As I've noted many times in these entries, I know very little about most of the books I am reading here. And I am perpetually amazed at my inability to see where any of these novels end up. See my last entry about Greene's The Heart of the Matter for a perfect example of an unexpected turn. I'd like to think that my failure to predict has nothing to do with my being an inattentive or weak reader. Instead, I think that it is because I don't know what the novel is about until the ending twists my neck along with the plot.
It will not surprise you to learn, then, that Paul Bowles throws me for yet another loop with his novel The Sheltering Sky.
At the start of the novel, Bowles sets up the characters, their competing desires, and the tensions that will fuel their interactions. Port and Kit are independently wealthy New York intellectuals who are traveling in Northern Africa to see some part of the world untouched by the war. The couple is estranged sexually, though they still have many affections for each other and appear to be best friends. Port is searching for something genuinely not European or American, something original, something primal. Kit, while very like Port, would much rather be in Italy or France. Neither likes the heat, the people, or the Europeanized city that they begin in, but Port wants to move deeper into the Sahara desert, fascinated by its raw wildness. Port wants a solitary experience, but he wants Kit to share it with. Kit is a believer in omens and sign and does not care to glimpse into the power beyond them. Even the recounting of dreams shakes Kit to her foundation as she fear what's at the route of them. In one of the happier moments, Port and Kit rent bicycles and go riding out to the dunes, where they park and watch the sunset. For Kit, "Sunset is such a sad hour." But for Port, "It was such places as this, such moments that he loved above all else in life. . . . And although he was aware that the very silences and emptinesses that touched his soul terrified her, he could not bear to be reminded of that." He hoped she "would be touched in the same way as he by solitude and the proximity to infinite things," but of course, they merely terrified her. But for this critical difference, the two seem very well suited to each other, and both overthink their actions and reactions and fail again and again to make the connection they want.
Complicating matters is their traveling companion, Tunner, a good looking man several years younger than they who was captivated by the couple and gladly followed them to Africa. He is a perfect foil for Port. Tunner appears to be shallow with a surface of kindness and good-spiritedness that drives Kit crazy. The other Eurpean characters are Mr. Lyle and the woman he claims is his mother.
It is among these characters and their interaction that the stage is set, and foolishly I thought the stage was set for interpersonal drama. We have a love triangle (Tunner has a crush on Kit, and the two have a shared night in a train car while Port has traveled ahead with the Lyles). We have growing tension as the group travels deeper inland away from civilization that they understand and amenities they are used to. Mr. Lyle turns out to be a thief and makes off with Port's passport, and when Port takes Kit further inland without his passport to avoid meeting Tunner who is returning with his passport, it seems that they couple is bound for trouble. Will the couple work things out? Will the love triangle resolve or explode? Will the missing passport and the inability to prove his identity land Port in trouble with the authorities? On that final bus ride into the Sahara, port becomes ill, and we wonder will the lack of hospital care force Kit and him into a precarious position?
And just as everything is set up, as all the questions are floating before the reader, the plot crumbles in our hands. Port dies after an extended period of delirium. And after hiding the fact of Port's death, Kit steals off into the desert in the middle of the night. The entire last portion of the novel follows Kit as she encounters strange Arab merchants who take her for a lover and then a wife, disguising her as a boy. Then after she escapes, she encounters another Arab whom she takes for a lover before he steals all her Francs.
What?!
I did not see that coming. And it's at that moment, that I always need to re-approach the first two-thirds, the setting up of the story. Either the writer panicked in the middle of his book and went running off in a blind direction, or the points he built up earlier were not about what I thought they were about. And sure enough, it becomes apparent that Ports infidelities with Marhnia and his obsession with the blind dancer are not about his infidelities any more than Kit's is. The girls are that true experience with another world that Port is questing for. Meanwhile Bowles is letting us know what Kit is like faced with the limits of her knowledge. Tunner is there not to set up a love triangle, but to propel Port into the desert where he can die alone in a tete-a-tete with the nothingness of being. That moment is what the novel builds too. In fact, we are given hints that this is where we are going from the very beginning.
