tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23812627661818161322024-03-19T21:46:57.709+11:00English One-O-WorstRoderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-67150627798104002572014-02-03T03:49:00.001+11:002018-07-01T00:54:37.703+10:00M. R. James and Count Magnus: What Is This Thing That I Have Done?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia";">'Count Magnus', first published in <i>Ghost Stories of an Antiquary</i>, by M. R. James, </span><span style="font-family: "georgia";">1904.</span></span></h4>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsCvP6A1o054ts0QRlJUx9ZjY6F1aEM6eWxcWgokNtSNT6l8JtWFG89mtZvTKJDBvRRJxcEK_PGrDjpaWM3Aw-JnISwqs0w61N37LRRIL7oq0stK7ahQTwhMpV1z1c1rvTTI246BPHIXA/s1600/the+count+by+Rosemary+Pardoe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsCvP6A1o054ts0QRlJUx9ZjY6F1aEM6eWxcWgokNtSNT6l8JtWFG89mtZvTKJDBvRRJxcEK_PGrDjpaWM3Aw-JnISwqs0w61N37LRRIL7oq0stK7ahQTwhMpV1z1c1rvTTI246BPHIXA/s1600/the+count+by+Rosemary+Pardoe.jpg" width="456" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'The Count' by Rosemary Pardoe</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia";">Montague Rhodes James,
like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien after him, exemplified a bygone variety
of creative and scholarly fecundity that many people would easily conjure to
mind: the image of the British university don, scribbling away at private,
eccentric visions as a pastime in between lectures and research. Perhaps James
helped create the image himself, with his characters often coming from the
ranks of tenured savants, variously absent-minded, churlish, gruff, and/or asocial.
The impact James, Lewis, and Tolkien had on the fantastic genres of the
twentieth century was genuine and substantial, and yet they stood far outside
the usual flow of pressures familiar to most commercial genre writers, in their
own time and ours (quite distinct from today when literary writers basically
have to become teachers to make a living). On the contrary, their appeal and
achievement lay precisely in the way they offered to readers respite from the
raucous. Like Tolkien, James worked his own delight in the arcane and the
trappings of the scholarship he enjoyed into the texture of his creations, and
likewise, the sense of untold lodes of lore and knowledge informs so many
fleeing concepts and words found in their work. But James, a medieval scholar,
archaeologist, translator, archivist, and finally teacher, was ultimately a
very different kind of artist to the two later fantasy writers, and not just
because they were Oxfordians. James’ world is our world, petty, mundane, often
chokingly dull and predictable, and yet occasionally a veil is ripped, and
emanations of another zone invade stable reality and shock his characters into
comprehending the fragility everything that surrounds them. The past stalks
them like a bloodhound. Their transgressions, their need to learn, to uncover,
to profit, to know, becomes their undoing, as they run into the limits of the
liminal. If they are to be saved, if they can be saved at all, they must abide
the primal rules of the taboo and the ritual. Return the treasure to its hiding
place. File the ancient document in the deepest archive. Pass the runes back.
Run away as fast as you can.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">An anecdote from James’
childhood holds that he broke out in tears when faced with a birthday party,
and only calmed when he was allowed to retreat into a library. Around the same
time he developed a fascination for an antique bible that he poured over for
hours. Not surprisingly, he died unmarried. Yes, James was what we’d now call a
nerd, and much of his later writing contains an element of self-criticism, and
self-provocation, in having the bubble of scholarly calm, and the domesticity
and regulated, conciliatory civility of English life around it, disturbed by
reminders of the uneasy nature of all stability. James’ prose is off-hand,
rarely descriptive, except when sensatory experience starts to be distorted by
strange presences and epiphanies. Oftentimes he writes as he’s speaking to
another academic scholar, mumbling about manuscripts and pedantic details of
dating, sometimes commencing stories with dry anecdotes how he obtained such
and such a paper. The feeling of confidentiality, even intimacy, that James
could create, turns his readers into confidants, fellow academes, someone to be
told over a nice glass of sherry and a warm fireplace just why Professor
so-and-so had to retire last year, or why Mr somebody-or-other seemed to just
vanish. There’s often the carefully contrived feeling that he’s writing down a
conversation or experience of his, or a friend’s. James got a kick out of
reading his stories to fellows and friends around the university. It’s also
certainly an aspect of the matter-of-fact approach he takes, and indeed often
gives his work a unique quality, at once fustily old-fashioned and peculiarly
modern, even post-modern. Texts and accounts pile up, as if loosely arranged in
a pile on his desk, trying to add them up into a narrative, scanning the
evidence for the pivotal phrase, the revelatory moment. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">M.R. James</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; text-align: justify;">There is, in this
method, some anticipation in James of Jose Luis Borges’ games with fake
manuscripts and troves of imagined lore. ‘Count Magnus,’ one of James’ most
famous and anticipatory tales, coalesces into a narrative in such a fashion,
and indeed James states it upfront: these “papers out of which I have made a connected
story…assumed the character of a record of one single experience, and this
record was continued up to the very eve, almost, of its termination.” The
recent craze for “found footage” movies – </span><i style="font-family: Georgia; text-align: justify;">The Blair Witch Project, Rec,
Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, Chronicle,</i><span style="font-family: "georgia"; text-align: justify;"> </span><i style="font-family: Georgia; text-align: justify;">Paranormal Activity</i><span style="font-family: "georgia"; text-align: justify;">, </span><i style="font-family: Georgia; text-align: justify;">ad
nauseum</i><span style="font-family: "georgia"; text-align: justify;"> – which has proven particularly common in horror cinema, is based
around exactly the same method, and popular for exactly the same reason. As a
storytelling method, it raises an ambiguity, however spurious, over the
presumed nature of the narrative the audience is experiencing, bringing some
elements into crucial relief whilst helping obscure others. Wilkie Collins’ </span><i style="font-family: Georgia; text-align: justify;">The
Woman in White</i><span style="font-family: "georgia"; text-align: justify;"> and Bram Stoker’s </span><i style="font-family: Georgia; text-align: justify;">Dracula</i><span style="font-family: "georgia"; text-align: justify;"> exemplified the epistolary
novel as a method for making the supernatural seem credible, but James’
approach is consciously much less neat. Whereas </span><i style="font-family: Georgia; text-align: justify;">Dracula</i><span style="font-family: "georgia"; text-align: justify;"> makes literal
and clear what threat the living protagonists are dealing with, and arms them
with all the power of a rational society to meet it, ‘Count Magnus’ is
disturbing for its elision, even abstraction, of the threat. That ambiguity is
generated by James’ careful diffusion of the narrative in making the reader
conscious of how it’s been recorded, or, indeed, failed to be recorded. James
engages with the almost tactile nature of the document as a repository of
selective truth.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An illustration for 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad, <br />
frequently used as a cover illustration for James' books.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia";">James was the great suggester of horror fiction, what Val Lewton would be for the cinema, the firm
proponent that true interest lay in just what can’t be entirely identified,
quantified, or treated with a rational mind. James’ namesake Henry had laid the
building blocks for the psychological horror story with ‘The Turn of the
Screw,’ but both men digressed from taking such a tack too literally, knowing
the effect of such stories would degrade if reduced too obviously to symbolic
tales of repression and frustration, and probably such an approach would have
bored them anyway. And yet these qualities haunt M.R. James’ stories, stalking
his heroes with their dried sap and fusty introversion. James’ stories often
seem to ramble at first, partly because of his methods, as if the product of
some intelligent but disorganised mind and disinterest in the reader’s
immediate desires. ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ commences with a full, long
paragraph of Latin, an antiquarian’s nastiest joke on his average reader.
Structure and language often seem quaint, distracted, and yet his best stories
always seem to suddenly crystallise in some memorable piece of phrasing that
doesn’t violate the authorial voice and yet signals the presence of the
unnatural, an obtuse invocation of something intensely disquieting, with an
effect that can raise goose-bumps at the right hour of the morning. Examples
stick in my mind years after first reading them:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“…He could have sworn,
he said, though it sounded foolish, squirrel or not, it had more than four
legs.” – The Ash-Tree<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“There was something
about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close
quarters.” – Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“One remark is
universally made by those to whom I have shown the picture: ‘It was drawn from
life.’” – Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">“…But now his face was
not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off the bones.” – Count
Magnus<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">These lines are
generally benign out of context, gaining effect only after the mood James
creates has done its work. Only the last quote resembles a kind of gore money
shot found in movies, where the other quotes are more oblique, yet all contain
a queasy communication of unnatural physicality, made flesh out of the
perversities of nightmare figurations. As Nigel Kneale, one of many genre
writers who counted James among his influences, noted, James was always at his
most concise and effective when describing physical mutilation and abnormality.
The line from ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ comes at the end of a passage
describing an illustration in a medieval book, of a Satanic monstrosity so
perversely shaped a sane and lively contemporary expert in morphology couldn’t
sleep for nights after seeing it. The idea that it’s so real, so troubling,
that it can only have been drawn with the model standing before it, provides a
gleefully alarming punchline. H.P. Lovecraft often tried to achieve a similar
effect, to impart to the reader a sense of something so utterly inhuman that it
beggars both countenancing and description. Lovecraft is often mocked for
sometimes failing to achieve what he was going for, which indicates perhaps how
skilled James was. He never made the mistake of describing too much. The use of
the most seemingly bland, inexact word imaginable, “something,” in the quote
from ‘Oh, Whistle,’ is James’ coup there, conjuring a disturbing image for the
reader without anything concrete: everyone can fill in their own notion of
alarming locomotion. The thing with more than four legs that mysteriously stalks
the estate in ‘The Ash-Tree’ proves, in the climax, to be a spider: nothing so
unnatural in that, except that the spiders, when uncovered, prove to be
poisonous brutes the size of a king crab. In ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,’
the treasure-hunting hero uncovers a horde of treasure, only for an unseen
monster to gasp him with a clammy sensation of cold flesh, unknowable numbers
of limbs, and wretched stench. James’ ability to concisely communicate a sense
of physical unease permeates so many of his tales that some commentators have
believed he was trying to work through a phobic dislike of all bodily contact.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLrfOFkRRxQh-ONFLIF4rUbT-e63t1eA33EhOS8BJPFRFyY9MW97qoH1BIWV03HwgKgPXbhwR9kuE5V4r8dsrRnXEqQTohiEKSmyHlBQ2Cus0Sa3JLquyH3DqnW2L3gbpe7jCJHoUS9dE/s1600/Magnus_Gabriel_De_la_Gardie_%2528ur_Svenska_Familj-Journalen%2529.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLrfOFkRRxQh-ONFLIF4rUbT-e63t1eA33EhOS8BJPFRFyY9MW97qoH1BIWV03HwgKgPXbhwR9kuE5V4r8dsrRnXEqQTohiEKSmyHlBQ2Cus0Sa3JLquyH3DqnW2L3gbpe7jCJHoUS9dE/s1600/Magnus_Gabriel_De_la_Gardie_%2528ur_Svenska_Familj-Journalen%2529.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Count Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, the inspiration for James' character.<br />
He was the Lord High Treasurer of Sweden 1652-1660.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia";">‘Count Magnus’ begins,
as usual, in a conversational manner, as the narrator, James “himself,” imparts
how he assembled the tale from many documents, whilst mentioning that the
reason he now possesses them thanks to a stroke of fortune which, however, he
can’t reveal until the story’s end. The protagonist of his tale, Wraxhall, is
only vaguely rescued from the obscurity of the written word and the fragmentary
nature of the evidence; even his first name isn’t given, and the sorts of
accidents that render a historian’s work frustratingly hard, in this case a
fire that consumed a repository, have conspired to keep Wraxhall’s background
all the more obscure. A professional writer with scholarly interests, Wraxhall
embarked upon writing a guide book for English tourists venturing to Sweden,
having already written one on his time in Brittany. James takes a poke at the
fad for such books in the 1840s and ‘50s, a time when the idea of recreational
travel was becoming more possible for burgeoning middle class folk in Britain,
and explains the formula for writing such books: “reported conversations with
intelligent foreigners, racy innkeepers and garrulous peasants.” James’
sideswipe at a dated version of Lonely Planet and the well-manicured paths of
popular travel gives both an aptly mundane background to his story, a hint of satire,
and also a digression of mood that’s a familiar part of his method. Wraxhall,
James goes on to explain, travelled widely in Sweden before visiting a hamlet
in Vestergothland, where he wanted to investigate a large archive kept by a
prominent local family, at their manor house, known as Råbäck. Out of deference
to the family’s respectability, he only goes so far as to refer to them by the
name of one of their antecedent clans, De La Gardie.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Loneliness is a keynote
of ‘Count Magnus’ – loneliness, rootlessness, exposure, and finally
desperation. Wraxhall is a forgotten being, albeit one who, in his time, was
successful, but untethered to any hearth or heart, past middle-age and “very
much alone in the world.” James notes that “he had, it seems no settled abode
in England, but was a denizen of hotels and boarding-houses.” He declines an
offer to stay with the De La Gardies and instead takes up in a hotel a mile
away from the manor, a consequential choice. Wraxhall’s intention to write a
usefully middling book is twisted back on itself, as he all but disappears
within his travel notes, with their seemingly inane lists of fellow passengers.
James folds the narrative inwards like origami until Wraxhall becomes only a
distant, haunting memory of strangers of a frantic man who died mysteriously
and gruesomely. Whilst sifting through the De La Gardie archive, he learnt
unusual things about the founder of the family’s fortunes, Count Magnus, whose
body rests securely in a large sarcophagus in the church situated halfway
between manor and hotel, in the midst of a private forest Magnus used as a game
reserve. So zealous was Magnus about the inviolability of his property and
protecting it from usurpers that he burnt down the houses of neighbours, with
whole families inside, and earned infamy for vicious reprisals to a peasant
rebellion. Yes, Magnus was a right charmer, but for Wraxhall, as for most any
inquisitive contemporary person safe in their vantage centuries hence, horror
and tyranny have become sideshow. Discovering that Magnus apparently dabbled in
alchemy and magic on top of such ruthless aristocratic behaviour “only made him
a more picturesque figure.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Varnhem Abbey, the real resting place of Magnus</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Count Magnus should be,
like Wraxhall, a mere vestige. Like the writer, he is held firmly in the grip
of the past, extant to posterity only through his works, writings, and legend.
But here emerges qualitative difference: Magnus is force of nature and force
outside of nature, as desolating and consuming as nuclear fallout, and the
totems of his existence have terrible power. Far more so than Wraxhall, who can
barely dominate a page of his own narrative. Wraxhall is hapless Everyman.
Magnus is extraordinary lord, a product of an age with a different, less
constrained idea of power, made immortal by different concepts of existence.
Magnus’s portrait, Wraxhall records, depicts an extraordinarily ugly man. His
book of cabalistic and alchemic research, which the unlucky writer finds in the
De La Gardie archive, contains references to the unholiest lore. His body still
lies in a sealed sarcophagus in the church, held in check by three massive
padlocks. His house and grounds are still inviolate. Upon the sarcophagus are
engraved unusual designs, including one that depicts a mysterious, diminutive
form chasing a hapless man in a forest, at the direction of an onlooking
master. Of the pursuer, we’re told, “the only part of the form which projected
from that shelter was not shaped like any hand or arm. Mr Wraxhall compares it
to the tentacle of a devil-fish.” Holy hentai, Batman. But most of all the
power of Magnus is sensed the effervescent fear apparent in the locals when
questions about Magnus’ activities are raised. The terror engendered by Magnus
in his tenants and neighbours when alive was bad enough, but his malign reputation
still reverberates. Wraxhall’s enquiries are, in what is now a familiar pattern
for genre fans, deflected and delayed by garrulous men and helpful priests who
suddenly clam up and avoid further questions when some particularly grim or
evil subject is broached, especially that matter of the Black Pilgrimage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Like Arthur Conan Doyle,
who wrote fine some fantastic stories situated on similar fault lines of the
modern consciousness to his, James was essentially a late Victorian writer, but
one who also kept producing stories until his death in the 1930s, and so helped
mediate his era’s struggle to accept the coexistence of emergent modernity’s
sanitising urges and nagging cultural spectres. The capacity of the Victorians
to be both archly rational and airily religious stemmed from a zeitgeist very
different to the one James, with his knowledge of the arcane world of medieval
and classical literature, knew underpinned much of the European intellectual
tradition. In studied contrast to the sun-dappled, pacific moods of the
tea-sipping Anglican sensibility, James dredges up pages torn from ancient
alchemy textbooks, points of lore from near-forgotten grimoires, relics from
before Hastings, and obscure evils from the darkest corners of Mosaic and early
Christian mythologies, like the monster from ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’, a
Solomonian grotesque that seems to eat its way out of the page containing it to
stalk the milquetoast sons of men inhabiting the future. James delights in
suggesting such scarcely plumbed depths from ages when distinctions were far
more permeable and the zone of religion, science, magic, philosophy, and
politics grew in tangled, troublingly intimate awareness of each-other.
Lovecraft synthesised a body of imagined lore to prop up his morbid universe.
James merely refers with sinister vagueness to such a body of possibly imagined
yet authentic-sounding volumes from the dark vaults of Medieval Europe’s covert
intelligentsia violating boundaries of presumed reality. Wraxhall records
Magnus as possessing “the book of the Phoenix, book of the Thirty Words, book
of the Toad, book of Miriam, Turba philosophorum, and so forth.” At the heart
of the story’s mystery is a genuine piece of Biblical lore, the village of
Chorazin in the Holy Lands, where the Antichrist will supposedly be born.
Magnus went on his “Black Pilgrimage” there to kneel in obeisance before a
Satanic emissary, and “brought something or someone back with him.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN-AAv6ZurF2E8omv6Y4sin_M4lSf4nPQcn8PjS1vd8lLhgGwKjxWmBp19u0dFImP2bdu483R8xfoJzkdog9idnRknPQxkbwqkkdO2XplShvOUbyP5glKmNt8ZX4j8iuq_bPt1OGW9yAo/s1600/large_magnus1by+Paul+Lowe.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN-AAv6ZurF2E8omv6Y4sin_M4lSf4nPQcn8PjS1vd8lLhgGwKjxWmBp19u0dFImP2bdu483R8xfoJzkdog9idnRknPQxkbwqkkdO2XplShvOUbyP5glKmNt8ZX4j8iuq_bPt1OGW9yAo/s1600/large_magnus1by+Paul+Lowe.gif" width="438" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Count Magnus' by Paul Lowe</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia";">Could it be that Magnus
returned to his home with his own personal devil, that disturbing imp portrayed
on the side of his sarcophagus? Well, duh. Small wonder that Magnus in all his
cruelty and malignancy emerges far more vividly than Wraxhall from his
artefacts, to the point where Wraxhall falls under his spell, quite literally
it seems. “Ah, Count Magnus, there you are,” he utters fatefully (and fatally)
in a seeming jest whilst gazing at the Count’s mausoleum: “I should dearly like
to see you.” Later, “James” informs us, Wraxhall recounted an odd interlude of
distraction bordering on compulsion, recovering to find himself “singing or
chanting some such words as, “Are you awake, Count Magnus?” or, “Are you there,
Count Magnus?”’ There’s an echo here of the repeated name that manifests Clive
Barker’s Candyman, with a similar note of reference to both religious liturgy
and childish invocation. “He had not no eyes for his surroundings, no
perception of the evening scents of the woods or the evening light on the
lake,” James notes as Wraxhall is drawn towards the church for one of his
dissociative reveries, drawing the reader’s attention to imagine precisely
those things whilst describing Wraxhall’s state, a fine example of James’
minimalist skill.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">‘Count Magnus’ is
interesting not least because of its resonance with that more famous undead
literary count; indeed, the anthologist Peter Haining once included the story
in a collection entitled <i>The Rivals of Dracula</i>, where I first read it.
As in Stoker’s book, a Briton travels into an unfamiliar locale in one of
Europe’s extreme places, and encounters a supernatural remnant of an
aristocracy that once lorded over a Europe so different to the new society, and
yet whose powerful grip on the mind and reality of the structure of that
society can still prove staggeringly powerful. Like Dracula, based on Vlad ‘the
Impaler,’ Count Magnus De La Gardie is associated with the past’s harshness.
Except that where Vlad was a religious warrior in a time of invasion, Magnus is
characterised as a vicious oppressor, who seems to have actively sought as much
power in the spiritual world as he had in the human, his hubris both
transcendingly mighty and amazingly petty and greedy (a common trait of those
who set evil in motion in James’ tales). Unlike Dracula, Magnus remains a
threatening cypher, a black figure at the far end of the path in the twilight.
James’ manipulation of viewpoint and storytelling texture is most pronounced
when Wraxhall finally extracts the source of his innkeeper Nielsen’s anxiety in
discussing Magnus. Nielsen cautiously offers up his own anecdote from “my
Grandfather’s time – that is, ninety-nine years ago.” Another layer of
storytelling, another layer of time, and yet here the presence of threat
becomes tangibly immediate. “I can tell you this one little tale, not any more.
You must not ask anything when I have done.” Nielsen presents details like
James himself, hard and impersonal, descriptive but unelaborate, telling
everything by only telling what was certain. Nielsen recounts his grandfather’s
story of two men who decided to mock Magnus and violate his domain, that
private forest, and culminates in pure horror movie shtick of recollections of
dreadful screams (“just as if the most inside piece of his soul was twisted out
of him”) and mocking, inhuman laughter. The morning after finds one man driven
mad, pushing away what he still imagines is threatening him, and the other man,
the good-looking one, the one who no longer had a face: “The eyes of Anders
Bjornsen were looking up, because there was nothing to close over them.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Yikes. By James’
standards this is gory, spectacular stuff, but wrought with an exacting skill,
like the use, in the sentence I quoted earlier, of the word “sucked” in noting
the mutilation of Bjornsen’s face. Not a cliché like eaten, gnawed, or ripped,
but <i>sucked</i>. What the hell kind off unholy creation could suck a man’s
face off, we’re left to wonder. Perhaps even more effective is the description
of the reaction of the men present – so appalled were they that they buried
Bjornsen on the spot – and those who have been told this tale, all of whom have
its baleful intimations engraved upon their memories. This note recurs again in
the story’s finale. Nielsen’s anecdote is a work of artisanal concision,
delineated with pronouncements that describe the edge of taboo and atrocity,
recalling an event so terrible it still chills the blood of people 99 years
later, and ending with the bluntness of a smash cut in a movie, for the story
continues the next day, without note of what sort of night’s sleep Wraxhall had
after hearing that. Not too bad, it seems, as Wraxhall remains ignorant of
threat until it’s too late. Too late being when, about to depart for England,
he stops for a farewell visit to Magnus’ sarcophagus from which the padlocks
keep somehow falling off (a touch pilfered by Terence Fisher and Peter Bryan for
<i>The Brides of Dracula</i>, 1960) in defiance of physical fact. The last one
clangs to the floor at his feet, and “there was the sound of metal hinges
creaking, and (he) distinctly saw the lid shifting upwards.” Bad enough, but
Wraxhall further describes that “there was something more than I have written
that alarmed me, but whether it was sound or sight I am not able to remember.
What is this thing I have done?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Wraxhall’s subsequent
flight from Sweden and journey home dissolves is described only in a peculiar
series of lists he makes of fellow passengers, and James’ inference from his
handwriting that a mere few days of sailing reduced him to “a broken man.” What
he was looking for becomes clear: a tall man under an old-fashioned hat and a
short companion in a hooded cloak. Magnus and his familiar, pursuing the
scholar, for whatever reason, whether for a petty slight or in maliciously
black-humoured fulfilment of his wish. The undead master and malignant imp dog
Wraxhall’s footsteps until he meets his fate in a village, Belchamp Saint Paul.
The sparseness of the narrative style here, with James’ bare-boned,
inference-laden telling from scant details, somehow manages to wring the worst
kind of existential despair from the situation. Wraxhall finds himself
spiralling unavoidably towards a fatal encounter, with the bitterest of ironies:
this man who has no home and knows only boarding houses and hotels can find
lodgings in the village but no aid, for even the parson’s away for some reason,
and we’re left to imagine a Wraxhall in his final hours quivering in terror at
what will inevitably be his horrific end. “What can he do but lock his door and
cry to God?” James questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Nor does James provide
any final escape: “And the jury that viewed the body, seven of ‘em did, none of
them wouldn’t speak of what they see,” he recounts. Note the shift to the
regional dialect, James’ last twist of technique, as he now quotes an
eyewitness (and not even distinguished by quote marks), another layer of
storytelling and this one the most immediate and (falsely, of course) authentic,
spoken to James’ own ear, or so he would have us believe. And how did he piece
together the bulk of Wraxhall’s narrative? Why, he happened to inherit the house
where Wraxhall found his last lodging, so benighted by the event that no-one
would live in it, so he had it demolished, uncovering Wraxhall’s papers. Nice
one, Monty. James wasn’t always a downbeat or unsentimental writer, and some of
his great endings, as tales like ‘Casting the Runes’ and ‘Lost Hearts’ provide
memorable defeats for evil, as does the closest thing I think he ever wrote to
a romantic narrative, in ‘The Tractate Middoth’. But never in James’ work is
the feeling that the forces of the supernatural are more than briefly
containable. No silver bullets, no stakes through the heart, no handy
exorcisms. Often his tales end with the protagonists wisely repairing whatever
violation they’ve committed and retreating gratefully into obscurity. This
quality makes him still feel modern and vital in the horror genre, and one
reason why his influence seems to me to be everywhere in it today, even in
product from another culture, like those signal J–Horror works, <i>The Ring </i>movies.
Whereas Bram Stoker demonstrated that the new world of mercantile bourgeoisie
could forge alliance with deferential aristocracy and the new prophets of
science to defeat an emissary of an evil variously identified as foreign,
bygone, and tyrannical, James offers no such solace, nor even a grip on the
phenomenon. Magnus and his familiar are finally as alien as Stanislaw Lem’s
planet in <i>Solaris</i>, as cryptic and unforgiving as Kafka’s unseen forces,
as unstoppable as Lovecraft’s Elder Gods. Magnus is the pure spirit of the
past’s evil, but also the future’s, blank, abstract, and implacable, sure as
death. Wraxhall does at least achieve one small victory. No-one who reads his
tale would ever make the mistake of wanting to meet Count Magnus.</span><span style="font-family: "georgia";"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia";"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia";"><i>Note: this piece first appeared on the website </i><a href="http://wwwbillblog.blogspot.com/">The Kind of Face You Hate</a><i>.</i></span></div>
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Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-18500464536035568412011-11-05T21:47:00.002+11:002014-02-03T04:21:56.830+11:00What He Rightly Is: King Lear as King and Man, Parent and Child<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The Tragedie of King Lear</i>, by William Shakespeare, 1606.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_zErEuwfHYkaOa0KHfdbgvFbBOK3qjHCWUic_7xwNPdQz-q4cj0hs-BFgLH2gzNJhuUeW4L2RucqZcQqKI9lt8ZjN0AWpcUdwcoJoMrbD8t6Ps5ZXPobTmOJVKdhiAZQ7bzvmjH0VRSc/s1600/The+Tragedie+of+King+Lear+with+woodcuts+by+Claire+Van+Vliet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_zErEuwfHYkaOa0KHfdbgvFbBOK3qjHCWUic_7xwNPdQz-q4cj0hs-BFgLH2gzNJhuUeW4L2RucqZcQqKI9lt8ZjN0AWpcUdwcoJoMrbD8t6Ps5ZXPobTmOJVKdhiAZQ7bzvmjH0VRSc/s640/The+Tragedie+of+King+Lear+with+woodcuts+by+Claire+Van+Vliet.jpg" height="640" width="592" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Woodcut illustration for "The Tragedy of King Lear" by Claire Van Vliet</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Come, sir.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I would you would make use of your good wisdom,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Whereof I know you are fraught, and put away</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">These dispositions, which of late transport you</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">From what you rightly are. (1.4.213-17)</span></div>
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<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Of the many themes <i>King Lear</i> encompasses, perhaps the most essential is that of the
disintegration of order. Natural order, familial order, political order, even
finally in the psyche, language, and the body: all fall prey to a process of test
and failure that almost, but not completely, destroys the settled world found
at the play’s outset. Most fundamental is the fateful fall of Lear himself,
both representative and singular man, a confluence of social and metaphysical orders.
This fall, whilst foreshadowed from the outset, commences proper in the lengthy,
subtle, crucial Act I, Scene iv, as the forces that will destroy Lear and his legacy
begin to resolve. In the course of this scene, the breach between Lear and his
daughter Goneril properly manifests, and the course of the subsequent drama
takes on, from this point, a quality of inevitability, diving towards a nadir
of human behaviour in which a handful of exemplary characters labour and largely
fail to save each-other from oblivion. What Lear “rightly” is, as king and
patriarch, gives way to the vagaries of old age and the insidious potency of
the inheriting generation, and small acts of offence and betrayal snowball into
calamity. This scene therefore presents the dramatic fulcrum of the first part
of the play, whilst raising the question of just what Lear rightly is, pivotal to comprehending
a vast moral drama, with subsequent dramas foreshadowed in the characters’
words and attitudes in this early scene.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Detail from "Cordelia Disinherited" by John Rogers Herbert</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 24px;">At the outset, one settled order is concluding,
and the order that will replace it is the crucial question. Lear’s famous
solution, to divide his kingdom for each of his three daughters, Goneril,
Regan, and Cordelia, immediately begins to go awry when Cordelia fails to play
the game Lear has made an unstated condition of his settlement. In Scene iv,
the cracks in Lear’s solution truly begin to show. Characters are now polarising
according to the sides they will now take, with </span><st1:country-region style="line-height: 24px; text-align: justify;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kent</st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 24px; text-align: justify;">, appearing for the first time
in disguise, ingratiating himself for the purpose of protecting the king. His
opposite, Oswald, the archetypal venal courtier, is introduced. So too is the
Fool, a voice of honesty strained through songs and jokes, meditating upon
Lear’s ill-wisdom. Goneril, offended by her father’s retinue, plots to create a
crisis that will enable her to lay down the law. </span><st1:city style="line-height: 24px; text-align: justify;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Albany</st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 24px; text-align: justify;">, as he will continue to, equivocates,
pleads innocence, and lets others fight for him. Lear rejects his daughter’s presumptions,
and storms out. On the level of exposition, this scene sees much that could go
wrong in the opening’s settlement begin to do so, whilst fundamental ironies
rise to the surface. </span><st1:country-region style="line-height: 24px; text-align: justify;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kent</st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 24px; text-align: justify;">,
ill-treated and stripped of all that is his, nonetheless proves himself
peerlessly loyal. The Fool offers telling sense, making explicit that Lear is
the real fool for putting himself at his daughter’ mercy. Goneril, having
mouthed pretty speeches as required of her, now reveals herself as manipulative
and disrespectful. By the scene’s end Lear is beating his own head, realising
his folly (1.4.272-3), and the monarch of supreme power is literally on the
road to becoming a semi-crazed vagabond.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">Scene from Grigori Kozintsev's <i>Korol Lear </i>(1971): <span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 24px;">Jüri Järvet as Lear, Valentina Shendrikova as Cordelia</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span lang="EN-AU">King
Lear</span></i><span lang="EN-AU"> is defined by its relative
abstractness and remoteness from all but the broadest political references,
based as it is in the accepted conventions of folk-tale-derived material
(Bradbrook, 1935: 40). This quality however gives the play scope to explore
notions like royalty, loyalty, duty, family, and hierarchy in a less hampered
context. This is the Tragedy of King Lear above all. The disparity between Lear
the man and Lear the king is apparent, and a certain alienation of one from the
other is an aspect of Lear’s character, as Regan notes his lack of
self-knowledge (1.1.293-4), and yet their simultaneous unity cannot be ignored.
Even in his now aged and intemperate state, Lear is at the outset still a
vessel of great power: voice of law, partitioner of the natural and social
worlds, a dragon, a father-god, “the <i>summum</i>
of all that culture is” (Long, 1976: 170). A fundamental discrepancy, of the
mortality of the man and the immutable nature of his role, leads to an ultimate
crisis in this culture: we have the “spectacle of a king who </span>overthrows his own kingdom” (Epstein, 1993: 6). The
lone voice of tolerated dissent is his Fool, who counters Lear’s
misapprehensions through metaphoric jests and allusive mockery, and his concise
description of the lot of the honest: “Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be
whipped out.” (1.4.114-15) Lear’s power, however, cannot do much to prevent him
from walking into Goneril’s design, or avoid justifying her subsequent acts,
with his aggression towards Oswald and his knights’ general intransigence. When
Goneril upbraids Lear for his “dispositions”, taking precedent over his “good
wisdom”, it is already clear what these dispositions entail, after Lear’s
summary fury in exiling Cordelia and Kent. These are not wise acts, and the
lack of wisdom will reverberate throughout the play.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuUfnYQK3aaUejKd5q5H7Vcf760nv5BuWNKlzq9DWvvh75GjOrqeWo1IVu2v1uH8j30vEMYUdmoLVOj9u3dS9o5dmMRrK8UeB5wnTdd8e0B2MZhC3GVZMEiVyyE73axTr5wTHkvP3FonU/s1600/kle_0704_gallery_11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuUfnYQK3aaUejKd5q5H7Vcf760nv5BuWNKlzq9DWvvh75GjOrqeWo1IVu2v1uH8j30vEMYUdmoLVOj9u3dS9o5dmMRrK8UeB5wnTdd8e0B2MZhC3GVZMEiVyyE73axTr5wTHkvP3FonU/s640/kle_0704_gallery_11.jpg" height="640" width="640" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Romola Garai as Cordelia and Ian McKellen as Lear, in a 2007 RSC production</span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lear compounds his mistakes in I, iv. <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kent</st1:place></st1:country-region> ingratiates
himself with the king by indulging his prejudices and participating in his sufficiently
offensive antics. Lear would not have tolerated them; Goneril does not, either.
Lear is no longer, as Goneril’s words indicate what he once was, a man of sound
strategic wit, now irascible and tetchy. He has pinned his fate on what is
essentially an act of faith, that his daughters’ words and actions must accord.
Lear is here inseparable from his self-concept as king and the way meaning and
form flows out from his person, and his mistake is to believe this is felt by
all others to be incumbent upon them. Even his contradictions and switches of
mood are inviolate: “I have sworn; I am firm” (1.1.245). His idea of what his
daughters are for is made clear to Cordelia: “Better thou / Hadst not been born
than not to have pleased me better.” Lear’s heirs are extensions of his own unbounded
ego, and his power is a cultural maxim. “Lear is (a) character who…asks us to
think about the psyche of a ruler from the inside out, of what it must be like
to consider yourself godlike even as your body and your children betray you”
(McEachern, 2010: 192). Good and evil in the play are subsequently defined by
individuals’ relationship with that maxim, even as it is tested and found
wanting. The heroic characters, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Cordelia</st1:city>,
<st1:country-region w:st="on">Kent</st1:country-region></st1:place>, and Edgar,
display unswerving fealty even when mistreated. Goneril, Regan, Edmund, and <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Cornwall</st1:place></st1:city> see value in wresting
such power for themselves, and are willing to ignore sentiment to do so. And
yet in that act they annihilate the very purpose of this leadership caste,
which is to define and uphold certain faiths. All that is left otherwise is
mere power. In <st1:place w:st="on">I.</st1:place> iv, Goneril begins this
process of disentangling the legal and moral shape of a world, much as the
bastard Edmund has already vowed (1.2) to accomplish, which Lear has been the
guardian and definer of.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgupCoeij_OAOeiQx-p_214dzK2k1snwP0hizX_2f-5L0lPw-nkdXes-U0-bIlKjeWVQd84a3Sv4BC34RPILwokKaG4aHHerz3bKyWKXSPwUlC_Ed2thzcUYw1oHhtH3ePtJGnr4qxF1as/s1600/Paul+Scofield+%25285%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgupCoeij_OAOeiQx-p_214dzK2k1snwP0hizX_2f-5L0lPw-nkdXes-U0-bIlKjeWVQd84a3Sv4BC34RPILwokKaG4aHHerz3bKyWKXSPwUlC_Ed2thzcUYw1oHhtH3ePtJGnr4qxF1as/s640/Paul+Scofield+%25285%2529.jpg" height="462" width="640" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">Scene from Peter Brook's <i style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">King Lear</i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"> (1971): Alan Webb as Gloucester, Paul Scofield as Lear</span></span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The irony of Goneril’s request for Lear’s “good
wisdom” is then clear, in that she has no desire for Lear to return to what he
“rightly” is, or rather, her definition of that is not one he would recognise.
