At Swim Two Birds – Flann O’Brien

5 Dec

Like all forms of art, there are pioneers and contemporaries.  While the former have an indelible foothold, contemporaries possess a more narrow cult following.  When we think of the great Irish novelists of the 20th century, James Joyce is without a doubt the first name that comes to mind.  While Flann O’Brien’s recognized, but rarely mentioned, At Swim Two Birds fits the latter definition.

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At Swim Two Birds follows an unnamed university student writing his first novel in-between classes and pub visits; Pooka McPhillimey, a member of the devil class; author Dermot Trellis, who (unknowingly) creates a cast of conscious characters who are none to happy about their creator’s ruling hand ; and Fin Mac Cool & Mad King Sweeney, two Irish folk legends. By the end of the story, we wonder who is writing who?  An admirer and friend of Joyce(who would’ve thought?), the fellow Irishman confines an excessively meta-world in his debut novel.

Readers, and more importantly non-readers, know Modernist literature is not famous for simple comprehension.  I remember a friend recalling, after finishing Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, tossing his paperback against the wall in frustration. O’Brien instead decides to keep his readers in mind with At Swim. Separating the novel into biographical reminiscences of the student, Trellis and his characters, and Mac & Sweeney, allows the author to combine the three stories into a single,  less complex narrative.  Moreover, like the best writing in the genre, an authorial rhythm soon develops:

“Biographical reminiscence, part the first: It was only a few months before composing the foregoing that I had my first experience of intoxicating beverages and their strange intestinal chemistry.  I was walking through the Stephen’s Green on a summer evening and conducting a conversation with a man called Kelly, then a student, hitherto a member of the farming class and now a private in the armed forces of the King.  He wa addicted to unclean expression in ordinary conversation and spat continually, always fouling the flowerbeds on his way through the Green with a mucous deposit dislodged with a low grunting from the interior of his windpipe.  In some respects he was a coarse man but he was lacking in malice or ill-humor. He purported to be a medical student but he had failed at least once to satisfy a body of examiners charged with regulating admission to the faculty.  He suggested that we should drink a number of jars or pints of plain porter in Grogan’s public house.  I derived considerable pleasure from the casual quality of his suggestion and observed that it would probably do us no harm, thus expression my whole hearted concurrence by a figure of speech.

Nature of figure of speech: Litotes(or Meosis)”

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas quipped  “The perfect book for your sister- if she a loud, dirty, boozy, girl“, which later acted as a tagline for At Swim. While the quote has comedic accuracy, it also carries the quality of down-playing depth within the novel. As “third in the trinity” of Irish writers from the 20th century, O’Brien oscillates between humor and exploring a deeper conscious, much like Nabokov. Even if it’s rife with cynicism, the author has no hesitation vocalizing his opinion:

“It happened that this remark provoked between us a discussions on the subject of Literature – great authors living and dead, the character of modern poetry, the predilections of publishers and the importance of being at all times occupied with literary acitivites of a spare-time or recreative character. My dim room rang with the iron of fine words and the names of great Russian masters were articulate with fastidious itonation. Witticims were canvassed, depending for the utility on a knowledge of the French language as spoken in the medieval times. Psychoanalysis was metnioned – with, howerever, a somewhat light touch.  I then tendered an explanation spontaneous and unsolicited concerning my own work, affording an insight as to its aesthetic, its daemon, its arguement, its sorrow and its joy, its darkness, its sun-twinkle clearness.

Nature of explanation offered: It was stated that while the novel and the play were both pleasing intellectual exercises, the novel was inferior to the play inasmuch as it lacked the outward accidents of illusions, frequently inducing the reader to be outwitted in a shabby fashion and caused to experience a real concern for the fortunes of illusory characters. The play was consumed in whole fashion by large masses in places of public resort; the novel was self-administred in private.  The novel, in the hands of an unscrupulous writer, could be despotic.  In reply to an inquiry, it was explained that a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree credullity.  It was undemocractic to compel characters to be uniformly good or bad or poor or rich. Each should be allowed a private life, self-determination and a decent stardnard of living. This would make for self-respect, contentment and better service. “

At Swim Two Birds is an example of “Mineppian satire”- novel length prose focusing on confronting mental attitudes. Literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin famously characterized this form as Carnivalesque, stating ”Carnival is past millennia’s way of sensing the world as one great communal performance.“  Following this definition, O’Brien finds himself in the same vein as Joyce and Swift:

“Many social problems of contemporary interest, he wrote in 1909, could be readily resolved if issue could be born already matured, teethed, reared, educated, and ready to essay those competittive plums which make the Civil Service and the Banks so attractive to the younger breadwinners of to-day. The process of bringing up children is a tedious anarchronism in these engligtened times. Those mortifying stratagems collectively known as birth-control would become a mere memory if parents and married couples could be assured that their legitimate diversion would be straightway result in finished breadwinners or marriageable daughters. “

Sadly, unlike the aforementioned predecessors, fame for At Swim Two Birds was stunted. Publication paralleled with the outbreak of war in 1939, causing the novel to sell a meager 244 copies, despite having the praise of Graham Greene and Argentine Jorge Luis Borges.  A further curse arose after a Nazi bomb burned down the publication house in 1944.  Thankfully in 1998, the Dalkey Archives would republish At Swim and O’Brien’s subsequent novel (and apparently more experimental), The Third Policeman.

