Category Archives: Lit–Analysis

Go, Man, Go! Rediscovering Howl

Posted on by Amanda

On my impromptu day off, I’m making the terrible choice to blog instead of catching up on the massive amount of research to be done before the promised land of graduation.  This is senioritis, English-major-style: I blow off writing about literature so I can instead write about literature.

I’ve recently revisited the marvelous, hypnotic “Howl,” in which human creative fountain Allen Ginsberg pours forth a series of word combinations that, while not always making logical sense, come together to paint a perfect picture of urban-based nausea and burnt-out despair.  I had an intense love affair with Beat writings in my high school days and had since kind of forgotten about the 50s in favor of 18th and 19th century word-flowers.  I remember now what I loved so much about these guys–the spontaneity, the clusters of evocative words, the torrential flow of the phrases.  What I never got to appreciate before, though (because I am ancient and YouTube wasn’t a thing when I was in high school) was the sheer delight of hearing Ginsberg perform it.  And when I say perform, I mean perform.

If you read the poem, it’s stirring, certainly; if you listen to him read it, you can hear the music and mania of it.  It’s a whole new dimension. The Beats tried to model their works after jazz, both in their flow and extemporaneous improvisation, so their works are meant to be heard.  In some ways, I see it more like singing Gospel songs at a Baptist service than listening to a jazz band, though.  (This is especially releavant, I think, if you consider the holy-holy-holyness of his footnote to “Howl”–it’s like a combination of a mantra being chanted and the possession experienced during Pentecost.)  While hardly ‘Christian’ in content, “Howl” so demands audience participation and so catupults the listener into a spiritual-seeming revelry that I think the comparison is unavoidable.  The first time this poem was read, Jack Kerouac ran around the room screaming, “Go, Go!”  And, when you hear Ginsberg reading it, rattling off line after line, it’s easy to picture yourself as Kerouac and getting caught up in the experience that way.

But enough jazzy, Beaty fun.  Back to the schoolwork at hand.

Grokking the Dionysian and the Apollonian in Stranger in a Strange Land

Posted on by Amanda

I’ve been listening to Heinlien’s Stranger in a Strange Land, bit by bit, on audio for the last few weeks.  Orientation on less conventional formats such as audio and the Kindle is never easy–I really have no idea how far into the story I am, and I’m too lazy to check by looking at the track listings.  But there was just a delightful passage about the difference between the Dionysian culture (human) and the Apollonian culture (Martian) which inspired me to type a few quick words.

I did a large project on the Apollonian and the Dionysian about this time last year, and it was one of the most intriguing, insightful (and COMPLETELY unintuitive) ideas I’ve ever had the pleasure to explore.  For those who haven’t read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, let me say that briefly summarizing these ideas is quite a challenge, so please know what follows is an anemic explanation.  The Apollonian is everything that makes sense.  It like lucid dreaming.  The Apollonian is harmonious, geometric, individualistic, dispassionate, and logical.  As for the Dionysian, my philosophy teacher described it like this:  Imagine you’re at a party, and everyone has been drinking.  There’s loud music, and the whole room is dancing in unison to the music.  Everything seems surreal, and you feel united with all the people at the party. Also, you have to throw up.  Also, if you drive home, you might die.

In Stranger, Jubal calls Smith’s Martian culture Apollonian and Earth’s culture Dionysian.  He’s right.  Earth seems to be a place of emotion and revelry.  There is fury and ecstasy, war and dance, conniving and rescuing.  Smith, all the while, retains a stillness that seems…well, alien.  The degree to which humans experience emotion is incomprehensible to a Martian, and there is no word for war in their language.  When the two cultures blend in a balanced way, just like in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, it is the best of all worlds.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when Smith kisses the girls of Jubal’s house as an experiment.  In true Apollonian fashion, Smith focuses with all the powers of his mind on the action, with no hint of anything sensual at all–indeed, no idea what that word would even mean.   The girls, of course, swoon in a typical Dionysian-culture reaction to such attention.  They completely let go of all mental control, giving themselves utterly to the sensation of the moment. As a result, both entities are delighted.  I thought it was a fun illustration of the perfect marriage Nietzsche described between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

The clashes come, of course, from the imperfect balance.  When Earthlings attempt to dominate the conversation, injustice results.  This is why Jubal insists on a council of equals when the Secretary General and Smith meet–to try to foster that Nietzschean balance.