She wants him to behave in a becoming fashion, and adapt to her regime. She is
quick to put his anger down to a man giving way to senility: “Let his
disposition have that scope / as dotage gives it” (1.4.295-6). Lear has no wish
to adapt. For one thing, it is virtually incompatible with the role he is
defined by: the king is still the king, a fact which betrays a false assumption
in his settlement. His exiling of Cordelia and Kent is the act of a man used to
no limits on his power. But Lear is subsequently a reactive rather than decisive
force. “The King himself destroys his own kingship, and the remainder of the
play shows the restoration of that kingship in him” (Epstein, 1993: 4). Lear’s
motives for the division of his kingdom are unstated beyond simply making
provision for his inevitably brief future, and yet implicit in it is awareness
of his own failing capacity to govern. That he will be alive, and yet no longer
an omnicompetent ruler, presents an inevitable tension, which he exacerbates in
his insistence on maintaining the privileges of overlordship. Lear’s legacy can
be seen as an attempt to avoid making painful choices. He gives up power, but
not the form of it; he gives away his country, but instead of favouring either
of the most powerful lords in his realm, Albany and Cornwall, connected with
his eldest two daughters, he divides it between the three daughters, a balanced
act immediately undone because of Lear’s rash temper. From one perspective,
Goneril’s sentiments about the behaviour of Lear and his retinue are entirely
understandable. And yet she capably avoids the one real price she had to pay
for gaining half a kingdom. The breach of this condition is the germ for a
tragedy that destroys a governing class.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNXLQO0NfNsfOnCXsy1pqVOGABmb7eZ3DAg2EUq1BhDVmQe5pFQg_sLyv7xsNLm4FdmeLNYQ4iYItyedUpZGGtVhPGlcqq2ZLAlF-W9u8TC8bQq8mkde3jESJlYIscNbRnmky1k-mv5NM/s1600/13_West%252C+Benjamin_+King+Lear_+1979.476.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNXLQO0NfNsfOnCXsy1pqVOGABmb7eZ3DAg2EUq1BhDVmQe5pFQg_sLyv7xsNLm4FdmeLNYQ4iYItyedUpZGGtVhPGlcqq2ZLAlF-W9u8TC8bQq8mkde3jESJlYIscNbRnmky1k-mv5NM/s640/13_West%252C+Benjamin_+King+Lear_+1979.476.jpg" height="480" width="640" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"King Lear" by Benjamin West</span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The roles of family are here irreducibly linked
with those of royalty. Lear’s betrayed prestige is both political and
patriarchal; likewise his exile. For daughters to cause their elderly father to
wander off in the rainy night would be seen as a failure of care, no matter the
era and reason. It is also in this context an act of treason, albeit one Lear’s
own lapses have allowed. Lear is at least canny enough to recognise Goneril’s
game almost immediately: his riposte to her entreaty, “Are you our daughter?”,
comes well after he has sensed the wane of deference and respect for his party
amongst her retinue, which he has resisted interpreting until now as purposeful
aggression (1.4.68-72). His question recognises the distance between this
Goneril and her earlier, fawning filial piety. Lear makes it plain that he was
bargaining for a kind of treatment that he now sees he will not receive. Father
and daughter now talk past one-another. Goneril has engineered a situation to
stoke her father’s anger and justify her own; he refuses to reply to her
according to “good wisdom” and instead will not recognise her. These stances
can only have one outcome, and Lear is the clearer loser. His savage invocation
to nature (1.4.278-292) for barrenness to be visited upon Goneril, concludes
with the most telling phrase that “sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / to
have a thankless child.” Here Lear’s pathos as both father and king is clear. Lear,
as a lawmaker and supreme figure, sees his own fall as a fall for all humanity,
invoking the wrath of gods on his daughter’s womb, and then at mankind in
general (3.2.1-24), before, in his “mental fragmentation” (Brailowsky, 2009:
208), giving way to a complete dissolution of moral and sexual propriety which
is, by his standards, an embrace of total nihilism even before the cast begins
to die like flies. That development may in fact, considering the potency of
Lear’s relationship as king with the metaphysical order, be rooted in his
nihilistic curses: his invocations on mankind carry weight with the gods he and
others see working behind human actions.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL5I7XOgxYsduJaXnU8aYAhWmgc23eFK_5t2Y4YLVXbqa2tkD9k3DUe_1E09klI3Z7S9_ubYawswTLQtfn4EiUDWKzOi3s1oLv9CgXzJ20Am9KwIGjX2bzYoLiT6WkoZis-kMga0TLHSE/s1600/King-Lear-Cordelia-Farewell.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL5I7XOgxYsduJaXnU8aYAhWmgc23eFK_5t2Y4YLVXbqa2tkD9k3DUe_1E09klI3Z7S9_ubYawswTLQtfn4EiUDWKzOi3s1oLv9CgXzJ20Am9KwIGjX2bzYoLiT6WkoZis-kMga0TLHSE/s640/King-Lear-Cordelia-Farewell.jpg" height="290" width="640" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"Cordelia's Farewell" by Edwin Austin Abbey</span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In I, iv, the Fool teases Lear with his mixture
of wit and astringent truth, perhaps most enlightening in this screed: “Thou
mad’st thy daughters thy mothers; for when thou gav’st them the rod, and put’st
down thine own breeches” (1.4.174-76). The inversion of the power relationship
of parent and child that is an effect of aging is here given new urgency as a
more severe inversion, that of master and supplicant, looms. The threat that
Lear will essentially be a child, coddled and scolded by daughter-mothers and
reduced to dependence, is a fate he rejects with self-destructive fury. Lear’s
settlement again tried to avoid this, but instead he loses all support. The
king, defined by his office and power, completely stripped of all trappings of
rank and power, returns to a state of childishness, garbing himself in flowers,
and rejecting previous moral maxims, newly instilled with “compassion for sin
as well as suffering” (Granville-Barker, 1970: 43). When he is finally rescued
and awakens before Cordelia, he is both a very old man and a young child,
Cordelia both true daughter and mother-blesser, the only force who can restore
him to sanity, sanctity, and kingliness. Captured by their enemies, Lear looks
forward to sharing childhood with Cordelia in jail, a rebirth in being relieved
of all responsibility and laughing at the courtly world he so recently headed. Yet
the next-to-final image of him is almost motherly now in himself, “a reversal of
the mother-son axis in the imagery of the Deposition as depicted in countless paintings
and statues of the Italian Renaissance” (Riemer, 1994: 16), carrying Cordelia
in his arms, now a vessel of world-sorrow. Moreover, the plot completes the
inversion of the natural in the fashion that Goneril and Regan, having failed
in their responsibilities towards a male patriarch, destroy each-other rather
in competition for a male pretender, Edmund. Edmund, the anti-social force, is a
perfect fetish object for the two daughters.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: justify;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOX1A2mRfU17bJXlKxBPt5lWpE7zX62i8GFH3BonTaO_udbwZYbUZQfVgZ2KXkpo0xRJVaacLQB4h7-IdV5YQQXJv7fYVl8Uc2ZNuRbE_4lZxXSJbMRZMgAyIyw-b5FAaEHGA6S3Vk_Lg/s1600/hurt-olivier.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOX1A2mRfU17bJXlKxBPt5lWpE7zX62i8GFH3BonTaO_udbwZYbUZQfVgZ2KXkpo0xRJVaacLQB4h7-IdV5YQQXJv7fYVl8Uc2ZNuRbE_4lZxXSJbMRZMgAyIyw-b5FAaEHGA6S3Vk_Lg/s640/hurt-olivier.jpg" height="640" width="466" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Scene from <i>King Lear</i>, 1982 Granada TV production: Laurence Olivier as Lear, John Hurt as The Fool</span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lear’s rhetorical failure to recognise his
daughter elucidates how sight, and its corollaries recognition and discernment,
becomes a crucial motif. Lear has already failed to recognise <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kent</st1:place></st1:country-region> as an
honest friend and then at all. The same with Cordelia, whilst the borrowed verbal
facades of Goneril and Regan have entirely fooled him. Coming after Goneril’s entreaty,
this failure of recognition highlights the constant alteration and alternation
of roles throughout the play. King to vagabond, earl to exile, bastard son to
almost-prince, beloved offspring to hated enemies: characters remain constant
and yet their roles and apparels are in flux, a dangerous state for a society
defined by roles. Whilst disguise is an art of the wicked, it’s also a survival
tool and weapon for the wronged, as it is for Kent and Edgar, and these
disguises both increase the intrigue and the emotional complexity of the play (Bradbrook,
1935: 67). In such a world, the notion that anyone is rightly something seems
almost absurd, when identities can so easily be blurred, usurped, stolen,
adopted. Gloucester’s eyes, instruments which he abuses himself for failing to
tell the difference between good son and bad, are the targets of grim
punishment, in a scene where “the emphasis immediately shifts from blinding to
things which must not be seen” (Peat, 1985: 104), redolent of crossing the
boundaries of taboo, things that are against the shape of the human and world. <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Gloucester</st1:place></st1:city> is then given
a redemption by his son Edgar in a play-act contrivance, as the loss of
physical sight gives way to a clearer vision of the truth. Lear’s own
prescription in the midst of his derangement: “A man may see how this world
goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears” (4.6.151-2). The Fool’s constant wordplay
dresses and undresses the truth, and he gets whipped for all possible
interpretations of his words, for “his philosophy demands of him that he tell
the truth and abolish myths,” (Kott, 1967: 129) in a role that is at odds with Lear’s
as the proponent of form over truth. “These are biblical parables. The blind
see clearly, madmen tell the truth.” (Kott, 1967: 127) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There are bonds and feelings that finally do not
break, between Lear and Cordelia, Lear and <st1:country-region w:st="on">Kent</st1:country-region>,
Edgar and <st1:city w:st="on">Gloucester</st1:city>, and the servants who aid <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Gloucester</st1:place></st1:city>, and these
confirm the strength of deeper links between humans in the face of nihilistic
forces. These bonds, as well as the cleansing process of his alienation and
madness, partly redeem Lear from his foolishness and obstinacy, and yet the
play finally refuses to depict a world put right. Instead, like a broken gear,
the initial mutual lapses of wisdom and respect smash the entire mechanism. Justice
catches up with the wrongdoers, but the innocent and the misguided are also
victims, and therefore the meaning of the tale moves out of the stage of the
morality play and into a more urgent consideration of the ties and
responsibilities that construct a civilised world. The mighty, the guiltless,
the villainous: all become victims of a form of blindness that fails to
perceive the authentic and the sustaining. By the otherwise desolate finale,
Lear’s own life has undergone a simultaneous evolution and devolution, sifting
the ages and states of man in a desperate process of attempting to find just what
he rightly is, what any human then rightly is, attempting to bear the burden of
crushing sorrows and still, indeed, remain human.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><u>Bibliography</u></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Bradbrook, M. C. 1935, </span><i style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small; text-align: left;">, C.U.P., Cambridge.</span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Brailowsky, Yan 2009, ‘“The Lusty Stealth Of Nature”: Desire And Bastardry In King Lear’, <i>And that’s true too: New Essays on King Lear</i>, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, UK.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Epstein, Paul 1998, ‘The purgation of the Shakespearean hero’, in <i>Animus: The Canadian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities</i>, Vol. 3, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Corner Brook, Newfoundland.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Granville-Barker, Harley 1970, ‘King Lear’, in <i>Prefaces to Shakespeare: King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra</i>, B.T. Batsford, London.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Kott, Jan (trans. Taborski, B.) 1967, <i>Shakespeare Our Contemporary</i>, 2nd Edition, Methuen and Co, London.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Long, Michael 1976, <i>The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy</i>, Methuen and Co, London. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">McEachern, Claire 2010, ‘Shakespeare, religion, and politics’, in <i>The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare</i>, eds Margareta de Grazia & Stanley Wells, 2nd edition, C.U.P., Cambridge.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Peat, Derek 1985, ‘Responding Blindly? A Reading of a scene in King Lear’, <i>Sydney Studies</i>, Vol. 20, University of Sydney, Sydney.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Reimer, A. P. 1994, ‘The Promised End: Some Last Words on King Lear’, <i>Sydney Studies</i>, Vol. 10, University of Sydney, Sydney.</span></div>
Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-48442449624585804012011-07-15T16:11:00.003+10:002014-02-03T04:25:31.503+11:00Watching the Screw Turn: Henry James, Narrative Ambiguity, and the Battlefield of Interpretation<div>
<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 11pt;">‘The Turn of the Screw’, by Henry James, originally published serially in Colliers Weekly. Edition I read: <i>The Turn of the Screw: A Norton Critical Edition</i>, <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Norton</st1:city>, <st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state></st1:place>, 1966.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size: 10pt;">Henry James, in a 1913 charcoal sketch by John Singer Sargent</span></i><span lang="EN-AU">.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Henry James’ novella <i>The Turn of the Screw</i>, presents, on the face of it, an eerie ghost story. It recounts the experience of an unnamed young Governess, commissioned by a blithe young gentleman to take care of his orphaned nephew and niece, who finds herself the sole apparent observer of manifestations of a haunting around the two children and the large house of Bly they inhabit. The ghosts, she comes to believe, are those of Mr Quint and Miss Jessel, two former employees, who the Governess comes to believe wants to keep a grip on the children. This story, perhaps the most famous James ever wrote, has become since its publication the subject of argument as to whether it is a tale of psychological disintegration, or a plain tale of supernatural haunting. This argument is complicated by James’ own pronouncements on the subject, displaying his evident intent to write a literal ghost story, and, therefore, the legitimacy of the psychological interpretation has been forcibly denied. And yet it persists, partly because of questions of James’ motives for writing the story, but chiefly because of the ambiguity of James’ chosen writing style, the depth of his engagement with the problem of point of view, and the nature of the genre he was working in. Tales of the supernatural are all, arguably, metaphorical adventures into the realm of the psyche and the irrational, and therefore by working in the genre James invited such reinterpretation. James’s own announced intentions, to return vitality to the ghost story by minimising the fantastic, also concedes to an age in which credulity is best achieved through minimisation of the fantastic.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“In matters like this the work itself and not the author that is the ultimate authority,” Harold Goddard, one of the first to take up the psychological argument for interpreting the book, declared. Here arises one of the recurring problems of intention versus interpretation, which is central to so much contemporary literary study. “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash,” as Roland Barthes stated, and the idea that an author can have a grasp of every conceivable interpretation of a work is disputed. But so can the notion that an author is fixated on and aware of only one interpretation. James’ story is in itself an interpretation, of a ghost story he said was told to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less. James synthesised characters to act out the roles in such a fashion that pleased him and his opinion of how to make such a story believable and dramatic. One of James’ first decisions was to utilise a layered authorial voice, and reception of the story depends on this. James uses three levels of storytelling: that of the authorial “I”, recounting the gathering of people listening to ghost stories; the reading by Douglas, one of that group; and the memoir he reads, of the memoir by the Governess herself.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black;">The Turn of the Screw</span></i><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black;"> takes its name from a metaphor used by the second of three narrators for the tale, <st1:place st="on">Douglas</st1:place>, meaning the desired effect of intensification of drama and suspense. The story calls attention not merely to its own designed effect, but to the effects behind its literariness: the object of <i>The Turn of the Screw</i> is not merely to turn the screw, but to observe how it is turned. This was not so uncommon in fantastic genre writing of its era: the controlled reportage and viewpoint in “found” material, such as diaries, letters, and journalistic accounts, was a commonly utilised method for affecting realism, one that would give grounding to the incredible, not far, indeed, from the method of contemporary horror movies like <i>The Blair Witch Project</i> (1999) and <i>Paranormal Activity</i> (2007) in imitating documentary and home movie techniques. The fantastic genre can be defined as one that “oblige(s) the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and supernatural explanation of events...the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work”, as Tzvetan </span><span lang="EN-AU">Todorov describes it<span style="color: black;">.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Supernatural phenomena were largely, by the time of James’ writing, considered improbable if not ludicrous by most. Therefore, the construction of a mood of credulity became the most important task in a supernatural tale. James wrote his novella in this generic mould, and this genre is distinct from the realistic, albeit highly psychological, morally searching novels James was best known for. Unlike such works, which are indebted for at least a certain amount of their creation to grounded observance, the representative nature of a ghost story is easier to suggest. James’ preoccupation, whilst engaging this technique, as he himself acknowledged the start of this tendency as being Wilkie Collins’ <i>The Woman in White</i>, was to move beyond pseudo-realism into something more penetrating. He moves sideways from this; despite the first-person narrative, the Governess writes like Henry James with long, endlessly qualified and subjunctive sentences, and she even jumps over key pieces of her own experience contrary to the nature of most first-person reportage where the precision of description afforded by observation might be expected. Such leaps include her observations of Miss Jessel, when she appears close to herself and Flora, just like a writer delaying narrative pay-off for the sake of suspense, but also because it is only in the later recounting to Mrs Grose that this incident and the Governess’s instinctual observations take on reality – in the act of communicating them.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">How one interprets such a story depends on individual point of view. Especially following Edmund Wilson’s essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James”, the psychological view became important in regarding <i>The Turn of the Screw</i>. People predisposed to belief in spirituality and other concepts that resist purely rational reduction will possibly retain at least credulity for spiritual emanation and thus be sympathetic to the substance of the ghosts. An arch rationalist, with a scientific mindset or an awareness of psychological theory, will probably interpret any ghost story as essentially a psychological one, investigating it for coherence of metaphor and the intelligibility of its codification of psychological concepts. Such attitudes are not necessarily automatic, but there is still a choice of viewpoint involved. James’ story presents, in its images, characters, and narrative processes, much material that resembles psychological symbolism. James’ brother William was a pioneering psychologist, although such symbolism as the phallic tower on which Quint appears whilst Miss Jessel appears by the equally suggestive lake is more distinctly Freudian. The possibility that James was writing a disguised meditation on the illness of his sister Alice has been floated, including by Oliver Cargill, and that this was his reason for now being explicit about his intention, instead preferring to call it, in a letter to H.G. Wells, “essentially a potboiler.” A problem here is not just the disparity between the intention and effect of an author’s labours, but also how reception of a work evolves. Just because later readers and critics regarded James’ story as a great work that might encompass deeply personal reflections and acute thinking on psychological viewpoint and therefore represent a major James tale, that nonetheless doesn't mean that the writer himself couldn’t think it really was a potboiler, compared to his more elaborate, realistic novels. Nonetheless James’ determination, as stated in his preface, to “improvise with extreme freedom”, indicates his intent to explore new territory in the ghost story. And how to achieve this? To recharge its effect by deemphasising the spectres as much as possible and rendering them secondary in controlling effect to the viewpoint of the heroine, working on the theory that what is not seen, explained, literalised, is the most effective. James is therefore demonstrating how perspective is inseparable from reality, and that credulity is perhaps ironically best serviced by ambiguity. If the traditional manifestations of ghost are, as James argues, “little expressive…little dramatic,” then the only thing that can give them substance, threat, drama, is to make their nature undecidable. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-size: 10pt;">Rebecca Evans and Timothy Robinson in an English National Opera production of Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation of </span></i><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-size: 10pt;">The Turn of the Screw<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, composed in 1953</i></span><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black;">.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Throughout the narrative, events, statements, and curiosities of expression in the testament of the Governess suggest an authorial awareness of the nature of hysteria, projection, and sublimation, constantly in evidence throughout the tale. These are seen in the behaviour and attitudes of its heroine, enforced by the subjective nature of the telling, where things are only seen and reported, albeit with curious elisions and apparent distortions, through her eyes. The Governess, barely out of adolescence herself, can be seen to invent bogeyman projections of gross male sexuality in Quint, displacing a desire stoked by her employer, and a wretched self-projection in Miss Jessel as a fallen woman, a duality hinted when the Governess recognises herself as having taken the place of Miss Jessel as the wretched woman at the foot of the stairs. She then displaces her fearful emblems onto her two young charges, whose very lack of obvious maliciousness and minor faults become a blank screen onto which the Governess can project her neurotic obsessions. The most famous film version of the story, Jack Clayton’s<i> The Innocents</i> (1961), exacerbates the theory of sexual repression by casting not a young woman but the middle-aged Deborah Kerr as the Governess, and, accordingly, transforms the tale into “precisely the psychological narrative which James’ writing painstakingly invalidated and avoided,” as it was put in Phil Hardy’s <i>Encyclopedia of the Horror Film</i>. At one point, referring specifically to a boat, but in a way to the entire substance of her narrative, the Governess cries, “Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs.” Such a line can seem a precise portrait of a paranoid schizophrenic mindset, where elaborate fantasies are constructed, where everything is infused with meaning due to a private logic.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Therefore aspects of the tale can be used to argue against a literal haunting. The fact that no-one else sees the ghosts is perhaps the most significant, with Mrs Grose’s and Flora’s apparent inability to see Miss Jessel when the Governess can. Whether by the design of the ghosts or the illness of the narrator, they do not share their appearance with anyone else. Yet this does not mean they are not there, or, as Desmond Manderson recently put it: “This <i>nothing</i> is what is most troubling about James’ ghosts; ironically, it establishes their presence and their menace.” The Governess has explicated how the children always readily acquiesced to her scenarios to act out, and it might be argued that the moment of truth with both children sees them stricken with cognitive dissonance at this new scenario, in which their perpetual companion and mentor suddenly starts seeing dead people, and wants them to do the same. The children therefore respond, unconsciously, to the Governess’s desires for them to enact her fantasies. Simultaneously, incidents which allow the possibility of the Governess’s convictions include the fact that Mrs Grose seems to recognise Quint from the Governess’s description, the inexplicable nature of Miles’s expulsion from school (“for that was really but the question of the horrors gathered behind”), the eventually revealed cause of it, his collusion with Flora to defy the Governess at several junctures, and his apparent anxiety and inexplicable death when the Governess tries to break her hold over him. Yet none of these on their own constitute solid proof. The Governess’s description of the man could simply have given Mrs Grose a slate on which to inscribe the face of Quint, a man who offended her. Miles’ rude language might have been picked up from Henry Fielding, whose <i>Amelia</i> even the Governess, whose experience has before Bly not even encompassed such an act, reads, or indeed from other sources. Mrs Grose surrenders to credulity thanks to her conviction in what she “heard” the children say, and to the persuasiveness of the Governess’s conviction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-size: 10pt;">Deborah Kerr as the Governess and Peter Wyngarde as Quint in </span></i><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-size: 10pt;">The Innocents<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, Jack Clayton’s 1961 film version</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Governess’s preoccupation eventually narrows to the moments in which she tries to confirm that the children are aware of the spectres too. The result in one instance is for Flora to not want to speak with or see the Governess again, and for Miles to drop dead. Only in this last case does a real, undeniable event linking the Governess’s fixations with undeniable physical truth occur, and even here, what causes his death, whilst she attributes it to his being “dispossessed”, is hardly inarguable. Throughout the story, key aspects retain an ambiguity that is hard to dismiss, particularly in the Governess’s encounters with Miss Jessel in Chapters VI and XV, where the information she gives to Mrs Grose in subsequent chapters seems at odds with what she herself describes. The observations and certainties that the Governess expresses to Mrs Grose in Chapter VII seems to have no basis in what can have been observe by her, but a chain of inferences based either in preternatural or paranoid sensitivity. The limitations, and the advantages, of the viewpoint James chose for telling his story here become apparent. The peculiar elision at the end of Chapter VI, which concludes with the Governess resolving to observe the shade of Miss Jessel watching her and Flora: “My apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after some seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes—I faced what I had to face.” The narrative voice then jumps to the subsequent conversation where the gap between what seems substantiated by her earlier observations and what the Governess now proposes is difficult to account for.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Nonetheless, whether the apparitions are real or imagined, the story can still be observed to work, at least on a mechanical level, in the same fashion. Apparitions appear to the heroine; they make her concerned for the safety of her position and the children entrusted to her care; she sees the apparitions as attaching themselves to the children and fears their corruption; this drives her to assert more and more rigorous control over the situation, which instead causes her command to completely unravel. This attempt, to assert control over the irrational, be it spectral or psychological in nature, is the lynchpin of the story. The Governess is entrusted with a position of great nominal power, especially by the standards of a young woman in her profession, far beyond the normal in fact. Her commission from the employer is “that she should never trouble him…take the whole thing over and let him alone,” far beyond the usual limits of a Governess, especially one of the protagonist’s age and level of experience. Into her hands is thrust not only the task of teaching the children but in taking proxy responsibility for them in all things, and the stake of the drama, the end which the Governess dreads most of all, is being forced to appeal to the masculine employer who excised himself from the situation.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Equally central to the Governess’s threatened failure is the possibility of her losing control over the education of the children, the infiltration of their minds and worldviews by Quint and Jessel and the forbidden values associated with them, the bad language which caused the expulsion, as the Governess finally teases out from Miles. This merely accentuates the problem of child-rearing, for which the Governess is unequipped, and the anxiety of exposure to corrupting influences that rupture the boundaries of the acceptable, the ordered, and the controllable. In both the psychological and literal readings, the ghosts still perform this function, of perverting the course of learning for the children, or at least the Governess fears they will, away from the accepted norm which she has been charged to shape them to; the ghosts literally and figuratively embody the threat of sexuality, amorality, and disobedience assaulting the settled order the Governess must maintain. As the Governess’s anxiety mounts, even their seeming perfect behaviour becomes, becomes a pretence through which she professes to discern a great play-act designed to fool her. Later, particularly in Chapter XVII, Miles’ own precocity, with his pronounced desire to “see more life” and suggestions of adult sexuality beginning to grow in him, or, as the Governess would have, being instilled in him by Quint, responds to the attention of the Governess herself, whom he calls “dear” like an adult. This is increasingly complicated by the fact that the Governess projects an adult sexuality onto the boy, that of Quint, rather than an emerging form, and her own incapacity to differentiate the two, exacerbates the problem, leading to the moment in which Miles blows out the candle like a lover. Here, the gap between the interpretations is so great yet so close, as the choice is between an external, malevolent force, drawing them both in through deception and advantage, or an internal force in both violating a social and psychological barrier.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is therefore an implicit disparity between the conclusions offered by the literal and psychological interpretations. If Mr Quint and Miss Jessel really have come from beyond to claim the children, then the things they embody are designated as Other, as evil, corrupting, and corrosive as the Governess fears, dispersing the anxiety generated by the personal ramifications of the story, and partly justifying the Governess’ push into a “war” that ends in an innocent’s death. If, however, they are manifestations of her mind, they are the opposite, representing the inescapable human-ness of sexuality and its perversion, through lack of self-awareness, by a repressive social order that tries to restrain it. Miles’ death is the product of the failure of the paradigm the Governess tries to enforce, but which is failing inside her already. Yet if ghosts are automatically symbols, then either way, they embody a primal truth unanswerable to reason. Michael Scofield argues that James left his story so much implied because of three reasons: to rouse the reader’s imagination, because the subject matter of his story was too shocking to treat overtly, and because he himself did not want to face its implications. Yet studies of “evil…of a sexual nature” were a familiar James preoccupation. As with the question of point of view, therefore, a consistent authorial interest has been invested in the work, which, then, enriches it, intentionally or not, beyond generic limits: it becomes instead a study in the way the individual human deals with reality and subliminal drives. James’ desire to avoid writing a ghost story as a “mere modern psychical case, washed clean of all queerness as by exposure to a flowing laboratory trap,” as he described it, indicates a need not only to preserve mystery, but to respect the things he was invoking, suggesting their power and vitality even in their monstrousness. Therefore, part of the beauty of <i>The Turn of the Screw</i> is that it never forces a definite conclusion.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">BIBLIOGRAPHY</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Barthes, R (trans. S. Heath) 1977, ‘The Death of the Author’, in <i>Image-Music-Text</i>, Hill and <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Wang</st1:city>, <st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state></st1:place>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Cargill, O. 1963, ‘“The Turn of the Screw” and Alice James’, in <i>The Turn of the Screw: A Norton Critical Edition</i>, ed. R. Kimbrough, <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Norton</st1:city>, <st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state></st1:place>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Kimbrough, R (ed) 1966, <i>The Turn of the Screw: A Norton Critical Edition</i>, <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Norton</st1:city>, <st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state></st1:place>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Gelder,<i> </i>K (ed.) 2000,<i> The Horror Reader</i>, Routledge, <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Hardy, P (ed) 1985, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Encyclopedia of the Horror Film</i>, Aurum Press Ltd, <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">James, H. 1898, ‘To H.G. Wells’, in <i>The Turn of the Screw: A Norton Critical Edition</i>, ed. R. Kimbrough, <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Norton</st1:city>, <st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state></st1:place>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">James, H. 1908 ‘The <st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state> Preface to Volume XII of “The Novels and Tales of Henry James”’, in <i>The Turn of the Screw: A Norton Critical Edition</i>, ed. R. Kimbrough, <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Norton</st1:city>, <st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state></st1:place>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Manderson, D. 2010, ‘Two Turns of the Screw’, in <i>The Hart Fuller Debate – 50 Years On</i>, ed. Peter Cane, Hart Publishing, Oxford, p. 197-217.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-size: 10pt;">Scofield, M. 2003, ‘Implied stories: implication, moral panic and <i>The Turn Of The Screw’</i>, </span><i><span style="color: black; font-size: 10pt;">Journal of the Short Story in English </span></i><span style="color: black; font-size: 10pt;">(Online), 40, Online since 29 July 2008,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Spilka, M. 1963, ‘Turning the Freudian Screw’, in <i>The Turn of the Screw: A Norton Critical Edition</i>, ed. R. Kimbrough, <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Norton</st1:city>, <st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state></st1:place>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Seymour-Smith, M (ed.) 1980, <i>Novels and Novelists</i>, W. H. Smith and Son, <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Todorov, T. 1975, ‘Definition of the Fantastic’, in <i>The Horror Reader</i>, ed. Ken Gelder, Routledge, <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>, 2000.</span></div>
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<u><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 10pt;">Film</span></u></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-size: 10pt;">The Innocents</span></i><span lang="EN-AU" style="color: black; font-size: 10pt;"> (motion picture), 1961. 20th Century Fox, Achilles. Director, Producer: Jack Clayton. Writers: William Archibald, Truman Capote.</span></span></div>
Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-6772869695126660082011-06-20T17:02:00.011+10:002013-10-11T04:19:43.536+11:00Inconceivable: The Princess Bride<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The “Good Parts” Version, Abridged</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, by William Goldman, 1973. Edition I read: Bloomsbury 2008.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">William Goldman’s novel <i>The Princess Bride</i> describes itself as the “Good Parts Version”, whittled down from a purported “classic tale of true love and high adventure” by one Samuel Morgenstern. It is in fact a tongue-in-cheek and multi-layered game evoking and exposing not only the mystique of classic writing and the fantastical novel tradition, but also the conflicting impulses of a contemporary commercial writer. Goldman commences with an account of why he edited Morgenstern to reconfigure his book, his “favourite” novel even though he has never “read” it, from the political satire it was originally intended as. A hive of ironic elements is soon found lurking within the novel, waiting to sting the reader. These ironies include the fact that Goldman is responsible as author for the entire work. The text’s sardonic approach also reflects seriously on the nature and purpose of reading and writing, and permeating the novel is Goldman’s sarcastic, knowing, even obnoxious authorial voice. This voice mediates the investigation of narrative and the underpinning values of the kind of storybook tale his novel reproduces.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span lang="EN-AU">In the Introduction, Goldman explains how Morgenstern’s novel was first read to him by his father during a childhood bout of pneumonia. This was a transformative experience for a sports-mad boy and future author, and also a key moment in his relationship with his father, a barely literate immigrant barber who gives to his son the gift of a canonical work of literature from his homeland, the country of <st1:place st="on">Florin</st1:place>. Of course, there is no such country as <st1:place st="on">Florin</st1:place>, and the “real” William Goldman cannot have roots there. Goldman nonetheless presents this detail, as well as his relationship with characters encountered on the page, including his favourite teacher, Miss Roginski, whom he recalls having once tried in vain to develop a literary streak in him, and to whom he sent his first novel upon publishing it, hoping she would still remember him and appreciate her part in his success. The sentimentality of this aspect, the student paying tribute to the inspirational teacher, is offset by the obnoxiousness with which Goldman endows himself, as a kid and as a man. We also meet his wife and son, agent and producer, in the Introduction, which plays as ostensible autobiography, making reference to his real-life work, including not only his first novel, </span><i><span style="color: black;">The Temple of Gold</span></i><span style="color: black;">,</span> <span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span">but also his works as a screenwriter. Goldman credits Morgenstern’s </span><i>The Princess Bride</i><span class="Apple-style-span"> as an inspiration for a famous scene in his script</span><i> </i><span class="Apple-style-span">for the 1969 film </span><i>Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid</i><span class="Apple-style-span">, and also imbuing him with a sense of the power of storytelling, as opposed to the analytical values of elevated literature. And yet this is truly due to his father’s selective reading of Morgenstern’s work.</span></span></span></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">William Goldman, drawn by Bo Hampton, with Westley as the Man in Black and Buttercup.</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Life imitating art, art imitating life; I really get those two confused,” as Goldman confesses, yet <i>The Princess Bride</i> is about the tension between the two. Goldman’s literary voice delivers a gruff, worldly perspective on a fantasy that nonetheless still packs a still-vital punch for him, all the more attractive when life lets him down. The Introduction, whilst technically a minor part of the novel, nonetheless tempers reception of all that follows, as Goldman recounts how, frustrated and lonely in Los Angeles, far from his New York home, dealing the problematic and painful exigencies of negotiating with Hollywood big shots, meets the beautiful starlet Sandy Sterling, who makes an obvious come on to him, hoping he can help her career. Goldman, panicked, diverts his desire into an increasingly desperate attempt to track down Morgenstern’s book. He wants to get his own son, Jason,, to read it, but he finally does get hold of it, he discovers its true, discursive form, and sets out to reedit it according to his father’s model. Goldman is driven to do so because he feels alienated from his son and seeks the kind of catharsis it once offered in his own youth. The vignette of Goldman’s dinner table, with the author frustrated at every turn by his wife and son, sees his anxieties over health, sexuality, parenting styles, and class all revealed incidentally in the dialogue, giving a picture of Goldman suspended uneasily between worlds. Whilst this, and Goldman’s subsequent fury at his son giving up on reading <i>The Princess Bride</i>, is played out as comedy in which Goldman willing casts himself as an aggressive, but actually powerless, patriarch at the centre of the family unit, nonetheless the emotions mooted here radiate through the book.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span lang="EN-AU">The Princess Bride</span></i><span lang="EN-AU">, that is, Morgenstern’s work, is a presumptive satire of the decline of European feudalism into arbitrary authoritarianism, played out in the form of a hyper-clever, Ruritanian chivalric adventure. A young woman named Buttercup, living on a remote farm with her mutually loathing parents, and their young farmhand known only as Boy at first, although his name proves to be Wesley, comes to the attention of one the most powerful man in <st1:place st="on">Florin</st1:place>, Count Rugen, who travels with his wife and entourage to take a look. Whilst <st1:place st="on">Rugen</st1:place> finds the stories of Buttercup’s beauty unexaggerated, his wife finds Wesley her male equal. Buttercup, who had relentlessly bossed and degraded Wesley, now, hanks to the Countess, recognises his quality to, and when she confesses it clumsily to him, learns that he willingly acquiesced to all her commands, always with his signature statement, “As you wish,” because that phrase actually meant, “I love you.” Wesley decides to go to <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region> and make his fortune so that he can return and marry Buttercup, and departs, but Buttercup soon learns that Wesley’s ship was captured by the Dread Pirate Roberts, the one who never takes prisoners. Buttercup is heartbroken, and attains a persistent melancholia that serves only to make her the world’s beautiful woman.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span lang="EN-AU">Two years later, Buttercup agrees to marry <st1:place st="on">Florin</st1:place>’s crown prince, Prince Humperdinck, although she knows she will never love anyone else. Which is fair enough, as Humperdinck loves nothing but hunting. He looked for a local bride, and accepted Count Rugen’s suggestion, after his parents, the king and queen, tried to arrange a marriage between him and a princess of Guilder, the country neighbouring <st1:place st="on">Florin</st1:place>, who was unfortunately, accidentally revealed to be bald during a state banquet in her honour. Shortly before the wedding is to take place, Buttercup is kidnapped by a trio of criminals, led by the hunchback </span><span style="color: black;">Sicilian </span><span lang="EN-AU">Vizzini</span><span style="color: black;">, so clever he seems to be psychic in anticipating the thoughts of others. His team is rounded out by Inigo Montoya, the world’s greatest swordsman, who became such in his determination to track down and kill in combat his father’s murderer, and the colossal Turk Fezzik, who can crush many men with his bare hands. They plan to murder Buttercup on the Florin-Guilder frontier, thus sparking a war between the nations. But they find they are being pursued by a mysterious man in black, and in spite of </span><span lang="EN-AU">Vizzini</span><span style="color: black;">’s belief that it is “inconceivable” anyone could catch up with them and prove a problem, the man in black succeeds at both. </span><span lang="EN-AU">Vizzini</span><span style="color: black;">, to outpace this masked rival, has his two henchmen wait in turn for him, bringing to bear their specific gifts with the blade and the fist, whereupon the narrative digresses to explain the backstory for each man – how they got to be the men they are, and why they, as good men, are working for the dastardly Vezzini.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Morgenstern” had thus written a pastiche of a romantic adventure novel, and used it to examine the evils of feudal aristocracy and <st1:place st="on">Old World</st1:place> corruption through sarcastic metaphors like bridal luggage and marriage rites. “Goldman” uses the Morgenstern narrative to cast an eye on the anxieties of a successful second-generation immigrant and family man, and also on the business he works in, the creation of fiction in novels and <st1:place st="on">Hollywood</st1:place> movies. “Barber’s sons, if they hustled, maybe got to be IBM salesmen, but writers? No way,” Goldman says in nurturing that ambition and his awareness of its improbability. The veneer of gruffness he maintains in surviving this alien world, just as his father survived in a new world, is a survival mechanism. Goldman identifies himself with Morgenstern in defending a mutual fondness for anachronistic-seeming dialogue and dislike for critics. When Goldman makes overt reference to Morgenstern’s Jewishness and the quality of shtick which infuses the Miracle Max portions, the basis of Goldman’s style in Jewish humour also presents itself. Part of the novel’s intent is not merely to pay homage to adventure stories, of which films starring Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks Snr seem unavoidable inspirations. Such films represent a genre that Brian Taves boiled down to being about “the valiant fight for freedom and a just form of government, set in exotic locales and the historical past”. But Goldman also reveals his debt to the reflexes of Jewish comedians from the Marx Brothers to Mel Brooks, and more “serious” writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, as Morgenstern supposedly did, immigrated to the <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Map of Guilder and Florin, with the locations of the novel's incidents marked</span></i>.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">For one thing, the business of family, and especially that between fathers and sons, echoes throughout both the meta-narrative and the “proper” story. Swordsman Inigo, dedicated to avenging his father, elucidates a simple, purified version of family responsibility, just as Westley’s love of Buttercup and Humperdinck’s malevolence present vividly polarised versions of emotions that are usually more mixed and peculiar in lifelong relationships. Goldman’s encounter with Sandy Sterling, the beautiful and tempting starlet, echoes but also contrasts the passive beauty of Buttercup, who in the story’s latter stages comically embodies the lady fair patiently awating the arrival and victory of her true love. Count Rugen, in planting his assessing eye on Buttercup of acting as a kind of <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Hollywood</st1:place></st1:city> casting agent for the role of potential Queen. <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Sterling</st1:place></st1:city>’s presence, and threat, stirs Goldman’s frantic effort to find Morgenstern’s book and its promise of becalming fantasy, a fantasy which the Goldman whose voice we hear throughout the book needs all too badly. The central imbalance of strength (Fezzik), skill (Inigo), and brains (Vizzini), evokes the imbalance of sporty young Goldman’s personality, and his ignorance of the imaginative. Goldman makes fun of the true love found in Morgenstern novel by referring snidely to his own true love being porterhouse and enchiladas, just as Miracle Max favours cough drops. These story elements are both mocked but also given new urgency by the pathos in Goldman’s self-castigating vignettes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span lang="EN-AU">The Princess Bride</span></i><span lang="EN-AU"> is more than a funny, exciting book: it’s the sort of work that can serve as a perfect introduction to some of the thornier aspects of modern literary theory, in a fashion that barely makes you conscious of it. Goldman considers the moral problem of believing in literature, which can construct worlds where life is fair and things turn out well, in high contrast to the world he actually lives in. Yet what values are authentically preserved and transmitted? If, as Michel Foucault said, “the notion of author constitutes the privileged moment of individualisation in the history of ideas, (and) knowledge, literature,” Goldman stretches the limits of the writer’s role to make the reader aware of the limits of that individualisation. He pays heed to the common pool of elements a writer can access, in the father’s recounting of juicy elements in the novel (“Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies.”) and in his own use of one in <i>Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid</i>. In his way, Goldman confirms that the text is what Roland Barthes described as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” What such cultural heritage means, to anyone engaged in the act of passing heritage on through family, and to the writer, mediating agreed storytelling elements to the audience, is part of the texture of <i>The Princess Bride</i>. The way in which Goldman’s father gives a national classic to his son, and which Goldman then tries to give to his own offspring, makes this aspect specific and personal. The pertinent element of Morgenstern’s novel as a cultural article is cut out first by Goldman’s father and then by Goldman himself in reconstructing <i>The Princess Bride</i> as an idealised genre tale which is an encomium to the pure love of “what happens next”. Whilst the satire of Morgenstern’s novel was relevant to some other place, in the entertainment industry only the story retains its interest. “Everything is about story,” Goldman said himself, in an interview in 2001.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Whilst of course what Goldman is doing is not self-conscious in an academic sense, he is still exploring not only the way texts transmit ideas and questioning what ideas and ideals retain validity as time passes, but also the nature of his job as a commercial writer, as an entertainer who must reduce his concerns to provoke immediate, personal sensations and maintain a grip on the audience. Throughout the novel, his digressive inserts explain where and what he’s cut material out from Morgenstern’s novel. He is, then, demonstrating the screenwriter-adaptor’s job, slicing out anything that stalls pace, distorts plot impetus, and frustrates the broad audience. Goldman argues this is always an aspect of reading, pointing to the way readers skip pedantic chapters in Melville’s </span><i>Moby-Dick</i>. The nominal audience of the edited <i>The Princess Bride</i> is Jason Goldman. Now, of course, we come to the crux: Goldman in fact has no son, but two daughters. So perhaps he means everyone’s son. “There is one place where this multiplicity (of writings) is focused and that place is the reader, not as was hitherto said, the author,” as Barthes said, and Goldman is concerned with both how the author is also a reader, and a conduit of ideas. And yet he also revels in his complete control over those ideas within the limits of his work, even when hiding behind the guise of another writer and a false persona.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><i>André "The Giant" Roussimoff</i></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><i> as Fezzik, Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, Wallace Shawn as Vizzini, and the hand of Robin Wright as Buttercup, in Rob Reiner's 1987 film of </i>The Princess Bride.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The uneasy relationship between <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Hollywood</st1:place></st1:city> and literary custom is similarly exposed here in a fashion that reveals through Goldman’s father’s experience the cultural problem of popularly coherent narrative. The father takes on a role not dissimilar to a <st1:place st="on">Hollywood</st1:place> mogul, searching for the good story and the way to sell it. William Goldman’s prickly fictional persona, on the other hand, is that of a seasoned player: this Goldman is long since acclimatised to having his love of pure creation and the nobility of story diluted and assaulted by the collaborative, commercialised nature of both big publishing and cinema. He is the survivor of such unromantic, ideal-stripping processes, just as he is disillusioned with family life. He uses inserted comments to not only explain how the book made him understand that life is not always fair, but also to play games with narrative expectation, even threatening to violate the cardinal rule of the happy ending, to pinpoint the disparity between art and life. Yet he also validates the power of such stories to create a sense of a receptivity and shared experience, to weave a web of imagined fulfilment that pushes us towards trying to achieve a similar state, to reconstruct reality. Goldman repeatedly states he does not believe in the novel’s principles, and yet he wants to, and still more to share that credulity with his audience. Genre works, as Leo Braudy formulated it, “essentially ask the audience, ‘Do you still want to believe this?’ Popularity is the audience answering, ‘Yes.’” Goldman’s novel then asks a further question, what and why do we believe in such stories? Here the whole art of the storyteller is both turned inside-out, yet validated. The final irony is that Goldman creates a highly critical work out of the building blocks of pure entertainment.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The most remarkable aspect of what Goldman pulls off is that he manages to be so sarcastic and satiric, and yet achieves the trickiest feat that he set for himself: he builds to the expected emotional and storytelling crescendos of a great adventure yarn with a power that dwarfs many more standard examples. Goldman both exaggerates and delights in recreating the beautifully, absurdly elaborate set-pieces of the adventure story, in the hilarious, riveting passages in the Fire Swamp and the Zoo of Death, and most of all in the long sequence in which the Man in Black – who is Westley, of course, and also the Dread Pirate Roberts, but that’s a long story – has to surmount the formidable yet incomplete strengths of Inigo, Fezzik, and Vizzini. That leads to the epic piece of pseudo-logic that Vizzini employs in trying to outwit Westley, only to fall foul of a double-bluff he’s too single-minded to escape. Inigo’s final battle with the Count counts as a classic genre scene regardless of the context, evoking a meta-textual will from the reader to the character in overcoming his wounds to defeat the villain in the same way that kids cheer from the audience for Tinkerbell to live, and indeed Goldman's method makes this aspect all the more palpable. The open-ended finish is a little less persuasive, convincing less as a final ironic deconstruction of the genre than of a reticence on Goldman’s part as to what point he finally wanted to make. For the rather lacklustre, skit-like film version by Rob Reiner, Goldman at least solved that fault, by transplanting his spiel about the world’s most perfect kisses from early in the book to towards the end.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Altman, R. Film/Genre, </i><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><i>London</i></st1:city></st1:place><i>, BFI Publishing, 1999.</i></span></div>
