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July
2012
The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark
Warning:
plot-spoiler (though whether it matters with this book is a moot
point, as our discussion will reveal).
There was radical division in the group over this very short novel
(Mark's suggestion) of 1970 in which thirty-four-year-old protagonist
Lise sets out on holiday with a firm purpose which appears initially
to be to experience a holiday romance or sexual encounter, and in
which we are told from fairly near the beginning that 'she will
be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds.'
Mark pointed out in his introduction that it's a departure in style
for Muriel Spark and for this reason when he read it about three
years ago he didn't like it, but having thought about it for our
meeting he now liked it very much indeed. He felt it's a book that's
better for rereading; indeed - as I put in - it both invites and
requires rereading, because it's only in the light of the gradual
revelation that Lise's purpose is precisely to be murdered, that
the true project of the book can be appreciated. However, it was
the question of the project of the book over which we were divided,
and our conflicting views raised once again the questions of authorial
intention and the competing authorities of writer and reader.
Mark, John, Doug and I saw the book as a metafiction, a comment
on traditional narrative with its assumption of omniscient authorial
authority and confidence in the revelation of psychological truth,
and on crime fiction in particular, which, with its careful plotting
and complacency about the solubility of mystery, takes the mode
to the extreme. The prose here is mannered in a way that, as Mark
had indicated, is unlike Spark's usual fluent high satirical English
style, and geared I would say to defamiliarise and disrupt conventional
expectations, with insistent repetition and surprising, sometimes
discordant imagery - a laughing woman in a brown overall, for instance,
is 'emitting noise like a brown container of laughing-gas'. By making
the protagonist the 'victim' (rather than a detective) and temporally
leading up to the crime rather than away from it, and indeed by
questioning or even denying her status as a victim, Spark effects
a subversion of crime fiction, but thwarts any move towards traditional
literary fiction by overturning the conventional literary narrative
trajectory and beginning with the revelation of the end of the story,
the murder. As Mark said, Spark called the book a 'whydunnit' rather
than a whodunnit, but one wonders if this is another of her sly
jokes, since, in the psychological terms of traditional novels,
we never do find out why Lise wants to be murdered (apart from suggestions
throughout that she is mad) - a gap we considered highly intentional
on Spark's part - and the book might more accurately be called a
howdunnit.
Someone said that Lise herself is a gap, and Spark does indeed withhold
significant information about her, and does so in a signalled way
via the mannered prose. We do not know Lise's nationality or, in
consequence, that of some of the other characters; she never volunteers
this information when people she meets tell her, seemingly pointedly,
where they are from. We are told, with significant repetition, that
she 'speaks four languages'; occasionally we are told she is speaking
in one of those languages, which can come as a surprise to disrupt
our assumptions and make us realise that on most occasions we do
not know which language she is using; we do not know which country
she lives in and flies from, we are only told, in Lise's notably
stilted dialogue, that she lives in 'the North'; we do not know
which city in which country she flies to, only that it is in 'the
South' and that from there it is possible to drive to Naples. The
narration eschews omniscient knowledge of Lise's feelings or motives
but watches her from outside like a camera and, carefully, only
surmises - she 'does not appear to listen' - or refuses even to
surmise: 'whether she has failed to leave [the envelope] at the
doorkeeper's desk by intention, or whether through the distraction
of the woman's laughter, one could not tell from her serene face
with lips slightly parted'; 'Lisa is lifting the corners of her
carefully packed things, as if in absent-minded accompaniment to
some thought, who knows what?' - a wry comment, I'd say, on both
the fictive detective who takes the reader through a process of
deduction via clues and the novelist who presumes possession of
the truth about characters and drops clues for the reader. All in
all, I said, I took the book as a spoof and a postmodern joke.
Now there were objections. Trevor didn't like my use of the words
spoof and joke but he did agree when I said, Well
it's a comment on crime fiction. I'm not sure exactly why
he wanted this distinction: I think he felt the actual story and
character should be taken more seriously than our reading did, and
that he himself had felt at less of a distance from them than we
had (and thought we were meant to be) (and he did say he had very
much enjoyed it). Jenny also didn't like my use of those terms,
and went further: she didn't at all agree with our interpretation.
She said she simply took the book as being about Lise's death wish.
She said you could tell things about Lise's personality and feelings:
she's old-fashioned and she's very controlling, her flat is sparse
and over-neat, and we can deduce from the plot that she has spent
time in a mental hospital and is deranged. Most of these things
are true: it is stated that Lise wears old-fashioned lipstick, and
the clothes she wears for her trip are of an old-fashioned length.