An American Tragedy–The Manufactured Scarcity of Hortense’s Presence and Dreiser’s Daring Characters

Posted on by Amanda

It’s been a bit, yes.  There’s this whole thing where I’m in school and have to produce an amount of writing and research that would kill a mere mortal.  Luckily, I am not a mere mortal.  I prove this now and will continue to prove this later by not dying.

After a flurry of holiday activity, I am happily back to reading Dreiser.  Actually, I was happy to read most of this semester’s selections as well–Keats, the Shelleys, Gretchen Henderson’s amazing Galerie de Difformite, the lesser-known charlatan William Hazlitt, and some super-interesting art criticism.  Frankly, though, I’m relieved to come back home to the book I’ve been trying to find time to read all semester, and I’m really loving it.  More about why later.

Though I’m well into Part Two of An American Tragedy, the thing I’m most interested in writing about is the captivating section in Part One in which two teenagers are beginning to understand the politics of dating.   Hortense (what a name, huh?) is blossoming into a full-blown gold-digger in record time.  She has discovered that she has looks upon which she can capitalize, and now she is fine-tuning her ability to manipulate circumstance so that she gives the least and gains the most.  She has already divined a counterintuitive fact:  the more spoken for she appears to be, the more attractive she is to others.  So Hortense continually makes it clear that her free time is consumed by dates in order to make Clyde feel as if he is lucky to get a mere moment of her time.  She procures “gifts” the same way.  If so many men are willing to buy her things, as she implies, Clyde must prove he is different.  He plays right into her hands, setting himself apart by his willingness to spend the most money on her.  She balances affection, condescension, and rejection perfectly, making herself just impossible enough to win.  This balance–not her looks or her personality, as he would think–keeps Clyde’s attention.

Clyde is ruled by hormones.  Though it might seem as though he is the tragic hero in this situation, and Hortense the villain, he is just as ruled by crooked motives.  He is focused solely on conquering her and would have little interest remaining once the challenge was over.  Hortense is smart to keep him wanting more.

They feel out the same game, and they play it by the same rules: it’s a sex/bribery quid pro quo, almost explicitly discussed between the two. But they understand the game in fascinatingly different ways, and their ideas of fairness evolve as the stakes go up.  It’s  a delight to read, and it’s agonizing that it’s left unresolved.  I desperately wanted Clyde to give up on her.  Just I felt as if it was going to happen, Dreiser makes the novel take a dramatic turn.  I suspect I’ll hear more about that later on in the book.

Dreiser books with male protagonists are better than his ones with female protagonists.  Why is this?  Dreiser exhibits so much sympathy to the plight of the nonconforming woman.  Yet his books about them are maddening because the women are awful.  They are too sweet, too submissive, too self-sacrificing.  His men are needy and immature, but they have an independent streak that keeps me reading with delight.  They are daring.  Now, Sister Carrie was quite good, and I think it’s because Carrie had her moments of daring (quite unlike Jennie Gerhardt).  But most of the book shows her acquiescing to the desires of men.  In contrast, even as Clyde follows Hortense like a puppy, we hear his inner monologue, and it displays the thoughts of  a bitter, despondent, and rebellious character, not a gentle lamb.

At any rate, I am really loving An American Tragedy.  Clyde is a selfish, shallow, sour character, but I don’t have to like him to be interested in what happens to him.  I just have to think he has daring, apparently.

Jennie Gerhardt as Budget Sister Carrie

Posted on by Amanda

I really liked Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, as I indicated in my last post.  Jennie Gerhardt provided me with my first Dreiser disappointment, and I was willing to forgive it until I read the author’s Wikipedia page.  I had pegged this as a young Dreiser work, and I was right.  It was his second.  The novel, though characteristically sensitive to poverty and the ostracism of “impure” women, lacked the character development, depth, and narrative coherency of both Sister Carrie and The Genius.  I assumed that this was a book written as Dreiser attempted to develop skills that would lead him to the creation of a balanced novel.  With that assumption, Jennie Gerhardt could be seen as a step in authorial development rather than a misstep.  But, as it turns out, Sister Carrie was his first novel.  That makes this second book, also about a young female protagonist carrying on an extramarital affair, seem like an attempt to rewrite Sister Carrie with a miserable ending instead of a happy, or even well-rounded one. Since Dreiser had already proved he knew how to construct a beautiful novel, there isn’t really any excuse for Jennie Gerhardt.