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<i><a href="http://www.cnn.com/COMMUNITY/transcripts/william_goldman_chat.html%3E"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">‘A chat with William Goldman’ 2001, CNN.com, Cable News Network</span></a></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Barthes, R. (trans. S. Heath) 1977 ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text, Hill and </i><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><i>Wang</i></st1:city><i>, </i><st1:state st="on"><i>New York</i></st1:state></st1:place><i>.</i></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Foucault, M. 1984 ‘What is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow, Pantheon, </i><st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on"><i>New York</i></st1:state></st1:place><i>.</i></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Taves, B. 1993 The Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies, </i><st1:city st="on"><i>Jackson</i></st1:city><i>, </i><st1:place st="on"><st1:placetype st="on"><i>University</i></st1:placetype><i> of </i><st1:placename st="on"><i>Mississippi</i></st1:placename></st1:place><i><span class="Apple-style-span"> Press.</span></i></span></div>
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Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-42256440152947527992010-11-12T15:52:00.012+11:002013-10-11T04:45:15.138+11:00Possession and the Possessed<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Possession: A Romance</span></span></span></i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, 1990, by A. S. Byatt, Chatto and Windus</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. Pictured: first American edition.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlWGZko1Q4REaJmicpN0p4eKzoo50E4gSp7h4Ad5WCLgXptBce09ydSIz3elJ9Y4kqj9mZJtrxOE4LXqpYRuNjCmo0XF0Uem7UtQXxdqyeZ3b9D6Wjbv80_jZzF-HqjW6GcgGVB4MRRcc/s1600/Possession.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span><img alt="" border="0" height="640" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5538522626769556610" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlWGZko1Q4REaJmicpN0p4eKzoo50E4gSp7h4Ad5WCLgXptBce09ydSIz3elJ9Y4kqj9mZJtrxOE4LXqpYRuNjCmo0XF0Uem7UtQXxdqyeZ3b9D6Wjbv80_jZzF-HqjW6GcgGVB4MRRcc/s640/Possession.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: justify;" width="404" /></a><br />
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<i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Possession: A Romance</span></span></span></i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, the 1990 Booker Prize winner (oops, sorry, the, er, Man Booker Prize), is one of those relatively few modern novels to command respect from both an avid general readership, and critical and academic elites. It was also the breakthrough success for Oxford-schooled Professor Antonia Susan Duffy, for whom Byatt is a pen name, inherited from her first husband. Byatt for a long time lived, as a writer, in obscurity compared to her younger sister, Margaret Drabble, but finally made her academic experience and comprehension of the buzzwords of literary theory work for her in composing </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Possession</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, a novel which cunningly invokes and utilises much of the contemporary panoply of academic paradigms. It’s also a sneaky revenge on these notions, in celebrating the traditions of the good old fashioned yarn and the still-towering authority of the Victorian English cultural firmament, and offering a swathe of artful pastiche, but also interrogating these forms, breaking them into fragments and turning them over, provoking questions relevant to the English faculty and also to general readers. </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">How well do we know our great artists? Do we do them any favours with our contemporary obsession with biography and life circumstance, in an age in which, ironically, the celebrity of the artist and an industry of grubbing biographers and scholars has reached fever pitch, long after literary theorists had tried to cast biography out the window when it comes to understanding writing? How are heroes created, and are alterations in our picture of them damaging to their art? Are the new voices of the post-modern, post-colonial, post-patriarchal culture doomed to repeat crimes of the old? Is romantic passion a liberation or a distraction, especially for female artists and intellectuals, when it comes to achieving lives of creativity? Is life without creativity worth living, and is creativity worth anything when constantly subordinated to the effort to reduce it to coherent theories? </span></span></span><br />
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<i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Possession</span></span></span></i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> succeeds then in being a genuinely, intellectually rich and thought-provoking novel, as well as one that plays out with a thriller’s verve and a Shakespearean comedy’s sense of mirth and human frailty. It has limitations, for the omnipresence of Byatt’s technique and layering renders her main characters, both contemporary and period, more than a little opaque, and leaves the admirably multi-levelled plot’s progression frustratingly jerky. And yet </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Possession</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> is as much about those layers, or more, as its story. The framework is a scholarly detective story: one day in the mid-1980s, young researcher Roland Michell makes an unexpected discovery with the potential to unbalance whole literary universes. Having failed to advance into the major teaching posts his academic efforts have been aimed towards, Roland is working part-time for James Blackadder, a crusty senior don at Oxford who’s also the editor of an official complete volume of the works of Randolph Henry Ash, a famous, idolised (and reviled) poet of the mid-1800s, chiefly modelled on Robert Browning with dashes of Tennyson and other major figures of the period. Roland himself, a dedicated Ash fan, is a man quietly suffocating in his ignominious job. His relationship with his partner Val, a romance that commenced at college, is slowly foundering as she bears most of the pressure of breadwinning whilst working as a legal secretary. This still only affords them a dingy basement flat, located under a house owned by an eccentric old lady whose army of pet cats infects the place with the eternal odour of feline urine. </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">When in the course of a minor research errand for Blackadder, inspecting a book owned by Ash, kept by the British Museum and not apparently opened since being placed there over a century before, in search of some ephemeral point, Roland discovers what appears to be the drafts of a love letter that Ash started writing to some woman he had met at a literary luncheon. Tantalised and comprehending a mystery that no-one else seems privy to, Roland steals the drafts and begins a hunt to find who these letters were intended for. Roland’s investigations, conducted with some guilt behind Blackadder’s back, produce a definite candidate: one Christabel LaMotte, an Anglo-Breton poetess whose own oeuvre has only recently begun finding fame and favour, thanks to feminist scholarly efforts to expand the literary canon. Roland presents his discovery to Maud Bailey, a descendent of LaMotte’s sister who is herself an academic, a teacher of Women’s Studies at </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Lincoln</span></span></st1:placename><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><st1:placetype st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">University</span></span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> and an expert on LaMotte. Maud is a talent and a beauty, but reputed to be a bit of an ice queen. Roland is warned about this by Fergus Wolfe, a former classmate of Roland’s who beat him out for a prestigious position, and who had an affair with Maud a couple of years earlier. Maud is highly sceptical of Roland, both of his claims and of his relevance as a human, but he captures her attention sufficiently, so that they set out to visit the house in which Christabel lived her final few years and poke around for clues. Through a series of fortuitous accidents, Roland and Maud befriend the house’s highly cranky old holder, Sir George Bailey, a distant relative of Maud’s, and his wheelchair bound wife, whom Roland gallantly saves from a sticky wicket. </span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Allowed to stay the night in the house, Maud decodes one of Christabel’s poems as directions to finding a stashed secret, and uncovers a trove of letters which prove, indeed to be the collected correspondence of Ash and LaMotte. These establish that they did embark on a romantic affair, in spite of the fact that Ash was married, and that Christabel has been assumed to have been a lesbian, having lived for many years with another female artist, the painter Blanche Glover. Learning the sometimes exhilarating, often sad twists of this ill-starred romance, then, become an obsession for Roland and Maude, whilst they try to keep a few steps ahead of other interested parties, of whom Blackadder is the least threatening. Most problematic is Mortimer Cropper, a wealthy Midwestern American, an Ash aficionado and author of a popular but pompous biography of the poet, who uses his vast family capital to buy anything and everything relating to the man, and places them in the mordantly named Stant Collection back in his home town’s university. Maud also declines to share the information with her fellow in LaMotte scholarship and tough-minded feminism, the pushy, garrulous American scholar Leonora Stern. It soon becomes apparent that Ash and Christabel’s affair, fired by real intellectual, sexual, and artistic kinship, nonetheless swiftly foundered as a distraught Blanche tried to interfere by bringing the affair’s attention to Ash’s wife, before committing suicide. Christabel fell pregnant to Ash, fled </span></span><st1:country-region st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">England</span></span></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> to have her baby whilst living with her cousins in </span></span><st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Brittany</span></span></st1:place></st1:state><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, wracked with guilt and shame, and caused Ash to eventually think she might have killed the child. Whilst divining this tale, the edgy, uncertain, romantically disinclined Maud and Roland, in spite of many barriers and misgivings, seem themselves to be forming an attachment.</span></span></span></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">A.S. Byatt</span></span></i></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The title of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Possession: A Romance</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> is a fruitful nexus of polysemy, from which the novel’s story and themes spread like limbs on a tree. Both “possession” and “romance” have multifarious meanings which entwine and threaten to choke one-another throughout. The journey of Roland and Maud, in echoing that of their mutual idols Ash and LaMotte, dovetails several definitions of, as well as objects of, possession: that of lovers, that of social and cultural institutions, of knowledge, of lineage and heritage, and even of the innermost self. Throughout the novel, the manifestations of possession, as well as attending ambiguities, are interrogated, as Byatt’s narrative calls into question the ownership that individuals and institutions can claim over art and artists, language and discourse, even private emotions and sexual instincts. Roland’s stealing the draft letters is a breach of law, and of the rules of scholarly trust and hierarchy, and yet the arbitrary revelation stimulates impulses within Roland as both scholar and aficionado, and he feels this dictates his action. He will later describe himself as possessed by the urge to pursue the mystery to its solution. His act suggests, initially, motives of worldly self-interest, for such a discovery might revolutionise his career. Roland is presented as a man of no status, peripheral to the people and institutions in his life, except for Val, the woman to whom he is tethered in a relationship failing, ironically, partly because of a successful inversion of traditional gender roles. His grasp at possession seems sourced in desperation to escape this rut. And yet his choice of career is bound up with his admiration of Ash, and this provides a </span></span><span style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: medium;">subtler </span><span style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: medium;">personal impetus.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Possessions are a measure of status, wealth, and power, expressed through many properties in the novel, from Cropper’s grasping at any object relating to Ash, an acquisitiveness that approaches a fetish, to the basement flat where Roland and Val live, which seems to belong more to the landlady’s cats than to the tenants. Roland’s recompense, his muse and joy and millstone, is the commonwealth of words offered by poets like Ash, who rebuild worlds out of nothingness. Cropper is armed with money and unscrupulousness that dwarfs Roland: he will literally rob a grave to complete his quest. The desire to possess a totem of obsession, to commune in tactile, erotic immediacy with that object of affection, is inherent in both the romantic and scholarly travails of the main characters. And yet to possess is to be possessed, as Roland learns, and as Ash himself puts it in his love letter to his future wife Ellen, where his “most ardent desire is to be possessed entirely by the pure thought of you.” This contradiction is the central enigma of the novel, apparent in many forms. </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Cropper’s ultra-modern stasis for the objects he places in the Stant Collection contrasts the mess of the English scholars’ workplaces. His method is, in a way, more caring for the material he takes ownership of, and yet he is removing it from a living tradition, the realm of accumulated cultural immediacy. A certain thematic kinship here is found not only with the isolated, closed-off state of Victorian femininity that Byatt attempts to elucidate and also to subvert, but also with the unfeeling stasis that Maud asserts on herself which is beyond physical and emotional intimacy, thus beyond potential damage, and yet rendering Maud alienated from herself within an emotional vacuum. Sexual politics, their evolution and perpetual agonies, are part of both the plot and texture of the novel to an inextricable extent. A key irony Byatt explores throughout is her passion for feminist ideas and ideals, and her mild but urgent dismay as to some of their joyless interpretations. Her celebration of the great worlds those ideals opened up in the reclamation of hidden histories and artistic produce, the exploding possibilities and hugely expanded freedoms, is matched by frustration with the more censorial, reductive attitudes in merely human adherents, which she presents as being potentially as forbidding and restrictive as the patriarchal oppression it replaced. Maud is emotionally drained and rendered rigidly uncomfortable in being squeezed between a sisterhood that had once hissed her </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">en masse</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> for her physical attributes, and aggressive sexual conquest on the other, the casual masculine-skewed licentiousness that was second-wave feminism’s death-dance partner in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">That is partly embodied by the coolly manipulative predations of Fergus Wolfe, who used his knowledge of deconstructive theory and nose for sexual insecurity to first bed Maud and then keep her on a kind of short rhetorical leash, so that even though the affair ended long ago, Fergus still retains power over Maud in presenting himself as the only man worthy of her, the only one to comprehend her inner nature, and therefore the only one strong enough to degrade her. Maud’s memory of the affair then is encapsulated in the image-totem of a soiled, despoiled bed. But the alternative, the wilfully political lesbianism that Leonora has embraced, builds only to a kind of bedroom farce in which Maud dodges her fellow scholar’s efforts to seduce her. Roland, for his part, feels perpetually dizzied and invaded by the pretentious sexualisation of all language and expression by so much modern theory, as particularly exemplified by Leonora’s writing, an inspired satire on Lacan-esque psychological symbolism mated in ungainly fashion with feminist ballyhoo. </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Another major irony is the notion that art – here, chiefly, poetry – is a public possession, one which can inspire a deeply personal desire to take custody of the art and artist, and yet which is ethereal in nature, communicated by signifiers that possess a life of their own. Just as, in its own way, romantic love does. Roland’s act late in the novel of listing words that he can’t reduce to an academic meaning, as the basis for creative endeavour, is his attempt at mediation: a deliberate dispossession of concept, and an attempt grasp the entirely suggestive texture of words, in an embrace of fluidity, for fluidity is Byatt’s own </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Eden</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">. His act is a purposeful one in as far as the problems of cultural possession, ownership of language, institutions, and artistic figureheads and heroes, encage all the characters. Christabel and Blanche Glover’s effort to create a space in which female artists can work, shared by LaMotte’s cousin Sabine de Kercoz, mirrors the achievement of an independent space by Maud and her “sisters” a hundred and twenty years later. LaMotte’s efforts, like Byatt’s own, attempts to restore the centrality of the female voice of folk mythology in her writing, as a key to subverting rigid structures within artistic discourse. The war between camps of theory and scholarship, Roland and Blackadder with their passion for Ash, Maud and Leonora for LaMotte, each determined to foist their hero, and the mutual hostility highlights how possession of the literary canon is at stake. Moreover, the designation of the poets according to various dogmatic identities – the feminist camp is compelled to regard Ash as a stolid, misogynist Victorian establishment figure, whilst celebrating LaMotte as lesbian and proto-feminist. The shock of revelations entailed by the discovered affair blurs firm battlelines and generates new dialogue, as the personal impetus behind much of both poets’ writings becomes clearer. The uncomfortable atmosphere of ‘80s academia, struggling to keep alive the radical questions of ‘60s and ‘70s movements in a time that is nonetheless swiftly going out of tune, is evoked with grim accuracy throughout the novel. </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The notion that social position in a class-oriented society </span></span></span><span style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: medium;">invokes another type of possession also recurs, laden with traps and inescapable truths that are nonetheless scarcely acknowledged, powerful in spite of invisibility. Maud’s membership of a privileged class has given her life and career lustre, contrasts middle-class Roland’s frustrated efforts to ascend, a device that further inverts the balance of apparent power between this man and woman. Sir George Bailey, in his fraying Tory disdain, is a more extreme figure of fading pre-eminence. His possession of LaMotte’s legacy, for which he has nothing but contempt, is a by-product of his class’s retention of power in terms of property, if no longer possessing social and financial clout, and cultural heritage becomes a commodity to relieve waning fortunes. Byatt tempers her semi-comic portrait of the aggressive, irascible Sir George with awareness of his feeling of being assailed, and tethered to a property and a wife that are both crumbling. Roland’s discomfort at failing in the traditional masculine value of being a breadwinner, and Maud’s with her physical beauty, pinion them, in a way, as firmly as Ash’s unfulfilled married life pinioned him. Roland’s embrace of art, a dynamic process, offers a better grasp on himself, as a man and lover, in an act of self-possession. At the same time, he has abandoned any claim on the worldly consequences of his discovery of the letters. Maud echoes the necessity of self-possession in her admiration of LaMotte’s “self-possession, her autonomy”, and her own journey leads to discovering that her nature is the genetic product of a transgressive act rather than a stultifying heritage. She too gains a deeper awareness, a new self-possession, than she had before.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">We learn that Ash’s affair with LaMotte was at least partly the result of the fact Ellen, having been forced to wait many years to marry Ash, finds intercourse unbearable and so they have never had a sexual relationship, an interesting mitigation in Ash’s actions: Ellen tolerates his affair because he has tolerated her. Ellen seems therefore locked entirely into the surface role of the Victorian wife. And yet she’s a subtle kind of rebel, too, in both her permissiveness and her actions as guardian of legacies and privacy. The process of women taking command of language and lives, just commencing in the time of LaMotte, Blanche, and Sabine, has advanced since into a freer yet still uncomfortable place, where the need to avoid the patriarchal role as enthralled and suppressed females, has been supplanted by Maud’s estrangement from emotional immediacy and Leonora Stern’s liberated, essentially good-natured bisexuality. A recurring, persecuting disparity manifests between the desire for autonomy in both LaMotte’s and Maud’s lives, and the nature of romance, the act of being possessed, the corny trope of masculine sexual prowess in “taking” a woman, alchemised into the final, purposeful passage in which Roland takes “possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him”. Sexualised possession is also apparent in Cropper’s purchasing of Ash ephemera, a proof on a kind of impotence, of his inability to come close to his love-object. The risk of possession is, naturally, loss of possession, and the destructive potential of possessiveness is most tragically present in the fate of LaMotte’s probable lover Blanche, in which self-destruction is also an eternal wound against her spurning former partner. LaMotte’s final self-reprehending exile is partly in repudiation of her failure in her responsibility in the mutual possession of love. Simultaneously, LaMotte’s failure of self-possession degrades her as an artist and a person, in spite her own intentions and that of her lover Ash. </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">LaMotte refers to her obedience to love with words like “necessity”, binding herself to a course of action in full awareness of the likely consequences; it is as if she is possessed, just as surely as Roland later feels possessed by the urge to uncover her and Ash’s story, by an instinct that courts chaos. Although Roland, Maud and their confederates set out to catch Cropper in the act of defiling Ash’s grave for ostensibly punitive reasons, they, in turn, possess him, by using him as their instrument to perform the grubby last act in uncovering the story’s end. The twofold nature of possession is both one in which some kind of ownership is presumed, but also includes a responsibility, one of protection and guardianship, encapsulated in Roland’s final vow, “I’ll take care of you, Maud,” and yet also inherent in other actions in the novel, such as LaMotte’s preservation of hers’ and Ash’s correspondence, and, it is suggested, Blanche’s art trove too, and even, in his way, Cropper’s collection. And yet there is danger perceived here, the danger of entrapping things, be it potential and talent, emotional and intellectual fecundity, or the right to common access that scholars thrive on. The threat of stasis and entropy, of the removal of self-will, is the constant refrain, especially for the female characters. Maud’s problematic relationship with her own beauty, and her fear of becoming “a property or an idol” of men for whom the possession of beauty is a boon of status, is a clear personal correlation. Self-possession is a vital aspect of the journey of Roland and Blanche as well as mutual possession, as each in essence discovers a new identity for themselves by the end that allows them to reconcile their heretofore conflicted inner natures.</span></span></span></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Jennifer Ehle as Christabel LaMotte and Jeremy Northam as Randolph Henry Ash in Neil LaBute's 2002 film of </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Possession</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">.</span></span></i><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The artistic voice, too, is beholden to possession. Ash, dubbed by Cropper as “the Great Ventriloquist” for his ability to mimic many voices, has his consequential effect on LaMotte’s poetry – Roland swiftly recognises the impact of his voice on hers as he familiarises himself with her work – and vice versa. The advance of plot and story is itself a form of possession, the expression of the author’s intention for their characters. Passages late in the novel that describe Roland’s, Maud’s, and Leonora’s awareness of the different genres and archetypes that the investigation has invoked draws attention to how the figures on the page are being controlled – possessed – and driven towards a certain end, and the novel in particular reproduces the format of the quest narrative, always defined by a transfer, of a power, a totem, or status. Roland’s name, tethered to his modest person, evokes the heroic tradition of western poetry, and the status of romantic hero claims Roland, like many classical heroes, thanks to his initial transgression. In a similar way, LaMotte’s tale “The Glass Coffin” invokes, in the most naïf fashion, the roles which Roland, Maud, and Cropper play out. Such are “</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">the kind of device that effectively conveys the author's claim to total control over his/her work”, as P. C. Domínguez put it in her 1995 essay on the novel. </span></span><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The notion of actual spiritual possession, an undercurrent found not only in the language of the characters but also in the subplot of Ash and LaMotte’s discussions of spirituality, and climactic encounter at a séance, becomes conflated with this sense of outwardly directing influences on Byatt’s protagonists. The protagonists relate to the narrative of Ash and LaMotte as readers of the novel do, with vicarious pleasure, but where the elder poets’ crucial acts and inner truths are often unknowable, in a profoundly frustrating fashion, Maud and Roland are accessible to the readers of the novel, and yet hardly at all to each other. The inner lives of those heady poets cannot be possessed, only inferred intuitively and therefore vulnerable to misinterpretation. The incapacity to grasp these remote love objects is confirmed. </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">By revealing much of this narrative through many texts, the poems, letters, diaries and essays supposedly composed by the characters, Byatt mimics a kind of post-modern coup in trying to explore past and present through various voices that create a textured perspective. Some of this gets a bit strained – there’s a couple of proto-feminists too many in the historical context – but she tries to authentically encapsulate, through this narrative style, the very real processes of scholarship, and to fragment the story and the perspectives contained within it, according to modern principles, producing a kind of cultural map of the evolution of feminism and the devolution of expressive literate culture as a central social force. Ash’s wife Ellen, within the story, performs an equal, opposite function of withholding information, hiding private truths from public analysis: if Byatt’s narrative deliberately synthesises the reader’s possession, Ellen within it obfuscates and removes facts from public grasp, writing a diary she knows, as the writings of the wife of a famous writer, will be turned over by scholars, and so is composed in the most frustratingly opaque terms. Such is a subversive act that gives her a unique kind of power over the truth, and a cunning inversion of her status as the archetypal dutiful, suffering, asexual Victorian hausfrau. Ellen repudiates all inquisitors, even her own author, and acts like a sphinx in guarding the secret from all but the bravest inquirers. </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">And yet, simultaneously, Byatt makes mischievous sport of all these variegations, drawing attention to the way her characters are aware of their own themes and their shifts between genres. Roland and Maud disdain the idea of romance, partly because they’re aware of how it’s been constructed, and then deconstructed, as a story form. Roland and Maud’s subjugation by an emotional reflex that is pointedly not under their control, is an ironic end of a journey that has ransacked their lives and presuppositions: their dread of the mess of passion, which has ruined so many lives before theirs, is nonetheless an irresistible force, and one not worth resisting. Byatt defends her own pretences to classical authorship with wit, for in the last chapter of the novel she makes a gift of knowledge to the reader cheated of the novel’s characters, in an epilogue that confirms Ash learned his daughter’s identity and assured himself of her security. Byatt is overt here in her defiance, in the same sort of way Roland learns to defy academic reduction of art, and her reasons for this are intuitively honourable. She finally stands to defend the right of the author to synthesise resolutions of dichotomous, sparring ideas and to be a creator of new paradigms. Thus her finally bringing Maud and Roland together isn’t merely a sop to romantic expectation; it’s a way-station in the search for a new harmony and a way of living. </span></span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Both Maud and Roland remain, in spite of all the detail about them, nonetheless remain somehow ill-focused, as if standing in for principles Byatt wants to animate but never quite imbues with self-animation: in spite of its thematic appropriateness as noted above, Roland’s inner life, beyond his perpetual queasiness about his situation, is never presented with the kind of immediacy that lends credibility to his eventual transformation into a poet (one of the few good ideas of Neil LaBute’s sloppy film of the novel was to put this aspect of Roland more up-front). He feels, on occasions, more like a fantasy sketch of a Sensitive New-Age Guy. Considering that one of the novel’s most riveting passages is the direct flashback that confirms Roland and Maud’s theory about a trip Ash and LaMotte took together – the interior perspective used to convey Ash’s fascination with the guarded and altogether mysterious LaMotte, especially when he contemplates how it seems he’s taken the virginity of a woman who is nonetheless very sensually experienced – it’s odd that she’s so choosy about what she flashes back to. The dark central tragedy of the period romance, Blanche’s death, remains problematically out of reach, feeling not so much purposefully as conveniently elusive. The story never quite recovers the impetus of the first quarter when it’s happy to be a realistic novel where the rush of discovery, the everyday grubbiness of Roland and Val’s life, and the oppressiveness of the major characters’ circumstances, are outlaid with keen, occasionally beautiful writing. The clashing textures of romanticised historicism and contemporary drear, all but suffocating in their irreconcilable natures, are excellently conveyed. But a lot of the subsequent pastiche, whilst technically brilliant, nevertheless often defies penetration in lacking the essential musicality of their models, and Byatt to a certain extent proves her own sneaking preference for the old-fashioned novel. Nonetheless, Byatt pulls off the novel’s last segment with a magician's touch, revealing many of the oppressive qualities to be shadows Roland and Maud have been boxing, as characters who seem threatening and one-dimensional blossom into contradictory, likable creatures, like the amusing, accidental partnering of chalk-and-cheese couple Blackadder and Leonora as they chase after Roland and Maud. </span></span></o:p></span><br />
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<i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Possession</span></span></span></i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> is still finally an excellent book, and one with a strong final meaning, looking beyond both the cordoned-off repressions of Victorian patriarchal society and the stifling culture wars of ‘80s academia, but also rifling those eras for their worthy aspects, in searching for a life that treasures the sensual and the intellectual, the immediate and the ageless, the male and female. Byatt’s interests and arguments finally lead to an interesting and revitalising place, in her desire to return magic, passion, force, immediacy, and empathy to the modern novel, whilst not abandoning the critical, rebellious, and awareness-raising aspects of contemporary permutations of literary theory. Possession, as a word, initially seems to be a word that indicates clasping greed, ownership’s prerogatives, and battlefields between the many camps. And yet finally it comes to mean something more respectful and honourable, the role of the custodian, lover, nurturer, and artist. The limitations of possession, the inviolability of some mysteries and experiences, are also firmly underlined, in suggesting that nothing can be truly possessed. </span></span></span></div>
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Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-56665718545294451632010-10-31T23:32:00.010+11:002016-12-14T14:19:42.375+11:00Notes on the Erotic in Literature: What is it, and who is it for?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">The concept of the erotic was once snappily differentiated from the pornographic in a quote attributed to Isabel Allende: “Erotica is using a feather. Pornography is using the whole chicken.” That’s obviously not a dictionary definition, but it is a helpful one. This conveys a sense of erotica as a suggestive, intuitive, subtle, teasing counterbalance to the carnal cornucopia of pornography. But this is not in itself satisfying. Some definitions of the gap between erotica and pornography smack of the legalistic: in the visual arts, especially in movies, since the 1960s, the erotic is usually seen as portraying sex and sexuality, but edges into pornography when actual genitalia engaged in copulation is glimpsed. One can see how the outer edges of erotic art blurs constantly with the romantic and the pornographic, revolving as they all do around a fundamental human trait, and yet erotica stakes out an instinctive middle ground between the two. Romance (to use the modern, colloquial sense of the word rather than the older, specific literary genre) is a social process as well as an interpersonal one, a negotiation and an overture. As a form, romance obeys certain idealized blueprints, as does, in a different way, pornography. Where the romantic is defined by conventional forms that unite or divide potential partners who are attracted and attached by purposeful exchanges – words, glances, visual appreciation of physique, sympathy of mind, etc – the pornographic tends to be equally idealized in editing out emotional or social context, or at least the reduction of these to singular signs, and the enactment of fantasy, display for the sake of libidinous satisfaction, over mutuality and awareness.</span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">The erotic, in opposition to both of these, tends to be more tactile and personal, even, occasionally, entirely one-sided and interior, and yet also less evasive, than romance, in that sexuality and sexual expression, a distant end of the road in romance, is fundamental. It also rejects the convenient, narcissistic qualities of pornography. To take the example of a text like </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Lolita</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, often described as an erotic novel, is to observe the way it makes a mockery of the expectations of romance – two older men competing over the physical possession of a girl at the cusp of adolescence, with all the psychological, physical, and power issues this automatically raises – and also of pornography, because as well as refusing to satisfy Humbert Humbert’s desire, it investigates that desire. The roots of his sexual psychology are suggested; his narration explores the teeming ironies of his situation, attitude, social position, and in the object of his desire herself, and all the while the erotic is constantly evoked, and the pornographic constantly stymied, by Humbert’s efforts to grasp and explore his reactions. Humbert finds erotic savour merely in the syllables of Lolita’s name. The purpose is not merely to arouse but to investigate arousal in multifarious forms. Whereas in romance the processes of a lovers’ negotiation anticipates, and in modern writing usually encompasses, sexual coupling, it usually celebrates the coupling in such a way that renders specificities of the erotic vague, and also institutes a balance of power. Pornography, on the other hand, usually tends to be an expression of power, a manipulation of erotic puppets into a desired form, or a play-act of one partner’s power over another. Erotica, in its way, objectifies and questions the way power moves in a flux between human beings engaged in intimacy, and it also invokes the way people wrestle both with the objects of desire and also their desire itself. The erotic is, then, about struggle as well as about beauty and lust: struggle between desire and society, between lovers, between psyche and body, to find a balance.</span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">The question of whether erotica, as an idea and form, excludes a female or non-heteronormative participation, as was recently posited to me, demands being considered on two levels, one theoretical, and the other in observing historical practice. In theory, in consequence of definitions offered above, such a limitation is non-existent; having defined the erotic as invoking the vast panoply of the human psychosexual experience. In practice, delineations through such terms as “homoerotic” reveal the way areas of erotic experience are commonly divided along traditional lines gender interest. The traditional verbiage of romantic writing evokes the act by a man engaged in an active quest in “winning” a passive female, whilst the struggle inherent in the erotic has generally been realised with force by heterosexual male writers like Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, stacked on the male side, with masculine prerogative almost idealised and yet also endangered, constantly endangered by sapped virility, or castration by various forces. Of course, homoerotic writing has mostly been forbidden or highly surreptitious since long before the modern era, and one often has to look back as far as classical sources to find a sense of the erotic as a dynamic, unsettled, unlimited thing. Women writers were for centuries discouraged from engaging in such writing (which is not to say they entirely obeyed). Yet one can observe the ways these delineations may become porous – the way lesbian erotica is often seen as a male stimulant, and even indeed vice versa – and the term “erotic” itself has been in my experience often described as merely the female version of pornography.</span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">As reductive as all this is, it’s still perhaps revealing that some of the most noted and controversial erotic writing of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries has come from female writers: Erica Jong, Marguerite Duras, Anaïs Nin, Pauline Reage, Elfriede Jelinek, and others. In such a light, erotic writing can seem like the battleground chosen by many women writers to war against the nominally sordid yet more pervasive and eminently consumable field of pornography. Of course, it’s not merely a rebuttal to a proposition to say that women and gay people might write erotic literature anymore than it is to say colonialism was trifling because the colonised worked for the colonisers, unless a transformative dialogue is inherent. But because of erotica’s capacity to be psychological, interior in scope, as well as associative and even cryptic, it gives free play to be ironic and critical as well as celebratory or arousing, therefore the expressive ground of erotic writing is inclusive in variegated ways. In the hands of a talented artist of any gender, the form can be stretched far beyond the immediately perceptible. And then again, of course, there’s the great wealth of generic erotic, from which most of the pictures you can see have been drawn. To each his/her own.</span></span></span></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS-ZR5D5V8KSrpv1ZKyvHpA2HELH2yvxrr6KwOzrpmtfYUCQqJBqE5NbZkjD-XQ04BAha4UMbhX7uBDgKM8yYYVOSnfLRf0dEVXdL-nvW1qX2qU-2oBTHZ9UM-xJDyhVs6E2BfKZ3CJB0/s1600/trip.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><br /><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5534187813467066066" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS-ZR5D5V8KSrpv1ZKyvHpA2HELH2yvxrr6KwOzrpmtfYUCQqJBqE5NbZkjD-XQ04BAha4UMbhX7uBDgKM8yYYVOSnfLRf0dEVXdL-nvW1qX2qU-2oBTHZ9UM-xJDyhVs6E2BfKZ3CJB0/s400/trip.JPG" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 305px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: justify; width: 400px;" /></a></div>
Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-32787370648512532022010-07-05T13:31:00.016+10:002016-12-14T14:24:38.166+11:00Impossible Choices: The Moral Tragedy of Phaedra<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">'P</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">haedra', 1677, by Jean Racine (trans. John Cairncross), in </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Racine: Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, Penguin, 1963.</span></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4YjPAMFiYlig_A1E3StwkfzZfYBep8Or06-0Y0v5Yy0VhQkV0nN8TuEgg5EVc2sLFGk3Sv_fRw5ns002mpkrqAI1wSdlVlzlqxmIj_pN7ohOlFtj2peKU8_8mPIcqj6e1O0cizjGgOqc/s1600/phaedra2_Alexandre+Cabanel.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5490261498245671042" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4YjPAMFiYlig_A1E3StwkfzZfYBep8Or06-0Y0v5Yy0VhQkV0nN8TuEgg5EVc2sLFGk3Sv_fRw5ns002mpkrqAI1wSdlVlzlqxmIj_pN7ohOlFtj2peKU8_8mPIcqj6e1O0cizjGgOqc/s1600/phaedra2_Alexandre+Cabanel.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: left;" /></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">'Phaedra' by Alexandre Cabanel (1</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">880)</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Responsibility in the tragedy of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Phaedra</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> is a Hydra-headed beast. If, as </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Racine</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> says in his introduction, Phaedra is neither entirely guilty nor altogether innocent, it is because she is “involved with her fate”, not passive, and yet her efforts at action are ruinous. As laws of nature and the state are violated, the taint of liability touches many characters, and yet what constitutes independent action is called into doubt. Intention and confusion, the fatal inability of one human being to understand another, the eruptive nature of desire, the tyranny of circumstance and the paranoia of power, conspire to create a situation, ironically defined by committed ardour and defence of honour, which is finally deadly to its two central protagonists. If a tragic hero’s fate should inspire the pity and terror of catharsis, both feelings can be extended to Phaedra, whose entrapment and sorry end suggests all too finite human capacity to fully direct their own fate. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">The immediate drama of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Phaedra</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> is fuelled by a common theme in </span><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Racine</span></st1:city></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">’s work, of a frustrated passion, here the titular character’s transgressive love for her son-in-law Hippolytus. That corrosive visitation she blames on forces outside herself, such as visited her own mother Pasiphae, mother of the Minotaur. “Venus was on me with her dreaded flames, / The fatal torments of a race she loathes,” she declares (I, iii), believing herself to be the final vessel of punishment for a cursed line of royalty, stricken with fatal love. Yet </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Racine</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> also understands such an affliction in clear psychological terms: it’s a logical, if no less unwelcome, problem for a woman with a once-notoriously lecherous husband to be besotted with his elder progeny. This is the catalyst for what occurs, and yet it also merely affects a situation that is already unstable and nearing “the moment of crisis…triggered by an outward event…which will inevitably lead to disaster” (Radford, Shorley, Hossein, 1988: 55): the threat of change in a royal house. The political situation at </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Phaedra</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">’s outset is finely balanced, requiring only rumour to set potentially lethal machinations in play, in a power vacuum that would inevitably be left by Theseus’s death or even merely his extended absence. </span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKM5WLBeWdjmDfu5HczRIwlnUlp29kEyBHGoY2pVGjpSBrAaLmpu-q1fX1hfSkrOzIHCGyFxLx_ntGAlVwt-Ubg_FDEu2CBHUG2usstJzhnQ6gYeb-POCBWvGDrvKbEUybbyvXmlz-q_8/s1600/RACINE_par_De_Troy.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5490261488236588242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKM5WLBeWdjmDfu5HczRIwlnUlp29kEyBHGoY2pVGjpSBrAaLmpu-q1fX1hfSkrOzIHCGyFxLx_ntGAlVwt-Ubg_FDEu2CBHUG2usstJzhnQ6gYeb-POCBWvGDrvKbEUybbyvXmlz-q_8/s400/RACINE_par_De_Troy.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: left; width: 286px;" /></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">'Jean Racine', by Jean Francois de Troy</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Nature abhors a vacuum, and there are three clear alternatives for the throne: Hippolytus, oldest and most respected of Theseus’s sons; his sons by Phaedra with her as regent; and Aricia, feminine remnant of a feared rival line. Political mechanisms, which the characters set in motion without entirely comprehending, reinforce the power and authority of the kingship and law it represents. Each party, then, contains within themselves dualistic potential to be either victim or despot, and such a scenario forbids passivity at the cost of power, status, even potentially one’s life, for action seems by then necessitated by survival and protection’s sake. And yet action is equally proscribed for Phaedra at the outset, and torturous when commenced. Oenone, servant and fellow conspirator, hardly expects the result she and Phaedra gain in pre-empting potential disgrace by accusing Hippolytus, when the conflict has ceased to be one of immediate power and has become one of “honour” (III, iv), that is, the appearance of rectitude, before the father-judge-king. Phaedra’s first impulse, to waste away and die with her secret undivulged, seems on the surface irrational, less reasonable and improbably noble compared to her later weakening. And yet her early resolve is an attempt to assert control over chaos, the rampant nature of Eros in an environment charged by anxiety. Phaedra gives into the greatest potential failing in such a scene, the surrender of reason: “Serve my wild heart, Oenone, not my head.” (III, ii)</span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Peril is present, as Oenone incites Phaedra, for her sons. Hippolytus could easily grab power, as Oenone reminds the Queen (I, iv), and, when the potential for disgrace is upon them, advising for her children, “Pity both of them.” (III, iii) In this ancient sphere, the personal is political, and the wild card in this game is the potent, unknowable manner in which love and hate commingle, for the major protagonists in the royal drama are all linked too in a romantic roundelay. The links of affection hardly however guarantee security and amity, for such affection is more often than not forbidden: Phaedra’s illicit passion for her son-in-law and Hippolytus’s love for the forbidden Aricia have potential to set off an eruption from Theseus in any circumstance, and violate their given roles. If the essence of tragedy involves the plight of heroes of exalted ranks who are defined by flaws, the array of protagonists in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Phaedra</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> are linked by both weaknesses and rank. Although the characters are mythical, such subjects gave </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Racine</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> scope to observe what </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">I. C.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Thimann called “the savagery of passion.”</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">'Phaedra, Act 2 Scene 5', by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1824)</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Theseus’ literal and symbolic functions in the story are important, for it is his judgement, calling on divine retribution to punish a violation of a primal law, which actually brings about Hippolytus’s death. Theseus, as king, is saviour from chaos, embodiment of civic and natural law and tyrannous truth, giving the lie to the hubristic indulgence of a momentarily envisioned, easier path: as Oenone suggests to Phaedra, that “your love becomes like any other love” if the king is dead. Theseus is finally defined by the weight of his word, which is more powerful than even the man who speaks that word. He is provoked by the apparition of unnatural sexual desires, bearing out Roland Barthes’ proposition that </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Racine</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">’s drama was based in the institution of a taboo on incestuous sexuality. Theseus combines civil, patriarchal, and moral authority as king and slayer of monsters, holder at bay of moral chaos, and is the crushing fist ready to fall on violators of those laws, his precipitous reaction to apparent evildoing possessing supernatural force. Theseus’s outrage at Hippolytus’ falsified impropriety has strong personal reflexes: he calls Hippolytus “last of the brigands whom I swept away,” (IV, i) explicitly associating both with the monsters he vanquished in the world and the lecher he conquered in himself and fears in his offspring. That Theseus returns home to find turmoil at the heart of his own realm is ironic, and his righteous reaction is the final ingredient in tragedy. He is stoked to such a fury by a lie, but he also plays out his civic and moral role without hesitation.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">'Phaedra, Act 3, Scene 5', by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1824)</span></span></span></span></div>
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<h1 class="posters_title_single" style="color: rgb(135 , 93 , 70); font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51 , 51 , 51); line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Phaedra, Oenone, Theseus and even Hippolytus himself, for his honour, all then contribute to the latter’s death, yet none can be identified as a certain villain. Theseus curses his son, but Poseidon sends the monster that causes his end. Oenone spreads the false story of Hippolytus’s lechery, but only with Phaedra’s blessing. Phaedra acquiesces to this end, but not of out entirely malicious motives, for her own actions partly circumstantially imposed: the security of her sons’ inheritance, and the curse of a goddess, imposes violently contradictory necessities upon her private moral code. Phaedra’s early death-courting is her attempt to maintain a purely personal, egocentric integrity in the face of irrational motives: her strength as a being of integrity is tested by a “blind urge, fatal in its birth, normally destructive, often cruel.” (Cazamian) But </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Phaedra</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> is really what Lytton Strachey described as the “history of a spiritual crisis…the final catastrophic phases of a long series of events.” The dilemma Phaedra faces throughout the play is whether to be destroyed by her own hand, in repressing her emotions and thus killing herself, or by an external imperative, disgraced and exiled for illicit, treacherous evil. The strength to resist, in obedience to a rule, what one wants, is a recurring challenge, one that both Phaedra and Hippolytus fail in their fashions.</span></span></span></span></span></span></h1>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">'Phèdre et Hippolyte' by Baron Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1802)</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Oenone, whilst acting as petty plotter and confidant for Phaedra, is not finally morally responsible for Hippolytus’s end, but incidentally. She is one of a “race of confidants, servants, messengers, matrons, and guards (who) come and go, responsible for feeding tragedy with events.” (Barthes) She acts on Phaedra’s impulses, and represents her egocentric side (her implorations to remember that she came with the Queen from Minos confirm that to lose rank would be to lose all place in the world), whilst Phaedra’s efforts to spare herself pain result in her twice hurting Hippolytus, once with feigned hate, the second time with the genuine variety, if still inextricable with crippling ardour. “All I need is your silence to succeed,” Oenone says, introducing a legal precept: silence implies consent. “He is a fearful monster in my eyes,” Phaedra says (III, iii) of Hippolytus when he spurns her, his “manly pride” (II, ii) suddenly imbued with the appearance of contempt, exacerbated by the discovery that he loves Aricia. Phaedra is happy to play martyr to desire for a man with no love for womankind, but turns all too jealous at the idea that she is a scorned woman, causing her to reject the chance to save him. This final reflex of egocentrism condemns him and Phaedra herself. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">There is an all-or-nothing reaction here that extends Phaedra’s tragedy to the outmost limits, where idyll and nihilism are held in perfect quarrel: either perfect obedience to form, the social, familial, and interpersonal dictate, or inviting the total disintegration of those forms, beckons to her, and “anguish has become a grace and death a glory.” (Strachey) Phaedra is not in fact obeying any simple, natural law: she is, after all, not actually Hippolytus’ mother, but playing that role in a social function. The poisonous mix of love, guilt, and outrage within Phaedra is irrational not only in source but also in what it demands of herself and her love-object – he must be either untouchable idol or despicable foe. That’s a lapse she’s not alone in: Theseus, too, ignores the probable in character, specifically that of Hippolytus, and obeys the secret anxiety instead, like his wife, of the fear that their own imperfection is being reflected in Hippolytus’ spotless mirror. That spotlessness, however, is in itself negative: Hippolytus’ haughty insistence on principal leaves himself vulnerable to a curse he knows well his father has laid on him.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">H</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">elen Mirren as Phaedra and Margaret Tyzack as Oenone in the 2009 National Theatre production.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">If Phaedra is tragic because the choice between a world of ridiculousness and the annihilation of that world consumes her mind, Hippolytus is smaller in his scale because his moral rigidity is in part his own undoing. He will not deign to defend himself to his father from Phaedra’s accusations, for he holds her and his father as lesser beings than himself, indicated by his deploring of his father’s womanising and snide comment after Phaedra’s admission of her passion: “Oh God, who knows / Her heart, is it her virtue you reward?” (II, iv) But again, he sees in another’s fault his own: “How love / Has spread its baleful poison through the house! / Myself, full of a passion he (Theseus) condemns…” (III, v) Whilst his ardour is more familiar in the sense that a young man falls in love with a young, eligible, unattached female, he is still rebelling against patriarchal authority, and yet he stands on respect for his father as a reason to conceal the truth. Unlike Euripides’ Hippolytus, who is defined by a “fanaticism of his virginality” (Kitto, 1939), the prince is a falling idol in that regard here. He, like Phaedra, elects himself to the role of martyr to an ideal, but unlike her he carries it through in apparent oblivion to the potential cost. That is Hippolytus’ hubris, and it’s worth noting again that the play’s full original title was </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Phaedra and Hippolytus</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, their tragedy presented in binary terms. </span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Having served Phaedra’s wild heart, Oenone is dismissed by her mistress as “detestable” (V, vii), but of course, Oenone only saved Phaedra from what Barthes called the “trivial kitchenry of doing.” Action in this tragedy is either only reaction, or invitation of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">fait accompli</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">. The cruel joke that circumstance plays on the protagonists, with Theseus first believed dead before proving to be not only alive but returning home, gives the characters the hope of freedom and then dispels it, suggesting the illusory nature of wilful direction. Everything that follows is a kind of damage control, which proves impossible, and consequences must be played out to the end. That there is no clear demarcation of forces welling within and imposed from without suggests that in any situation the capacity for action is inherently compromised by presented choices. The essential chain of this tragedy is fully defined: the situation, the tragic hero, the crisis, the sad result.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 17px;"><em style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">'The Death of Hippolytos'</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1860)</span></span></span></em></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Theseus’s condemnation of his son is only the final link of that chain, which commences with Phaedra’s nihilism, a reflexive reduction of fate to either her own annihilation or that of the world about her, passion at the absolute extreme. Her suicide is atonement and moral act, a final attempt to restore to proper order, rather than evasion a life of shame: “…death, robbing my eyes of light, will give / Back to the sun its tarnished purity,” are her very last words, and they reflect Racine’s fundamentally Christian rather than pagan outlook. Theseus’ final lines, “Would the memory / Of her appalling misdeeds die with her!”, can be read as both prosecutorial and empathetic, as a new perceptiveness on his part of the unknowable and frail nature of humans, or simply more reflexive pomposity. Phaedra dies, as she had intended at the beginning, with all intervening attempts to stave off fate having resulted in disaster. Her tragedy is, finally, not merely that she does wrong in spite her instincts to do right, but that th</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">e choice between one and the other was impossible.</span></span></div>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">BIBLIOGRAPHY</span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"></span></span></i></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Barthes, R. 1993, “From ‘On </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Racine</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">’”, in A Roland Barthes Reader, Vintage, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">London</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">.</span></span></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Brown, A. 1983, A New Companion to Greek Tragedy, Croom Helm, </span></span></i><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Beckenham</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, </span></span></i><st1:country-region st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Kent</span></span></i></st1:country-region></st1:place><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">.</span></span></i></span></span></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Cazamian, L. 1955, A History of French Literature, </span></span></i><st1:placename st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Oxford</span></span></i></st1:placename><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span></i><st1:placetype st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">University</span></span></i></st1:placetype><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> Press, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">London</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">.</span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Highet, G. 1949, The Classical Tradition, </span></span></i><st1:placename st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Oxford</span></span></i></st1:placename><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span></i><st1:placetype st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">University</span></span></i></st1:placetype><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";"> Press, </span></span></i><st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">New York</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:state><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">.</span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Kitto, H. D. F. 1939, Greek Tragedy, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Methuen</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">London</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">.</span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Mason, G. 1959, A Concise Survey of French Literature, Arthur Barker, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">London</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">.</span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Radford, C., Shorley, C., Hossain, M. 1988, Signposts to French Literature, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Hutchinson</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">London</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">.</span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Strachey, L. 1948, ‘Racine’, in Literary Essays, Chatto and Windus, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">London</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">.</span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Thimann, I. C. 1966, A Short History of French Literature, Pergamon, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">Oxford</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times new roman";">.</span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></span></i></span></div>
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Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-14154789241764073332010-05-28T18:49:00.022+10:002010-11-12T16:28:17.212+11:00Aspiration and Actuality: George Eliot’s Middlemarch<div style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Middlemarch</span></span></i></span><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, 1872, by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). Edition I read: Chatto and Windus, 1950.</span></span></span></div><p></p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCnq0rDULHEIYmpELyOa30alwLq4fMJvEeDpa-IovyqVg9eHP6dqdtY6_LgUA1uC5bYFFf_3EKkm_Ly7_bcdCeSwKfc-Jxw8Va2psMI8motJSxRMke2XUm6U9F_YNj3HYSuSYFWcThZjY/s1600/d&c.JPG"><img style="text-align: justify;display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 323px; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCnq0rDULHEIYmpELyOa30alwLq4fMJvEeDpa-IovyqVg9eHP6dqdtY6_LgUA1uC5bYFFf_3EKkm_Ly7_bcdCeSwKfc-Jxw8Va2psMI8motJSxRMke2XUm6U9F_YNj3HYSuSYFWcThZjY/s400/d&c.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5476240905092494290" /></a><blockquote style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">D</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">orothea finds Casaubon dead, from a painting by W. L. Taylor. </span></span></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">In her novel </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Middlemarch</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, George Eliot describes a culture and era which was for her, and her original readers, recent and familiar. Although it is a work of Victorian-era artistic conscience, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Middlemarch</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s focus is in fact on the epoch immediately preceding </span><st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Victoria</span></st1:state></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s, and details in panorama the subtle shifts of British social life. The novel is defined by a constant dialogue of dichotomous actions and reactions, and how they might manifest and conflict in forms individual and communal. “There must be a systole and diastole in all inquiry,” pronounces Dr. Tertius Lydgate, one of Eliot’s protagonists, and his medical metaphor identifies Eliot’s own method of contemplating the human world, whether observable in the clash between private ambition and social role, emotional passion and restraining roles, settled custom and new possibilities, and a multitude of other oppositions. These forces work upon each other within the psychology of Eliot’s heroes, and on the field of Middlemarch society, always resolving with complex, often costly, but also necessary compromises.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Middlemarch</span></span></i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> is a curious work insofar in that it’s a work of great expanse – and length, dear reader! – and yet it retains a personal intimacy comparable to Jane Austen’s works, as it charts several specific stories engaging a select group of characters, whose fates entwine in overt and subtle fashions: the first major character, and the dominant figure in the book, is Dorothea Brooke, the niece and ward of Mr Arthur Brooke. Contrasted by her perceptibly more sensible, and yet actually, utterly uninteresting, conformist sister Celia, Dorothea, at the conclusion of her teenage years, pours both her natural adolescent fervour and frustrated intellectual yearnings firstly into a passionate religiosity, and subsequently into an ill-advised marriage with Edward Casaubon, a middle-aged cleric and scholar whose object of a life of intellectual labour is a tome that resembles something not so far from Frazier’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Golden Bough</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> and the works of Joseph Campbell, a key to the shared roots of all mythologies. But Casaubon, an heir who’s never struggled for a moment in his life, has grown stale in mind and emotions, his learning proves to be general pedantry, and the image of intellectual greatness that makes Dorothea smitten with him fades in the instant she marries him and therefore can’t escape her poor choice. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Dorothea soon enough finds, without quite perceiving it, a more fitting and attractive beau in the form of Will Ladislaw, a young scholar and artist who’s benefited, without much mutual respect or gratitude, from Casaubon’s patronage: Casaubon’s fortune came to him thanks to Will’s mother being disinherited for making her own way in the world as an actress, and eventually marrying a Polish immigrant. Will and Casaubon’s characters as well as social positions and ideals of vitality are highly divergent, and Will and Dorothea’s unconscious magnetic attraction hardens Casaubon’s dislike of his nephew, and as his and Dorothea’s marriage calcifies, his flashes of jealousy and pettiness concord with a quickening physical rot that overtakes him. This romantic triangle is contrasted by the swift marriage of seemingly well-matched ages and physiognomies, as Tertius Lydgate, a young reform-minded doctor who makes waves in Middlemarch with his haughty disregard for settled habits, marries Rosamond Vincy, the beautiful, spoilt daughter of the new mayor of Middlemarch, mill proprietor Mr Vincy.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Rosamond and Lydgate’s marriage proves however just as disastrous as the Casaubons’, for Lydgate and Rosamond absolutely fail to deal with each other during a fiscal crisis early in their marriage, and Lydgate, far from realising his genuine ambitions to become a pioneer of medical science, gives in to his wife’s wilful dictates. Rosamond’s brother Fred, introduced as a callow gadabout who’s flunked out of the university studies he was undertaking in order to join the gentlemanly clergy as was his father’s dream, expects a large inheritance from a perverse aged relation, Peter Featherstone. But when that expectation is dashed in a series of mordantly hilarious circumstances, he’s humiliated in the eyes of his lifelong love Mary Garth, who’s been working for Featherstone, since her manager father Caleb had fallen on lean times, an humiliation compounded by the fact Caleb has to then pay Fred’s debts. Lydgate’s patron in Middlemarch is the unctuous, much-disliked but powerful banker Nicholas Bulstrode, whose investments and charity works are always designed to further the influence of his elevated Protestant theology.</span></span></p><p></p></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghhR0OJRedaLE8JVmmLZoKm9yBQ0xpu0_ulDKRI3IUDmtK_ICJ8TOrPN6mp5EacYVRkOqUPLL9hqv_d-1xw_TGjk6xFY5s1mJi_nji4XjS-GnESNsRC15N49ux9jc2T3yonPm1d0S0_-4/s1600/mae.JPG"><img style="text-align: justify;display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 395px; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghhR0OJRedaLE8JVmmLZoKm9yBQ0xpu0_ulDKRI3IUDmtK_ICJ8TOrPN6mp5EacYVRkOqUPLL9hqv_d-1xw_TGjk6xFY5s1mJi_nji4XjS-GnESNsRC15N49ux9jc2T3yonPm1d0S0_-4/s400/mae.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5476240898358548178" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><blockquote style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">G</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">eorge Eliot, in a sketch by Samuel Lawrence for a lost portrait</span></span></span></blockquote></div></div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The historic milieu that </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Middlemarch</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> recounts is defined by its transience, between the Regency and Napoleonic Wars, and the ascension of </span><st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Victoria</span></st1:state></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, with the First Reform Bill, the coming of the railways, medical development and other signifiers of oncoming change often preoccupying the characters. None of these however arrive within the novel’s body, which is defined by the ineluctable tension between new and old, institutional and transformative. The historical nature of Eliot’s enquiry is repeatedly noted, through phases like “in those days” and “in those ante-reform times.” The landed class, depicted through figures like Tory stalwart Sir James Chettam, dithering Mr Brooke, a would-be reform candidate for Parliament who neglects his tenants, and eccentric old Peter Featherstone, who uses money to taunt and goad relatives and yet finally leaves it all to an illegitimate son, is still enshrined as the essential power base, a hegemony the Bill promises to at least partly shake, in favour of manufacturing and mercantile forces, which have already begun to take up the mantle in local governance, as embodied by Mr Vincy. Yet the elevated bourgeoisie still yearns, as illustrated by Rosamond Vincy and also in Mr Vincy’s hopes for his son Fred, to ingratiate the aristocracy and rise to positions associated with that caste, such as the clergy.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Within this social landscape, individual human dramas are defined by the constant push and pull of aspiration and actuality, and the way one can alter the other. “It is…the community that preserves…an inherited wisdom about the human condition…it is the medium in which the individual lives, and shapes his destiny,” as R. T. Jones put it in his 1970 survey of Eliot’s work, and </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Middlemarch</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> is defined by a contrapuntal reflection between the acts of its heroes and the reactions of social choruses. The major protagonists are defined by compliance to a personal dominant honour and circumspection, enforced by condition and custom but also quite often welling from a deep interior conflict between desired end and inner scruple. Constantly reiterated throughout the novel is the fact that characters with new-fangled outlooks and notions are all the more conscious of behaving in a fashion correct both in the eyes of others and within themselves. Thus Will, a young man with a free-ranging artistic, political, and philosophical mind, is rigidly dismissive to the legacy offered him stemming from disreputable business dealings, and courtly in the extreme towards his forbidden object of desire, Dorothea, after she has been widowed. Dorothea, with her fulsome ambitions to work for social good and intellectual fulfilment, initially expresses her longings through a marriage that proves disastrous, and channels them into religious dogmatism, abnegation, and scholarship that is retrograde, maintains a determination to live up to her choice.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <span lang="EN-AU"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The institution of marriage, as ever a most cherished and troubling form of social bondage, is rigorously examined, as the unions in </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Middlemarch</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> drive much of the plot and create various nexuses of clashing values. Dorothea’s yearnings founder upon Edward Casaubon’s empathetic impotence, Lydgate’s privilege-formed high-mindedness falls prey to the clasping middle-class egotism of his new wife Rosamond, and the romance of Mary Garth and Fred Vincy is constantly staved off by her insistence on Fred’s discovering a level of independence. Such romances and unions are at the forefront of the novel, but the supporting cast teems with odd examples of mismatched temperaments and socially iniquitous partnerships, with such loaded examples as Mr and Mrs Bulstrode, locked in a marriage defined by dishonesty and disappointment although it had seemed founded in civil security and mutual religious certainty, and one that proves to have a final integrity far greater than some others</span></span></span><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-size:12.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></div></span></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK20new-AIqojn-t8vNrIfBmj-9aDDvIP_N9SaxjWh0YqZJ-nyHXG4ErZTCf9C8hNBw446VMtMyYPGN11ekXYNJnoFW6gBjomnelBIhIr0Y2cjfMHO63o6WNNVzooDlWm07tNtD1IUook/s1600/ghl1.JPG"><img style="text-align: justify;display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; cursor: pointer; width: 310px; height: 400px; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK20new-AIqojn-t8vNrIfBmj-9aDDvIP_N9SaxjWh0YqZJ-nyHXG4ErZTCf9C8hNBw446VMtMyYPGN11ekXYNJnoFW6gBjomnelBIhIr0Y2cjfMHO63o6WNNVzooDlWm07tNtD1IUook/s400/ghl1.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5476240891828129826" /></a><div style="text-align: center;"><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">George Henry Lewes as a young man, by Anne Gliddon</span></span></blockquote></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">In this way marriage, the binding of distinct personalities, considered far beyond mere expression of immediate personal desires, becomes vehicle for the attendant concerns of money, property, and propriety. Dorothea’s first husband, Casaubon, seems a personification of the unpleasant qualities Mary Garth associates with the genteel clergy, and yet he beguiles Dorothea at first with a vision of towering, unimpeded intellect and labours of great spiritual worth. His increasingly aloof, controlling intent exacerbates exactly the situation he fears, and he becomes, whilst not altogether unsympathetic, a kind of fossilised example of a waning, inarguable patriarchal authority rooted in possessor’s privilege, and religious and scholarly orthodoxy. Rosamond Vincy becomes avatar of corrosive self-interest and firm, insensitive willpower, although, ironically but logically, as a pretty and respected native of Middlemarch, none of the same level of social disapproval falls on her as it does on assailed outsiders like her husband and Ladislaw.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Lydgate, before marrying her, has pretences to achieving greatness in medical circles as a researcher, a pretence gradually ruined by debt, the wiles of his wife, and his own guardedness, so he settles for being merely a “successful man,” an amusing antithesis, but also a reduction that seems tragically unfair. And yet Lydgate conforms entirely to the expectations of family and society he imposes on himself in marrying Rosamond. The inability of individuals to escape such binds of imposition, for which marriage is both common example and neat metaphor, is something both Lydgate and Dorothea repeat. Both do their best to please their partners through support and capitulation, but both face obstacles that cannot be surmounted, stoked by Lydgate and Casaubon’s shared trait of intense, elevated pride that exacerbates rather than leavens their situations. Lydgate himself, although desiring to define himself an explorer of new medical worlds, and brusquely dismissive of entrenched interests and received thinking within his professional sphere, is unimaginative and inflexible, even innately conservative, beyond it, and is weak in the world in a way that is described long before he marries.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">For her part, Dorothea’s ambitions to find herself a niche in which action and engagement, with both a factual world of people in need and with a high-minded life, and desire to become part of a great man’s life and therefore expand her own moral and intellectual horizons, is expressed through marriage, a path to self-fulfilment that sees her first subordinated to Casaubon’s increasingly sinister prerogative, for his scholarship is, in spite of the hoped-for confluence of religious prerogative and real-world benefit, entirely divorced from any useful end. She then finally fades into social inconsequence whilst Will rises to fame with the aid of her private income. Her marriage to Casaubon is considered mildly objectionable for the unseemliness of a young woman choosing an older man for his mental faculties rather than physical desirability or fiscal and social security, although the marriage does bring her the last two, at a bitter cost. Dorothea nonetheless dedicates herself to that marriage with as much fortitude as she can muster, reduced in essence to unpaid secretary and servant to Casaubon’s embittered and paranoid will, and their union proves to embody the mustiness of the lifestyle Casaubon extols. Dorothea’s ripostes and rebuttals to her husband’s often grating insinuations and statements, however, only result in guilt-wringing bouts of illness.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Dorothea’s second marriage, to Will, brings larger external consequences, with severance from fortune and family (if temporary) and from the standards with which she has lived in the Middlemarch scheme of things. Both marriages are acts of aspiration in intent, the second even revolutionary in terms of the expectation of her relations and peers. Yet each marriage, to some extent, removes from Dorothea the self-animating will and sense of mission that drives her during both her adolescence at the outset, and then in her extended period of widowhood, and “the emphasis is all on aspiration, very little on achievement,” as Robert Speaight put it. Even within herself, Dorothea is a bundle of contradictions, imbued with enormous capacity for feeling and sympathy, and yet early on, at least, expresses herself through priggish, abstaining conduct. A link between Dorothea and Rosamond is discernable, in spite of their disparate natures and deeper than their mutual attachment to Will. That similarity is found in their essential dissatisfaction with being passive agents in how their own lives are to proceed, and can both be described as “victims of their fancies.” Both embark on marriage as much in the hope it will change their world, in reaction to their home lives. In Dorothea’s case, to swap the haze and dismissiveness of Mr Brooke’s upbringing for elevation into exalted spheres of learning and achievement, in Rosamond’s for the far more worldly end of entering aristocratic circles and bathing in attendant glamour distant from Mr Vincy’s cash-conscious volatility. For both, ambitions have to be filtered through marriage and its attendant submission to a sentimental form of neutrality and sublimation, a submission Rosamond resists in relation to Lydgate, and which Casaubon tries to impose on Dorothea even after death.</span></span></p></div></div></div><img style="text-align: justify;display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; cursor: pointer; width: 305px; height: 400px; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWcOBxs1YWTWgUtqYqqJgkhnN6-8tDE5AGM9nBWvDQy7HmNBYLcEaTc2bW3JQgmywd9bf4GdqSaQop2384MAZPvYoVv5LfR6p5u2UZzhB8YX_HTC0ga332azaMCPA-x5Poanm7Gi9gC8c/s400/Middlemarch.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5476242939359934850" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; "><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><blockquote style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">"Middlemarch", by Stephen Alcorn</span></span></span></blockquote></span></div></span><div><div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><i></i></span></p></div></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Whilst Chettam’s embodiment of the proper, felicitous, pompous noble comes to weigh on Dorothea, Chettam proves something a straw dummy, much as the class he represents is starting to be supplanted. Fred Vincy, as initially indolent and destructive as his sister, is alchemised into a thriving and sturdy young man, partly from the positive influence of Mary, whose secure and assured sense of character, enforced by her own experience which cannot indulge the romantic notions of Dorothea and Rosamond, and by her father Caleb, a figure who embodies the transition, and the link between, classic yeoman England to a newer, more industrial and business-like one. Fred’s early expectation is to inherit Featherstone’s Stone Grange and become a landed gentleman, anticipating that he would “know that he needed to do nothing.” But he fails to possess the property through playing a game which Featherstone has rigged for his own amusement, in which reward and achievement has nothing to do with deserving or responsibility but arbitrary prerogative and minatory guilt. Featherstone then stands in for courtly world, where success and favour are based on such whims and sources of power. Fred comes to own Stone Grange having instead proven himself in middle-class arts of management, book-keeping, and rational application, which even Caleb Garth, with his still partly plebeian dedication to business without an entirely competent understanding of finance, has not yet mastered. In the story of Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, a new era is nascent, in which something resembling a meritocracy is discernible if hardly fully, inarguably formed. Such is, Eliot suggests, the desirable and inevitable way of progress, as an incremental process realised only through trial. Middlemarch, for all its dampening agents, is being altered all the while.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Middlemarch is also a vicinity of ironies and hypocrisies. Mr Brooke, genial, pro-reform independent political candidate, is a tightwad about maintaining his property and tenants. Bulstrode, apostle and arbiter, made his fortune out of pawnbroking and dubious deals and can contemplate manslaughter to protect his reputation. The Casaubon fortune too, with its idyllic estates and great house replete with the signifiers of careless luxury and scholastic wealth, a summit of genteel aspiration, is based in the same, dirt-smeared processes of exploitation and pretence. The scandal of Bulstrode and Lydgate “gathered a zest which could not be won from the question whether the Lords would throw out the Reform Bill,” a deliberate phrase that links the failures of both men’s differing crusading spirits in the face of enthused reactionary attitude and the high political manifestation of a similar sentiment. A constant quid pro quo in social, moral, and personal values is detailed, as positions of power and reliance are altered and often reversed. Twinning opposites are continually described, through characters like Will, the “gypsy” rebel, and Bulstrode, dean of Middlemarch capitalism and tireless labourer for God’s glory – if strictly in terms of his denominational preference – are found to be intricately linked, and likewise with Casaubon, pillar of learned clergy and landed gentry, and both elders hide deplorable characteristics, where Will’s intelligence, honour, and careful progressive ideals count for little in the face of xenophobia and expedient prejudice. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Poor marriages and unfortunate alliances are easily made; more fitting ones constantly impeded by decorum and economics, and also sometimes through good sense. Through Will and Dorothea, and other characters, adherence to customary social forms of etiquette and behaviour is confirmed as a necessary codicil to any novel outlook, partly to justify and paint in the best light those outlooks, for even the whiff of wrongdoing gives conservatives a weapon, and because of a logical link in the author’s mind that a dedication to progress is a hallmark of a highly conscientious character. Even Casuabon’s and Bulstrode’s actions spring from an overwhelming, almost morbid sensitivity, and whilst he cannot be called a reformer so much as a zealot, Bulstrode’s cash and dedication is vital to Lydgate’s efforts as medical progressive. And yet, often, acting in pure accord to both custom and conscience finally provides as many problems as it checks, as, for instance, Lydgate’s affectations conspire to cut off all but his last, most odious recourse. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The punishment for even minor violations or evasions of strict responsibilities can be severe, as proves all too accurate in the case of Lydgate, and for Bulstrode, whose own agenda is gleefully sabotaged by the enemies he has made, after the return and then suspicious death of the sleazy reprobate Raffles, his foil in the novel’s second half. Whilst to a certain extent imbuing the likes of Will and Dorothea with such exacting private standards, as opposed to the likes of Rosamond and Bulstrode, serves the familiar need of a dramatic author to render the figures intended as exemplary and those who are not in their necessary, exclusive light, it also offers the firm assurance that fibre, and the capacity to withstand and absorb abuse and compromise, is a necessary characteristic of the first-rate human. Lydgate, for instance, is entirely defeated precisely because he is too rigid to conciliate: his capitulation, to Rosamond, to monetary imperative, to Middlemarch’s rejection, is total rather than arbitrated.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Eliot’s ambition then to create a narrative that describes what is a lucidly probable and prognosticative account, albeit with positive results and instructive lessons attached (as opposed to one in which various ideals are illustrated and fulfilled, or pointedly unfulfilled), can be described as quintessentially “realist”, and the manner in which she thoroughly describes a precise sense of the relationship between individual and society, essayed through an “interpreting intelligence” as a hallmark of that style, as C. P. Snow summed that genre up. The gift that Eliot’s authorial voice offers the reader is one lacking for the characters, the capacity to leap from one viewpoint to another, conceive discursive perspectives and how they collude to create painful situations, of the “inevitable incompleteness of every human judgement” on any action, except, in glimmerings, for Dorothea. All deeds and consequences are considered in both their personal and public light, “compelled by many conflicting currents in their daily flow” (Speaight) and </span></span><span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Middlemarch </span></i></span><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">presents that populace as a fully functioning organism, with a heart and its own systole and diastole motions.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">In terms of pure craft, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Middlemarch</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, in spite of its length, is a dream of a book, Dickensian in its humour and evocation of human peculiarity, but not half as overgrown in prose, Austen-esque in its intricate sense of the interpersonal, but far wider in the scope of its awareness and depth of its portraiture. Many commentators over the years have found Will an insufficient character, a censure which characters intended as good generally draw. He’s not the kind of bitingly convincing figure who can drive the reader insane with their sorry aspects, like Rosamond or Raffles, or the kind to move you with efforts to find their better nature, like Fred. But Will’s keenly described psychological reflexes, in trying to avoid facing his own terminal attraction to his “aunt,” and his hot, suggestively resentful sense of his own outsider status when he lets loose in outrage at Bulstrode and Rosamond, and natural his bohemianism – he likes to lie on the carpet of people he visits – nonetheless make him a far more convincing and substantial character in such traits than most other idealised characters in Victorian fiction: none of the ghostly goodness of Oliver Twist or Elizabeth Bennet here. But Dorothea, whose quality is always a given but never pushed into the realm of unlikely saintliness, is by far the superior character. She moves through a series of educational tragedies and often fails in tact and form, and whilst her innate integrity doesn’t change, the way it expresses itself, and the ideals she pours it into, are convincingly remoulded and fortified by life.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Eliot was also often perceived as a woman who insisted on a high moral tone in her books, perhaps to compensate for own her mildly scandalous relationship with George Henry Lewes, whom Will is partly based on. It’s certainly true of </span></span><span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Middlemarch </span></i></span><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">that she emphasises that behaviour has inescapable consequences, and adherence to propitious norms is necessary for happiness in life. And yet the quiet crackle of the erotic is almost always tangible in, say, Will's conversations with Dorothea, so that it’s not too hard to see why Casaubon goes rigid at the merest sight of them together. Such a crackle is also preset in Lydgate and Rosamond’s flirtations, and interestingly absent from Fred and Mary’s relationship, which began and has remained largely pre-adolescent in its purity. Eliot’s slow-burn narrative pays off with several scenes that are sheer beauties in climactic effect, and yet which are nothing, in terms of any external drama: Dorothea’s appeal to Rosamond to be a better partner to her husband, a moment which sees the two women joined in momentary fellowship, and, then, Dorothea’s explosive spurning of all she possesses for the inevitable clinch with Will, in Casaubon’s deserted, cavernous, shadowy house as a thunderstorm erupts outside. It’s the kind of romantic melodrama that </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hollywood</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> is always yearning to reproduce, but it doesn’t violate the novel’s realistic tenor.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">As </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Middlemarch</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s narrative draws to a close, of her major protagonists, some find fulfilment, others prosperity, but the two are not necessarily mutual. The immediate story concludes with the rejection of the Reform Bill, whilst Lydgate and Rosamond, Mr and Mrs Bulstrode, and Will and Dorothea all must leave Middlemarch, the median nature of which is suggested by its very name: it is the centre, the core, the given, the banal and the essential. Lydgate does well for himself, but considers himself a failure. Will is elected to parliament and becomes a man of note, at the expense of Dorothea’s shrinkage to mere social appendage. All of these are ambiguous, imperfect ends that seem symptomatic of their era and human relations within them. But Eliot reminds us that she is writing of the past, and that such was the nature of things, she suggests, whilst the future has already happened and will go on happening. In Dorothea, most clearly, awareness of humanity as a shared state, sensing “the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance…that involuntary, palpitating life”, rather than as a net of limitations, a new reality awakens, and all these were skirmishes in an ongoing struggle for society and the self.