The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Brian Moore published The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (originally called simply Judith Hearne), in 1955 after he had left Belfast for Montreal. For this book Moore won the Author's Club First Novel Award (although it wasn't really his first novel). The book appears on the Guardian's list of 1000 books 'everyone must read'. A 1988 movie of the same name starred Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins. Graham Greene apparently called Moore his 'favourite living novelist' (though I can't find the source of this quotation). Here's more about Moore by Ralph McInerny, and a review of this 1955 novel by John Self.

Moore here plumbs the turbid soul of a desperately lonely woman who's on the verge of becoming an old spinster. She's done in by the repressive mores of her culture, which she has internalized and of which she's largely uncritical. (Moore based Hearne loosely on one of his mother's friends, Mary Judith Keogh.) The other character whose thoughts are probed at length is James Madden, Hearne's last chance at a husband. He, too, has outlived his dreams and (like Hearne) drifts though his days in fear and frustration, which are relieved only by vices that promise short-term relief but long-term doom.

Moore's story is marred by some heavy-handed symbols (an empty church, e.g.), and I grew impatient with the protracted torments to which the author subjected poor Judy Hearne. Nevertheless, the book is a thorough and disturbing study of the corrosion and eventual demolition of a life by loneliness.

Hearne seeks refuge from her isolation in weekly visits with a happy and prosperous family whose patriarch she has known since childhood. She half knows that the family members generally dread her visits, but she goes to them anyway out of sheer desperation for some human contact. These portions of the book are pretty painful, for Moore makes it clear that the family members don't take Hearne seriously as a person. They treat her more as an ongoing bad joke.

This dismissiveness is echoed near the end of the story by the other tenants in Hearne's rooming house. Hearne drops from even this sad little society after a night of drinking that leaves her singing and talking to herself for hours on end in her room. After that, her housemates stop taking her seriously. They see her as a 'nutter' who needs to be evicted. As in her visits with the happy family, then, she's surrounded by people who don't respect her as a somewhat rational agent roughly on a par with themselves. Instead of recognizing her as a person, they see her as a nuisance and soon-to-be outcast.

In the end, Hearne is deposited in a residential hospital, where her interactions are largely with people who are, well, paid to interact with her and the other patients. In a cruel paradox, her life is now marked by not only a dearth of meaningful relationships but also a lack of privacy.

Philosophy of Mind in Ian McEwan's Saturday

I liked Ian McEwan's Saturday partly because of its focus on the mind-body relation. The main character, Dr. Perowne, is a materialist -- there's nothing more to a mind than a brain.

Perowne regards three persons through this reductionist lens:

1. Perowne's alcoholic father-in-law, a complicated poet whose foibles grow predictably from the effects of alcohol on the brain;

2. Perowne's mother, who suffers from dementia; the sections about her are the most profound in the book, focusing on the pathos and tragic affront when a good and caring person is deleted by brute, neural wiring malfunctions; and

3. Baxter, the intelligent thug; the issue here is the conflict between, on the one hand, our natural moral indignation at the heinous crimes of a free person and, on the other hand, the picture of the criminal as an unfree victim of his own gnarled neural wiring. (Shades here of philosopher Wifrid Sellars' contrast between the Manifest Image [our common, everyday sense of ourselves and others as free and responsible persons] and the Scientific Image [in which those persons dissolve into amoral atom-swarms].)

Here's an ambiguous quotation in connection with that last point:

“Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?”

I've earlier quoted a nice philosophy-of-mind passage from McEwan's Atonement. Here's a phil-of-mind quotation from Saturday, this time on philosopher Jerry Fodor's notion of 'Mentalese', an innate representational medium with syntactic structure in which the mind does its thinking or representing (I believe Fodor developed the idea under Chomsky's influence):

“This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call Mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second, and blending it inseparably with its distinctive emotional hue. … So that when a flash of red streaks in across his left peripheral vision … it already has the quality of an idea … unexpected and dangerous, but entirely his, and not of the world beyond himself.”

The main weakness of the novel is its plot, which seems implausible and jury-rigged in places, as if McEwan had notebooks full of good passages and riffs that he was itching to publish and just threw together any old narrative in which to embed them. The book is marred also by some smug political musings that are espoused by Dr. Perowne and that resemble some of McEwan's own political views. (I suspect that a lot of the recent, blogosphere animus against McEwan stems from disapproval of his politics. But who knows?)

