Category Archives: Lit–General

Beloved and Trees

Posted on by Amanda

I’ve had some time to marinate the Beloved tree issue in my brain juices for a bit, and there are a lot of complications.  I tried drawing on a major end-of-semester research project from three years ago discussing trees in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. (I said that the pear tree was a metaphor for Janie and argued that, as she tried to grow, she kept being pruned back by the men around her.  It’s a metaphor I beat to death in the most senseless spurt of cruelty, believe you me.  I cringe when I think of it.)  In Their Eyes, the tree is clearly a positive symbol–one of healthy relationships, discovery, and flowering life.  And in Beloved, Paul D.’s fondest memories of Sweet Home revolve around a tree he named Brother–surely a sign that the tree must be something good here as well. But the elephant in the room as far as tree symbolism goes is the “chokecherry tree” on Sethe’s back: a massive, sprawling tangle of scars that rise like rifts off her back from a whipping that nearly killed her. It’s a horrific juxtaposition, this disfigurement from such nauseating violence and the description of her freshly wounded back as having branches, leaves, beautiful blossoms, fruit. Ug. Early on, we learn of the striking beauty of Sweet Home and how, when Sethe remembers it, “there was not a leaf on the farm that didn’t make her want to scream” though the landscape remained captivating to her, despite the horror of it.  She wondered “if hell was a pretty place too.”

The more I thought about it, the more I was certain the tree in Beloved couldn’t be good.  In fact, it seemed the opposite of the tree of Their Eyes Were Watching God–the tree shows up in Beloved when life is being taken away. When Sethe standing in the forest clearing (no trees), revisiting the spot where Baby Suggs held her renewing, spiritually-charged gatherings, Beloved stands in the forest and telekinetically chokes her. When Sethe has flashbacks, it’s of dismembered slave boys hanging from trees. The tree imagery is complex enough that the formulation of what the tree might mean in Beloved took me awhile to get at, and, in fact, the symbolism is so subtle that it’s easy to overlook the tree in the first place. But it’s there if you want it. I reread the passage in which Morrison describes Paul D. exploring Sethe’s “tree” on her back, and the passage makes it quite plain what the tree means–just easy to miss.

“He rubbed his cheek on her back and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it, its wide trunk and intricate branches.”

The tree is sorrow.  It has roots that stretch deep into the characters.  It has complexity, and it makes them do complex things.  It is wide, a sizeable force to be reckoned with.  Replace all the trees in Beloved with sorrow, and there you have it.  The clearing is a place surrounded by sorrow, but also a place free of it.  Paul D.’s tree, Brother, towers over the smaller tree of his love for the beauty in the world, a love “small and [held] in secret.  His little love was a tree, of course, but not like Brother–old, wide and beckoning.”

This brings to mind the complications of the tree as negative I alluded to earlier.  Brother, Paul D.’s enormous sorrow, is “beckoning”?  Sethe remembers “boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world”?  When Sethe’s wounds are so infected it looks like white blossoms are erupting on her back and the blanket she lies on becomes stained with “roses”?  Why is the sorrow so grotesquely, stomach-curdlingly beautiful?  I imagine the key is one of Morrison’s driving point about slavery–how can such horrible things happen in such beautiful places?

I was reading an essay by bell hooks in Rebecca Walker’s (yes, Alice Walker’s daughter) collection of feminist-themed essays, To Be Real.  Hooks was saying that her grandmother loved to look at beauty in nature and her mother loved beauty as portrayed through advertisements, and she sees a broader shift toward materialism as means of experiencing beauty in the African American community.   She says, among other things, that her “Southern black ancestors recognized that in the midst of exploitation and oppression suffering could be endured if transforming encounters with beauty took place.”  I think that Morrison is saying something less political, but relevant nonetheless.  The characters in Beloved saw Sweet Home, even the trees the boys hung from, as beautiful.  Paul D. tried to use beautiful Brother as a source of comfort, as that transforming encounter that would let him rise above his situation. But in the end, all the beauty does for both the characters and the reader is serve as horrifying, revolting contrast to the inhuman treatment of one human being to another.  It’s no wonder the roots of the characters’ sorrow run so deep.

Just as something to end on, I thought it was so interesting that my Their Eyes Were Watching God research (the last time I thought this much about trees, ha)  led me to believe that the tree, as a symbol, was life-giving and men were always cutting Janie down before she had a chance to blossom.  The ax, in that essay, was the worst of all metaphors.  In Beloved, Paul D. says, “Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax…Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.”  But if a man could chop down the sorrow in the book with an ax in Beloved, he’d be the hero of the novel.

