Stein Stein Stein

Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. NY:Vintage, 1990.

This may remain the ultimate history of the Lost Generation rive gauche avant garde in Paris around WWI and through the 1920's. I'm tempted to pluck a bouquet of bons mots and tidbits about favorite artists and authors, but surely that's been done elsewhere.

The book could give gossip a good name.

Otherly, this is probably the most accessible extant example of Stein sentences, a matter worth study. It's also a useful though limited revelation of Stein's intentions in her other well known works, The Making of Americans, 3 Lives, Stanzas in Meditation, Tender Buttons, and Geography and Plays. This contains as extensive and accessible set of reflections as any I've seen by Stein on her relationship with publishing and the general difficulties of the public with most of her work.

"[Stein] says that listening to the rhythmn of [Basket the poodle's] water drinking made her recognize the difference beween sentences and paragrpahs, that paragraphs are emotional and that sentences are not" (248).

This is deliberately provocative, impossible in the literal, and worthy of study.

"Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality. She has produced a simplification by this concentration, and as a result, the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should not be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry and prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry or prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or an inner reality" (211).

One might ask how anything without emotion might render either an inner or an outer reality. But Stein's intentions might (I can only surmise) be approached by pulling apart the distinctions between incidental sentiments that relate to an author's circumstantial relationship to historical events, and the passion involved in a recognition of the ubiquity of such relationships, and the music or dance of their so relating.

In my long experience as a thoroughly failed author and poet, one way that one may thoroughly fail is by mistaking one's emotion for the readers' emotions, one's relation to the text for the readers' relation to the text.

I feel certain that this is what T.S. Eliot, for example, tried to get at with his theory of the objective correlative. Yet I have still nowhere seen this expressed in a way that satisfies me, and it strikes me as perfectly reasonable that one baffles students in trying to express it. The thing is that what's intended by this POV and what's intended by the Romantic and Post-Romantic insistence that the acme of art is the expression of the author's inner emotion are not contradictory, and yet the words in which these things get couched most definitely are.

I think that the refinement needed to resolve this falls along these lines Yes, the writer's relationship to Universe or common concern resembles the readers' almost exactly; however, it differs in matters of the specific case. And the writers' POV of these matters, filtered through the readers' POV does not equal the readers' POV itself.

To avoid the distortion in this, the author cannot simply gush forth emotion. What results inevitably contains the emotion, the objects that provoked the emotion in their temporal array -- the history, in other words. Expunging these may provide relief to the writer; they don't provide this as well to the reader, who has experienced another history. However, that business of relationship is experienced by both parties. That retains public value. And it's not so much that having to hear personal details dilutes that value; we're happy enough to hear personal details properly framed. It's that changing the music or the structure to match the incidentals of one's own experience of Event distorts the experience of relationships otherwise offered.

Otherwise, the more emotion involved the better, and we shall call it passion instead of sentiment. As Louis-Ferdinand Celine quotes the biologist Savy, "Everything is emotion." I should think these poles are equally true.

It was at that time [of travelling in Granada] that Gertrude Stein's style gradually changed. She says hitherto she had been interested only in the insides of people, their chracter and what went on inside them, it was during that summer that she firstfelt a desre to express the rhythm o fthe visible world" (119).

For this kind of writing, see particularly Stanzas in Meditation, from Sun and Moon, as well as Tender Buttons.
Here's a passage I will have to read Picabia to judge:

"Picabia had conceived and is struggling with the problem that a line should have the vibration of a musical sound and that this vibration should be teh result of conceiving the human form and the human fac in so tenuous a fashion that it would induce such vibration in the line forming it. It is his way of achieving the disembodied" (210).

This should be compared to Olson in "Projective Verse."

Ach, no end to Stein. But I will have more opportunities with The Making of Americans shortly.

Le Guin

The Left Hand of Darkness is kind of a unique story for this collection. It's what's usually called sci-fi, a loose tale on Romantic premises set on another planet. There's an odd weave of loose resemblances between The Ekumen and Euro-American colonizations, though the dark side of that seems to have mysteriously evaporated.

The plot dominates the social comparisons, which are many but loose.

Basically, here goes. Genly Ai has arrived at Karhide, a banana-republic style kingdom on Winter, a very cold planet. Genly carries an offer of alliance from The Ekumen, a loose federation of 84-odd planets of remarkably similar hominids who can't even really visit each other effectively because of the distances involved, but manage to communicate and travel a bit because of presumed time-distortions of relativity, physics' signal contribution to plot-contrivances.

Ai finds Karhiders' overly polite and indirect, gets booted out of the country by the king, a jealous king, who would have no other kings before him. He then gets busted by the cartoon-totalitarian country-across-the-way until his supposedly dishonest and disloyal original adviser, now in exile, busts him out and leads him across the local midwinter Siberia back into Karhide, to call the space ship and make another attempt at truce.

Entering Karhide, Ai's chum rides past the guards and deliberately gets shot to death. One might imagine that he does so because it's somehow diplomatically convenient for Genly, though that makes little sense, considering that Genly is a rather recognizable alien, and goes immediately to mourn his friend's corpse.

Because

Freedom of Love

(Translated from the French by Edouard Rodti)

My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude*
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire

Andre Breton

Harriet Wilson

Wilson, Harriet. Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the life of a free black In a Two-story white house, north. Showing that Slavery's shadows fall even there. NY: Vintage, 2002.

Originally published in 1859. It was ignored for some time, then returned to small prominence by Henry Louis Gates around a century later. Our Nig appears to be the 1st novel published by a woman of African descent in English.

Wilson appears to have been born "a free black" in 1827 or 1828, though some records have her born as hearly as 1807.

The story recounts the life of an African American woman living under dire poverty and abusive conditions. Wilson starts with the mother, a white woman who gets pregant out of wedlock and falls into poverty when her lover dumps her. She marries an African-American, out of desperation and for his kindness, but he works himself to death within a few years, leaving her broke again, but with several children. She gives the kids away, and the rest of the story follows the career of her daughter Frado, who becomes informal prisoner and slave to a white family. Some of the family members are moderately kind, but none have the integrity to confront the lady of the house over her sadistic torment of "Our Nig," Frado.
Frado works all her waking hours without show of kindness, decent food, adequate clothing or shelter. She's deliberately kept from anything that might stimulate or educate her. She sickens as she matures, unsurprisingly.
Various family members die off, and Frado is finally adult and free to marry. She does so, hapless hubby dies, and the cycle continues.

The writing is smooth and unsentimental. Various circumstances of publication support the idea that this is an autobiography; it was at least presented as one. Use of the epithet "Nig" in the title, would have been less shocking in the 1840's when this was written, but it must have had an edge even then, especially with the possessive, and more especially given that it is also given as the name of the protagonist. The result is really a strikingly modern text.