Regardless, while it isn't as good as Atonement, there's some great writing in Saturday.

Here are some interesting reviews of Saturday, one of them by the late Richard Rorty.

Gotthelf's Black Spider

Image from here.
Jeremias Gotthelf's most touted story is his 1842 novella Die Schwarze Spinne (The Black Spider), which Thomas Mann professed to "admire almost more than anything else in world literature" (The Story of a Novel, trans. Richard and Clara Winston [NY: Knopf, 1961], p. 63).

This novella was not published in English until 1957, and was not among the most esteemed of Gotthelf's works until WWII, at which time it appears to have been co-opted by the Nazis. The story continued to grow in popularity in Germany after the war. It is not hard to see why; one of the story's motifs concerns the collective guilt of a community that has acquiesced in the evil plotting of one (or more) of its members.

I'll preface my review with a recommendation of these four posts on The Black Spider at Journey Round My Skull and of this review at Wuthering Expectations. I earlier provided some background information on Gotthelf.

The story begins in a Swiss village with preparations for a baptism. The villagers are affluent, indulging in a rich feast before departing for the church. They are keen to observe the social niceties and present themselves in accordance with the mores and customs of their community. After the baptism, they return to the parents' house for more socializing.

While lounging about, an old man tells a story about a window post in the house that looks out of place. It turns out that this post was taken from previous houses on this family's property. They preserve the post because it has for centuries imprisoned a monstrous spider. It is the family's duty to prevent the evil that lurks in this piece of their home from escaping.

The old man tells two tales, both of which are set centuries in the past.

The first story is set in the medieval era, when the Teutonic Knights ruled the area in which the village is located. The head knight commands the villagers to perform arduous tasks that leave them little time for their own farm work. The most burdensome of these tasks is to remove several large trees from a distant valley and erect them by the knight's castle.

The villagers realize that they cannot both complete this work and harvest enough food to get them through the winter. As they are complaining to each other, a green huntsman appears and offers to do most of the work required for re-locating the trees. His fee? Well, it turns out that he's Satan, and he wants the villagers to give him an unbaptized child. At first they refuse, but eventually one of the villagers, Christine, accepts the devil's terms. The other villagers are uneasy about this, but end up going along with the arrangement (by co-operating with the devil to move the trees). So the whole village is implicated in Christine's fiendish pact. They reckon, however, that they can refuse the devil his due by baptizing each newborn at birth.

Satan, of course, has prepared for this eventuality. When he made the agreement with Christine, he kissed her cheek, which made her feel "as if some sharp-pointed steel fire were piercing marrow and bone, body and soul." She sees his face "gleefully distorted," and then he disappears. (I'm quoting from p. 162 of German Novellas of Realism, Vol. 1, ed. Jeffrey L. Sammons, trans. H. M. Waidson [Continuum, 1989].) Commentators have long noted the sexual overtones of this passage, especially in view of the fact that the devil's kiss implanted the beginnings of a creature in Christine's face. When it becomes apparent that she plans not to keep her part of the deal, the creature grows in her face, taking the shape of a spider-like blemish. As it grows larger, it becomes clear that it really is a spider. Its growth causes Christine great pain, leading her to try and secure an unbaptized child for the devil.

At one point, the spider gives birth to a legion of smaller spiders which burst from Christine's face to torment and kill the villagers' cattle. A commentator, David Gallagher ("The Transmission of Ovid's Arachne Metamorphosis in Jeremias Gotthelf's Die Schwarze Spinne," Neophilologus, on-line preprint), says that on one longstanding interpretation the spiders represent the plague -- Christine is infected and the army of little spiders that spread from her are like germs that carry the disease.

After Christine's subsequent, failed attempt (abetted by other villagers) to steal a child, she undergoes a full metamorphosis into a large spider, or the spider in her face consumes her -- it isn't clear. This large spider kills many villagers. It does at least have the decency to kill also the local Teutonic Knights. Eventually, though, one heroic and pious woman, wishing to protect her kids from the spider, imprisons it in the window post. She does, however, suffer a spider bite, which kills her. The lesson is clear: a good mother is willing to lay down her very life for the sake of her children.

The second of the old man's stories is less involved. Briefly, a couple of centuries later a rash fool lets the spider out; it launches another reign of terror, which is ended only when another pious individual (this time a man) sacrifices his life in order to protect some children by putting the spider back in the window post.