It started out promising.  A young girl was taken advantage of by a man so rich and generous she was not in a position to refuse him if she wanted to save her impoverished family.  But the rest of the novel detailed an incredibly long affair with another man, reportedly (but not demonstrably) charismatic, and it’s simply drudgery to read.  That is of course until the end, where the book doesn’t get better, but things happen.  Things like everyone dying except Jennie and her resigning herself to a wretched, lonely life.  Eeyorrrreee.

I think the difference between this novel and the other Dreiser works is that you both don’t like the characters and you don’t understand them.  As I argued in my post about Sister Carrie, a collection of people you don’t like but understand can be the stuff of a great novel.   I didn’t like Jennie for the same reason I didn’t like Carrie–she seemed like the typical Shakespearean waif (see Desdemona, Hero, etc.) who just wanted to humbly martyr herself while knitting children sweaters and trying not to think of the giant empty hole in her where a personality should be.  Actually, Jennie is even more this way than Carrie was–at least Carrie protested and eventually left abusive situations.  The thing that really bothered me was that Dreiser kept insisting that Jennie was an amazing, exceptional woman and there was no one on earth like her.  It’s a glaring example a writerly sin: he’s telling instead of showing.  If this were a paper I was tutoring, I would say, “Jennie is an exception woman, alright–let’s cite some specific examples to back up that claim.”

As I implied earlier, her supposedly charismatic lover Lester is also not revealed to be anything of the sort in Jennie.  He’s a silly, capricious snob who, with all the proclamations that he owns Jennie, should try out for a leading male role in an Ayn Rand book.  Dreiser tries to explain what makes Lester so complicated in a way that won’t turn us against him, but he doesn’t do a very good job of making us understand him or making us like him.  Lester does a number of unpredictable things, and the most unpredictable of all is that he stays with Jennie despite how amazingly boring and weepy she is.  I could see him being taken with raising the station of  a poor girl and then leaving.  I could understand him throwing social mores to the side and marrying/staying with Jennie just to annoy his family.  But he hates being cast aside.  If he loves being with Jennie so much and can’t bring himself to leave her, I just can’t understand why he wouldn’t marry her if it would solve all the problems he has with family and society, which Dreiser seems to imply it would.

I suppose the lesson here is that you can have unlikable characters, and you can have characters you don’t understand, but if your characters are both unlikable and mind-boggling, your chances of creating a masterpiece are virtually nil.

Nonetheless, I am not deterred.  On to An American Tragedy!  Will be a recipe out of Aristotle’s cookbook?  Or will it be an organic form, growing out of itself and creating its own rules?  Anticipate a full report!

Sister Carrie and the Nuance of Theodore Dreiser

Posted on by Amanda

The main reason you should read Dreiser is because you won’t really like any of his characters.

That’s not at all to say you won’t feel for them or enjoy reading about them–you will, which is why I’ve started with the (perhaps rhetorically obnoxious) provocative statement.  Besides having oodles of delicious moral ambiguity, Dreiser’s books are populated by characters are decidedly not-stock (unstock? antistock? stock-taneously combusted?).  There’s not any black and white in the palate to mix and get gray.

All of the characters in his novels do things you won’t like. Yet you’ll understand why they do them.  Take Carrie.  She wants to learn how to be a refined, cosmopolitan lady who exudes the kind of grandeur she sees in other women about town.  She trades in her country charm and earnest naivete for affectation and imitation.  She becomes a fancy carbon copy, practicing faces in the mirror, worrying constantly about the image she cuts, mimicking the mannerisms and gestures of all the grande dames she admires.  It’s awful to read about.  Yet you’ve just read about how underestimated and disrespected she had been, and now people are starting to notice her and treat her like a human being.  Wouldn’t you do the same?  Then you learn that she is a born actress, and all this imitation comes naturally to her because her calling is the theater.  The primping and preening still seems obnoxious, but it’s all forgivable now.  It’s as if her life is a dress rehearsal for playing other characters.