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Brian O’Nolan, the actual Flann O’Brien, would find best success under another pseudonym, Myles na gCopaleen. This latter nom de plum was most prevalently seen in The Irish Times, allowing more instant success than the novels permitted.  Due to heavy drinking, a heart attack would take his life at 54.  Regardless of At Swim Two Birds finding a spot on Time’s Best English Novels of the Century, and a Google Doodle to commemorate his 101st birthday, O’Nolan, O’Brien, and Myles are still fighting to be a contemporary, much less a pioneer.

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Nexus – Henry Miller

7 Nov

What do we look for at the end of a trilogy? Is it necessary for an all-encompassing finale or simply a solid third act? If you have visited this site before, my admiration of Henry Miller is no mystery. After the writing of his Obelisk Trilogy, which included Tropic of Cancer & Capricorn, the author began The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. Having read Sexus and Plexus earlier this year, Miller set the stage for an exciting conclusion. So, what do we expect from Nexus, the last book in the trilogy?

As with the preceding novels, Nexus is a semi-autobiographical retelling of Henry’s topsy-turvy marriage with Mona and struggling years as a writer. We begin with Mona searching for a stable job so Henry can write. This would be fine if he was not stuck with Anatasia, his wife’s live-in friend and possible lover. This domestic strife allows for little working time and further unhappiness in the marriage. As usual, Henry clears his mind with trips around New York City. In the author’s paved paradise, no story is too small.  These tales, that usually result in seemingly limitless observations, fill the final chapter of the trilogy:

“Ah, the monotonous thrill that comes of walking the streets on a winter’s morn, when iron girders are frozen to the ground and the milk in the bottle rises like the stem of a mushroom. A setentrional day, let us say, when the most stupid animal would not dare poke a nose out of his hole. To accost a stranger on such a day and ask him for alms would be unthinkable. In that biting, gnawing cold, the icy wind whistling through the glum, canyoned streets, no one in his right mind would stop long enough to reach into his pocket in search of a coin. On a morning like this, which a comfortable banker would describe as ‘clear and brisk’, a beggar has no right to be hungry or in need of carfare. Beggars are for warm, sunny days, when even the sadist at heart stops to throw crumbs at the birds.” 

The most discernable difference in Nexus is size. Compared to the combined 1,100 pages of Sexus and Plexus, the final installment barely breaks 300. Thankfully there is no lack of substance. Instead of a colossal volume to climax the trilogy, Miller whittles down a concise style. To follow the rather distant goal of the narrative, a wish to write like his influences, Miller shows he does not need size for success:  

“To get back to Feodor…They got me itchy sometimes with their everlasting nonsense about Dostoevski. Myself, I have never pretended to understand Dostoevski. Not all of him, at any rate. (I know him, as one knows a kindred soul.) Nor have I read all of him, even to this day. It has always been my thought to leave the last few morsels for deathbed reading. I am not sure, for instance, whether I read his ‘Dream of the Ridiculous Man’ or heard tell about it. Neither am I at all certain that I know who Marcion was, or what Marcionism is. There are many things about Dostoevski, as about life istelf, which I am content to leave a mystery. I like to think of Dostoevski as one surrounded by an impenetrable aura of mystery. For example, I can never picture him wearing a hat-such as Swedenborg gave his angels to wear. I am, moreover, always fascinated to learn what others have to say about him, even when they views make no sense to me. Only the other day I ran across a note I had jotted down in a notebook. Probably from Berdyaev. Here it is: ‘After Dostoevski, man was no longer what he had been before.’ Cheering thought for an ailing humanity.”

In Nexus, we group ourselves as a ‘kindred soul’ with Miller. Unlike the erotically charged Sexus or surreal pontifications in Plexus, the third novel acts as a synthesis between the two. As readers, we are skeptical to fall off the usual authorial devices; sexual fantasy, surrealism, polemics. Though there are no literary tricks to be discovered, the novel manages to bypass pandering:

(Mona has devised a plan to present Henry’s writings, under her name,  to a rich benefactor)

“What element there was of the bizarre and the outlandish intrigued Pop to no end. He had wondered openly-how a young woman, the author, in other words, came by such thoughts, such images. It never occurred to Mona to say: ‘From another incarnation!’ Frankly I would have hardly known what to say myself. Some of the goofiest images had been stolen from almanacs, other were born of wet dreams. What Pop truly enjoyed, it seemed, was the occasional introduction of a dog or a cat. (He couldn’t know, of course, that I was mortally afraid of dogs or that I loathed cats.) But I could make a dog talk. And it was doggy talk, no mistake about it. My true reason for inserting these creatures of a lower order was to show contempt for certain characters in the book who had gotten out of hand. A dog, properly inspired, can make an ass of a queen. Besides, if I wished to ridicule a current idea which was anathema to me all I had to do was to impersonate a mutt, lift my hind legs and piss on it.”