The upshot of the old man's stories is that the villagers must always be pious and vigilant against the evil that lies within lest it erupt and destroy them all. Also, they must appreciate the significance of baptism, standing ready to sacrifice themselves for the well-being of their children.

I didn't really appreciate the point of Gotthelf's story until I read an article about it by Jamie Rankin ("Spider in a Frame" The German Quarterly 61 [1988]: 403-18). Rankin describes a narrative structure that typifies many of Gotthelf's stories: first, there is a framing narrative, in which a narrator (who is not a character in the story) describes some events that are roughly contemporary with their narration; the second part of the structure is an internal narrative, which appears when a character in the framing narrative recounts some events from the past. According to Rankin, Gotthelf used this structure for a didactic purpose. Briefly, the characters in the framing narrative exhibit some vice, the characters in the internal narrative more clearly exhibit the same vice, and the internal narrative is designed to impress upon the characters in the framing story the need to mend their ways.

Rankin then applies this template to The Black Spider, which requires finding some vice in the characters of the framing story. This runs counter to the interpretive tradition, though, since the frame narrative in The Black Spider seems to be full of merriment in a nice, solid community. So, what's wrong with the people in the framing story? Well, says Rankin, Gotthelf, a devout pastor, would surely not have approved of the villagers' attitude to the baptism. They see this religious ceremony mainly as a festive event, an occasion to socialize and display their material wealth (in the form of a great feast). Little thought is given to the religious purpose of the ceremony, the focus of which should be the well-being of the child.

For Rankin, the villagers' failure to attend to this point is an instance of the larger flaw of self-centredness. The focal concern for each person at the baptism seems to be her own reputation and the social game-playing that is designed to enhance it. As a result, the villagers come across as being too self-centred to care genuinely for the well-being of their peers (except insofar as their well-being is necessary for one's own). In short, each villager seems to regard his peers as mirrors, where what he really cares about is how he is reflected in their opinions. Such obsessive self-concern stands in marked opposition to the selfless care for others that Gotthelf prefers, and that is supposed to be at the forefront in baptism, a sacred rite performed for the sake of a new member of the community (and not an occasion to party or improve one's own social standing).

The villagers' self-centredness is reflected in an exaggerated, grotesque way in the internal narratives, especially the first one. There, the villagers end up trying to prevent a child's baptism, being prepared to sacrifice this potential new member of their community for the sake of their own material well-being. By contrast, the heroes in both internal stories display a thoroughly selfless devotion to the well-being of others (children in both cases).

Rankin doesn't mention Kant, but Kantian ethics fit nicely into Gotthelf's lesson, especially the Kantian idea that one ought never to treat others wholly as means but always as ends in themselves. The villagers in the framing story treat each other as mere means to self-praise, or to the ehancement of their reputations, showing little real concern for another person as an end in himself or herself (a locus of intrinsic value that may call for the sacrifice of something of one's own).

Finally, there is, sadly, blatant sexism in Gotthelf's work. For instance, in the second internal story there is this description of a male character: "... his will lay bound by that of his womenfolk, and such dependence is certainly a heavy sin for any man. ..." (p. 206). Again, we find this description of the fool who set the spider free: "... in the company at large he was like a ravening wolf and behaved as if he hated everyone, as if he wanted to outdo them all in wild deeds and words; but men like that are supposed to be just the most attractive to women." (p. 202) Also, Christine, an evil woman, is an assertive woman, and these traits seem to be linked in Gotthelf's view. (Worse still, she's from out of town!)

One critic, William Collins Donahue, has a paper in which he claims to excavate, by Freudian means, a deeper, pervading misogyny in Gotthelf's novella ("The Kiss of the Spider Woman," German Quarterly 67 [1994]: 304-24). I'm not convinced. I think the sexism is all on the surface, and once we dig deeper we find less sexism. For example, in Gotthelf's novella evil takes both male and female forms, there are powerful, scary male and femal characteres, both male and female characters exhibit the chief vice of the story, male and female characters make sacrifices for the sake of the children, male and female characters learn from the internal stories, etc.

Update (August 7, 2008): I've just found another interesting reference to The Black Spider, this time by Elias Canetti. On p. 216 of the Granta version of Canetti's A Torch In My Ear (part of his autobiography), he says that when his future wife, Veza, spoke highly of Peter Altenberg's work, he (Canetti) "found this ridiculous" and "opposed Altenberg with my Swiss writers: Gotthelf's The Black Spider and Keller's 'The Three Just Kammachers'."