I am Beloved’s

Posted on by Amanda

Oh, Beloved.  I reread it while sailing the Mediterranean these last few weeks.  It was a magical moment: sitting by the pool, music wafting over the deck, sun shining, enjoying a little light reading about baby blood and scars from slavery. Joking aside, it doesn’t matter if the book is light or not.  If you haven’t read it, my heart aches for you.  You simply have to.  There’s nothing like it.  Not even Toni Morrison has written anything like it.  The Bluest Eye was riveting, but was perhaps a bit too hard-hitting with the issues it presented.  Sula had the same kind of narrative power as Beloved, but it didn’t quite have the socio-historical commentary which packs so much punch.  Beloved does exactly what writers want so badly to be able to do the right way–present issues that move people, stories of pain and healing and injustice and revenge, and present them in such a nuanced way that they sneak up on you, horrify you, delight you, haunt you…

We had to read Beloved my junior year of high school.  (Parents were predictably outraged.)  After furiously counting on my fingers, then getting furious at my fingers because there weren’t enough of them for my purposes,  I finally have determined that it has been fifteen years since I last read Beloved.  Fifteen years of forgetting…

Was Sethe ever forgetting Beloved?  Not for a second. Beloved comes to the house needy, convinced she’s been rejected.  Yet every desparate second Beloved isn’t acknowledged, she believes she is forgotten; all it takes is a single moment that doesn’t revolve around her, and Beloved flies off the chain.  When Sethe finally begins to find some peace with Paul D–perhaps even move on from that traumatic incident in the barn, so  grotesquely foreshadowed by the vivid comparison of baby blood to hot oil–Beloved isn’t having it.  There is an amazing scene near the end in which it’s physically manifested how much Beloved feeds off of Sethe’s attention.  When a group of women from the town come to call out Beloved, she shows up at the window, fat, swollen, and shining.  Sethe appears next to her, anemic and shrunken.  It’s a reversal of their original states, and it’s a sign of Beloved’s endless hunger.

But what I would really like to examine is the motif of the tree in Beloved.  The scars on Sethe’s back from an unjust whipping take the shape of a tree.  She continually fights the image of her fellow workers hanging from trees.  Paul D becomes attached enough to a tree to give it the name “Brother.”  There’s a thread here (and the makings of an awesome paper if I hadn’t just gone and graduated).  I’ll figure it out by the next time I write, which should be relatively soon.

A Quick Observation on An American Tragedy Upon Completion…

Posted on by Amanda

A bout of insomnia allowed me to finish An American Tragedy at about 3:30 AM this morning.  Here’s where I announce the fact that this quick post contains a

 

SERIOUS SPOILER–Abandon all hope of surprise, ye who have not read and enter here.

 

 

Have you left?  Okay.

 

Clyde never once feels bad about killing Roberta.  (And by the way, he totally killed her–I don’t think that was ever really up for debate.)  He feels bad that he will be forever haunted by the deed, he feels bad that he got caught, he feels bad that he’s done something society thinks is wrong, he feels bad that he lost everything important to him, he feels bad that his mother is freaking out, he feels bad about all sorts of things. But does he ever feel bad that he took someone’s life, as if it was his to dispose of as he saw fit?  Does he ever feel bad that Roberta was once alive, had thoughts, had a past, a family, ideas for the future, and now is dead–because of him?  Not even at the very end does he feel actual remorse for anything except that his life went in a downward trajectory instead of an upward one.  

Clyde is one of the most repulsive characters I’ve ever encountered in literature.  My disgust was physical during the portion of the novel where he was contemplating killing her–I could feel my face scrunching up as I read, and I felt like I was going to throw up.  I’m not a believer in capital punishment, and I’m a little ashamed to say I found the electric chair to be an satisfying ending for this character.  There have been a lot of baddies in literature, but I don’t think anyone has turned my stomach quite like Clyde.  

Dreiser is an AMAZING author. I know–it’s no secret I think that.  But I’m again struck by his character development. It’s his way of taking you inside the character’s mind, showing you how the character came to be…he does it so naturally and with such finesse.  The way he handles long periods of time and subtle changes is perfect.  Clyde’s supposed to be our protagonist.  We watch him grow up.  We see his struggles.  We understand why he is the way he is.  It’s most natural that we’d sympathize with him, root for him even when we don’t really want to.  Dreiser makes his personality turn ugly in such a convincing way that I actually wanted to see him sent to the chair.  That’s something else.    

An American Tragedy was one of the most satisfying, moving literary experiences I’ve had in awhile.  I don’t know if I would call it a delight to read, the same way I wouldn’t call Othello or Wuthering Heights a “delight.”  But it’s a masterpiece. I don’t read for warm, fuzzy feelings, anyway.  I read because there’s nothing like getting wrapped up in the experience of an author displaying his/her craftsmanship.  Dreiser is wonderful for that.

The Society of An American Tragedy

Posted on by Amanda

I made a critical error and picked An American Tragedy back up one night this week, ignoring the onslaught of forthcoming deadlines which punctuate the end of my undergraduate journey with a series of exclamation points. (Or maybe, more accurately, “@$#%!*”.)  Big mistake.  Now I’ve spent the week throwing aside the literally fifteen books I have to read for my Russian Revolution class research paper, and I instead find myself sucked into an orbit around the Kindle, unable to resist the gravitational pull of Planet Dreiser.