However, her clothes are purposefully chosen as a chief aspect of
the 'trail' that the narration tells us she is laying for detectives
later investigating her murder: 'Lise in her knee-covering clothes
at this moment looks curiously of the street-prostitute class beside
the mini-skirted girls and their mothers whose knees at least can
be seen./So she lays the trail' (my italics). She is certainly
very controlling, and her main characteristic betraying this is
her firmly closed mouth, but it seems to me that in the context
of the withholding of so many other facts about Lise, the constant
over-repetition of this authorial observation, linked with the equally
frequent observation of her parting her lips slightly 'as if in
a trance', amounts to a send-up of this kind of authorial clue-dropping.
I'd say the same could be said for the description of her flat,
which went on at rather ridiculous but self-conscious length, and
I said that I felt that that description had a more metafictive
purpose: the way that everything in the flat folds away from view
symbolises the way that Lise's inner life is folded away from both
narrator or reader. Jenny didn't agree: she saw it as more straightforwardly
implying things about Lise's character. Lise's control itself is
to me in any case a satirical vehicle rather than a realistic psychological
characteristic: by leaving clues for others to find and piece together
Lise is acting like an author: she is in effect writing the story,
in the narrative driver's seat. Jenny clearly didn't accept this
either. She said she took the title 'The Driver's Seat' to mean,
more simply, that by choosing to be murdered and setting out to
find her murderer, Lise had taken control of events in her life.
Jenny said, in any case there is a plot and clues you can
piece together, and it is a whodunnit in that you are kept
guessing until the end who is going to be the man - which is true.
John had previously noted that there was a conventional laying of
red herrings in the form of the other, threatening-seeming men she
meets who however turn out to be 'not her type'. Trevor said, mind
you, I did think some of the coincidences were ridiculous, in particular
the fantastic one of the bloke that Lise had once known and whom
she wanted to murder her being on the same flight. I said that I
thought that was part of the spoof (hesitating to use the word,
but unable to think of a better). In fact the coincidence is developed:
he turns out to have been booked into the same tiny hotel at their
destination, and one begins to wonder if, rather than its being
a coincidence, Lise has plotted even this, but since there is no
evidence that we could pick up of such prior plotting we can't know
- another send-up in my opinion, or calculated disruption of the
conventional techniques of crime fiction. Doug now said that if
the novel is the kind of novel Jenny suggested - a crime novel,
albeit an inverted one - then it is a really terrible novel, but
if it's the postmodern interrogation of such novels that we others
thought it, then it's brilliant, and of course we others agreed.
Jenny didn't agree with that either; she said she thought it was
a good novel on her terms.
There was now some discussion which I'm afraid degenerated quickly
into heated argument, as it foundered on our differing understandings
of terminology as a result of our differing disciplines. I repeated
my belief that you weren't intended to give the novel a psychological
reading, and Jenny, a sociologist, strongly objected to my describing
her reading of the novel in this way. The heated nature of the exchanges
meant that I couldn't ask her why, or explain what I meant (the
inference of characters' motives and feelings - their psychology
- from descriptions of their behaviour). She and Trevor also objected
to the term postmodern, and Mark and I did manage to explain
what we meant by postmodernism in literary terms: a questioning
of traditional narrative modes. Jenny told us what postmodernism
was in sociological terms, but I'm afraid I've forgotten it, and
Jenny seemed to stick to it in judging the book as not postmodern,
so we were equally dismissive of each other's uses of the term.
There was a spat about whether the book was realist or surreal.
Jenny insisted it was surreal but John objected that the Surrealists
were interested above all in the role of the subconscious in the
writing process whereas here Spark is utterly, cerebrally in control.
Mark now hotly objected that the book isn't surreal at all: the
whole thing is couched in the careful realist observationist mode
of the detective novel. Doug however pointed out that some of the
incidents do have an improbable surreal nature - which is a different
use of the term from that of John's, and I think what Jenny meant.
I wanted to say that the book is neither of those things, realist
or surreal, but playing with both modes to make a specific literary
point, but didn't manage to do so. There was a calmer moment as
we considered the crucial matter of Lise's wanting to be murdered
and engineering her own murder. Some thought that it was so psychologically
unrealistic as to be necessarily a kind of send-up, but Trevor and
Mark pointed out that, actually, there are known cases of people
agreeing to be murdered. I said that I thought it was a satirical
comment on the theory, very current at the time of this novel's
writing, that the victim is an agent in his or her own murder -
Martin Amis's 'murderee', as Mark and Trevor reminded us - but no
one seemed particularly interested in pursuing this idea. Finally
Trevor made the point that the author may have intended the reading
most of us were saying she had, but if people gave it a more conventional
reading the author had no control over that, which is a point you
can't argue with, and one that writers need to keep in mind.
