Author Archives: Amanda

Knocked Up 2: Ophelia Considers Her Options

Posted on by Amanda

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I was just moseying through some old pictures, and I came across this one. It’s one of my favorites.  I called it “Ophelia,” after the scene in Hamlet where the supposedly crazy Ophelia goes so supposedly crazy. She’s throwing out flowers and slights left and right, knowing the veil of madness will allow her to express all she’s keep silent. But one needs to know a bit about floral/herb symbolism and history to really know where she’s getting with all that. In many ways, she’s probably getting nowhere (except where the essay-writing English 102 student chooses for her to be getting). But in one particular instance, I don’t know how else to read it except 1. she’s not crazy, and 2. she’s a baby momma and, oh boy, does that spell trouble for her.

She speaks outright about a few things–rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thought. Fennel and columbines are thrown about, and many people argue fennel symbolizes flattery. That can mesh well with the plot, considering the treatment of Claudius. But the thing about symbols, especially ones that have been around for a while, is that they can also mean a lot of other things. Fennel can symbolize victory, though there is a bitter variety of fennel (the bitter victory of Claudius?). It can improve eyesight, which is certainly something that, symbolically, a variety of people in Hamlet could use. One of the most telling symbolic uses of fennel is in Greek mythology. According to everyone’s favorite academic source, Wikipedia, Prometheus used a stalk of fennel to steal fire. And if we’re going to talk about thievery, there’s certainly a place we could go with that in Hamlet. (Hint: it involves crown- and life-stealing.)

Problem is (plug your ears, 102 students), fennel can also mean, well, whatever it is you want it to mean. Longevity? Courage? Strength? Sweetness? Stomach ache fixer? Pesticide? Toothpaste? (That last link says the plant is “erect,” too, so do your part and don’t let any Shakespeare scholars follow that link, or–poof!–every annotation in Act IV, Scene 5 of all modern prints of Hamlet will be all about the erect fennel.  You know how much all those dirty old critics love this stuff. All other possible meanings will be thrown to the wind in light of this new, extremely mature discovery.)

The columbine is the same way. Just this one site talks about it being symbolic of foolishness, the holy spirit, innocence…so, you know, whatever. Whatever creates you the best essay, English 102 students–that’s what these flowers and herbs mean.

Except rue. Rue means Ophelia is pregnant. And that’s it.

First, it’s pretty hard to ignore the fact that the word “rue” means something in everyday vernacular (yes, Shakespeare’s everyday vernacular, too–see the OED’s history of its usage). It means she regrets something. It’s also pretty apparent from this gem…

Quoth she, ‘Before you tumbled me, / You promis’d me to wed.’ / He answers: ‘So would I ‘a’ done, by yonder sun, / An thou hadst not come to my bed.’ (IV.5.2924-28)

…that Ophelia could indeed be pregnant, despite how chaste everyone believes pre-women’s-lib ladies to be. Why might Ophelia give herself the plant rue–meaning feel rue, regret,–for making this choice? Well, her boyfriend has been pretty rude to her lately. Also, he just kind of took off, and it was clear things weren’t going well between them before he took off. He killed her dad, and that’s a pretty big deal, but we don’t have a lot of reason to believe that Ophelia and Polonius had the most beautiful father/daughter relationship. Nonetheless, it’s disturbing. Upsetting. Might make you rue your choice to give yourself freely to such a regrettable partner.

But rue your decision to the point of suicide?

Suicide means you see no way out. What position could Ophelia be in that made her feel trapped enough to pursue death? What made her so terrified of the future? And why would the only plant she reserved for herself be the one with the most well-known use being that it had powerful abortifacient properties? (Yes, your favorite academic source, Wikipedia.)

But would Ophelia had known about these powers of the rue plant? Well, Ophelia was a resident of the palace, and would have been as educated as a woman of the time could expect to be.  Pliny the Elder (23 AD-79 AD) and Soranus of Ephesus (1-2 century AD) had claimed it could induce abortion, and these folks certainly predate Hamlet’s setting.

In my opinion, there’s not a lot of other ways to see this one. Unless you just want to argue that Ophelia was crazy and therefore killed herself from an overabundance of crazy. Or she died accidentally because…crazy. And if that’s your argument, that’s cool, English 102 student. But your teacher thinks your straightforward reading of the play boring and uninspired. She likes my picture, though, so print that out and include it with your essay.

Cite your source.

Also, if you’re a parent and you would like to expose your children to excessive portrayals of death early on, let me recommend this Wikihow site that will show them how to make a delightful Hamlet puppet for their Hamlet puppet show. Here are some of the highlights:

“Keep Hamlet’s shirt color dark to indicate his melancholy mood.”

Cut out two pair of 2-by-2-inch eyes for Hamlet. Paint one pair of eyes calm and natural. Paint the second pair of eyes thin and angled downward to indicate his seething rage.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

Separating the Author from Looking for Alaska

Posted on by Amanda

Look how quickly I’ve returned, and I’ll tell you why. It’s all due to the remarkable readability of John Green’s Looking for Alaska.

But first, if you don’t like spoilers, I’m going to throw out a fatty. That “back” button on the left hand corner of your browser–click it. I’ve buffered the discussion of the spoiler with a decent amount of text, so just don’t scroll down. Hit “back.” If you don’t mind spoilers, then onward, undeterred soldier!

