More on Machen and Women

From Arthur Machen's short story "The White People," written sometime in the 1890s:

"But shouldn't we experience a certain horror - a terror such as you hinted we would experience if a rose tree sang - in the mere presence of an evil man?"

"We should if we were natural: children and women feel this horror you speak of, even animals experience it. But with most of us convention and civilization and education have blinded and deafened and obscured the natural reason."

Women are like children and animals and lack proper civilization. Riiiiight. Again, this type of shit is why I'm actually glad Lovecraft had so few female characters.

Arthur Machen, Monstrous Matrons, and Other Eldritch Things Man Was Not Meant to Know

"No, I think not, even if the worst happened. As you know, I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine, to use as I see fit. Come, it's getting late; we had better go in."

"Yes, I married, Villiers. I met a girl, a girl of the most wonderful and most strange beauty, at the house of some people whom I knew. . . My friends had come to know her at Florence; she told them she was an orphan, the child of an English father and an Italian mother, and she charmed them as she charmed me. The first time I saw her was at an evening party. I was standing by the door talking to a friend, when suddenly above the hum and babble of conversation I heard a voice which seemed to thrill to my heart. She was singing an Italian song. I was introduced to her that evening, and in three months I married Helen. Villiers, that woman, if I can call her woman, corrupted my soul."

"Everyone who saw her at the police court said she was at once the most beautiful woman and the most repulsive they had ever set eyes on. I have spoken to a man who saw her, and I assure you he positively shuddered as he tried to describe the woman, but he couldn't tell why."

Arthur Machen (1863-1947) was born in Wales to a poor vicar. He left for London to seek his literary fortune but found mixed success, although a surprise inheritance sustained him comfortably for a time. He took up acting and associated briefly with the Aleister Crowley circle, though mostly out of curiosity. After a brief period of popularity in the 1920s, Machen's fortunes faded, but on the event of his eightieth birthday a literary appeal was made to formally recognize him as a distinguished man of letters. Signers included T.S. Eliot, Bernard Shaw, Walter de la Mare, Algernon Blackwood, and John Masefield. Its success gave Machen's final years a long-sought security.*

Much more so than Robert W. Chambers, Machen was an enormous influence on H.P. Lovecraft. In his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," Lovecraft praised "The Novel of the Black Seal" and "The Novel of the White Powder" (from the episodic novel The Three Imposters) as "perhaps represent the highwater mark of Machen's skill as a terror-weaver" and used them as the basis for his own stories "Cool Air" and "The Colour Out of Space." Machen's most famous work, the 1894 novella The Great God Pan, inspired Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror," which shares many significant plot points and even gives its predecessor a shout-out. ("Great God, what simpletons! Show them Arthur Machen's Great God Pan and they'll think it a common Dunwich scandal!") More recently The Great God Pan has been said by Stephen King to be "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language" that cost him several sleepless nights and deeply influenced his 2008 novella N.

As part of my Year of Lovecraft I purchased a copy of the anthology The Three Imposters and Other Stories:Vol. 1 of the Best Weird Tales of Arthur Machen from Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu fiction line. It contains The Great God Pan, "The Inmost Light," "The Shining Pyramid," and The Three Imposters; or, The Transmutations. According to editor S.T. Joshi (a leading Lovecraft scholar and editor of the Chambers collection as well), Machen was a "religious mystic, [for whom] the triumphs of nineteenth-century science were anything but victories; instead, it seemed to him that science was coming to rule all aspects of life, even those aspects - the spiritual life and its corollary, art - where it had no place." In his 1902 treatise Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature Machen criticizes "such writers as Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackery for work that is too much under the control of the conscious reason and not sufficiently open to the wonder, mystery, and 'ecstasy' of life." Machen can perhaps be called a Dark Romantic for whom nature was a chaotic, untrammeled force of creation and destruction, of joy and madness.

Machen's concept of nature is basically horror's original Eldritch Abomination, a special type of Cosmic Horror made famous by such Lovecraftian entities as Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth. In fact, the latter is best known for its role in "The Dunwich Horror," in which the godlike entity impregnates a human woman and brings forth a monstrous half-human hybrid. The key trait of the Eldritch Abomination is that it is above and beyond our comprehension - even to see one is enough to shatter the human mind. They are rarely actively evil; rather, the havoc they wreak is indirect, akin to a human accidentally crushing some bugs while performing a mundane task. Encounters with an Eldritch Abomination are often the result of meddling in things Humanity Was Not Meant To Know, such as Dr. Raymond's experiment on Mary in The Great God Pan which would enable her to "see Pan." Originally the Greek God of Nature, Machen's Pan is the true formless form of the universe.

"We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form."

Her single glimpse of Pan drives Mary insane and, as with Lovecraft's Lavinia Whateley later on, somehow results in a pregnancy. While Wilbur Whateley was a repulsive man with tentacles, Machen's Helen Vaughan is a beautiful but sinister woman who seduces prominent men and drives them to suicide. The misogyny is blazingingly obvious: Helen, under her alias "Mrs. Beaumont," is a single, independent woman with no authoritative male attachments - no husband, father, or brother. Machen may have been racy for his time, but his portrayal of liberated female sexuality only reinforces the Victorian status quo. As Harry Markov puts it in his review of the Cthulhurotica anthology:

Sex is strength for women in “Cthulhurotica.” Their sensuality is a tool. What Everett doesn’t explain, however, is why the women in the Lovecraftian universe are ready to transition from the ‘uninitiated’ – sexually and in the sense of knowing the world – to ‘initiated’ – accepting the layers hidden within our world and coming back stronger from meeting the horrors. Well, historically speaking women were demonized because of their sexuality. Lilith supposedly slept with demons and Succubi are sex-starved demons that drain men of their life force after sex. Sirens lured men to their death with an irresistible song. Circe tried to seduce Odysseus to his death. Witches were rumored to copulate with Satan himself. In the long run, myths and legends – told by men – stigmatized women’s sexuality as sin and demonized them to a point where it’s ingrained in our subconscious collective mind. It’s why women in the Lovecraftian universe can transition and accept, whereas men fail to and become insane.