Paragraphs

Another observation about paragraphs -

The mind must recurse through the iteration of a paragraph in the same or almost the same way that it does in a sentence. So the rhythm of a paragraph must vary in ways fairly analogous to the rhythms of a sentence. Therefore modes of reference and of modification must be similar in a paragraph to those in a sentence.

Those in sentences have been fairly thoroughly mapped; it remains to correspond them.

In a sentence, using something like the Minimalist model insofar as I understand it, There's a head. Against the head one may also have a gaggle of modifiers.

The head operates something like the scene-setting shot in film editing. That's often called "the long shot" or something like that -- I should go to a film person for this. Actually, I'll need an editor used to working with visuals as Murch is used to working with sound, ideally.

So, given the long shot, we know that the rest contextualizes in this scene, and we use the characteristics of the scene to fill in information, and we use the added details to flesh out the scene.

We have some natural conflict in that the head must delimit in some way, and because the details must add, amend, change. A "closed" story (closed per Bernstein) is one that changes little the initial shot, essentially adding to it or embellishing it rather than "actively" destroying its assumptions and revising them.

Think Apollo and Dionysus here, as in Nietszche's reading.

It strikes me that the issue for me, the issue of incomprehensibility in my writing, is that my readers generally want to insist that there be a long shot to b
egin with, a setting shot.

OF course, that tends to be a thesis or a declarative sentence. And that tends to establish limits I do not want. However, it seems there should be some way to counterfeit this, or to give them something that satisfies their will for a context-establishing shot without making the whole more closed or didactic.

What I need to do is classify and qualify types of opening shots in opening paragraphs, and see how this is done and who is more and less didactic, and what qualities establish scene.

Of course, it won't work exactly by Ph.

Also -- 2 principles that must be relevant:
1) In sentences, items of the Head are identified either by being labelled, or by position in the sentence (that position being designated by the pauses and musical qualities of speech, or by punctation. Therefore something similar will apply in Ph's. Now, the thing I must compare with is almost certainly not verb changes, but declension and terminations of nouns, subject and object, since the verbs are not ID'd as subject or object by their terminations --- although maybe, maybe the terminations can determine which they apply to, though it does not seem so in English.
Check in this context also inversions. Why does Milton still make sense when he inverts?
2) In sentences and paragraphs, listeners and readers clearly play accepted structural elements that may be ID'd and analyzed against presumptions of intention derived from content, reference, and social circumstance. All the latter would seem to be more significant the farther one gets from sentence.

So there are two opportunities to designate that do not need sequence of the unit designated -- though they may need sequence otherwise, within the unit or of larger units of the level in which the unit in question is contained.

NOW, then, a possible Key to Hypertext might be contained in the way of making a phrase or unit function naturally as a scene-setting shot without allowing it to function as a definer or delimiter ---

though this seems as though there may be some contradiction inherent. I need to go more precisely into the nature of this delimitation as opposed (?) to its suggestivity.

Another observation --- Establishing the HEAD in the sentence clearly DOES = or ~ establishing the scene or noun or topic in the ph.

I have to wonder whether another trip through Pedro Paramo is requisite.

Offhand, I think the following are necessary:

1. Joyce in Ulysses, Wake, and Artist
2. Beckett at the end.
3. Rulfo in Paramo and in a couple stories, including El Hombre.
4. Hemingway.
5. A couple people I am less happy with. Updike and Bellow, perhaps.
6. Breton
7. Rimbaud. vs Baudelaire and Ponge?
8. Wharton
9. Woolf
10. Mary Shelley
11. John Milton

Some poets. Whitman, Eliot, Celan, Pound, Williams. Sonnets -- perhaps Shakespeare.

I'm not sure it will work usefully with plays, in which so much will be unspoken -- the orientation provided by the mise en scene.

======

Paragraphing -- further notes

Language

I need to describe it musically, syntactically, punctuationally, visually, possibly referentially. The major problem is that the phrases distinguished will not nest properly. As such, I need internal and external tags to designate differences in the same qualities, as differentiated at different phrasal levels and syntactic levels.

Margaret Fuller

Fuller, Sarah Margaret Ossoli.
The blow-by-blow for the Papers on Art ----

A Dialogue. Poet. Critic. --

Poet vs critic in socratic dialog, each insist on the value of his own. The critic tenatively manages to justify herself, denying the poet's accusation of lack of emotion on the basis that part is better than nothing, that reason explores things that would be left unexamined.

The Two Herberts --

Lord Herbert and George Herbert is "intended chiefly as a setting to the Latin poems of George Herbert," and prefers George's more ethereal observations to his brother's richer stylel (15).

The Prose Works of Milton --

Reads like dust-jacket material for a Works of Milton, and reminds one that into the 20th Century, Milton enjoyed a prominence very near that of Shakespeare. Herein find Fuller's amended Romantic and Transcendental eidos in praise of M's spirituality and the grander span and grasp of his insight. Sublime does not come up, it it's very near the point.

The Life of SIr James Mackintosh: By his son; Robert James Mackintosh --

Clearly, clearly written as a book review, given that it discusses things like the binding, and goes through the pleasantness of owning a thing to which Fuller doth not grant genius. The drift seems to be how the elder Mack did not altogether reach fame and genius for human qualities that may be more admirable. One really wonders whether the younger were not a personal friend or patron.

Modern British Poets --

Campbell -- "... a poet; simply a poet-no philosopher. His forte is strong conception, a style free and bold . . ." (58).
. . . Anacreon Moore, sweet warbler of Erin! What ecstasy of sensation must thy poetic life have been!

The poetry of Walter Scott has been superseded by his prose, yet it fills no unimportant niche . . . . These poems are chiefly remarkable for presenting pictures of particulare epochs . . . " (63).

"Crabbe has the true spirit fo the man of science; he seeks truth alone . . . . The poor and humble owe him much, for he has made them known to the upper classes, not as they ought to be, but as they really are; and in so doing, in distinctly portraying the evils of their condition, he has opened the way to amelioration" (67).

"The youth of Shelley was unfortunate. He commited many errors" (68). But we don't hear which in any specific way. He is "most lyrical," yet "the struggles of Shelley's mind destroyed that serenity of tone which is essential to thei finest poetry, and his tenderness has not always that elevation of hope" (69), which I'd reather call a compliment than a criticism. She only faults him for lacking "unity of purpose and regulation of parts," for which I can only imagine that she's referring to the longer poems rather than substantial jewels like "Mont Blanc" and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty."

". . . a sorrowful indignation curls too strongly the lip, lightens too fiercely the eye, of Byron" (74). On the other hand ". . . Byron's moral perversion never paralyzed or obscured his intellectual powers, though it might lower their aims" (76) -- an odd separation of moral and intellectual, but I think we're hearing that Byron's often clever without being profound.