I’ve adored John Green as a person for awhile now.  He’s a general humanities nerd who doesn’t care an iota about his hair, and his analytic thinking and open-minded takes on history, literature, and politics makes him an awesome resource for anyone looking to gain new insights or learn to think in broader terms. He talks a mile a minute, like a spiral firework of wit and cleverness, and he’s got so much charisma. Listen to him talk about The Great Gatsby. No, I’m serious.

So after watching him via YouTube and following him on Twitter for a year or two, I realized I am kind of awful for liking his brain so much and not checking out anything he’s written. (It actually took me awhile to figure out that’s what he was–an author–because I just assumed his skill at teaching me things meant he was a teacher.) But, ug, YA! Am I really going to join the ranks of the Harry Potter/Twilight group? Do I want to join teenagers (and horrible adults) in reading about teenagers? Ug, YA! But it’s John Green, so I had to at least give it a go.

Everyone is all atwitter about The Fault in Our Stars these days, but I heard it’s pretty much the saddest thing on earth. Also, the only thing worse than YA is romance YA. And I heard Looking for Alaska was being taught/banned in schools (a promising combo).  So that’s what I went for.

I had some difficulty right off the start due to my familiarity with the author. I hadn’t anticipated this.  I’d watched so many of his videos that he was practically narrating in my head as I read. And, stumbling upon the first f-bomb, I was like, “John Green is not a f-bomb dropper any more than your 7th grade English teacher was an f-bomb dropper.  This can’t be right.” So I was in trouble quickly. There was no reconciling.

Then, it just seemed that all these teenagers were entirely too clever. Like, John Green clever. They were all little versions of John Green–too witty, too quick, too wise, too snarky to be teenagers. The character called “The Colonel” especially was like this.  They were super smart, thought on their feet, were interesting troublemakers, everyone had some kind of nickname…I don’t know. I had trouble with it. They were all different bizzaro versions of John Green.

But at some point pretty early on, that all drifted away. It drifted away because John Green is an excellent storyteller. He will get you lost. The book is so readable and so accessible that, unlike a lot of the books I read, I can pretty uniformly say that everyone on earth could read and would like, if not love, this book.  The only caveat is that it’s immensely sad, and if you don’t feel like crying over some pages, you can keep this one off your list. Actually, if someone would have told me how sad it would be, I probably wouldn’t have read it. (The girl who told me The Fault in Our Stars is sadder gave me sufficient reason not to read it, no matter how much I like Green’s writing.)

So remember that spoiler alert? Coming up.

The book is divided into “before” and “after,” which tells you that there’s something significant to the story is going to happen in the middle.  The “before” section, on the surface, just describes antics, developing friendships, and high school life. As I said, in the beginning, I had trouble. But it didn’t last long. The interactions between the kids became real, and it wasn’t long before the social dynamics mirrored the complexities of real life interactions. Their displays of affection, awkward moments, unexplainable and impulsive choices, along with a fair share of fights–it all did justice to the complications of real human connections and disconnections. I thought Miles a bit of a milquetoast, but I loved Alaska. She was jaded, impulsive, and delightfully warm-blooded. She did terrible things some times, but, again–how like real life.

So, like I said, there is a “before” and an “after,” signifying an event in the middle. I only knew what that thing was going to be on the very last page of the “before” section, despite so many warnings. The title is a warning. Alaska talking about smoking so she can die is a warning. The fact that Alaska seems to be on a collision course, of at least a psychological nature, is a warning. Yet, I didn’t see it. All the warnings were so well-disguised as real life.  The main character, Miles, could have easily been looking for Alaska as much in the first half as in the second half.  And some teenagers are pretty well adjusted, but many are as melodramatic and tortured as Alaska is. Many are risk-takers, like Alaska. They don’t die.  But Alaska does. And I didn’t realize it until Miles mentioned the fact that Alaska was too drunk, too upset to drive, but no one wanted to stop her. That’s when I knew what event would be significant enough to warrant a “before” and an “after” section. I had thought that they were building toward a school prank gone wrong, or perhaps a change in the relationship between Miles and Alaska. I didn’t think she would die.

The “after” section describes this struggle to come to terms with her death. It’s awful. It’s so very, very believable. And that makes it awful. And it also qualifies this as excellent writing.

By the “after” section, the danger of tripping in the narrative (because I know John Green–in an internet-followy way, anyway) was far past. My level of absorption into the story was proven by how horrified I was that Alaska could just be gone: there, alive, warm and passionate one second, and then a just a body, an unliving object the next. I don’t know if it’s a compliment to say this book does death really well, but, oh my, it does death really well.  I felt like I lost her.  She seemed so real to me, and her sudden disappearance from the book left a terrible emptiness, such confusion. There was a hole in the book where she used to be. When I got to the end, I wanted to re-read the entire “before” piece in a new light and appreciate her while I had her. I think I actually loved and idealized her more when she was gone than in the “before” section. And if that doesn’t sound like the kind of grief that would accompany death in real life–wishing you could do it over, wishing you had appreciated the time you spent together more, imagining someone who is gone was a little better than they actually were, feeling that gaping emptiness–I don’t know what does sound like real grief.