Update (May 6, 2009): Oneworld Classics have re-issued Waidson's translation.

Update (July 30, 2009): Bill Marx has a short review at World Books.

Die Judenbuche (The Jew's Beech) by von Droste-Hulshoff

I've just read The Jew's Beech (Die Judenbuche), an 1842 novella by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. This story is her only completed prose work. She is known mainly for her poetry. Before Germany adopted the Euro, her image adorned the 20-Deutsche-Mark note, and an asteroid is named after her.

This month, Oneworld Classics is re-issuing the Calder & Boyars 1958 translation by Lionel and Doris Thomas (pictured above in orange), which also appeared in a volume of Continuum's German Library series. I read Michael Fleming's more recent translation. (The on-line translation, by Sir Edwin Nathaniel Bennett, was published by Oxford University Press in 1934 in a collection called German Short Stories [vol. 415 in the World's Classics series].) The above image on the right is of the cover of the new Oneworld edition.

The narrative is loosely based on a true story and is set in the village of B. (believed to be Bellersen, now part of Brakel) in Westphalia shortly before the French Revolution. Droste-Hulshoff characterizes the locals as a rowdy bunch who show little regard for the law -- they frequently poach game and pilfer timber from the surrounding woods.

The central character is Friedrich Mergel. We're told about his rough, lonely upbringing. His father, a wife-abusing alcoholic, dies while Friedrich is a child. The boy is then raised by his mother, Margreth, a bitter woman who shows him little, if any, tenderness. Margreth's malign character is revealed in a brief exchange with her son about Hulsmeyer, a neighbour. When Friedrich says that Hulsmeyer robbed and assaulted a Jewish acquaintance and also steals wood from the forest, Margreth insists that the neighbour is a good and respectable man. She doesn't deny that Hulsmeyer acted in the ways described by Friedrich. Instead, she tells her son that it's okay to take wood from the forest and proceeds to vilify Jewish people as swindlers and 'rogues'. Ironically, these traits are best exemplified by Margreth's younger brother, Simon.

The other villagers' superstitious nature leads them to believe that Friedrich's deceased father is an evil spirit haunting the woods. As a result, they generally don't interact with poor Friedrich.

The worst influence on the boy is his uncle, Simon, for whom Friedrich works in his adolescence. Simon, it seems, is part of a particularly destructive band of timber thieves. It also seems that he has co-opted his nephew into his criminal operation by putting him to work as a lookout. It's in this capacity that Friedrich sends an unwitting forest ranger to his death -- he deliberately gives the ranger inaccurate directions so that Simon can ambush the ranger. At least, that's what appears to happen. The ranger's murder, like the other three deaths in the tale, isn't portrayed in the story. In fact, throughout the story the narrator can convey only an unclear, incomplete presentation of the central facts. So it is possible that Friedrich himself killed the ranger. However, it is suggested in a later conversation between Friedrich and his uncle that Simon committed the murder and the boy merely set the ranger up (probably without realizing that the ranger would be killed rather than -- say -- beaten).

In the face of such corrupting influences, Friedrich reaches adulthood as a vain, nefarious ne'er do well. His debased character is most in evidence when Friedrich (apparently) commits manslaughter. He borrows money from Aaron, the same man who was robbed by Hulsmeyer, but doesn't repay the loan. Aaron locates Friedrich at a rowdy wedding reception and demands payment. Humiliated, Friedrich flees. As he is leaving, pursued by Aaron, others at the reception yell anti-Semitic insults, encouraging Friedrich to hit Aaron. Later, Aaron's lifeless body is found in the woods. Evidently he was beaten to death by Friedrich.

It is noteworthy that in both his crimes, Friedrich extends his mother's values. His complicity in Simon's timber-stealing is not surprising in view of Margreth's earlier defence of Hulsmeyer's activities; also, Margreth expressed virulent bigotry toward Jewish people and even condoned Hulsmeyer's assault, a judgment that found its echo in the taunts yelled by the people at the wedding reception. So, Friedrich may be seen as a conduit for the vicious values of his community. His adult personality has concentrated all that hatred, violence and rapacious greed into an especially toxic mix.

