Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart is a quiet novel. Taking place largely in the upper-class home of Anna and Thomas Quayne, the story plays out like a novel of manners, with guests coming and going and people being rather polite to each other. Or at least they seem to be polite to each other, and it is in that seeming that Bowen's story finds its strength. This two-faced behavior is commonplace enough and shouldn't surprise anyone. But the lies told, the secrets kept, and secrets revealed in confidence take on new depth and import when seen through the eyes of Portia Quayne, the sixteen-year-old girl at the center of the novel.
Portia is above all an observer. The love child of an upper-class man who longs for his old life and a common woman forced to live an uprooted life by her shamed husband, Portia is the quintessential outsider. She grew up in hotels, traveling from one to another, watching the fellow guest come in and out of her life. After her father's death, Portia and her mother are an isolated pair with no ties. And when her mother passes, Portia goes to live with her father's son, Thomas, and his wife, Anna, in London.
Portia keeps her observations in a diary. At the opening of the novel, we learn that Anna, who does not care for her quiet guest, has found Portia's diary and read it through. Anna is upset that Portia is watching her and making notes. She does not complain about what Portia has said, and there is no evidence that Portia is mean spirited in her writings, but she feels violated on behalf of everyone who has been watched. Anna seems disproportionately upset by her discovery, and that is our first indication about Bowen's plan for this novel. There is power in observation and in the silent passing of judgment. Anna feels that Portia is laughing at her behind her back, and this practically unhinges Anna.
Characters throughout the novel are obsessed with being watched, being exposed, and being in the public eye. As long as you are the one laughing at others, feeling superior to others, you are in the position of power. But to be laughed seems to be a fate worse than death; at least it is an equal fate, as the very title of the novel suggests.
The titular heart is Portia's. The novel is a coming of age story for Portia, and her final entrance into adulthood is not love, or sex, or independence. The thing that hurtles her irreversibly into adulthood is having her heart broken by the betrayal of her boyfriend, Eddie. Eddie's betrayal is not that he loves another. While Portia is upset that Eddie held hands with Daphne in the movie theater, Portia accepts his odd explanation and moves on. In fact, Portia is maddeningly indifferent to Eddie's awful behavior, seemingly willing to tolerate any kind of mistreatment. But the one thing she cannot tolerate is the knowledge that Eddie knew that Anna read Portia's diary regularly, and that Anna knew that Eddie knew but Portia knew none of this. Eddie and Anna, in other words, had a secret and excluded Portia. "You have laughed at me. You've laughed at me with them," says Portia to Eddie, shattered. Later she tells Major Brutt, "It, it isn't all right there [at Anna's house] any more: we feel ashamed with each other. You see, she has read my diary and found something out. She does not like that, but she laughs about it with Eddie; they laugh about him an me."
This betrayal is worse than if Eddie and Anna had had an affair: "Oh, he's not her lover; it's something worse than that."
Meanwhile, at the Quayne house, politeness fall apart (even as they continue to act politely to each other) as Anna and St. Quentin reveal their subversive acts to each other.
This much more plot summary than I am usually comfortable with in these posts, but the meanings of the novel are woven so tightly into the plot that I have a hard time grabbing the individual threads. The novel was intense and driving even as nothing of any seeming import happened. All the characters' interactions with each other and themselves are ripe with subtext and potential energy on the brink of becoming kinetic. It is in the end a rather dark novel about relationships and the unavoidable power relations between all people, power that unbalances everything and makes a simple union an impossibility. I have seen many films try to tackle this same subject and have never found them satisfactory. The reason Bowen succeeds where others have failed, I think, lies in her ability to plunge into the hearts and minds of the characters and let us linger in the wet dark of their thoughts. We are the additional layer in this power relationship as we, as readers, sit in judgment, in the know. We are the ultimate diary readers, the ultimate observers. Will we laugh at these creatures and share a joke amongst ourselves at their expense?
Another novel I am glad to have read. I feel like I have read an original thing here, a thing that others have tried to imitate many times and failed.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Swimming through At Swim-Two-Birds
At Swim-Two-Birds is one hell of a trip. It is unlike anything I have read before, and most certainly unlike anything else on this list so far.