Looking for Alaska is a haunting book. It’s very real, and it stays with you.  Was Alaska really that great? If she hadn’t died in the book, would I love her this much? I don’t know. But I miss her, as weird as that is to say.

Since John Green is such an analytic reader and thinker, I expected there to be more thinking involved with this book. It was kind of what I was hoping to get from it, frankly. As you probably see, it was much more of an emotional read than I’d normally choose–not so much a journey of the mind. But this isn’t necessarily a knock. I read to think about things in a new way, but I also read to experience. This book is a beautiful experience.

The Handmaid’s Tale. Where to Start…

Posted on by Amanda

The Handmaid’s Tale left me speechless for awhile.  I’m already halfway through my next literary endeavor, and it’s only now that I thought maybe I can begin to collect my thoughts on this beast of book.

It isn’t a beast, lengthwise. There’s just so much going on–not least of which is the experience of reading the book.  To read The Handmaid’s Tale is to become lost, and it’s difficult to think analytically when you are lost.

If you’ve not familiar, The Handmaid’s Tale can be horrendously, embarrassingly oversimplified by yours truly as being 1984, with gender as the central planet around which the dystopia orbits. Caste systems, regressive fundamentalist religion, and (considering our narrator) especially concubines play a part in this world crafted with as much precision as Orwell could boast. I don’t feel too bad attributing this much influence to Orwell, seeing as Atwood herself cites him, among others, as inspiration in a 2013 Guardian article. The main character is a handmaid used by a high-ranking officer for breeding purposes.  And as repugnant a life as that sounds, she doesn’t have a half bad lot compared to some alternative designated societal roles in this wretched imagined instance of a possible future.

The story pushes and pulls with such vigor. Maybe that’s just my personal experience. I’m the kind of person who hides her eyes when there’s a really intense scene on T.V. I can’t bear to watch.  I’m also the kind of person, left to my own devices, who will rewind and watch scenes I relish over and over. Likewise, I read parts of The Handmaid’s Tale as if I was word-starved, hanging on every sentence, dying to know what happened next. At other times, I scanned paragraphs, squinting my eyes to impair my ability to make out the words, flipping pages, hoping to god what I was reading would soon be over.  Surprisingly, it was the moments set in the immediate past–the current events, as you’re reading–that I hung onto.  It was the memories of the pre-dystopian past scattered throughout the narrative that I couldn’t stomach. The protagonist’s life before this quick revolution and totalitarian takeover was described with such understandable alternating numbness and pain, numbness and pain…it seemed so very believable.  That such a takeover could happen and such quick and complete change (penetrating so deep into the psyche of the women converted) could be implemented as quick as Atwood’s timeline indicated it did–not so believable.  But her protagonist makes it real. And it hurts to remember with her.

I lived for what would happen next, in the protagonist’s future. Those are the passages I read ravenously. It seemed unlikely that there could be any escape for her, but I wanted so badly for an escape opportunity to arise that I kept pushing on, hoping. Like the narrator, I clung to every moment, however small, that broke the monotony, that showed a glitter of humanity under the shells walking the desolate planet Atwood created.  And I think those glitters are what I most wanted to write about, out of the dozens of things I could have written about after reading this book. (Another reason this post was delayed–I was paralyzed with options.)

There’s a really smart thesis out there. I’ve only scanned it, so I hope I’m not misrepresenting it in any way.  (I plan to read it front to back when I get a chance.) It’s by a San Jose State U grad student named Alanna Callaway, and you can find it here. She has a very interesting reading of the book as a clash of the branches of feminism. Feminists, on the whole, can agree that women should be in a position other than what they currently are. That’s (kind of famously) where all agreement starts and ends. I really like her reading, though I think it’s one of many. It really shed light on some of the individuality issues that most intrigued me in the book.

All women are dressed according to their caste, and so women are differentiated that way. Women are, in general, supposed to be pious and submissive. Their castes dictate the subtle differences in the permissions allowed them–wives, for instance, are allowed to garden.  But women’s actions as a caste are supposed to be identical. You, in theory, could not tell one handmaid from the next. They dress the same, have the same canned responses to most inquiries, walk the same way, have the same naming convention (they are “of” whatever man’s child they are supposed to bear, so our narrator is Offred.) The narrator, looking at another handmaid walking away from her, feels she may as well be a mirror reflection of her companion. She feels soulless, like a body and nothing else, like she’s being erased.

And yet, such individuality between handmaids begins to emerge over time. It’s what the protagonist’s owner described as bad math: for women, one plus one plus one plus one doesn’t equal four. It equals one and one and one and one. Individuality will not die. The handmaids are all clearly actors playing their roles, with personalities just underneath the hardened surface–hardened out of self-preservation, but never calcified enough to permanently keep secret the desire for connection, expression, experience, and rebellion. These personalities really do manifest themselves in ways I can connect to branches of feminism.

The protagonist’s mandatory companion (handmaids have an imposed buddy system to keep each other accountable) turns out to be a quiet insurgent, hoping to bring down the system she so despises. The reader doesn’t find this out until far into the book, since this woman is very good at keeping her secrets. But even she eventually reaches out to the narrator, hoping to find her as rebellious as she is–hoping to find an ally in her espionage and eventual takedown of the oppressive regime.  This woman wants to take the traditionally male role of hero and reclaim it. She’s an underdog spy, hoping to bring an entire system to its knees and save her fellow women from this injustice with the strength of her intelligence, will, and devotion to her cause. This, to me, is the liberal feminist.