In the first chapter, Port wakes from a nap, and Bowles describes the moving in and out of nothingness, into and out of the room around him, and Port's calm. This scene is echoed in Port's dying scene in which he enters and leaves the room, balancing between something and nothing. Losing Port, Kit must face the ugliness of existence and the loss of her only love. Her experience is further tainted by her guilt and anger, and the result is something of a psychotic break. Her fear of the nothingness of death is greater than her fear of life and she wanders out into the world no longer afraid wanting to forget all her experiences and knowledge.
Now what happens to her after that is either reality or purely fantasy. It is gripping and bizarre, but my brain kept revolting against what it was being fed. I do love the ending however, where Kit re-encounters "civilization" a broken woman who belongs neither among the living or the dead.
The moral of the story (my story, that is) is that we often mistake our misreading of a book for the mis-writing of the tale. We need to be willing to assume that the writer told the exact tale that he or she wanted to tell, and our anger and frustration that it did not go where we thought it would go (and wanted it to go) is not to be blamed on the book itself. Part of our job as reader is to wrestle with the text and pull out the meaning that's there.
If you can experience The Sheltering Sky for what it is and not get caught up in what it is not, you are in for a real treat.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Sunday, June 3, 2012
The Matter at the Heart of the Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter is all about Scobie, the high-ranking police official of an unnamed African community in the British Empire. How the reader responds to Scobie and his philosophies is how the reader responds to the novel as a whole. I found myself in a complicated position when thinking about Scobie because always at the back of my mind I was trying to divine what Greene himself thought about Scobie.
As readers, we almost always look for the author's attitude toward his or her subject, and we normally don't have to look that far. We know pretty early on that Orwell is not a fan of Big Brother. We know that Isherwood is not a fan of the Nazis and that he is deeply in love with all his characters. We know how the author's feel because they make it so easy to like some characters and so difficult to like others.
Greene, on the other hand, is incredibly subtle with his character. Other characters pass judgment on Scobie, but they are not reliable evaluators of the man. Wilson, for instance, hates Scobie for a number of reasons, and his declaration that Scobie does not love Louise or anyone but himself are hardly worth anything. Louise loves Scobie, and she also feels that the only person Scobie loves is Scobie. Helen feels the same at times, but Louise and Helen are his lovers, and it is unclear how far they see into Scobie's character. So it is left to us to determine what kind of man is Scobie.
Perhaps he is a good man who falls into a web of lies and deceit that eventually undo him both morally and physically. Yes and no. This is definitely the story of Scobie's decline, but to see the crux of the matter as the political intrigue that pretends to be at the heart of it all is to miss the larger point. I initially thought it was just such a book, one about the political world around Scobie that conspires and pressures him into an ever-tightening circle. The book has all the trappings, and Greene lays them out brilliantly. Scobie is an upstanding man. His compassion for a father and fellow Catholic leads him to do his first immoral thing, burn inconsequential letters instead of handing them over to the censors. His desire to give his wife what she desperately wants leads him to take out a loan from a crooked Syrian, putting himself in Yusef's debt. At the same time, Wilson is in town as a spy, who shortly has it in for Scobie because Wilson falls in love with Scobie's wife and embarrasses himself by letting Scobie witness his tears. While Louis is gone, Scobie takes on a lover, and in an effort to please her, he writes a compromising letter that is intercepted by Yusef's men and used to blackmail Scobie into breaking the law by smuggling diamonds for Yusef. The Louise returns unexpectedly and Scobie cannot break it off with Helen or his wife and feels he must keep his deception up. As everything gets tighter, Scobie goes to the one man who knows all his secrets, and tells Yusef his worries. When Ali, Scobie's servant and companion is killed, Scobie has no one to turn to.
That's great writing! Right!? That's a crazy good web of problems for poor Scobie to stumble into one turn of the screw at a time! I'd swear this book was a kind of thriller, and I enjoyed myself immensely through the first two-thirds of the book as thing ratcheted up for our protagonist. But then, after Ali dies, the screws stop turning altogether. No one breathes down Scobie's neck. Yusef disappears. Wilson quits hounding him. The outside concerns vanish, and we are left with only the internal worries and pressures of Scobie and his Catholic beliefs. The build up was false and was never about what it seemed to be about. We are like Wilson, who confronts Scobie only to be told, "The things you find out are so unimportant." Because what we quickly learn is that the mad descent of Scobie's morality, all those pressures acting upon him, were there primarily to put his mortal soul in danger, not his personage. The final third of the novel is about the safety of his soul, not his skin.