Flann O'Brien is one of the several noms de plume of Brian O'Nolan, an Irish contemporary of James Joyce. Written at the height of High Modernism, At Swim-Two-Birds is convoluted and non-linear, encasing stories within stories and levels upon levels. But this must be one of the most tongue-in-cheek modernist novels written. There were many times when I laughed out loud (LOL!) at the ludicrous storylines. One of the characters, for example, Finn MacCool is a hero of Irish legend who likes to tell stories, recite poetry, and engage in hyperbole. Early in the novel, Finn relates what a man must do to be a part of Finn's gang. Near the end of a list of impossible abilities, Finn adds:
"One thousand rams he must sequester about his trunks with no offense to the men of Erin, or he is unknown to Finn. He must swiftly milk a fat cow and carry milk-pail and cow for twenty years in the seat of his drawers. When pursued in a chariot by the men of Erin he must dismount, place horse and chariot in the slack of his seat and hide behind his spear, the same being stuck upright in Erin. Unless he accomplishes these feats, he is not wanted of Finn. But if he do them all and be skillful, he is of Finn's people."
O'Nolan delights time and time again in the absurdities of the happenings in this novel. The structure alone is absurd. O'Nolan has a fictitious author, O'Brien, write a novel of a fictitious narrator, unnamed, who writes a fictitious book about a fictitious author, Trellis, who writes his own stories and keeps his own fictitious characters locked up in his house. Trellis's character Finn tells a lengthy story of his own about a man called Sweeney. Trellis rapes one of those fictitious characters who then gives birth to a son, fully grown, who meets up with Trellis's other characters to write a piece of revenge fiction about Trellis. Who is the author and who is the authored becomes intertwined and in some ways inseparable.
The highest frame of the story, that of the narrator and his encounters with his college friends and his confrontations with his uncle seems rather trivial, since it seemed to me merely a way to get out the stories about Trellis and his characters. There is not much of a plot as far as the narrator goes. He is a lazy man who spends most of his time in bed writing his stories. He leaves his room to share his stories and to be needled by his uncle, whom the narrator detests, to study harder and be a good student. I was surprised therefore when I came to the end of the novel and found myself combing through the story with this tension between the narrator and his uncle as my guide.
See, this is a novel obsessed with the act of writing and creating. And as the story of Trellis and his characters brings to the fore, "author" is intimately tied to the word "authority." He who writes claims a power and an authority over that which he writes. But that authority is tenuous at best. The characters have full lives beyond the boundaries of the novel. Like actors, they play the part directed by the author, but when business hours are over, they drug the author and have free reign of the house. In that piece of revenge fiction, the characters bring a lawsuit against Trellis for misusing and abusing them.
Trellis is an interesting combination of the narrator and the uncle. Like the narrator, Trellis spends all his time in bed, but like the uncle, he wields his authority bluntly. And when the uncle demonstrates fairness at the conclusion of the novel, the narrator seems to reconceive Trellis's cruel fate, letting him off the hook, but simultaneously freeing the characters by burning Trellis's manuscript.
That's why I see this novel as the portrait of the artist as an awkward young man. The author is part rebel (against society and the authoritative forces around him) but he is the very essence of authority and a creator of society (within the boundaries of the novel) itself. How does the self-aware young author reconcile these internal contradiction? With great absurdity and humor according to O'Brien. And a lot of bloodshed and pain too, for the characters express this struggle in the young artist with their own contradictory natures. Specifically, there is a great amount of gentility to the characters and their exchanges with each other (at every level of the story (stories)), but they are simultaneously vicious, devising levels of punishment through which few readers could experience any kind of uncomplicated joy.
This novel confounded my original attempts to make any sense of it, and somewhere around page 20, I just let go and let the current sweep me away, laughing as I went. And whether or not you struggle with the whats and wherefores of the novel, you are in for a good time if you have a keen sense for the absurd.
Flann O'Brien is one of the several noms de plume of Brian O'Nolan, an Irish contemporary of James Joyce. Written at the height of High Modernism, At Swim-Two-Birds is convoluted and non-linear, encasing stories within stories and levels upon levels. But this must be one of the most tongue-in-cheek modernist novels written. There were many times when I laughed out loud (LOL!) at the ludicrous storylines. One of the characters, for example, Finn MacCool is a hero of Irish legend who likes to tell stories, recite poetry, and engage in hyperbole. Early in the novel, Finn relates what a man must do to be a part of Finn's gang. Near the end of a list of impossible abilities, Finn adds:
"One thousand rams he must sequester about his trunks with no offense to the men of Erin, or he is unknown to Finn. He must swiftly milk a fat cow and carry milk-pail and cow for twenty years in the seat of his drawers. When pursued in a chariot by the men of Erin he must dismount, place horse and chariot in the slack of his seat and hide behind his spear, the same being stuck upright in Erin. Unless he accomplishes these feats, he is not wanted of Finn. But if he do them all and be skillful, he is of Finn's people."