So, does Nexus complete the trilogy and stand alone as a novel? Of course. The final installment of the Rosy Crucifixion is a culmination of the conscious for Miller (and readers). “When Henry stuggles, we struggle”, I say in my review of Sexus, which is why we are elated when our author reaches his goal. Nexus shows a budding writer cease from imitation to become our favorite iconoclast:

“Fleeting though such a love may be, can we say that there had been a loss? The only possible loss-and how well the true lover knows it!- is the lack of that undying affection which the other inspired. What a drab, dismal, fateful day that is when the lover suddenly realizes that he is no longer possessed, that he is cured, so to speak, of his great love! When he refers to it, even unconsciously, as a ‘madness’. The feeling of relief engendered by such an awakening may lead one to believe in all sincerity that he has regained his freedom. But at what a price! What a poverty-stricken sort of freedom with everyday sight, everyday wisdom? Is it not heartbreaking to find oneself surrounded by beings who are familiar and commonplace? Is it not frightening to think that one must carry on, as they say, but with stones in one’s belly and gravel in one’s mouth? To find ashes, nothing but ashes, where once were blazing suns, wonders, glories, wonders up wonders, glory beyond glory, and all freely created as from some magic fount?” 

“I have have made extensive use throughout these books of irruptive onslaughts of the unconscious, such as dreams, fantasy, burlesque, Pantagruelian word play, etc., which lend the narrative a chaotic, whimsical, perplexing character.” 

The enjoyment of Miller is living vicariously through him. Remembered best for his perversity, I find the author to be provocative  in a more lasting nature. The Rosy Crucifixion, and veritably all of Miller’s works, create a canon for crude and cultivated minds.

 

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A Dead Man in Deptford – Anthony Burgess

9 Oct

Like most, I became acquainted with Anthony Burgess through A Clockwork Orange, a dystopian novel concerning the consequences of crime & punishment through protagonist Alex Delarge. Since then, and after completing a handfull of of earlier novels, there has been a strange connection between the British author and myself. His works have never been outstanding, but rather interesting. So, on my way to London, I decided to (appropriately) crack open Burgess’ last novel, A Dead Man in Deptford. 

Published in 1993, A Dead Man in Deptford is a semi-fictionalized account about the life and death of Christopher Marlowe. Our narrator, (a small-town actor Burgess lifts from Shakespeare’s First Folio) follows “Kit” from his seminary days, to his infamous career as a playwright, a government operative, and finally, to his untimely death.

Infamous for his atheist beliefs, Marlowe is known for brawling in bars over questions of faith. Besides heretical rhetoric, Marlowe also engages a secular lifestyle in his relationship with Thomas Walsingham, a young aristocrat with ties to the government. A romance that would eventually lead to trouble.

As if his personal life wasn’t complicated enough, Marlowe was begrudgingly employed as a spy for the English government. Under the supervision of Thomas Walsingham, his lover’s uncle, the imminent playwright weeded out conspirators from the Spanish government. Burgess centers this portion of the novel around Marlowe’s participation in the Babington Plot — an attempt to kill Queen Elizabeth and put the Catholic, Mary Queen of Scots, on the throne. Kit is supposed to remain anonymous during his time as an informant, but it proves difficult for such a nefarious dramatist.

Christopher Marlowe is, of course, best associated with his work as a poet and playwright. Burgess manages to implement this talent through the playwright’s Tamburlaine, with the utmost clarity. Not only are we treated with verse and countless events inspiring the poet, but also through criticism. Known for his quick quips, the author manages to sum up Marlowe through his evaluations of others:

“Kit read the sheet proffered:

‘Saul then smote hard all those of Hebrew bloode

That saw in Christ arisen their sole goode,

Enchaining them and striking with a rodde

Them that acknowledged not the hidden Godde

That never woulde affront His maiestie

By in raw flesh descending from the skie. 

-You want my help in what capacity, poetic of theological? 

-That is but a draft. I have worked long at it, I need a fresh eye and ear. 

-Saul did not smite the Christian Hebrews. He smote only the Greeks who had turned to Christ. Of these St. Stepanos was the first.

-I am no master of arts in divinity.

-And I am now lover of the turncoat Saul or Paul…Why not call your poem Fast and Loose? Fast-bound in devotion, loose in form. And he that was fast or speedy to persecute was loosed from his obligations by a fit of the falling sickness. The title could have manifold meanings.”

Burgess hilariously fills Deptford with the language of Elizabethan England. The world reads romantically scummy down to the rats on the pavement. “Plain English cannot encompass a life so various, tortured and contradictory”, our narrator states.  Readers of A Clockwork Orange know the author’s love of linguistics only too well. Burgess’ fascination, which appears more of an obsession, forces readers to literally speak his language. We notice this no better than in the opening to the novel:

“You must and will suppose (fair or foul reader, but what’s the difference?) that I suppose a heap of happenings that I had no eye to eye knowledge of or concerning. What though a man supposes is oft (often if you will) of the right and very substance of his seeing. There was a philosopher who spoke of the cat that mews to be let out and then mews to be let in again. In the interim, does it exist? There is in us all the solipsist tendency which is a simulacrum of the sustentive power of the Almighty, namely what we hold in the eye exists, remove the eye or let it be removed therefrom and there is disintegration total if temporary. But of the time of the cat’s absence a man may also rightly suppose that it is fully in the world down to the last whisker. And so let it be with my cat or Kit. I must suppose that what I suppose of his doings behind the back of my viewings is of the nature of a stout link in the chain of his being, lost to my seeing, not palpable but of necessity existent. I know little. I was but a small actor and smaller play-botcher who observed him intermittently though indeed knew him in a very palpable sense (the Holy Bible speaks of speaketh of such unlawful knowing), that is to say on the margent of his life, though time is proving that dim eyes and dimmer wits confounded the periphery of the centre.” 