–PAUSE FOR LEARNING MOMENT–

The liberal feminist faction is anxious to throw off previous perceptions of women as the weaker sex, hopelessly sentimental and unable to be pragmatic or powerful. (The criticism of this faction is that women are trying to overcome inequality by acquiring traditionally male characteristics, thereby accidentally acting in compliance with a patriarchal system that sees male characteristics as superior.)

–THANKS FOR PAUSING–

The protagonist’s companion seems to fit this role perfectly, and it makes her relationship with the equally rebellious Offred rocky because they are not rebellious in the same way.  Our narrator handmaid is summoned to see her owner during forbidden times, as he seeks her companionship. Offred’s spy-buddy sees this as a tremendous opportunity for reconnaissance and begs her to learn all she can from him. But rebellion in this way–intelligence-gathering and heroism–is not Offred’s form of rebellion.

Offred is different. What is missing from the construct created by the coup-executing masterminds, in her mind, is love. She dreams of her old husband, of her child, of touching, of romance.  Her mind is consumed with pleasures not exactly sexual, but certainly sensual–drags of a cigarette, kisses, lotion on her skin. When she truly rebels, it is to escape to the room of the young male caretaker and lose herself in the closest thing she can find to love.  She is not interested in being a hero. In fact, she wants so passionately to be alive that she feels she would do anything, any degrading thing at all, just to keep breathing. So when her spy buddy asks her to jeopardize her life and her one comfort–the only surrogate for the kind love she needs, the embrace of the young caretaker–she refuses to rock the boat. She won’t sacrifice her only relief for this greater, noble cause; she won’t take any risks by stealing information from her owner or prodding him for information.

–PAUSE FOR LEARNING MOMENT–

Cultural feminism is a faction that believes that women are different from men and that those differences are glorious. But they believe women’s differences do not make them inferior to men in the slightest. They instead think that the capability to bear children comes with natural differences from men, such as a loving nature, a particular movement of the body, an inherent interconnectedness, ability to almost telepathically commune with others, grace, empathy, all that jazz.  These are things to be celebrated, not, as they historically have been, ridiculed or used as a reason to give women lesser rights. In some circles, these things that make women different are even to be worshiped. The problem with this is that it pigeonholes people into performing gender characteristics, whether they feel it true to their personality or not. (“I really don’t feel like hearing you cry over the phone about whatever at 4 AM, but I should feel like it because I’m a girl, and I’m supposed to be caring, and you expect sympathy, and it’s pretty much my obligation, so…”)

–THANKS FOR PAUSING–

Moira is the radical feminist. She isn’t a handmaid and this post is turning epic, so I’m going to just throw that out there and wrap up.

To sum up, individuality among those who were supposed to be one personality-less mass was prevalent, and I thought Atwood showed it in ways that were very believable, in accordance with her story. It was about bottled-up individuality that feigned invisibility but couldn’t help but bubble to the surface.

I feel very much for the protagonist, I do. I don’t have quite the same ideas about love that she does, but I wanted so badly for her to have what she needed. And I understood her self interest. I understood that her desire for little moments to make her life bearable were more important to her than grand causes, sacrifice for the greater good, and righteous (quite genuinely righteous) indignation.  And I don’t think she was the one who deserved to be escorted to freedom, as one interpretation of the ending goes. Her companion, who was brave enough to fight, was the one who should have been set free. And yet, whether she deserved it or not, I am so, so happy to think of once-Offred’s freedom. I dance at the thought of her being ushered out of hell.  I really didn’t want this one to end in tragedy, and I choose the interpretation that it didn’t.

Mythologies. I’m trying.

Posted on by Amanda

Really, I am.

It started off with such magic. The wonderful world of wrestling as Aristotelian tragedy! Performance as catharsis! Relief from our own pain in a chaotic world that provides no clear reason for suffering–relief brought by the portrayal of simple stories of pain, caused by simple reasons (i.e., evildoers), and the subsequent execution of simple justice. Wrestling is life writ small and dumbed down until everything that confuses us is brought within our grasp. Everything makes sense.

But I jump ahead.  Let me tell you about a man who was killed by a laundry truck.

Roland Barthes drank whatever was in the water in France in the mid-to-late-20th-century.  French philosophers and theorists in this time period were mental gymnasts. They could think backwards and upside down while patting their head and rubbing their stomachs. All the major thinkers behind structuralism, post-structuralism, rhizomatic thinking–these, to me, are philosophical giants because they see the world in through lenses I would have never found by myself. I think Barthes especially is an amazing thinker. Some of his predecessors along the line of structuralist thinking were psychologists and linguists, and they were awesome. But Barthes is the literary guy, so I’ve always been partial to him. Barthes began as a structuralist thinker, believing that there were signs (signifiers) pointing toward universal concepts (signified). He moved toward post-structuralism later in life, tearing down the idea of universal absolutes instead of building them up. To this later version of him, for instance, a book’s content is not determined by the author at all. The reader is free to create what they like of the book instead of struggling to understand the single meaning the author intended to convey.