O'Nolan delights time and time again in the absurdities of the happenings in this novel. The structure alone is absurd. O'Nolan has a fictitious author, O'Brien, write a novel of a fictitious narrator, unnamed, who writes a fictitious book about a fictitious author, Trellis, who writes his own stories and keeps his own fictitious characters locked up in his house. Trellis's character Finn tells a lengthy story of his own about a man called Sweeney. Trellis rapes one of those fictitious characters who then gives birth to a son, fully grown, who meets up with Trellis's other characters to write a piece of revenge fiction about Trellis. Who is the author and who is the authored becomes intertwined and in some ways inseparable.
The highest frame of the story, that of the narrator and his encounters with his college friends and his confrontations with his uncle seems rather trivial, since it seemed to me merely a way to get out the stories about Trellis and his characters. There is not much of a plot as far as the narrator goes. He is a lazy man who spends most of his time in bed writing his stories. He leaves his room to share his stories and to be needled by his uncle, whom the narrator detests, to study harder and be a good student. I was surprised therefore when I came to the end of the novel and found myself combing through the story with this tension between the narrator and his uncle as my guide.
See, this is a novel obsessed with the act of writing and creating. And as the story of Trellis and his characters brings to the fore, "author" is intimately tied to the word "authority." He who writes claims a power and an authority over that which he writes. But that authority is tenuous at best. The characters have full lives beyond the boundaries of the novel. Like actors, they play the part directed by the author, but when business hours are over, they drug the author and have free reign of the house. In that piece of revenge fiction, the characters bring a lawsuit against Trellis for misusing and abusing them.
Trellis is an interesting combination of the narrator and the uncle. Like the narrator, Trellis spends all his time in bed, but like the uncle, he wields his authority bluntly. And when the uncle demonstrates fairness at the conclusion of the novel, the narrator seems to reconceive Trellis's cruel fate, letting him off the hook, but simultaneously freeing the characters by burning Trellis's manuscript.
That's why I see this novel as the portrait of the artist as an awkward young man. The author is part rebel (against society and the authoritative forces around him) but he is the very essence of authority and a creator of society (within the boundaries of the novel) itself. How does the self-aware young author reconcile these internal contradiction? With great absurdity and humor according to O'Brien. And a lot of bloodshed and pain too, for the characters express this struggle in the young artist with their own contradictory natures. Specifically, there is a great amount of gentility to the characters and their exchanges with each other (at every level of the story (stories)), but they are simultaneously vicious, devising levels of punishment through which few readers could experience any kind of uncomplicated joy.
This novel confounded my original attempts to make any sense of it, and somewhere around page 20, I just let go and let the current sweep me away, laughing as I went. And whether or not you struggle with the whats and wherefores of the novel, you are in for a good time if you have a keen sense for the absurd.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Their Eyes Were Watching God is for me a purely pleasurable reading experience. I find Hurston's poetic prose meaningful, profound, and weighty without ever being pompous or overwritten. Hurston is a folklorist by trade and a collector of tales. I read a good deal of Of Mules and Men a while back and see in this novel the same love of how people communicate with one another, how stories and ribbing games are more than just ways to pass the time; they are the very root of who we are and how we connect.
At one point in the novel, when Janie is disillusioned by Joe's desire to keep her "proper" and "respectable," Janie reflects upon where her life went wrong. She says, and I can't find the passage now, so I am quoting from memory, that in the course of her first two marriages "she went out in search of people" but has only found "things." Like Janie, this novel goes out in search of people, and that is precisely what it brings back to us, characters and world fully developed and rich. In many ways, the novel reminds me of Grapes of Wrath, in that Hurston shares Steinbeck's love of the poetry of common speech. Steinbeck's novel has of course at its roots a political concern, and while Hurston touches upon racism and Southern social politics, they are merely peripheral, an undeniable element that surrounds the characters but never touches their souls.
And this is an amazing and modern love story that I find very uplifting. Their is no meaningless poetry is Tea Cakes wooing of Janie. He lets her experience life by involving her in all his doings. And he involves her because he wants to share all his experiences with her, not because he wants to be some guiding principle in her life. Playing checkers, fishing at midnight, working in the muck of the glades, they are true partners and lovers with whom I can whole-heartedly identify.
And this romantic relationship makes the book wholly unique to me. In a romance, the writer must always find a way to keep the lovers apart, to create tension with misunderstanding, jealousy, and ill-timed meetings, but Hurston does away with that. Instead, she creates her climax when one lover is out of his mind, sick with a disease he contracted while rescuing his love; our hero must shoot her own hero in self defense, a horrible and painful fate made all the more horrible because of their true love and friendship.