As you can tell from above, Burgess openly admits to the common fault of historical novels:”The flatfooted affirmation of possibility as fact”, he mentions in the Afterword. Though unlike my uneasiness to E.L. Doctorow’s substantial cast of shallow characters in Ragtime, the cast of A Deadman in Deptford shows depth that rivals preference for fact over fiction. Marlowe is not the lone philosopher in the novel, but rather surrounded by minds comparable in measure:

“‘-And do you believe?’ Raleigh asked bluntly.

-’Does belief or disbelief affect God’s substance? I would put it this way, that there may be an unmoved mover. Bt this is not of necessity of intelligible make, no primary model of ourselves. What is termed God may well be a force as inhuman as the sun and as indifferent whether to bless by warming or curse by burning. It may be a force progressing through change, whose faculty is built into essence, and coming through the transformation of matter into spirit to a final realisation of what it is. A the end of time, so to say, there may be a God realised, but God is till then no more than a conceptus hominis. We are in advance of God in possession of the concept. He or it must wait.

-Well, said Warner, nodding, you are on the right side. You deny stasis.

-Can you deny it wholly? the Wizard Earl asked Warner. You work in the chemistry that was called alchemy in search of solidities that by some miracle of sudden fusion turn into a new solidity. Things are not wholly continuous. And I would put it to Mr. Merlin here that in denying a God with characteristics that seem human merely because we are made in his image, we are like him, he not like us, he denies also divine sanction or its opposite for human acts. There may be no great Day of Judgement, but all that would seem to matter is whether a man follows good or evil. I put it so, I am not necessity one that subscribes to the belief that man is mere substance for moral adjudication, but must it be assigned solely to human government the business of defining the good, the evil, the right, the wrong?

Like all great writers, Burgess possesses a unique spirit. Born in Manchester, the working class population and “Rabelaisian” atmosphere produced a profound effect on the author. Diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor(later proved a misdiagnosis), he and his wife were rushed back to the UK from his post in Brunei. During this period-his ”pseudoterminal year“- Burgess wrote to provide for his family, and consequently, ignited a literary career.

“I’m unsatisfied. I’ve been writing now for a long time and published about 45 books, which is rather too much I’m told. But I’m not satisfied. I feel that I’m getting old and learning, though not fast enough. It is, I think, someday possible for me to write a good book. But I haven’t written one yet.” 

Said in 1982, if Burgess were still to believe these sentiments after the publication of A Dead Man in Deptford, he’d be mistaken.

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Boredom – Alberto Moravia

29 Aug

The literature of Alberto Moravia has been made into some of the most prominent cinematic gems of European cinema. During the surge of film adaptations in the 60′s and early 70′s, the Italian author was at the height of popularity. Boredom (or The Empty Canvas), published in 1960, explores an artist stuck in ennui. Constructing his narrative with frank sexuality, does Boredom still hold relevancy today or, like the contemporary opinion, is Moravia old hat?

Dino has always been “bored”. Not in the sense that he has nothing to do, but rather a disconnection from the outside world. Since childhood, neither people nor objects could rouse Dino to take any significant interest. Even after departing from his mother’s wealthy estate to become a penniless painter, Dino could not find substance.

While musing over his frustration one afternoon, a young girl, Cecilia, walked under Dino’s window. Returning daily, the 30-year old painter noticed the teenager was visiting the neighboring apartment, where the 64-old painter Balestrieri lived. After his neighbor’s sudden death — supposedly in the arms of the young girl — Dino tracks down Cecilia. The two soon begin a sexual relationship, but will Dino be able to break his boredom?

After critics began to write off the author, Bill Marx points out, Moravia moved to more self-reflective fiction. Dino’s ramblings, resembling the essay driven romanzo-saggio style, hinder any chance of progress. These lecture length thoughts of the disconnected artist, where Moravia truly finds his stride, oscillate between comic and sadness. It’s easy to pity Dino, but empathy is another question:

Two months had passed since the day when Cecilia came into my studio for the first time, and I was now beginning to wonder how it was that Balestrieri had been able to entertain so violent a passion for her; how it was, in fact, that Cecilia had come to play the part, for him, of the ‘fatal woman’-using those two words in the full sense of baleful predestination which they ought to have and normally do not have. I found it difficult to believe because, apart from her noteworthy sexual capabilities – which in any case she had in common with a great many other girls of her age – Cecilia seemed insignificant in the highest degree and therefore incapable of arousing a passion as destructive as Balestrieri’s. The clue to this character of hers, so devoid of interest and of pretext for taking interest in it, was provided, as I have already hinted, by her colorless, summary manner of expressing herself…Cecilia continually gave the impression not so much of lying as of being incapable of telling the truth; and this not because she was untruthful but because telling the truth would have implied having a relationship with something, and she did not appear to have any relationship with anything. When she really told a lie (and it will be seen that she was perfectly capable of doing so), one almost had the impression that she was saying something true, even in a negative way, simply because of the grain of participation, that is, of truth, which any lie contains within itself.