She does go on to Southey, Cage, Wordsworth and eventually Coleridge. The comments are more evaluative than analytical.

All in all we have here a catalog for potential readers, and the long quotes that she includes are display rather than meat for close reading.

The Modern Drama -- Shakespeare's "children should not hope to walk in his steps" (103), though british drama far exceeds the american.

". . . if you burn or cut down an ancient wood, the next offering of the soil will not be the same kind, but raspberries and purple flowers will succed the oak, poplars the pine. Thus, beneath the roots of the drama, lay seeds of the historic novel, the romantic epic, which were to take its place to the reader, and for the scene, the oratorios, the opera, and ballet.
"Music is the great art of the time" (104).

She argues further that more respect be shown the actor and what Artaud call the mise en scene. But she trails off in sundry observations of minor work -- accurate enough, but leaving little to report.

Dialogue -- Old friends discourse about not seeing each other so often, the one feeling neglected. They have recourse to various Romantic poets to augment their discussion -- and of course, to Shakespeare.

Poets of the People: Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-Loom Weaver by WIlliam Thom, of Iverrury.

"in this book, the recollections are introduced for the sake of the 'Rhymes,' (2).

Here, finally, is an aesthetic statement:

"There are two ways of considering :oems, or the pruducts of literature in general. We may tolerate only what is excellent, and demand that whatever is consigned to prin fo r the benefit of the human race should exhibit fruits perfect in shape, color, and flavor, enclusing kernels of permanent value.
"Those who demand this will be content only with the Iliads and Odysseys of the minds' endeavor. -- They can feed no where but at rich men's tables; in teh wildest recess of nature roots and berries will not content them. . . . .
"But, on the othe rhand, literature may be regarded as the great mutual system of interpretation betweeen all kinds and classes of men. it is an epistolary correspondence between brethren of one family, subject to many and wide separations, and anxious to remain in spiritual presence of one another" (2).

This is a pretty fair statent of the credo of the departments that would bring the academic study called "Literature" to "Cultural Studies," the contextualists. It's a more self-aware statement than I've read otherwise. This is worth quoting at more length as she extends the principle to criticism:

"In like manner are there two modes of criticism. On which tries, by the highest standard fo literary prefection the critic is capable of conceiving, each work which comes in his way; rejecting all that it is possible to reject, and reserving for toleration only what is capable of standing the severest test . . . .
"There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain . . . " (3).

It's easy to see where Fuller's sympathies lie. She mistakes better work of the formal critic, who should be not so much evaluating, or not evaluating as an end, but should determine and describe the workings of text.

Fuller's tone throughout seems that of a social reformer rather than an artist, clear and sharp rather than subject to transports in the Romantic mode she describes. One can picture Thoreau or Whitman engaged with Emerson's transparent eyeball, but Fuller will be there to remind the boys what work remains to do when they stumble down from that hill.

The rest trails into discussions of poverty, and of Victoria -- which are perhaps in part the same topic.

Miss Barrett's Poems -- F considers BB as free from "morbid sentimentalism" (23). F greets warmly the lush lyricism by which BB remains popular, without playing much with its excesses, as might be imagined from the above.

Browning's Poems -- Interesting that Browning must be Robert and not Elizabeth, even for Margaret Fuller, whom one suspects of other sympathies. Actually, her response to him seems more perceptive than most of what's gone before:

"['Paracelsus'] is one of those attempts, that illustrate the self-consciosness of this age, to represent the fever of the soul pininig to embrace the secret of the universe in a single trance. Men who are once seized with this fever, carry thought upon th eheart as a cross, instead of finding thesmselves dailly warmed and enlightened to more life and joy by the sacred fire to which their lieves daily bring fresh fuel" (31).

Fine notion, and apparopriate to RB, hang it all. Also, this is pretty revealing of Fuller, and who she is and who she is not. Let's note first that insofar as one does not "embrace the secret of the universe in a single trance," one does not embrace it, but stands aside and recognizes and perhaps describes. Fuller's in the latter house, clear where Emerson's not, but, having never seen from that transparent eyeball, she does not fully appreciate the value of getting it all at once.

"Byron could only paint women as they were to him. Browning can show what they are in themselves" (41).

Lives of the Great Composers; Hayden, Mozart, Handel, Bach, Beethoven.

"It is easier to us to get the scope of the artist's design and its grown as the area where we see it does not stretch vision beyond its power" (47).

Left politic and rightis aesthetics -- not an unusual combination.

An interesting comparison between the apparent processes of Emerson and Fuller occurs. Harkening back to the explanation of logic with non-discrete words, one might say that Emerson feels forcibly the instability of his discrete pronunciations and repeatedly weaves back to respond to the unspoken. He has some faith that at some level Kosmos unifies and organizes and so forth -- his transcendent level, of course. For Fuller, the associations of discourse resolve adequately within the sentence, and the recursions of paragraphs and larger units revisit only what has been made relatively explicit in the prior text; where they extend it, they do so relatively straightforwardly.

This difference is quantitive, and anything but absolute. Emerson's trying for clarity, too, and Fuller for profundity. And both achieve some of each. But Emerson spills over regularly, whereas Fuller falls back into abstraction.

This is much of what the business of jumping around consists of in freshman compositions, too. Only they haven't the experience or desire to police it, so they allow it where they have little call to do so.

This has something to do with the difference between linguistic and mathematic analysis. In mathematical analysis, the terms are quantities, their natures fixed or presumed to be fixed. In language one tries for similar strictures, or approximations of them, but the language is presumed referent, therefore it continues always subject to the dissonance of reference. Also, it remains subject to the dissonance involved in categorization, in the parting of externals by the separate samplings of sense and the fictions of its subsequent reassembly.

Mathematics further tends to presume the referent as expressible in quantities, or in a quantity of quantities. Language, conversely, favors the subjectively irreducible goache-fluxus of sense. Mathmind takes the world to be asensual, to hold Meaning or Nature unavailable to the senses or to vision -- possible available to sound or movement, in kinesis.

Here we bend back to a surprising unity -- Fuller is the master of the kinesis in her sentences and paragraphs; Emerson is not. She owns or spans the effective sentence, the long moment of meaning. She has the measure. THE PROCESS OF MEASURE, OF MEASURING, IS TEMPORAL. One measures from __ to __, :. movement.

Now, here's also the problem with the stylistic alterations often requisite of simpler prose. They don't strive like Robert Browning to embrace their topic-wisdom at once. They treat a whole as assembled of parts. Therefore, they tend to lose the specific relationship of those parts. The logical phrase, then, loses the possibility of feeding those aspects into the general pattern, then determining whether other constructs can or cannot be staged mutually with the first construct.

Ooh.