The "monstrous female," Markov argues, achieves dominance through sexual destruction. In this respect, Machen's vision of the Pan mythos seems to draw heavily on that of Bacchus/Dionysus, whose wild female followers, the maenads, tore powerful men like Pentheus to shreds with their bare hands. Women in Classical myth, I remember my professor telling us, are always associated with hysteria and madness, even in ostensibly positive portrayals such as Sophocles's Antigone, in which the titular heroine is irrationally fixated on properly burying her dead brother in defiance of all danger and dire consequence. Dido in The Aeneid is another good example. And these associations are hardly a dead trope: the second season of True Blood featured a maenad named Maryann Forrester who fed off primal emotions and was said to have been known in ancient times as Lilith, Isis, and Gaia, a Greek goddess of earth. Here once again we have a connection between a "monstrous female" and destruction, raw nature, and crazed emotional states. Maryann driving all of Bon Temps to ecstatic madness further positions her as a literal threat to civilization.**

If women are intrinsically linked to an eldritch vision of nature, then men represent restraint and civility. The characters opposing Helen Vaughan and trying to stop her (by killing her) are all male. The other Machen stories included in the anthology center on English gentlemen stumbling into various occult mysteries, ranging from arcane rituals to a particularly nightmarish version of the Fair Folk. There is a vivid contrast between "the darkness of the thicket, the dance on the mountain-top, the scenes by lonely shores, in green vineyards, by rocks and desert places" and the urbane London flat, where a man of letters and a scientist converse about cryptic encounters with the strange people of the streets. For all their emerging awareness of the dark corners of the earth, however, Machen's heroes - such as Dyson, the recurring amateur detective - maintain their cultivated aristocracy. No one even Goes Mad from the Revelation, as usually happens in Lovecraft, although they may be shaken.

Which is not to say that only women in Machen are villainous. Dr. Lipsius in The Three Imposters is a truly diabolical figure that may remind modern readers of Senator Palpatine. But even then, his victim was seduced intellectually (as opposed to sexually or emotionally) by promises of ultimate knowledge. Where women are victims, this simply transforms them into infernal gateways. Both Mary and Mrs. Cradock ("The Novel of the Black Seal") bring forth monstrous children of rape. Mrs. Black from "The Inmost Light" obediently submits to the experimentation of yet another mad doctor, this one her husband, and is turned into something no longer human which must be destroyed. A possible exception to both villainy and victimization could be Miss Lally ("Black Seal"), who is rationally skeptical of Professor Gregg's obsession with the Fair Folk. But given the twist ending of The Three Imposters that dramatically alters our perception of the preceding stories, both her example and that of Mrs. Cradock are probably nullified.

Despite my complaints, though, I really did enjoy Arthur Machen, even more so than H.P. Lovecraft! Compared to Machen's subtlety and elegance, Lovecraft comes across as little more than the pulp writer he was. The big issue I have here is one most marginalized bodies (i.e. women, people of color, the GLBTQ community) face when reading fiction: that of how to enjoy literature, especially older literature, when you're likely to encounter stereotypes and prejudicial beliefs. I agree with one gay blogger who argues that it's usually better to be erased than to see yourself portrayed in an offensive manner. Given the sheer amount of FAIL Lovecraft displayed towards minority groups, I'm actually glad female characters are practically nonexistent in his works. It comes down to how many bumps you're willing to tolerate, I suppose. Along with Chambers, Machen could use more love, though not without a critical eye.

The Great God Pan can be read here. For "The Dunwich Horror," click here.

* Yes, I wrote the TV Tropes page for Arthur Machen and supplied most of the tropes. I did the same for "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." LOL I am such a dork.
** And on the Wild Mass Guessing page for True Blood, I even argued that Maryann Forrester was Helen Vaughan. TV Tropes will ruin your life.

"the only thing worth while is the feel of the unique"

And yet the music only has to begin and suddenly everything that has been troubling one drops away and one enters the music and lives the music and travels with the music and enters that magic land where doors that had long been closed open of their own accord and the deepest and darkest things become clear and comprehensible and, if not livable-with, at least recognized and accepted.

Alas, this post is VERY LATE! Apologies!

So - Gabriel Josipovici's Moo Pak: where to begin? For 151 pages, this book sure is huge even though its first-person narrator never actually says anything. The single, ongoing paragraph is made up entirely of the musings of retired English professor Jack Toledano. Over the course of several walks around London, Toledano will expound on everything from typewriters v. word processors, friendship, postmodernism, the ancient Greeks' laments to the gods, the Holocaust, the gradual disintegration of authentic Britishness, kids these days, the soulless literary PR machine, liberal activism as the new Puritanism, his favorite writers, and finally, the novel he has been working on for the past decade, a 700-page fictionalized account of the history of Moor Park, where Jonathan Swift once lived, and which has been, at various times, a college of theology, a lunatic asylum, the code-breakers' headquarters during WWII, and a chimp research facility. For this belated post I thought I'd discuss Toledano's theories about life and art.

Moo Pak builds on many themes stemming from the concept of uniqueness, or being set apart: "It is vital, he said, not to succumb to the values of a society at large, not to be swayed by the siren voices that preach truth and reality to us." Toledano's perspective of art is a religious one that distinguishes between the "crassness and philistinism" of "the world" and the sanctity of individualistic integrity. Its priests or prophets are the great writers such as Proust, Kafka, and Cervantes who embraced their own voices. To grow cynical and deny the transcendent possibilities of art is to "sin against the Holy Ghost and that is the sin committed by so-called post modernism in all its manifestations." And yet, ironically, there is a very postmodernist element at work here. Without meaning to, Toledano slips into Baudrillard territory. The "secular" world opposes art and self-realization because it is no longer real - the same media-driven blanket has descended over everyone and everything and informed the way we think, live, and express ourselves.

But now, he said, England is rapidly becoming indistinguishable from America and soon Poland and Russia will be indistinguishable from America as well. I came to England, he said, in the last days of its real Englishness, when it was considered indecent to wear tapered trousers because only Teddy Boys wore those, and everyone drank Horlicks, when you could get any book you wanted out of the public libraries and the Third Programme would juxtapose a one-hour reading of Wallace Stevens with the latest ply by Ugo Bettit translated by Henry Reed. Since then, he said, the libraries have disintegrated for lack of funds, the Third Programme has given to way to what one might call a classical musak channel, and England has become more like America and less and less like the birthplace of Langland and Chaucer and Donne and Herbert and Pope and Swift and Woodsworth and Coleridge. . . But it is already too late, he said. It has already happened. The horror is already upon us and the only way we can fight it is to retreat into the fortress of ourselves and prepare for a long siege.

Returning to this topic some pages later, Toledano asserts that life must be lived authentically in order for one to truly know oneself. Living teaches you who you are and there is no substitute for real experience. Not psychoanalysis and certainly not the passive reception of media.

The world is all one today, he said, and there is nowhere to escape to. Radio and television have ruined us, he said, it would be quite unnatural of course to shut our ears and eyes to them and yet it is equally unnatural to try and cope morally and psychologically with the horrors they report day after day and week after week.

As such, modern society is obsessed with suffering because it is allegedly "more real" than well-being. In fact, Toledano believes, too many hacks are published solely because of their tragic histories. Now at this point I think he's backed himself into a corner. It is certainly true that an affluent suburban American is as real a person as a Bosnian refugee or Congolese rape victim. And yes, being a survivor doesn't automatically make you a good writer. But isn't it important that we hear those latter two stories? That we are made aware life experiences we can't begin to imagine? I'm don't think Toledano even fully establishes just what he means by "authentic" living, but it's implied throughout Moo Pak that it involves a great deal of art consumption. Which, to me, is an extremely privileged position. Basically, he's asking that marginalized peoples - those most vulnerable to the many forms of suffering - be silenced because they don't meet his standards of artistic creation. This from someone who also rambles about being intellectually persecuted by academic activists and the disciples of postmodernism.