Moravia is reminiscent of fellow Italian Nanni Moretti’s nervous character, who has been coined as the ‘Italian Woody Allen.’ Despite the grave imagery in Boredom, it’s difficult not to laugh at the excessive anxiety between the binding. Like Moretti and Allen, the comedic surface is thin enough to see the author’s intent:

I said to myself, for instance: ‘Now Cecilia and her friend are in some retired corner of the Borghese Gardens and Cecilia is doing with him what she has done so many times with me: she is kissing him awkwardly and coldly, with her childish lips, and at the same time is giving him her customary hard, eager push in the belly with her groin.’ And immediately afterward I thought: Why do I think all these things and why do I suffer? Obviously because I saw them together.  And am I then forced, in spite of myself, by the sole fact of having seen them together, to be jealous on her account and to suffer?

With a main character detached from the outside world, Moravia can examine sexuality from a distance. “The 19th century novel told all, even better than us, except eroticism. On this it was silent, it didn’t have the problems to speak on sexual nature. Freud gave us these tools-not the terms, but liberated the language. Before Freud, eroticism was naughty”, the author explains in an interview. With essay driven dialogue along with Freud’s sexually liberated lingo, Moravia wraps his thesis: the connection between sex and money.

Boredom gave me the same sensation of angst as Catcher in the Rye. Despite the age difference in Salinger’s Caulfeild and Moravia’s Dino, a confused, bitter solipsism runs through both characters. Saying that, I was disappointed to hear the Italian author wrote uncannily similar narratives of impotent artists through most of his career. Having not read any other works from Moravia, perhaps he is blessed with the Fassbinder theory of repetitive success – “Every decent artist has only one subject, and finally only makes the same work over and over again. ”

What we learn from Moravia is unlearning. The ability to examine what the author calls “illumination” — the rapid reasoning in society — and peer into a more lucid, albeit distant, psyche. “A writer who was constantly trying to get to the bottom of the human imbroglio”, Anthony Burgess once said about Moravia. Whether the tools of soul excavation in Boredom are comical or cutting, Morarvia writes them with ease, and most important, relevancy.

In Evil Hour – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

14 Aug

Love or despise, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the most notable figure in magical realism.  With his masterpiece ’100 Years of Solitude’, the Colombian author implements the densely layered definition of the genre-blending magical elements into reality with ease.  Though only five years prior, Marquez would pen his debut novel In Evil Hour, the story of a small Latin American town plagued by mysterious but damning lampoons.

Much like his other novels,  In Evil Hour revolves around an unnamed South American town.  The inhabitants, who have recently recovered from a violent military coup, find themselves once again re-living the tortured past when lampoons cause a scorned husband to kill his wife’s lover.  The Mayor, a lieutenant of the new regime, re-enacts the curfew and suppresses all anti-government material.  Though muzzling the citizens causes more strife than safety.

Without spoiling the intricate narrative of In Evil Hour, readers of Marquez will notice  the usual multitude of characters and their whimsical role in story structure.  Usually the author does this with seamless flow, but his debut novel is bogged by lack of depth. With less than two-hundred pages, Marquez attempts his style of bypassing significant events; we never find out the substance of the lampoons, with disastrous results:

“While they were receiving their Wednesday pay, the widow Montiel heard them pass without answering their greetings.  She lived alone in the gloomy nine-room house where Big Mama had died and which Jose Montiel had bought without imagining that his widow would have to endure her solitude in it until death.  At night, while she went about through the empty room with the insecticide bomb, she would find Big Mama squashing lice in the hallways, and she would ask her: ‘When am I going to die?’  But that happy communication with the beyond only managed to increase her uncertainty because the answers, like those of all the dead, were silly and contradictory.”

Even in the most dry readings, we look for an exciting passage to peak our interest. Sadly, Marquez has trouble even delivering something to keep eyes open. It’s obvious that atmosphere, not entertainment, was the author’s intent, but the novel’s omnipresence – a method that would champion 100 Years of Solitude as a masterpiece – is useless without underlying circumstance:

“In his office the mayor was waiting for him with a moral problem.  As a result of the last elections, the police had confiscated and destroyed the electoral documents of the opposition party.  The majority of the inhabitants of the town now lacked any means of identification.  ‘Those people moving their houses,’  the mayor concluded with his arms open, don’t even know what their names are.’ Judge Arcadio could understand that there was a sincere affliction behind those open arms.  But the mayor’s problem was simple: all he had to do was ask for the appointment of a civil registrar.”