Then, when she is practically kidnapped by her overzealous, possessive lover who won’t take no for an answer, instead of giving him a black eye and and hightailing it as far away from him as possible, she feels sorry for him and marries him.  And you’re disgusted with her again.  But you know she’s trapped, so…

Speaking of the overzealous possessive lover, Hurstwood is the same way.  There is so many things about him to hate.  Stealing.  Treating Carrie as a amusing little possession.  Cheating on his wife.  Leaving his wife and kids without a word.  Lying.  Lack of motivation in getting a job. Gambling all his money away instead of making sure he and Carrie were taken care of.  Yet, when he looks for work (less often than you think he should, but still, he looks), you understand his problem.  He has no money, but he has the air of wealth still about him.  No one will hire him for menial tasks until it’s too late–eventually, he becomes such a wreck he can’t get any kind of job at all.  He’s so pathetic, but his difficulties are so empathetically recounted and his memories of success and happiness are so bittersweet that you can’t help but understand why it’s so hard for him.

I love this.  The way Dreiser crafts his characters is so authentic, because so often I feel this way about real people (in essence, “I hate what you’re doing, but I understand it.”)  Human beings ARE this complicated, and I think Sister Carrie is such a beautiful testament to Dreiser’s brilliance.  With great finesse, he really conveys human complexity.  The Genius also does this (a book which is free, thanks to the wonderful folks at gutenberg.org–it’s long, but SO, SO worthy of your investment of time.  I liked it better than Sister Carrie.) The main character in The Genius is another example of someone who does terrible, terrible things, and yet you understand him.  You even cheer for him as he’s wrecking other people’s lives around him.  It’s amazing.

Another thing that makes Dreiser so interesting is that his books just contain snippets of people’s lives.  It’s like if someone’s life story was film on a reel, and Dreiser takes a scissors and makes two casual, random cuts.  Poof, there’s the plot he works with.  Then, through magical, crafty, authorly powers that I can’t imitate, only recognize, he finds a way for the sequence of events to seem rounded out when it comes to an end.  For Sister Carrie, he ended with a kind of life lesson that could be applied to all the characters. In The Genius, he leaves you with the hopes that Eugene has finally grown up, at least a little.   But the actual plot really has no rhyme or reason to its beginning and end–it’s as if Dreiser is simply handing you a snapshot and letting you examine it close up to feel what the moment in time was like.

Frankenstein and Self-Pity

Posted on by Amanda

I’ve spent the last few days reading Frankenstein in anticipation of my Romantic Lit class this upcoming semester (I like to get a head start when I can).  It wasn’t necessarily on my reading list before signing up for the class, though I adore Mary Shelley’s mom and had some curiosity about whether or not that way with words could be inherited.  But on the whole, science fiction doesn’t much attract me–and though, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this book isn’t really as much science fiction as it is a moral tale, society has certainly billed it as sci-fi. Before reading this, when I thought of Frankenstein, I got visions of a lab with smoking beakers and a green-faced, flat-headed dude hooked up to electrodes, making sounds like a rabid cow.  Just not something I’m really interested in.

It, of course, was not what I expected.  First off, society is wrong; Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster.  That totally blew my mind.  How has the belief that he’s the monster been perpetuated this long?  I’m not the only one who thought he was the green guy, right?  Oh, and another thing–he’s not green.  He’s yellowish.  There is no mention of him looking like a 1980s Wesley Snipes Chia Pet.

Second, there was very little science in this fiction at all.  Dr. Frankenstein had no desire to talk about the actual science of what he was doing at all.  He was more interested in talking about himself.  And, OH MY, talk about himself he did!!

~My loose, opinion-tainted, spoiler-loaded partial synopsis here~

Once upon a time, there was an adventurous sailor who has nothing to do with the actual plot but is nonetheless our gateway to meeting Dr. Frankenstein.  This sailor has a sister to whom he writes letters.  She also has nothing to do with the plot. After reading for a long time and hearing nothing about science and green people, the reader is confused.  Then we meet a man rescued by the ship who is quite disturbed, as would anyone who spent his entire life obsessed with himself might be.  The not-very-smart adventurous sailor thinks this miserable wretch is the cat’s meow, so the stranger decides to tell him what led him to be chasing around some giant dude in a dog sled.  He prefaces the following by telling the sailor this will be a really, really miserable story.