This was my second time reading this novel, and I would readily read it again.
At one point in the novel, when Janie is disillusioned by Joe's desire to keep her "proper" and "respectable," Janie reflects upon where her life went wrong. She says, and I can't find the passage now, so I am quoting from memory, that in the course of her first two marriages "she went out in search of people" but has only found "things." Like Janie, this novel goes out in search of people, and that is precisely what it brings back to us, characters and world fully developed and rich. In many ways, the novel reminds me of Grapes of Wrath, in that Hurston shares Steinbeck's love of the poetry of common speech. Steinbeck's novel has of course at its roots a political concern, and while Hurston touches upon racism and Southern social politics, they are merely peripheral, an undeniable element that surrounds the characters but never touches their souls.
And this is an amazing and modern love story that I find very uplifting. Their is no meaningless poetry is Tea Cakes wooing of Janie. He lets her experience life by involving her in all his doings. And he involves her because he wants to share all his experiences with her, not because he wants to be some guiding principle in her life. Playing checkers, fishing at midnight, working in the muck of the glades, they are true partners and lovers with whom I can whole-heartedly identify.
And this romantic relationship makes the book wholly unique to me. In a romance, the writer must always find a way to keep the lovers apart, to create tension with misunderstanding, jealousy, and ill-timed meetings, but Hurston does away with that. Instead, she creates her climax when one lover is out of his mind, sick with a disease he contracted while rescuing his love; our hero must shoot her own hero in self defense, a horrible and painful fate made all the more horrible because of their true love and friendship.
This was my second time reading this novel, and I would readily read it again.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Gone with the Wind - Part 3
In my last two posts, I talked about how ambitious and how successful Mitchell is with her epic tale. As a feat of storytelling, Gone with the Wind is amazing. The characters are vivid and consistent. The main characters are rich and wonderful. The story never sags for long, which is hard to do in a short story, let alone in a book of this magnitude. Each section is interesting and rewarding so that you are never left pining for an older section; you happily move on and let the characters go on their way, happy to follow.
Moreover, Mitchell has incredible timing, bringing each twist and turn together to build up to something amazing. Having Melly's child arrive as Atlanta is under siege is fantastic. The rug is constantly pulled out beneath our heroes at just the right time.
As a feat of storytelling, I loved this book.
Politically, I hated this book.
As I touched upon in my last post, the South is romanticized beyond repair. The two burrs in my saddle are not surprisingly the issues of gender and race.
The book seems obsessed with what is masculine and what isn't. Every male character fails the test of masculinity except one. Every one of them is either effeminate ("He's nervous and timid and well meaning, and I don't know of any more damning qualities a man can have.") or boyish. Only Rhett is strong enough to man-handle Scarlett, to bend her to his will, to forcefully kiss her. As we are told repeatedly, "He was a man, and no matter what he did, she could never forget it." Near the end of the book, when Rhett is drunken and confronting Scarlett, he insists on his marital rights and carries her up the stairs. But instead of rape, we find the best sex of Scarlett's life. Once he kisses her roughly and controllingly, Scarlett melts away and gets what she's been needing the whole novel. Because of his uncontainable manhood, Rhett could even get away with knowing french fashions, which on any other man would be "rank effeminacy."
It's not that Mitchell insists on all women acting like women and all men acting like men. But what she does is romanticize the roles and social structures that bind them. The men may not know more, but the women should let them feel like they do. The tension in the book comes from Scarlett and Melanie and Ellen basically having to take care of all the men around them. But this seems to be a result more of the necessity of the times than a comment about any real social equity. And while we pity Ashley and his like-troubled southern men, we are left with something of disgust at their failures. Rhett is a shining example of what they could be and what they have failed to be.
And I do not have to say much about the politics of race here. Mitchell mocks Uncle Tom's Cabin because every northerner thinks that all slaves are brutalized when really they are treated more like family than slaves. But even Uncle Tom's Cabin shows some slave owners who are not brutal. There is nothing bad about slavery in Mitchell's book. In fact, we meet many blacks who having tasted freedom really just want to go back to their masters. And most disturbingly, we are supposed to share Rhett's outrage that he could be jailed for killing a black man who was "uppity" with a white woman. The Klan in Gone with the Wind never has been and never will be a terrorist organization; they are merely respectable southern gentlemen who are given no other recourse to righting the wrongs done against their womenfolk.