Afterwards, thinking more about this, I pondered the ending. The
policemen who will arrest the murderer are dressed in uniforms and
trappings that 'protect them from the indecent exposure of fear
and pity, pity and fear.' This, the final line of the novel, is
a reference to Artistotle's (psychological) theory that the production
of fear and pity in an audience is essential to good drama - an
idea that has underpinned Western literature and deeply imbues conventional
fiction with its insistence on allowing the reader to identify with
and feel for (and believe in) characters, but which has been challenged
by twentieth-century literary theory. What does Spark mean by the
'indecent exposure' of those emotions, and whose emotions are the
policemen being protected from as they interrogate the murderer?
Lise's? Or the murderer's? Because in fact towards the end of the
novel I did at last find myself moved and identifying, and, in a
reversal of convention, on behalf of and with the murderer. It is
quite clear from his behaviour that he is frightened as Lise pushes
him towards his crime - 'He is trembling'; ' "Stop trembling,"
' she tells him; in a perverse way he becomes her victim - and in
fact I found that this passage prompted me to read in the conventional
psychological way, ie to know his emotions from his behaviour and
that of Lise, and identify with him. Is hard, therefore, not to
see this, like the conventional whodunnit embedded in the 'whydunnit'
and pointed to by Jenny, as Spark's sly sleight of hand and an acknowledgement
of the power of conventional emotion-based fiction.
August 2012
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Ann
suggested this short novel, which takes the character of Rochester's
mad wife Bertha, incarcerated in the attic in Charlotte Bronte's
Jane Eyre, and tells the story of her life, chiefly in her
own words but also with sections related by Rochester. As Ann said,
she is a gap in the Bronte novel, and this novel fills the gap.
Ann had previously read the book on the recommendation of her English
teacher when she was a teenager struggling with Jane Eyre,
and then she had enjoyed it as an interesting prequel, but this
time around she had found a lot more in it. This time she found
it a very dense book, in which every word and sentence matter -
at which several people nodded in agreement - and was afraid that
as she had had to read it quickly at the last minute this time she
hadn't given it the careful reading she felt it needed.
The book takes as its cue the short section from Jane Eyre
in which Rochester relates to Jane how he was tricked into an arranged
marriage in Jamaica with his Creole wife who then turned out to
be mad, and recreates those circumstances from a different perspective.
Here Bertha is Antoinette, the name by which she went before Rochester
insisted on calling her Bertha - and we are presented with her vivid
and evocative memories of a lonely and emotionally deprived childhood
as the daughter of a deceased slave owner and his grieving and fearful
widow. Descendants of the original English colonials, ostracised
and indeed threatened by the ex-slave community in post-Emancipation
Jamaica, Antoinette, her congenitally disabled younger brother and
her distracted and grieving mother live in isolation and increasing
poverty. When her mother remarries wealthy Mr Mason, a new colonial,
they seem 'saved', but he is incapable of understanding the social
situation. His failure to heed his wife's warnings about the resentment
of the ex-slaves leads to a tragedy which impels her towards complete
emotional breakdown and loss of control, resulting in her incarceration
in a 'safe' house where she eventually dies. It is this 'madness',
along with the infirmity of Antoinette's (also now dead) brother,
which a jealous and disowned half-brother of Antoinette's, her father's
son by one of his former slaves, uses to poison Rochester against
Antoinette, convincing him of her incipient madness. Antoinette
has been at first unhappy to be trapped in a forced union to a man
who needed her wealth and now, according to English law, owns it
(in reality she is in love with a second cousin, Sandi, who is also
the descendant of slaves, but she must be married off to someone
of pure English descent), but subsequently ecstatically sexually
seduced by her new husband Rochester, only to have him then turn
cold and even hostile towards her. She reacts in a deeply emotional
(and non-English) way that only confirms the warnings about her.
It is now that Rochester begins to call her Bertha, the second name
that she shared with the mother whom everyone now takes for granted
was mad. By the end of their short honeymoon in her old family house
on Dominica, he has categorised her as lunatic, and plans already
to incarcerate her:
' White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter...
She's one of them. I too can wait - for the day when she is only
a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend.
Or lie...'
The final short and harrowing section is related by Antoinette from
the attic room in Thornfield Hall, where she is now truly deranged
by the isolation and the lack of knowledge of where she is, why
she is kept there and why her husband doesn't come to her.