Well, back to Fuller-Ossoli-- She's on to A Record of Impressions of Mr. Allson's Pictures in the Summer of 1839.

"I seemed to recognise in painting that self-possessedelegance, that transparent depth, which I most admire in liaturere; I thought with delight that such a man as this had been able to grow up in our bustling, reasonable community, that he had kept hsi foot upon the ground, yet never lost sight of the rose-clouds of beauty floating above him" (109-110).

The operative concept here seems to be transparence. The relations to Emerson's images of transcendance and transparency describe something of the aesthetic to which Fuller refers. Transparency may involve an alignment of molecules or surfaces. Thus glass is transparent while it lays as melted or poured. Light passes through the aligned surface with little reflection. We see ground glass as white because light of various frequences bounces from the various surfaces. Likewise one considers the moment of recognition as one of clarity or transparency because factors under consideration align; one can also thereby ignore certain aspects of them, because these can be assumed to be in alignment. One can consider other aspects that would normally have to be bracked away from consideration. On has the impression of great or universal perception.

American Literature --

She bops through a few near-contemporaries, admitting a general lack in amlit, but noting Dr. Channing, a Unitarian preacher near to the transcendentalist movement; and JF Cooper, more noted for his faults than blessings, though we're still awaiting Twain on this one. I guess the Sage of Concord must be Emerson, though she ought to say. She disses Longfellow as elegant but "artificial and imitative," Lowell as less. Emerson's mentioned differently, so the Sage above is probably Channing, or the elder Channing. There is also William Ellery Channing "nephew and namesake of Dr. C."

As to the stage of development, she mentions "those who find the theatres of this city well filled all the year round by an audience willing to sit out the heroisms of Rolla" (134). The city is probably New York. She goes on to complain of the play, but the people are there.

". . . the most important part of our literature, wile the work of diffusion is still going on, likes in teh journals, which monthly, weekly, daily, send their messages to every corner of this great land, and form, at present, the only efficient for the general education of the people.
Among these, the Magazines take the lowest rank. Their object is principally to cater for the amusement of vacant hours, and as there is not a great deal of wit and light talkent in this country, they do not even this to much advantage. More wit, grace, and elegant trifling, embellish the annals of literatuer in one day of France than in a year of America.
"The Reviews are more able. If they cannot compare, on equal terms, with those of France, England, and Germany, where, if genius be rare, at least a vast amount of talent and culture arebrought to bear upon all the department so fknowlege, there are yet very creditable to a new country . . . " (137-138).

Swedenborgism ---

"The claim to be the New Church, or peculiarly the founders of a New Jerusalem, is like exclusive claims to the title of Orthodox. We have no sympathy with it" (160).

Owen Wister

Wister, Owen. The Virginian. NY: Barnes & Noble, 2005.

How can I write about Owen Wister? I feel like I'm ratting out family.

Wister gives a terribly romantic view of all this, but it's all massively familiar. I feel like I'm rooting Grandpa's Field and Stream's from the Forbidden Basement under the lizard's oven, sitting between old men with hearing aids and the odor of Hoppe's #9 floating around, or fingering the .22 case on my bedstand to think of my father.

I should probably reflect on how much of my ethical heritage derives from bad dialog and faux cowboys, but I'll leave it off for discouraging.

Let's leave it with this:

• The woman has to release her will over the V's violence to wed him. This is supposedly to do with her releasing her hold on class superiority and eastern niceties -- but that would seem a little optimist about the East and downright fanciful about the upper classes. This is supposedly plain-guy, populist stuff. Just how populist Wister's sentiments really are can be seen in much of what follows here.


• Wister grossly misrepresents relations between labor and management on the ranch in the expanding West. There's nothing about people railroaded and forced off their lands, for instance. (one might look to Frank Norris' The Octopus for comparison). The closest thing to worker organization is dismissed as cattle rustling, the act of lynching not only excused but lionized, defended at length by a character to whom Wister attributes education and legal background. The closest thing to a labor leader is a Snydley Whiplash named "Trampas" (Spanish for tricks, traps, or betrayals). He decides to get too drunk to shoot and call the V out, principally because that certain time of the book had arrived when his character had to be done away with so that V could marry.


• (see pp 198-202 for an extremist anti-union charade).


• The only good injun is a daid injun, or thereabouts. Wister scoffs at the notion of peaceful Indians, but shows the whites debating whether to raid an Indian village because unidentified Indians may have attacked someone on the road.


• The character is so zugnisch that one feels like appending a recording of the old Lenny Bruce routine, "Thank You Masked Man."


• The Virginian invests in land and becomes a capitalist, embodying Wister's imagination that the old venturesome spirit of the ranch-hand laborers (who else drove cattle and fought Indians and thieves?). He's told Shorty that Shorty should have just saved his money up to buy land; notwithstanding, Shorty is paid less because he's not as good a hand; also, he sends money back to a sweetheart back east, he has to sell his horse to get by. So Wister is taking the morés of the cattle men -- thoroughly romanticized, granted -- and pasting them onto these managerial types. So we continue today with the idea that the businessmen are in some kind of adventure, that our "Indians" in whatever place we're invading at the moment cannot be peaceful, pretending that Iraq has a civil war instead of a war iagainst occupation.

But then, I've got to say, I still miss Bodie.

Joan Didion

I'm not sure why it startled me to find Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem set so close to home -- not just L.A. or Southern California, but the east-of-Eastside 2nd generation Okie and southwestern folks I grew up with -- and in the 50's and 60's, while I was there.

The inanity of murder in the sort of bilgewater sameness of everything rings just true.

The rest continues as a sort of collage of half-essays in response to popular culture. Didion takes her title, of course, from famous end of Yeat's poem. The 60's was of course a time when many felt that various centers "could not hold," perhaps because certain central facts were finally under some little examination by a portion of the populace.

Didion gives a desultory view of all this, always entertaining. But in some places it seems she wanders from critical points. John Wayne is heroic in his battle with cancer, it seems, but we hear no mention that he and almost all the cast and crew most likely got it from shooting a movie too near the Dirty Harry H-Bomb blast. Likewise there's no comparison of Wayne's nonservice in WWII and his hawkline politics and screen persona.

But maybe this is part of what we pay to allow her to skip blithely to Joan Baez and her school for activists, followed by a glimpse into the apparent chaos of the Haight-Ashbury drug scene in which she manages to render the disorder, but not the order.

Ernest J. Gaines

Gaines, Ernest J. Bloodline. NY: Dial, 1968.

If "A Long Day in November" is a short story, "Heart of Darkness" might as well be.

Gaines is a competent author in a conventional sense, writing a style that comes out of 19th century realism moderated by 20th century consciousness of perspectives. Perspectives are arranged for easy identification. It's an easy read altogether. Long Day makes a statement, then: about values.

