Meursault and so

*Spoiled like a sandwich left out on a summer day in Algiers*

I have taken a brief break in my reading challenge to read two classic works that my son has been assigned this semester.  The first was Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and the second is Camus’s The Stranger.  I hadn’t read The Stranger since I was in high school, and I was interested to see what it was like, my memory never being my strongest feature.

What a fascinating novel to return to!  What I think makes it so interesting is the way in which it struggles with the difficult terrain that lies between a novel and a work of philosophy.  It seems to me that there were two things that Camus wanted to discuss in The Stranger.  The first is the idea that Meursault is condemned to death less for the murder of another human being than for his reaction to his mother’s death.  This plays out in detail twice, once in the first chapter when we go through his entire experience surrounding his mother’s funeral, and then again during the trial when the prosecutor harps on the subject.  Meursault offends everyone’s sense of decorum and proper behavior and is punished primarily for that offense.  The second thing Camus was interested in in telling this story was the contemplation of a condemned man who understood the absurdities of life.  The final chapter is a powerhouse of ideas and a fitting culmination of the story being told.  Among the things discussed in these final pages are “the machinery of justice” that grinds up men who are in turn “forced into a kind of moral collaboration” with it, the notion that the death penalty has been handed down by mere mortals (“it had been decided by men who change their underwear”), and the belief that “there was nothing more important than an execution . . . it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in.”  Meursault already confronted the religious fervor of the magistrate, but he has a much more pointed conversation with the chaplain, as Camus uses Meursault to show an acceptance of life and death without the presence of God and an afterlife.

In these two areas, Camus’s novel does some pretty great things and makes some pretty piercing observations.  The problem is that character in a novel cannot be confined to just the points that you as a writer wish to discuss.  By Camus making Meursault the narrator as well as the main character, we are invited into his head for the entirety of the novel, and we are left with questions about him and his behavior that I think Camus would rather not discuss.  For example, we know that not everyone has a great relationship with his or her parents, and we know that even those who feel a loss sharply will respond in different ways to grief.  I, as I imagine many other readers were as well, was not put off by Meursault’s actions and reactions in the first chapter.  But of course, his apathy about his mother’s death is only part of a larger apathy, one that included not caring about whether he stays in Algiers or moves to Paris, whether he marries Marie or never sees her again, and whether he shot five bullets into another man or not.  As he tells us during the trial, “I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything.”  The prosecutor is certainly blowing things out of proportion when he call Meursault “a monster, a man without morals,” but morality does not in fact appear to be a needle on his compass.  While judging other people’s morality is certainly an absurd thing to do, we are asked by the novel to overlook the fact that someone lies dead with five bullets in his body.  If we are upset by the trial being waged over the burial of Meursault’s mother, we cannot say that an innocent man has been incarcerated.  All of this leads to a weird indictment of society while asking us to side with a capricious murderer.  It is worth noting that the murdered man’s friend and his sister, the woman Raymond beat extensively, were not called on the stand to testify about the dead man’s life.  The victim here is forgotten as much by Camus as by the prosecutor.

Because character is a continuum in a novel, it is hard to resist the urge to analyze Meursault and declare that he has some kind of affective disorder, which is of course a far cry from Camus’s interest.  All the same, Meursault’s bouts of passion during the trial and his jail cell ruminations are shocking when we first encounter them, since before then nothing seemed to move Meursault to have feelings.  After the trial is adjourned, Meursault hears “the familiar sounds of a town I loved.”  It is surprising to hear that he “loves” the town, especially when it was not long ago that he tells his boss he could live in Paris or in Algiers, “it was all the same to me.”  Then of course in the final pages, Meursault grabs the chaplain by the collar when “something inside me snapped.  I started yelling at the top of my lungs.”  Is it that only in facing death does anything genuinely matter to a person?  Or is it that Meursault’s been having deeply felt feelings and desires the whole novel and not coming clean with us?  As he tells his attorney, “I had pretty much lost the habit of analyzing myself.”  This is what I mean by the character getting away from Camus and pointing to much more than the few things that interested him.  In short, in spite of Camus’s best efforts, we are forced to do what the jury is asked to do, and pass judgment on who Meursault is.  How you interpret this character has everything to do with how you respond to the novel and its analysis of the individual’s place in both society and the “gentle indifference of the world.”