But I think Toledano is meant to be an anachronism - an old man out of touch with current attitudes. It does tie into his perspective of himself as an outsider (ironic, in light of the above) due to his national/ethnic background and literary tastes. Toledano is a Sephardic Jew who was born in France but spent most of his childhood in Egypt, following the outbreak of World War II. Although he misses the sense of "belonging" he felt in Egypt, he also recalls that,

The day I set foot in England, . . . I began to come alive. It was the thirteenth of September 1956 and apparently it was the first fine summer's day that year. From that day on, I began to recognize the value of not belonging. I began to flourish and to feel myself expanding, discovering what I could do.

The roots of his present-day persecution complex are found in the uprooted childhood of a refugee whose minority group was expelled from two countries. Now I began to understand him better. Toledano's history informs how he reacts to and perceives the world - as does everyone's history. Although Moo Pak drifts all over the place and into a whole multitude of topics, I see the bulk of it as Toledano's articulation and exploration of a feeling that has haunted him since he was a boy: that he surrounded by hostile and/or alien forces who demand his intellectual and cultural conformity (assimilation).

For a long time, he said, I tried to go my own way and to teach them the values I myself believed in, but there comes a point when you realise you cannot win the war. You may win a skirmish here and there or even a battle there, but you cannot win the war. In the interests of sanity, he said, it is better to get out then, before you are ground into powder by the unthinking unseeing unfeeling forces ranged against you.

Moo Pak initially comes across as merely a catalog of scholarly digressions. There is a psychological base to it, however, one that shapes Toledano's thoughts regardless of where they end up. Moo Pak is more than a collection of ideas; it is a portrait as well, a sort of memoir as monologue, if that makes any sense. Gabriel Josipovici takes a motley grab bag of subjects and unifies them in a very subtle manner that allows his book to flow seamlessly from one point to another without turning into a motley grab-bag of arguments, ideas, speculations, and so forth. Definitely an intriguing read. (The single-paragraph format isn't nearly as annoying as you'd think.)

And thus, I return to real blogging. The state of things around here for the past week and a half has been sorry indeed.

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Moo Pak was our Unstructured Group Read for the month of June. Please feel free to join us at any time! You can find a complete book list here.

Other June participants include:

Claire
Emily
Frances
Richard
Sarah

Past selections:

March: Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana
April: Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual
May: Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels

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Bad, Bad Blood

I've got a new post up at Slaves of Golconda. It's a group blog/book club I participate in that "meets" every two months to discuss the selection we had voted on from a list of candidates. This time it was Lorna Sage's award-winning autobiography Bad Blood. Unfortunately, I didn't finish it. It started to bore me and I was already weighed down by Tender Morsels, which was also dragging. So I decided to cut my losses and post about the parts of Bad Blood I did read.

Also check out: my October post for Susan Hill's Woman in Black, which I loved.

A Unicorn Grows in London

A Kid for Two Farthings
By Wolf Mankowitz
128 pages
Bloomsbury Publishing
November 2009
Original Pub. Date: 1953





'Every animal when it was made by the Almighty was given one extra-special present, . . . But the unicorn got the most special present of all. He was given a magic horn which could cure anything anybody was ever sick from. It could grant anybody's wish - straight off.'

A Kid for Two Farthings by Wolf Mankowitz has been recently reissued as part of the Bloomsbury Group, a series of out-of-print novels from the early twentieth century specially chosen by writers, bloggers, and readers. The books also have beautiful vintage-inspired covers that will surely delight any print junkie.

Best known for his work on the early James Bond films, Wolf Mankowitz was born in 1924 on Fashion Street in Spitalfields, London. The Jewish community where he grew up is also the setting for A Kid for Two Farthings, where six-year-old Joe lives with his mother above a workshop owned by Mr. Kandinsky the trouser-maker. With Joe's father away working in Africa, Mr. Kandinsky has become a surrogate parent of sorts who frequently entertains Joe with fantastic stories. According to Mr. Kandinsky, unicorns once flourished until they were hunted nearly to extinction for their horns, which could grant wishes and were worth ₤100,000. The remaining unicorns found refuge in Africa, although some may still be found out in the world, ready to bring good fortune. Mr. Kandinsky, for example, could use a Superheat Steam Presser, while his assistant Shmule needs to win an upcoming wrestling match to buy his fiancée a ring. And Joe still doesn't know when his father is coming back.

Then Joe unexpectedly finds a unicorn for sale at the local animal market. Maybe now everyone's dreams will come true.

Actually, Africana is a small goat but Joe's innocence transforms the sickly little animal into a magnificent stallion from an exotic fairy tale. This fanciful perception is also reflective of how Joe, as a very young child, views his world at large. Although the tough character of his neighborhood is made clear, its implications often go over Joe's head. For example, little work simply means that his mother and Mr. Kandinsky have more time for him, while Mr. Kandinsky's story of the unicorns can actually be seen as an allegory of the Holocaust. Still, it is obvious that Joe is learning about his environment. After witnessing an old homeless man die in the street, Joe understands that he no longer has to worry about the "cannibal king" who had seemingly threatened Africana several days ago.

This double perspective gives A Kid for Two Farthings a particular charm that will appeal to both kids and adults alike. Children will enjoy the simple story of a boy's imagination and desire to help his friends with the assistance of a unicorn. Older readers, meanwhile, will emphasize with the difficulties faced by the residents of Fashion Street and may also be interested in the social history aspects. The setting actually reminded me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and taught me that the immigrant ghetto of the early twentieth century is not a uniquely American phenomenon.

Overall, I would place A Kid for Two Farthings alongside Harry Potter and the films of Miyazaki as children's entertainment that parents can appreciate as well. It's an adorable, poignant little book and I am very glad that Bloomsbury has given modern readers the opportunity to experience it.

Wolf Mankowitz adapted A Kid for Two Farthings into a screenplay. The film was made 1955 and directed by Carol Reed. Here is part one of the complete film available on YouTube.





Click here for Frances's review.

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Review Copy

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One Epic to Rule Them All, Part Trois

'Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!'

'But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.'


So much WIN! I love that part. There was a prophecy that the Witch-king of the Nazgûl ("Ringwraiths") could not be slain by any man. So he was killed by a woman and a hobbit (Merry). It is a true Crowning Moment of Awesome.

So anyway, here I am, almost a week late for the conclusion of the Lord of the Rings read-along, which began in January with The Hobbit and which I didn't even know about it until my initial post for The Fellowship of the Ring. My timing was pure coincidence. I hadn't planned on reading the other two books so soon but was encouraged to do so by the news that other bloggers were reading them too. I found that I loved The Two Towers even more and was equally wowed by The Return of the King. With the trilogy complete, I would like to extend my thanks to Theresa of Shelf Love for introducing me to the read-along.