This precis of mine makes the thrust of the novel, in terms of plot,
seem much clearer than it does on a first reading. The prose is
highly economical, as Ann pointed out, and there is a focus on the
emotional rather than the factual dimensions of the story. Information
about the factual circumstances is often slipped in only subtly
and even indirectly - a perhaps inevitable and even calculated effect
in a story of cultural confusion and increasing psychological derangement.
I found that on a first reading, concentrating on the emotional
element, which is indeed complex and subtle, I missed some of these
points of fact and I wasn't absolutely clear about the sequence
of events and therefore of some of the causes and effects, and it
was only on a second reading that the whole thing fell beautifully
into shape for me as above. Not only did Ann feel she had read the
book too quickly, but Jenny hadn't yet reached the final section,
and Doug, who had read it years ago but is moving house and has
all of his books packed away, hadn't managed to find it to read
it again, and as a result there was a fair bit of doubt and discussion
about fairly radical aspects of the book.
Ann considered that it was a book about people in new places and/or
situations they don't understand and in which they don't know how
to cope - the ex-slaves and both the old and new colonials in the
post-Emancipation West Indies, and the two young people forced by
their families into their cross-cultural marriage. (Rochester is
especially hurtled into it: arriving in Jamaica only three weeks
before the marriage his family have arranged to a woman unknown
to him, he is immediately struck down by illness and spends a large
part of that time in a fever - which he will later look back on
as a way in which he was cheated of finding out about Antoinette
in time.) And indeed, when Ann looked up the book on the internet,
she found it called 'the original post-colonial novel'.
This led to quite a lot of sharing by group members of factual information
about colonialism, slavery, multiculturalism and the history of
the West Indies. Taking the focus back to the book, Jenny said she
felt sorry for most of the characters, including Rochester, who
is also a victim of a social system (expected to maintain his social
status but impoverished by primogeniture and consequently manipulated
by his family into this marriage, and of course entirely innocent
of the West Indies social situation into which he is plummeted).
Along with most others, I agreed with this last, though up to a
point. By allocating sections of the book to Rochester's first-person
narrative, Rhys does give an insight into Rochester's predicament.
However, I felt that the book had a more feminist message than had
been noted so far in our discussion. Victim of a patriarchal society
though Rochester may be, nevertheless he undoubtedly ends up with
the patriarchy-sanctioned power to save himself by destroying and
negating Antoinette. I felt that this book was taking up a point
made on more than one occasion by Jane Eyre (who narrates the Bronte
novel) that women and children are not the sweet, angelic creatures
they are thought to be and meant to be and that women can have tumultuous
emotions and the same ambitions as men. Rhys seems to me specifically
to develop this point and the notion that is thus implicit, if not
actually tackled, in the Bronte novel, that behaviour in women not
sanctioned by a patriarchal society is merely called madness, a
repression which ironically however can induce true derangement.
John agreed (and recalled our discussion of Tender
is the Night and its so-called mad character Nicole, a
novel in which the author seems less aware of such a notion). (People
seemed initially a little taken aback by the idea that Jane Eyre
could be considered feminist, with its heroine in love with a distant,
brooding and even cruel man, but no one apart from John had read
it recently - he went back to it after reading the Rhys book - and
Trevor hadn't read it at all, although he had seen a film adaptation.
We reminded everyone that although Jane 'gets her man' in the end,
she does so on her own terms, as, finally, a rich and thus independent
woman, and when, as Trevor put it, Rochester has been emasculated,
blinded and having lost his right hand - indeed 'punished' by the
backfiring of his own action in incarcerating Bertha/Antoinette.)
Doug however, not having read the Rhys book recently either, was
unconvinced that Antoinette was not congenitally mad - after all,
wasn't her mother mad before her? This led to some general discussion
about what constitutes madness, but pinning it back to the book,
those of us who had read it more recently insisted that there were
circumstances which had driven Antoinette's mother to distraction
- although I think we omitted to mention the crucial and precipitating
one, the tragic death of Antoinette's brother. Explaining Antoinette's
own 'madness', Clare referred to her emotionally deprived and fearful
childhood, and her consequent emotional vulnerability in the situation
into which she is forced with Rochester. Still Doug worried about
it all: but to have been in such a state that she was incarcerated?
Once again, as in our discussion of Sebastian Barry's The
Secret Scripture, he was met with a chorus of protest that
throughout history women have been incarcerated as mad simply for
unacceptable or emotional behaviour, and once again Jenny said that
it happened to an aunt of her own.
I said that I thought the theme of obeah (or voodoo) in the novel
was not simply a function of cultural difference but was put to
specifically feminist use. In fact, the implication is that it is
not a point of difference: Rochester's insistence on calling Antoinette
Bertha, the name of her 'mad mother', is indeed a kind of voodoo,
and Antoinette recognises this: ' "That's obeah, too."