While the tragedy is apparent in the text, Marquez takes for granted the sympathy of his readers without adequate backstory.  This is further intensified by most audiences lack of knowledge concerning la violenca in Colombia(at least mine), one of the origins cited for In Evil Hour. Though they only came at rare moments, Marquez finds his stride while recounting the vicious period:

“They didn’t receive precise orders.  Leaping down the stairs four steps at a time behind the mayor, they left the barracks in Indian file. They crossed the street without worrying about the drizzle and stopped in front of the dentist’s office. With two quick charges they battered down the door with their rifle butts. They were already inside the house when the lights in the vestibule went on.  A small bald man with veins showing through his skin appeared in his shorts at the rear door, trying to put on his bathrobe. At the first instant he remained paralyzed with one arm up and his mouth open, as in the flash of a photograph. Then he gave a leap backward and bumped into his wife, who was coming out of the bedroom in her nightgown. ‘Don’t move’, the Mayor shouted. The woman said: ‘Oh!’ with her hands over her mouth, and went back to the bedroom. The dentist went toward the vestibule, trying the cord on his bathrobe, and only then did he make out the three policemen who were pointing their rifles at him, and the mayor, water dripping from all over his body, tranquil, his hands in the pockets of his raincoat:  ‘If the lady leaves her room they have orders to shoot her.”

Written in Paris without a means for income, Marquez was convinced by friends to re-write In Evil Hour for a literary contest in Colombia.  Awarded, the novel was sent to Madrid where, on the behalf of the publishers, all Latin American slang was absolved and replaced by “dictionary” Spanish.  In 1966, a year before the publication of  100 Years of Solitude, the novel was finally re-printed in it’s original form:

“Nobody Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and Big Mama’s Funeral all reflect the reality of life in Colombia and this theme determines the rational structure of the books.  I don’t regret having written them, but they belong to a kind of premeditated literature that offers too static and exclusive a vision of reality.”

- Marquez admits of his earlier work in The Taste of Guava-a collection of conversations with journalist Apuleius Mendoza.  Having not read Big Mama’s Funeral or the typically lauded Nobody Writes to the Colonel, my opinion is invalid, but In Evil Hour fits well into the author’s definition. There is no escape from Marquez’s “exclusive” vision of reality in the novel, which seems to contradict his following work.

This limited scope in Marquez’s debut novel is further hindered by Gregory Rabassas’s translation. The famed translator, along with Edith Grossman, has transcribed a bulk of the author’s work and seems lost in the Colombian jungle of expressions.  As Robert Coover notes, ”There is the Colombian’s love of the idiomatic vaina, for example, which might be translated as anything from “predicament” or “difficulty” to “nonsense,” “trouble” or “fiasco,” but which Mr. Rabassa obstinately renders over and over as “mess,” until he gets in an awful one.”

Researching Christopher Ishwerwood’s debut All the Conspirators, one commenter noted the dismay that arises from completionist reading of an author. Like Marquez, the notoriously sub-par novel from Isherwood is better enjoyed with the hindsight of a more accomplished literary career. Thankfully In Evil Hour allows readers to glean the forerunner of a literary movement, but, in the finale, ultimately feels like the inhabitants of the city:  clueless and apathetic.

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Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

26 Jul

Madame Bovary is one of those books I constantly passed up. Don’t ask me why, it just never happened.  Admired by nearly every writer I’ve read, Gustave Flaubert was not always such a literary darling. Serialized in 1856, Bovary was condemned by French courts for obscenity.  Like most other forms of censorship, the suppression only produced the inverse; the novel became a hit and Flaubert was acquitted. So what still makes this book so notorious?

As noted by most readers and scholars, Madame Bovary ironically opens (and closes) with Charles Bovary, a provincial boy from the Northern French province of Normandy.  Arriving in the classroom on the first day of school, young Charles is ridiculed for a ridiculous hat.  As he grows older, Charles manages a subpar medical degree and position in the Public Health Service.  After his studies, a widow is chosen by Charles’s mother to be his wife. The couple head off to the village of Tostes after the marriage to begin a practice and life of their own.

During one of his home visits, Charles meets Emma Rouault, a beautiful young daughter of a farm-owner. Fixing the owner’s broken leg, the doctor earnestly returns to re-affirm the successful procedure. When Charles’s visits become questionable to his wife, she forbids him from visiting. Eventually his wife dies, and after a brief period of sadness, Charles pursues Emma.

Now we focus on Emma. While Charles is a caring, but dull husband, Emma yearns for the luxurious lifestyle from popular novels. This fantasy becomes a seeming reality when the couple attends a ball giving by a nearby Marquis. The lavish soiree paves a posh life in Emma’s mind and contempt for her current marriage. Though escaping her provincial life for a more proper one isn’t as easy as Emma would wish.