The Return of the King continued with several of the themes established in the previous volumes: nostalgia, environmentalism, metafiction (an epic about epics), good v. evil, and dark v. light. I would like to talk about that last one.

My issue is not that Tolkien's entire cast is white - after all, LOTR was inspired by European mythology. It would be rather odd to open a novel about a world based on feudal Japan or ancient China and find that most of the characters are non-Asian. And I don't know the history of the dark-light dichotomy frequently used in Western discourses on good/evil, so I couldn't tell you if it's found in other cultures or if it predated extensive European contact with other peoples. But I feel compelled to discuss something that bothered me about LOTR, much as I otherwise enjoyed it.

As I noted briefly at the end of my last post on The Two Towers, Sauron's human allies are described as 'dark,' 'swarthy,' and 'black.' One, viewed up close by Sam in TTT, has 'black plaits of hair' and a 'brown hand.' According to Merry, the evil Men he and Pippin saw in the Ent's battle with Saruman were mostly 'dark-haired' and several even had 'goblin-faces, sallow, leering, squint-eyed.' Actually, he concludes, they resembled orcs. Now compare that to Faramir's glowing description of their allies the Rohirrim as 'tall men and women, valiant both alike, golden-haired, bright-eyed, and strong; they remind us of the youth of Men, as they were in the Elder days.' He goes on to explain that the Rohirrim may be related to one of the Three Houses of Men to which also belonged the legendary Númenóreans, who are also considered the High Men or Men of the West. In the middle are the Men of the Twilight, and on the bottom there are the Wild Men, or the Men of Darkness.

Orcs are also 'black.' In one of his letters, Tolkien further characterized orcs as ". . . squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." The "Racism in Tolkien's Works" article on the Tolkien Gateway website, while admitting the insensitivity of his words, tries to argue that Tolkien's disclaimer of "to Europeans" is an acknowledgment of his own cultural bias, while "degraded and repulsive versions" means that he is not referring to actual "Mongol-types." I'm not buying it. You can't take a blatantly racist statement and then try to explain it away by nitpicking certain phrases. The fact still remains that Tolkien sees his agents of evil as having physical characteristics associated in the real world with people of color, even referring explicitly to Asians (using a now-archaic term).

(Peter Jackson, meanwhile, made sure that the armor and symbols utilized by the human villains in the movies bore no resemblance to those of any real-life culture.)

Tolkien vehemently denied any racism and I don't think LOTR's racially problematic aspects were something he did on purpose, just as I don't think Stephenie Meyer intended for Twilight to be quite that sexist. Sometimes our prejudices and misguided beliefs just manifest themselves unconsciously. I personally was able to look beyond LOTR's trouble spots and enjoy the story, or maybe that's just white privilege talking? To this day, fantasy as a whole remains pretty whitewashed and the problem of "dark v. light" has not gone away. According to Tami, an African-American fan of contemporary urban fantasy, the speculative nature of the genre freely invites a re-imagination and restructuring of society, yet most authors simply end up reproducing the hierarchies and biases of the real world. She goes on:

. . . [T]he aforementioned series feint at subverting mainstream beauty standards--heroines may be ginger-haired, rather than blonde, short rather than statuesque, and much is made of their supposed physical "imperfections" (Rachel Morgan's curly hair and freckles, Merry Gentry's large breasts). But important female characters are generally white (or white identified in the case of Anita Blake), slim and young. And paragraphs are spent on the description and worship of their pale skin and its beauty. (The villains in Hamilton's Merry Gentry series delight at threatening to mar the heroine's pure, white skin.) Whiteness becomes fetish. Darkness is often equated with menace.

The Lord of the Rings, of course, is a tradition-bound tale set in a land based on medieval England and inspired by the legends of bygone eras. It is not, for example, True Blood, in which we are asked to imagine, based on real-life civil rights movements, what would happen if vampires were to "come out of the coffin." LOTR, like other works of high fantasy, can be thought of as an "old story." It recalls the grand myths of the past and relies on timeworn tropes such as the heroic journey, larger-than-life feats of strength and daring, fantastic creatures, and the threat of evil outsiders intruding and invading the homeland.

Beyond the environmental message (most old epics and romances such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight depict nature as dangerous and untamed), LOTR is really not a modern book. Tolkien said very clearly that he did not intend for it to be allegorical. As such, while writing LOTR I don't think he ever had to consider the new issues of race, identity, representation, and feminism that were coming to the forefront of his own era. I am not saying that LOTR is innocent or naive or superficial. It is a powerful achievement that deals with the universal themes of friendship, loyalty, courage, death, and heroism. But it also looks back to a more "glorious" past, before, as Elrond put in Fellowship, 'in the wearing of the swift years of Middle-earth the line of Meneldil son of Anárion failed, and the Tree withered, and the blood of the Númenóreans became mingled with that of lesser men.' In short, LOTR really doesn't engage those new questions that arose in the twentieth century. Tolkien simply does not seem to have had any reason to challenge his own assumptions on race (and gender - female characters don't have much of a role, other than Éowyn, Galadriel, and maybe Shelob). And that shows in his books, unfortunately.

Did that make any sense? This whole thing is a complicated matter and I think a better-read Tolkien fan could probably quash me here. What's your opinion? Am I pulling stuff out of the air or am I making a good argument? Discuss!

Lastly, this month's host, Maree of just add books, had some mid-month questions for us. Of course I'm only just getting to them now:

If this is your first time reading LOTR, how are you finding it? Are you falling in love with Middle Earth?

Yes, this is my first time. I had long disdained the genre of fantasy, finding it silly and cliché-ridden. I mean, I like Gothic literature and God knows most of that borders on self-parody, but I never, ever saw myself willingly reading a book about elves, dwarves, wizards, and magic. But then came the LOTR movies, which I absolutely loved. It took me a couple of years, but I eventually decided to pick up The Fellowship of the Ring and see how compared to the film version (which I saw three times while it was still in theaters). Truly amazing. Of course, LOTR paved the way for Todd Newton's The Ninth Avatar, which I reviewed recently for Trapdoor Books. That was my second fantasy read.

How do you feel, when you close the end of the last part; after Sam's words on the last page? Are you sad it's over, nostalgic? Looking for your next read already?

Sam's words were perfect. 'Well, I'm back.' It was fitting that The Return of the King does not have a stereotypical fairy-tale ending. Certainly, everyone is quite happy, but as I noted in my post on The Two Towers, the trilogy as a whole has a very elegiac tone. There's a sense that something is ending and something unknown is beginning. The Elves are departing, the Ents mourn the loss of the Entwives, and there are recollections of an earlier, grander time. In fact, I think it was Sam who best represents the character of Middle-earth. He is a humble hobbit sent from his rustic home in the Shire into the great unknown on a dangerous and seemingly hopeless mission. He is a rural gardener forced to face down the legions of a Dark Lord. And yet, through it all, Sam accepts his responsibility out of friendship and loyalty to Frodo, keeping hope alive by musing about the great tale that will immortalize their deed. Sam, to me, represents innocence. Not in a childlike way, but as a kindly little hobbit who values the simple things in life and will fight to the end to see goodness, happiness, and love preserved for the coming generations. The ending of TROK is bittersweet. The good guys win, but Frodo is irrevocably damaged by his experiences and must leave with the Elves.