The community's greed is signified by the gradual disappearance of the trees. One tree stands out: the beech tree mentioned in the title. All four deaths in the story occur in its vicinity. After Aaron's death, the Jewish community buys the beech tree as a sort of memorial, engraving in its wood a line that expresses their desire for the killer to be brought to justice. By the end of the story, this happens (apparently). Friedrich, who had fled the authorities after killing Aaron, returns as an old man and, out of remorse and perhaps a desire for atonement, hangs himself in the beech tree. When he does this, the beech tree stands alone, the other trees having perished before the woodsman's axe. The villagers were poor stewards of their patch of creation. In their greed, they have laid waste to their environment.

Among the more interesting features of Droste-Hulshoff's story is the mysterious Johannes Niemand. His name translates into English as John Nobody. He appears to be Simon's son, born out of wedlock. He so resembles Friedrich that Margreth at first mistakes him for her son. But even as she does so, Johannes appears to her as a pared down, more timid version of Friedrich. Her misapprehension falls away when the real Friedrich enters the room. This is the first appearance of Friedrich as a bolder, more adult individual than before. Johannes is generally regarded by critics as Friedrich's double and, perhaps, is a distillation of Friedrich's old, more childish attributes. For more about this uncanny scene, I recommend Wuthering Expectations' post.

Another interesting feature of the tale is that the two people who were killed (Aaron and the forester) perished at the moment when they were trying to enforce obligations on members of Friedrich's bilious little village. Both victims were killed by members of that community but both killings were eventually blamed on distant outsiders (unidentified timber thieves and a criminal from a distant town).

Update added June 8: This novella is remarkable for its use of a blinkered narrator. Narrators are either omniscient, affording a God’s-eye view of events, or have only limited knowledge. In the latter case, the narrator is typically a character in the narrative who provides a fallible, incomplete, blow-by-blow account of events as they transpire. The odd thing about Die Judenbuche is that the narrator is not omniscient but also is not a character in the story. Since the narrator sometimes recounts things that only one or two characters could know about, and since the narrative establishes that neither of those characters is the narrator, it isn’t even possible to regard the narrator as a flesh-and-blood inhabitant of the world about which s/he narrates.

The result is a disembodied but not omniscient perspective, a flawed-God’s-eye-view, of events. This is just one of the things that makes Die Judenbuche such a strange novella.

Update (March 22, 2010): Here's an analysis of this story by Katje.

Apocalypse -- what now? Cat's Cradle and The Road

I read Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel, Cat's Cradle, shortly after finishing another post-apocalyptic novel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This post is mostly about Vonnegut's book, but I'll say a little about The Road near the end.

I agree with John Self that Cat's Cradle is 'a masterpiece of Vonnegut's seductive, clear-eyed whimsy.' In part, the book is a hilarious send-up of irresponsible scientists. Especially funny were the early descriptions of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, inventor of the A-bomb and ice-nine. Vonnegut there launches a masterful satire of the supposedly innocent and harmless scientist who, full of child-like curiosity, tries to evade the adult burden of moral responsibility by not inquiring into the potential applications of his inventions. In the case of Dr. Hoenikker, the evasion appears to have been complete -- the narrator finds Hoenikker's old lab to be full of childish, dime-store toys.

The figure of the irresponsible tinkerer is later skewered in the form of Dr. Hoenikker's older son, Franklin Hoenikker. Though not really a scientist, Frank is adept at technical work. He declines an offer of political power in San Lorenzo (an impoverished island republic) in order to oversee the island's technical operations. This prompts the narrator to muse about the ‘abrupt abdication of Frank from all human affairs’ (ch. 100). Later, a character says, ‘My agreeing to be boss had freed Frank to do what he wanted to do more than anything else, to do what his father had done: to receive honors and creature comforts while escaping human responsibilities.’ (ch. 100) Like his father before him (and like the island's ex-Nazi physician), Frank aspires to be an amoral tool at the disposal of the powers that be -- whatever those powers may be.

Vonnegut extends his critique beyond scientists to science itself. His message seems to be that while science is indeed the only road to knowledge, it cannot yield truths of a moral or spiritual nature. Indeed, one might add that it is in the very nature of science not even to address such matters, for its empirical methods require dispassionate, value-neutral inquiry, and it is hard to see how moral or spiritual questions can even be broached, let alone resolved, in this manner.

This interpretation of Vonnegut is borne out by at least a couple of passages in Cat's Cradle.

First, in a bar-room exchange early in the story, a prominent scientist is reported to have said that science can end our troubles and 'discover the basic secret of life.' (ch. 11) The bartender adds that according to the local newspaper, scientists have now discovered this secret. But the discovery is not the grand revelation that we were led to expect. After some effort in trying to recall the details of the news report, the bartender recalls that the secret is 'protein'.