Oh, and then Barthes gets hit by a laundry truck and dies. For a life filled with such glorious thoughts, it’s a pretty inglorious end.

Oversimplified, Mythologies is a series of essays that aim to draw symbolic meaning from things in Barthes’ contemporary culture. Structuralism is a little more complicated than I just made it sound, but that definition will probably suffice for our purposes. For instance, in “The World of Wrestling,” wrestling becomes a drama that helps people feel that there is clarity in the world. They can cheer for the justice they can’t see clearly and simply played out in their own lives.

There’s also one on toys in which Barthes poses a rather luddite-smelling argument–that toys today just aren’t the same as they used to be. I’m not inclined to take most hell-in-a-handbasket speeches seriously, but the digging Barthes does is admirable.  He talks about how plastic, a chemical substance, replaced wood as the compositional material of toys, and he describes how the sort of toys made in his present were prefabricated and don’t encourage invention or construction the way they used to. Like I said, a familiar argument in general: “Man, they sure don’t make ’em like they used to. Kids today are going to grow up all scrambled.” But it’s an interesting argument in specifics–that the actual materials of toys act as signifiers. It’s fascinating to watch someone take Saussure’s ideas that words are signposts for concepts and then make the argument that actual things in this world–like plastic toys–also act as signposts.

So far, so good. Barthes has a lot of brilliant things to say.

But then,  there’s the section called “It’s Cute When Women Try, But They Better Not Forget Their True Calling as Human Incubators for My Genetic Material.” Oh, I’m sorry, I think it’s actually called “Novels and Children.” I’m going to just assume my objections to this section are obvious.

Since reading that chapter, I just haven’t been able to pick Mythologies back up. I got past “Novels and Children” and I only have a few chapters left, but it is just so, so hard for me to not feel sour on the book now. I pick it up and feel disgusted. I’m sure I’ll get over it, because don’t misunderstand–there’s a ton of value here.  A chapter out of a bygone era shows betrays what are now pretty unsavory convictions. You see it all the time. I’ll finish it one day. Probably even soon.  But meanwhile, I’m going to go read The Handmaid’s Tale (with great purpose) instead.

Lolita as Juxtoposition

Posted on by Amanda

Lolita is a terrible, wonderful book. Apt, I suppose. It’s a book filled with side-by-side complimentary contradictions, living together strangely and naturally, united in both the most subtle and the most outrageous ways.

What jumps out as the most obvious juxtaposition is the jaw-droppingly gorgeous prose of Mr. Humbert with, well, what he’s saying. He is so well-mannered, so eloquent, just a marvelous wordsmith with such delicate turns of phrase. I could sit at the feet of Humbert and listen to him talk all day…or rather, for maybe five or ten minutes. At that point, I assume I would need to leave the room in a fit of disgust.  Because these elegant sentences are conveying the most nauseating sentiments and actions.  I’m not just saying this as a product of a culture that sees pedophilia as taboo, either–more on that later.  I mean, using the most beautiful language you can imagine, he tells you that he is planning to drug a prepubescent girl and her mother so he can have his way with the girl without really stealing her innocence because, you see, she isn’t conscious so it doesn’t count. You’re pretty sure it’s a joke when he says it. Except then he plans it for months, continually goes to the doctor to refine the dose, drugs the mother to observe the potency, and eventually sneaks it to the little girl without having any idea how she will handle the pills. His language and what he is using the language to describe was the first thing that struck me about the book.

Humbert also takes full blame while at the same time justifying his actions and absolving himself of wrongdoing.  He self-flagellates,  calling himself terrible things, feeling ashamed, confronting thoughts that make him hate himself. But then talks about other societies that have accepted adult/child “love” and throws in many references to how he is helpless in the grip of these seductresses (also more on that later).  He believes his attractions are a result of his thwarted childhood romance. (And by thwarted, I mean that he blames it on the fact that, when he was in his mid teens, he didn’t get to seal the deal once when he really wanted to.  It was a real tragedy, I understand. Where’s the sarcastic font on the WordPress character dropdown?) He believes he is a child himself trapped in a man’s body, so in his mind he really isn’t doing anything wrong by engaging a twelve-year old.  It’s really a romance of two equals.  Yet, his power over the child’s situation–one that only an adult can have–is one of the things he seems to enjoy most about the relationship.  He acknowledges this in many ways and feels a superficial amount of shame, but never enough to cause him to offer up anything more than platitudes–admissions of self-hatred that seem more like tokens to pay a debt to a society that rejects him.

Another juxtaposition is the way Humbert sees little girls, specifically the ones he is drawn to (“nymphets,” as he calls them.) They are the purest angels and at the same time scarlet demons.  They are coy seductresses, even witches, in his mind.  As they toss a ball back and forth on a playground, Humbert seems convinced they are showing off for him.

But it is their innocence, the very absence of the seduction he attributes to them, that is so magnetic.  He knows the childish demeanor proves they know nothing of adult sexuality.  He doesn’t quite ever get there in his narration, but I think that it’s obvious he feels this way–he always seems most attracted to little girls when they are distracted by childish endeavors or thinking about something else. Watching children play games with one another or read books arouses him.  Dolores’ tennis playing inflames him. Humbert’s OK Cupid profile would list  “girls who aren’t thinking about sex” as his turn ons.  Yet he does everything in his power to convince the reader, and himself, that these fourth graders know just what they are doing.