Mitchell's defense of southern social structures made parts of the book very difficult. There were many passages that made me feel dirty just to be reading them, and when I read those passages, I wanted to hide the book when someone walked by so they would not know I was reading this racist shit lest they think I endorsed it. And sadly, I cannot say I wholly enjoyed reading or thinking about the novel because of these passages.
I am very interested to see what the movie does with the politics of the novel, to see what extent they are left intact and to what extent they are washed over to emphasize the romance story.
Moreover, Mitchell has incredible timing, bringing each twist and turn together to build up to something amazing. Having Melly's child arrive as Atlanta is under siege is fantastic. The rug is constantly pulled out beneath our heroes at just the right time.
As a feat of storytelling, I loved this book.
Politically, I hated this book.
As I touched upon in my last post, the South is romanticized beyond repair. The two burrs in my saddle are not surprisingly the issues of gender and race.
The book seems obsessed with what is masculine and what isn't. Every male character fails the test of masculinity except one. Every one of them is either effeminate ("He's nervous and timid and well meaning, and I don't know of any more damning qualities a man can have.") or boyish. Only Rhett is strong enough to man-handle Scarlett, to bend her to his will, to forcefully kiss her. As we are told repeatedly, "He was a man, and no matter what he did, she could never forget it." Near the end of the book, when Rhett is drunken and confronting Scarlett, he insists on his marital rights and carries her up the stairs. But instead of rape, we find the best sex of Scarlett's life. Once he kisses her roughly and controllingly, Scarlett melts away and gets what she's been needing the whole novel. Because of his uncontainable manhood, Rhett could even get away with knowing french fashions, which on any other man would be "rank effeminacy."
It's not that Mitchell insists on all women acting like women and all men acting like men. But what she does is romanticize the roles and social structures that bind them. The men may not know more, but the women should let them feel like they do. The tension in the book comes from Scarlett and Melanie and Ellen basically having to take care of all the men around them. But this seems to be a result more of the necessity of the times than a comment about any real social equity. And while we pity Ashley and his like-troubled southern men, we are left with something of disgust at their failures. Rhett is a shining example of what they could be and what they have failed to be.
And I do not have to say much about the politics of race here. Mitchell mocks Uncle Tom's Cabin because every northerner thinks that all slaves are brutalized when really they are treated more like family than slaves. But even Uncle Tom's Cabin shows some slave owners who are not brutal. There is nothing bad about slavery in Mitchell's book. In fact, we meet many blacks who having tasted freedom really just want to go back to their masters. And most disturbingly, we are supposed to share Rhett's outrage that he could be jailed for killing a black man who was "uppity" with a white woman. The Klan in Gone with the Wind never has been and never will be a terrorist organization; they are merely respectable southern gentlemen who are given no other recourse to righting the wrongs done against their womenfolk.
Mitchell's defense of southern social structures made parts of the book very difficult. There were many passages that made me feel dirty just to be reading them, and when I read those passages, I wanted to hide the book when someone walked by so they would not know I was reading this racist shit lest they think I endorsed it. And sadly, I cannot say I wholly enjoyed reading or thinking about the novel because of these passages.
I am very interested to see what the movie does with the politics of the novel, to see what extent they are left intact and to what extent they are washed over to emphasize the romance story.
Gone with the Wind - Part 2
In my last post I reflected on the greediness of Gone with the Wind and Margaret Mitchell's desire to have it all. That greediness is reflected also in her depiction of the South.
Why is Scarlett so nasty and selfish? Why is the heroine of our book someone we not only love but love to hate? Scarlett believes herself superior to just about everyone except maybe her mother and Ashley. She will step over anyone to get the thing she thinks she wants. She is areligious bordering on atheistic. And unlike modern novels or movies, the story is not one of progress. Scarlett doesn't end the novel a changed woman, regretting her character flaws. Scarlett is Scarlett throughout.
This was my first time reading the novel (and I have yet to see the movie too) and I was surprised at how this most-loved book had a rather wicked protagonist. In any other book, I would have expected the main character to be a sluicing together of Scarlett and Melanie, or Scarlanie. Scarlanie would have Scarlett's determination and strong-headedness. Scarlanie would have Melanie's faith and devotion, her dedication to her friends. Why would Mitchell take this tack?
I believe it has to do with this being a Southern book. Mitchell has stated that Scarlett is like Atlanta during the reconstruction, an odd mixture of the old South and the new South. But she is really only part of the old South in her roots and ties. The old South is found in Melanie and Ashley, the Tarletons, and everything that Tara represents. Scarlett loves these things, but she is not like these things.