~Nested story in adventurous sailor’s story~

Dr. Frankenstein grows up in Switzerland with some childhood friends, who he keeps in his life until he becomes responsible for their early deaths.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  At college, he discovers how to animate the inanimate, and he cobbles together corpses and miscellaneous parts to make a human form.  He works almost like a possessed man, dreaming of this person he creates being like a son and a worshipper all at once and imagining what advances for science this will bring.  But when this weird blob of organs opens its yellow eye, Dr. F. is terrified and bolts, leaving the poor thing to fend for itself.  He wanders around in terror of encountering the monster and has periods of illness.  He returns home to Switzerland when he hears of his brother’s murder, and–ACK–there he is, there’s that yellow-eyed, eight-foot-tall thing, being all ugly!  He killed his brother, the doctor was sure of it.

Later, he meets the monster in the Alps and wants to kill his creation.  The doctor is repulsed by the thing’s hideousness.  But the monster, who is surprisingly eloquent, convinces Dr. F. to hear him out.

~Nested story in Frankenstein’s story in adventurous sailor’s story~

The monster tells of how he manages to survive and learn enough to sustain himself.  He quickly figures out that people are horrified by his appearance and will drive him away, but he desires human connections.  The monster stays near a poor family who he grows to love immensely, and he secretly helps them with all their chores.  Through watching them, he learns about interactions, family, music, and language.  Eventually, he desires reciprocation of his love so much that he feels he must at least try to befriend them.  But before he does that, he tells us the story of this family’s history, as he overheard it.

~Nested story in the monster’s story in Frankenstein’s story in the adventurous sailor’s story~

I’m not actually going to go into this, but perhaps you see the point I’m trying to make about the nested stories.

This will become a seriously long post if I continue to sum up the plot, so suffice it to say that the monster just wants love and feels like hurting the whole world when he is deprived of it.  He especially wants to hurt his creator.  They become locked in a battle of revenge.  It’ s sad.

Now, here’s the interesting part, and I’ll be interested to hear what is said in class about this.  I feel immensely sorry for the monster, though he continually murders innocent people related to Dr. Frankenstein.  Dr. F., is by all accounts is victim here.  After all, he wasn’t really trying to create anything bad.  But he feels sorry enough for himself for the two of us, and I have no sympathy for him.  Here’s just a few samples of why:

“Far from being surprised at my misery, you will only wonder that I survive what I have endured”

“How can you understand what I have felt and still feel?”

(When his new wife seems sad) “You are sorrowful, my love. Ah! If you knew what I suffered and what I may yet endure, you would endeavour to let me taste the quiet and freedom from despair that this one day at least permits me to enjoy.”

Oh, and about that wife…the monster wants his creator to suffer as he suffers, and he does this by taking away all the people Dr. F. loves.  Dr. F. knows this.  Or he should, anyway–I saw it.  When the monster threatens to be there on his wedding night, that clearly meant to me that he would kill the doctor’s wife.  But the doctor just kept mourning the wedding night as the night he would die at the hands of his creation.  He says, “if for one instance I had thought what might be the hellish intention of my fiendish adversary,” he would have never gotten married.  I thought, “How did you miss it?”

He says he blames himself for the murders of his family, but, lord, it sure seems like he feels like the victim.   At the most, he blames the fact that he created something “evil,” and connects himself that way.  Couldn’t he have given the monster a puppy or something?  Shelley makes it very clear that the monster is anything but evil.  His responses are extremely human.  What seems inhuman to me is to see something as lonely as the monster and to not have any pity for it.  But all the doctor’s reserves of pity seems to be already spoken for.

“And They Lived Happily Ever After”–How The Master and Margarita Does it Right

Posted on by Amanda

Before launching into the literary subject matter at hand, I’d like to to take a moment to beg forgiveness of my esteemed reader and offer an explanation for my absence.  I’ve been doing a lot of travelling and miscellaneous adventuring. I’ve also begun to spend much of my time copyediting software engineer/dreamboat Erik Dietrich’s blog at daedtech.com. (If any of you folks dabble in things tech-y, I highly recommend the blog. Erik often draws from historical and literary sources for his software metaphors, and it’s a real pleasure to read.  That’s coming from a person who was pretty sure “C++” means “really close to being a B” and “motherboard” is the plank you walk up to get on the main flying saucer of an alien fleet.)