What's your favourite scene in ROTK?

Éowyn! (See above.)




Also, click here for some Arwen awesomeness that, sadly, was not in the book.

Update: I really hate to bring up Twilight again, but I just found this great two-part post covering similar issues in Stephenie Meyer's portrayal of vampires and werewolves. Here is Part 1 and Part 2.

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Other LOTR read-along participants:

Beth Fish Reads
Clare
Maree
Theresa

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One Epic to Rule Them All, Part Deux

'Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We're in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: "Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring!" And they'll say: "Yes, that's one of my favourite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn't he, dad?" "Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that's saying a lot."'

In my previous post about The Fellowship of the Ring I discussed some of the metafictional aspects of the work. The Lord of the Rings is noted for the embedded songs, tales, and speeches which correspond with and add to the action of the main plot. Here in The Two Towers, for instance, King Théoden of Rohan, upon hearing about the Ents' battle with Saruman, is amazed that children's tales told around the campfire are seemingly coming to life. 'And now the songs have come down among us out of strange places,' he says, 'and walk visible under the Sun.' The trilogy, I observed, is a story about storytelling; it is a conscious attempt to write an epic or new mythology by referring to the time-honored forms and elements of the Grand Saga found in many cultures. In that sense, LOTR can be compared to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which I also read this month), as a play about plays that expands on Shakespeare's famous axiom that "all the world's a stage." Both recognize and refer to themselves as works of art (artifice).

That theme of metafiction is present in The Two Towers as well, but there is also a strong environmental message developing here. Although Tolkien stated that he hated allegory and did not wish for his books to be read as such, he nevertheless presents a literal black-and-white contrast between the harmonious relationship that the Free Peoples of Middle-earth have with their beautiful lands and the ruin and corruption of the lands occupied by Sauron.

They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing - unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. 'I feel sick,' said Sam. Frodo did not speak.

Previously we had been introduced to the Ents (tree-shepherds) and their anger at the Orcs for cutting down their beloved trees and laying waste to vast tracts of unspoiled forest. In both The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, trees are presented as intelligent beings capable of thought and feeling. In fact, they often despise sentient animal life for the intrusion and destruction frequently wrought upon forests. It is said by several characters knowledgeable of ancient lore that the woods of Middle-earth used to immense, similar to how we are told that, before the arrival of Europeans, a squirrel could travel from Delaware to New York without touching ground.

LOTR's concern with the dignity and preservation of nature (particularly Treebeard's tale of the loss of the Entwives and overall centuries-long decline of the Ents) is further bound with a larger motif also connected to the trilogy's self-awareness of itself as a literary epic. Several works of Classical literature, such as The Iliad and Ovid's Metamorphoses, refer back to an older time in which things were better than they are now: peace reigned, heroes were grander, and humans reached loftier heights. The Greek poet Hesiod's Works and Days established the "Ages of Man," which begins with the Golden Age - a Garden of Eden in which humans mingled freely with the gods - and progressively devolves until we reach the present era, the Iron Age, where strife is common and people must toil to reap bounty from the land. Similarly, in the first two book of LOTR, the old greatness and prosperity of Gondor is recalled, as is the stronger relationship once had between Elves and Men. Explains Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring:

'In the South the realm of Gondor long endured; and for a while its splendor grew, recalling somewhat the might of Númenor, ere it fell. High towers that people built, and strong places, and havens of many ships; and the winged crown of the Kings of Men was held in awe by folk of many tongues. Their chief city was Osgiliath, Citadel of the Stars, through the midst of which the River flowed. And Minas Ithil they built, Tower of the Rising Moon, eastward upon a shoulder of the Mountains of Shadow; and westward at the feet of the White Mountains Minas Anor they made, Tower of the Setting Sun. There in the courts of the King grew a white tree, from the seed of that tree which Isildur brought over the deep waters, and the seed of that tree came from Eressëa, and before that out of the Uttermost West in the Day before days when the world was young.

'But in the wearing of the swift years of Middle-earth the line of Meneldil, son of Anárion failed, and the Tree withered, and the blood of the Númenoreans became mingled with that of lesser men. Then the watch upon the walls of Mordor slept, and dark things crept back into Gorgoroth. And on a time evil things came forth, and they took Minas Ithil and abode in it, and they made it into a place of dread; and it is called Minas Morgul, the Tower of Sorcery.'

When Sam and Frodo eventually reach Minas Morgul on their way to Mordor, it is heavily marked by the same waste and decay that characterizes all of Sauron's territory, except those newly conquered.

Even on a smaller scale, there is a very elegiac, nostalgic tone throughout LOTR. Even before Sauron's reemergence, the Elves, the wisest and most beautiful of the Free Peoples, were already in the process of leaving Middle-earth and surrendering its dominion to humans. The evil forces of Sauron are not only physically manifested in nature but also in a sort of corruption of the path of life itself. Of the adventure stories he had been told growing up, Sam Gamgee says that,

'I used to think they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting, and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folks seem to have just landed in them, usually - their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on - and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, although not quite the same - like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of tale we've fallen into?'

No one really seeks out danger and possible death. No one really wants to be caught up in war of Good v. Evil, with Evil seeming to have the upper hand and the fate of myriad innocent lives resting in one's shoulders. Many characters in LOTR lament the turn events have taken and look back to a lost peace, as well as ahead to happier times as a beacon of hope in moments of gravest peril, even if their present plight forms the basis of what will be another great saga. 'If ever beyond hope you return to the land of the living and we re-tell our tales,' says Faramir to Frodo, 'sitting by a wall in the sun, laughing at old grief, you shall tell me then.' The Free Peoples differ from Sauron and his allies in that they take this fight reluctantly as the defenders of Good. The forces of darkness start wars for power and conquest; their opponents, by contrast, are the stalwart preservers - of peace, of nature, of freedom.

In short, The Two Towers continues a great work of fiction that never ceases to hold the reader's attention. It is such straightforward storytelling and yet its themes are ancient. As the middle book The Two Towers is neither beginning or end, but nor is it merely filler. We continued the action from The Fellowship of the Ring and have set the stage for The Return of the King. And onward!

There is nevertheless a troubling racial aspect that becomes even more apparent in The Two Towers. Sauron's human allies are at different times described as "dark," "swarthy," and "black." Also refer back to Elrond's words about how 'the blood of the Númenoreans became mingled with that of lesser men,' as though purity of race is somehow vital to the preservation of virtue. Evil is also frequently portrayed as hereditary. When questioned, Tolkien always vehemently denied any racism, but you'd have to be pretty oblivious not to notice some very problematic areas in LOTR. Here is a great, balanced examination of this issue.