By letting us follow hard and ruthless Scarlett, Mitchell avoids a cloyingly sweet novel about the romantic South, while at the same time indulging endlessly in the romantic South. In fact, Scarlett's hardness only makes the old South all that much more romantic. There is no criticism of any of the social structures that propped up the old south. Sexism? No, chivalry. Racism? No, family. There is not one mistreated slave or one cruel master; those things are northern myths. The Klan? They are needed to protect our women from uppity blacks egged on by the carpetbaggers, a necessity created by the North.
It really all comes together in Rhett Butler. You may think that you love his rascally and irreverent ways. Okay, you do, but you can enjoy them because at root he is a southern gentleman who always knows the truth before him. He may deal with the northerners and make friends with ne'er-do-wells, but he knows the score. His charm is all southern, and whenever the chips are down, he acts just like the Old Guard. His southern gentriness is like his love for Scarlett; something that he hides but really the thing that defines him.
So through these characters and this world, Mitchell gets to present the most romantic image of the South possible without seeming to write a novel that pines for the past. Now that is brilliant writing. We get a modern tale with modern players AND the nostalgic romanticized backdrop for them to act out their tale.
Didn't I say she was greedy? But again, you can be greedy as long as you can pull it off. And Mitchell most certainly pulls it off.
Why is Scarlett so nasty and selfish? Why is the heroine of our book someone we not only love but love to hate? Scarlett believes herself superior to just about everyone except maybe her mother and Ashley. She will step over anyone to get the thing she thinks she wants. She is areligious bordering on atheistic. And unlike modern novels or movies, the story is not one of progress. Scarlett doesn't end the novel a changed woman, regretting her character flaws. Scarlett is Scarlett throughout.
This was my first time reading the novel (and I have yet to see the movie too) and I was surprised at how this most-loved book had a rather wicked protagonist. In any other book, I would have expected the main character to be a sluicing together of Scarlett and Melanie, or Scarlanie. Scarlanie would have Scarlett's determination and strong-headedness. Scarlanie would have Melanie's faith and devotion, her dedication to her friends. Why would Mitchell take this tack?
I believe it has to do with this being a Southern book. Mitchell has stated that Scarlett is like Atlanta during the reconstruction, an odd mixture of the old South and the new South. But she is really only part of the old South in her roots and ties. The old South is found in Melanie and Ashley, the Tarletons, and everything that Tara represents. Scarlett loves these things, but she is not like these things.
By letting us follow hard and ruthless Scarlett, Mitchell avoids a cloyingly sweet novel about the romantic South, while at the same time indulging endlessly in the romantic South. In fact, Scarlett's hardness only makes the old South all that much more romantic. There is no criticism of any of the social structures that propped up the old south. Sexism? No, chivalry. Racism? No, family. There is not one mistreated slave or one cruel master; those things are northern myths. The Klan? They are needed to protect our women from uppity blacks egged on by the carpetbaggers, a necessity created by the North.
It really all comes together in Rhett Butler. You may think that you love his rascally and irreverent ways. Okay, you do, but you can enjoy them because at root he is a southern gentleman who always knows the truth before him. He may deal with the northerners and make friends with ne'er-do-wells, but he knows the score. His charm is all southern, and whenever the chips are down, he acts just like the Old Guard. His southern gentriness is like his love for Scarlett; something that he hides but really the thing that defines him.
So through these characters and this world, Mitchell gets to present the most romantic image of the South possible without seeming to write a novel that pines for the past. Now that is brilliant writing. We get a modern tale with modern players AND the nostalgic romanticized backdrop for them to act out their tale.
Didn't I say she was greedy? But again, you can be greedy as long as you can pull it off. And Mitchell most certainly pulls it off.
Gone with the Wind - Part 1
My version of Gone with the Wind is 1450 pages long. Lord knows the book is long enough and complex enough to warrant quite a bit of blogging. I don't know how much energy I'll have, so I decided to create several smaller entries rather than one big one.
Now I don't know Margaret Mitchell personally, you may be surprised to learn, but I do know this: she is greedy. Or at least, Gone with the Wind is the greediest novel I have ever read. Mitchell has decided to put everything into one book. Everything.
Gone with the Wind is a novel of manners. The first part of the book plays like an Austen novel as we follow the young, wealthy, and beautiful folks of the County. There are proper ways to behave, proper things to say, proper reactions to have--and Scarlett follows none of them. The novel is more appropriately a novel of manners turned on its head. Scarlett is no Pamela; she is the opposite, using all her energy just to pass as decent and not give her inner demons away.