Basically Hapless Hubby gets a car, probably for the first time. He gads about, leaving his wife alone until she gets fed up and leaves him -- that's where we enter the narrative, seen through the POV of their early gradeschool-aged child. HH is probably messing around on her, though that's not altogether clear. She takes off to Grandma's; he follows within a few hours; Granny strews some buckshot over his head to discourage him.

He borrows money to pay a soothsayer. The cagey old lady tells him he has to burn his car. He goes to his wife and burns it, and she does indeed return to him.

Pauline Hopkins and Langston Hughes

Hopkins, Pauline. Contending Forces NY:AMS,1999.

The novel Contending Forces seems fairly episodic. Hopkins' intentions involve discussing differences between Southern and Northern blacks in the Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction era. Her comments display her intents: "I have presented both sides of the dark picture -- lynching and concubinage -- truthfully and without vituperation" (15).

The first tale involves a slave-owning planter who decides to move from the Bahamas to North Carolina when the Brits outlaw slavery. Mysteriously, the man makes this move despite his intention to free these same slaves in a few years, though this cannot possibly be reasonable economically.

In NC, skanky white neighbors displeased with his too-noble ways and covetous of his wife make up a story that she's black, lynch him for freeing slaves, whip her with scarce-hidden sexual overtones to their pleasure, auction off his property and take his sons into slavery. If any irony suggests that such practices were unusual, I missed it.

In the next story, a romance is contrived between northern and southern African-Americans. Hopkin's characters go on and on and on with various ideas about various difference between different combinations of black and white genes. In places, it's unclear just how much of this Hopkins herself buys. Passages like the following are not clearly attributable to one character or another:

"Langley's nature was the natural product of such an institution as slavery. Natural instinct for good had been perverted by a mixture of 'cracker' blood of the lowest type on his father's side with whatever God-saving quality that might have been loaned the Negro by pitying nature. This blood, while it gave him the pleasant features of the Causasian race, vitiated his moral nat ure and left it stranded high and dry on the shore of blind ignorance . . . " (221).

One of the more durable curses slavery seems to have put on African-Americans is this business of analyzing their responses in terms of their whiteness or blackness.

Come to think of it, this endures even in such a talent as Langston Hughes. In the last story of The Ways of White Folk, Hughes describes the homecoming of a prodigal son of interracial concubinage. In the only scene detailed from the boy's childhood, the white father beat the "black" son horribly for calling him "Papa" in public, though no one stood in much doubt as to his parentage. The boy has predominantly white features, and on several occasions is described as having inherited much of his father's obnoxious character. The boy stands up to his father, expecting to be shot, but the father fails to shoot him and dies in the scuffle, as though from a heart attack.

Part of the point for Hughes appears to be that there's a balance in that the old man's evil has reproduced itself in his son, and the final point, that the man "left no heirs," is of course deeply ironic. For Hughes, the violence has occurred because the boy has inherited a white character and white attitudes.

At the same time, many's the time these narratives go out of their way to describe how close to white certain black protagonists are. It always is done as a way of making them appear more attractive and even more deserving -- which represents an appalling degree of acceptance of the value system of the slaveowners. The same kind of thing operates to this day among the population of Mexico, where a woman is called "guera," or fair, as a compliment.

...

Going on, Hopkins describes an African-American politician, sucked deep into compromises in which the majority of the African-Americans gain little if anything despite promises.

. . . . As a continuation of the previous imminent lynching issue,


The ending brings the threads together in true soap-opera serial style. Will, who wishes to marry Sappho, the girl who flees rather than admit she has born a child to a rapist,

As a whole, it's written with fair competence, but remains unexciting fiction because the author's aims are almost strictly polemic and present themselves as mostly obvious to anyone not beset by the peculiar brand of racism that she writes against.


Thumbnail plot:

• Engand would outlaw slavery.


• Slaver Montfort, in English protectorate, flees to N. Caroline with his brown-eyed wife.


• Jealous cartoon southerners make up a story that his wife is black. They kill him, rape and beat her, and enslave their kids.


• A man buys one kid to liberate him, probably because he's white.


• The other kid remains a slave and eventually marries a slave; they have children, one of whom has children Will and Dora.


• Will has trouble with Sappho because she has been violated by descendents of the men who ruined the Montforts. She runs away rather than reveal her misfortune


• Everybody meets up and lives happily ever after

It's interesting to see that the recurrent themes of slave narratives constantly involve family matters. There are always relatives lost -- sold, escaped, or transplanted by violence. But also the black children of white slavers or bosses are also a constant fixture. Interestingly, the authors invariably take the white features to be good-looking, but generally consider white ancestry to be bad blood otherwise -- that is, contributing to violence, unnatural pride, and even insanity.

Langston Hughes

Hughes, Langston. The Ways of White Folks. NY: Vintage, 1990.

Hughes' white folks are seen, of course, in terms of their dealings with African Americans. He's sympathetic with individuals, but unsparing with systemic problems. There are several stories.

As follows:

"Cora Unashamed." Black servant Cora Jenkins sympathizes with the young white lady she has raised when the latter gets pregnant out of wedlock. The white parents, her bosses, feel only horror and fear. The girl gets a back-alley abortion, then dies of the complications. Cora finally busts out and criticizes the whole lot of them, breaking up the deeply hypocritical funeral, and is fired.

"Slave on the Block." A bohemian artist couple with some mysterious source of income have some kind of romantic notions about African-Americans which comes out in their art. They pay their servants to pose for them and so forth. They're kind in some ways, but remarkably thick-headed, and deeply patronizing. When a more aggressively racist friend comes over and they back the friend, the servants get fed up, tell them off, and leave.

"Home." A musician comes home from Europe to the American South because he may be dying of tuberculosis. He attracts the attention of a local music teacher, who arranges that he play concerts and so forth, though most of the population don't get the classical numbers that have become part of his repetoire. She hails him in public somewhere, and he's beaten to death by passing whites for talking to her.

"A Good Job Gone." The narrator has lost his job because his white employer has gotten himself into trouble chasing after the black women he dictates to. One of them rejects him, and over the course of a few weeks he goes nuts.

"Rejuvenation Through Joy." A preacher who's passing for white sets up a cult exploiting some fantasy of African "naturalness" and spontaneity and joy as a healing procedure for nutsy whites. It finally falls through, of course.

"The Blues I'm Playing." A white female philanthropist underwrites a young black female musician for some time, but demurs when the girl intends to get married. Also, the philanthropist seems to think she can dictate how her charge plays. Hughes makes a neat finish. The girl plays "O, if I could holler / Like a mountaing jack, / I'd go up on de mountain / And call my baby back" -- to which Mrs. E answers "And I would stand looking at the stars." This is clearly intended as a cultural observation, with white folks as somehow apart from life.

