Breaking Up is Hard to Do in the Wide Sargasso Sea

I first read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in an upper level college course about colonialism in 1993.  I was aware, of course, that the novel told the story of Rochester’s madwoman-in-the-attic wife.  I had read Jane Eyre only three years earlier, and my Norton edition was filled with hastily written marginalia declaring Rochester to be a smug, self-aggrandizing megalomaniac, so I was excited to see him revealed as some kind of monster and victimizer.    I was in fact so caught up with the novel’s connections to the Bronte classic that I did a grave injustice to the book and did not read it for what it really was, its own story.  There is certainly enjoyment in seeing the points where the narratives cross over, but if you come to Wide Sargasso Sea looking for Jane Eyre tie-ins, you will not only be disappointed, but you will lose the opportunity to find a heartbreaking and compelling narrative all its own.

The novel is divided into three parts.  In the first section, Antoinette narrates her time from the 1833 British emancipation act, when she is a small child, to when she is a young adult, being removed from the convent by her stepfather to meet the man he plans for her to wed.  At the time that the slaves in the British colonies were freed by the emancipation act, the British government promised financial compensation to the slaveowners, but that compensation was a long time in coming.  Families like Antoinette’s that relied entirely on slaves found their funds rapidly depleted and their estates increasingly rundown.  Antoinette and her mother lived near poverty, rejected by the wealthier white British families and scorned by the black islanders who struggled with their own poverty.

This state of being between two worlds and belonging to neither defined Antoinette’s existence.  Many times does Antoinette state that she does not know who she is or where she belongs, and Rhys makes use of the recurring theme of looking glasses as a way of showing Antoinette’s crisis of identity.  She occupies a no man’s land at the intersections of white and black, European and Caribbean, colonizer and colonized, wealth and poverty, privilege and disenfranchisement.  Traditional critical discussions of Wide Sargasso Sea have centered on the cultural, racial, and national complexities that make up Antoinette’s identity crisis and their inevitable contributions to her madness.  But the reason the novel has endured over the last 50 years is not because of any of the political quandaries it casts light upon, but because it allows the problems and confusions of poor Antoinette to live and breathe with reality and subtlety.  Antoinette is not some puppet for Rhys.  She is a sympathetic, heartbreakingly tragic figure with a real life dimensionality.  As I found myself marveling at the depth of the characters, I was drawn to Rhys’s treatment of “madness” itself.

In my memory of my first reading, I would have told you that Rochester (who interestingly remains unnamed in the novel) drove Antoinette to madness with his cold cruelty.  But of course Antoinette is already in a fragile state before Rochester takes her away for their honeymoon.  Having watched her mother’s passionate outbursts at her own powerlessness, having been rejected by her mother when she needed her comforting touch, having been taunted and physically assaulted by other children, Antoinette sought nothing more in this world than safety.  When she lay in bed as a child, she would say to herself, “I am safe.”  When her father died and she and her mother slid into poverty, Antoinette notes that “feeling safe in bed . . . belonged to the past.”  When her mother begins to fall apart, Antoinette observes this in terms of safety: “Once I would have gone back quietly to watch her asleep on the blue sofa—once I made excuses to be near her when she brushed her hair, a soft black cloak to cover me, hide me, keep me safe.”  The world is hostile and a threat to Antoinette’s personhood and sanity.  (As a side note, I find it not coincidental that Wide Sargasso Sea and The Painted Bird were written and published around the same time since they are both haunted by horrible cruelty.)

In her relationship with Rochester, she dares to reach for more than mere safety.  The shy and self-protecting girl of the first section is replaced by a charming, happy young bride in the second section, narrated by Rochester.  She is talkative.  She is earnest.  She seems genuinely delighted with her new husband as she loves him and believes he loves her.  But all that improvement comes to a crashing halt when Rochester’s dislike of Antoinette and the Dominican island lead him to greater acts of cruelty, culminating in his sleeping with the servant Amelie within earshot of Antoinette.  In the aftermath of this betrayal, Rochester has a long conversation with Christophine, Antoinette’s childhood nanny, and the only person who seems to care about Antoinette’s well being.  This conversation, or rather, confrontation, is for me the heart of the novel.