Gone with the Wind is an apocalyptic tale. Once Atlanta is in flames, the novel resembles The Road, or The Walking Dead, or The Road Warrior. How will Scarlett and her band of dependents survive? From whence will they get their next meal? Oh thank god she found a calving cow! Oh thank god she shot that nasty Yankee in the face and took his good horse!
Gone with the Wind is a buddy story. Like the novel of manners, however, this buddy story is turned upside down, since one of the buddies loathes the other. For all of Scarlett's continual whining about Melanie, Melanie is by her side the whole of the novel. She's there with the saber when the vile Yankee needs a good Dick Cheneying. She's there to support her every step of the way. Scarlett doesn't know she's in a buddy story; she thinks hers is a love triangle story.
Gone with the Wind is an Horatio Algers story. With a little gumption and honesty, the American Dream is open to everyone. Once the apocalypse has subsided and Scarlett marries Frank, her story is one of the search for the American Dream. Only instead of having honesty and spunk be at her back, it is pure selfishness and fear that gets her to get Frank's shop in shape and to buy two lumber mills and employ a ruthless Irish overseer to beat the prisoner labor force. She get to live her American Dream, but of course, it will turn out to be a nightmare in the end.
Gone with the Wind is a romance. Love overlooked, love thwarted, love barred, love denied--this book has it all.
Gone with the Wind is the greediest book I've ever read. It wants it all. It wants to be every story it can be, even if it has to run over a thousand pages long to get there. Perhaps Mitchell knew she would only write one novel, so she crammed six or seven into the one book for good measure.
The amazing thing is that she pulls it all together and makes it all work as a unified whole. It is dazzling in its ability to be all these things and be such a good and solid story the whole way through.
Now I don't know Margaret Mitchell personally, you may be surprised to learn, but I do know this: she is greedy. Or at least, Gone with the Wind is the greediest novel I have ever read. Mitchell has decided to put everything into one book. Everything.
Gone with the Wind is a novel of manners. The first part of the book plays like an Austen novel as we follow the young, wealthy, and beautiful folks of the County. There are proper ways to behave, proper things to say, proper reactions to have--and Scarlett follows none of them. The novel is more appropriately a novel of manners turned on its head. Scarlett is no Pamela; she is the opposite, using all her energy just to pass as decent and not give her inner demons away.
Gone with the Wind is an apocalyptic tale. Once Atlanta is in flames, the novel resembles The Road, or The Walking Dead, or The Road Warrior. How will Scarlett and her band of dependents survive? From whence will they get their next meal? Oh thank god she found a calving cow! Oh thank god she shot that nasty Yankee in the face and took his good horse!
Gone with the Wind is a buddy story. Like the novel of manners, however, this buddy story is turned upside down, since one of the buddies loathes the other. For all of Scarlett's continual whining about Melanie, Melanie is by her side the whole of the novel. She's there with the saber when the vile Yankee needs a good Dick Cheneying. She's there to support her every step of the way. Scarlett doesn't know she's in a buddy story; she thinks hers is a love triangle story.
Gone with the Wind is an Horatio Algers story. With a little gumption and honesty, the American Dream is open to everyone. Once the apocalypse has subsided and Scarlett marries Frank, her story is one of the search for the American Dream. Only instead of having honesty and spunk be at her back, it is pure selfishness and fear that gets her to get Frank's shop in shape and to buy two lumber mills and employ a ruthless Irish overseer to beat the prisoner labor force. She get to live her American Dream, but of course, it will turn out to be a nightmare in the end.
Gone with the Wind is a romance. Love overlooked, love thwarted, love barred, love denied--this book has it all.
Gone with the Wind is the greediest book I've ever read. It wants it all. It wants to be every story it can be, even if it has to run over a thousand pages long to get there. Perhaps Mitchell knew she would only write one novel, so she crammed six or seven into the one book for good measure.
The amazing thing is that she pulls it all together and makes it all work as a unified whole. It is dazzling in its ability to be all these things and be such a good and solid story the whole way through.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Call It Wonderful
I have enjoyed almost every book that I have read for this project. Some books I had read before and were excited to re-read. Some books I had heard of before and always wanted to read. Some books were brand new to me. Call It Sleep falls into this last category. I had never heard of Call It Sleep, and I had never heard of Henry Roth. And the experience I had reading this book is exactly the experience I was seeking when Ann and I started this project. It is a wonderful, striking, compelling, beautifully written work of fiction that has been rolling around in the recesses of my mind since I began it a few weeks ago.
As Ann has undergone her journey as a novelist over the past couple of years, I have had the opportunity to reflect on what I love most in the books I read and in the writing I enjoy. The one thing I keep telling Ann that she does to perfection is to be profound without being pompous, to be meaningful without being heavy-handed, to be rich without being baroque. A real piece of art strikes you intellectually and emotionally while at the same time just being interesting and compelling. Henry Roth does what Ann does so well and creates real art here.