It took until maybe halfway through the book that I fully turned my back on Humbert, but once I did, I realized he is a DESPICABLE, DISGUSTING human being.  At first, I felt pretty sorry for him, actually.  I could see that he was making excuses.  I found his attraction to little girls as inherently problematic, but it wasn’t his fault he was attracted to who he was attracted to.  We don’t have a lot of control over that. But then he took action on his desires and demanded years of, ug, carnal servicing from a child who was totally confused and unable to escape him.  We had to watch a little girl actually become a virtual sex slave.  The descriptions of Dolores having to trade her body for permission to be in a school play or for allowance…it curdles the stomach. Humbert made her struggle for coins during the act, thinking it was an adorable, titillating game (and then later hinting that he thought she was saving so she could run away from him). Then he acts the father, shaking his head at the moral depravity of this young girl insisting on getting paid for sex. Oh, it’s just heartbreaking and sickening.

But, oh, I loved this book. Psychological portraits are my favorites, and this was beautifully done.  I know a lot has been said about the unreliable narrator in Lolita, but let me just second it–Nabakov did the unreliable narrator in a way that puts The Great Gatsby to shame. It takes skill and delicacy to write something from the point of view of someone so skewed and twisted and still allow the reader to see exactly what’s going on.  And the language was just show stopping.  Every sentence was like a work of art.  Things got a little weird and surreal at the end, and it didn’t really seem to fit the tone of the rest of the novel, but that’s really my only complaint.  I think this will be one of the books I will return to over the years, like Crime and Punishment, Les Miserables, and Clive Barker’s (marvelously imaginative, if at times awkwardly gross) Books of the Art.

Can I read Roland Barthes’ Mythologies now? Please? I’ve been waiting forever for life to give me the time…

On a More Positive Note–The Killer Angels!

Posted on by Amanda

I first read The Killer Angels when I took a class on the American Civil War, a subject that has fascinated me for many years now.  Now, I’m listening to it on audiobook with my boyfriend. I’ve been trying to make him read it for ages, and this seems to be the best medium for busy lives and car trips.

First, the facts. The Killer Angels is historical fiction that covers the battle of Gettysburg.  The author, Michael Shaara, tells of the events leading up to and all throughout Gettysburg, and he does it by taking you back and forth, 3rd-person-omniscient style, from Union commanders to Confederate commanders.

Now, let’s talk about history teachers.

I was a credit away from a history minor, so I’ve taken my fair share of history classes–not nearly enough to even have a tenuous grasp on history’s vast expanse, but enough to know a thing or two about its teachers.  History teachers are what make or break the class.  You get one with a political agenda or who is never prepared for class, and it’s all over, no matter your interest level.  But get a history teacher that lives and breathes the subject, one that is a storyteller, and that will be the best teacher. The class will be riveting. These people from the past will seem as though they’re right in front of you, and your heart will break or soar with each turn of events. My Civil War teacher was like that.  He made everyone come so alive. I was brought to tears in the class more than once.

If you’ve never had a history teacher like this, never fear.  Michael Shaara will be that teacher for you. The author pored over letters, pictures, firsthand accounts, secondhand accounts, descriptions of people, locations, and details, and the result is not just historical accuracy–it’s as if he knows the characters.  Each officer has been meticulously researched.  For instance, he’s taken the description of Lee’s soft-spoken nature and instilled that perfectly in the book’s character in a way that’s also harmonious with his aggressive war tactics.  He hints that Lee’s heart disease may have been the source of his (extremely unusual) bad judgement calls, as some historians speculate. Shaara does this in a way that is so marvelously subtle.  Readers get to hear about the battle from someone who makes it seem like he was there and who, better yet, understands both sides and paints each with equal sympathy.

And he’s a beautiful storyteller, painting the most vivid pictures and engaging all your senses. He describes the heat of the days, the exhaustion of the generals, the sorrow of loss, the revulsion mixed with a sense of pride and duty of the soldiers, the small joy of a cup of coffee and a piece of meat in the midst of weariness. All the physical and psychological details are done in such a way that you sincerely feel as if you’re listening to a story, not studying history. Sometimes the adjective lists and overexcited similes get a little out of hand, but I’d rather it be this way–Shaara is bursting with empathy, and it is contagious.

This book is not at all gritty, by the way.  It’s raw, and death is hardly something that Shaara shies away from–how could he, after all?–but it’s not the literary equivalent of watching a slasher film.  You won’t get endless descriptions of gore. Nor is the book tactical the way some war books are, though you will understand the tactics of the battle without much issue.  It’d describe it as elegant and extremely accessible, no matter your understanding of the subject matter.  It’s a book for all readers.

So if you always wanted a great history teacher and never got to have one, here’s your chance.

On a totally unrelated note, now that I’ve forsaken Dreiser…the Pynchon I’ve been swearing I’m going to read or some long-overdue Nabokov?  Lolita‘s been on my list for an eternity.  But not like that. Oh no, here comes Chris Hansen.