One of the most important, yet overlooked, aspects of Madame Bovary is the subtitle: ‘Mouers de Province’(Provincial Lives).  As mentioned in the Geoffrey Wall’s Introduction, Flaubert kept a scrapbook entitled The Dictionary of Received Ideas, where the “voices” of his village in Normandy were recorded.*  When Charles and Emma relocate to Yonville (where most of the novel is centered), a wide array of characters enter the text.  Much like the Bovarys, we enter a new social group, and becoming acquainted with the village characters takes time.  By the end of the novel, we find Flaubert’s inclusion of these seemingly superfluous inhabitants much to our delight:

“Clattering across the floorboards in his clogs, he went up the stairs in front of Emma, and showed her into a little office, where on a large pinewood desk stood a number of ledgers, secured behind a padlocked iron bar. Against the wall, under some calico remnants, you could just see a safe, but one of such dimensions that must have contained other things besides the bills and money. Monsieur Lheureux made small loans on security, and this was where he kept Madame Bovary’s gold chain, along with the earrings of poor Pere Tellier, who, forced eventually to sell up, had bought an ailing grocery business in Quincampoix, where he was dying of a catarrh, with a face yellower than the candles in his shop.”

As you can tell the excerpt above, Flaubert makes careful use of his voice.  Known for his re-writes, the author composed over 4,561 pages in which 400 became Madame Bovary. This certainty of writing within the novel allows Flaubert to be a “pioneer” of Realism in literature. The main component of movement is, as you imagine, reality over romantic notions that previously held a foothold in narratives. Despite Bovary‘s airy prose, the author even makes explicit mention of grounded parochial landscape over former Romantic themes. Notice Charles’s Mother attack her son on Emma’s “spoilt” reading habits:

“Ah! Busy indeed!  And with what?  Busy reading novels, wicked books, things written against religion where priests are made a mockery with speeches taken from Voltaire.  It al leads to no good, my poor boy, and anyone with no religion always comes to a bad end...Therefore, it was decided to prevent Emma from reading novels.  This was by no means an easy matter.  The old lady took it upon herself: on her way through Rouen she was to call in person at the lending library and notify them that Emma was canceling her subscriptions. Would they not have the right to tell the police, if the librarian still persisted in this poisonous trade?”

There is much difficulty in finding fault within Madame Bovary‘s pages.  Henry James dedicated a significant portion in his 1914 book on literary criticism, Notes on Novelist:

“‘Madame Bovary’ beyond question, holds first place…The elements of the picture are of the fewest, the situation of the heroine almost of the meanest, the material for interest most unpromising; but all these facts only throw into relief one of those incalculable incidents that the proceedings of genius.” 

And later Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa would pen an autobiographical admiration for Flaubert’s novel in The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary:

“In the summer of 1959 I arrived in Paris with very little money and the promise of a scholarship.  One of the first things I did was to buy a copy of ‘Madame Bovary’ in the Classiques Garnier edition, in a bookstore in the Latin Quarter.  I began reading it that very afternoon, in a tiny room in the Hôtel Wetter, near the Musée Cluny. It is at this point that my story really begins.  From the very first lines, the books power of persuasion was like an extremely potent magic spell.  It had been years since any novel had vampirized my attention so quickly, blotted out my physical surroundings so completely, plunged me so deeply into the story it told.  As the afternoon wore on, as night fell, as dawn began to break, the magical decantation, the substitution of the fictional world for the real one, held me spellbound.  Morning had already come, Emma and Léon had just met in a box at the Rouen opera when, dizzy with fatigue, I put the book down and went to bed: in my troubled sleep at that hour the Rouaults farm, the muddy streets of Tostes, the figure of Charles, good-natured and stupid, the ponderous pedantry of Homais (who might well have been Argentine) continued to exist, as vividly as when I’d been reading about themand above these persons and these places, like an image foreshadowed in a thousand childhood dreams, dimly glimpsed from the moment I’d begun devouring books so avidly in adolescence, there hovered the face of Emma Bovary. As I woke up so as to go on reading, two certainties flashed through my mind, like two bolts of lightning: I now knew what writer I would have liked to be; and I knew that from that moment on, till my dying day, I would be in love with Emma Bovary.  In the future she would be for me, as for Léon Dupuis in the first days of their affair, “the beloved of every novel, the heroine of every play, the vague she of every volume of verse.” ”

Flaubert’s Madame Bovary legacy obviously carries on today; why else would I feel bad about not reading it until now?  Despite it’s intoxicating prose and Vargas’s obsessive reading of the novel, I took my time dipping into the provincial lives outside of Rouen – why rush reading about a location where time stands still?  My advice is to fill yourself with the comedy, romance, and tragedy of Madame Bovary and enjoy the country landscape as Flaubert did, even if it’s trivial.

*Though Flaubert condemned with narrow minds, he would remained cooped up and kept company by the middle class he so loathed.

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Metropolis – Thea von Harbou

11 Jul

Metropolis is one of the few films from UFA still relevant in mainstream media. In 2010, as most fans of the film know, previously lost footage was discovered in an Argentine vault. A shining light in director Fritz Lang’s career, the film’s story of “The heart as a mediator between head and hands” is undoubtedly timeless. Like a good portion of films then and now, Metropolis was based off a novel by Lang’s then wife, Thea von Harbou. Whether the story is the product of Harbou’s 1924 screenplay or a collaborated novel with Lang is up to debate. Nevertheless, the novel was released in ’26 with the film following a year later.