The story of David Schearl simultaneously feels like an extended character piece (what Alfred Kazin calls The Portrait of an Artist as a Child) and a plot-driven story about David’s world. The plot is mortar-tight, but you never see it coming. At times the story feels like it wanders and introduces characters because they interest David. It is not until later that the pieces click into place and come into focus as the foundation they always were. That is a very difficult feat to create in any story.
The symbolism and meaning that infuses the novel was at first off-putting for me. The meaning of the Cellar as a place of dark human/animal desires and sexuality is so Freudian, that while I read the first section of the novel I thought to myself, “Oh, this is why the book was so popular in the 60s, the height of Freudian interpretations in literature.” The Oedipal issues that David has with Dad, his relationship with his mother, the dark underpinnings of sexuality, can all be packaged up and dismissed, were it not for Roth’s deeper characterization. David’s relationship with his mother is more than some Freudian desire; there is a real relationship here, complex and touching. David’s problems with his Dad isn’t just a war over Mother, it is a struggle with a man who suffers from paranoia and other personal problems. Albert is both frightening and pathetic, a terror and a struggling immigrant. Roth lets these larger structures and systems fall like a cloak over the characters, scenes, and situations, but he keeps everything alive by having the characters move and tussle beneath the cloak, struggle and strive to resist any such reduction.
Kazin’s comparison of Call It Sleep to Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist seems very fitting to me. This is high literature like Joyce’s work, only Roth manages to achieve Joyce’s level of profundity while still allowing the plot and character’s motives to be simple and comprehensible. The only point of confusion for me is the penultimate chapter, when David burns himself on the third rail. But because this is the ultimate climax and David’s at a fevered pitch, it all seems fitting. I do not mind the confusion, and I feel like I could parse it out and untangle the connection between David’s search for the pure light that once made him unafraid and confident and the grownup inhabitants of the Lower East Side discussing sex from an adult perspective not seen in the book up to this point.
It is a joy to get the highs with the lows in this amazing novel.
As Ann has undergone her journey as a novelist over the past couple of years, I have had the opportunity to reflect on what I love most in the books I read and in the writing I enjoy. The one thing I keep telling Ann that she does to perfection is to be profound without being pompous, to be meaningful without being heavy-handed, to be rich without being baroque. A real piece of art strikes you intellectually and emotionally while at the same time just being interesting and compelling. Henry Roth does what Ann does so well and creates real art here.
The story of David Schearl simultaneously feels like an extended character piece (what Alfred Kazin calls The Portrait of an Artist as a Child) and a plot-driven story about David’s world. The plot is mortar-tight, but you never see it coming. At times the story feels like it wanders and introduces characters because they interest David. It is not until later that the pieces click into place and come into focus as the foundation they always were. That is a very difficult feat to create in any story.
The symbolism and meaning that infuses the novel was at first off-putting for me. The meaning of the Cellar as a place of dark human/animal desires and sexuality is so Freudian, that while I read the first section of the novel I thought to myself, “Oh, this is why the book was so popular in the 60s, the height of Freudian interpretations in literature.” The Oedipal issues that David has with Dad, his relationship with his mother, the dark underpinnings of sexuality, can all be packaged up and dismissed, were it not for Roth’s deeper characterization. David’s relationship with his mother is more than some Freudian desire; there is a real relationship here, complex and touching. David’s problems with his Dad isn’t just a war over Mother, it is a struggle with a man who suffers from paranoia and other personal problems. Albert is both frightening and pathetic, a terror and a struggling immigrant. Roth lets these larger structures and systems fall like a cloak over the characters, scenes, and situations, but he keeps everything alive by having the characters move and tussle beneath the cloak, struggle and strive to resist any such reduction.
Kazin’s comparison of Call It Sleep to Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist seems very fitting to me. This is high literature like Joyce’s work, only Roth manages to achieve Joyce’s level of profundity while still allowing the plot and character’s motives to be simple and comprehensible. The only point of confusion for me is the penultimate chapter, when David burns himself on the third rail. But because this is the ultimate climax and David’s at a fevered pitch, it all seems fitting. I do not mind the confusion, and I feel like I could parse it out and untangle the connection between David’s search for the pure light that once made him unafraid and confident and the grownup inhabitants of the Lower East Side discussing sex from an adult perspective not seen in the book up to this point.
It is a joy to get the highs with the lows in this amazing novel.
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