' A patriarchal system which calls women submissive, and mad when
they fail to be so, allows them no other way to be and locks them
into one or other of those states. Rochester himself is half-conscious
of his own voodoo-type power: having decided to hate Antoinette
and destroy her hatred for him, he says, 'I did it too. I saw the
hate go out of her eyes. I forced it out... Say die and I will
die.'
In a similarly ironic way, it is at this point that the prose of
Rochester's first-person narrative changes and adopts rhythms, images
and conceits similar to those of Antoinette's, implying similar
mental breakdown: 'I thought I saw that tree strike its roots deeper,
making ready to fight the wind.' In a further twist of irony, this
is when he finally decides that he is sane: 'All the mad conflicting
emotions had gone and left me wearied and empty. Sane.'
People commented on the descriptions of nature, its beauty and yet
its sinister character to both Antoinette as a child and the adult
Rochester, and the jungle that threatens to encroach on Antoinette's
ancestral and honeymoon home, another very real way in which the
characters are overpowered by an alien environment. I said I thought
that the weather was also used in a symbolic way: at the point when
Rochester finally hardens against Antoinette and asserts his English
patriarchal values over her, the weather changes and becomes, in
his words, 'cool, calm and cloudy as an English summer.'
John now read out a passage from the section in Jane Eyre
where Rochester explains and justifies himself to Jane, saying that,
actually, reading Wide Sargasso Sea had rather spoilt Jane
Eyre for him. As John was indicating, in the light of Wide
Sargasso Sea Rochester comes over here as utterly self-centred,
indeed selfish, lacking in empathy and cruel: in fact, the passage
almost reads as satirical, yet one is aware that Bronte, while not
dealing with him uncritically, is not intending satire. Interestingly
and ironically, as Clare pointed out, because Rhys provides some
insight into his predicament, he comes over less badly in her novel
of cultural and feminist redress. Trevor, however, didn't agree.
In his view the Rochester of Wide Sargasso Sea was 'a bloody
plonker, a Grade One.'
There was now some discussion as to whether it was necessary to
know Jane Eyre in order to appreciate Wide Sargasso
Sea, and opinion was divided, or at any rate uncertain. I said
that surely it was necessary (ie to truly appreciate it), since
it was a work of redress and the original was so explicitly flagged.
(It truly is harrowing to have one's previous perceptions of the
ghostly threat in the attic overturned by the final section of Wide
Sargasso Sea, an experience that would not be available to
you if you did not know Jane Eyre.) But then Doug said
that once again we come up against the impotence of authors in the
face of the way that readers read.
At any rate, everyone agreed that, short as it is, it had been a
difficult book to read, and whether this was because none of us
had recently read Jane Eyre beforehand it wasn't really
possible to know. Trevor seemed to have found it the hardest and
he was the one who had never read Jane Eyre (though of
course he had seen a film adaptation): he said he really had to
struggle with it and force himself to go on reading, and although
he is the one in the group who enjoys most books, as a result he
hadn't enjoyed this.
September
2012
Looking for Mr Goodbar by Judith Rossner
In
the last couple of months my time has been completely taken up by
intensive writing and some pretty radical decorating (involving
stripping paint and replastering!), so I haven't been keeping up
our book group reports, I'm afraid. It's now about seven weeks since
our September meeting (and I've had those massive preoccupations
to push it out of my mind), so my following report might be a bit
sketchy, but here goes.
Clare chose this book, set in the early 1970s and based on a real-life
1973 murder case, about a convent-educated primary-school teacher
in her late twenties, Theresa Dunn, who haunts the singles bars
of New York picking up men for brief sexual encounters, and is finally
murdered by one of these men, a psychopath.
The book was published in 1975 to ecstatic reviews, and generally
accepted as being of 'considerable literary merit' (New York Times).
None of us present, however, felt that the book was well written,
and as far as I recollect a fair bit of the discussion concerned
this discrepancy. Clearly, at the time of publication, the subject
matter - a woman cruising bars for casual sex, in particular a woman
from a respectable Catholic family with a highly respectable job
and, later on, a respectable lawyer fiance - and the explicit way
in which the sex was portrayed, were explosive, and it is interesting
to see how response to subject-matter can affect one's perception
of prose style.
Most of us, reading the book in the present day, felt that it was
very difficult to understand on an emotional level why Theresa engages
in this double life of self-destructive behaviour. Least perturbed
by this was Clare who is a counsellor and who, introducing the book,
said she could identify certain psychological theories about emotional
damage and promiscuity being consciously worked through in the book.