That’s my impression at least.  Perhaps I do not give Camus enough credit, and perhaps the struggle over our insistence on understanding Meursault is actually his point.  If it is, he has done a damn fine job of it.  That’s the futility of debating an author’s intention, as I have discussed in these reviews before.

I Loved Beloved

*Spoilers ahead*

When I first read Beloved in 1992, a few years after it came out, it showed me what contemporary fiction could be like at its most beautiful and most meaningful.  I had never read anything so poetic and so gritty at the same time.  Coming back to it now, nearly 25 years later, I find that the book is even more amazing than I remember.  Toni Morrison’s novel is one of the best I have ever read.  There is everything to love about this book; characters, plot, language, scope, dialogue, emotions, meaning—these are all pitch perfect and come together in a way to create a masterpiece of fiction.

Beloved is set in the outskirts of Cincinnati in the 1870s. Sethe is an ex-slave living in a house once occupied by her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, who was bought out of slavery by her son, Sethe’s husband, Halle.  While Sethe had four children, only her youngest, Denver, now 18 years old, lives with her.  Denver’s older brothers ran away from home before they were thirteen, and they haven’t been heard from since.  The third child, a girl whose name we never know, was killed by Sethe’s hand shortly after Denver’s birth when Sethe’s slave master tracked her down and came to reclaim his property.  Sethe attempted to kill her children instead of letting them return to slavery.  She only succeeded in killing the one child, though she and the remaining three children were soaked in the toddler’s blood.  This is the setting for the drama that unfolds when Sethe and Denver receive two new visitors: Paul D, a field slave from Sweet Home, where Sethe was a slave, and a woman calling herself Beloved, and who appears to be the return of the murdered child.

The novel is simultaneously intimate in its setting and epic in its scope.  Most of the novel takes place in 124, the house Sethe occupies.  We occasionally see Sweet Home, and rarely see the streets of Cincinnati and a smattering of other locales.  The thrust of the drama centers on this single family, but through these specifics, Morrison is speaking to the condition all black Americans in the wake of the slavery, both during Reconstruction and, I believe, well into the present.  Everyone we meet in Beloved is deeply scarred by the lives they lived under slavery and continue to live in a world in which white people are an ever-present threat to the autonomy and peaceful existence of black people.  What we see in Beloved, in short, is the way that slavery and the American system of white supremacy has crippled and will continue to cripple black lives.

The continuing criticism of Sethe, for example, is that her “love is too thick” or that she loves too deeply.  To protect themselves from the terror of slavery, the black characters have had to learn to love small, to keep themselves at an emotional distance from anything they love, including their children.  Paul D claims that he no longer has a heart, just a “tobacco tin lodged in his chest” that has been rusted shut to protect him from feeling anything too greatly.  In his love for Sethe and his learning of her actions, that tin is busted open and all of its contents pour out, driving him to solitude and drink until he can put it together.  Baby Suggs has to struggle to learn to live with her new degree of freedom.  When she is thinking about her old masters, she realizes that “ she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like,” or as Sethe observes, “freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that free self was another.”  Baby Suggs knows that “the sadness was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home.”  What finally broke Baby Suggs was the realization that no matter how “free” she was, the white men could still invade her yard at any time and cause the destruction of the things she loved.  The appearance of the four horsemen that led Sethe to her desperate actions in the cold house drove Baby Suggs to her bed to contemplate things that couldn’t hurt anybody, namely the colors blue, yellow, and pink.

Beloved is like a war story in which the characters are trying to adjust to a society after the brutality of war, only what these characters suffered is much greater and much more horrifying than anything witnessed on a battlefield.  Generations are ruined and maimed.  Even Denver who is born in freedom is not spared the ravages of slavery.   And even as Denver ends the novel putting her life together, there is no suggestion that everything will be ironed out in a few generations because as long as there is not equality, the white men will always be able to come into your yard.  Love can never be allowed to be “thick” in those conditions, and a cautious love is always a watered-down love.