I’ve finally finished The Master and Margarita, and I’m just clever enough to know that there is plenty of satire afoot and just not clever enough to understand what the satire is targeting.  Maybe it requires more than a single Russian history class to understand.  I did notice wonderful hints at what Russian society is like, though.  I remember learning that Stalin was a late-to-bed, late-to-rise type and the hours of governmental operation and eventually the whole country began to mirror those hours kept by Stalin.  That explained why the literary folks at the club ate dinner near midnight. But since some of Bulgakov’s more subtle points about society were, I fear, lost on me, I will focus on that which enchanted and entertained me.  The story itself was incredibly amusing.  I loved watching Satan and his cohorts wreak havok for awhile, and I found myself wishing desperately Satan’s darling tom cat was real so he could come by and stir things up for my amusement and then go on a rampage about no one giving cats the respect they deserve.

By the the end of the novel, it struck me that I was actually rooting for the fairy tale ending–a thing which, under normal circumstances, bores me to tears.  “The poor Master and Margarita deserved to be together,” I thought near the end of the novel.  “They belong with one another, and I will throw a FIT if it doesn’t work out for them.”  Then I slapped myself, because, what,  I’m pulling for the cheesy ending?  What have I become?

But I realized that there’s a reason I can root for a happy ending to the story without feeling like it would be cliche.  After all, the two are in league with Satan, so this reader is more likely to give herself permission to cheer for romance as long it’s countered by being able to root for “evil,” too.  It’s not as sugary.  There’s balance. So, well played, Bulgakov.  I wanted your characters to be together forever.  And when they were, I was very satisfied with your ending, because, HA, it means that it pays to sacrifice your soul to Satan!  I can embrace romance and still feel edgy!

I love seeing things work in literature, and I love trying to figure out just what the author did right, making me putty in their hands (words?). I love seeing where authors fail, as well.  I thrive on the weakness of others.  Kidding, of course; figuring out where authors went wrong is very edifying to me because I’m more and more often in a position to give advice to others about their writing, and I’d like to think my advice will result in the real improvement of their creations.  Critical reading is one of those skills I aim to sharpen to an exceptionally fine point.  But, oh, perhaps you see that therein lies a real philosophical conundrum.  Just because a twist of phase, a plot device, or a directional choice doesn’t work for me doesn’t mean it that it won’t work for others.  Arguably, all taste is subjective, and what literature is good, what is bad, and even the difference between what writing is literature and what isn’t is an incredibly blurry line.  Yet, as species that has been around for awhile, we agree to keep some writers around and collectively esteem their works.  Studying them seems to be a good way to build up an idea of what is generally good and what isn’t.  But, ug, the quandries that arise when examining Hume’s expert-mimicry and the like are too great for bloggy snippets, and I’ve wandered far enough away from the topic as indicated by the title of this post.  If anyone wants to chat philosophy on these matters, I’m more than happy to dance in circles around these questions that have no answers with you.  It’s one of my favorite pastimes, and I have no resolved opinions on the matter, making me a great person to discuss things with.

The Master, Margarita, and Twin Peaks

Posted on by Amanda

I’m utterly convinced that David Lynch is the reincarnation of Mikhail Bulgakov.  I’m about halfway through The Master and Margarita, and everything is so surreal that I can’t tell who is crazy and who isn’t.  There are skips in time, supernatural occurrences, and people with cryptic and prescient messages (though not armed with chunks of driftwood). Like Lynch’s, sometimes Bulgakov’s story is whimsical, sometimes it’s dark.  The only difference is, with Lynch, I root for the good guys, and with Bulgakov, I’m on the side of Satan. I’m not totally sure what that says about me.  But in my defense, the trio of Satan, his, um, “manager,” and his Cheshire cat companion victimize people who are selfish, obtuse, frivolous, and generally hateable, and it’s pretty hilarious when they get manipulated.

For instance, Satan puts on a black magic show for a Moscow audience.  The crowd has seen Satan’s cat rip off the head of the master of ceremonies and reattach it.  Whether the act is an illusion or not, to the audience, it’s a portentous sign.  Most audience members are fairly shaken, especially the women.  Yet, the next “trick” is to open up a ladies’ shop onstage and invite women to come partake of the Parisian dresses, lavender shoes, and jeweled bottles of perfume, and, after a moment’s hesitation, all previously-seen violence is forgotten.  The women storm the stage, demanding all sorts of luxury items.  One woman can be heard berating her husband for his reluctance to let her join the legion of clucking hens fussing over froof onstage.  I found the scene an accurate reflection of society’s goldfish-proportioned capacity for memory.  And I was absolutely DELIGHTED to find that, when the women left the theater in their new finery, it began to disappear, leaving them on the street in their underwear.  Score one for Satan.