In this confrontation, Christophine accuses Rochester of wanting to “break [Antoinette] up”: 

you make love to her till she drunk with it, no rum could make her drunk like that, till she can’t do without it. It’s she can’t see the sun any more.  Only you she see.  But all you want is to break her up.

Christophine repeats the phrase “break her up” to describe Antoinette’s emotional and mental meltdown.  She never uses the words “crazy” or “mad.”  It is Rochester who first uses the word “mad” when he asks Christophine, “And that her mother was mad.  Another lie?”  Christophine responds:

They drive her to it.  When she lose her son she lose herself for a while and they shut her away.  They tell her she is mad, they act like she is mad.  Question, question.  But no kind word, no friends, and her husban’ he go off, he leave her.  They won’t let me see her.  I try, but no.  They won’t let Antoinette see her.  In the end—mad I don’t know—she give up, she care for nothing.  That man who is in charge of her he take her whenever he want and his woman talk.  That man, and others.  They they have her.  Ah there is no God.

For Christophine, all that happened to Annette was that “she los[t] herself for a while.”  But instead surrounding her with kind words, friends, a loving husband, they diagnose her as “mad” and treat her as such.  That declaration of “madness” is Annette’s doom, for with it, she is discarded by her husband and family and left in the “care” of strangers who have no interest in helping, only in taking advantage of a powerless and hurt woman.  And when Rochester won’t be swayed by Christophine’s words to love Antoinette and nurture her, Christophine declares: “You think me a fool?  You want her money but you don’t want her.  It is in your mind to pretend she is mad.  I know it.  The doctors say what you tell them to say.  That man Richard he say what you want him to say—glad and willing too, I know.  She will be like her mother.”

When someone is broken up, she is a sympathetic creature to be healed and made well again.  When someone is “mad,” she is something to be feared and locked away.  “Madness” is a tool for blameless dismissal of another human being.  As if to drive the Christophine’s point home, once Rochester forces Christophine to leave, he thinks:  “She’s as mad as the others.”  Boom.  With the one word, Rochester rids himself of needing the consider anything said to him.

This distinction between madness and broken up ties in neatly with the novel’s larger concerns about race, culture, and colonization, since it is the European men who give the diagnosis of madness like an obeah curse, bringing a dramatic end to fates of Antoinette and her mother.  In the section that follow’s Rochester’s talk with Christophine, Rochester seems as broken up as Antoinette ever was, employing broken syntax and passionate outbursts.  But this momentary outburst, not even three pages in my edition, does not result in “madness” as Rochester regains his composure and determination in the next section.  Both Antoinette and Rochester suffer the same ailments, but one is bundled off to an attic in England while the other gets to establish himself as a Byronic hero.

Moving Beyond Mere Plot in The Painted Bird

I occasionally chart my progress though this reading list on Facebook and invite others to join me in reading the next book.  Once I finished Herzog, I made a blanket invitation to read The Painted Bird with me.  I noted that I had no idea what the book was about but that it was less than 250 pages in the version I had, so come play!  There were no takers, but then there never are, so that’s not especially noteworthy.  The thing that interested me was one of my friends’ responses: “Hooboy,” he wrote.  I asked  if he had read the book and what his comment meant.  He responded, “ Yea. I have not read the Painted Bird, but it's often at the top of ‘I want to be really really depressed, what should I read?’ threads.”  His comment made me both laugh and think.

The last time I had heard someone tell me that he didn’t want to read a book because he didn’t want to be depressed was in reference to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.  If someone summarized just the plot of Grapes of Wrath, I don’t think I’d want to read it either.  Similarly, if before reading The Painted Bird, I knew that the story followed a child as he aged from 6 to 12 in the backwoods villages of a non-specific Eastern European country betting beaten, abused and molested while watching other get beaten, abused, and molested until the war ends and he is reunited with his parents only to discover that everyone is broken from the brutality of the war and no connection with anyone else can be made—if I knew that, I would not have dived energetically into the book.

But of course a novel is so much more than the outline of its plot.  In fact, with the exception of plot-twist-filled mystery stories, the plot is usually the least interesting part of any novel.  If you were to give a two page plot summary to 100 writers and asked them to tell that story, you would get 100 entirely different novels.  A novel is created by language, by characters and characterizations, by descriptions and the lack of descriptions.  It’s tone and perspective, sentence structure and attitude.  A book is never “about” its plot, and to dismiss a book because of its plot is to deprive yourself of some incredible reading, especially if you are talking about Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird.