Among all the other things that Beloved is, it is also a coming of age story.  In the final section, Denver “inaugurated her life in the world as a woman.”  She becomes a part of the community and learns to soldier on like all the men and women before her.  Merely stepping beyond the limits of the yard:

 Remembering those conversations and her grandmother’s last and final words, Denver stood on the porch in the sun and couldn’t leave it.  Her throat itched; her heart kicked—and then Baby Suggs laughed, clear as anything. ‘You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina?  About your daddy?  You don’t remember nothing about how come I walk the way I do and about your mother’s feet, not to speak of her back?  I never told you all this?  Is that why you can’t walk down the steps?  My Jesus my.’

             But you said there was no defense.

             ‘There ain’t.’

             Then what do I do?

             ‘Know it, and go on out of the yard.  Go on.’

There is triumph of courage and determination.  There is bravery and camaraderie.  There is love and support, and there is the promise of better things down the road, such as the suggestion that Denver might be going to college.  In the face of all the hardships, damages, and unbeatable racism that surrounds them, these characters keep forging ahead with admirable courage.

I want to go on and on.  There needs to be discussions about the white people in the novel (such as the Bodwins, who “hated slavery worse than they hated slaves”).  We need to talk about the act of naming.  We need to talk about why the house is referred to as 124.  We need to talk about the absence of young black men in the novel.  We need to talk about the symbolic importance of milk.  We need to talk about ghosts and the brand of magical realism that Morrison employs.  We need to talk about pride and its complicated place at the juncture of individuals and communities.   We need to talk about the uncommon poetry and insight and weight that Morrison creates from the most common of words.  I want to go on and on, but if you get it already you don’t need my elaboration, and if you don’t, you stopped reading ages ago. 

Beloved is one of the most beautiful, painful, insightful, meaningful, and important books I have had the pleasure to read.  Were we as a nation ever to have the conversations about race that we keep insisting on not having, this book would be a wonderful starting point.

Watchmen

Watchmen hit the stands when I was 14 years old and still reading Iron Man and Daredevil, sticking to classic superhero stories rather than special issues like Watchmen.  I remember my brother being very into the series when it first came out, though by the time the last issue hit the market, he was away at school, so I don’t know his final feelings about the series.  I didn’t pick up Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibson’s creation for the first time until shortly before starting this reading list, when my sister lent me her copy, sometime in 2008 or 2009.  I read it quickly and had mixed feelings about the whole thing.  I found it by turns brilliant and pretentious, insightful and tired.  I remember being especially dissatisfied with the climax of the mystery, the look of the whole puzzle once it had been put together.

The novel, as you would expect with such a dense piece of literature, benefits from a second read.  While there were a few chapters that I still thought were lacking (Chapter VI, for example, in which Rorschach’s past is revealed), I found the narrative on the whole consistently compelling, and I got entirely over the feeling that the storytellers were being pretentious.

The things that struck me are the things that would strike any attentive reader.  Gibbons rewards the reader with so many little details within the frame--from newspaper headlines, to graffiti, to background action--that it becomes a pleasure to linger on each frame and see what treasures are hidden within.  In this same vein, the geography of the main street corner featured in the story, where the Gunga Diner, the newsstand, The Utopia theater, and the Promethean cab company are located, is beautifully consistent in ways that slipped by me on the first read.  Every garbage can and architectural line are attended to, and it becomes clear to the reader only over time that scenes are taking place in the same vicinity.  The third gift Gibbons and Moore give to their readers is the clever transition, in which the positioning of characters in one frame matches the positioning of entirely different characters in another frame.  These visual connections of two different situations and groups of actors seem to me thematically linked to the story told in addition to being simply neat. 