In fact, the book makes plain, on a factual level, the causes of
Theresa's behaviour: struck down at the age of four by polio which
resulted in a slight curvature of the spine that she works hard
to disguise, suffering a repressed sense of parental neglect (the
death of her elder brother after her illness prevented her parents
noticing her incipient disability and getting it treated), feeling
inferior to a glamorous elder sister, and used and hurt by her first
callous and predatory lover, her college lecturer, she suffers from
low self-worth and, as a kind of warped self-protection, dissociates
sex from emotion: brief sex with strangers is exciting, or at least
briefly satisfying - the more threatening or detached the more exciting/satisfying
- but sex with her sincere and loving fiance is anaesthetic. However,
we were generally agreed that none of this was convincing on an
emotional level: it was hard to feel Theresa's psychological
development (if it can be called that) and changes of gear; the
book, as Doug said, just didn't feel lived or felt.
Ann
said she had read that Rossner had been commissioned to write the
book in the aftermath of the real-life case, and wondered if this
had made for a lack of true emotional engagement on the part of
the author. Mark and Ann both felt too that Rossner's age at the
time - I think they had read she was about forty - set her apart
from the newly sexually 'liberated' scene she was describing: she
had indeed not lived it and was portraying it from the outside.
Those in the group who had been young at the time felt that she
hadn't in fact got it right: while everyone present could agree
that promiscuity can be a kind of masochism, there was nothing in
the book of the atmosphere of the time whereby women who did behave
this way revelled in it, telling themselves (however mistakenly)
that they were exercising a newly found sexual power.
Whatever the reason, we felt that, in spite of the critical praise,
it is the prose that fails to convey the crucial emotional element.
In spite of an innovative beginning - a police report on the murderer
followed by the murderer's confession - the book very quickly becomes
a conventional third-person linear plod through the events of Theresa's
life, with much ground to cover and a consequent tendency to tell
rather than show. This leads inevitably to a lack of vividness,
leading in turn to a loss of significance. For instance, I said,
when I realised that Theresa in adulthood was jealous of her elder
sister Katherine I was surprised: I had missed that; and once again,
I was really surprised to learn that Theresa had been very fond
of Katherine's husband Brooks. Therefore I found it unconvincing
that Theresa should be so upset when Katherine leaves him, and in
turn even more unconvincing (even baffling) that when Theresa goes
to Brooks' flat to comfort him and finds him with a young woman,
she is so upset she hotfoots it down to one of the bars to pick
up a man. There were general murmurs of agreement among the book
group. The need to cram in a lot of backstory in a somewhat doggedly
linear tale leads to clumsy (and over-proliferated) sentences such
as this: It turned out that the way Katherine had broken her
engagement to Young John was by running away with and marrying a
cousin of Young John's whom she met at a wedding she'd gone to with
Young John, and to clumsy structure and an over-reliance on
exposition. After Theresa finds the supposedly grieving Brooks with
the young woman, and before she seeks refuge in a bar pickup, she
feels she really needs to talk to someone and thinks of another
teacher at her school whom she wishes she could call (if she knew
her better and if weren't too late in the evening). This teacher
has not been mentioned previously in the novel, and slap-bang in
the middle of Theresa's supposed emotional crisis we are given an
account of this teacher from scratch - Her name was Rose and
she was middle-aged and Jewish - what she looks like, her home
circumstances and her personality, and any narrative tension is
dissipated. This links with a general complaint in the group that
very little attention is given to the schoolteaching side of Theresa's
life - a result being that the supposedly shocking contrast between
the two aspects of her life becomes merely academic for the reader.
Although in theory everyone in the group accepted the notion of
a secret life - as Mark said, it's one of the basic subjects of
novels - most of us found it unconvincing when we were told in this
novel that Theresa handles the children so well and is such a caring
teacher - it merely seems inconsistent with the pathetic lack of
emotional control in the other side of her life. Similarly, Ann
noted, although we are told about Theresa's Irish-Catholic background,
there is none of the particular emotional flavour of that (and so
we miss out on any visceral sense of its emotional impact). A specialist
in textiles, Ann said also that the bottom fell out of the novel
for her at the point when we are briefly told that Theresa makes
herself some new curtains even though she has never sewn anything
before in her life - a small but vital indication of the lack of
felt experience in the book. None of us could remember all the different
men Teresa had taken back to her flat, or the order of her doing
so; the linearity and account-type style of writing had created
a repetitiveness that made them blur into each other and failed
to turn them into much of a narrative arc. This was a failure compounded
by the randomness of the ending. Although Theresa's repressed prudery
combined with her fear of closeness are what tip her murderer over
the edge, the fact that she picks up a psychopath in the first place
has an inherent randomness rather than any inevitability. All in
all, for most of us present, what should have been an exciting story
was a tedious read.