The Financier: Deflated Reading

Posted on by Amanda

It’s a sure sign that what I’m reading isn’t holding my interest if I’ve gone this long without posting.  I’m always in the process of reading something, and some combination of work ethic and refusal to acknowledge defeat sometimes makes me continue even when I’m not exactly enjoying myself.  It’s taken months for me to admit that I’m not going to finish Dreiser’s The Financier. I just can’t. I’ve been plodding through it at a snail’s pace, and though I’m a good deal in, I’m going to put it to bed.

Dreiser is the Sybil of authors.  I can’t understand him for the life of me.  When he’s good, his books are just entrancing. When he’s bad, it’s…well, it’s quite bad.  And he’s bad in exactly the areas he’s so good in other books.  The character development in The Financier is just abysmal. The old adage of “show, don’t tell” is so very appropriate here. Dreiser knows so well how to develop an amazing, nuanced character, so I just can’t comprehend the laziness here.

His main character, Cowperwood–I’m so uninvested after a few hundred pages that I can’t remember his first name–is flat in a way that defies flatness.  He is not vanilla.  He is like whatever the thing tasted like before vanilla flavoring was added.  He is like a chunk of drywall.  He is a chalkpit of bleh.  And it shouldn’t be that way. He’s supposedly brilliant, as Dreiser constantly reminds us, and every time I’d turn the page Cowperwood would be reportedly the youngest person to ever be making these kind of advancements in the financial world.  And he certainly has all the moral ambiguity of Eugene from The Genius and Clyde from An American Tragedy.  That often makes for an intriguing character, if not always a likable one. There’s a particularly repulsive scene not too far in where things get pretty rapey with Cowperwood’s wife-to-be, but it’s just the scene I found repulsive.  I didn’t find the idea that Cowperwood would take any kind of action, good or bad, believable, so I never got the chance to even hate him.  The only reason the reader knows anything about this character is because the author tells us directly or tells us through another character’s thoughts.  And this is the unforgivable sin, in my mind, especially if it seems stilted or gimicky.

The reader encounters this telling-not-showing really quickly into the book.  The main character is introduced as a child, and only a few pages later, Dreiser just cheats. I’ll show you what I mean in a moment.

In his books, Dreiser often drifts from character’s mind to character’s mind.  He actually does quite fluidly and I enjoy it, so no problem there. But it’s as if he drifts into the other characters’ minds in this case solely to escape needing to advance the plot by, well, plot.  Here’s Cowperwood’s mother thinking to herself after her son had bought and sold something at an auction:

“Mrs. Cowperwood looked at her boy curiously at dinner. Was this the son she had nursed at her bosom not so very long before? Surely he was developing rapidly.”

So, reader, in case you missed it, things are moving forward, says Dreiser!  The whole book is like that.  And everyone always says the same thing: “Wow, this person is very strong and determined and I am so very impressed by him. Never before have I been this impressed.” YAWN.

But what’s worse is the insult that underpins the message.  The other characters, in essence, say, “in case you’re not getting what you need to know about this character from the plot, I’ll just go ahead and say what you should be thinking.” And with that, I think I’ve gotten to the heart of what I dislike so much about the book.  It’s not just poor character development.  It’s an affront on my intelligence. And it takes the power out of my hands to decide how I think the character is developing.   I’m being assaulted on all sides from all characters in unison instructing me to be impressed by a character that is not impressive.

I’m far too rebellious to do what I’m told.

On Difficulty and The Name of the Rose

Posted on by Amanda

I have not been busy.  It’s just taken me this long to get through The Name of the Rose.

This book was difficult for me to get through.  Surface observations are these: when I would pick up the book, I would frequently find myself trimming cuticles, picking up my phone to play Candy Crush in the middle of a chapter, reading the same sentence over and over, skipping over pages and scanning for where the action picks up again, falling asleep–you know, the usual signs that the book you’re reading just isn’t really your cup of tea.

Some of my problems with books in the past is that they’re poorly written, unconvincing, or have flat characters.  None of this applied to The Name of the Rose. It was well written, other than some minor squabbles I might have with the readability of longer sentences. The book was utterly convincing: I never read a word that took me out of the pre-Renaissance setting, and I’d assert with confidence that the book was a product of plenty of research (at least language-wise, I’ve not enough knowledge to attest to its historical accuracy).  And I thought all the characters were marvelously developed.  From the material-wealth-loving abbot to the subtly snarky, deadpan William to the obsequious narrator, there was no one I didn’t think had their own personality.  And those personalities were developed skillfully and never presented in a way that seemed over the top.  So what made this book so hard for me?

George Steiner wrote an essay called “On Difficulty” which outlines problems readers might have with a text.  I think two of those apply here.  One of those difficulties is called “contingent.”  These are problems that arise when you don’t understand the material discussed in the text due to language or time gaps.  I recently bought my first property, and the difficulties I had with the closing documents were contingent ones–it’s all in lawyer-speak or referred to financial matters that I, up until now, didn’t know the first thing about.  Those were all challenges I could overcome with research and education (though I must confess that I prefer to let the legal-ese translators present at the closing spell it out for me).

One of the major things that made The Name of the Rose difficult for me was the Latin. The more learned reader can probably decipher plenty through knowledge of etymology.  That’s not really my specialty, so a lot of the dialogue went over my head.  Also, a substantial portion of the book was devoted to describing the warring religious sects’ tenets and interactions with one another.  It was impossible to keep up with, and even more impossible to keep up with which people belonged to which sect (and was mad at which other sects).  The religious history laid out was so layered and complex that I had no hope of following it unless I started taking notes.  And frankly, I am out of school and I am tired of taking notes.  So maybe chalk that up to reader error. At any rate, these are difficulties I could have overcome with research and work.  But this brings me to my second difficulty.