Watchmen cares about the interconnectedness of all things, just as we are all bound up together on this Earth, sharing one fate.  The recurring visual act of zooming out from an extreme closeup to a wide shot asks the reader to see where each part exists in the larger composition.  And the main recurring structural tool employed by Moore and Gibbons is the interweaving of narrative elements, either by physically intercutting two scenes or overlapping one scene’s visual elements with the audio elements of another scene.  The best example of this of course is the way the Black Freighter comic in integrated into the scenes of the lives unfolding around us.  These acts might come across as tricks or merely cute when first encountered, but it becomes clear that the technique is thematically tied to the point of the novel.

Moore and Gibbons create such a complete and compelling alternate universe that whether you find the conclusion satisfactory or not, you cannot help but admire all the thought and artistry that went into this unique novel.

Being a Man Gets Harder All the Time - Richard Ford's Sportwriter

*Spoiler lie ahead like statistics in a baseball program.  Read on at your own risk.*

The Sportswriter is the story of Frank Bascombe, a 38-year-old, white, newly-divorced, father of two, living in Haddam, New Jersey.  Frank is not only our subject but also our narrator.  In his opening address to the reader, he tells us “that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret.  Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.”  He continues, “I believe I have done these two things.  Faced down regret.  Avoided ruin.  And I am still here to tell about it.”  What follows is the story of his regrets, how he faced them down, and how he avoided ruin. 

While the “present” of the novel covers the three-day weekend of Easter, Frank looks back at the scope of his life and gives us scenes from a good deal of his past, and he has a lot of things, like we all do, to potentially regret.  His marriage dissolved after his wife discovered a pack of letters from a woman who admired Frank, but with whom he did not have an affair.  His oldest son, Ralph, died of a horrible disease a few years back, before his marriage came to an end.  He had a promising future as a fiction writer, what he calls a “real” writer, but his drive to tell those stories died out and he switched to sportswriting, which he greatly enjoys.  He tried teaching college students for a spell and had a lengthy affair with a woman there while he was married but about which his wife knows nothing still.  He has no deep and lasting friends that he can lean on or that can lean on him.  Through the course of the novel, his relationship with his latest girlfriend, Vicki, comes to an end.  Through it all, Frank has a relatively easy-going attitude that acknowledges mistakes but does not give in to the emotional weight of regret.

In recounting the details of his life, Frank creates systems by which he can understand his reaction to events.  He discusses “dreaminess,” the difference between being a “literalist” and a “factualist,” the importance of embracing “mystery,” the danger of “empty moments” and the emotional state of “looking around” your feelings.  These are the intellectual signposts that he has erected to understand and direct his life.

On the one hand, it’s a really excellent idea for a novel.  On the other hand, I found myself with very little patience for Frank and his narration.  The book from my reading list that The Sportswriter most reminds me of is Updike’s Rabbit, Run.  Both novels have an ass of a main character whom it appears that we are supposed to have some fondness or admiration for that just doesn’t make sense to my brain.  (For my review of Rabbit run, click here --->http://insearchofsmarts.blogspot.com/2013/12/on-run.html.)  And like Rabbit Angstrom, Frank Bascombe is given multiple novels beyond his debut, which once again suggests that a number of readers really enjoyed hanging out with Frank.  Everyone responds to literature from his or her own perspective on life, and different viewpoints resonate with different people who see the world in different ways.  This is not a character or a perspective that spoke to me.