Jon Fredersen presides over all of Metropolis, a sprawling city where select few play on the top while most slave away in the ‘New Tower of Babel’.  Jon Fredersen’s son, Freder Fredersen, is one of the lucky few who dines with the proverbial silver spoon.  Freder’s comfy lifestyle is disturbed when Maria and a group of impoverished children stumble into the ‘Club of Sons’.  Abashed by his lavish lifestyle (and Maria’s beauty) Freder sets out to find how the other half lives.

To weave into Metropolis’s working world, Freder must rid himself of the white robes bestowed to the Upper Crust. Finding exhausted worker “11811″, the Son of the City switches identities and puts himself to work.  Slaving away until the siren, Freder finds a message in 11811′s uniform about a meeting in the catacombs that evening.  Finally making it down to the lower depths, Freder finds his love Maria addressing the workers about a peaceful revolution against their oppressors.

Unluckily for Freder and Maria, Jon Fredersen has also stumbled across a message about the meeting. Frightened by the thought of a worker’s revolt, Jon enlists the help of the mad magician and inventor, Rotwang. The two had fought for the love of a woman, Hel, but Fredersen won her, only for her to die when she gave birth to Freder. The ‘frienemies’ decide to stifle the revolution by altering Futura, a robot constructed by Rotwang, making it resemble Maria and creating a mouthpiece of their own.

Metropolis is wonderfully overwritten, even down to the most minute description. Those who have seen the film know that not all the plot points add up – and thankfully the novel clears up any confusion. Though gleaning these missing pieces (or Harbou’s objective) isn’t simple. Harbou channels a writing style that would mirror the futuristic cityscape while also incorporating the sincerity deemed necessary by the novel’s oft repeated maxim, “The mediator between the head and the hand is the heart.”:

“The searchlights raved in a delirium of colour upon the narrow windows which ran from the floor to the ceiling. Cascades of light frothed against the panes. Outside, deep down, at the foot of the New Tower of Babel boiled the Metropolis. But in this room not a sound was to be heard but the incessantly dripping numbers. In this room, which was at the same time crowned and subjugated by the might time-piece, the clock, indicating numbers, nothing had any significance but numbers. The son of the great Master ofMetropolis realised that, as long as numbers came dripping out of the invisible no word, which was not a number, and coming from a visible mouth, could lay claim to the least attention. Therefore he stood, gazing unceasingly at his father’s head, watching the monstrous hand of the clock sweep onward, inevitably, like a sickle, a reaping scythe pass through the skull of the his father, without harming him, climb upwards, up the number-best ring, creep around the heights and sink again, to repeat the vain blow of the scythe. At last the white-red light went out. A voice ceased.”

Written during the torrid Weimar years, Metropolis has it’s fair share of propaganda, both political and pious. True to Harbou (and Lang)’s Protestant upbringing and  fascination with India, the cultures are contrasted without subtlety, resulting in overt religious imagery.  Metropolis manages to implement both Eastern enchantment and Christian rearing. When Freder, a cosmo-Christ, enters the New Tower of Babel he cannot help but relate the machines to divine mechanisms:

“He felt-and saw, too-how, from out the swathes of vapour, the long soft elephant’s trunk of the god Ganesha loosened itself from the head, sunken on the chest, and gently , with unerring finger, felt for his, Freder’s forehead. He felt the touch of this sucker, almost cool, not in the least painful, but horrible. Just in the centre, ovr the bridge of the nose, the ghostly trunk sucked itself fast; it was hardly a pain, yet it bored a fine, dead-sure gimlet, towards the centre of the brain. As though fastened to the clock of an infernal machine the heart began to thump. Pater-noster…Pater-noster…Pater-noster.”

Politically, as you can tell from Jon Fredersen’s plan and the “sickle clock” excerpt, allusions to the then recent Soviet revolution are made throughout Metropolis. The violent changing of the guard in Russia was still fresh in Harbou’s mind while the fear of a similar uprising was brewing in Germany*. A favorite among the Nazis – Goebbels even asking Lang to be Fuhrer of the film program- Harbou had good reason to fear if there were a Communist backlash. The author warns readers, true to her beliefs, that the revolution must wait for a mystic mediator:

“‘Be patient, my brothers!’, she said. ‘The way which your mediator must take is long…There are many among you who cry, Fight!, Destroy!-Do not fight, my brothers, for that makes you to sin. Believe me: One will come, who will speak for your-who will be the mediator between you, the Hands, and the man whose Brain and Will are over you all. He will give you something which is more precious than anything which anybody could give you: To be free without sinning.’”

Metropolis, like the excess of Hemingway, comes down to a personal preference. Even if you slogged through the excerpts above, don’t worry, their is a perfect fit in the novel. Personally I couldn’t put the book down. It is an especially great read if the film piqued any interest. Though much like Leni Reifenstahl, the continued collaboration by Harbou with the Nazi’s casts a dark shadow over her career.  Penniless, she would work as a “rubble woman” after the war for money. In this case, we admire the sin, but despise the sinner.

*Shameless plug to read my review of ‘The Berlin Stories’ by Christopher Isherwood.

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