I think it might be interesting to examine Satan’s role in this book as an administer of justice.  Maybe that will be a task for when I finish the book.  And maybe that’s where Lynch and Bulgakov differ.  Lynch’s evil is simply chaos personified, or maybe, more accurately, an entity that thrives on the pain of decent people.  Satan in The Master and Margarita perhaps deals out harsher punishments than people really deserved (the ladies in the theater get off by far the easiest, as far as TMATM punishments go), but I will tentatively say that all the people who suffer are greedy, pompous, or just horribly stupid.

More later.

Gogol’s “The Overcoat”

Posted on by Amanda

Having teeth forcibly removed from my head has slowed my The Master and Margarita progress to a plod, but I’m getting through.  (That’s why I had previously said it would take two days to read or forever to read–I was scheduled in two days for the removal of several impacted and/or generally evil teeth. I knew it was going to make me a vegetable for, like, a week.  But unable to eat vegetables. All the qualities of being a vegetable without the nutrition of vegetables.  Okay, I’m going to stop with the vegetables now…as you see, all my faculties have not yet returned.)

I’ve been alternating between The M and M and a collection of Russian short stories I have on the Kindle, and I just finished Gogol’s “The Overcoat.”  I’d read it before, but I’d forgotten how absolutely heart-wrenching it is.  This is why I love Russian lit as much as I do. Russian lit has this amazing combination.  Eloquence normally puts a kind of professional, decorous distance between the speaker and the spoken-to.  But Russian lit is eloquent and raw and intensely personal and amazingly human at the same time, and the combination is just jaw-dropping.  Nothing does this combination like Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground, in my opinion.  But Gogol’s “The Overcoat” is another example of how there must be something in the water in Russia or something.  These authors compose the most stirring works.

For those who have not had the experience, “The Overcoat” traces the last days of a man who is very awkward–too socially inept, in fact, to communicate in full sentences.  Kind of like me right now.  He walks around with fruit rinds and fuzzballs and various garbage attached to his coat, probably smells funny, and likes to keep to himself.  He very much reminds me of Melville’s Bartleby, though he is immensely dedicated to his work as a copier and, after work, goes home and copies for pleasure.  He has no friends, no family, and is quite poor.  Everyone at his job teases him relentlessly because of his shabby dress and general weirdness, and that in itself, as told by Gogol,  is fairly heartbreaking.  But, when a freezing Russian winter is setting in and he discovers holes in his decrepit overcoat which cannot be patched, he must begin to scrimp and save for a new one.  As he helps the tailor pick out the material and discusses its manufacture, he begins to feel excited about the new coat.  Here’s part of Gogol’s mastery–to see this man’s existence so far has been so sad that the reader feels positively elated as the man starts to show signs of life. As he dreams of his new coat, he starts living for the day that he can put it on.  On the very first night he has it, he gets mugged and it is stolen. He dies from the sickness he gets from exposure to the cold that night.  Go ahead, cry.  It’s okay.

Gogol keeps a beautiful balance in his narrator’s voice throughout all this.  The storyteller is present in the story, but he makes himself disappear at the crucial moments, and then makes us aware of him again later to shock us out of the story and call our attention back to him again.  The push and pull of the seriousness of the narrator’s retelling is fascinating.  The one relaying the story is a fairly lighthearted person, as can be seen in the beginning, and that’s certainly a contrast to the material the lighthearted person is relaying.  The thing that really strikes me about the story is how immensely compassionate it is without using gimmickry to try to appeal to the reader.  It’s almost as if Gogol himself felt so much for his invention, this character whom the world had forgotten, that he had to write about it and didn’t care much what we, the reader thought.  Though the narration and the push and pull of seriousness that I mentioned seems like a tactic or an emotive device of some sort, I almost feel as if Gogol just knew the perfect way to express his own sympathy for the forgotten and his devices are an outflow of compassion.  I don’t really have any evidence for that.  It’s just a feeling.  I usually know when I’m being manipulated into feeling something–it’s like authors fall back on triggers (cue rape, child abuse, or man hitting woman.)  And this is so authentically, actually, gimmick-free-ly moving.  It’s refreshing.  And also (sniffle) sad!

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Genre-Pogo Sticking, and Doing it Well

Posted on by Amanda

A multitude of apologies to any who held me to my promise to report on Gravity’s Rainbow.  As the great poet Amanda once said, the best laid plans of mice and men are oft thwarted by their own incalculable sloth.  I wanted a book, I was upstairs, Gravity’s Rainbow was in the basement, Cloud Atlas was in the guest bedroom.  Cloud Atlas wins by proximity.

