A Brave New Handful of Dust

I'm getting a little ahead of Ann for the moment, but I'm sure she will catch up in no time. For now, we forge ahead into the unknown, into Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust.

This was another intriguing book, one of those whose final act seems so incongruous with those that preceded it, like A Passage to India. We begin as a comedy of English city society and end in the jungles of Brazil. I felt like I tumbled into the surreal as Tony and Dr. Messinger struck out into the jungle, like Waugh had been reading Heart of Darkness and decided to give that a go for a while. Then I started to wonder, which came first in the creation of the story: the jungle or the city? So I looked it up on Wikipedia and there was a quote by Waugh saying that he had had an experience in which he was far from culture reading to an older gentleman when it occurred to him that the man could keep him hostage if he wanted to. So that is where this book began for him. He worked back from there, he said, to play out further "civilized man's helpless plight among [savages]." Tony is of course our civilized man and Brenda, Beaver, and the lot are the savages. You can probably take it all from there.

The thing that I actually thought of most when I finished this book was how similar it was to Brave New World by Huxley. In both stories we follow a man who shares our sensibilities about the world and how people and society ought to behave while struggling in a world that actively works against him. Brave New World even has that section in it where the protagonist goes to live amongst the savages, which struck me as being similar to the jungle section in Waugh's book. And of course, both protagonists are beaten down in the end. Curiously enough, Brave New World was published in 1932, just before Waugh would have been writing his book. Whether or not there was any influence, it is clear that there is something of a zeitgeist here that both authors are tapping into about the fears of where contemporary society was headed. The Great War was a ways behind them, but more turmoil was brewing and the modern political machinery was churning away.

This is a book that I have enjoyed thinking about after I finished it more than I enjoyed the actual reading of it, although I did find the characterization of John Jr. very funny and greatly enjoyed the fake affair scene with Tony and Milly and her daughter. This is my first exposure to Waugh and I would be delighted to read more.

Some Light (in August) Reading

This blogsite is appropriately titled because I want to begin every post by stating that I am not smart enough to be writing about this book. Light in August is no exception.

Trying to wrap my head around this book is like trying to fit a twin-sized sheet on a queen-sized bed: I can get one corner on, and then a second, but as I stretch to make the third corner fit, one of both of the first two comes flying off. The stories of Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, Joe Christmas, and Gail Hightower could each stand alone in a short story or in a novella, so what is Faulkner doing bringing all these lives under a single cover in a single novel? What unifies all these different tales? What do all these characters have in common?

After much mulling and pondering, I think that Faulkner is saying something about the way we deal with life by withdrawing from it. The thing that got me started in this direction was Reverend Hightower. When he delivers Lena’s baby, his dissatisfaction with Bryon changes, and he wants to thank Byron for pulling him out of his non-existence into the world around him. He has been so busy living in a world of ghosts that he has not interacted with the world around him. From there, I thought about Ms. Burden and her life of isolation on the hill. And then there was Byron himself, who is so afraid of becoming hurt that he avoids human contact, especially with women. When he works late on a Saturday he feels safe, like nothing will come and endanger him there. In this light, Lena’s imperturbability in the face of others opinions begins to look like something other than mere strength. She has checked out, in her own way, living in a fantasy nearly as complete as Hightower’s chasing down Joe Brown/Lucas Burch even after he is untraceable.

So how does Christmas fit into all of this? First, let us look at the way he impacts the world around him. He is a catalyst of sorts that upsets the whole world around him. In the most obvious way, he affects Ms. Burden. Before Christmas, she leads a solitary life, shunned by Jefferson’s white community and shunning them in return. As her relationship with Christmas progresses, she goes through something of a breakdown. At first, she is detached and calm, but then she begins to unravel, going to emotional extremes, and as Christmas observes, she behaves like three different women. Finally, she pushes Christmas in a way she has to know will end badly; she asks him to go to a school for blacks and then learn the law under a black lawyer. As if that weren’t enough, she pulls an ancient revolver on him to force him to act. I wonder if she is practically committing suicide by pushing Christmas as she does. After 40 years of controlling her world tightly, when she lets go and engages, it all falls apart.

Christmas doesn’t have this exact result on everyone else, but he crashes into all of their neatly monitored worlds and breaks them all apart. Byron brings Uncle Doc and his wife to Hightower, and Christmas charges into Hightower’s home where he is murdered. Christmas’s presence forces everyone to interact with each other.

Christmas. In all the novels we have read so far, none of them have dealt with race issues so bluntly. Passage to India dealt with race, but it was all put in the context of nationalism. Here, Christmas believes himself to be of a mixed race simply because other people tell him that he is. This information shapes his whole life. He uses it to start fights and to force others to react to him. He hates himself and those around him, both white and black. When Burden asks him how he is sure, he notes that he has certainly wasted much of his life if he isn’t indeed mixed. What is Faulkner saying about race here? Is Christmas somehow the South, mixed and struggling 70 years after the civil war to come to terms with its mixed heritage? Christmas is the most active of the characters in this novel, even if his actions are destructive and self destructive. What does that mean? Moreover, this novel deals more with the reaction to race than to race itself. This book does not show white and black characters working anything out; instead, it shows how all these people react to the suggestion that there is a black blood somewhere in the gene pool.

So now I have to devolve into a set of questions that I have and would love to hear anyone’s thoughts on. In a novel where we get everyone’s past, even the past of Grimm, who appears in one chapter to shoot Christmas, why is Joe Brown (or should I say Lucas Burch) given no history? We get nothing on him. Peculiar.

What is Faulker saying about authority and America through McEachern and Grimm? Faulkner makes it clear that each sees himself reacting without passion, following immutable laws of behavior. Neither man is set up as a model to emulate, certainly; one acts from religious piety, and one from patriotic vision. Both are cruel and as detached as the other characters in the novel. But acting through passion is just as problematic, as Uncle Doc and the folks who killed the Burden family illustrate. Withdrawing, bad. Following rules blindly, bad. Being blindly passionate, bad. The closest we get to a hero is Christmas and Hightower. That is rough.

How is Christmas’s relationship to his grandfather, Uncle Doc paralleled with Hightower’s relationship to his grandfather? I’ve heard that Christmas, who is 33 in the novel, is likened in some criticism to Christ; how does that idea follow through?

This novel is rich and complex and way beyond my meager intellect, but it sure is a compelling read. What do you have to add?

Bueller? Bueller?