So, basically, the book got a thumbs-down from us, although it turned
out later that Trevor and Jenny, who had both missed the meeting,
had very much enjoyed it. Trevor agreed that it wasn't too well
written, and also that the sexual ethos of the 70s hadn't really
been the way it's portrayed in the book, but he hadn't found that
that mattered and had really liked it as a cracking and 'juicy'
read.
October
2012
Dubliners by James Joyce
We
have always had a rule that we don't discuss collections of short
stories, initially because one of our early (now ex) members, Sarah,
said (as someone who liked to sink into a good long novels) that
she couldn't stand short stories. I have to say that as a short-story
writer I found her comment upsetting but I was happy to go along
with the decision as I felt that a good short story can take a whole
evening's discussion and that any discussion by a disparate group
of a whole collection of stories was most likely to be superficial.
So it was with some trepidation, I think, that Doug suggested this
book, which he had always loved, assuring us that he had thought
about it carefully and had decided that the cohesiveness of this
particular collection would make for a good discussion after all.
It turned out that he was right: we did have a good and thoughtful
discussion, a main mark of that being that, unlike many of our discussions,
it resulted in the adjustment of some people's perceptions, including
my own.
Like Doug I have always held Dubliners to be one of my
favourite books, but when I came to read it again this time (after
many years) I found that I had hardly recalled the stories and,
even more disturbingly, reading them this time under great pressure
of time and commitments I found they blurred one into the other
and I could hardly recall individual stories the day after reading
them. When I bumped into Mark in the cafe some days before the meeting,
I disconcertingly found myself agreeing with him that the stories
were tedious, and this was the attitude with which both Mark and
I arrived at the meeting. However, by the time the group had discussed
the stories and reminded each other about them, both Mark and I
began to engage with them, and having gone away and read several
of them again since at much greater leisure, I'm glad to say they
are restored to my personal canon.
By contrast to Mark and me, Doug, introducing the stories, said
he had found his enthusiasm for the collection undimmed. He argued
for its suitability for discussion: the fact that the stories are
unified by a distinctive voice and authorial outlook and by the
themes of religion, alcoholism and the ultimate hopelessness of
the lives of its characters struggling in the hinterland between
respectability and degradation in the economically-slumped Dublin
of the early twentieth century, and by an overall structure of movement
from childhood, through youth to maturity.
Jenny agreed: she had very much liked the stories (although she
did, it turned out, also find it hard to remember which was which),
but wondered why they are considered so groundbreaking for the time
in which they were written. We talked about the fact that the stories
eschew the traditional definitive resolution, and instead, in keeping
with the theme of hopelessness and struggle, often end in a way
that seems to leave us hanging. Even though most of the stories
do in fact end on what Joyce called an 'epiphany', a moment of adjustment
of perception for the reader, the meaning of that adjustment is
not always clear, and the stories move towards uncertainty rather
than certainty: it's a defocussing rather than a focussing, and
thus a strong move away from the moral certainties of nineteenth-century
fiction. (As someone put in at this point, one thing that characterises
the book is that it's not moralising towards any of the fault-riven
characters.) The final story, 'The Dead', as the story of maturity,
presents the most obvious epiphany: Gabriel Conroy, having discovered
a long-hidden truth about his wife's early past, has not only his
perception of her adjusted, but also the perception of himself that
both he and the reader have been nurturing all along. It is not
simply, however, that in the light of his new knowledge he now sees
himself 'as a ludicrous figure'; he moves on from that to a larger
sense of uncertainty: One by one they were all becoming shades...
The solid world itself ... was dissolving and dwindling... His soul
swooned slowly...
This 'defocussing' is closely linked to another Modernist aspect
of the stories: the fact that they are ultimately psychologically
internal and deal with the contingency of consciousness. In fact,
only the first three stories are told in the first person, and the
rest are cast in a third person that cannot even be said to be an
intimate third, since characters are often described in an objective-realist
nineteenth-century mode and their personalities and life situations
authorially summed up - aspects of the book which seem indeed very
old-fashioned and were I think what set Jenny wondering about the
book's Modernist credentials. However, there is an engagement
with the consciousness of the protagonists of these stories, taking
place on an important linguistic level: the narration partakes of
the inflexions and diction of the characters and thus of their psyches:
one character is 'handy with the mits' and 'Lily, the caretaker's
daughter, was literally run off her feet.' As John pointed out,
the characters are thus seen from both the outside and the inside,
which, before I had fully re-engaged with the stories, seemed to
me an inconsistency (in the group, I praised the three first-person
stories as the only ones with a consistent viewpoint) but which
I now see as a deliberate authorial project achieved via a complex,
multi-layered prose (which would be fully developed in Ulysses).