Second, near the end of the book, Frank's entomological inquiries prompt the narrator's recollection of a passage from The Books of Bokonon (a religious text), which runs as follows:

‘Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. … He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.’ (ch. 124)

The suggestion is that while Frank may indeed 'learn something', his inquiries won't yield any real wisdom (or moral-spiritual knowledge).

Science is thus limited, Vonnegut implies, but remains the only road to knowledge. Nothing else fills the epistemic void that it leaves; for nothing, religion included, can answer truthfully the questions from which science shies away. Bokononism, the religion outlined in the novel, acknowledges this with its paradoxical claim that Bokononism itself is 'shameless lies.' (ch. 4; cf. ch. 78 and ch. 98)

Nevertheless, Vonnegut apparently sees religion as performing a valuable function as long as it is humble enough to acknowledge the paradoxical and distorting nature of its own proclamations (which leads to some vexing questions about the status of the above Bokononist quotation). It's all well and good to say with Wittgenstein, 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,' but (Vonnegut seems to say) whereof one cannot but speak, thereof one may hold forth even if only in a self-consciously paradoxical fashion.

In support of this last interpretation of Vonnegut, he once pointed out that back when Marx dubbed religion the opiate of the masses, opium was generally the only available pain-killer; so Marx's idea might today be better expressed by calling religion the Aspirin of the masses. And what's wrong with Aspirin? Here’s another video, this one of Vonnegut talking specifically about Cat’s Cradle.

I admire Cormac McCarthy's The Road for the slow, cumulative power of its melancholy refrain, its litany of desolation. Its bleak and depressing tone is poles apart from the light-hearted humour of Cat's Cradle. What is odd about this is that Cat's Cradle is easily the more pessimistic work. Its message is that, stuck in its own depravity, the human race has no long-term prospects. By contrast, hope hangs on with astonishing tenacity right to the end of The Road. Its conclusion is ambiguous. Certainly there's no guarantee that things will go well, but at least that's a possibility.

Bartleby

I hadn't read Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener until just recently. My Yankee wife tells me it's a standard in American high-school English classes. I can see why. Melville's tale is puzzling in a provocative way and rich in the kind of symbolism that my high-school English teachers loved. It cries out for interpretation.

A Wall Street lawyer hires the eponymous character to work as a scrivener. Poor Bartleby seems trapped in the soul-killing monotony of his job, a job that leads a co-worker to get soused every day at lunch. After a while, Bartleby starts refusing his assigned work, but in turning away from these tasks he doesn’t turn to doing anything else. His rebellion is passive – staring at the brick walls that enclose him and the others on Wall Street, he becomes a standing rebuke of superficial ‘busy-ness’, a rebuke from which his employer eventually flees.

I appreciated this story more after reading Mordecai Marcus’ interpretation of it (‘Melville’s Bartleby as a Psychological Double’, College English 23 [1962]: 365-8). Marcus sees Bartleby as his employer’s ‘double’. That is, this recalcitrant worker is a part of the lawyer’s own psyche, one that suffers neglect in the urban office. Something essential to its sustenance is missing. Obdurate in the face of monetary enticements, this increasingly spectral other won't fit its assigned slot in the urban workplace. It belongs to nature, the lawyer’s own nature, and is marooned in 'unnature' (Wall Street). Naturally, it withers in this world of material plenty (as Bartleby starves in a place where food is abundant).

The story reminds me of Theodore Roethke's poem 'Dolor', with its lines about 'the inexorable sadness of pencils' and 'desolation in immaculate public places'.

Justice Deferred

Heinrich von Kleist wrote Michael Kohlhaas in 1811. I read the translation published in Melville House's 'Art of the Novella' series.

In sixteenth-century Brandenburg, a horse dealer named Michael Kohlhaas sets out for business in neighboring Saxony (where he maintains a second home). At the border, a crooked knight seizes two of his horses. It later turns out that the horses were worked almost to death and that one of Kohlhaas's servants was harassed and abused by the knight's men.