Planet Dreiser is populated by the society of the 1920s.  If anyone’s seen Boardwalk Empire, you might imagine that the twenties were filled with topless women and gunfire.  (Thank you, Hollywood, for your ever-accurate history lessons–though I shouldn’t judge too harshly, as I imagine the criminal underground did have plenty of both those things to go around in the twenties. I just think it’s a mistake to think that small circle of folks are representative of society.)  But society in An American Tragedy is a prison. Both Roberta and Clyde are inmates, but in different ways.  Considering my feminist leanings, (and considering that Clyde is highly unlikable at this point in the novel) I’m much more moved by the way Roberta is imprisoned. Clyde is trapped by society in that he can only think about the struggle to climb upwards in rank.  But Roberta is a different story.  Clyde pressures her into forsaking her moral qualms about sex with his unspoken threats of not just withdrawing his affection but also making her time at work an emotional nightmare.  Then, when she becomes pregnant–hardly a surprise in a society that considers the subject of birth control taboo–her options are few and terrible.  And the very society that makes her options so terrible is what has placed her in the position in the first place.  Women are supposed to serve the needs of men but remain pure.  Women are to show deference to men’s authority, to be meek and compliant,  yet they are ostracized if they allow men access to their bodies.  But this is an old, old complaint, of course, with roots in the familiar reductionist Madonna/whore dichotomy.  I think Roberta is a perfect example of how real human beings are neither one nor the other.    But her society must slap polarizing labels on her, and her time as the Madonna is about to end.

A good example of this is when she finally finds access to a doctor who, as rumor has it, has performed an abortion before.  Thanks to Dreiser’s inclusion of the doctor’s internal monologue, we get to hear him wavering back and forth as he tries to make a judgement about who Roberta is.  First, she seems too innocent to have that kind of problem, so surely she is here about some trivial health problem which makes an exceedingly modest girl shy.  Then, he remembers how even the most innocent-looking patients have had the darkest, most immoral secrets.  When he finally understands her situation–that she is unmarried and pregnant, he is consumed with distaste toward the situation.  In his defense, his excuse that there is no reward in performing the abortion, only risk to his career and danger to her…well, that seems pretty unarguable.  And yet, he clearly possesses this Madonna/whore mindset that is so prevalent in An American Tragedy’s society–either she’s an innocent, sexless waif or a scarlet woman meant for the streets.  I love Dreiser because a reader can clearly see how the people in his books want to reduce things to categories of black and white.  The reader, at the same time, sees at the same time how resistant to categorization these characters are.  Complicated characters struggling to uncomplicate each other.  This is Planet Dreiser.

Back to Planet Russian Revolution Research, whose gravitational pull is no match for that of luxury reading these days.

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.

Slaughterhouse Five and Its Moments, Which, in My Opinion, are Few

Posted on by Amanda

Well aware of how limited my reading freedom is about to be due to class beginning, I’ve been on a book frenzy.  I’ve put away Swami Rama’s Meditation and Its Practice in anticipation of needing to calm down over the semester, April Winchell’s Regretsy, a hilariously irreverent exploration of crafts gone wrong, Slaughterhouse Five, and, sadly, only the beginnings of Sister Carrie.  I say sadly because I’m instantly loving it (not a surprise, I’m turning out to be a huge Dreiser fan) and I’m pretty sure that it’s going to collect dust until December.  Oh, school.  For a literature lover, it can be the ultimate frenemy.

Since Slaughterhouse Five is the only book I’ve read in the last week that can be agreed upon as literature (though the other two are awesome), that’s what I’ll talk about.  When I finished it, I closed the book with a resounding “meh.” I’ve never really been a fan of the minimalist, Hemmingway-esque writing style, though I understand the unique impact such simplicity can have.  I found the book not at all as powerful as it was built up to be, though there was a part about cut-up springs fed to a dog that almost made me cry-puke.  (If you don’t know what cry-puking is, a million wishes that you may continue to live life in that blissful ignorance.)  But it also almost made me stop reading the book, never to pick it up again, and I’m not sure that’s the kind of impact it was supposed to have.  All the time travel stuff was weird and unresolved, although I imagine fans think that’s the beauty of it all–the story, like life, is never-ending.  But, as pithy, snappy, and sound-bite-y as that sounds, I want to know how he got off the alien planet! I feel cheated!

That said, I really liked the part about Billy watching the war movie backwards. He sees it as if the planes were healing the cities and people were disassembling the bombs and putting the parts back into the earth.  That was beautifully written, and the idea was brilliant.  And, though I thought the “so it goes” repeated over and over during the book was overdone, I see what Vonnegut is doing.  It’s a sneaky way to convey the kind of emotional death that becomes the coping mechanism in the wake of so much tragedy.  Every time someone dies horribly or is the victim of some horrendous wrong, the uttered phrase “so it goes” implies that life is, in essence, an endless encounter of such stories for Billy.

But, ug, the choppy sentences and bare-bones language.  AND THE POOR DOG. I was so happy to move on to Sister Carrie.  Oh, it’s beautiful, folks.  And now I must get ready for class, and I see the shiny Kindle with my precious, newly-encountered Dreiser masterwork and, in my mind, it’s drifting further and futher away and I’m reaching out in slow motion and saying “nooooooooooo….”

Oh well.  One more year of reading nothing but what other people tell me to in my spare time.  Then, a lifetime of freedom.