"Red-Headed Baby." Here Hughes stays close to the white, red-headed sailor who is the focalizer throughout. After several years, he's revisiting an African American woman whom he pays for sex; his thoughts are shot through with racism. When he arrives, he's welcomed. But his amours are interrupted by a little red-headed African-American baby. Though no one accuses him of being the father or asks him for anything, he has no stomach for the procedure, and he leaves, with no real perspective on his own behavior at any point.

"Poor Little Black Fellow." When a servant dies, the son is adopted by the rich white folks. They raise him in apparent kindness, though he doesn't fit into their white neighborhood nor with the African-Americans raised in lower-class circumstances. They take him to Europe, where he meets people for whom his blackness just isn't very important. His adoptive parents react bizarrely, suddenly becoming very strict and not allowing him to socialize at all, though no explanation is given for their unprecedented behavior. So the boy leaves, deciding to stay on in Paris.

"Little Dog." A severely depressed woman has the building janitors bring bones for her dog. She falls in love with the married African-American who brings the bones. To avoid responding to this, she moves out, eventually dying with no friends.

"Berry." A corrupt home for crippled children fire their African-American help at the first opportunity. He leaves without his wages, glad to be gone.

"Mother and Child." A married white woman gives birth to a black child, and the father's family gets prepared for the onslaught and probable lynchings.

"One Christmas Eve." The white family arrives late on Xmas eve and underpays their African-American servant, who leaves to try to shop for her family. She brings her kids to the stores, where the youngest is frightened by the storefront Santa. To make him feel better, she tells him it isn't really Santa, just a "theater for white folks."

"Father and Son" is dealt with in the Pauline Hopkins entry.

Jamaica Kincaid

Kincaid, Jamaica. At the Bottom of the River. NY: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1983.
-----------A Small Place

A Small Place gives a fairly straightforward impression of a St. Thomas idea of the British and American tourism and imperialism that forms the island's history and economy. She does little theorizing, and gives fairly full vent to her understandable rancor. If someone doesn't get why oppressed peoples in tourist traps resent tourists, this is a pretty straightforward version.

At the Bottom of the River is a collection of little tales that seem half prose poem, and kind of between magic realism and surrealism. Giving a synopsis of plots doesn't convey why their active. "Girl," for instance, just recounts the directives a little girl receives, as though she were going over them in her head -- which I suppose she is, years later. In "In the Night," a little girl dreams of marrying a motherly woman who will tell her stories.

The lyricism lasts more than the plot or, for me, the sense. Check this:
"In the night, way into the middle of the night, when the night isn't divided like a sweet drink into little sips, when there is no just before midnight, midnight, or just after midnight, when the night is round in some places, flat in some places, and in some places like a deep hole, blue at the edge, black inside, the night-soil men come" (6).

This is typical in its performative sentimentality, its strongly parallel cadence, its lush description, its acceptance of metaphor as little distinguished from what passes for literal.

Tillie Olsen

Olsen, Tillie. Tell Me a Riddle. Labor organizer Tillie Olsen recounts an old woman's death by cancer. The principles resemble her parents demographically, and the narrative feels recalled more than invented. The ethnic dialog gives some nice rhythms. The unsettled nature of the woman and her life, the systemic privation, is clear throughout.

The plot's simple. She'd live hither, her husband yon. They fight and snipe over old wounds. She's diagnosed with cancer. They go to a 3rd place, for medical reasons that don't make sense or help. No one supports or cares well or has more than a few good memories. She and her husband say they have taken advantage of each other all their lives. She won't budge. He finally caves in a bit when he finds she's dying. The characters seem uninterested in the social fountains of their misery. Olsen sees it, but she's above preaching, and one wants to cry with it.

Michael Herr

Even including O'Brien, Dispatches is still the most striking book on Nam I know of. It reads even stronger than it did nearly 30 years ago when it first came out. Herr catches the rush of detail, of tragedy that's too too too too too fast and thick to present as tragedy -- just pointless lethal ongoing murderous misery.

Herr is credited as a co-writer on the Apocalypse Now filmscript. My understanding is that John Milious wrote a script, Coppola made some changes, then shot a movie that was at least as much based on Heart of Darkness as his script. Apparently Herr wrote the VO narration spoken by Martin "Captain Willard" Sheen, apparently in a hotel in the Bay area sometime after most of the filming. However, there's no doubt that parts of Herr's book map to Coppola's movie too directly to be coincidental.

Herr lets one feel the soldiers' heroism without pretending that they're doing anything that makes sense or that they are not regularly committing atrocities -- torture, genocide, infanticide, you name it.

I wonder whether anyone has ever written anything like this for the Vietnamese. If so, I hope it gets translated.

Lydia Child

Child, Lydia. Letters from New York. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1970.

The form of Letters suits Child way more than the novel, and this is a way better read than Hobomok. The same good intentions and misshapen pretensions apply, of course.

Oh my. Yet there are some things of value in Child's writing, and even in the form of these letters. She's serious about her moralism and her abolitionism, and while she doesn't seem to understand Indian or African-American society even as an outsider, she does understand white American society well enough to smell the common frauds of feudal slavery and slaving capitalism, and her rampant Christianity does not include pretending these are part of some other world.

Formally, the letters here unquestionably form a single discourse, though I suspect the sequence could be shuffled,if not randomly. She appears to have envisioned beforehand that her stay in NYC gave her an opportunity for a theme. She saw that she could narrate her exploration of NYC and at once describe the various subcultures and subclasses that interacted in the metropolis. Each letter follows a fresh social thread, and each concrete incident is treated as exemplar of Child's humanistic and (mostly) antijudgmental Christianism. The style suffers considerably because she thoroughly conflates idea with sensory input, recycling old pastoral images as though Marlowe and Spenser and Co. were really talking about shepherds. She seems to feel the questions of the world are largely resolved in their long lines, and that enlightened humans are left to explore the details and bring along their beknighted brethren, so she appears to see her mission as polemic.

"'Every flower writes music in the air;' and every tree that grows enshrines a tone within its heart. Do you doubt it? Try the willow and the oak, the elm and the poplar . . . "

On the other hand, she had some value as a polemicist for the era, remaining clear at times when subtler minds had grown lost in calculation. She's got the guts to undercut Milton, for instance:

"Milton (stern moralist as he was, in many respects) maintains, in his 'Christian Doctrine,' that falsehoods are sometimes not always allowable, but necessary. 'It is scarcely possible, says he, to execute any of the artifices of war without openly uttering the greatest untruths, with the undisputable intention of deceiving.' And because war requires lies, we are told by a Christian moralist that lies musts, therefore, be lawful!" (171).