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">BIBLIOGRAPHY</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Bullett, George 1947, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">George Eliot: Her Life and Books</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, Collins, </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">London</span></span></st1:city></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Jones, R. T. 1970, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">George Eliot</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, </span></span><st1:placename st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Cambridge</span></span></st1:placename><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span><st1:placetype st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">University</span></span></st1:placetype><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> Press, </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">London</span></span></st1:city></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Snow, C.P. 1978, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Realists</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, MacMillan, </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">London</span></span></st1:city></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></span></p> <span lang="EN-AU"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Speaight, Robert, 1954, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">George Eliot</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, Arthur Barker, </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">London</span></span></st1:city></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></div></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS';"><br /></span></div>Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-92179718601982873112010-05-16T19:51:00.023+10:002023-03-22T18:08:48.949+11:00Conan Doyle’s Tales of Unease: The Haze at the Dawn of Modernity<div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjpmVhMVfQidfjLvAmWNgWAI1HNYLfNs4AkBG0UtTxRpT-E3TsZO-LS_OoEFM07MheNZB7f7BzxQbhDez-TXX_x9SlN03tSHbhCTsGvMWaYUf0hX_Ku-kNvhZT1YCDLwS5ikiFtq-xQfU/s1600/tales1.jpg"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5471803520867730770" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjpmVhMVfQidfjLvAmWNgWAI1HNYLfNs4AkBG0UtTxRpT-E3TsZO-LS_OoEFM07MheNZB7f7BzxQbhDez-TXX_x9SlN03tSHbhCTsGvMWaYUf0hX_Ku-kNvhZT1YCDLwS5ikiFtq-xQfU/s400/tales1.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 256px;" /></span></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>Tales of Unease, collected short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, written between 1883 and 1921. Pictured, 2000 Wordsworth edition, with introduction by David Stuart Davies.</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Arthur Conan Doyle is of course most famous for creating one great pop culture icon, Sherlock Holmes, and to a much lesser extent a second, Professor Challenger. The man himself had always wanted however to expand his literary horizons, and he was most proud of his historical novels, with some good reason: <i>The White Company</i>, for instance, is lively and sweeping where its models, the works of Walter Scott, lumber today. Why no-one’s made a film of it I can’t imagine. <i>Tales of Unease</i>, however, is a collection of some of his ephemera, ghoulish and ghastly stories that suggest the breadth of his imagination and his genre reflexes. Conan Doyle had a particular fondness for adventure, for tales of revenge, and for the motif of penetrating the unknown, for exploring and explaining the inexplicable. This last fascination, and the desire to hold the irrational at bay, is at the root of the electric brilliance of the character of Sherlock Holmes, sitting with the authority of a judge at the crossroads of chance and fate. Conan Doyle became increasingly frustrated with writing detective stories, and his hero, precisely because they stood in the way of his indulging his interests more deeply: where Holmes became beloved because he delivered readers from the anxiety of the fantastic, it was exactly the anxiety of the fantastic that propelled Conan Doyle’s invention. As he became more and more of a mystic, the idea that all perceived truth had deeper levels changed its nature for him.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In this light, a curious aspect of the Holmes stories – and this is why the Holmes novels are all rather inferior to the short works – is that they are in essence passive. Although both Holmes and Watson, on the page if not always in their film and TV incarnations, are robust men capable of taking care of themselves, and there’s often some last-minute piece of gallivanting to try and catch some criminal before they escape, yet they are almost always too late upon the scene. The events are always happening to someone else, in some other place. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In the Holmes story the real action, such as it is, is to be found in the pleasure of listening to Holmes explicate how clues have allowed him to cut through all confusion and obscurity. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Considering that Conan Doyle took real delight in derring-do, ripping yarns, and physical action, which he had a real gift for writing, this constriction, as well as his more intellectual preoccupations, were at odds with the detective genre as he had helped to codify it, whereas later writers in the mode would skew the genre closer to mental parlour games where action is inconsequential and the processing of clues up front.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In any event, Conan Doyle was a natural yarn-spinner, and some of the stories collected in <i>Tales of Unease</i> resemble the kinds of crime Holmes would come across after the fact, particularly the morbid vengeance romance of the 'The Lord of Château Noir' and 'The Brazilian Cat': the latter tale, especially, possesses one of those faux-avuncular villainous relations with nasty intentions that Holmes battled so often. In the 'The Case of Lady Sannox', a Turkish ambassador desperately appeals to the surgeon Douglas Stone, a flashy man about town who is currently the lover of society diva Lady Sannox, to come and save the life of a veiled Eastern woman by slicing away her lower lip, which has been inoculated with a poison that will soon spread and kill her.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“He grabbed the wounded lip with his forceps, and with two swift cuts he tore out a broad V-shaped piece. The woman sprang up on the couch with a dreadful gurgling scream. Her covering was torn from her face. It was a face that he knew. In spite of that protruding upper lip and that slobber of blood, he knew that face.”</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Yes, the woman is Lady Sannox, and the Turk is her husband Lord Sannox in disguise, having artfully contrived a vicious and unmistakeable punishment for both guilty parties: </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“It was really very necessary for <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Marion</st1:city></st1:place>, this operation,” said he, “not physically, but morally, you know, morally.”</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">He signs off with commands to forward his mail to <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Venice</st1:city></st1:place> and to exhibit the results of his amateur gardening. The contrived destruction of Lady Sannox’s intoxicating, ego-fulfilling beauty, the noted sleaziness of Stone’s dedication to his streak of sensualism that has rendered his professional income, the “third highest in all of London”, still insufficient to match his consumption, the Lord’s cool abstraction and ruthless detachment, are details that lend the story vivid piquancy, although it lacks the emotional strength that some other stories in the collection retain, and the tension of others, because it’s not too hard to guess where it’s all going: indeed Conan Doyle signals the aftermath at the outset, but even there lies the morbidly amusing twist to the initial information that Lady Sannox had "taken the veil". Still, it’s a story that contains the seeds of the kind of vicious physical mortification for moralistic ends and cunning mastermind villainy that underpins much of the modern horror film. Just as obvious and in some way even more nasty is 'The New Catacomb', in which poor young German archaeologist Julius Berger introduces his rich, self-satisfied English friend Kennedy to the undiscovered catacomb he’s located under the Roman countryside, only to leave him lost within the depths of that labyrinth. This act is Berger's acute revenge on Kennedy for his having casually seduced and abandoned to social disgrace the girl who had been, unbeknownst to Kennedy, Berger’s fiancé.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“There was a rustle somewhere, the vague sound of a foot striking a stone, and then there fell silence upon that old Christian church – stagnant, heavy silence which closed around Kennedy and shut him in like water round a drowning man.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Like many of Conan Doyle’s similes, that last one is both a touch overwrought but also utterly relishable: the clever dovetailing of the image of silence, in Kennedy’s isolation in the dark, with water that will drown him, both having the same import of inevitable death, and the image of drowning itself presaging expiration in a similar welter of helpless panic. The brief epilogue, a supposed new report of Berger’s subsequent fame and fortune as the discoverer of the catacomb with the grim corollary of the tragic finding of Kennedy’s decomposing corpse, “his sad fate” written off as the “natural result of his own temerity”, sees Conan Doyle’s pithy technique utilising the mistaken tone of the account, and the way drama can be abstracted to meaninglessness through reportage, to give a blackly ironic cap to the story.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The medieval moralism in these two stories, and in 'The Lord of Château Noir', is both the source of such tales’ appalling pungency and vicarious entertainment value: the refusal to countenance moral rather than merely legal violations, and their direct, physically totemistic punishment, is of course a long tradition in macabre fiction, but one that’s actually taken a relatively long time to soak into the cinema with “torture-porn” films that explicitly mangle the bodies of pretty young things in vengeance for their wanton, rapacious way. Conan Doyle’s take isn’t as orgiastic as such generic mutations, although his prose lends it a rather lusher force than many, and the erotic undertone to the violence in 'Lady Sannox' in particular is hard to miss. Conan Doyle’s influence on other writers and then filmmakers was however detectable in a much older subgenre of the horror film, a specifically interesting aspect of two other, elaborate tales in the collection, 'The Ring of Thoth' and 'Lot 249', which anticipate various mummy-on-the-loose movies. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A sadistic kind of moral expiation is thoroughly condemned, and yet a fascination with an eroticised variety of it still fully on display, in a story that evokes the theme indirectly: 'The Leather Funnel' sees an unnamed narrator visiting his strange, rich, occultist Parisian friend Lionel Dacre. Dacre, with his fascination for psychic and paranormal phenomenon, convinces him to sleep for the night next to an odd antique, the titular funnel, rigid with age and scored with strange grooves. The narrator has a dream that proves to have been exactly the same as that Dacre had when he slept near the funnel, and Dacre then explains the object’s history: it was the funnel used for giving the ‘extraordinary question’ – filling a person’s stomach with water until their torso ruptured – by inquisitorial authorities to a “small young woman with blonde hair and singular, light-blue eyes – the eyes of a child.” The horror of the narrator in having witnessed part of the woman’s fate is barely leavened by learning what Dacre has discovered about the mystery: she was an infamous aristocratic murderess, despised for her utterly amoral, psychopathic crimes including killing her father and brothers, and yet one who gained respect for the bravery of death. The marks on the funnel were from her teeth biting on it in her agonies. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘The Lord of Château Noir’ is likewise set in France, and invokes relatively recent history (in 1894 when the story was composed) in being set during the Franco-Prussian War. This story extends Conan Doyle’s innate interest in poetic justice into that recent conflict, suggesting the way violence, even modern warfare, contains eternally primal essentials. Here his deft descriptive prose is on exhibit: </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“It was a cold December night when Captain Baumgarten marched out of Les Andelys with his twenty Poseners, and took the main road to the north-west…A thin, cold rain was falling, swishing among the tall poplar trees and rustling in the fields on either side….Behind them the twenty infantryman plodded along through the darkness, with their faces sunk to the rain and their boots squeaking in the soft, wet clay.” </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And the Château itself: </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“At half-past eleven their guide stopped at a place where two high pillars, crowned with some heraldic stonework, flanked a huge iron gate. The wall in which had been the opening had crumbled away, but the great gate still towered above the brambles and weeds which had overgrown its base…The black château lay in front of them. The moon shone out between two rain-clouds and threw the old house into silver and shadow…Above was a dark roof breaking at the corners into little round overhanging turrets, the whole lying silent in the moonshine, with a drift of ragged clouds blackening the heavens behind it. A single light gleamed in one of the lower windows.” </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A better lesson for creating a fetid, menacing atmosphere in the space of a few paragraphs is hard to find, the prose charged with cinematic vividness. The picture of Captain Baumgarten himself, bald, “heavy-jawed, blue eyed, with a curving yellow moustache”, not brilliant but stolid and reliable, is a fittingly, cool, crisp representative of the Prussian forces, who leads his men out one night, acting on intelligence bought from a captured farmer, identifying Count Eustace of the Château Noir as the leader of the murderous band of guerrillas killing Prussian soldiers. The German soldiers, desiring revenge on the man who’s been assassinating their comrades, instead find themselves entrapped by their quarry. Baumgarten settles to wait for the absent Count’s return, with his men bivouacked in the château, by a fire in the house’s great hall, only for Eustace to appear from the shadows of his own great hall, like one of his own family portraits has come to life, or an unforgiving ghost, to confront the Prussian warrior. Eustace’s motive for unremitting punishment of the Prussians is slowly, memorably revealed as he inflicts upon the Captain the same hideous disfigurements and humiliations that were imposed on the Count’s own son, who had fought with the French army, before showing a final, dubious pity, as did the Prussian general who released his son as a blind, agonised ruin: </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“And so it was that Captain Baumgarten, disfigured, blinded and bleeding, staggered out into the wind and the rain of that wild December dawn.” </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Conan Doyle’s sense of the world as islets of composed civility and calm surrounded by intimidating chaos, unruly passion, uncharted menaces and ethereal possibilities, to be approached with scientific curiosity but understood with instinctual fervour, is apparent in all the stories in the collection, and are quintessentially Victorian in many ways: the fear of the new, waiting to be stumbled upon, or the fear of explosions of things thought repressed and forgotten, is constantly described. Something of his Holmesian methodological approach is apparent in ‘The Brown Hand’ applied to a supernatural subject, a story which also, like <i>The Sign of Four</i> and its model <i>The Moonstone</i> evokes the blowback effect of disrespect to foreign cultures and Imperial plundering infiltrating the bourgeois English landscape. Sir Dominick Holden, a brilliant and well-rewarded surgeon who had lived and worked for many years in India, is now an exhausted and melancholy wretch even though he’s retired with his equally suffering wife to a house bordering Salisbury Plain. The reason, as described by a distant relative who tells the story, is because Holden had amputated the hand of an Indian man, and had kept the severed hand as an object of his medical research having promised the man he would see the hand was buried with him when he died. But the hand had been destroyed in a fire and now Holden is relentlessly persecuted by the Indian’s shade, appearing every night to search his house for the jar containing his lost limb. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The narrator’s cunning ploy, once he’s experienced the shade’s forlornly angry appearances, is to offer the ghost a substitute, fetching the amputated hand from a dead Indian man from a <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">London</st1:city></st1:place> hospital, and contriving that the spirit will come across the hand and claim it as his own. Conan Doyle cunningly tweaks the conclusion by having this ruse seem to fail, only for the narrator to realise this was because he used the wrong hand. The other hand, once procured, satisfies the ghost, Holden is freed of his visitations, and the narrator becomes Holden's heir. The interesting proximity to the cauldron of British mysticism, out on Salisbury Plain, accords well with the intrusion of a manifestation of an alien creed, the baleful counterbalance to the White Man’s Burden. Meanwhile the suggestion that even the most irrational force can be kept in check with reason and reasonableness is reassuring, so that whilst the descriptions of the brown man’s manifestations are as ineluctably creepy as something that might have sprung out a J-Horror film, it’s a spirit that can be laid to rest. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘The Brown Hand’ and ‘The Brazilian Cat’ have similar starting points, tales of penniless young men visiting wealthy relatives recently returned from overseas with dire secrets, and they each pay off with the hero becoming rich after an adventure with those relatives, but through very different methods: ‘The Brazilian Cat’ is perhaps the story in the collection that most entirely resembles a Holmes tale, lacking only the detective himself to discern the grim intent of the villain. Young Marshall King, who had been raised to expect being the heir of a Lord but has fallen, through indolent ways, into grave fiscal peril, eagerly accepts an invitation from his cousin Everard King, a former Brazilian planter, to stay with him for a while, hoping to beg for some money to escape a debtor’s disgrace. But King has other, deeply sinister plans, which to be fulfilled require him to lock <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Marshall</st1:city></st1:place> in with the jaguar he keeps as a pet. What follows is a riveting survival tale as Marshall discerns ways to elude the cat within the small, apparently fatal pen in which it’s kept, finally attempting to secure himself within the innermost cage that is usually the creature’s home, having taken refuge at first on top of it: </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Pulling off my dress-coat, I threw it down over the head of the beast. At the same moment I dropped over the edge, seized the end of the front grating, and pulled it frantically out of the wall. It came more easily than I could have expected. I rushed across the room, bearing it with me; but, as I rushed, the accident of my position put me on the outer side. Had it been the other way, I might have come off scathless. As it was, there was a moment’s pause as I stopped it and tried to pass in through the opening I had left. That moment was enough to give time to the creature to toss off the coat with which I had blinded him and to spring upon me. I hurled myself through the gap and pulled the rails to behind me, but he seized my leg before I could entirely withdraw it. One stroke of that huge paw tore off my calf as a shaving of wood curls before a plane. The next moment, bleeding and fainting, I was lying among the foul straw with a line of friendly bars between me and the creature which ramped so frantically against them.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The big cat, having tasted human blood for the first time, is now insatiable for it, and, of course, the moment Everard enters in the morning, he instead becomes the animal’s brunch. Again, the gross physical violence that Marshall suffers is necessary for his moral character – he’s not the same dissolute gadabout at the end – and he finishes up the beneficiary of the Lord’s inheritance finally thanks to Everard’s other conniving. Everard’s menagerie of collected animals and association with exotic climes of course resembles Dr Roylott in ‘The Speckled Band’, the idea of arranging a financially fortuitous animal’s mauling obviously similar to <i>The Hound of the Baskervilles</i>, and Everard’s falsely genial, Pickwick-esque air of equanimity disguising bottomless depravity similar to Jephro Rucastle’s bogus bonhomie in ‘The Copper Beeches’ (and also his end at the jaws of his own deadly mastiff). The first-person account of the experience is however great storytelling both technically and in effect, the reassurance inherent in the device barely compensating for the you-are-there intensity of the night in the cat’s cell. Again, like ‘The Brown Hand’ and several other stories here and elsewhere in Conan Doyle’s oeuvre, the importation of the exotic sets off almost unnoticeable yet finally destabilising vibrations, akin to the psychic emanations of the object of ‘The Leather Funnel’ and the thought-manifestations in the short mystical story ‘Playing With Fire’. Everard’s beasties indicates not the mere fancy of an eccentric but his embodied wish to have his relative eaten and the violence that might otherwise have been suppressed and made latent in him by the bland English weather instead stoked to psychotic ends by unfulfilling foreign adventures, is an interesting, and largely unconscious, metaphor for the colonial project’s effect on the masterminding nation. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Some stories in this collection are throwaway fillips, and two of the least essential are basically jokes, albeit each possessing an irony over transforming expectations: ‘The Nightmare Room’ and 'The Los Amigos Fiasco' are attempts at outright humour that prove Conan Doyle’s dry wit was better served stitched into the fabric of far darker pieces. Both are set in the United States, a country which for Conan Doyle, as for Jules Verne, represented excitable pioneering not always tethered to reasoned application, and ‘The Los Amigos Fiasco’ offers another B-Movie plot that would be pinched for the <i>The Invisible Ray</i> and <i>Man-Made Monster</i>: a rampaging bandit named Duncan Warner is to be executed via the new invention the electric chair, but using a far stronger power source than has been used before, for the small Californian town of Los Amigos has a brand new and very powerful generator. But Peter Stulpnagel, a canny but little respected local researcher chosen as one of a panel to arrange their experiment in electrified homicide, predicts that a stronger electrical charge will, instead of killing a man, imbue him with amazing properties of power and longevity, and this proves to be the case: Warner and Stulpnagel hoot amicably as the Los Amigos lawmen try first to kill the criminal with great charges, and then to hang him the good old-fashioned way, which proves laughably unsuccessful. In ‘The Nightmare Room’, a hoary melodrama in which two men, a French dancer’s husband and her lover, play a game of death to see who’ll be her final mate, proves to merely be a lousy movie that the producer wants to shoot over again. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">No more substantial is ‘How It Happened’, although it has a different focus, being a story that is plainly the offspring of Conan Doyle’s spiritualist bunkum. It's a supposedly verbatim account of a female medium’s channelling of the spirit of a man who died in a car crash and how he came to experience his own death and lingering in the afterlife, meeting a friend who had died before in perplexity before the penny dropped. ‘Playing With Fire’ likewise is built around spiritualism, with a circle of bourgeois London dilettantes introducing a new member, an inquisitive, slightly reckless French psychic into their company, and he begins pressing them to penetrate new possibilities in generating physical manifestations of their thoughts, finally resulting in the appearance of an invisible unicorn that makes havoc in the house, unicorns having been the obsessive subject of an artist in the circle. It’s a stry mostly interesting for how Conan Doyle treats plainly his great thematic refrain: the manifestation of the subconscious impulse, and the literalisation of terrifying forces.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p>‘The Horror of the Heights’, like ‘The Los Amigos Fiasco’, is based around a dated piece of theorising about new technology, but with a far more clever gimmick, and a real air of menace, in offering the supposed account of one Joyce-Armstrong, an aviator who had developed a theory around certain inexplicable accidents that had killed several aeronaut fellows who had ventured to great heights in the new, more powerful varieties of aircraft (the story was written in 1913, a year before the age of aerial warfare commenced in earnest). Check out how this story offers grisly suggestions that help build a tense mood, so well employed the hairs did actually stand up on my neck: </o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“His habit of carrying a shotgun with him in his aeroplane was one manifestation of (his eccentricity). Another was the morbid effect which the fall of Lieutenant Myrtle had upon his mind. Myrtle, who was attempting the height record, fell from an altitude of something over thirty thousand feet. Horrible to narrate, his head was entirely obliterated, though his body and limbs preserved their configuration. At every gathering of airmen, Joyce-Armstrong, according to Dangerfield, would ask, with an enigmatic smile: ‘And where, pray tell, is Myrtle’s head?’” </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Joyce-Armstrong soon proves, by taking a new aeroplane up to the edge of the stratosphere, that the great heights are inhabited by colossal jellyfish-like animals that are so lightweight that they spend their entire lives drifting upon the air currents, and decay away to nothing before ever falling to earth when they die. Some of these animals are harmless but others are great beaked things held up by gas bubbles within their bodies, capable of tearing men and machines to pieces, and finally Joyce-Armstrong becomes the victim of them when he ascends once too often. It’s both an inspired piece of cryptozoological fancy, and a kind of steampunk horror-adventure from the days when the earth’s limits weren’t so well defined. It’s enough to make you wish that flying the friendly skies occasionally required passengers manning machine guns to fight off swarms of gossamer beasts. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">More familiar in plot if just as tense is ‘The Terror of the Blue John Gap’, which likewise it told by an account within another narrative, left behind by a recently deceased doctor, John Hardcastle, who, upon taking a restful visit some years earlier to rural Derbyshire, encountered a terrifying phenomenon. The familiar if sparse atmosphere of the region is well laid out and a feeling of the humdrum encoded in such details as the fact Hardcastle is living with a pair of old spinsters, a world as far from menace and the inexplicable as it seems you can get, and yet the landscape is eerie and teems with hidden caves and pits, including the Blue John shaft, dug by Romans extracting precious ore, which is now the centre of local legends about a mysterious beast that roars within and steals out at night to consume livestock. A young divinity student, Armitage, tells Hardcastle about these stories, willing to say he’s heard the roars himself. The doctor dismisses him, but soon hears the menacing howl from deep within the earth himself, and, taken over by curiosity, ventures into the shaft, only to fall and extinguish his light, soon realising he’s trapped within with a huge, unseen thing, and the written description of this encounter possesses a Spielbergian relish:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“It was a tread – yes, surely it was the tread of some living creature. But what a tread it was! It gave one the impression of enormous weight carried upon sponge-like feet, which gave forth a muffled but ear-filling sound. The darkness was as complete as ever, but the tread was regular and decisive. And it was coming beyond all question in my direction.” </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Hardcastle keeps his wits together and the creature doesn’t detect him, and he flees the shaft, but on hearing that Armitage has vanished, probably snatched by the beast in walking the moor, he decides to arm himself and ambush the monster. Conan Doyle cleverly exploits a folk-myth atmosphere here – many a rural locale has its unexplained marauder that consumes sundry sheep to this day – and generates a sense of unease in the English landscape, and a good old-fashioned monster hunt with the clever potential explanation that the animal belonged to a species of underground-dwelling bears look though extinct but perhaps having instead lived deep and this had through luck found a portal to the surface that gave it an easier supply of food. Whilst Hardcastle takes on the beast and emerges victorious, he, like several of Conan Doyle’s protagonists here, is consumed swiftly once he has looked deeply into the potential for chaos to linger in the orderly world. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If ‘The Horror of the Heights’, ‘The Terror of the Blue John Gap’, and to a certain extent ‘Playing With Fire’ are all kinds of monster yarns, so too is ‘Lot 249’, one which also links to ‘The Ring of Thoth’ in sharing a motif of ancient Egyptians alive in the modern world, but they are actually quite diverse stories. If ‘The Ring of Thoth’, with an unknowably old but still perceptibly human ancient stalking the deserted corridors of a museum searching for the mummy of his long-lost lover, obviously prefigures the 1932 Karl Freund film <i>The Mummy</i>, ‘Lot 249’ anticipates other more familiar varieties of mummy movie where a bandaged, desiccated working corpse possessing great power and mindless menace stalks unfamiliarly everyday locations. ‘Lot 249’ was actually filmed, very loosely, as an episode of 1990’s <i>Tales From The Darkside: The Movie</i>, but the story's atmosphere is less William Gaines and far more M.R. James, with the fusty academic locale of Oxford vital to the ironic disparity of the drama, although it never suggests James’ gift for almost abstractly suggested menace and subliminal manifestation. Conan Doyle was finally, usually much more literally minded than James, and less authentically antiquarian in his references. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In ‘Lot 249’, an industrious young medical student, Abercrombie Smith (you’ll have noticed that several of Conan Doyle’s protagonists here are, like him, doctors or in training as such), living in a tower on campus with two other young men, Edward Bellingham and William Monkhouse Lee, is told by another friend, Jephro Hastie, of the nastiness Bellingham has exhibited, and the strange grip he has on Lee, having gotten himself somehow, in spite of his rotundity and obnoxiousness, engaged to Lee’s beautiful sister. Soon, it becomes apparent that Bellingham’s gifts for obscure languages has given him rare knowledge for using Egyptian black magic for influence, and he’s taken it step further by obtaining and reviving a mummy to use to assault enemies and people who defy him, as attacks about campus proliferate and Smith begins to understand the dreadful nature of the sounds he’s been hearing from the room beneath his. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“…he glanced back at the road along which he had come. Something was coming swiftly down it. It moved in the shadow of the hedge, silently and furtively, a dark crouching figure, dimly visible against the black background. Even as he gazed back at it, it had lessened its distance by twenty paces and was fast closing upon him. Out of the darkness he had a glimpse of a scraggy neck and of two eyes that will ever haunt him in his dreams. He turned and with a cry of terror he ran for his life up the avenue.” </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Such classic macabre imagery marks out the story, the longest in the collection, although Smith’s final dealing with <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Bellingham</st1:city></st1:place> and elimination of the menace is a bit plain, and the story is essentially an elaborate “boo!” Conan Doyle smartly leaves off on a faint note of lingering mystery as <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Bellingham</st1:city></st1:place> disappears to continue his research. ‘The Ring of Thoth’, on the other hand, lingers in the memory with some of the same sepulchral emotion as the Freund film inspired by it, particularly withered but undying antihero Sosra’s air of ageless sorrow. He has survived ages of mankind unable to end the immortality he was able to imbue on himself through what he assures was entirely scientific means, being now 3,500 years old. Sosra turns up in the museum where a scholar, John Vansittart Smith, is working through the midnight, and tells him his story: he’s searching his timeless love Atma, who was also loved by a friend of his, Parmes, to whom he had extended the gift of immortality. Parmes, rather than live without her, and furious at his friend for failing to save her in time, develops a way to die, and then hid the secret from him contained in a ring emblazoned with the image of Thoth, so that he’d be forced to wonder the earth alone. But Sosra had recognised the ring upon the finger of a mummy Vansittart Smith himself had disinterred. He is finally found dead, embracing Atma’s mummy.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The note of crepuscular romanticism and lingering, consuming emotional loss in this story is even more defined in the collection’s best story, ‘The Captain of the <i>Polestar</i>’. Here several of Conan Doyle’s characteristics come together with completeness: penetrating a veil of existence at the limits of the rational world, the lingering of the spirit, the mystery to be discerned, the excellently sketched physical environment, the morbid sexuality, and the enigmatic dominant man whose motives are barely perceivable to the common fellows about him. Here, that dominant man is the eponymous captain, Nicholas Craigie, an almost suicidally valiant captain of a whaling ship threatened with becoming icebound within the <st1:place st="on">Arctic Circle</st1:place>, his increasingly anxious crew reporting visions of spirits around the ship and wailings from the hazy semi-perpetual twilight. Craigie himself, described by the narrator, the ship’s young medical officer John McAllister Ray, is a brusquely intelligent but strangely changeable, capricious man, who has enjoyed putting himself the in the way of danger in the past. In spite of the eerie manifestations and physical danger the ship is in, he’s determined to hold on, and Ray himself, archly rational, gives way to the atmosphere:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“The night was very dark – so dark that, standing under the quarter-boat, I was unable to see the officer on the bridge. I think I have already mentioned the extraordinary silence which prevails in these frozen seas. In other parts of the world, be they ever so barren, there is some slight vibration of the air – some faint hum, be it from the distant haunts of men, or from the leaves of trees, or the wings of the birds, or even the faint rustle of the grass that covers the ground…It is only here in these Arctic seas that stark, unfathomable stillness obtrudes itself upon you all in its gruesome reality. You find your tympanum straining to catch some little murmur, and dwelling eagerly on every accidental sound within the vessel. In this state, I was leaning against the bulwarks when there arose from the ice almost directly underneath me a cry, sharp and shrill, upon the silent air of the night, beginning, as it seemed to me, at a note such as prima donna never reached, and mounting from that ever higher and higher until it culminated in a long wail of agony, which might have been the last cry of a lost soul.”</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Conan Doyle was actually writing here partly from experience, for he had served for a voyage on a whaler in the north, the <i>Hope</i>, in 1880, and his story, written three years later, was actually one of his first stabs at fiction. That it displays a care in creating mood and a depth of feeling that’s missing from the most recent stories in the collection perhaps says something about how being tethered to the Holmes stories eroded his more expansive authorial gifts. But they never abandoned him entirely. The storytelling in ‘Captain’ is indeed nearly as minimalist and suggestive as M.R. James, as a tantalising sketch of a beautiful woman in the Captain’s cabin accords with the feminine appearance of the ghost stalking the ship, the Captain maintaining a murmuring vigil making promises to the wind, and then finally leaping from the ship and vanishing across the ice floes chasing this wraith, to be found later, frozen to death, his apparent death wish finally fulfilled. The explanation? It comes in a brief epilogue supposedly written by the young doctor’s father, accounting the story of a friend who had known Craigie:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“According to his account, he had been engaged to a young lady of singular beauty residing upon the Cornish coast. During his absence at sea his betrothed had died under circumstances of peculiar horror.”</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The suggestiveness here, the simultaneous offering of solution to the mystery and suddenly even more ambiguous reasons, is genuinely poignant, and the story itself captures something of the same mood of seaborne desolation found in the end of <i>Frankenstein</i> and in Coleridge. It’s not unworthy of either, and it’s the only time in the story that Conan Doyle wields the aura of the truly grand kind of fantastic story, and not merely exciting or sly. But they're all marked out by how lingering past and looming future always seem to offer the same immensity of threat. Finally, Conan Doyle’s bifocal sense of reality and truth at least served him well in creating tales of unease.</span></div>
Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-22402748627185425272010-03-20T14:18:00.010+11:002014-02-03T04:20:21.356+11:00Kenneth Slessor: The Frozen Moments of “Out of Time”, “The Night-Ride”, “Beach Burial”, “Five Visions of Captain Cook”, and “Five Bells”<span style="color: white;">. .</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span">It is the theme of time as a remorseless thing of terrible beauty in much of Kenneth Slessor’s work that strikes most powerfully. He conceives of time as a great force, intricate with the state of the natural world, conjured as the “hundred yachts” in ‘Out of Time’, an unstoppable flotilla of grace. Part and parcel with this is a partly ironic consideration of the way humans measure time, and thus attempt to place limits and controls on their understanding of nature, which is not governed by a time moved by “little fidget wheels”, as he puts it in ‘Five Bells’. That is, the time kept by pocket and wrist watches of bankers and businessmen, of the everyday world. Slessor attempts to define a deeper, more ethereal concept of time, one which the imagery of water easily intertwines with; time, and the ocean, drown everything with completeness, they are vast and mysterious entities.</span><span class="Apple-style-span"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This idea of being drowned and thus lost to time is literal in the subject of ‘Five Bells’ (“The tide is over you / The turn of midnight water’s over you”) and ‘Beach Burial’, both of which engage in acts of remembrance for dead men lost at sea, and conflate time, the ocean, and night into a singular whole, a state of formlessness. Consider also in ‘Out of Time’, where “(t)he moment’s world as it was; and I was part / Fleshless and ageless, changeless and was made free.” Slessor’s concept of freedom seems precisely to invite a boundless disintegration of form, a complete immersion in the totality of things. “The gulls go down, the body dies and rots / And time flows past them like a hundred yachts.” The physical world decays, in the relentless march of time. There’s no intimation of a god or an afterlife here; it’s more as if time itself is the god, neither cruel nor pitying but implacable, that Slessor envisions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Thus the nautical measurement of time, the ringing of the ship’s bell, seems to have a more crucial, salutary relationship for Slessor to the nature of time, the sea, and memory, both in a purely imagistic fashion – the toll of a bell sounds sonorous and mysterious, the image of ‘Five Bells’ ringing out in the dark before dawn, it and it evokes a prayer chime. Compare this to Cook’s two chronometers in ‘Five Visions of Captain’. One clock hangs back, the other races forth, just as Cook’s intent races forth and the minds of his crew hang back; the clocks evoke the splitting of the scheme of things into past and future, death and hope, known and unknown. The two clocks evoke Cook’s relentless, almost alchemistic grappling with the future, the unknown, and the drag of the past, of the old world, which is of course where Alexander Home ends up again, blind, with his vision left in the new world, that land of blinding sun, an adventurer left narrating great tales to empty chairs. The dark, sightless old world and the bright, overwhelming new world concords with the sluggish time and the quick time, the memory of home and past and the act of racing into the future. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s ironic that Slessor gets high on the image of Cook as the great captain, advancing into the future, when Slessor’s concept of his own present, the future for Cook and his men, is so mutable; Home is a first victim of this. The march of time in the five stanzas ‘Cook’ is in itself telling, moving from the pre-scientific codes of alchemy and sorcery and legend, the Captain conceived as a shamanistic conqueror of the limits of the earth, to the drag of “the most important things / That serious-minded midshipmen could wish / Of plantains, and the lack of rum”, and then, finally in Home’s situation in the conclusion, a blind man with a wife “who lived in a present of kitchen fumes”, with visions of new worlds, ironically, irretrievably in the past, lost amidst the mundane and the domestic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s a concept linked to ‘Fixed Ideas’, and the tedious tyranny of the familiar and the settled. In ‘The Night-Ride’, the everyday commuting world is alchemised into something alien, the destination and the reason for travelling vague, only the immediate transformation by dark and wet of the familiar into something, dare I say it, rich and strange (everything in these poems seems to be suffering a sea-change), of any reality, a reality which is utterly dominated by Slessor’s perception and poetic imagination. In a similar fashion to the way the ocean and time transform things, so in ‘The Night-Ride’ the identity and nature of things melt and invert; passengers “slow blowing” and the engines “yawning”, the precisely identified and described objects somehow taking ownership of the humans, “Black sinister travellers” who are “hooked over bags / Hurrying, unknown faces”. In the night journey, the world is submerged in a version of his ocean of time, dissolving boundaries between things, eating away at the settled concept, the firm identity. It’s like the image of “the Cross hangs upside-down in the water”, the cityscape inverted and transformed into a dream painted on the sea.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In ‘Beach Burial’ the annihilation of identity is crucial, for Slessor sees the former enemies, whose bodies are buried in the sand, halfway between the settled earth and the boundless sea, going off to some undefined “other front”. Slessor’s vision here isn’t as entirely hopeless, or at least morbid, as it appears elsewhere; the change, the loss of form, involves a constant alteration, a kind of alchemy, into something else. Time transforms everything, whether we want it to or not. The troubling quality is that somehow the act of dying and the act of discovery are joined; it’s a sort of morbid romanticism that despises the immediate, sensing truth only lies in the vast ocean of time and the act of trying to penetrate that veil of mystery.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A common element in ‘Five Bells’ and ‘Beach Burial’ is that each is, in a fashion, an act of mourning, and yet they are also different kinds of mourning. The first is an utterly private meditation, a private reckoning of what the acts of remembering, and indeed the act of dying, means, in terms of the human relationship with time and existence. ‘Beach Burial’ is something different; it’s a public work, an act of eulogy engaged with the tragedy of war, which conjures a vision of some variety of transcendence, but one which is felt in uniquely apolitical, indeed, asocial, utterly private terms. Either way, in Slessor’s two poems ‘Five Bells’ and ‘Beach Burial’, the dead are not quiet. In ‘Five Bells’ it’s a firmly metaphorical disquiet – the narrator is taunted by memory that lacks neither form, firm grave marker, the “Nothing that was neither long nor short”.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Slessor of ‘Five Bells’ takes little comfort from the “funeral cakes of sweet and sculptured stone” that mark the graves of “a thousand men / Staked bone by bone”, where the frigid perfection of “tablets cut with dreams of piety” of the totems built by Joe’s blinded father contrasts Joe’s lonely seaborne death and also the hastily fashioned crosses of driftwood that mark the sailors’ graves in ‘Beach Burial’. It’s as if death was Joe’s family business. That wood has a kind of seaborne, natural purity, denied the weighty confections of the graveyard. In ‘Five Bells’, Joe’s death is glazed in mystery, his life remembered, the intrusion of his spirit only identified as fragments of a life stored within Slessor’s memory. In ‘Beach Burial’, they seem something more, there’s a hint of an afterlife allowed, the unknowable “other front”. Either way, it’s the act of creating totems of remembrance that each poem essentially celebrates; indeed what each poem is. Slessor creates in each poem a kind of clear space where the phenomenon of death and the reaction of the living to it given attention. He doesn’t mollify with promises or prayers. The afterlife and religious significance even in ‘Beach Burial’ is hazy, but the desire to make a kind of sense, to achieve a resolution, of the relationship between living and dead is crucial. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is private urgency in both poems for Slessor. The first is a poem about a dead friend, the second expresses a divided spirit, being as he was from a German family, trying to work through a haunted notion that literally splits his identity in two. Thus the poem is presented in a translation, and his final hope for some reconciliation. The act of translation, of communication, of remembrance, ties together with a salutary desperation in the “last signature of men, / Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity” that is the sad appellation ‘Unknown seaman’, which “The breath of wet season has washed their inscriptions / As blue as drowned men's lips” ties together the decay of identity with the decay of the flesh and of the anonymous, totemistic name. Names, bodies, human existence – a ‘ghostly pencil’ the same hue as a drowned man’s lips sketches a bland memorial for men. Writing, one form of language, and lips, purveyors of another, each equally blue, sapped, dead, lost to the men who are dead, their buriers “tread the sand upon their nakedness”, men who are no longer men. Like Joe in ‘Five Bells’, these dead are not dead, for “(t)he convoys of dead sailors come; / At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,” searching out the place where they wish to be laid to rest. They demand memorialisation. The ghostly pencil’s sketch matches the rough-hewn memorial of the “driven stake of tidewood”. What the sea throws up is sapped, denuded, rendered a shadow of its real self, and yet the driftwood retains a spiritual emblematic power. The people who bury the washed-up corpses remain invisible, unidentified, their motives opaque, they who wield the ghostly pencil. The “sob and clubbing of the gunfire” that punctuates the war zone seems to mourn itself for the dead men. The state of the world becomes their enveloping graveyard. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s a contrast to the memories of Joe in ‘Five Bells’ where Slessor recalls most vividly that it was “(s)o dark you bore no body, had no face, / But a sheer voice that rattled out of air” – the human voice a penetrating actualisation, the proof of presence, the island of intelligence in the great darkness. Where Joe and Slessor (who is, of course, only the narrator Slessor) exist inseparable and eternally separated by their life and death, the dead sailors of ‘Beach Burial’ have found a kind of communality denied them in life in death. Slessor recalls himself and Joe caught in the dark, “(t)he naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky, / Knifing the dark with deathly photographs”, a phrase that illuminates that inner state of mind Slessor ceaselessly captures, the brief intense vision, the momentarily lit scene. Sight and darkness have powerful symbolic value for Slessor; The blind Alexander Home in ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’, Joe’s equally blind tomb-making fiddler father in ‘Five Bells’, and Joe himself speaking out of the enveloping black, tied together in offering visions of other worlds, of south sea islands and afterlives, fiddle music, exotic women and Milton, all coalescing in a hazy mid-ground between sensuality and annihilation in the narrator’s imagination. Life, and the human consciousness, is a moment of brightness in sea of dark. Only the totemistic moment, act, recollection, the act of creating a totem, be it art or driftwood cross, offers a bulwark against nothingness.</span></span></div>
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Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-83122027593602477702010-01-30T20:14:00.013+11:002014-02-03T04:31:37.736+11:0010. Madness and Machismo: Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island<div>