Frank is one of the most self-involved characters I have read, and not in a charmingly selfish kind of way.  He has enough sympathy to understand other people, but he really doesn’t give two shits about them.  Until he interviewed Herb Wallagher for the magazine, I merely found Frank’s posture annoying, that of a down-to-earth guy without pretensions who is keen at spotting the pretensions of other people.  Herb, the wheelchair-bound athlete in Michigan, was the first character in the book that I found fascinating, and he freaked Frank out.  Finding something more complicated than he was prepared for to write a piece that could “pull a heartstring,” Frank dismisses Herb as “crazy” and flees like that craziness might be contagious.  Then there is the continual condescension Frank expresses toward the people of the Midwest.  Frank puts a lot of stock in regional stereotypes (in spite of his insistence that he couldn’t be a writer because too much literature reduced the complicated realities of life into ready-made stereotypes), and will gladly go on about Midwesterners, Michiganders, New Englanders, Texans, and on and on.  In fact, he embraces stereotypes of all kind.  He anticipates Vicki’s father will be “a gun store owner type.”  When he finds a picture in Vicki’s bag of what he assumes is her ex-husband, he notes, “I would recognize him anywhere.  Lonesome Pines was full of such types.”  The police in town are “guinea[s]” and “spaghetti-bender[s].”   In his thoughts about Bosobolo, his African boarder, Frank lets us know that Bosobolo is “almost certain the kind to have a long aboriginal penis.”  What?!  There is a “kind” for that?

Bosobolo brings us to how white, how male, how heterosexual, and how privileged Frank is without having any idea.  The racial, sex, and gender politics that underpin this novel are cringe-worthy.  Except for Bosobolo, race is a relatively minor aspect of the novel.  All the “negro” characters, as he calls them, are minor or passing, and they all seem to think Frank is alright.  Frank is always keen to let us know he is alright.  The counterpoint to Frank is Walter Luckett, another recently-divorced white man in town who is going through a hard time.  Walter confides in Frank, much against Frank’s wishes, that Walter recently had an evening of conversation and sex with another professional man in the city.  Walter is clearly in crisis over what this means about him and his life.  Frank is cool and patient with Walter, letting him speak even as Frank is watching the clock and the door to figure out how quickly he can get out of the conversation.  He expresses non-judgment, even as his thoughts are full of judgment.  He plays the part alright, but we are privy to his real thoughts.  In the end, Frank rejects all attempts at connection and human contact, stating, “I simply found out that you couldn’t know another person’s life, and might as well not even try.”  There it is.  I can only know myself, so why bother to try to know anyone else or let anyone else try to explain him- or herself to me?  Alone and adrift, Walter fails to avoid ruin and ends his life by shooting himself.  Again, in the wake of Walter's death the reader gets to see that Frank’s sympathies are horrifyingly lacking.

Finally, the women in the book are all dismissed and condescended to by Frank.  While the women possess attitude and strength, generally, they are never important as individuals to Frank.  Frank is more interested, for example, in befriending Vicki’s father and brother than he is in the lastingness of his relationship with Vicki, just as he values his lasting relationship with his ex-wife’s father.  And for Frank, the thing that rights his Easter, after he has lost and been punched by Vicki, after Walter has shot himself and left a suicide note for Frank, after his ex-wife has told him that she doesn’t “like him very much at all”—the thing that rights all this and gives the day a happy ending, is that a cute blonde girl who is interning at the sports magazine approaches him who wears a “white cotton blouse concealing a pair of considerable grapefruits.”  I shit you not.  Frank, twice the girl’s age, flirts with her and sees that they get along great because they have “plenty to share—her admiration for me, my advice about her future, my admiration for her, her respect for my opinion (which may rival even her old man).”  There you have it, Frank’s relationships need.  She admires him, he as advice to give her, she respects his opinions, and she respect his opinions more than what he assumes must be the most important man in her life.  Frank, Frank, Frank.  Frank has no idea how limited he is.

The thing that makes it difficult to take is that it is never clear that Richard Ford has any awareness either.  Frank is instead presented as a kind of “Everyman,” and judging by his appearance in two more well-selling novels, it seems others have embraced him.

I suspect that there is an excellent analysis to be made by placing this book in its cultural time and place.  Frank says, without irony, that “[b]eing a man gets harder all the time.”  He might as well have said that being a white, heterosexual, middle-class, professional man gets harder all the time.  America was in a state of change in the mid-80s, as it is today, and a lot of this book feels like a reaction to, and resistance to, that change.  If someone writes (or has written) that analysis, please let me know. 

This same story told without all the racial, gender, and sexual bullshit could have been a compelling narrative.  But as it is, I would have been just as happy not reading it.