Check out the rest of the Lord of the Rings read-along.

The Whole World's a Stage, Part Deux

Yesterday, Sunday, February 28th, was the third meeting of Padfoot and Prongs's Good Books Club. Padfoot and I were joined by Lula O. and Janefan for a discussion of Thomas Stoppard's 1968 play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, which tells the tragic tale of its bumbling title characters. Minor comic relief in Shakespeare's Hamlet who met a fatal end, Ros & Guil now take center stage in their very own quest to make sense of the grand events that seem to be sweeping them along. Not only have they been assigned to find out what's eating the Prince of Denmark, they also have to deal with that troop of actors whose play mirrors the plot of Hamlet. What could it all mean???

Padfoot and Lula were convinced that Ros & Guil were already dead from the start. (Their interpretation of two characters, I noted, was akin to the role of the Fisher King in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land.") It wasn't just the title, Padfoot and Lula argued, but the odd vibes they got from the opening scene, with Ros & Guil's ruminations on probability and divine intervention and the impression that they had been playing coin toss - and landing on heads every single time - practically forever. I still wasn't convinced. I countered that the play was leading up to their deaths, in accordance with the overarching themes of art, life, order, and absurdity. "There's a design at work in all art - surely you know that?," says the Player. "Events must play themselves out to aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion." The point of the plot, I felt, was that Ros & Guil were trying to understand a series of causes and determine what the effect of would be on them (death).

We arrived at a compromise: that Ros & Guil were in a limbo of sorts. Neither alive or dead. You got the feeling that the drawing of the curtains did not mean the end - that Ros & Guil were doomed to start the whole thing over again until they finally figured shit out. But they are, after all, characters in a play. So it's basically a metatheatrical casualty loop that Lula compared to "one of those Star Trek episodes." A play within a play within a play, with an invisible scriptwriter somewhere, or, more accurately, a variation of Voltaire's "cosmic clockmaker" who got the whole thing rolling and then walked away. "Wheels have been set in motion," Guil, the more sensible of the two, observes, "and they have their own pace, to which we are . . . condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order."He then recalls a Chinese philosopher who had dreamed he was a butterfly and spent the rest of his life wondering if he was a butterfly dreaming that he was a philosopher. You have to envy his certainty, Guil concluded.

Meanwhile, Padfoot was properly horrified that I had seen neither the Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead movie nor The Princess Bride! I promised to rectify the situation as soon as possible. Although I can't quite bring myself to be all that enthusiastic about a kid's fantasy story, I really must see the film version of this, which was directed by none other than Thomas Stoppard himself. Plays really are meant to be seen, not read, and having already seen Hamlet onstage, I look forward to the translation of Stoppard's words into acting.

Up next: Brave New World, yet another twentieth century Shakespeare reference!

Previous Selections:
Mother Night
Something Wicked This Way Comes

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The rest of the group was quite silly over Gary Oldman, who played Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films. So while we're on the subject of Shakespeare and sci-fi/fantasy actors, I give you Ian McDiarmid in the BBC's 1979 production of Macbeth, also starring Ian McKlellen (Gandalf in the LOTR films) in the title role.



Can you believe that cute little redhead became Emperor Palpatine???

Woolf in Winter: The Waves

This is a repost of an essay I did on Virginia Woolf's The Waves in college. Yeah, it's a bit much - I really could've toned down the florid prose. But my professor was Joanna Scott and I think I was trying to impress her.

I kept thinking of T.S. Eliot as I read Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves. In the midst of the gaiety surrounding Percival’s imminent arrival, Louis can only think “Death and again death” as he imagines with Rhoda a bloody, bacchanalian dance round a pagan fire. The blend of the surreal and the mundane into a waking, blasted dreamscape; whispers of past grandeur adrift in the disillusion and decay of the present; the starkly beautiful imagery – “Nothing again nothing” is all one of Eliot’s narrators can come up with in response to a thoroughly Modernist backdrop. Woolf, of course, was an entirely different writer with a singularly illuminating stroke that could bring to full life the slightest daily motions. The Waves, first published in 1931, essentially gathers bits of nothing – the aggregate aspects of human life that always seem so trivial – and creates an interlocked something that continually morphs into six separate beings named Bernard, Rhoda, Louis, Jinny, Susan, and Neville.

It is not a conventional novel. The story is told through a series of inner monologues that frequently ascend to pure, abstract poetry. Indeed, the book is at times reminiscent of the atonality of a Stravinsky piece: seemingly meaningless, felt rather than intellectually identified. Or, as Neville bluntly puts it: “Much is sheer nonsense.” Yet Woolf simply wishes to give rise to a moment or an emotion in a manner that makes perfect sense without the candor of standard prose. She wants to go still deeper than the interior lives of her six characters to what lies beneath waking perception and its subliminal underpinnings; she wants to get at those underlying waves that unite myriad mortals in every motion of life. “‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’ – but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?” Rhoda wonders in the midst of a concert audience. “. . . The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares.” What Woolf means by this passage is left precisely unclear, and yet it is known that the death of Percival, the mutual friend of the group, has somehow enabled Rhoda to see beyond the mundane.

In other words, the ties between people, even those who are gone, seem to have an uplifting effect, as demonstrated by the very organization of The Waves. The monologues combine to create an entire novel as they build on, reinforce, or contradict one another. That is how the reader comes to know Percival: through the impressions he makes upon his friends and the interpretations they form and how these all interact. Other times, however, the speeches stand alone, especially those of Bernard, to offer insight into the rest. “Am I not, as I walk,” he speculates, “trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy, which, unmoored as I am from a private being, bid me embrace these engrossed flocks; these errand-boys and furtive and fugitive girls who, . . . look in at shop-windows?” Their final expression is the waves. Periodically throughout the book, there is a cut to a beach somewhere outside the inner universe of six lifelong friends. As the day dawns and dies the light brightens and dims, the waves weave, crash, and drift in a natural elucidation of the ever-evolving bonds between humans in society. The novel covers decades, yet these interludes breeze through one solitary day. It is as though, in the eternal scheme of things, that is the length of a single lifetime. Percival dies, but his memory lives on in Bernard, Rhoda, Jinny, Neville, and Louis. The individual is departed, yet that intertwined web will always remain.

And it wasn’t just the echoes of Eliot. There was something very American about The Waves that seemed to hearken back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. One imagined an “Over-soul” from which each being was but a drop that had dripped away; the other sang of himself as embodying a vast and variegated multitude of individuals who yet coalesce into one nation. Woolf, of course, was writing one hundred years later, in England, in the wake of a world war and an economic depression. Whitman’s liberal exuberance is appropriately lacking: there is a stylized weariness and uncertainty clouding The Waves that persists to the very end, an aesthetic melancholy Woolf shared with her contemporary Eliot.