I had put the book on my Christmas list knowing next to nothing about it.  An author in the New York Times’ book review had opined that all students of literature should read it, and I had thought, “Students of literature? Why, that’s me!  Someone’s telling me to do something!”  So, like any well-programmed English major automaton, I sought out a book because the “experts” say I should.  Now, this robotic behavior is only re-enforced, because Cloud Atlas is simply stunning.  I love you, experts!

I’m only a little more than a third into the book, but the post simply couldn’t wait.  I am quite enthusiastic about the experience so far.

A review from the Boston Sunday Globe is printed on the back of my Random House edition, and it describes the defining characteristic of the book best, I think: “One of the biggest joys of Cloud Atlas is  watching Mitchell sashay from genre to genre without a hitch in his dance step.”  I couldn’t agree more.  The book opens with a entries from a kind of travel journal written by a credulous, wholesome, and rather dense character.  The year is about 1850, and Mitchell does a pretty great job of mimicking the spelling, phrasing, and general mindset of the times.  (Some of the colloquialisms–“backcountry,” “refused to take a cent for it”–ring a little inauthentic for the 19th century, but whatever…since another character later mentions feeling the same way about the phrasing in the travel journal in another section, I wonder if it won’t be addressed later in the book).  Mitchell demands some investment from the reader right away, which may be off-putting to some.  It’s hard to orient yourself to what’s going on in the first few pages, and the writing is rather dry.  This is because the character writing is himself a grandmotherly milquetoast, not because Mitchell lacks zest as a writer.  He is plenty zesty and proves it in the next section.

The first section ends abruptly.  I mean, mid-sentence abruptly.  It’s jarring, which, I assume, is calculated.  The next section is written masterfully and was such a pleasure to read.  It consists of letters written by a gregarious, rougish young musician living in Europe in the 30s to his friend, Mr. Sixsmith.  The character is despicable but immensely entertaining, and the letters are wonderfully done.  Mitchell balances perfectly the language of a man of high English breeding who engages in lower-class behavior and acts on socially-rejected, promiscuous or frowned-upon desires, and Mitchell never misses a beat as far as era-appropriate language goes.  This young man stumbles upon the travel journal from the first section and sells it to a collector.  (And then prostitutes himself to the collector. And then robs him.)  Voila! The first two pieces are connected.

The rest of the sections continue to be like that–connected in unexpected, interesting ways.  The next section is a suspense/mystery piece set in the 70s, with a young journalist protagonist (a woman refreshingly not romantically defined) who meets Mr. Sixsmith, recipient of the previous section’s letters.  She winds up finding those letters, among other things.  This section, in keeping with the genre, is comparably readerly, though not brainless.  It’s a  page-turner, and I had difficulty putting it down.

The next section is written by a crotchety old Englishman, and  it is hilarious.  I’m not even sure what the genre is.  Irreverent 2000s realism?  The section’s narrator is an editor, and a mystery woman sends him the contents of the previous section to examine for publication.  Connection!

This collection of interrelated-short-story-type of snippets is extremely appealing to me.  I almost feel as if I’m a part of an exclusive club or part of an inside joke.  Every new section talks about people I already know from before, and I get to maybe learn more about those people or see what connections they have with other people or events.  Sometimes I wonder if that’s why magazines like People attract eyes at the grocery store or being in the gossip loop is so valued–because we all have this interest in finding connections between people, and we bond over these connections.  Like, “Ooo, an actress, I recognize her.  And she knows this actor, who I also know, but never knew that she knew.  And they’re having a baby, creating a hybrid person out of these people I know…”  Maybe these new interrelated-short-story collections are my version of People magazine, because I really enjoyed Jennifer Eagan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad for the same six-degrees-of-separation-like reason.  Each section elaborates on a person I’ve already met, and I get to see who that person winds up knowing and how their stories affects others’ stories…

May I just say, too, that I am tickled by the presence of an author, living and writing NOW, at this VERY MOMENT, who does not feel a compulsion to include Superfluous Raunch in his book?  Construction of any type of media these days is apparently considered unfinished without the inclusion of some S.R., and it’s a breath of fresh air to see its absence in Cloud Atlas.