Now as readers we are charged with the task of evaluating Scobie's logic and attitudes about God and salvation. Up to the final third, I had not given Scobie's personality much thought. He was my protagonist. He was a decent guy. He seemed pretty level headed. He thought and felt deeply, even if we didn't agree on everything. But once I was done with the novel, and I was left trying to figure out the importance of what finally happened, I had to go back and study him closely--I had to study him closely to find out if Greene left me any clues.
In the end, I don't know. And to be blunt, I don't know because I am not Catholic or even religious. Clearly Greene wanted this to be thought of and discussed even among Catholics (especially among Catholics?). But as with other Catholic novels on this list (and there seems to be a lot of them--Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Power and the Glory, Brideshead Revisted), I cannot trust my own instincts to interpret the novel because my assumptions and beliefs can run perpendicular to those of the authors. Nevertheless, we are allowed and invited to make analysis (and even judgments) no matter our religion, so I will forge ahead.
After re-approaching Scobie at the close of the novel, I found that I glossed over his attitudes toward his fellow human beings. At first I loved his obsession with pity, because it was such a unique concern: "He had no sense of responsibility towards the beautiful and the graceful and the intelligent. They could find their own way. It was the face for which nobody would go out of his way, the face that would never catch the covert look, the face which would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference that demanded his allegiance. The word 'pity' is used as loosely as the word 'love': the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience." And I loved what seemed like a generosity of spirit: "Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst." I dismissed the notion expressed by Wilson and Louise and Helen that he loved no one but himself. But as Louise expressed that very sentiment to Father Rank in the final pages of the novel, the Father responds, "And you may be in the right of it there too." Did Scobie love anyone else, or was he only able to feel pity and responsibility? And in spite of his glorification of pity, pity is a lopsided emotion, one that places the pitier in a position of superiority over the pitied. Scobie's detachment seemed to me more and more pathological. His affair with Helen, which was odd even on the first read through, just seemed odder as he never had a moment of pleasure with her. He went from non-committed to responsible and full of pity. He put himself in a position of power over his wives when he says that he "formed" them in his school, that he turned them into miserable creatures. The more I looked at Scobie, the more he seemed to have a God-complex, a conviction that he was the only one who saw things as they were. He even compares his suicide to Jesus's crucifixion.
Perhaps Greene intended this re-interpretation of Scobie, or perhaps he meant his reader to be suspicious of Scobie from the start. Or perhaps, he felt that Scobie was in the right, that he saw things accurately. What Greene wanted, we can never know, nor does it really matter in the end, because a work of literature is far more than intention. In it's consumption, the novel fuses with our DNA and is rewritten in our brains and comes out as a new thing, a synthesis of the original words and our interpretations, perceptions, and feelings.
As readers, we almost always look for the author's attitude toward his or her subject, and we normally don't have to look that far. We know pretty early on that Orwell is not a fan of Big Brother. We know that Isherwood is not a fan of the Nazis and that he is deeply in love with all his characters. We know how the author's feel because they make it so easy to like some characters and so difficult to like others.
Greene, on the other hand, is incredibly subtle with his character. Other characters pass judgment on Scobie, but they are not reliable evaluators of the man. Wilson, for instance, hates Scobie for a number of reasons, and his declaration that Scobie does not love Louise or anyone but himself are hardly worth anything. Louise loves Scobie, and she also feels that the only person Scobie loves is Scobie. Helen feels the same at times, but Louise and Helen are his lovers, and it is unclear how far they see into Scobie's character. So it is left to us to determine what kind of man is Scobie.