An aged Bernard leans on a fence overlooking rolling hills swathed in winter. “Life has destroyed me,” he reflects. “No echo comes when I speak, no varied words.” He becomes Emerson’s transparent eyeball. But he does not experience, as Emerson once did, the everlasting power “Universal Being” flowing through him. He is not a “part or particle of God,” a receptor of the transcendent Word. The landscape is gone, the woods a barren shadowland, and “I saw on a winding road in a dust dance the groups we had made, how they came together, how they ate together, how they met in this room or that.” Having spent his life in search of some overarching, ideal platonic truth, Bernard has come to it at last – it is this uncertainty. Yet is there certainty even in uncertainty? Does there yet still remain something out there among the grasping, coveting, laboring, losing, winning, breathing horde of humanity that is nevertheless forever intertwined within the branches of that deep-rooted Tree of Life? He swears to find it. “And in me too the wave rises,” Bernard concludes. “. . . I am aware once more of a new desire, something beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. . . Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”

I can only leave you with more Eliot:

Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

A big thank-you to Claire for hosting!

Click here for Mrs. Dalloway.

One Epic to Rule Them All

As soon as he set foot upon the far bank of Silverlode a strange feeling had come upon him, and it deepened as he walked on into the Naith: it seemed to him that he had stepped over a bridge of time into a corner of the Elder Days, and was now walking in a world that was no more. In Rivendell there was memory of ancient things; in Lórien the ancient things still lived on in the waking world. Evil had been seen and heard there, sorrow had been known; the Elves feared and distrusted the world outside: but on the land of Lórien no shadow lay.

By now just about everyone has seen the film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson's masterpieces were most people's first exposure to the trilogy that defines the word EPIC; not surprising in a culture that has seen a steady decrease in the patience and imagination demanded of the reader and come to rely more on the quick, visceral, and largely passive experience of the blockbuster movie. (With apologies to serious film buffs: I know Hollywood does not define the industry.) But, I think, there was something else at work there too, which has become more clear to me upon finishing the book The Fellowship of the Ring. It's one thing to make an empty special effects extravaganza (like the Star Wars prequels), and quite another to produce something like the books and movies of The Lord of the Rings, both of which possess something a whole lot deeper than simply WHAM! BANG! ZOOM!

They're great, classic storytelling.

For all Tokien's intricate world-building and the effect of having lived through two global conflicts, there is something ancient and universal at work here. The grand story of a band of heroes battling and triumphing over a destructive, intrusive force is an old one found in many cultures worldwide. It's the unadorned tale of Good v. Evil, one easily translated into just about any social context. The Lord of the Rings has an almost metafictional element to it - like it's an epic about epic. Glorious deeds and great heroism of the past are frequently recalled, with songs sung and poetry recited to their memory. The speech act - first introduced to me in The Iliad and The Odyssey - plays a prominent role, and the impression is of characters who are aware that they're characters in a mythical setting. Frodo's quest, after all, arises from a chapter in Bilbo's book, telling of the time he stole a magic ring while on his own adventure. The ensuing journey is not only a physical one through Middle Earth towards Mordor, but also a didactic one through song and legend that slowly comes to reveal spiritual truths about darkness and light.

Despite his panoramic themes, however, Tolkien's prose is mostly straightforward and characterized by an "Anglo-Saxon dryness" that recalls stuffy Oxford lecture halls even while describing breathtaking scenery and all sorts of fantastic creatures (such as the totally awesome Balrog). Though difficult to get into, its cultured, conservative tone is nevertheless well-suited to the narrative. The restrained style does not distract from the magnitude of the story itself, and the scattered moments of lyrical grace stand out all the more.

They had not gone far before the sun sank behind the westward heights and great shadows crept down the mountain-sides. Dusk veiled their feet, and mist rose in the hollows. Away in the east the evening light lay pale upon the dim lands of distant plain and wood. . .

It was dark. Deep night had fallen. There were many clear stars, but the fast-waning moon could not be seen until late. Gimli and Frodo were at the rear, walking softly and not speaking, listening for any sound upon the road behind. At length Gimli broke the silence.

Said C.S. Lewis: "Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron."

Comparing book to movie, I'm still not sure which I prefer, especially since both mediums have their own unique appeal. Peter Jackson was able to actually show us, but there is something about Tolkien's telling that seems singular to the novel-form. Maybe it's the demands the written word makes on the imagination, insisting that the reader pay attention and draw upon their own stores to fuel the novel's imagery. Cinematic time limits are another concern. Unlike directors and screenwriters, the author is free to roam and meander as long as they please, and the result is often a much more multilayered narrative. I am not a fantasy fan at all but being drawn into Tolkien's world was a wonderful experience and I hope to begin The Two Towers sometime in the near future. In the meantime, I can take a couple hours and just watch the movies again!

Now tell me a story.



Update: I just found out about a Lord of the Rings read-along that I caught up with just in time! They read The Fellowship of the Ring for the month of February and will be doing The Two Towers in March. I'm in!

Woolf in Winter: Mrs. Dalloway

Beauty anyhow. Not the crude beauty of the eye. It was not beauty pure and simple - Bedford Palace leading into Russell Square. It was straightness and emptiness of course; the symmetry of a corridor; but it was also windows lit up, a piano, a gramophone sounding; a sense of pleasure-making hidden, but now and again emerging, when, through the uncurtained windows, the window left open, one saw the parties sitting over tables, young people slowly circling, conversations between men and women, maids idly looking out (a strange comment, theirs, when work was done), stockings drying on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants. Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life.

Here I am a day late for the Mrs. Dalloway edition of Woolf in Winter, hosted by Sarah of what we have here is a failure to communicate. Grrrr. I had to work all day too, and we can't use the Internet except on lunch break, not even to check email. And my desk faces in to everyone else's, so I can't even sneak it. Now I feel like I missed a party. Darn darn darn. It's all Octavia Butler's fault.

So anyway - Mrs. Dalloway! The problem with Virginia Woolf is that I never know where to begin with her. This is my third Woolf novel, following Orlando and The Waves, and once again I am left feeling confused. I just don't understand how it is that a woman who could write so beautifully and creatively about the "infinite richness" of life, who could articulate the inarticulate, who could link one character's internal world to another's and weave such an intricate tapestry - how could this woman have committed suicide? Of course there is a darkness to Mrs. Dalloway in the form of Septimus Smith's vividly-rendered mental illness, but the overall impression is that of an author in love with life and deeply understanding of the human soul. This isn't Poe and his overwrought masochism or Plath and her foreboding verses. Every Virginia Woolf novel I read is an homage to the Human Infinite.