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<span style="font-weight: normal;"><st1:placename st="on" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><i>Shutter</i></span></st1:placename><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: justify;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></i><st1:placetype st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Island </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">by Dennis Lehane, 2003. Bantam Press. Pictured: 2004 Bantam Books Paperback edition.</span></st1:placetype></span></span></h4>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dennis Lehane made his name with cleverly plotted, gritty yarns of sleuthing and suffering in <st1:city st="on">Boston</st1:city>’s harder precincts, providing the basis for two strong films in recent years, Clint Eastwood’s <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on"><i>Mystic</i></st1:placename><i> <st1:placetype st="on">River</st1:placetype></i></st1:place> and Ben Affleck’s <i>Gone Baby Gone</i>. Lehane’s gifts for convincing psychological portraiture and intriguing moral conundrums have seen his reputation expand beyond the limits of the paperback genre world. Now, <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on"><i>Shutter</i></st1:placename><i> <st1:placetype st="on">Island</st1:placetype></i></st1:place> has been filmed by Martin Scorsese, and the appeal of the work for him is obvious, and not only because Lehane’s milieu is obviously inviting after the success of the Boston-set <i>The Departed</i>. Lehane’s plot builds with deliberation upon hoary templates: gothic melodramas, old prison flicks, <i>Gaslight</i>-esque they’re-trying-to-drive-me-mad yarns and locked-room mysteries of yore. But there’s also a darker, acutely probing spirit lurking within Lehane’s outré narrative.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The eponymous island is the location of <st1:placename st="on">Ashecliffe</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Hospital</st1:placetype>, a federal institute for the criminally insane, situated far out in <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on">Boston</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Harbour</st1:placetype></st1:place>. The island’s institution incorporates a Civil War-era fort and mansion, and the landmass around it is infested with rats. In a brief prologue, Lester Sheehan, a psychiatrist formerly employed at the island and now, with his wife dying and he himself approaching the end of his days, meditates on a strange sight he once beheld on the island, which was virtually impossible to escape from due to the powerful currents washing around it, of a rat that he believed made the improbable swim from Shutter Island to a nearby outcrop. The memory of this sight leads him to think about one Teddy Daniels, who he believes would have applauded the rat’s achievement. The narrative proper begins in 1954. Daniels, a <st1:country-region st="on">US</st1:country-region> <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Marshall</st1:place></st1:city>, makes the trip to the island with a new, hastily provided partner, Chuck Aule, as they are brought in to locate a patient, Rachel Solando, who has supposedly disappeared from her cell despite a plethora of safeguards. However, even the swiftest and simplest deductions by the two Marshals determine that it’s impossible Rachel’s disappearance can have been accidental: either someone helped her escape, or someone took her away, most likely Sheehan, one of the staff psychiatrists, who’s listed as being currently off the island.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Daniels and Aule quickly form a friendship in spite of being apposite breeds. Daniels, son to a drowned fisherman, is a quintessential figure of modern <i>noir</i> literature: faintly desperate in his blending of terse toughness and ruined romanticism, socially awkward in comparison to the slicker Aule. Aule explains that he’s a recent transfer from Seattle, having been harassed out of his post there after marrying a Japanese-American girl. Teddy is bitterly, physically afraid of the sea, his forefathers’ stomping ground, and this confirms an edge of anxiety about being unable to cope, to withstand the scale of terror in the world, that they once possessed. As the two men dig into the bizarre mystery, Shutter Island is besieged by a hurricane-force storm that cuts off all communication to the outside world. As an increasing paranoia overtakes the two Marshals, as they realise the story of Rachel’s escape is impossible and there is some underlying, insidious motive to bringing them to the island, Daniels admits to Aule his underlying motives: his wife, Dolores Chantal, died in an apartment building fire started by a pyromaniac named Andrew Laeddis, whom he now believes is imprisoned on the island. Daniels also believes the institution is being used for illicit psycho-surgical experimentation with funding from the HUAC, being supervised by the institution’s chief doctor, Cawley.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Where all this leads is devilishly clever, if not terribly believable, conjuring a gothic thrill-ride that also doubles as a perfect schizoid fantasy of persecution and imprisonment: Teddy’s own. For Teddy is Laeddis, as Cawley reveals in the concluding chapters, and he has been a patient<span lang="EN-AU"> at Ashecliffe for two years, having shot Dolores after she, a deeply disturbed lady herself, drowned their three children. Teddy, consumed by guilt not only for the killing but also for trying to ignore all the warning signs of her instability, including the firebug acts he had ascribed to his alter ego, has retreated deeply into this delusion. Cawley and Sheehan, who has posed as Chuck, have desperately arranged this distended exercise in role-playing to try and provoke a self-perceiving crisis in Laeddis before, as a delusional, violent and uncontrollable patient, he is otherwise to be pacified with a lobotomy.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As a prose stylist, Lehane doesn’t rock the boat of his appointed niche nor contradict much of modern genre fiction’s tendency to read like a film treatment. Efficient is the fittest word for it, narrowing to elegantly punchy passages when it suits him:</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The razor slid so far through Teddy’s skin he suspected it hit jaw bone. It widened his eyes and lit up the entire left side of his face, and then some shaving cream dripped into the wound and eels exploded through his head and the blood poured into the white clouds and water in the sink.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lehane differs in many respects to James Ellroy, the current dean of modern American hardboiled literature, offering far tighter and more focused storylines and infinitely less Byzantine complications to his narratives and characterisations. And yet the two writers offer similar approaches to fleshing out the hoary bones of a genre rooted in an age of ingrained machismo and updating it by describing deep psychological distress, even hysteria and madness, lurking within their heroes, who fixate on the singular women in their lives with self-consuming intensity even whilst handling other situations with rugged force.</span></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lehane inverts the archetype to a certain extent as he peels that layers of what is finally revealed to be Teddy’s complex schizoid denials – Daniels/Laeddis is what he thinks he is to a certain extent, as he was indeed a US Marshal before his crack-up, and his other memories are accurate, such as his grim experiences in the war including a mass execution of Nazi jailers at Dachau, of which he was part of the liberating force. But he’s also a portrait of a man so shell-shocked by the violent and suspicious spirit of his age that he’s been driven deep into complex fantasy that, no matter how horrific it seems, is still preferable to the truth. The singular masculine hero, so adept at physical feats of strength, is unable to bear the weight, and indeed it’s precisely his accomplishment in arts of violence that finally dooms him to any hope of rescue from his solipsistic state.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lehane purposefully plugs into the ineffably paranoid mood of the early ‘50s, with its then utterly novel and unfamiliar landscape of atom bombs, hallucinogens, lingering ghosts of WW2, spies and Reds-under-the-bed anxiety, HUAC and the blacklist, and general post-war deflation, with the nascent Civil Rights movement and glimmers of feminism beginning to upset the apple cart. Daniels’ awkward relationship to the many black men who work as orderlies in the hospital is intriguingly portrayed, as is Chuck/Sheehan’s much easier way with them and people in general:</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Teddy thought of trying it, decided he’d fail, a white man trying to sound hep. And yet Chuck? Chuck could pull it off somehow.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Finally, Lehane constructs effective parable about the decline and fall of traditional American masculinity in the face of these corrosive horrors and grinding contradictions. A charged exchange early in the book takes place between Teddy and one of Cawley’s colleagues, Dr Naehring, engaged in psychologising “warrior” types, explicitly interested in teasing apart the mental makeup of alpha males.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lehane lays clues that offer evidence of the resolution without quite giving enough to blow the revelation’s force, noting for instance how Teddy was unnerved and repelled by Dolores’s unvarnished, slightly off-kilter expressions of sexuality in spite of his utter worship of her, and the way her identity seems to constantly threaten to merge with Rachel’s. Rachel proves finally to have been the name of one of their sole daughter, whilst Edward and Daniel were the two sons. Certain aspects of Teddy’s fantasy are intuitively correct: Sheehan really does have a relationship with the nurse, Emily, who stands in for Rachel Solando (it’s she, later his wife, who’s dying at the opening). And the Warden, who carries a stout black book with him at all times, possibly a Bible and spouts apocalyptic assertions, seems to be, whether or not he’s role-playing, as crazy as his patients. One key encounter with a woman Teddy thinks is the real Rachel Solando, a psychiatrist living in a cave pretending to be dead, remains a peculiar ambiguity, the narrative not spelling out entirely if she’s another of Cawley’s role-players or a pure schizoid hallucination, and either way the encounter has a light dusting of the truly bewildering long before the climactic revelations.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span lang="EN-AU">Whilst <i>Shutter Island</i> doesn’t really transcend its generic trappings, it certainly plies those trappings with gusto, as the hurricane barrels in, the Island becomes a gothic abode assailed by the elements, and the sense of tingling paranoia mounts, with Teddy’s assailed wits perceiving danger and persecution in every corner, his haunted psyche vividly described, so that it’s easy to get on his side and be afraid for him. By the same token the novel doesn’t alienate in the conclusion as stories like this often do – perhaps, as a device, such twists work better on the page - but successfully concludes on a note tragic failure. The concluding passages are genuinely, darkly, intelligently wrenching as Teddy, awakened, if only temporarily, to his own nature, treads back along the true, dread path that brought him to <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on">Shutter</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Island</st1:placetype></st1:place>, and confronts the kind of moment no man should have to comprehend, and the very end elucidates the haunted note of Sheehan’s opening. The inability t</span><span lang="EN-AU">o save an innocent, the story finally says, haunts a man like no other. </span></span></div>
Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-75857308009356897832010-01-06T19:21:00.016+11:002011-10-06T15:05:13.307+11:009. Decisions and Alibis, Nature and Myth: Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll<div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixxGP2qOWVQsMaFRs9sxwDCIXKW2zeX0aQzxaUfI7v2ozzYmSqVtUdV79iHFyxgHMF9Qyy0Yn0EX1fuB4OlHXN2Ln7yEpzHlr39utEsl6mVLr6PQ02dgz5_MgDkvjhb4LK87FnwPirlb4/s1600-h/image_thumbnail2.aspx.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5423539890839020834" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixxGP2qOWVQsMaFRs9sxwDCIXKW2zeX0aQzxaUfI7v2ozzYmSqVtUdV79iHFyxgHMF9Qyy0Yn0EX1fuB4OlHXN2Ln7yEpzHlr39utEsl6mVLr6PQ02dgz5_MgDkvjhb4LK87FnwPirlb4/s400/image_thumbnail2.aspx.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 240px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 156px;" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Summer of the Seventeenth Doll</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">, by Ray Lawler, first performed at the </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">R</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">ussell Street Theatre</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">, 1955.</span></span></i><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">June Jago as Olive in the first production on the cover of the current Currency Press edition.</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><br /></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><i>Summer of the Seventeenth Doll </i>is</span></span></span><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><i> </i>widely regarded as a crucial work of Australian theatre, in a similar vein to </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Death of a Salesman</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">’s impact on American drama and </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Look Back in Anger</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> on the British, and like those works it summarises a fundamental crisis in a nation’s mid-century psyche. In immediate terms it’s the story of the disintegration of a heretofore convenient domestic arrangement. Roo and Barney, two labourers who specialise in cutting sugar cane in the far north, spend many months of a given year in Queensland, but always decamp for Melbourne when their off-season, the “lay-off”, comes around. During the lay-off, they live in the house of Roo’s long-time girlfriend Olive, and her mother Emma, and spend their accumulated wages in a happy extended booze-up. Each year, Roo returns with a gift both totemic and yet somehow childish, a kewpie doll, for Olive. But in their seventeenth homecoming, Roo and Barney return riven with tension and bewilderment. Roo, long the leader, divinely anointed by his physical strength and stamina, of a work gang, has been displaced by a younger rival, Johnny Dowd, and he covered up his humiliation by faking a bad back, before then leaving the gang and hiding out in Brisbane for many weeks: he is, then, broke. Barney failed to join his mate Roo in this action, a source of niggling tension between them. Barney himself has lost his own girlfriend, Nancy, who has recently married an intellectual, and Olive is hoping to convince her fellow barmaid, the bourgeois, propriety-concerned </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Pearl</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Lawlor’s drama revolves around a crisis in the lives of its characters, where they are forced to give up the lives they have been living up until its conclusion, which sees a series of ructions and disillusioning revelations result in an irreparable break between its core romantic pairing, Roo and Olive. The meaning of this transition can appear immediately conservative, as if it is confirmed that to choose such alternative lifestyles is inherently false in at least social terms, but also raises the more vital and interesting ideal that efforts to ignore the natural rhythms of life are a root cause. The precise delineation of the two paradigms is never exactly clarified. The play is built around several crucial statements of private morality and expectation whose articulation punctuates the structure of the tale. These articulations represent both a dramatic dialogue between society and individual, prescription and freedom, duty and ardour:</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Olive’s crucial “five months of heaven” speech in Act One, Scene One lays out her private sense of joy in the seasonal nature of her affair with Roo. She lays out the creed by which she lives. It is defined by natural cycles, masculine potency, outside the norm.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Barney in Act One, Scene Two defending himself as a man who always made sure he fulfilled the fiscal responsibility of a father without fulfilling the social or familial aspects of the role. He stands for the capacity of the individual to transcend a prescribed role. He defines himself as a special case, outside the norm.</span></span></div>
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<st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Pearl</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> in Act Three: “Take a grown-up look at the lay-off”. Pearl points out the now self-evident tendency towards disintegration in a situation without codified relationships. She stands for the necessity of living up to prescribed roles, within the norm.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Emma, in Act Three: “I might be a damned fool around the place, but I can still nut that one out.” She insists that self-determination demands neither conformity nor arch individualism, but self-awareness and the capacity to grow.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Context is everything in how we read this. As it is Olive’s final catastrophic reaction to Roo’s offer of marriage and settling down looks like the crumbing of a febrile personality before the accepted standard of male-female relations and a confirmation of the wrongness of her world-view, thus confirming the conservative social structure. If the play was written today, and involved characters from another socio-economic milieu, we might perhaps hear no end of commentaries on Gen X/Gen Y fecklessness and refusal to commit and mature. Is this then reactionary, or is it a reflection on a more perpetual problem, couched in specific social terms of the mid ’50s?</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Either way, Lawler’s structure sees perpetual reassessment of the characters, whose essential nature of the characters is only slowly revealed, and no single feature dominates. Whilst it may be too schematic that Roo comes to stand for acceptance and Olive for denial, the characters articulate individual perspectives and moral and social positions, all of which are tested, and found both potent and wanting. The characters individually are largely failures. </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Pearl</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">, though insulated by decorum, is anxious and lonely; Emma, for all her vinegary wisdom, is insufferably misanthropic, her talents untapped; Barney is shallow and inconstant; Roo waning in his alpha male authority; Olive unable to accept an altered idyll. The empty spaces between them are defined by collapsing boundaries, and collapsing alibis. The dolls, totems for an unfulfilled family life, are smashed. Barney’s self-justification in abandoning his children is shown up by his failure to follow Roo and his intention to, in essence, procure </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Pearl</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">’s daughter.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Johnnie Dowd and ‘Bubba’, Olive and Emma’s teenaged neighbour who has been for many years something of a surrogate child for them, counterpoint Roo and Olive not because they seem to stand for something more regular but because they seem to stand for something more assured. Whilst Roo, Barney, and </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Pearl</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> keep Bubba infantilised in their dealings with her, Bubba has become self-determining. When Dowd enters the house, his immediate diagnosis of the lack in Roo’s and Olive’s union (“Is that the best he can manage?”) is met with Bubba’s equally direct acceptance of a date with him. Both are characterised by decisiveness, where the older trio’s lives are defined by careful elisions, a pointed lack of decision, of perpetual avoidance covered by alibis; but their decisiveness also threatens a similar blindness to fate that has defined their elders. Roo covers his disappointment in himself with anger at Barney, and ran away rather than face the consequences of his waning prowess. Barney left behind children. Olive turns from Roo rather than give in. </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Pearl</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> becomes near distraught at the idea of her daughter Vera spending an afternoon with the gangers, suggesting that her stable world is no more secure, and is in effect defined by vague and shadowy terrors of soiled innocence. In each character, their rhetoric defines their fears and failures rather than their triumphs. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> </span></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Roo’s solution to his crisis, a kind of crash-dive surrender, is as profound a shock to Olive as Roo’s discovery of his waning strength before Dowd back in the cane-fields, and the crisis it precipitates is very similar; Olive retreats from the battleground, refusing to deal with the moment, nursing her grievance, much as Roo did in his specifically masculine way. Barney, much as he did when Roo left the gang, advocates going on with work and maintaining an air of businesslike removal form emotional consequence. The dramatic force that Pearl and Emma wield in the last act would have been denied them earlier, with Pearl looking like a right wowser compared to earthy vivacity that Olive promises, and Emma a comedic biddy, whose bawling out the younger folk for not taking things seriously when singing reflects her deeper, more urgent contempt for their way of doing things.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">That each woman gains a kind of moral authority towards the end does not however necessarily invalidate the positions of Olive, Barney, and Roo in deference to theirs, but they do point out the two great weaknesses in them: their lack of thought for the problems of the world outside their circle (and what such ignorance can cost an individual), and their inability to look at themselves honestly. Pearl, whose life has been defined by trying to keep her daughter sheltered and making her way as a single mother, reflects the authority of a bourgeois, suburban world that considers a kind of safe bubble of experience desirable; an attitude Olive explicitly detests. Her own idealisation of the lay-off is tied to her own relative level of independence. She holds “the household power”, as the Setting notes put it. Threatened with the big stick of adult compromise, Olive crumbles; but this, rather than affirming anything, identifies a terror that faces all of the characters – the inevitable challenge to their favourite assumptions and private universes.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">In such a context then it’s easy to explain George Molnar’s comment on “strangers who were us”, for, despite their unusual individual characteristics, the crisis that faces the characters is indeed one that faces everyone, all the more in a conservative era, of finding a compromise between private ideal and public reality.</span></span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Summer of the Seventeenth Doll</span></span></i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">, at least in terms of how it evokes echoes of an agrarian, cyclical sense of human life, as experienced in terms of nature, contextualised in the conflicting, unnatural setting of suburban ’50s Melbourne. The dolls, whether one sees them as tokens in place of real children or not, certainly have a totemic value that sets the seal on the year past and makes pledges for the year to come. Such is a motif that reeks of a pre-modern world, in which cycles of nature, and nature itself, are of great importance. This easily accords with the image of Roo and Barney as the epitome of “real men”, as Olive describes them – physically confident, powerful men, far above the petty workaday males of the city. That is, men leftover from an age when physical strength and potency were prized. Such is not merely an Australian archetype; it’s a general version with accord in other portraits of a pre-industrial world in which men go off to do their work and the women tend to the hearth. For instance, the whalers and their wives in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Moby-Dick</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">, where the sailors are absent on their labours for years at a time, or, the Spartan warriors and their women in any version you care to name of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">300 Spartans</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">. Olive exalts in her status as Gorgo to Roo’s Leonidas. It’s redolent of a balance of lives, seasons, duties, from a more pure, classical world.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Of course, this idealised image receives a tremendous scrutiny, with its flawed representatives, and it disintegrates in the face of the contemporary suburban world’s increasing hegemony, with entirely different ideas of duty. Roo’s strict sense of homosocial etiquette, which insists on firm loyalty, pulling weight, maintaining discipline, and purity of action that can if need be divorced from practical responsibilities, implicitly contradicts </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Pearl</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">’s sense of the duty of a man as being domesticated and subject to compromise. Roo is a king by his own, pre-modern standards, and a total nonentity by </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Pearl</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">’s bourgeois ideals. Barney is merely lacking in such terms; he at least </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">has</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> children. If the new world’s hegemony is communicated strictly in domestic terms, then both Roo and Olive have failed, and the shock of surrender has a terrible impact. But part of their failure is indeed not merely social but also natural. They have held on to an early phase too long, and thus neglected the inevitable effects of aging; that is, of moving from the regular alternation of work and lay-off, but into the greater lay-off, which demands time for creating a new generation. Thus Dowd, the new bull male, follows up his defeat of Roo in the primal duel of masculinity on the canefield, by claiming his surrogate daughter and mocking his failures as a breeder. </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Pearl</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">, the voice of the domestic world, desires a man, but gets along perfectly well without one.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">In terms of pre-modern cultures, the dolls Roo brings home could be said to possess a kind of magic, a sort of religious symbol. They represent homage to, but also an attempt to forestall, the natural cycle, the pantheistic demand. The doll at the crux of the play is specifically identified as the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">seventeenth</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> – in essence, only a year shy of the modern, accepted age of consent, and thus of maturity, of the child Roo and Olive may have had in their first year. A promise, obviously, unfulfilled. Roo cannot any longer maintain the pretence of being a classical hunter-gatherer or warrior; but the time is swiftly approaching when neither he nor Olive will be physically capable of reproduction. Thus Roo and Olive become avatars for a spiritual crisis – two people trapped irrevocably between a primal culture and a modern one, a culture that celebrates potency and youth which is, ironically, ageless, and a specifically more “adult”, but less fecund, specifically contemporary world. Roo and Barney return to the city, as if moving out of past to present, but it’s a movement that cannot be sustained. Finally, the men must either accept one place or the other.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">If the fantasy of Australia, much like that of America, is of an Eden rediscovered, its seminal early works concerned of fierce struggles of solitary, brave men contending with nature, and then the rebirth of Arthurian heroes – in American literature, figures like Natty Bumppo and the cowboy hero, and, in Australian, the Man from Snowy River, in the next phase of mythos, domesticity consumes the reborn natural male, but, interestingly, here it also crushes the female. Olive literally cannot countenance abandoning her concept of life, like a shaman choosing immolation rather than conversion. Roo, much like a cowboy hero, rides off into the sunset, with his “mate” Barney but fundamentally alone, and Olive breaks, mourning the loss of an ideal, eroded by the inability to halt time.</span></span></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEX3Qef_p-3V_IdQzwkU6Cni4v3KJrB-Bif5t8C6WheblEqq304RDcSnod51sAfKtmNZZ8ga0tTa111xlWThkCuEf_Ga9UUtQYTtpR6L7wk2XPWugpnK5Ge4wFXyaEF-MffyUeEqcklig/s1600-h/cap044.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5423539882066375266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEX3Qef_p-3V_IdQzwkU6Cni4v3KJrB-Bif5t8C6WheblEqq304RDcSnod51sAfKtmNZZ8ga0tTa111xlWThkCuEf_Ga9UUtQYTtpR6L7wk2XPWugpnK5Ge4wFXyaEF-MffyUeEqcklig/s400/cap044.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 300px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 400px;" /></a><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">John Mills, Ernest Borgnine, and Anne Baxter as Barney, Roo and Olive in Leslie Norman's 1959 film version, also called </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Season of Passion.</span></span></div>
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Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-1543517363970735692009-11-09T19:55:00.019+11:002023-03-22T19:57:25.251+11:008. Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story: Collapsing Identity in an Avatar of the Age<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijaFcSJlPqMEqpmZFNJU_JH_hMwhp_63PiBae56IcIW-Z9YKpxqBFlKpH2_Qd1t1FgIacwuY7TxL6M2BJTiVF2W5OY9dAya74K1NmDJD36xmvGcPU9vIVW4pa5trs1WqVh4oKl4dV-3YQ/s1600-h/AuntsStoryWhite.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5402025428466643202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijaFcSJlPqMEqpmZFNJU_JH_hMwhp_63PiBae56IcIW-Z9YKpxqBFlKpH2_Qd1t1FgIacwuY7TxL6M2BJTiVF2W5OY9dAya74K1NmDJD36xmvGcPU9vIVW4pa5trs1WqVh4oKl4dV-3YQ/s400/AuntsStoryWhite.JPG" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 400px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; text-align: justify; width: 252px;" /></a><i><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The Aunt's Story</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">, by Patrick White, 1948. Eyre and Spottiswoode. Pictured, Penguin paperback, 1985.</span></span></span></div></i><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Patrick White’s third novel was one of his own perpetual favourites, little noticed at the time but eventually viewed as a cornerstone of his early career. White, Australian literature’s first, and so far only, Nobel laureate, is an intimidating figure to many contemporary readers, and not without reason. His glutinous prose style can be off-putting, with his firm resistance to the minimalism of language normally associated with modernism, even whilst delving into some of modernism’s key concerns -- matters of perspective and conceiving the world. He also often wrote about an haute-bourgeois, Eurocentric sector of Australian society that’s less relevant today. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">As a reading experience and an artistic statement, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The Aunt’s Story</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> is both impressive and sticky. Slow, intense, often hallucinogenic in its perceptual intricacy, and yet as distant from immediate reality as its half-mad heroine, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The Aunt’s Story</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> is, as a feat of technical writing, quite amazing. Time and time again, White conjures sentences that paint in perfervid tones an imagination that perceives experience in an off-kilter, hyper-vivid style, shading into vague dissociation and then true madness. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The aunt in question is Theodora Goodman, the kind of human – a spinster, unattractive, too individual for her world and too distracted for meditation – easily ignored by life. And she is not, in her fashion, entirely pitiable. Her self-contained, sphinx-like quality, which tantalises and taunts, conceals a boundless and formless character, as Theodora intimates a descent into nihilism, a sense of inherent murder, of “the great millennium of dissolution”, contained within her psyche. Editing herself out of the real world, and into those lives she chooses, Theodora in her crazed way embodies a disintegrating world. Like a virgin priestess to some unseen deity, she holds herself in readiness, meditating on a too intensely charged connection to the nature of the earth and life. Or is she just an old dingbat? </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The novel proceeds in three parts: “Meroë”, “Jardin Exotique”, and “Holstius”. It opens just after the death of Theodora’s mother. Once the mistress of a large and impressive colonial homestead, Meroë, on a grazing property that her feckless intellectual husband had allowed to go to seed, Mrs Goodman had finished up living in a </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Sydney</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> house with the less beloved of her two daughters, the ill-shaped Theodora, despite a subtle strain of mutually homicidal resentment that lived between them. Theodora’s conventionally pretty and humdrum sister, Fanny, had received all the grace and favour of their mother, which helped her lasso an equally humdrum, good-looking neighbour, Frank Parrott, who was initially as intrigued by the tomboyish, knowing Theodora. Even from an early age, Theodora, wilful in her lethal desire to know everything, seems linked in a strange, morbid fashion to the world around the genteel Meroë, akin to its bone-like stony outcrops and seeing some ghost of her own soul in the hawks, one of which she shoots down to impress Frank, but perceives only her own self-annihilating streak in the act. She also senses a bond with an aging tramp, seemingly an old friend of her father’s, who comes to beg a meal, and accounts bitterly about how her father had once been a wanderer like him. Her father died: </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 27.0pt; margin-right: 27.0pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 27pt 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">‘She walked out through passages, through the sleep of other people. She was thin as grey light, as if she had just died. She would not wake others. It was still too terrible, too private an experience. As if she were to go into the room and say: Mother, I am dead, I am dead, Meroë has crumbled. So she went outside where the grey light was as thin as water and Meroë had, in fact, dissolved. Cocks were crowing the legend of the day, but only the legend. Meroë was grey water, grey ash. Then Theodora Goodman cried.’ </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">And Mrs Goodman and her daughter left Meroë for the city, where Theodora sustained a long platonic friendship, underscored both by fascination and loathing, with a successful aging lawyer, Huntly Clarkson, with the potential for marriage that never quite entices either of them quite enough. Finally, by the time Mrs Goodman dies, Theodora is pushing forty, healthy but turned ugly, twisted up as much by internal confusion as by genetic lot, sporting a faint moustache that her sister’s children love touching. Theodora takes her chief refuge in playing the role of aunt to her nephews and especially her niece, Lou, to whom she feels kinship as the kind of girl just a little too intelligent and outside of things to make Fanny comfortable. Nonetheless, her mother’s death frees Theodora to take advantage of her inheritance and embark on a trip to </span></span><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Europe</span></span></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">, where White throws her in the path of the spiritual calamity of the late ‘30s. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Theodora’s final descent into schizoid madness reflects a disintegrating culture. As Kerryn Goldsworthy noted, Theodora’s crack-up mirrors the world’s, which is breaking up, achieving a state of flux, the same state to which Theodora moves, not through religious learning but through spiritual instinct. In the novel’s second episode, Theodora, and the narrative, dips in and out of immediate reality, as Theodora immerses herself in the stories other guests in the same coastal hotel tell her, especially those of an old Russian soldier, Alyosha Sokolnikov, who calls himself a general, but later admits to only ever having risen to the rank of major. Sokolnikov calls Theodora Ludmilla, projecting onto her the likeness of his long dead sister, who was murdered by revolutionaries. Another guest, Mrs Rapallo, an American heiress, with whom Sokolnikov has a running but not deeply serious quarrel, later admits that a daughter that she has told her of, who supposedly married a rich aristocrat, doesn’t exist, an invention to make her own experience amongst the grandees of Europe more coherent and purposeful. Thusly, Theodora finds herself as a person with limited capacity to discern reality amongst many folk who maintain fictions to make their lives bearable. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Theodora embodies, firstly, a schism, that between social role and private persona. If a key modernist concern was the question of perspective and how it affects the world – and how prose presents that world – Theodora perceives existence hazily, through a filter of private fantasy and estrangement. Though seemingly innate, Theodora’s estrangement is surely enforced by her inability to adopt a shape pleasing to the world, in any form. She accepts the cliché of maiden aunt without demure, even with a touch of ironic pride, because it’s an identity that at least keeps her momentarily rooted to the structure of things, whilst also liberating her; it has no attendant ties, no solid part to play in other people’s lives, save the ethereal designation “aunt” to her sister’s children, or more specifically to Lou, that is a kind of spiritual, once-removed mother, the kind who sees into a soul without blinkers of expectation. It also prevents her from having to define herself in relation to the forces that work upon her, which finally becomes her crisis. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Other guests in the Hôtel include Katina Pavlou, a teenaged girl to whom Theodora becomes another kind of aunt; Wetherby, an English writer; and his German lover, Lieselotte, a Countess and painter who ran away from her crazed, Fascist husband, and is now possessed herself with a deeply nihilistic intent. Wetherby and Katina begin a flirtation which Theodora casually aids, hazily perceiving in their trip together to an old Napoleonic tower as the event for Katina’s loss of virginity. This precipitates Lieselotte’s final </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">auto-da-fe</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">, in which she murders Wetherby and sets fire to the hotel: </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 27.0pt; margin-right: 27.0pt; margin-top: 0cm; margin: 0cm 27pt 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">‘She was alone now, in the passage of the hotel, of which wall-paper rejected a long imposed flatness. Walls whipped. All the violence of fire was contained in the hotel. It tossed, whether hatefully of joyfully, it tossed restraint to smoke. Theodora ran, breathing the joy or hatred of the fire. She was not certain where. She heard the desperate cockroach pop under foot. Her own report, she supposed, would not be so round or, authorities said, so final.’</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The fire, of course, is percipient of oncoming war, and Theodora, now completely untethered from secure reality, heads to the United States, where she gets off a cross-country train and wanders about a small Midwestern town and its outskirts, is briefly taken in by a poor but kindly family, the Johnsons, before setting up home in an abandoned house that merges with Meroe in her mind, and she is revisited by the wanderer, who now calls himself Holstius and encourages Theodora to accept her imminent incarceration and divided self with acquiescence. Theodora is indeed soon collected by a doctor called by the Johnsons. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Theodora spans gulfs: new and old worlds, male and female, sane and insane, civilisation and nihilism, mystic and cynic. If the ideal of shamanism is something beyond male and female, a figure like Tiresias who can shift between the two and remain outside the normal slipstreams of time and identity, Theodora is something similar. She is, at last, everything and nothing. Carolyn Bliss suggested that Theodora, like another White hero, Voss, lurches in a great nothingness precisely because of this mix of solipsism and self-ignorance. Theodora’s meditative nature skips around her own nature, constantly critiquing everything else, imagining herself in other modes, other identities, trying on and casting away the rags of fraying world. She’s happiest drifting far beyond that structure, trying on other lives for size once she finally reaches that great outer world and finds, chiefly, endless reflections of her own mind. Once she is divested of her last true worldly responsibility, her mother, she goes out to meet the world; only when she is divested of her sanity can she begin to comprehend herself. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The France she encounters in the Hôtel du Midi is anachronistic, and the source of my unease about this segment: it feels walled up against the outside world, full of cultural refugees living in a distended belle époque that has precious little to do with France of the ‘30s, with Mrs Rapallo trailing associations of Henry James and John Singer Sargent, and Sokolnikov, straight out of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, and the rest, all of whom reflect the fractured state of pre-War Europe. But then again, Theodora’s distorted imagination seems to repaint everything in a new shade, and the Hôtel and its denizens could be as much her imagination as fact. Either way, it’s reminiscent of the Davos sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The Magic Mountain</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">, a similar abode of émigrés unknowingly awaiting a cataclysmic, with a seeker-hero keeping the focus. Theodora’s fantasias draw her off into lives that she might as well have lived – her particular identification with Sokolnikov’s legendary sister, which seems to sit well with her own mother’s foreign, possibly Russian background, the most potent of her variety of potential lives. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Who then is Theodora? Or, who is she not? With her masculine traits and father’s favourite status, she suggests the defeated tomboy, the crushed spirit of a sensualism not flowing through the familiar channels, to the point where her capacity to sense is both out of all proportion and yet strangely dead, an identity strangled in its cradle by a code of civility losing all purpose. Theodora’s youthful communion with the colonial landscape has remade her into something that cannot yet, at least not in her mother’s eyes, live; only after the old world immolates itself will it find a form.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Theodora perceives evil in herself, and her mother, hateful as she is, perceives a criminal solipsism, which finally is given free reign once her mother dies. Theodora’s association with weapons and death, her mastery of shooting and habit of walking off with knives and deep, preternatural identification with murderers, imbues her with the character, if not the actuality, of an angel of death. She carries a negativity within her that matches the age, one of war, declining presumptions of gentility (seen in general scope in the Hôtel du Midi, with its collective of runaways from revolutions and the “myth in jackboots”. She kills the little hawk, the spirit of wildness that reigns over the landscape at Meroë, the emblem of a brief and ferocious existence, thus annihilating her own self-realisation on that stage; she denies her own desire for a spectacle (also annihilating her sister’s love for her, who recognises she’s mad, and the glimmering interest Frank had in her). She’s a seeker, a searcher, and yet she’s not an aspirational explorer. Her father, fan of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The Odyssey</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">, charts Homeric enterprises, but, as for Odysseus, Theodora splits into the many-headed Scylla, looking quite the gorgon to the eyes of men. She escapes deterioration into utter mediocrity, such as inevitably grips her conventionally pretty sister and her conventionally masculine husband, who simply fulfil a biological function and instantly petrify. </span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Theodora’s desire to know takes on the morbid intensity D. H. Lawrence diagnosed in an Edgar Allan Poe tale like ‘Morella’, a need to know the world and people down to the bones, down to a basic nature, whilst simultaneously erasing herself, disposing of that “great monster Self”. The broader influence of Lawrence, who, some critics like Carolyn Bliss note, was an influence on White’s early fiction, can be detected in the symbolism of Meroë and the crucial avatars Theodora, product of a contorting, dying genteel civilisation, discovers instead in earth and animals; the closest kin she finds from the world of men is a Greek musician, Moraïtis, to whom she is introduced in Sydney, and whose music penetrates her deeply. He was a peasant from the ancient pagan cradle of civilisation, a trailblazer for her own search for some knowledge and experience of substance. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">But Theodora never truly penetrates the nature of neither the world nor herself, peeling the skin off the onion, until only nothingness is left. Bliss called her a Faust, the first Faust of White’s career of Fausts, offering her soul for knowledge and gaining only chaos and dissolute purpose. Theodora encounters her nihilistic, destructive side in the German artist Lieselotte, prognosticating an inferno that bursts out and consumes this European conclave, and leaves Theodora stranded to at last reckon with her own shattered self, just as modern culture, after that millennium of dissolution, will pick up its pieces. As Lieselotte predicts, ‘We have destroyed much, but we have not destroyed enough. We must destroy everything, everything, even ourselves. Then at last when there is nothing, perhaps we shall live.” As Lieselotte is driven to annihilate her lover, the poet, musician, and teacher Wetherby, that is a fount of creation, so to does Theodora pursue her annihilating programme right to its bitter end. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">White shows off his brilliance constantly - a bit too much so. Like the Jardin Exotique of the Hôtel du Midi which gives the second part of the novel its name, White’s prose is tangled and exotic, but also somehow fossilised, immobilising. Meanwhile his narrative is compassionate, visionary, deeply conceived, but also often distended, alienating, and, truth be told, as interminable as often as it is hypnotic. Most truly great works of literature can be as difficult as hell and yet graceful, a gift White hadn’t quite achieved by this point. </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The Aunt’s Story</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> is often ponderous and showy in its poetic affectations. Because the viewpoint is so intimately tied to Theodora’s skewed, occasionally unintelligible sense of reality, the "Jardin Exotique" isn’t deeply persuasive or terrifying in the attempt to paint a crumbing </span></span><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Europe</span></span></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">. Lieselotte, who acts out the destructive impulses Theodora harbours, is too distant to be deeply disturbing, in the same way that, say, Smerdyakov's link to Ivan is in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The Brothers Karamazov</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">: White would have achieved more power in his intent with a less circumlocutory style. Whilst White richly communicates Theodora’s mindscape, his thematic imperatives are dulled. </span></span></span></p> <span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">And yet it’s still an important and stimulating work of literature that rewards the patient reader with a darkly conjured sense of the disintegration of personality and of a cosmic need for disinfection.</span></span></span><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">See also:</span></span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Bliss, Carolyn 1986, “Patrick White’s Fiction”, MacMillan, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">London</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">. </span></span></i></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-AU"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Goldsworthy, Kerryn 2000, ‘Fiction from 1900 to 1970’, in “The </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Cambridge</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> Companion to Australian Literature”, ed. </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Elizabeth</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> Webby, </span></span></i><st1:placename st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Cambridge</span></span></i></st1:placename><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> </span></span></i><st1:placetype st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">University</span></span></i></st1:placetype><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> Press, </span></span></i><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Cambridge</span></span></i></st1:city></st1:place><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">.</span></span></i></span></p></span></div>Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-69260950812489242242009-11-06T18:49:00.020+11:002010-11-12T17:07:13.398+11:007. 'Tirra Lirra by the River’: Memory as Mystery<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzBe-7ttdzhuW-Z7Qm7mHrhUheCkz_GDE_4NpSbBIfhP_nC14EPYdD1GMWdBYqg2VVAPgik2UEUekE2ADd7SmbsiIT3nGunUz3dboM1tPyJrDyzgUSLf1KzbvMbvDyiNRRqO6Bi3uAjFI/s1600-h/TirraLirraAnderson.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 254px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzBe-7ttdzhuW-Z7Qm7mHrhUheCkz_GDE_4NpSbBIfhP_nC14EPYdD1GMWdBYqg2VVAPgik2UEUekE2ADd7SmbsiIT3nGunUz3dboM1tPyJrDyzgUSLf1KzbvMbvDyiNRRqO6Bi3uAjFI/s400/TirraLirraAnderson.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5400894845744767202" /></a><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tirra Lirra by the River, </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">by Jessica Anderson, 1978, Macmillan Company of Australia; pictured edition Penguin paperback, 1985.