The rest of the story is about Kohlhaas's quest for justice from the local potentate, the Elector of Saxony. Justice is repeatedly denied since the crooked knight has friends in high places. Kohlhaas rebels against the state by forming his own army, which attacks several Saxon towns.*

One interesting idea in the story concerns the role of the state. The state exists to provide justice to its inhabitants, from which it follows (according to one of the Elector's counselors) that by denying justice to Kohlhaas they have expelled him from the state, so that he is no longer subject to its laws; as a result, he's not so much a criminal as a foreign power making war against their state.

The tale at times comes across as a simple revenge story with Kohlhaas refusing to accept the legal outcome and forgive his enemies (as his wife and Martin Luther urged him to do). At other times, though, the story seems to present a clash between two laws: the human law that derives from the ruler and a higher, natural law that rulers ignore at their peril. This is the law that Kohlhaas, cast into the state of nature, aims to uphold.

In the end, it is Kohlhaas' willingness to die for this law that gives him more power than the Saxon prince, who fears for his own fate.

*Kleist thoroughly vilifies the Saxons, who in his own day were allied with Napoleon against his beloved Prussia.

Update (Sept. 26, 2009): Here's a stimulating reflection on Kohlhaas, the Grimms, etc. by Waggish.

Reflections on Der Schimmelreiter by Theodor Storm

I just read Denis Jackson's nice translation of Theodor Storm's Der Schimmelreiter (first published in 1888). For more about Storm, I recommend Jackson's great site about the author.

Storm’s novella contrasts two ways of responding to nature: there are the fanciful legends and superstitions of the community, and there is the more modern scientific and technological deployment of reason exemplified by the protagonist, Hauke Haien.

The story of Hauke’s life is told to a traveler by an old teacher, a ‘rationalist’ who doubts the supernatural elements of the tale. The teacher depicts Hauke as a great innovator whose engineering prowess gave him superior powers over nature, enabling him to design a better dyke to protect the community. The people repay Hauke with dark suspicion and rumors of his diabolical affiliation.

In the teacher's retelling of the story, the supposedly supernatural elements appear only ambiguously. So, e.g., there is a seemingly spectral horse, which is sold to Hauke by someone who laughs like ‘the devil’ (p. 72). But nothing much comes of this – the horse functions in the rest of the story like a natural though somewhat wild horse, one that only Hauke can tame (just as Hauke alone can tame the wild sea with better dykes). Then there's Trin Jans, who is presented not as a real witch but rather as ... well, as the sort of character who's a witch in more fanciful legends. There's also the suggestion that Hauke is cursed because he killed her cat (the cat came back, as it were). Thus, while the old teacher is aware of the supernatural aspects of the tale, he reigns them in to make them fit into a naturalistic interpretation.

The resulting narrative is in places quite eerie. Examples include the narrator's partly anthropomorphic characterization of some birds on the tidal flats (pgs. 22 & 99) and Trin Jans' uncanny story about a mermaid, which actually makes the mermaid seem terrifying, like something more and less than human (p. 98). In both cases the author embeds fragmentary human traits in what are ultimately strange, alien creatures that, like nature itself, efface humanity with a chilly indifference.

More generally, the tale charts a mundane landscape suffused with potentially supernatural elements that appear fleetingly in ambiguous forms, never quite surfacing as truly supernatural phenomena but, instead, appearing to be at home in the confines of nature. There is thus an ongoing juxtaposition of the world as (on the one hand) a natural order that fits the technical-scientific templates of reason and (on the other hand) a chaotic abyss from which wild, non-rational forces periodically erupt with cataclysmic effect.

These unpredictable natural forces find their echo within the human psyche. Hauke Haien, a paragon of reason, isn't alert to these destructive elements in his own soul, and so he's unaware of how they have eroded his own foundations over the years. Eventually, they catch him totally unawares, welling up from within and casting him into the abyss. Such a psychological reading is pursued in a meticulously Freudian direction by Anette Schwarz in her paper, “Social Subjects and Tragic Legacies: The Uncanny in Theodor Storm's Der Schimmelreiter” (The Germanic Review 73.3 [Summer 1998]: 251). Schwarz points out that neither Hauke nor his wife (Elke) has a mother who figures in the narrative (even though their fathers both loom large), and that Trin Jans stands in symbolically as the mother figure.

The most Freudian thing about Storm's novella, in my opinion, is its uncanniness. In describing the uncanny, Freud said that it characterizes fictional works that seem "to move in the world of common reality" but into which some strange, improbable or impossible events intrude. Freud focused on E. T. A. Hoffmann, but Storm's work seems a better epitome of Freud's theory.