I find myself comparing Mrs. Dalloway to The Waves. Though their stories differ, both use the stream-of-conscious method to blend multiple characters into one book-long chorus. It's not a collective consciousness (like some hive mind or the Borg). I'd say it's an omniscient perspective, like some all-seeing force has stepped back and is observing people think, move, interact, and grow old - like someone standing on a mountaintop and looking down at all the trees, lakes, crags, and the tiny village in the distance. In The Waves, however, the characters are already bound together as a group of schoolmates who remain close throughout their lives. By contrast, the two pivotal figures of Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway, never meet and never will. Mrs. Dalloway never even learns his name, only that he is a "young man who had killed himself." And yet Woolf is able to show us how they are connected, and how the news of "the young man who had killed himself" brings an odd measure of peace and self-understanding to Mrs. Dalloway, alone in the midst of her grand party.

It's like "the butterfly effect" of chaos theory: the idea that small and seemingly insignificant actions within a system can nevertheless have large-scale, long-term effects on other aspects of the system. I think part of what Woolf is asking us to do here is consider our place within society and what we do in it. Mrs. Dalloway the novel really doesn't offer us any transcendental truths or metaphysical notions of the cosmic and the divine. Clarissa Dalloway has a sudden vision of a man desperate to preserve his own happiness, and then realizes that her own life has been nothing but a performance. It is her individual truth, nothing more. But most people's lives are not epic.

Mrs. Dalloway is life and life only. It is about the rhythm of the everyday and slow, subconscious dance that takes place as people live and work together. That's it. But we are large, we contain multitudes.

"The Woman with the Wasted Face"

Just in time for Halloween, I have a post up on the Slaves of Golconda. Our book selection for this month was Susan Hill's Woman in Black. I chose to focus on the self-referential aspects of the work - that it is a ghost story that knows it's a ghost story. It is very creepy and very atmospheric and just perfect for the season.

24-Hour Read-a-Thon: 1:00 a.m. (Update #6)

I had four cups of coffee at 8:30 p.m. and I'm TIRED!

On the upside, I did get through the first 60 of 120 pages of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. As far as crazy Renaissance English goes, it's not nearly as bad as "The Terrors of the Night," although it does have its moments of incomprehension. I think what also helps is how funny it is. It is a picaresque concerning the misadventures of one Jack Wilton, a rogue, knave, cavalier, expert gambler, woer of women, fountain of wit. He remorselessly sends men to ruin with his trickery, including one particularly hated army captain, whom Jack convinces to go over to the French lines as a spy and assassin, in hopes that the French will either kill him or he would be flogged and sent back to the English in disgrace.

This confession could not choose but move them all to laughter, in that he made it as light a matter to kill their King and come back, as to go to Islington and eat a mess of cream and come home again; nay, and besides he protested that he had no other intention, as if that were not enough to hang him.

I got as far as the part where Wilton's love-sick traveling companion challenges the Court of Florence to defend the beauty of his Florentine-born lady back in England. Then the narrative started to drag with drawn-out description of battle armor.

Unfortunately, the coffee has also made it difficult for me to concentrate, so for the time being I will go back to poetry, this time Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot.

On . . . Peasants!

Unfortunately, whenever I hear the word "peasant" I think of an article I read in The Onion called "Peasant Wedding Gets Out of Hand," in which "a drunken melee . . . [leaves] several dead and the town's butter churn overturned." It's very amusing in its depiction of medieval peasants as a ribald and absurdly picaresque lot whose lives are marked by periodic violence on the scale of the ridiculous, much like the farcical marriage of Perseus and Andromeda in Book V of Ovid's Metamorphoses. I know it's wrong but I've never had much opportunity to amend this position owing to the lack of peasant-related material in my life. In studying American history I have come across sailors, slaves, and commoners – particularly in Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic – but, as John Berger notes in his introduction to his 1979 novel Pig Earth (first in the Into Their Labors trilogy), the United States has never had actual peasants due to "the rate of economic development based on monetary exchange was too rapid and too total."

Some might argue that the Jeffersonian yeoman farmers might be approximated to peasants, but these self-confident republicans, in my view, are far removed from the rather passive class of "survivors" described by Berger. There are two definitions of the word "survivor," he asserts. The first is someone who has lived through a one-time ordeal. The second "denotes a person who has continued to live when others have disappeared or vanished." Peasants, he continues have survived famine, plague, drought, sociopolitical upheaval, and, most recently, the pressures on their way of life from modernization and the rise of industry and wage-earning. Their subsequent "culture of survival" envisions a perpetual series of repeated acts of survival where a modern "culture of progress" sees growth and expansion.

Early American farmers certainly belonged to this latter group. In fact, it was argued in both the Revolutionary and Jacksonian periods that it was independent farmers who were the true guardians of liberty, as they were beholden to no man but themselves. They were neither passive nor resigned to their lot and were instead fiercely proud of their freedom and constitutional rights, foreseeing their descendants as proud heirs of these gifts. Daniel Feller's The Jacksonian Promise: America 1815-1840, for example, depicts the early nineteenth century as an era of ecstatic hope as Americans witnessed "the waves of revolutions in Latin America and the struggle for independence in Greece [which] seemed to herald the remaking of the world in America's image foretold by patriots a half-century before." Rapid technological and material advance, such as the completion of the Erie Canal and the introduction of the steamship and railroad only deepened a sense of imminent American greatness. Nathan O. Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity, meanwhile, discusses the sense of millennialism imparted by radical evangelical sects during the Second Great Awakening that foresaw the growth of Jeffersonian democracy as a precursor to the return of Christ's Kingdom to Earth. In other words, then, the difference between the independent American farmer and a peasant are largely psychological. "Peasant life is a life committed completely to survival," Berger immediately asserts.

(When I mentioned Pig Earth to one of my history professors, however, he raised the issue of differentiating between peasants and sharecroppers.)

Pig Earth strongly reminded me of another book I had read from another culture. I actually had a genuine sense of déjà vu. Berger's peasants are mid-century French; those in Takashi Nagatsuka's 1911 novel The Soil are late nineteenth-century Japanese. Other than that, with the exception of some narrative differences (The Soil focuses on one family and lacks the magic realism that appears at the end of Pig Earth), the two books seemed virtually the same. Both authors wrote from experience: Nagatsuka was a rural landlord who based his characters on real people, while Berger lived among the French peasants he wrote about. And both authors also include extensive anthropological detail and utilize a similar limited third-person narrator who concentrates on one person and then another (though I don't know how much of that can be attributed to translation). Of course, Berger argues, the peasant class is a pan-cultural phenomenon. "Their implements, their crops, their earth, their masters may be different, but whether they labour within a capitalist society, a feudal one or others . . . whether they grow rice in Java, wheat in Scandinavia or maize in South America, the peasantry everywhere can be defined as a class of survivors." If the hierarchical structure of an Asian or feudal society can be conceived as a pyramid, Berger goes on to say, "the peasants were on the base frontier of the triangle." Though both Pig Earth and The Soil each concern only one particular group of peasants, perhaps they can be seen as speaking for all of them.

I would only recommend these books for people interested in peasants or anthropology, by the way. I personally found them both rather dull (had to read'em for college).