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">As Mister Zimmerman sang: “He not busy being born is busy dying.” And such is the essential thesis of the life Nora Porteous, the heroine of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">T</span></i><i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">irra Lirra by the River,</span></span></i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> a work that provoked mixed feelings in me. It is an archetypal example of a ‘70s Australian “slim volume” novel: 141 pages long, laced with then-fashionable concerns, chiefly feminism and the cultural cringe, it captured the 1978 Miles Franklin Award, and it’s exactly the sort of stucco-crusted work that prize delights in. The narrative takes the structure of an aging woman’s assessment of her less-than-satisfied life, and expresses often urgent and telling emotions in a prose style that is occasionally witty and yet, for the most part, pedantic and lacking any formal grace, the kind of poeticism that could give it the weightless quality of reverie it requires. You can practically smell the green tea and potpourri wafting off the page. Heroine Nora is supposed to be a likeably flawed, but finally, heroically self-possessed woman who manages to reinvent herself against impossible odds, but it's possible to argue that, more often than not, she's the type of unfortunate personality who successfully blames everyone else for the traps she puts herself in.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Nora is a child of a </span><st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Queensland</span></st1:place></st1:state><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> town, to which she returns after nearly a half-century’s absence to find has been annexed by suburbs. She had left it first for </span><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Sydney</span></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, where she lived with her former husband, Colin Porteous, and then in </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">London</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, where she forged a career as a dressmaker and theatrical costumer. When she returns to Australia after a series of calamities ends the comfortable retired life she had been leading with two female friends and the man who was their landlord, she’s laid flat by a case of pneumonia for weeks and sorts through her mass of barely examined recollections, fancies, deliberate elisions and half-formed prejudices that have defined her life, in relation to her sister, Grace, whose death left Nora with the family house again, to her ex-husband, to two old childhood acquaintances, successful author Olive Partridge, and Dorothy Ivey, who married a man named Rainbow and had a son, Gordon, who is now Nora’s wan, distant attending doctor. His phlegmatic manner evokes a mystery for Nora over Dorothy’s end which, when Nora learns of it, proves far stranger than anything Nora could have expected.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">As a detailed portrayal of shifting cultures and psychological acuity, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tirra Lirra</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> isn’t deeply moving, because Nora’s perspective on other people is so disengaged, and the mysteries of her personality not all that terribly interesting. The core memory she dredges up of an incident when she was a teenager with a younger boy, Jack Cust, which seems to have caused her retreat from passion, isn’t exactly a riveting revelation, and the climactic discovery that Dorothy slaughtered her family except for young Gordon strangely lacks menace and horror, and proves, truth be told, to be just another wellwhaddayaknow in Nora’s life. The novel reads partly like listening to a long ramble on an airplane flight by the lady in the next seat. Compared to the vibrant psycho-sexual tension and indiscernibly confused mysticism and madness Patrick White evoked in his similar </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Aunt’s Story</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Anderson</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s writing is only prosaic and passable. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">It is as a piece of rumination that the novel gains a depth beyond the humdrum. It suggests that life is finally being little more than the accumulation of memories that prove it occurred, as Nora’s journey of reverie reveals. Nora has no children, so it is the momentary proofs of her life that signal its substance to her. Proof comes in objects, photographs. The father she never knew, smiling impersonally in ancient pictures. Brothers and once-were-loved-ones beaming in pristine remoteness. In the house, in the totems of a long-discarded existence. Objects confirm the past, but only memories explain the past, and memory can be tricky. Nora’s self-study pivots around the events of her past, and yet her memories are slow, even unwilling, to resolve. And without the willingness of memory, no object is itself a proof of anything.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Of course </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tirra Lirra</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> tells a temporal narrative, of a woman who has lived long, poised in a perpetual state of becoming. Death is of course the easier choice. Easier by far to cry one’s heart out to the last like the Lady of Shalott than to build Camelot (Nora maintains an attachment to Tennysonian imagery, and an of course unfulfilled vision of a perfect Lancelot, from childhood). Nora presumes that Dorothy chose death as Nora almost chose death, but in fact they were Janus faces conjoined to the same annihilating impulse. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Nora’s life encompasses several familiar Aussie mythologies, not the old ones of Clancy of the Overflow, but more contemporary varieties: the creative soul who has to fly overseas to find fulfilment. The hopeless dreamer hemmed in by dull-witted suburbs. The lively female corralled by an empty male. Very ‘70s. No, wait, very now. How many women do I know in their mid-’30s who have run screaming from paltry marriages? But I digress. Nora attempts to assert a measure of control over her life, and yet discovers in the end that possibly she cheated herself of becoming something else, something more interesting. Like too many people, she is an accumulation of mistakes, and not necessarily the best judge of herself. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">For Nora is a bundle of contradictions. Dissociated and ardent, tortured and blithe, talented and mediocre, self-destructive and self-actualising, unforgiving and compassionate, highly resolute and utterly malleable, she does a good job to survive as long as she does. She almost doesn’t, but she does. Nor does she go crazy from some unexamined anxiety like Dorothy. The twinning threat – self-annihilation or extermination of others – looms darkly in both her immediate life and the world about her, in the strange and yet coherent accord of her depression over her fading looks and the horrors of concentration camps, establishing the depressive’s sensibility that entwines all ills into a single mass, but also the artist’s sensibility, the poet’s sense of everything being connected – in what way do the terrors of the age reveal themselves in the individual life? Was Dorothy’s rampage only her own, or an explosion of frustration and horror keen to a generation like her? Is Nora alone in her plight, or a representative? </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">In this regard the novel is deadly accurate: the tight-fisted matriarchs, bowling club conspiracies, nervous homosexual bohemians and churchy suburban compost-tossers plainly evoke the seamy tedium of pre-‘60s </span><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Australia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">. Nora retains a distance from all this and her own life, great swathes of which pass by in dissociation and wilful passivity, and yet this doesn’t entirely conceal the lack of sense in Nora’s marrying a ponderous assassin of the soul like Colin: it feels more like a conceit to essay a theme. Like Theodora, Nora finally pursues the dream of Europe, only to find that dream cracking up; like her, she finishes up dreadfully sick and yet her physical confinement enables a final reckoning with her own nature. Nora’s sister Grace tries to have faith: she defines, both for herself and for Nora, faith as immobility, the definition of lethargy and non-becoming: death, in fact. Her novelist friend Olive suggests Aussie Protestants instead lapse into a kind of pantheism. Nora claims not to know what that is, but she does, in the sustenance she gains from the rivers and waters of her home, to which she returns, and yet cannot finally rediscover when she goes to search for the river in her now built-up suburb. Grace finally concluded rather that she had opinions rather than faith, and took up another faith – that indeed of the earth, fastidiously feeding her garden with compost, producing a gorgeous green glow and a proof of faith that Nora can’t quite submit to but still takes comfort in. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Nora too has faith, of a different, more immediate variety: faith in getting the hell of out sad and sickly little places. Like Grace, however, her conclusion is troubled by the sense that she missed something. In the act of running, much of the passing landscape is blurred. Nora, in waiting for life, refuses to live, in a crucial sense. She aborts her child and has a facelift, and both surgeries are crucifying disasters that rebound: her efforts to hold time at bay only confirm its force, and she is left old and powerless. The illness that afflicts her on homecoming seems as much the manifestation of an exhausted spirit, which has to be worked through before she can face her waning days with simplicity, as Nora looks at the mystery of herself and those people in her life.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The ultimate destination of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tirra Lirra</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, and its redeeming grace, is such meditation on memory, and how it constructs a person for their own understanding. Nora’s memories do not flow readily, and therefore her stock-take of her life gains an elusive, eliding uncertainty. Nora conceives herself as a mystery, which she attempts to solve in delving into the past, turning up lost fragments, like her forgotten physical flirtation with Arch Cust, that have the potential to upend her understanding of the past. The chains of her memories are built around severance, conclusions, to long patterns of existence that are vague in their being settled, and it is in that vagueness that Nora finds ambiguity, the kind that taunts and corrodes the settled opinion, the established prejudice, the assumed necessity. Nora’s certainty in what she doesn’t like, and her determination to escape it, reveals a final uncertainty of just what she wanted. Nearing the end of her days, Nora has no more experience to gain, but she does find a true second chance in her homecoming, a chance to delve into the nature of things, and discern their essence. Finally, </span><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Anderson</span></st1:city></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> suggests through Nora’s story, the time has come for Australians to stop either running in hysteria or settling into lethargy, but to settle and recompose their natures.</span></span></p>Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-51314935236071433382009-11-05T17:32:00.035+11:002010-11-12T17:07:47.184+11:006. Randolph Stow’s Tourmaline: Ambiguous Parable<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnAxbOgZkSiS3esS652dWphqyEY6GrJB2H7xxliqyC7cDeGHHdp0g-mCC3ZISQKEjLMvfvaxrYbKnT1zLI57tPm9r8TPwxcfJrGDGppwJdmAyKS-D_Efd5q-eLfXEmiGB1Jh6AAEOsKEM/s1600-h/StowTourmaline.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 243px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnAxbOgZkSiS3esS652dWphqyEY6GrJB2H7xxliqyC7cDeGHHdp0g-mCC3ZISQKEjLMvfvaxrYbKnT1zLI57tPm9r8TPwxcfJrGDGppwJdmAyKS-D_Efd5q-eLfXEmiGB1Jh6AAEOsKEM/s400/StowTourmaline.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5400894052810837602" /></a><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tourmaline</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, by Randolph Stow, 1963, Macdonald and Co.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">What is </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tourmaline</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">?</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">A Great Australian novel? A myth? A parable? Mystery? Obscure tome? Pie in the sky? All of the above?</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">What is rare about it is that is no single thing. </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Its preoccupations seem to contradict the possibly atheistic, surely pagan, almost nihilistic, strand in so many of our poets and writers. But I’m not so convinced. </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tourmaline </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">is about the need for Gods, the love of wonder, the water of hope. If no God shows up, humans will invent one. A man might call himself one.</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">In more concrete terms, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tourmaline </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">was the third novel of Randolph Stow, who had won the Miles </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Franklin Award with his previous work, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">To The Islands</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">. </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tourmaline</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> itself made a far </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">more ambivalent impact upon Australian letters when it was published in 1963, generally dismissed by many critics with their grounding in and insistence upon </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">social(ist) realism, for </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tourmaline</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> is nakedly allusive and spiritual in its method and intent. And yet it’s no failure as a depiction of small town life; its reported dialogue is quite often precise and flavoursome, and its characters burn with the </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">lightning solidity of impressionist figures. </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Stow</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> was (and is: he’s still kicking, now 74) also a poet and his prose bears it out, his sentences pruned but beautiful, his visions essayed in cunningly elusive terms. The novel’s themes, entwining grim visions of environmental decay and the collapse of spiritual bastions, have only proven all the more vividly prognosticative and relevant.</span></span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tourmaline is a town on the outermost fringe of the habitable world, an outpost in the advancing dead heart of </span></span><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Australia</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">. Once a prosperous, even beautiful town during a gold mining boom, its lack of a steady water supply in an age of corroding drought, plus the waning value of the town’s gold compared to the cost and difficulty of extracting it, has seen the place reduced to the closest thing to a ghost town. The oldest white resident calls himself The Law, for he is their sole police officer, and he narrates the tale. He recalls a town of gardens, fecundity, and hope. He is the law, yes, and the lore, the ledger-keeper, the rememberer, the story-teller. Other figures in town include Kestrel, the publican, a taciturn marauder and petty potentate, whose cousin, Byrne, is the town’s drunken troubadour, and Kestrel’s favourite victim. Kestrel is shacked up with Deborah, a half-caste girl, daughter to an aboriginal prostitute Kestrel himself had once frequented. But Deborah was raised by shopkeepers Tom and </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Mary</span></span></st1:placename><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span><st1:placename st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Spring</span></span></st1:placename></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, before gravitating towards Kestrel as the lone figure of potency in the town. An encampment of Aboriginals live nearby, keeping their own contract with the bitter earth. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">One day the town’s supply-carting truck pulls into town with a find: a sun-charred lump of man the driver found on the roadside. At first they think he’ll die, but he slowly recovers in Mary’s ministrations, and calls himself Michael Random, revealing that he’s a diviner. Byrne is besotted with this emissary of mystery, Kestrel alarmed and distrustful, Deborah fascinated in spite of herself, whilst </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tom</span></span></st1:placename><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span><st1:placename st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Spring</span></span></st1:placename></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> prods him in a barely-spoken metaphysical argument. Random lost his divining rod in the desert, and with it, he says, his virtue, but he also thinks that God has spoken to him, and that his having been saved and brought to Tourmaline has signalled God’s design for him, to bring life back to the shattered town. And the residents, especially The Law himself, desperately anticipate his discovery of water. But Random delays, turning up instead a reef of gold, and setting about prodding the townsfolk into returning the town’s church. But rather than instituting a spiritual revival, Random achieves more a kind of cult with himself as the messenger and deliverer. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Levi-Strauss would surely have understood Stow’s conjuring, in a novel that becomes in essence a study in comparative religion, tracing likenesses in Christianity and Aboriginal spiritualism and Buddhism and Taoism, threatening to boil them all down to a constitute singularity, a yearning for the infinite. For the water the town so desperately needs to revive is likened to spiritual fulfilment, to hope, in fact. But Random does not simply offer up water. He gives the town gold first. Of course we all know those fairy tales where princesses get gruesome comeuppances for snatching at gold whilst serving maids take up the water and gain all they desire. But is </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Stow</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s point really that simple? Well, yes, to a certain extent. And yet it’s not exactly the shadow of greed Random uncovers, for he wants to give it to the whole town of </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tourmaline</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, to anyone who wants it. And yet somewhere the bite of a serpent awaits. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Is Michael Random the fallen angel, Satan? A misbegotten messiah? Or con man turned cult leader? He truly believes in his mission, but he hardly knows what it is. God spoke to him in the desert. As Kierkegaard said, you ought to be carefully about whose message you’re receiving in such moments. If Random is a Satan, he’s not the one of medieval horrors. The Satan of </span></span><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Milton</span></span></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> and ‘</span></span><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Paradise</span></span></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> Lost’. The egotistical rebel without a cause, searching for one. He calls himself, either way, a Diviner. In the original sense. Touched by the divine. Searching, relying on the intimations of that divinity, but without a map. Who walked into the desert to find Tourmaline or something like it, or die, finished off by the deity he’s wrestling with. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">“Wild beasts are loose on the world,” the Diviner reports. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">A few years before they were letting off atom bombs in the desert, raining the already stricken earth with wormwood. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Either way, Michael Random comes to Tourmaline, riddled with wounds, purified by the fires of the desert – of hell, he claims. He brings hope to Tourmaline. Hope for water, for renewal and revival. Tourmaline, a dusty shithole populated by the tested and faithful – or the most craven and gutless, those who remain when all else have fled, the white conquerors who marched in, broke the earth, stripped its riches and fled as the desert asserted its wrath and took away the water. And the remnant progeny of its ancient race, the local tribes. They cling to the broken bones of the town. The “Law”, that old man, stalking his realm with philosophical impotence, dreaming of a return to glories of the past even as he becomes aware of his own imminent mortality. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Byrne, the troubadour and victim of Tourmaline, looks like the Devil. The Devil’s own son, fatherless. The man who sings of ruination, and tempts the destroyer in Kestrel. Kestrel, who flees, only to return, with mysterious, threatening minions and machinery to aid his own divination. Or are they just men with boring machines?</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Law, testifier and memory-keeper. As old as the hills, the Elder of his particular tribe. And a canny country copper who senses something might be out of sorts, eventually. The scars that pit Random’s body tip him off.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Old Gloria, matriarch of the tribe, who keeps a tree alive purely with her pee and keeps the church when no-one comes. Not until Random forces them to, signing them to an unfulfilled contract. The church, seemingly ruined, and yet with its roof off to the stars, where The Law constantly looks for his intimations of the eternal.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tom</span></span></span></st1:placename><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span><st1:placename st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Spring</span></span></st1:placename></span></st1:place><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> alone openly stands against him. Tom with his religion without words, only signifiers, preaching instead of the “unity of opposites”, “of being a rock to be shaped by winds and tides”. His is a passive, observant, waiting for death. His death seals the book. The loss of the last pillar in the town? Or its lone hero, given the transcendence he clung onto? His faith resists being translated into totems, any totems, not even words (how very Protestant), especially not gold hewn from the earth, which spring Random promises The Law will flow through him – his safe – and onto the rest of Tourmaline. It seems however that the gold is a harbinger of failure, of misdirected purpose. And yet it’s the only clear sign he receives. Tourmaline, a cursed place from the start. The earliest tombstone in Tourmaline: Kenneth Macarthur, struck by lightning. From on high!</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Michael comes to save them but loses his rod “all the virtue went out of me” – and Byrne’s replacement draws him to gold, not water. Tourmaline, and by implication civilisation, equips him with the tools of greed, not divinity.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Reversals: Byrne, who seems to be Random’s most loyal and ardent apostle and admits to loving him as other love gold or water, says he never believed in him. Kestrel, the doubter, takes his message most to heart and remakes himself as a Diviner. But what kind? Kestrel has a dark, violent heart. His reign as mystic chief in Tourmaline contains more inherent threat than Random’s.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The unity of opposites.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">A Divine purpose is not necessarily friendly to humans. It tests them, burns them to the bone, decimates races of the faithless, abandons them if they remain unworthy.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Mary, adopted mother of Deborah, whom Random brands a harlot - who becomes spiritual mother to Michael. Mary the mother? and Deborah, Magdelene? Shiny-eyed and delivered. The townsfolk become his acolytes, his church, his cult, his exodus, clawing at the earth in vigorous labour at his direction. His discovery of the reef of gold promises something. But what? A token? A temptation? Either way, Michael gains his congregation, a mystic ruler.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Until the project fails. No life will return to Tourmaline, not yet. Although the landscape is altered, the rhythms are unaltered. The sun will shine and the dust push in until nothing is left.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Michael’s communication with God fails. His hotline to the spirit world has become a party line, giving all sorts of garbled truth. Was he ever blessed in the first place? Did God really betray him? or was it Yahweh’s practical joke? That Michael had a gift is practically certain. He found the gold after all. Riches of the world, but not its life-source. Not the tool of renewal. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Even Moses wasn’t let into the promised land when he disobeyed the Lord’s precise instructions about just how to tap that stone to let forth the water to feed his flock. </span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">“Some nut who thought he was Moses or something,” Kestrel says.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">“Not Moses,” Byrne said. “Lucifer…He thought Christ was Lucifer too. Trying to make good and go home.” A Satan who constantly mistakes his lord’s power for his own? For Random’s final sin is more one of pride, of trying to force the folk of Tourmaline, no matter how hesitant or privately governed, into signing on for his kingdom of heaven. The villain as saviour. “The conviction came into my policeman’s head,’ The Law asserts, “And never left it, that he had been, somewhere, a criminal of quite extraordinary distinction.”</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Michael tries to make good. And then goes home. Back into the desert, surely to die. Or to hell. Or to </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Blacktown</span></span></st1:city></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">. Kestrel, meanwhile, where he once fed the townsfolk beer, will now feed them faith, a more addictive strain.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">I’m reminded of a very different book of the same era: Frank Herbert’s </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Dune</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">. The same imagery – the water of life, the desert congregations, the troubled and troubling messiah. Muad’dib walks into the desert to die at the end of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Dune Messiah</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, too, to escape the grim consequence of his efforts. </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tourmaline</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> too is a science fiction novel: “The action of this novel is to be imagined as taking place in the future,” as the introductory note says. Or is not </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Dune</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> but </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Mad Max 2</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">? Or Peter Weir’s </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Last Wave</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> – the opposite variety of apocalypse, but still the apocalypse. We Aussies are a calamitous lot.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Whatever </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tourmaline</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s philosophical vagaries and metaphysical obscurities, which will strike anyone not of the religious persuasion as only theoretically interesting, the novel nonetheless possesses a dark, bristling, intangible kind of power that’s virtually one of kind in our literature, and a genuine intellectual curiosity in the pan-cultural conceptualisation of faith and of sin. Dashes of the Melville of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Moby-Dick</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> and </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Confidence Man</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> face off </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Magic Mountain</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> and Goethe in a post-apocalyptic war-zone. I loved it.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family:Sylfaen;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-64421400380800850982009-09-26T13:50:00.019+10:002010-11-12T17:08:27.952+11:005. Michael Dransfield and the Hipster Apocalypse<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-rkobt6AuvkBaOg1ksdXXJimsXqqyZiN3EkUzi4coRZFc15ikLBvCFlnkAyURj1W7_NmfMEy7kChKib4Wdwn4rYrcz9aP8NEw9w8-4y5UOhWAUna-aWiB_EwWEeiD0V6txIlwOIR6hgU/s1600-h/photo4.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 258px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-rkobt6AuvkBaOg1ksdXXJimsXqqyZiN3EkUzi4coRZFc15ikLBvCFlnkAyURj1W7_NmfMEy7kChKib4Wdwn4rYrcz9aP8NEw9w8-4y5UOhWAUna-aWiB_EwWEeiD0V6txIlwOIR6hgU/s400/photo4.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5385619494719480290" /></a><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Michael Dransfield has something of the status of a Jim Morrison of Aussie poetry (or is it the “Keats of smack and hippiedom”, as John Forbes called him?): died young, had talent, had cool, with only the all-important balance of the two in question. Dransfield’s free-form, yet doggedly coherent and easily grasped poetry is replete with familiar themes fit for a post-Beat poet of the era: social protest, idealisation of outsider lifestyles and wayside culture, and longings for retreat in historical and rural idylls, the standard-issue pacifistic and anti-corporate slants, and attitude of rejection of the regulated and well-heeled. His ‘Endsight’, dedicated amongst others to Union Carbide and A.D. Hope conflates environmental pollution with the creed of “Official Poets”. In essence, he says, “IMHO – you’re all stinking up the landscape.”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">An air of desperation and a pose of aggressive rejection is a consistent feature of much art from the period, and also of newly celebratory earthiness, well encapsulated in the epic, circumlocutory let’s-get-it-on buzz of ‘Epiderm’ (“two islets in an atoll of each-other” is an exceptional chat-up line). Of course you could always take refuge in make-believe in the ‘60s, and the Courland Penders sequence, like ‘A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man’, revel in a retreat to a non-existent rural mansion and making like a homestead Edgar Allan Poe, the Rolling Stones in gentlemanly decadence on the cover of ‘Beggars’ Banquet’, or perhaps like Yeats in his tower. But it’s a useful imagistic basis for Dransfield, a symbol of pure imagination and the place of artistic revival, containing the tattered remnants of a long poetic and artistic tradition and the schism of generational divides – it is, after all, his father’s house, and contains all the memories, frustrations, resentments, and ardours associated with such a place. His inherited realm echoes with ghosts and teems with gothic potpourri even though it rests in a fertile and tranquil land. The ghosts that haunt it, are they immediate ghosts, are they the Rick and George of ‘That which We Call a Rose’, or wraiths of an indistinct past, historical, familial ghosts? Dransfield doesn’t cough his specificities up – call them all ghosts, and fight away shadows. What is distinct enough is the atmosphere of happy, embracing decay, and the title, ironic enough when the author is not yet twenty-five and all the more so considering Dransfield’s early, but probably anticipated, death, as a Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man; the Joycean inversion invokes a whole rejection not merely of being young, or socially engaged, but also of the whole youth culture and the culture of that young country, Australia, evoking a vaguely old-world atmosphere of fecund history, glorious lineage and civilisation so worn it’s falling apart – a country only for old men.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Therefore Dransfield’s vision of counterculture art is at once both ageless and understanding the archaic, anti-elitist but demanding intellect, the inevitable position of a mind spanning high art and low life. For out in that everyday, contemporary eight-hour-workday world, things look pretty grim through Dransfield’s eyes, in poems like “That which We Call a Rose”, where the delicate Shakespearean title announces a grim vision of an old and noble city being swiftly rebuilt by locusts of commercialism, and the last wild men whose “ideals precluded them from the Great Society” (cheeky LBJ reference) with its mix of idealism, barbarity and commerce (rather the idealism, barbarity, and commerce of drug culture), and the Whitmanesque self-contradictions of both delighting in the shattered, reconstituted perspective of the counterculture and the longing for the older, vanishing world. Dransfield envisions an era silently eating up men and materials in a “glut of martyrs money and carbon monoxide”, a landscape of merciless consumption and war, and “freedom is obsolete and honour a heresy”, envisioning Canberra as a place of lost minstrels and an Italian city waiting for rape of Huns, but it’s the Huns on the “morgue lists of morning”, his emblematic junkie heroes Rick and George dead and buried, symbolic offerings to Ginsburg’s Moloch. It’s not the heroic aren’t-we-great collegiality of a protest or academic-rebel culture, however. It’s the raw beauty and fear of a street life that Dransfield stares at and finds idealism and heroes in. It doesn’t seek the well-regulated poverty relief and necessary gratitude of Great Society-era social idealism, smelling the reek of conformity and hypocrisy.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The real, urgent wellspring of the anxiety, in the atmosphere of Vietnam and the Atomic Age, often noted but also often underrated in appreciating the concerns of the era, the atmosphere of outrage and frustration, and not simply the showing-off of a generation of prodigies, turns crucial in a work like ‘Visiting Hour (Repatriation Hospital)’, envisions a casual death comes just before mealtime, and contemplates the carefully metered-out time allowed the young men mangled by war, a world rendered sterile with a “white world after a urine-yellow sunset” and “chronometers of pity” as he calls them, the deliberately hoary technical word evoking a frigid, regimented approach to mercy. The young go to war and are sacrificed to war, or remain home and are sacrificed to drugs or commercialism or technology or something. Consuming fear of apocalypse and vital wrestling with questions of engagement with the world and war in “A Day at a Time”, where the poem meditates on Da Vinci’s participation in Renaissance Italy’s war-craft, whilst conjuring visions of a lonely walkabout, or living at the eye of a hurricane, that is, the utterly disengaged artist, serving in essence the same purpose as the fantasy of Courland Penders, the place of refuge and repose, becoming impossible to the contemporary man, as Dransfield anticipates death coming like a bullet or a bomb, with his back turned to it, sneaking up on the distracted, self-involved writer. It is then this air of reportage from life on the edge of an abyss that charges Dransfield’s poems with more than modish interest.</span></span><o:p></o:p></span></p>Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-22698561262200808892009-09-03T13:27:00.012+10:002010-11-12T17:09:29.222+11:004. Notes on Dorothy Porter<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWBvUhw-n6_AFyX1dPJsLaFk8VMJK93jyYQ7JsSF-XBYjiFRILsyviZDm9xWtOEIeEIty-i9CL5h5JopvG6IXb9fA4g8pKKLIXMFCDBFFEFkzXYJEwkLu5R8Fr06JmevUXQ5oLIXGgzuY/s1600-h/9780330363808.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 261px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWBvUhw-n6_AFyX1dPJsLaFk8VMJK93jyYQ7JsSF-XBYjiFRILsyviZDm9xWtOEIeEIty-i9CL5h5JopvG6IXb9fA4g8pKKLIXMFCDBFFEFkzXYJEwkLu5R8Fr06JmevUXQ5oLIXGgzuY/s400/9780330363808.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5377078003873783570" /></a><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Dorothy Porter ironically proved with her successful verse-novel ‘The Monkey’s Mask’ that she had something in common with Joe ‘Basic Instinct’ Eszteras: crime yarn + lesbians = hit potential (and yet such potential entirely eluded the film of it: a friend of mine said that it was so bad it was the first film ever made where you wanted the women to put their clothes back on). My first encounter with Porter’s work, the follow-up ‘Wild Surmise’, was a portrait of a ménage-a-quatre that mixed Sappho, Hokusai, hentai tentacle porn, and David Cronenberg to roughly equal degrees. A distinguishing feature of both her poetry (and poetry in general in the past half-century) is the reference to culture beyond the borders of poetry itself – and not merely the classical allusions of the early modernists but pop culture in its (theoretically) most seamy manifestations. Such is the new cosmopolitanism, poetics for the Age of Tarantino and Queer-lit. Contemporary with a capital-C, and yet, ironically, infused with a feel for classical culture – ah, what a pagan lot we are.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">A central concern of her poems is sensuality, but not exactly bawdy, instead alive to other textures, sickly things, even terror, in closeness to others – it’s a morbid little world she often invokes, and the culture beyond the beds of her narrative heroines lies in a billion iridescent pieces. Thus ‘Lollies Noir’ evokes horror movies and </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">film noir</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> in its stanzas cut down to murderous little pikes, the telephone transmogrified into “something awesome” announcing the ring of a lover like the ring of a murderer, bringing on “that psychopathic step / on the stair” and the conflation of acts of violence with acts of love. Porter’s evoked sexuality wavers between classical purity of Sappho’s elegant homoeroticism to the far-out tropes of slasher flicks, sensing the same gritty, effulgent mix of raw sensualism and pre-modern carnality in such disparate creations, “transcending / bad acting / cheap sets / lukewarm love” (any fan of Hammer Horror like myself understands this intuitively).</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">“The wind the Goddess brings / is both wonderful and vicious”, so Porter theorises in </span></span></span><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> ‘</span></span></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Exuberance With Bloody Hands’, which evokes the carnality of classical culture for precisely the same end as ‘Lollies Noir’ and its cinematic potpourri, a tense mix of death and fecundity charging the eroticism. The poem suggests the ancient Minoan sport of bull-leaping as a central metaphor, a sport in which teenaged girls and boys both participated in, a vital rite of passage, and powerful in its sexual imagery. “Whose throat would you cut / to have it happen again?” the conclusion begs, narrowing to a point the repetitive obsession of the height of ecstasy and annihilating consummation, the words and rhythms of the poetry evoking a mad pagan dance, contrasting the eternal potential of passion (and art) with the commonplace, immediate reality of “your mortal lover snores / and snuffles into your mortal skin” – back to Earth with a thump. And yet the imagery, the need to “(b)ecome the stone altar / become the moist fetish / become the bird screaming down on you” is powerful, immediate, more immediate than life, transcending its cheap sets again; the cheap sets, the bad actors, the merely mortal partners are indeed window dressing for the archaic blood rite.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The distance between artifice and sensation becomes, inevitably, crucial. In “P.M.T.” the moon explicitly lacks the quality given to it in a “fastidious T’ang poem”, throwing off its artifice and taking on the immediacy of a “mesmerizing chilblain”, thus taking on a painfully corporeal reality, that distant purified poetic world lost amidst radio “gossip, rubbish / and caramel”, just as a lover’s “delectable mouth” is lost in meditations upon moonlight that “splashes on my driving hands like freezing water”. It’s this “insistence, in her writing, on the bodiliness of experience – not just sexual experience, but sensory experience of all kinds, indeed being/alive”, as Leigh Dale described it, that is the loudest quality of Porter, imbuing her work with a kind of heady romanticism. With a note of self-satire in “Romantic”, one of the passages in ‘Wild Surmise’, Porter considers “(o)f course / lesbians like herself / could be the foolhardiest / romance junkies of all.” And yet it’s precisely Porter’s unapologetic hunt for concussive experience that gives the poems grandeur beyond the occasionally queasy, over-ripe images.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Such a leveling process, which tosses references to horror films, Minoan rites, and T’ang poetry together, suggests myriad reflections of a world culture that’s utterly free game, a cornucopia of refracted experience, both archaic and constantly rediscovered. Such is, as Porter’s poems hint, the state of the modern world, in eternal flux, relying on codices but unreliable in itself, in a state of flux; love, art, sexuality, infused with interchangeable qualities. In terms of a specifically Australian art, it makes perfect sense, as a multicultural society defined less by long history than multifarious, commonly inherited ideas and artifacts, everything is at once provisional and a smorgasbord. Specialised fields of interest become symptoms of retreat and failure in ‘Wild Surmise’, where the heroine Alex takes refuge from her anarchic sexual and emotional confusion, with theories of life on Europa, and her dying husband Daniel with his dreams of Virgil and Dante, searching such icons for fecundity and finding instead death and sterility. It’s a world without easy gods and easy transcendence, and possibly without any variety of either.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">In terms of a gay artist like Porter, the references to a pre-Christian world are intelligible enough, sensing in the mores of that world something friendlier to homoerotic experience, not discounting also the sheer cultural authority of the classics, first in the long line of outside influences upon the Australian culture. The cultural memory is as long as the moment of pleasure is short. As Leigh Dale notes in her essay ‘Canonising Queer’, Porter’s explorations of many of her concerns, both artistic and sexual, through European, classical, high-falutin’ cultural references can often seem, to a certain extent, hidebound, still in thrall to some narrowed cultural perceptions. Dale went on to note that surprising little room was available in the critical framework to accommodate an artist with such impulses and desires to be raw and communicative and intelligent and artful. Through being successful, she was suspect – no real artist can be successful! As well as engaging in the flux of modern culture, Porter’s desire, realised with ‘The Monkey’s Mask’, to hit a nerve and become, in itself popular, and thus, part of pop culture – anyone can “get” ‘The Monkey’s Mask’ or ‘Wild Surmise’ – and not merely commenting on it from an on-high position.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">And yet Porter herself wanted to write poetry “as tight and gutsy as rock ‘n’ roll”, as vividly and energetically communicative, as well as refined in principle. Her poems attempt to unify opposites, in a search to find commonalities in a host of concepts and seeming opposites, a reading that David McCooey supports in his essay ‘Contemporary Poetry: across party lines’, calling it a neo-Romantic impulse of the “post-‘68” generation of poets, that systematic annihilation of the regulation binary oppositions in the long history of fiction.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">It’s also possible to see likenesses in Porter’s work with, say, Kenneth Slessor, in that her poetry reports from fringes of experience (bohemianism for one, gay life in another, the relatively marginal nature of literary culture in this country for both, and indeed for another figure like Michael Dransfield) desperately concerned with expressions of mortality in art, and yet neglect refuge in metaphysical concepts. Just as Slessor’s living and dead are caught in their glassy bubbles of momentary existence, Porter’s float in clouds of sensation and culture, sustained only by memory and furiously created realms of artistry.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">See also:</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Dale, Leigh 2001, ‘Canonising Queer’, in “Authority and Influence: Australian literary criticism 1950-2000”, eds. Delys Bird, Robert Dixon, Christopher Lee, </span></span><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">University of Queensland Press</span></span></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, </span></span><st1:country-region st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">St. Lucia</span></span></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, </span></span><st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Queensland</span></span></st1:place></st1:state><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">McCooey, David 2000, ‘Contemporary Poetry: across party lines’, in “The </span></span><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Cambridge</span></span></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> Companion to Australian Literature”, ed. Elizabeth Webby, </span></span><st1:placename st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Cambridge</span></span></st1:placename><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span><st1:placetype st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">University</span></span></st1:placetype><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> Press, </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Cambridge</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Page, Geoff 2008, “60 Classic Australian Poems”. </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:placetype st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">University</span></span></st1:placetype><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> of </span></span><st1:placename st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">New South Wales</span></span></st1:placename></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> Press, Sydney.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Porter, Dorothy 2002, “Wild Surmise”, Pan MacMillan, </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Sydney</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Porter, Dorothy, ‘Statement’ in “Poetry and Gender”, eds. David Brooks, and Brenda Walker, </span></span><st1:placetype st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">University</span></span></st1:placetype><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> of </span></span><st1:placename st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Queensland</span></span></st1:placename><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Press</span></span></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, </span></span><st1:country-region st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">St. Lucia</span></span></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, </span></span><st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Queensland</span></span></st1:place></st1:state><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Tranter, John, and Mead, Philip, eds. 1991, “The Penguin Book of Modern Poetry”, Penguin Books, </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Ringwood</span></span></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, </span></span><st1:state st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Victoria</span></span></st1:state></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></span></p></div>Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-12422997954175338562009-07-06T21:09:00.035+10:002016-12-14T14:11:01.634+11:003. The Bay of Noon, by Shirley Hazzard<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The Bay of Noon, <i>by Shirley Hazzard, 1970, MacMillan & Co; pictured, Penguin paperback, 1982</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><i>.</i></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Possibly the best living writer born in <st1:country-region st="on">Australia</st1:country-region>, Shirley Hazzard was lost long ago to a larger world that saw her finally wash up in <st1:place st="on"><st1:state st="on">New York</st1:state></st1:place> and win the National Book Critics Award for her 1980 novel <i>The Transit of Venus</i>. I first encountered her through her almost mystically sparse, and yet damnably romantic, <i>The Great Fire</i> (2003), and like that novel, <i>The Bay of Noon</i> yearns to evoke an age of emotional and physical displacement, the haunted epoch after World War Two, in which the world is being tethered together in tighter bonds by modernity and yet still riddled with fault-lines between cultures and individual humans. In <i>The Great Fire</i>, the blasted wasteland of <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Hiroshima</st1:city></st1:place> was both symbol and nullification of symbolism, an undeniable remnant of extermination that both dwarfed and yet gave a strange new urgency to the problems of those individual humans in reinventing the future. In <i>The Bay of Noon</i>, the city of <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Naples</st1:city></st1:place> serves a similar purpose, as evocation and avatar of the expanse of history.