As a revelation of consciousness, I wouldn't set Hobomok or even these letters against any healthy slice of Paradise Lost or even any 3 Milton poems. Would one rather be right than Milton? In either case, there's got to be some value here.

Some historical notes:

"Music, like every thing else, is now passing from the few to the many. The rat of printing has laid before the multitude the written widom of ages, once locked up in the elaborate manuscripts of the cloister. Engraving and deaguerrotype spread the productions of the pencil before the whole people. Music is taught in our common schools, and the cheap accordion brings its delights to the humblest class of citizens. All these things are full of prophecy. Slowly, slowly, to the measured sound of the spirit's music, there goes round the world the golden band of brotherhood; slowly, slowly, the earth comes to itse place, and makes a chord with heaven" (192).


"Many more than half of the inmates of the penitentiary were women; and of course a large proportion of them were taken up as 'street-walkers.' The men who made them such, who, perchance caused the love of a human heart to be its ruin, and changed tenderness into sensuality and crime -- these men live in the 'ceiled houses' of Broadway, and sit in council in the City Hall, and pass 'regulations' to clear the streets they have filled with sin" (202).

Just a passing thought, but in an odd way, Child's form reminds me of Tropic of Cancer, of all things.

"We were to have an execution yesterday; but the wretched prisoner avoided it by suicide. The gallows had been erected for several hours, and with a cool refinement of cruelty, was hoisted before the window of the condemned; the hangman was all ready to cut the cord; marshalls paced back and forth, smoking and whistling; spectators were waiting impatiently to see where he would 'die game.' Printed circulars had been handed abroad to summon the number of witnesses reqired by law:-- 'You are respectfully invited to witness the execution of John C. Colt.' I trust some of them are preserved for museums. . . . Women deemed themselves not treated with becoming gallantry because tickets of admittance were denied them; . . . "



Some of the most painful moments relate to phrenology and race. Child's a nice-guy racist, but racist nonetheless.

"We who have robbed the Indians of their lands, and worse still, of themselves, are very fond of proving their inferiority. We are told that the facial angle in the
Caucasioan race is 85 degrees.
Asiatic 78 "
American Indian 73 "
Ethiopian 70 "
Orang-Utang 67 "

This simply proves that the Causasioan race, through a succession of ages, has been exposed to influences emininently calculated to develop the moral and intellectual faculties" (261).

-- but clearly not enough to prevent our enslaving the blacks and murdering the reds--among others. But the angle of the forehead demonstrates morals!


Here's the faith, right at the end:

"Man is moving to his highest destiny through manifold revolutions of spirit; and te outward must change with the inward" (288). Viva Hegel.

James Weldon Johnson

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Garden City, New York: Garden City 1927.

Just a quick synopsis ----

This book is a novel, not an autobiography. The protagonist is the illegitimate African-American son of a prominent white man. He's robbed en route to college and so loses his chance to study. He's patronized by a white millionaire for his piano playing, and travels with the man to Paris -- a revelation for its culture and relative lack of racism against Africans. But he eventually tires of the (fairly) good life travelling as a sort of parlour pet, and decides to return to the US and the African-American community. After a short time he witnesses a lynching.

Eventually he drifts into passing for white. At first, he has no intention to do so permanently, but he falls in love with a white woman who's horrified at his confession of African ancestry.

Bharati Mukherjee

Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. NYC: Grove, 1989.

Jasmine's an entertaining piece: lots of action; short, artfully spliced streaks of narrative match protagonist Jotyi-Jassie-Jazzy-Jasmine-Jane's metamorphoses or incarnations as she slips towards her next attempt at fulfillment.

It reminds me a little of Voltaire's Candide or even de Sade's Justine. The woman's caught in something like Marquez' hojarasca, and seems only partly aware of it. I suppose folks enamored of Jameson's conception of postmodernism could see this as an extension of that. People move, transplanted, before functions that the reader's free to trace to capital.

I'm entertained, but disturbed. The violence around Jasmine and Jasmine seems stylized. Like the protagonist of Gravity's Rainbow, J does follow the trajectory of the missile that has hit her life in India: she goes to America to chase the modernity that begins as her personal autonomy. But it's not clear that she comes closer to it, though I suspect that Mukherjee would claim that she does.

Violence:

• Her family is moved from their town by the violence of the Muslim, Lions, perpetrators and victims of the struggles that swept through India with the fall of empire there.


• Her husband is killed by Moslems in the same extended conflict, decades later and in a different part of India.


• She follows her husband's ambitions back to the USA.


• She's raped en route, as though for good measure or to emphasize the plight of refugees entering the US.


• The rapist gives her an implausible degree of freedom and trust, for which she kills him, with admirable efficiency.


• A couple adventures down the line, she's in NYC babysitting a kid for a couple of fairly stereotypical metropolitans, who, just as typically, will divorce. He falls in love with her, as everyone seems to. She takes off to Europe with a lover, but J sees a Lion selling hotdogs in NYC and decides to head off to Iowa.


• The narrative centers on the episode in Iowa, and the progressive explanation of her current Iowa life parallels the stories of her childhood in India and her progressive flight-quest thereafter. The local banker gives her a job, asks her to lunch, and throws his wife over.


• They adopt a Viet child. Why not? This probably does fix the story at some point in the 1970's and early '80's, since the '70's brought the boatpeople, and Vietnamese refugees were common.


• Banker Bud must turn down farmers' who apply for loans, so he gets shot, crippled. She stays with him and manages to get herself pregnant by him, despite his difficulties with intercourse.


• Another local farmer offers to sweep her away to New Mexico, but hangs himself from the rafters with an electrical cord when she turns him down and before she and Bud can go over to offer him a modified loan.


• Meanwhile, the guy from her NYC days comes a knocking with an offer to take her to California. So she dumps near-beloved Bud and jumps to the next guy, Western-style and very American.

So, what have we seen?

Gender issues, I suppose -- men are nice or vicious, but uniformly needy. But her Good Indian Husband has instilled the idea that she's doing things for herself, and she adopts that. The image of the shattered vase is central here. She keeps saying that once the vase is shattered, one can see that the air is the same inside the vase and outside the vase. Thus one finds that something like Indian Society or Indian Gender Roles or Jasmine's family gets shattered, so Jasmine scuttles from one situation to another trying to find complement.

In truth, there's a kind of diaspora here.

From the POV of a foreigner entering the USA, the broken vase might be taken differently: once one enters, one finds that circumstances within the US resemble those without. People here are equally driven before the artificial arrangement of spreadsheet needs projected by imperial capital rather than directly and coherently responsive to the needs of their mates and families.

Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy's The Group is an interesting history. It traces the careers of a handful of upscale Vassar grads through through about their graduation into the early part of WWII, but the focus is not on public events. McCarthy starts chatty. The plot progresses less like a sequence of events than a slowly gathering pattern.

