage to a few final syllables of fizzled-out purposelessness. The compression here is remarkable; Macbeth goes through several stages of grief in an instant, but never makes it to acceptance. The first six lines are meditative, thoughtful, even if Macbeth must stagger through them; what follows is shot-through with a bitterness of particular intensity:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The alliteration of "dusty death" has a grinding effect, especially given the way the phrase falls with the meter. It does not encourage the kind of bouncing along that alliteration often does but rather effects a slowing down to accomodate the two stressed d's. The tone of the passage turns fully upon the word "death." The full stop that follows it further emphasizes the sense of death's finality, and with the break in iambs the rhythm goes completely askew. "Out, out"--the only sensible reading I can hear is to stress both iterations of "out." The repetition creates a sense of mounting frustration as the news of Lady Macbeth's death works its way through Macbeth's psyche, and the prolonged initial vowels of both "outs" subject themselves readily to a tortured reading. There is no allowance for subtlety in these two words or in what remains, not until the final two words of the speech. The actor Nicholos Cage is something of a one-trick pony, but the one trick he knows well is a comsuming, punching-the-wall kind of rage, and I often think of him when I read from "Out, out" to "sound and fury."

By the time he gets to "Signifying nothing," though, Macbeth has expended all of his fury. The stresses are reversed here, the iambs that had begun to recover with "Life's but a walking shadow ..." suddenly finding themselves inverted. The last syllable of "nothing" can only trail off weakly.

This final word is followed by the acknowledgement of a messenger, who presumably stands mute as Macbeth finishes his blow-out speech. Recovering, Macbeth, who is gasping and resigned, prompts him: "Thou comest to use thy tongue; thy story quickly." The messenger is perplexed as well because he has no words to do justice to his message, which is that Birnam Wood itself appears to be marching on the castle. The messenger, attempting to speak the impossible, is nothing less than "a idiot" telling his tale, and it's impossible to imagine that Shakespeare didn't have this in mind when he wrote the speechless messenger's part. The sense of futility is thus further amplified.

In any case, the audience has got to know the magnitude of Macbeth's reaction to the news of his wife's death. Suddenly, nothing in life can hold meaning to Macbeth anymore. In the very moment before he receives the fatal news, Macbeth muses on the fact that he has grown immune to horrors. The speech that follows the announcement proves that he still has emotion within him to entertain one more horror before his own candle goes out. Not long after this speech, Macbeth compares himself to a bear tied to the stake, a reference to the bloodsport of bearbaiting. (In fact, King James was himself a fan of bearbaiting and had it performed in Whitehall. It is worth considering that bearbaiting might have been part of the evening's entertainment when the King's Men first presented the play to their liege in his palace.) At this point, Macbeth has only his animal instinct for survival, nothing else. Unlike the bear, who was presumably the usual victor in the sport that so abused him, Macbeth does not emerge with life intact.

To understand the profound nihilism of Macbeth's speech, we also must note the love that Macbeth bears for Lady Macbeth, which is somewhat easy to forget because we have not seen interaction between the two for many scenes. Throughout the play, the two vacillate between goading each other and comforting each other, but there is never any doubt that they need each other. The balance of responsibility for the evil they bring about swings from one to the other until it rests most heavily on Macbeth himself, and not on the lady who urged him forward so stridently. Shakespeare is sure, though, to show us what we need to see in an earlier scene that shows the Macbeths alone, trying to no avail to comfort each other. "Dearest chuck," Macbeth calls his wife, using the kind of term of endearment that we are embarrassed to use in public and reserve only for the privacy of the home. They urge the balm of sleep on each other but can find no rest. The Macbeths are like love-struck junkies who, strung out and inexorably tracking out their own demise, recall that they started using together, that it was a toxic act of their own love that brought them to this point. Macbeth finds in Act V that he had lived so long apart from that love that he had nearly forgotten it, and it only comes back to sting him at the end.

The pervasive presence of the witches in the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival performance enforces the notion of demonic possession that overtakes the Macbeths. The actors playing the witches are doubled or even trebled in the play, also popping up (still in their sleek, goth-punk witch costumes) throughout the play whenever extras are called for and skulking about as themselves -- spying on the action -- even when there is no stage direction indicating their presence. In effect, the witches rarely leave the stage, and the only change in their appearance, regardless of which character the actor might be portraying at the time, is the addition or subtraction of the red skull-face masks that indicate their identities as withces. When Lady Macbeth invokes the spirits "that tend on mortal thoughts," the witches writhe about her (unseen by her) as though to enter into her and take control of her--which they clearly do, but only with her permission. There is substantial evidence that Shakespeare deliberately suggests demonic possession in the play. Such stuff was a favorite interest of his patron, King James, who authored a book (Demonology) devoted to the subject. The chronic inability to find restful sleep was, according to King James, a sign of possession. When the witches themselves refer to Macbeth as "wicked" (a stunning instance of pot-kettle-black), the roots of the word provide an indication of Shakespeare's intent: "wicked" in its original meaning was seemingly a participial gerund referring to someone who had been made witch-like by the giving over of the soul to demons. We come to understand that, though the Macbeths are never for an instant absolved of their utter accountability for the foul deeds they have perpetrated, they are also the victims of nefarious supernatural forces. They allow their own demonic possession, but they get more than they could ever have anticipated in the moral demands it places upon them. This may not directly encourage sympathy for the Macbeths, but it certainly complicates our judgment of them.

It is a testament to Shakespeare's art that he can evoke any sympathy for his misbegotten king and queen in this play, and yet he does. For Lady Macbeth, this sympathy is evoked when we see the doctor and Lady Macbeth's waiting gentlewoman--both of them aware of the nature of Lady Macbeth's awful crimes--sorrow over her pitiful condition as she continually reenacts the scene of her guilt in the midst of her restless sleep. For Macbeth, it comes in his deep and eloquent expression of grief for his lost love. Her death has stripped the world of any meaning it once possessed.

Regarding the original point--the difficulty of performing the "tomorrow and tomorrow" speech--it may simply be that the words here bear too much weight to be done right on stage. They are unperformable because they are so fraught with meaning that no one around can do them justice. I've never heard a "to be or not to be" that I liked, either. Shakespeare wrote for the stage, but here are two instances in which the words might simply have transcended the medium for which they were composed.

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.