Perhaps he is a good man who falls into a web of lies and deceit that eventually undo him both morally and physically. Yes and no. This is definitely the story of Scobie's decline, but to see the crux of the matter as the political intrigue that pretends to be at the heart of it all is to miss the larger point. I initially thought it was just such a book, one about the political world around Scobie that conspires and pressures him into an ever-tightening circle. The book has all the trappings, and Greene lays them out brilliantly. Scobie is an upstanding man. His compassion for a father and fellow Catholic leads him to do his first immoral thing, burn inconsequential letters instead of handing them over to the censors. His desire to give his wife what she desperately wants leads him to take out a loan from a crooked Syrian, putting himself in Yusef's debt. At the same time, Wilson is in town as a spy, who shortly has it in for Scobie because Wilson falls in love with Scobie's wife and embarrasses himself by letting Scobie witness his tears. While Louis is gone, Scobie takes on a lover, and in an effort to please her, he writes a compromising letter that is intercepted by Yusef's men and used to blackmail Scobie into breaking the law by smuggling diamonds for Yusef. The Louise returns unexpectedly and Scobie cannot break it off with Helen or his wife and feels he must keep his deception up. As everything gets tighter, Scobie goes to the one man who knows all his secrets, and tells Yusef his worries. When Ali, Scobie's servant and companion is killed, Scobie has no one to turn to.
That's great writing! Right!? That's a crazy good web of problems for poor Scobie to stumble into one turn of the screw at a time! I'd swear this book was a kind of thriller, and I enjoyed myself immensely through the first two-thirds of the book as thing ratcheted up for our protagonist. But then, after Ali dies, the screws stop turning altogether. No one breathes down Scobie's neck. Yusef disappears. Wilson quits hounding him. The outside concerns vanish, and we are left with only the internal worries and pressures of Scobie and his Catholic beliefs. The build up was false and was never about what it seemed to be about. We are like Wilson, who confronts Scobie only to be told, "The things you find out are so unimportant." Because what we quickly learn is that the mad descent of Scobie's morality, all those pressures acting upon him, were there primarily to put his mortal soul in danger, not his personage. The final third of the novel is about the safety of his soul, not his skin.
Now as readers we are charged with the task of evaluating Scobie's logic and attitudes about God and salvation. Up to the final third, I had not given Scobie's personality much thought. He was my protagonist. He was a decent guy. He seemed pretty level headed. He thought and felt deeply, even if we didn't agree on everything. But once I was done with the novel, and I was left trying to figure out the importance of what finally happened, I had to go back and study him closely--I had to study him closely to find out if Greene left me any clues.
In the end, I don't know. And to be blunt, I don't know because I am not Catholic or even religious. Clearly Greene wanted this to be thought of and discussed even among Catholics (especially among Catholics?). But as with other Catholic novels on this list (and there seems to be a lot of them--Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Power and the Glory, Brideshead Revisted), I cannot trust my own instincts to interpret the novel because my assumptions and beliefs can run perpendicular to those of the authors. Nevertheless, we are allowed and invited to make analysis (and even judgments) no matter our religion, so I will forge ahead.
After re-approaching Scobie at the close of the novel, I found that I glossed over his attitudes toward his fellow human beings. At first I loved his obsession with pity, because it was such a unique concern: "He had no sense of responsibility towards the beautiful and the graceful and the intelligent. They could find their own way. It was the face for which nobody would go out of his way, the face that would never catch the covert look, the face which would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference that demanded his allegiance. The word 'pity' is used as loosely as the word 'love': the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience." And I loved what seemed like a generosity of spirit: "Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst." I dismissed the notion expressed by Wilson and Louise and Helen that he loved no one but himself. But as Louise expressed that very sentiment to Father Rank in the final pages of the novel, the Father responds, "And you may be in the right of it there too." Did Scobie love anyone else, or was he only able to feel pity and responsibility? And in spite of his glorification of pity, pity is a lopsided emotion, one that places the pitier in a position of superiority over the pitied. Scobie's detachment seemed to me more and more pathological. His affair with Helen, which was odd even on the first read through, just seemed odder as he never had a moment of pleasure with her. He went from non-committed to responsible and full of pity. He put himself in a position of power over his wives when he says that he "formed" them in his school, that he turned them into miserable creatures. The more I looked at Scobie, the more he seemed to have a God-complex, a conviction that he was the only one who saw things as they were. He even compares his suicide to Jesus's crucifixion.
Perhaps Greene intended this re-interpretation of Scobie, or perhaps he meant his reader to be suspicious of Scobie from the start. Or perhaps, he felt that Scobie was in the right, that he saw things accurately. What Greene wanted, we can never know, nor does it really matter in the end, because a work of literature is far more than intention. In it's consumption, the novel fuses with our DNA and is rewritten in our brains and comes out as a new thing, a synthesis of the original words and our interpretations, perceptions, and feelings.
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