The focus that finally orients the piece is the marriage of Kay. Her probably-gay theater-hopeful husband fools around on her, particularly with one of her fellow grads, who had been tangentially involved with The Group. The better to carry on his affairs, he enlists his mistress to help have Kay committed. Kay's fortunate enough to run into Polly, another old grad who has just happened to marry a shrink, and eventually they manage to get her released. Of course, in the meanwhile, Kay has had to recognize that she's not really going home to Honest Harald, her unharmless hubby.

Just after the war breaks out Kay jumps or falls from a building to her death. Boom. War and funeral give The Group another chance to torque their variously conceived needs against each other. Their grand mutual misunderstanding is, of course, thematic. It's a pity McCarthy couldn't have recycled Katherine Porter's title Ship of Fools. Not only do none of the particulars show any contrated concern for anyone else, they seem utterly mystified about what they themselves want.

The conversation of Corinne and Polly over their kids was probably the most straightforwardly revealing part of the book. Each has extensively defined and intrusive, yet vague and inconsistent ideas about childrearing. Neither has decided to give the matter any serious study, despite some vague feelings, at least on Polly's part, that what they're doing has consequences.

Meanwhile, the experts on childbirth have all been men, oddly, though oddly consonant with historical accuracy. Polly has the odd idea that babies scream bloody murder because they actually do feel things, while the so-called experts prefer to deny the obvious. Yet this obvious insight gets no attention, even from Polly. The two wonder whether their education at Vassar was a good idea or whether it has just gotten in their way. The various women have done various jobs since graduating, the reader would be justified in asking why, besides a wage, any of them would have bothered. Their ideas about childraising are painfully useless as well as unexamined, and the ideas of their male experts, who have had the benefit or ill of direct academic examination of the subject, understand still less.

Enfin, at the funeral, supposed genious __, who has turned out to be lesbian, pins a little point of revenge on supposed genius Harald. He has the odd idea that the Kay that he seems to want to feel he owned has had some kind of lesbian affair. Out of spite, ___ refuses to affirm or deny it, and in a rage he insists on stepping out of the car, which she quickly allows him to do.

Ending score: Bad guys 0; good gals 0.

The book held my attention better than I might have indicated. This kind of post 19-Century naturalism disappoints me. It's not that McCarthy has learned nothing from the preceding 50 years or so. The focalization shifts from point to point in ways that reflect the intervening presences of Faulkner and Woolf, and her willingness to dwell on outwardly insignificant detail reflects probably Proust as opposed to Joyce, and all of that is all fine and well and good. But I wonder: if all the Vassar education and crown-of-creation social puffery just screwed the ladies up, what is it they would have needed? Granted that McCarthy isn't supposed to moralize about it, but why can't we get the guts of that idea on the table somehow? A lot of relevant things get ignored here.

• These folks have servants, but there's no consciousness of class struggles for the servants


• Harald writes plays, and could have some consciousness of a reason why. All we get of his motivation is petty vanity, though he's obviously an ideologue.


• McCarthy seems to place all social ideas always at the same level. All are expressive of their bearers' insanity, regardless of how true or false, useful or useless, any of them are. McCarthy may wish to argue that the realism of this makes the ideas themselves inconsequential, but if so, she seems to assume the point she wishes to prove.

Altogether, this kind of realism seems retrograde after Joyce and Faulkner, frankly. The trouble is that Kay's breakdown cannot exist without Kay's past and her hopes. But here McCarthy gives us one without the other by showing us the trauma of one character through the eyes of another character. So we may recognize that an It is there, without recognizing what it is.

The operation of this kind of novel, then, operats actively on some planes, but insists on staying closed and sterile on another. The presentation of a rather narrow framework of social problems as social problems omits the social dynamic that produces the problems, and also omits the psychological nature of the problems themselves, leaving us with a rather thin image of them.

I'm going to refer to Dostoyevsky again. In some ways, McCarthy's work reminds me of a Dostoyevskian plot. She has a group of people, with characters coming and going, if not long Russian names. She has important themes. She has an even that could have made the newspapers, like the murder of Raskolnikov's pawnbroker or the old Karamazov. But Dostoyevsky's characters would have engaged the issues that drove them somehow. They would have directly addressed us or each other in their attempts at resolution.

Does this seem unrealistic for these characters? For Kay? For Harald? I don't think so. Why would Kay have never confessed to Polly? Why would Harald have never confessed to Corinne? But to show this level of response might have required a different kind of focus for the novel.

This does not seem to me a question of realism or irony or identification or objective correlative.

Katherine Anne Porter

Porter, Katherine Anne. Ship of Fools.

Porter sets Fools on a mixed passenger-cargo ship she designates as travelling between Mexico and Europe between very specific dates in 1931. The piece advertises itself as allegory, but isn't heavy-handedly so.

Writing during WWII (the novel was first published in 1945) Porter means to deal with people demographically, so various national, religious, and social groups are represented. The book saunters 500 pages through various classes of bigotry. As nearly as I can tell, Porter had considerable cultural range, both as a judge of dialect and of attitudes. Her English impressively renders various Mexican and hispanic prejudices quite distinctly. At various points one or another strangely unEnglish word choice reflects her decision to graft a very specific word from the Spanish.

On the other hand, I was disappointed in her rather harsh attitude towards her characters. I don't mind her calling us all fools: it's at least as true as it is false. I don't doubt that she's at least savvy enough to act like she considers herself another fool among us, which seems a fine and generous attitude for someone so obviously observant to take. But the people here seem inherently stupid as opposed to being victims of systemic folly and greed -- something Porter seems to have been quite aware of and may have treated elsewhere.

I think my sense of harshness has to do with the distance her narration maintains from her characters. She's following a kind of narrative that reminds me of Virginia Woolf, but she does not reveal more than flashes of intimacy with any one character. Specifically, Porter narrates in 3rd person. She jumps from focalizer to focalizer quite quickly, blending 3rd person descriptions of the focalizers with third person observations by the focalizer of various people and surroundings. Several times she took me aback with one or another bigoted statement; in each case, I eventually had to recognize that statement and attitude belonged to the focalizer, and that she had shifted from the Porter description of the focalizer to the next focalizer's view of the previous focalizer. In the midst of these shifts and the casually judgmental terms bandied about, it's difficult to get a sense of any social or psychological dynamic behind the characters' stupidities -- which left me feeling that the book was an unnecessarily skillful presentation of petty bigotries that remained inexplicable, though sharply observed -- the kind of text that makes me long for a good dostoyevskian confessions to clear the air. To be fair, presentation of this kind of material on the level of Ulysses might have taken another decade to accomplish, but I would have gladly accepted limitations of a different sort to accomplish that.

I'll be interested in seeing what the short fiction's like. Anyone have a suggestion as to which collection to start on?