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><o:p><i><span lang="EN-AU">The Bay of Noon</span></i><span lang="EN-AU"> tells a wispy, and yet highly involved and detailed little story, and tops off at about 145 pages. It is a study of a quartet of people, which eddies and then stops without resolving, a choice that lands with more force then a less skilled writer could deliver. It accounts a year or so in the life of Jenny, whose name is actually Penelope, but she had been misnamed on a refugee ship taking her to <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">South Africa</st1:country-region></st1:place> to wait out the war. Employed as a translator and typist by NATO, she had come to <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Naples</st1:city></st1:place> in the vanguard of a party of military personnel, her early arrival lucky as it gives her a chance to slip the net of the billets, and find her own lodgings, finally ending up in a seaside apartment. Engaged in some sublimely boring but time-demanding work, translating endless amounts of material to prepare a port that will see the construction of a major NATO base, Jenny is far more interested in engaging with the city. Armed with a letter of introduction from a friend who works at Ealing Studios to a woman novelist, Gioconda, whose first book had been made into a highly successful neo realist film, <i>Del Tempo Felice</i>, she hesitantly calls the lady up, hoping to make a useful local acquaintance.</span></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Gioconda proves a brilliant, intriguing, but lonely and disaffected woman, all too eager to gain a new friend, and she and Jenny become steadfast companions. Gioconda’s lover, Gianni, the film director who made <i>Del Tempo Felice</i>, is the man Gioconda credits with saving her life, in some vague, non-melodramatic fashion. As the histories of the two females resolve out of the murk of the past, Hazzard etches a picture of provisional emotional states. Jenny was happy to flee buttoned-down post-War <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">Britain</st1:country-region></st1:place>, but her more immediate motive for taking the job is that she had fallen in love with her brother, and her staidly bourgeois sister-in-law had unconsciously encouraged the passion. When Jenny realised that she lacked stable ground under her feet if this situation were to blow up, she looked for the first exit on hand. Gioconda is haunted by the death of her great love, a young painter, who had been a discovery of her father, an eminent History professor. The painter has sat out the war as a conscientious objector, but died some time after VE Day, when his boat struck an unrecovered mine, a late victim of that war. Now, tethered by real ardour to Gianni, but faced with a romantic life that cannot resolve itself into an accepted form, she becomes increasingly nervous and finds herself acting out almost embarrassingly stereotypical scenes. The last major character is Justin P. Tulloch, a Scottish marine biologist working out of the Naples Aquarium, but initially sponsored by <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Whitehall</st1:city></st1:place>, an intelligent, but coolly withdrawn, glibly discursive man who courts Jenny without any apparent intent.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Hazzard’s concerns are generational, inevitably and even willingly dated, and yet her sensibility is similar to a writer like Doris Lessing, with the same efforts at achingly precise charting of divides between men and women, in a context of post-War rootlessness, and turns retrospective flavour into an asset; it is precisely about the nature of recalling the past and watching it turn into present that is the key-note of <i>The Bay of Noon</i>. Sharing a biting precision in bottling secondary figures, Hazzard’s a more convincingly sensual writer and a less forceful conceptual thinker than Lessing. Sentence for sentence, there aren’t many modern writers who can stand up to her, especially in conjuring epigrams that are biting, cynical, and suggestive of deep hurt. Try, for instance:</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">“Edmund would assure himself that my disappearance was the best thing for everyone – it is what people always say when they have arranged something exclusively to suit themselves.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">“Thus, gratefully, he renounced uniqueness for a textbook anonymity.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Hazzard’s prose is usually at its most lethal when describing the provisional psyche of provincialism or military men, like the patronising, xenophobic Colonel who is Jenny’s supposed superior:</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">“When I joined (the mission) I knew nothing of the professional soldier in modern times. Seething is the word I find for them: so many of these people, particularly the officers, were perpetually seething – with fury, with fear, and with the daily necessity of striking out before they could be felled by inapprehensible foes. Of this seething, their profession was but a logical extension. (In fact, their attitude to their authorized enemies – Soviets, socialists, and agitators of all breeds – was tinged with a wistful worship. ‘Catch <i>them</i> putting up with a mess like this,’ or ‘<i>They</i> wouldn’t tolerate this set-up for a second.’)”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Gianni presents himself to Jenny as a conceited, opinionated man of the world, offending her when he tries to kiss her in the ruins of <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Herculaneum</st1:city></st1:place> because it’s the expected thing. He’s stringing Gioconda along with several other women, and has a wife and kids tucked away somewhere. The actual man takes some time to resolve, first glimpsed by Jenny when Gioconda rejects his request for her to move into his <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Rome</st1:city></st1:place> apartment. When she actually sees that apartment, Jenny is dismayed because it indicates a man of a different sensibility to the one he projects to his women. This comes after a disastrous trip where Gioconda follows Gianni to Tangiers on a film shoot, the fractious results of which Gioconda describes with the words “You can imagine":</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">“At this ‘you can imagine’, with its first reference to my own idea of Gianni, its first suggestion of culpability, I felt the compunction one feels when one has ultimately converted – corrupted – another to one’s point of view at the expense of some deep conviction of their own. With this phrase Gioconda acknowledged not only my reservations about Gianni, but their validity as well: there was no gratification in getting my own way; only, much graver, more crucial, the pang at her surrender.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Such is the way of things in a novella where Gioconda assures Jenny that love, being the most conditional thing in the world, can alter with minute gestures, and that her love for her brother will recede, in time, not in status, but like a landmark in the distance; such indeed is how the narrating Jenny regards all these scenes. Both the processes involved in moving on from a situation, a temporary state of things, and how that situation lingers, affects, determines actions in the future, are the tale’s crucial ideas; how nostalgia can weave itself around the most painful moments in life.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The irony that slowly becomes apparent</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> is that Jenny has skipped out from one situation with the threat of real incest and stumbled into another, albeit only metaphorically, as the go-nowhere romance of Jenny and Justin (the aural and visual similarity of the names of all four major protagonists is obvious) segues into a psycho-sexual train wreck where, whilst Jenny is stricken with jaundice, Justin and Gioconda skip off to Seville for a romp whilst a distraught Gianni comes to Jenny for comfort, which he finally gets. It is, as Jenny immediately identifies, more an expression of frustration on Gioconda’s part than a real break, and she, taking an offer to move on with the report to Washington, advises Gianni to go and fetch Gioconda back.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Hazzard excels at reversals of expectation that don’t try too hard to amaze, as when Jenny introduces Justin to Gioconda, with Jenny assuming the meeting to be a crashing disaster, only for Justin to muse on the "remarkable" lady shortly after. It's a moment that’s vital and predicative of what eventuates, and yet only announces itself as a slyly comedic punchline. Likewise Gianni’s resolution from an almost caricatured Italian macho to an intriguing figure pauses to acknowledge that he’s aware of, and likes, his assumed character. Gianni in his fullest realisation is a tender, leonine presence, who can’t entirely countenance being one of those “reformed characters” and give up his wayward, authoritarian masculine ways. In contrast, the humorous but artfully deflecting professional cynic, Tulloch, “seemed fictitious, a sort of sub-plot, something that had no existence other than to augment her experience and mine, to contribute to our legend. He himself had strengthened this impression by the defences – of language, of manner, of making love – he had constructed, had become their victim, like those heavily fortified towns that invite their own downfall by suggesting that there is something within to assaulted.”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Hazzard’s sensibility is too mediated and textured to favour thematic propaganda or bourgeois exoticism; it’s true, we cling to exotic places, the uncommon experience, and fondly recalled friendship. Her characters have the certain flesh of real people, even if they dance around each-other without really engaging in such a way that would make for a great, rather than a very good, work of literature. Gioconda can act recklessly and Gianni can look like a hero, and then reverse roles. Jenny watches and absorbs with youthful, not entirely wise eyes, so that her wiser older narrator can make that sense of altering perspective, rather than mere incident, the important realisation.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Hazzard’s theory that life tends to revolve around the same constant reference points, in different scales of relationship, is born out in its repeated motifs. The novella’s finale counterpoints two journeys: that of Jenny and Gianni leaving Naples and travelling north, so she can take a ship from Genoa and he can fetch Gioconda from Nice, and then, many years later, Gioconda’s return, when she make the passage from Naples to Capri by hydrofoil. This is a ride that she feels cheats her, in stripping her of the anticipated, rightful, becalmed pace of the old ferry, of the proper chance to gather her thoughts and steel herself before encountering Gioconda again. Likewise, the eerie opening report of a plane that crashes on Vesuvius in a fog that takes days to clear, which, when it does, reveals that the searchers had been looking in the wrong place, anticipates the almost tangential revelation of Justin’s fate in a plane crash that Jenny learns of in the newspaper after many half-hearted stabs at locating him. The volcano itself becomes an emblem, of emotional volatility, naturally, but also in the threat of perpetual stasis, of becoming locked, like the victims of <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Herculaneum</st1:city></st1:place>, in the same eternal poses flight and fear. The tension between eternal stasis and eternal movement, in essence equal forms of death, hardly resolves; it’s the tension that sustains its characters, who lives explicitly counter the more commonplace mode of life that people are adopting, clinging to the provisional, flavourless, history-lacking world of the military base and its bland, boxy structures, and even blander, boxier personnel.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><o:p><i><span lang="EN-AU">The Bay of Noon</span></i><span lang="EN-AU"> is not a tragedy; in material a little sex farce, in effect a work of meditative near-poetry, it may be said to tell a story about what happens between stories. In the past lie events such as Jenny’s hopeless passion and Gioconda’s wartime travails, and in the future, Jenny’s marriage and settlement in some unspecified but hopefully organic way of life, and Justin’s mysterious fate. The city, <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Naples</st1:city></st1:place>, imbues it all with a gauzy romanticism, its reckless, history-laden structures and mossy air of weary and yet every-youthful experience. Jenny’s final journey to Capri offsets an earlier incident that Gioconda had remembered, of walking into a New York art dealer’s and seeing a painting by her dead lover for sale, a pure shard of the past stabbing into the present, where Jenny’s journey is forced to take on the tasteless quality of tourism.</span></o:p></span></div>
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Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-15431800440265270712009-06-07T13:04:00.017+10:002010-11-12T17:10:15.606+11:002. Hawthorne, Puritanism, and The Scarlet Letter<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcOFzqRc2GUbKBhG3Xrw2reg8nh0s3QG3UXSLLkYX8VmIU7RwJMMVIqj62FPJYK2oBsHomJ-FFG0t-5jB36SdORz4vmIZlxo1OfvTftQJWS_09iJXcZKa1INLxhff7y2DHGGnJSEji_Jo/s1600-h/ScarletLetter.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcOFzqRc2GUbKBhG3Xrw2reg8nh0s3QG3UXSLLkYX8VmIU7RwJMMVIqj62FPJYK2oBsHomJ-FFG0t-5jB36SdORz4vmIZlxo1OfvTftQJWS_09iJXcZKa1INLxhff7y2DHGGnJSEji_Jo/s400/ScarletLetter.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5365585624496438962" /></a><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Scarlet Letter</span></span></span></i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850. Signet Edition, 1959.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Nathaniel Hawthorne’s </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Scarlet Letter</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> envisions the earliest era of Puritan settlement in New England, presenting an invented narrative </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> describes as if it were accounted in an obscure historical document, a tale of folk-inheritance. The ideals and philosophies of that era and its people stand at a remove from </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s time, and yet his novel affects to deal with the ideals of the Puritans in their own terms, and enacts the tradition of the morality play with aspects that could fit well into the fire-and-brimstone ideology of Jonathan Edwards. And yet the novel is finally more of an open dialogue with the past. Rather than embrace the ideals of his own era or Puritanical values, and see one victorious over the other, he identifies tensions between the two and the part they play in the psyche of </span></span><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">America</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> understood the importance of the Puritan founders, their character and world-view encoded in his sense of tradition. The novel’s vision is that of a writer who was cordial towards Emerson’s ideas, but for whom the tradition of Jonathan Edwards, the fierce preacher of The Great Awakening, retained a great metaphorical weight. The essential spirit of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Scarlet Letter</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> is haunted by a past forbidding and strict to a modern eye, yet </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> affirms it also as more resolute, authoritative, and inviting in its appreciation for human weakness and offer of all-embracing values. </span></span><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> pays homage to the Puritans for their vital part in forming his character, imagines his ancestors disdaining their feckless descendent, and surveys a present-day </span></span><st1:country-region st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">America</span></span></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> that </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> sees as littered with clapped-out heroes and spindly, shrunken women. Though </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:city></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> disparages his Puritans right back – their punishment of Hester betrays “severity”; they are “gloomy” – he also decides their women have “boldness”, the men have “fortitude and self-reliance”. They possessed the as-yet undimmed fecundity of Elizabethan England.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">At the novel’s outset, Hester and Dimmesdale have expended physical passion and the novel charts consequence rather than event, mimicking the Biblical Fall from </span></span><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Paradise</span></span></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">. The first real act of the human condition is to lose security of innocence. The actual mark adulteresses in New </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">England</span></span></st1:country-region></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> were sentenced to wear, as Leslie Fiedler noted, was not a mere ‘A’ but ‘AF’, or ‘Adam’s Fall’, in reference to Eve’s causing Adam’s ruin, a more explicitly misogynistic designation. </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s alteration quietly dilutes the potency of the denigration. Far from dismissing Hester as his “fall”, Dimmesdale, her lover, is consumed by guilt as an individual sinner, and by his failure to stand with Hester in the moment of shaming. He blames himself. The narrative of the novel has distinct aspects of a medieval morality play or gothic novel, where morality and superstition coalesce in emblematic figures. Pearl, offspring of Hester and Dimmesdale’s affair, takes on the aspect of a demonic personification, a perpetual reminder of sin, mocker of her mother’s pretences, scourge of other children, and she presses, without knowing why, Dimmesdale to join her and her mother on the scaffold. Her husband, Roger Chillingworth, reconfigures into a taunting devil, waiting for the moment when, as Edwards might have it, “</span></span><span style="color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">their foot shall slide”</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">. And Minister Dimmesdale’s soul becomes the object of this spiritual tussle, as he combats guilt and the threat of damnation.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">There is in the novel just such a constant threat of damnation, or moral failure. The narrative acts out a spiritual principle as Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth seem driven by forces beyond and outside themselves. The forest that surrounds </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Boston</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> is identified as the playground of “The Dark Man”, Satan, where Mistress Hibbins, the witch, invites Hester. In that wood Hester and Dimmesdale meet and succumb to the asocial impulse again. The dramatic climax sees Dimmesdale reject a temporal union with Hester, which would seem, in his system of values, an embrace of sin, and escapes then the menace of Chillingworth, minion of The Dark Man who brought out of the woods with him improvements to his alchemic skill which he uses to keep alive and then taunt the priest. Dimmesdale’s spiritual victory saves, by implication, his soul, Hester’s, </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Pearl</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s, and even Chillingworth’s. Sin is real in </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Scarlet Letter</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, or at least the impact of sin as a social metaphor.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Much of </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s narration affects the pose of an historical mediator, relaying the impressions of the townsfolk and civil legend as projected upon the event. Such refrains as “it was whispered” and “it grew to be widely diffused opinion” bear witness that the tale is being relayed via interpretations of its era. Such mystical signs as the great A that appears in the sky, and the mark on Dimmesdale’s chest, are differently construed by observers. What in Hester’s tale is folk myth and what is literal is not precisely identified. Running parallel is Hawthorne’s more modern delving into psychological perspective, where it’s possible to see Pearl’s childish wrath as stoked by resentment and isolation; Chillingworth’s anger likewise stoked by his aggrieved status as a cuckold, his pride as an intellectual injured, stung in having married a young woman against his better sense and gained exactly the result he might have expected; Dimmesdale tortured by his weakness before social wrath and all he holds sacred. </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> refuses to force a distinction between the two viewpoints, making the novel ambiguous in effect, yet opening up an exploration of the relationship between the religious and the psychological view of existence, and of the transition from understanding humanity through religion concepts to a new viewpoint.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><st1:city st="on"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></span></st1:city><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> contrives to have Dimmesdale’s guilty lonely vigil on the scaffold coincide with the death of John Winthrop, the first Governor of </span></span><st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Massachusetts</span></span></st1:place></st1:state><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> and author of the famed text ‘A Model of Christian Charity’. He also has Hester, with </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Pearl</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, and Chillingworth attend his deathbed in their different capacities. This places all the major characters within the context of actual history. The haunted husband, wife, and minister are also in thematic proximity to </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Winthrop</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s metaphysical charter for the colonial ideal, and reflect three things imported from the old world that Winthrop and the pilgrims could not leave behind: passion, hate, and frailty. Though the pilgrims </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Winthrop</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> addressed were engaging in a fiscal enterprise, this he held to be a smokescreen for a real purpose: to make a perfect realm of Christian life. If “</span></span><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">New England</span></span></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> was not an allegiance; it was a laboratory”, as Perry Miller put it, sinners explicitly disappoint the experiment. Hester is thus rendered a branded outcast with special stringency. The communal punishment is intended to save the soul, as well as defend the ideal of the Christian community: it is as vital a collective act as any ritual of celebration.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Yet in </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> it is Hester who appears a “model of Christian charity”. She makes no more money from her endless labouring than she needs to keep herself and her child. She visits the sick and dying and gives freely of herself to the whole community that initially loathes her and spurns her. That she could leave at any time and pursue a route of self-interest is never in doubt, and instead, by persevering, she is transformed in perception for many from unholy wretch to a sister of mercy. In both </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Winthrop</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s vision and Edwards’ hellfire, there is a concept of chosen community, a double-sided coin of hope and threat. </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Winthrop</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> promised his pilgrims that they would build a more perfect community, a beacon for the world’s salvation. Edwards promises eternal damnation for any sinner who does not come forth and seek salvation in his congregation. In both, the body of the faithful are the blessed, in opposition to the solitary, sorry lot of the sinner. And yet through an intimate knowledge of temptation and moral ambiguity, Hester becomes such a model.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">By contrast, the dignity of, say, Governor Bellingham is of no more detailed substance than the devilishness of Mistress Hibbins. Dimmesdale faces diminution to the most impotent of moral figures in his stricken inability to cast aside his public face: private sin is far more corrosive to his soul than Hester’s public disgrace. Hester’s decision to remain in </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Boston</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, withstand her humiliation, and work in selfless expiation, seems initially to confirm Hester as a woman of deep conscience. In ‘The Market Place’, </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> draws a likeness between the condemned sinner Hester and the “papist” image of the “Divine Maternity”, the Virgin Mary and child – reflecting, amongst other things, the editing-out of the Puritan Protestant ideal of the feminine in their religious icons: what’s left is the Scarlet Letter, Adam’s Fall, and the Witch. Only pages earlier, he notes that her passage from the prison passes by a bush supposed to have sprouted after Ann Hutchinson, the controversial evangelist who was exiled from </span></span><st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Massachusetts</span></span></st1:place></st1:state><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, walked the same route. This echo will repeat, and there is more to these likenesses than mere ironic reflection. Such comparisons confirm Hester’s deeper moral knowledge, where the other Christians have no real substance in terms of how they experience their religion. Suffering turns Hester from woman to martyr and model Christian. That her most private universe is not, however, quite that of a penitent is a truth </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> penetrates late in the novel.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">As </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> turns religious iconography to his own purpose, so too Hester reconfigures the A into her own symbol with her showy embroidery, one she casts off at the moment when it seems she will gain what she wants, and takes back when she loses that hope. The most crucial entrance into Hester’s interior life, in the chapter ‘A Flood of Sunshine’, confirms Hester’s interior debates on the nature of sin, society, and salvation. “For years past she had looked from this estranged point at human institutions,” </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> tells us, not as reported by others, but with direct authorial voice, offering Hester’s distinct perspective: “The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers – stern and wild ones – and they had made her strong.” It seems an overture to something like the Emerson of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Self-Reliance</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">: “‘…if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil.’ No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> will nonetheless snatch back the import of Hester’s self-realisation with the addendum: “But taught her much amiss.” If only in terms of her reintegration into the society she shares, her self-directing bent is conceived as potentially destructive. Nonetheless, Hester’s temporary removal of the embroidered A, as she endeavours to put this private code into action and reconstitute herself and Dimmesdale as natural beings, sees a moment when “her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty came back” – reborn as a living, passionate female. This contradiction, the voluble natural life of Hester and the laudable spiritual yearning of the Puritans, is the warring heart of the tale. Mark Van Doren summarised this well: (</span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s) Puritan world is in its own way beautiful. It fully exists, as Hester fully exists. If their existences conflict, then that is the tragedy to be fully understood.” Society wins, as always, but the self keeps fighting.</span></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">If </span></span><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">New England</span></span></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> is the laboratory, then Hester is the by-product of experimentation, and such mutations will keep occurring, until the “American Revolution” comes of age. If the Puritan ideal is socially encompassing, the matter of the tale is the way private conscience alchemises what enters its contemplation, and the conflict this causes. The narrative vindicates Dimmesdale’s spiritual, over Hester’s natural, consummation – and yet it does not erase it. It is necessary that Dimmesdale’s conscience triumphs – his hypocrisy, his loss of private integrity, is the worst sin, and cannot be abided, as D. H. Lawrence pithily noted. Dimmesdale obeys his ideal, and he dies. Hester obeys her ideal, more earthly, which bade her suffer everything if she could not realise her version of fulfilment. Only the beatification of that ideal had the power to remove the letter for her satisfaction: yet in accepting the disdain of society, she becomes strong. This is Hester’s transcendence. She does not die.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hester’s incapacity to voice dissent in a fashion that does not seem immoral by the codes of her society calls to mind Anne Bradstreet’s faintly sarcastic disavowal of any intention to dispute masculine hegemony. It can’t be argued with, and only the concession of a right to speak anyway can be requested. There is a lack of cultural form through which to approach dissent, amidst a community that considers everything else to be falsity. “The Greeks did nought but play the fools and lie. / Let Greeks be Greeks, and Women what they are,” Bradstreet insisted in her poem ‘The Prelude’, likewise relegating pagans and the female voice to a minor key. Hers is a society that takes shows of female independence, like that of the novel’s paragon of feminine purpose, Ann Hutchinson, as proof of ill intent. The historical figures of Hutchinson, on one, distant side of Hester, and Mistress Hibbins, executed witch, rather closer, confirm Hester in the centre, suffering the push and pull of the dualistic concepts that a Puritan ideal imposes on everything.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">That Hester cannot become a figure like </span></span><st1:city st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hutchinson</span></span></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> is both </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s conclusion and that of Chillingworth, his creation: “I pity thee for the good that has been wasted in thy nature.” She’s a failure in Puritan terms, but not only those terms. It’s a failure in terms of being able to express, to turn her private learning into a philosophy, a final inability to build as well as give birth; a failure of mental self-involvement that counterbalances her social dedication. Her efforts all go into action, not into philosophy. What Hester has learnt will have to be re-learnt, and communicated, by others. Hester retreats to the margin of her society, hovering yet between the wild of the wood and the discipline of </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Boston</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, neither condemned nor liberated from within or without. That she refuses the easy way out confirms her as a moral entity. That she is trapped between the poles of her time and </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’s is the tragedy of her life and the novel.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">© Roderick Heath 2009</span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">B</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">radstreet, Anne 1985, ‘The Prelude’, in </span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1</span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, 2</span></span></i><sup><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">nd</span></span></i></sup><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> edn, eds Murphy, F., and Parker, H., New York, Norton.</span></span></i></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Edwards, Jonathan 1985 (1741), ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’, in </span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1</span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, 2</span></span></i><sup><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">nd</span></span></i></sup><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> edn, eds Murphy, F., and Parker, H., </span></span></i><st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">New York</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:state><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, Norton.</span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Fiedler, Leslie A. 1967, </span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Love and Death in the American Novel</span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, Jonathan Cape Ltd, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">London</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Kaul, A.N. (ed.) 1966, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">: A Collection of Critical Essays</span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Englewood</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> Cliffs, </span></span></i><st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">New Jersey</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:state><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, Spectrum.</span></span></i></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Lawrence, D.H. 1964 (1924), </span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Studies in Classic American Literature</span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, Heinemann, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">London</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Lewis, R. W. B. 1966, ‘The Return into Time: </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">’, in </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">: A Collection of Critical Essays</span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, ed. Kaul, A.N., Spectrum, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Englewood</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> Cliffs, </span></span></i><st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">New Jersey</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:state><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></i></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Miller, Perry 1981 ‘The American Puritans’, New York, MacMillan Co, quoted in </span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Literary Guide to the United States</span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, ed. S. Benedict, Blanford Press, Poole, Dorset.</span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Murphy, Francis, and Parker, Hershel (eds) 1985, </span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1</span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, 2</span></span></i><sup><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">nd</span></span></i></sup><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> edn, </span></span></i><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Norton</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, </span></span></i><st1:state st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">New York</span></span></i></st1:state></st1:place><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Winthrop, John 1985 (1630), ‘A Model of Christian Charity’, in </span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Norton Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1</span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, 2</span></span></i><sup><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">nd</span></span></i></sup><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> edn, eds F. Murphy and H. Parker, Norton, New York.</span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Van Doren, Mark 1966, ‘The Scarlet Letter’ in </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hawthorne</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">: A Collection of Critical Essays</span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, ed. A.N. Kaul, Spectrum, </span></span></i><st1:city st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Englewood</span></span></i></st1:city><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> Cliffs, </span></span></i><st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">New Jersey</span></span></i></st1:place></st1:state><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family:Arial;"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><i> </i></span></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-AU" style="font-family:Arial;"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><i> </i></span></o:p></span></p>Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2381262766181816132.post-73500247609618269162009-06-05T15:51:00.027+10:002010-11-12T17:10:41.584+11:001. Othello’s Soliloquy.<div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><i><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPe3gy95xc_2Wo7JUJsbvjsJed3Xt4bjU9JuFTQ0Ko17ZTZ53EdjtPu6A2fI2lCX2mvHLIL4nMY12fRyn03R0YqsRgyW2h2gYsWHM9tIhwAgim33UrVgwa1NBFv_VpGh3z7xfYDp-7vho/s400/Othello.JPG" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 239px; height: 400px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5365584911085473554" /></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span><i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Othello</span></span></span></i><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, </span></span></span><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">by William Shakespeare, 1604. Pictured, Signet Edition, 1963.</span></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">III, iii. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">OTHELLO:<br />This fellow's of exceeding honesty,<br />And knows all qualities with a learned spirit<br />Of human dealings. If I do prove her haggard,<br />Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings,<br />I'd whistle her off, and let her down the wind<br />To prey at fortune. Haply, for I am black,<br />And have not those soft parts of conversation<br />That chamberers have; or for I am declined<br />Into the vale of years – yet that's not much –<br />She's gone: I am abused, and my relief<br />Must be to loathe her. O, curse of marriage!<br />That we can call these delicate creatures ours<br />And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad<br />And live upon the vapour of a dungeon<br />Than keep a corner in the thing I love<br />For others' uses. Yet 'tis the plague of great ones;<br />Prerogatived are they less than the base.<br />'Tis destiny unshunnable, like death:<br />Even then this forked plague is fated to us<br />When we do quicken. Desdemona comes:</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">(</span></span><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Enter </span></span></em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Desdemona </span></span><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">and</span></span></em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> Emilia.)</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself!</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">_____________________________________</span></span></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span></span></span></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Othello’s speech of Act III, Scene iii, represents the dramatic and psychological tipping point of the play. Up until this point characterised as a sturdy, stentorian nobleman, brave warrior, and devoted husband, from here we witness Othello’s murderous intent build and his personality disintegrate. Othello’s leaps of rhetoric reveal his most private, powerful anxieties, his vanities as a private man and public figure. All of these coalesce to create a foundation of credulity for Desdemona’s betrayal, pointing the way forward to his ultimate undoing. Many of the play’s core motifs, recurring ideas, concepts, images and figurations, are furthered in this speech, and open the way for subsequent events. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Othello’s single true soliloquy (Granville-Barker, 1969) opens with the most ironic of statements, that is, his reckoning of Iago’s trustworthiness: “This fellow's of exceeding honesty, / And knows all qualities with a learned spirit / Of human dealings.” It is a central irony, this constant use of the word ‘honest’ and its attachment to Iago, of whom “every moral attribute applied to him by anyone in the play is ironic finger pointing to the truth of its opposite” (Spivack 1958). This motif is entwined with Desdemona’s perceived lack of honesty, she and Iago being dualistic opposites in the work – Desdemona, honest, angelic, but not believed; Iago, dishonest, devilish, readily believed. </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Othello’s appraisal is, however, correct. Iago does know all qualities of human dealings. It’s the fashion in which he uses this knowledge that Othello is mistaken about. Iago faultlessly identifies every point of character he can take advantage of. He can establish an assumption of trust, as he has already succeeded in with Roderigo and now Othello himself. Take his avowal, earlier in the same scene: “Men should be what they seem.” This is Iago, exactly the type of man he is warning against, dispelling suspicion of it, whilst simultaneously inferring the presence of others who are not “what they seem.” He warns against jealousy, “the green-eyed monster, which doth mock / the meat it feeds on”, being precisely the emotion he is trying to spark. Such is the method with which he has woven his way into the mind of his quarry, and Othello’s unwitting acknowledgement of his power reflects his skill. </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Othello’s next thought is not to weigh the evidence and likelihood of Desdemona’s infidelity, but to contemplate his response to it as if he was a hawk-trainer releasing a half-wild bird “to prey at fortune”. His figuration of Desdemona as a half-wild hawk which, when unable to respond to “training”, ought to be released, flung away, contains both a desperate tenderness – “Though her jesses were my dear heart-strings” establishes the intensity of his attachment to her – and also a surprising, if short-lived, openness to the idea of letting her go her merry way. </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The theme of sexuality as animalism is rife throughout the play, commencing in Iago’s fervent images – “The beast with two backs” (I, i), and so forth. When, a few lines later, Othello will cry out, “O curse of marriage that we can call these delicate creatures ours / And not their appetites!”, his sexual anxiety is laid bare, the notion that whilst a man is considered master of the female, there is an element of the female – their capacity for sexual pleasure – that is beyond the mastery of a man. The juxtaposition of “delicate” with “creatures” and “appetites” is the ironic fulcrum. The war between the ideal and the base that is the anxiety of the characters and the meat of the play. The concept of the woman as something not quite human is ingrained here as earlier in the hawk metaphor. Desdemona is “delicate” like a dove or moth, yet also a rapacious beast of “appetite”. </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Othello segues into a series of stark, painful suppositions as to why Desdemona may betray him. That he is “black, / And (has) not those soft parts of conversation / That chamberers have” encapsulates his lack of easy social grace, his unfamiliarity, as a foreigner, with the finer points of language, his awkwardness as a black man in a white world, his being not as accomplished in seduction as the boudoir panderers of Venice. That he has “declined / Into the vale of years”, his age greater than Desdemona’s. His swift self-correction, “– yet that’s not much –”, fails to dull the bite of these concise lines, which confirm his panic. Though such aspects of his and Desdemona’s relationship have been drawn out by others – by Brabantio in the first act, by Iago constantly – this is virtually the first admission by Othello, that he shares these apprehensions.</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The perfect Venetian maiden, a role as defined by Brabantio and others, supposedly submissive and sublimely ethereal in her thoughts and deportment, is one Desdemona had self-consciously violated in her marriage to Othello. Female idealisation is not merely a social form, but a virtual philosophy, a religion. As Brabantio testifies, when he describes Desdemona as having been “of spirit so still and quiet that her motion / Blushed at herself” (I, iii), she had always fulfilled this role, and continues to after her singular lapse, a lapse inspired by powerful love. The unresolved issue in Othello and Desdemona’s marriage, that, as Brabantio warns, “She has deceived her father, and may thee,” (I, iii), is the single social breach by which Iago leverages his whole plot. The fact that Desdemona was so impressed by his character, that she could be inspired to escape, however temporarily, her social expectations, might serve for a more truly secure personality than Othello’s as proof of love. Yet it is instead for Othello’s insecure self a goad. Living as he does by the values of European civilisation, Othello is idealist turned misogynist (Granville-Barker, 1969), inherently confused then by a “maiden never so bold” being his wife, because it seems to contradict a set of values presented as inherent truths. Here, “we watch a culture reach the limits of its capacity and then snap.” (Long, 1976)</span></span></span><span lang="EN-AU"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">From sexual anxiety it is a short leap to intense sexual jealousy. “She’s gone. I am abused, and my relief must be to loathe her”, is embarrassing in its peevishness. The transfiguration of Desdemona is answered by Othello’s own, in the image of wishing himself a toad squirming in a dungeon rather than be a cuckold. Here is an increasing urgency and disgust in the animal metaphors. To the utterly base reduction in “the forkèd plague” of being a cuckold, Othello’s masculine pride asserts itself and refuses such a reduction. He sees himself in a situation that is “the plague of great ones”, whose relationships, supposedly, are placed under greater, more complex stresses than ordinary men’s. He is “simple, romantic, and – here is the chink in his armour – more than a little vain” (Speight, 1977). This powerful vanity in Othello is inseparable from his social and sexual anxiety. His feeling that Desdemona only loves him for his being a “great” man, rather than a wit or a nimble young lover, means the worst agony conceivable to him is part and parcel with his status, which has both won him and lost him his wife. This double-bind thinking entraps Othello. </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">It is within Othello’s fault-riven psyche that the concepts of this Christian Europe, with its admiration for purity, fairness, courtly idealism, and nature in its pagan framing filled with dirt, squalor, sex, colour, are at war. Othello is a living contradiction, by the standards he is presented with. A coloured man, defender of white Christian Europe from the infidel Turks. An aging, unhandsome male married to a fair young woman. A non-intellectual warrior without a war to fight, instead contending with politics, administration, and devious plotting. Othello is an outsider, whilst he conflates Desdemona with her status. She is inseparable from the state of </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Venice</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, being a Senator’s daughter, and also from the image of Christian purity. This hints at an explanation for the vehemence of Othello’s jealousy. If he is rejected by Desdemona, he is also rejected by his new home and his religion. All of his assumed identities are threatened. If one of his ideals is tested, all are endangered. </span></span></span><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">His final declaration, delivered upon seeing Desdemona enter, seems a disavowal of suspicion, and yet, there is a type of extremism encoded here that is ultimately catastrophic. His idealisation has reached the apogee of “heaven mocks itself!” If Desdemona is unfaithful, then heaven itself is a joke. Othello’s idealisation of Desdemona as the incarnation of heaven is, then, entwined with his murder of his angelic wife, his own collapse as a Christian man, and self-extermination as an “infidel dog” (V, ii). Whereas Desdemona, dutiful in heading to her death, achieves the status of martyr, as Emilia confirms in her cry at the climax, “O, the more angel she, / And you the blacker devil!” </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">So this is Othello at the crux of his own tragedy. Aghast, torn by self-doubt and now doubt in his wife. A man, desperate to believe in the ideals of his adopted society, infected by Iago, who loathes all ideals. Though he concludes with a disavowal of credulity, he is already utterly prepared to believe in the possibility as Desdemona’s unfaithfulness. Iago has prepared the stage, but Othello will enact the war within himself upon it, and end in a savage catharsis.</span></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> </span></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:85%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">© Roderick Heath 2008</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:85%;"><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">See also<br /><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Granville-Barker, Harley 1969. ‘Preface to Othello’, in Prefaces to Shakespeare: Othello and Love’s Labour’s Lost. B.T. Batsford Ltd. London.<br /><br />Eastman, A.M. & Harrison, G.B. 1964. Shakespeare’s Critics From Jonson to Auden: A Medley of Judgments. The University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor.<br /><br />Long, Michael 1976. The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy. Methuen and Co Ltd. London.<br /><br />Speight, Robert 1977. Shakespeare: The Man and His Achievement. J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. London.<br /><br />Spivack, Bernard 1958. ‘Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains’, in Shakespeare’s Critics From Jonson to Auden: A Medley of Judgments. Eds A.M. Eastman & G.B. Harrison. The University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor. </span></span></em></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify"><span lang="EN-AU"><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>Roderick Heathhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08107539379079558068noreply@blogger.com5