Thomas Mann characterized Storm's achievement as "an art kind to the mystical and uncanny, the pagan northern art of [Der Schimmelreiter]. ... [I]t is precisely here ... that something of primeval power is finally achieved, some combination of human tragedy with the wild mystery of nature, something dark and heavy with the greatness and unknownness of the sea...." (Thomas Mann, 'Theodor Storm', 1930)

Update (Dec. 15, 2008): New York Review Books will re-issue James Wright's 1964 translation of this novella in early 2009. In their announcement of this upcoming publication, they quote from Kirkus Reviews the claim, "There is nothing better in German fiction prior to the work of Thomas Mann."

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

Truman Capote's novella differs significantly from the great movie that was based on it. I first saw the movie in my late adolescence, and it's the characteristics and insecurities of that time in life that the story reflects.

The two main characters are outsiders. They are Holly Golightly ('Traveling' her card says) and the nameless narrator. Unlike the movie, there's no romantic tie between the two. Their connection is an asexual friendship, which facilitates viewing the narrator, an aspiring writer, as being a gay writer (like the author). His homosexuality, in that day, establishes his outsider status, while Holly's is secured by the fact that she's from a dirt-poor background and works as a call-girl. Both seem to lack stable relationships.

These features enable Capote to capture that moment in life when one has left home but has yet to mold an adult identity. The main characters' identities are malleable and in a state of flux -- neither one is known by a real name, and while not literally homeless they inhabit merely temporary lodgings. Neither character has found a place in the world.

Capote captures a stage in life when social connections have a transitory feel, when the members of one's cohort are all on their way to some vaguely dreamed of future. While this stage has its moments of joie de vivre, it is also marked by friends and acquaintances who all too soon withdraw into their diverse futures.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

Fans of thrillers will be disappointed by Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. In fact, they are likely to take it as an affront. I believe that's what McCarthy intended. His message seems to have been, "I know the rules for writing a thriller. Here, let me show you how it's done. And once I've lured you in, I'll change gears and disappoint your expectations, because in the end I don't want to write a thriller."

The first 240 pages (roughly) read like a great thriller in which McCarthy artfully builds up the tension. He carefully stokes the reader's expectations, sweeping one along towards what must surely be a climactic showdown between good and evil. But then McCarthy deliberately smashes it all up. After so many pages of buildup, carefully building the tension and anticipation, he cuts straight from the buildup to approximately 60 pages of anti-climax.

This will leave some readers feeling that they've been misled or tricked. For McCarthy exploits the formulas of this genre to feed the expectation of a classic 'good vs. evil' confrontation. There's the bad-a$# special forces guy (Wells), the hardworking 'nam vet (Moss), the virtuous old sheriff (Bell, a member of the 'Greatest Generation'). But none of these guys get to face off against the arch villain in any satisfying way. They're all cast aside, shown up as being no match for the great evil, the man without a history, Anton Chigurh, who sweeps past them like they're just so many yapping dogs. The climactic fight between good and evil never happens.

The author's message is one of hopelessness and desolation. By the end, all the Sheriff can feel is defeat. There's a Biblical allusion in the penultimate sentence, where Bell dreams of his father making a fire "out there in all that dark and all that cold." I think this alludes to a line in the gospel of John (ch. 1, v. 5: "The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not"). However, this image of hope is crumpled up and discarded by McCarthy. It's just an illusion, part of a dream from which Bell awakens.

I've heard some people complain that McCarthy is too 'preachy' in this novel, but that's true only if you identify his views with those of Sheriff Bell. Bell keeps criticizing the times he's living in, contrasting Texas in 1980 unfavourably with how things used to be. However, I don't take McCarthy to share that outlook; if anything, he subverts it with his references to past wars. E.g., Moss and Wells are Vietnam vets and Bell is a WWII vet. While talking to his uncle near the end of the book, Bell discusses a deceased relative who fought in WWI, and another relative who fought against, and was killed by, native Indians in the previous century. There's also a mention in that conversation of 'Coffee Jack', a 19th-Century Texas Ranger who fought against the Indians and the Mexicans. Indeed, that old war against the Mexicans seems to have continued in the form of the drug wars. Earlier in the book, another sheriff tells Bell that he'd just as soon give all this land back to the Mexicans.

In terms of the plot, there's no need for all these references to past wars. McCarthy throws them in to undermine Bell's nostalgia, the point being that violence and destruction are the way of the world, and that's how it's always been.