The story is riveting from the outset.  Kosinski creates such a complete and absorbing world, that I wanted more and more, no matter how horrifying the events were to become.  And even when they were at their worst, the neutral tone and simple structure of the sentences and observations, presented through the eyes of a child who is no longer innocent but still far from experienced, all work together to create a visceral and intellectual punch that provides an impact without dragging me emotionally down.  There is, in short, nothing sentimental to gum up the works and bring the story down to an emotional morass.

The Painted Bird is a brilliant way to approach the horrors of World War II.  The war roils all around the action and is a constant presence even though we never witness a single battle.  The genocidal policies of the Nazis are given a grand context of hatred and meanness that is at the heart of the human condition, as Kosinski sees it.  The peasants of the villages that the narrator wanders between are no romanticized or idyllic figures.  The hatred of Jews, Gypsies, and other dark-haired peoples pre-existed Hitler’s rise, and the “science” of the Nazis that discussed brain sizes and attempted to prove the sub-human status of a large portion of the human race are predated by the superstitions of the villagers that can believe the narrator to be a vampire, that the very color of his eyes are proof that he can cast curses.

In a lot of ways, The Painted Bird is a re-telling of The Odyssey.  Odysseus has become a child wandering through the world looking for his home, suffering greater trials than the Greek hero could imagine.  The mist of mythology is replaced by figures of earth and clay.  When the boy finally reaches home, he’s not sure that he belongs even there, as if Odysseus, upon reaching Penelope, decides he is too changed to live the life he once did.  Like all the children in the orphanage, the narrator is scarred and broken.  The children are identified by their unique brand of destruction and brutality, carrying names like Tank, Flamethrower, Torpedo, and Sniper.  It’s an interesting indictment of war.  The war is certainly responsible for tearing all these families apart, for crushing these children and ruining their spirits, but the narrator’s adventures show that the brutality of the world exists even before war comes to the land, and it exists completely separate from the war.  War does not break humans; broken humans make war.

The question at the heart of the novel is this:  why do some people have the power to make others suffer and why are others made to suffer?  The narrator’s main quest is survival, and to survive he wants to discover the secret of how he can move from a sufferer to the other side of the equation.  He turns to Christian prayers, and when he feels that fails, he embraces the powers of the Evil Ones.  They too fail him, and he is left with Mitka’s philosophy of revenge: if you are made to suffer, make he who hurt you hurt equally.  It is this philosophy that leads The Silent One to kill hundreds in an engineered train catastrophe in order to kill one man who hurt and embarrassed the narrator.  The Silent One created his own holocaust and still failed to exact revenge on the one person he wanted to die.  Clearly, this is no way to conduct our human affairs. 

In recalling The Odyssey or one of the Brothers Grimm twisted tales, the narrative sometimes feels like a piece of folklore, and like folklore, it holds the seeds of truth about human motivations and nastiness.  No matter how much you might love your fellow man, you cannot deny the accuracy of the ugliness in this portrayal.  There is a ton to think about here.  There are beautiful and disturbing passages to roll over in your mind.  There is a lot to be upset about, a lot to want to change.  But there is nothing to keep you from reading it.

Hanging with Herzog

In my post about A House for Mr. Biswas, I noted that V.S. Naipaul created one of the richest characters that I had so far encountered.   But having now read Saul Bellow’s Herzog, I wonder if there weren’t something in the air in the early ‘60s that called for in-depth and epic concentration on a single mind and a single life.  Both Mr. Biswas and Moses Herzog are richly complex and conflicted characters, but whereas we encounter Mr. Biswas from the outside, watching his struggles, successes, and failures, we are brought into the very thoughts and questionably maddened mind of Herzog.  

Moses E. Herzog is a fascinating character!  Philip Roth, in his introductory essay to the Penguin edition of Herzog, beautifully describes him as having

an innocence as phenomenal as his sophistications,  [and being] intense yet passive, reflective yet impulsive, sane yet insane, emotional, complicated, an expert on pain vibrant with feeling and yet disarmingly simple, a clown in his vengeance and rage, a fool in whom hatred breeds comedy, a sage knowing scholar in a treacherous world, yet still adrift in the great pool of childhood love, trust, and excitement in things (and hopelessly attached to this condition), an aging lover of enormous vanity and narcissism with a lovingly harsh attitude toward himself, whirling in a wash cycle of a rather generous self-awareness.