Steiner also outlined a difficulty he called “modal,” and this is the kind of difficulty that is a matter of personality conflict between author and reader.  Sometimes the objection might be moral. Sometimes it’s just a matter of taste. And I think this is really where my struggles with The Name of the Rose began and ended.  I could have looked up the Latin, took notes on the characters, tried to understand the religious history and theological  complexity being described.  But I didn’t care; the book didn’t make me care.

That isn’t to say I believe the book has some obligation to make me care.  I don’t know what Eco’s belief about the reader’s role in literature is, but I’m not of the opinion that an author is some performer here to entertain me.  I’m just saying that I wasn’t interested enough in the plot and the subject material to do the work.  And that–the difference between my and Eco’s interests–was the modal difficulty that made the contingent difficulty impossible to overcome.

Writing vs. Speaking: Structuralism and Poststructuralism for Beginners

Posted on by Amanda

I’m wandering my way through Donald Palmer’s Structuralism and Poststructuralism for Beginners.  (And even the beginner-oriented explanation of this theory/school of criticism/worldview is tremendously hard to comprehend, but this book does a decent job of at least making you able to speak the language of the theorists.)  In section on Jacques Derrida, Palmer talks about the precedence set by past thinkers for shunning written language and favoring spoken language.  This pretty much blew my mind, for a reason I’ll get to later.

Palmer begins with Socrates, who believed that “true philosophy had to be a living, conversational exchange of ideas.” This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s studied philosophy, since it’s well known that Plato, speaking for Socrates, wrote in dialogue.  The tradition of seeing writing as an empty version or hollow imitation of speaking continues.  Palmer lists a series of people who felt the same way: Aristotle, Paul the apostle, Rousseau, Saussure.  For theorists coming from a tradition of Freudian thinking, this makes sense to me. Spoken language can reveal underlying beliefs and motivations, providing information about people and society that written language cannot as easily show.  (Think Freudian slips.) That’s because written communication (minus the infamous 2AM drunken text message, of course) is a more self-censored, deliberate form of expression.

But Palmer even discusses the fact that Claude Levi-Strauss felt guilty about introducing a written language to a tribe in South America that, presumably, only communicated via spoken word. What confuses me most about this point of view is that people lump spoken and written communication under a general umbrella so unquestioningly.  It’s as if the communication forms are washing machines, and people need to check consumer reports to see if the Maytag or the Kenmore unit is superior.    In my mind, the spoken word and the written word are completely different, and they give us opportunities to do completely different things.  Spoken word allows us to give multiple meanings to what we say through intonation and facial expression.  The wonderful addition of sarcasm to our communication arsenal is a purely conversation-based development. (I’d argue that any writing that is sarcastic can only be identified as such from our experience of it in interpersonal interactions.) Banter and repertoires are  more easily established from spoken communication.  We also get immediate feedback on what we say, on which we can base our next word choices. But writing allows us, as I said before, to be deliberate.  It allows us to craft an entire intricate story spanning thousands of pages, with every detail worked out. It lets us think carefully about our sentence structure without the jarring choppiness of long pauses.  It gives us the opportunity to go on the record as saying something a certain way, which (ideally) is a documented defense against people reshaping your words.  This is why it’s amazing to me that Levi-Strauss felt guilty for introducing writing to the Amazonian tribe.  Their oral communication wasn’t being watered down; they, instead, were gaining a whole new method of communication in addition to the one they had.

For me, the difference between writing and speaking is so great, the two forms are barely comparable.  At no time has this been more apparent to me than in the last few months as I’ve been interviewing. I’ve been applying for editing and writing jobs–in essence, jobs where I’d be paid to be a wordsmith.  On paper–where it counts, in this case–the right way to say things comes naturally.  I imagine authors often feel the same way. I’m thinking of reclusive, awkward novelists who struggle with real world relationships but are somehow masters of human interactions in their stories. In person, I struggle mightily for the right words, I draw blanks, and I put my foot in my mouth so often I’m surprised it isn’t stuck there.  Now, over the course of the last few months, interviewing has been a kind of boot camp for me. I’ve managed to develop an in-person professionalism that is no longer feels stilted and like a mask.  But the difference between my spoken communication and my written communication is still so vast that I hardly consider them comparable.    And it isn’t just that I’m better at one than the other anymore–they just aren’t the same thing.  They serve different purposes, and they add different things to our communication.

What gets really interesting is when these two communications come together.  The journal I interned for just had its release party, and I was asked to do a reading of one of my poems.  I had written a poem that I absolutely intended to be read aloud, so I was excited for the opportunity to share it.  It’s ugly on paper, frankly.  But, when performed,  it has a flow that it lacks on paper, and it becomes a kind of hip-hop song (which is appropriate, because the poem’s setting is a club). This piece can’t live or breathe without both forms of communication.

So, is speaking vs. writing a battle worth having?  Is one better than the other?  Simple answer–in my world, it’s not even a question to be asking.