All those contradictions coexist in Herzog, and Bellow allows us to feel them all first hand by employing a delicate mix of the first and third person narration.  Technically, the novel is written in the third person, but the narrator never veers from Herzog’s consciousness, and in fact he stays so close that the narration slips easily into the first person accounts and thoughts of our subject.  This movement between objectivity and subjectivity allows us direct access to the active tide of Herzog’s mind while giving us a firm reality to simultaneously hold on to.  We are in Herzog and above Herzog, within him and without him, a part of him and separate from him—and it is all a total joy to experience.  I can’t think of any fictitious mind that I would rather be submerged in.

What makes Herzog’s struggle so interesting is that he is an unanchored intellectual whose life has been falling apart but who seems okay with the disintegration:  “Considering his entire life, he realized that he had mismanaged everything—everything.  His life was, as the phrase goes, ruined.  But since it had not been much to begin with, there was not much to grieve about.”  How can you not love a character like that?

The scope of the novel follows Herzog for about a week of his life in the depth of his mental breakdown.  Some months before we find him, Herzog has taken to writing letters (both on paper and in his mind): “[H]e wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.”  These letters intrude on the narrative with little prompting and even less fanfare, popping up and disappearing often without warning.  The reason for writing these letters, we are told early in the novel, is that  “Herzog had been overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends.”  A third of the way into the novel, Herzog is talking to his friend Lucas Asphalter about death, suffering, civilization, and reality, and he reframes why it is that he’s been writing letters:

The new attitude which makes life a trifle not worth anyone’s anguish threatens the heart of civilization.  But it isn’t a question of dread, or any such words at all . . . .  Still, what can thoughtful people and humanists do but struggle toward suitable words?  Take me, for instance.  I’ve been writing letters helter-skelter in all directions.  More words.  I go after reality with language.  . . . I must be trying to keep tight the tensions without which human beings can no longer be called human.  If they don’t suffer, they’ve gotten away from me.  And I’ve filled the world with letters to prevent their escape.  I want them in human form, and so I conjure up a whole environment and catch them in the middle.

These letters are a way to make sense of himself, his life, and the “reality” around him.  Herzog’s intellectual brain needs to take in everything and join it all together somehow, just has he has done in his scholarly work.  Throughout the novel, Herzog demonstrates an incredible knowledge of scientific, literary, and philosophical facts, and his intellect runs tirelessly over them.

In the end, what Herzog seems to be struggling for is a “grand synthesis.”  Near the end of the novel itself, Herzog is writing a letter to a Russian author whose work he admires, and he write, “’Synthesize or perish!’  Is that the new law?”  And indeed, that seems to be the pitch of his fevered mind.  At this stage in the novel, he is dubious of his abilities to achieve this synthesis: “Anyway the intellectual has been a Separatist.  And what kind of synthesis is a Separatist likely to come up with?”  But before this point, and throughout the novel, Herzog (and Bellow) play with all kinds of antitheses that seem to be in need of some healing syntheses:  there are concerns about what is the domain of man and what is the domain of woman, the Romanticists are pitted against the Realists, Herzog’s European feelings are held up in opposition to his brother’s American behavior, and Herzog’s emotional storm beats against the stoicism of those around him.  These are but a few of the recurring antithetical themes that play like individual melodies in search of a uniting symphony.  Herzog’s efforts, like everything else in his life, prove to be a failure, but like all the failures in his life, this one is hardly catastrophic.  In fact, it is sweet and beautiful and a gift to us readers.  He may not find the answer to it all, but he does find an inner peace, a moment when he had “no messages for anyone.  Nothing.  Not a single word.”

I had plans to discuss each one of the sets of antitheses above, but I see now that this post would be ridiculously long if I were to go on.  I will leave those essays for another day and most likely another person. 

This is my second Saul Bellow book, and while The Adventures of Augie March left me disappointed, Herzog has satisfied me greatly, filling my intellect, my sympathy, my humanism, and my love of a well turned sentence.  Herzog is by no means a quick read, but some things should force you to slow down and engage your mind and spirit.  This book is well worth the time.