Similarly, one of my complaints in the group discussion was that
there seemed to be erroneous moments of shifting viewpoint. The
story, 'A Mother,' in which Mrs Kearney chaperones her accompanist
daughter at a disastrously attended concert and, in spite of the
clear absence of box office returns, insists on the contractual
payment, is told entirely from Mrs Kearney's viewpoint until a moment
when, having become more and more insistent, she is suddenly seen
from outside, in fact from the viewpoint of the other characters,
'appearing' to discuss something intently with her husband. In the
story 'A Little Cloud', Little Chandler is made to see the futility
of his own life by a reunion with an old friend who left and made
his way in Fleet Street. We are entirely with his viewpoint until,
towards the end, he is trying unsuccessfully to stop his baby crying
when 'a woman' comes into the room, whom, due to the objective diction,
we only realise a sentence or two later is his wife and the mother
of his child. Doug said - too tentatively, it seems to me now -
that these were not authorial mistakes but intentional, and I now
agree with him (although I'm still not sure that either actually
works). In the first instance, a tension is being deliberately set
up between the internal world of the protagonist and the way she
is seen by others, the moment of change being perhaps the moment
of 'epiphany' for the reader, and in the second instance the switch
is either meant to create a similar adjustment for the reader (we
see the woman in a more objective light, rather than through Little
Chandler's self-centred eyes) or a sudden moment of alienation within
Little Chandler's own consciousness (he suddenly sees his wife as
alien to him) (or both). While the book uses realist methods to
capture and critique the social circumstances of the characters
- detailed physical descriptions including obsessive geographical
delineations of Dublin, careful and accurate observations of characters'
behaviour and lengthy colloquial dialogue - it also operates on
a more Modernist symbolic level to portray the perceptions and consciousness
that call into question the reality of that world, 'dissolving and
dwindling' it in the symbolic snowstorm at the end of 'The Dead'.
As Jenny said, nothing much happens in the stories, there's no drama,
and this is not simply because the lives of these characters are
humdrum, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because the true
focus of the stories is psychological and internal. Ann said she
found that on that level they were dramatic, in fact. She
had really liked the stories, and the episodic nature of the book
as a whole, and was very glad to have been given an occasion to
read it. She also found it amazingly prescient, touching as it does
on paedophilia, including that in the Catholic Church ('The Sisters'
and 'An Encounter') and corrupt politicians ('Ivy Day in the Committee
Room'), and everyone heartily agreed. People commented on the strong
criticism the book makes of the Catholic Church, and of both colonial
rule and Celtic Revivalism, while, as had been noted earlier, refusing
to moralise against the characters.
John commented that there were similarities between Dubliners
and Trainspotting - both episodic, both set in Celtic cities
and dealing with addiction. He said he felt that there was a hole
in the middle of the most famous of the stories, 'The Dead', in
that he didn't find it psychologically realistic that Mrs Conroy
should have kept the episode from her youth so secret from her husband,
but I don't think anyone else found it unreasonable, given the era
of the stories. Personally, I find it perfectly organic: the point
is that romance has long been worn away for the Conroys by the humdrum
struggle of their lives, and it is the sudden reawakening of romance
and lust in Gabriel Conway's bosom, his need to connect with his
wife and his uncustomary tenderness towards her, that, ironically,
unlock her emotionally and cause her to unburden herself.
Someone said that there was no humour in the book, with which I
couldn't at all agree. The contrast between the realist elements
and the internal, symbolic elements makes for an overall irony of
tone, and I can't see how the following, for instance, isn't funny:
The most vigorous clapping came from the four young men in the
doorway who had gone away to the refreshment-room at the beginning
of the piece but had come back when the piano had stopped.
I laughed out loud with Gabriel Conroy's audience when he relates
how his grandfather's horse, used to walking in a circle to drive
his mill, stops on an outing to walk round and round King Billy's
statue. There is of course however a bitter political edge to this
moment of merriment, and I do agree that the humour, residing always
in the realist moments, is ultimately subsumed by the existential
sadness falling like the snow 'faintly through the universe'.
There was some discussion about authorial intention. Jenny wondered
how far Joyce, and authors in general, consciously set out to create
the effects achieved. Could it be a question of just writing stories
as they came and justifying/explaining them in retrospect? I said
I felt on the whole, yes, writers write according to their temperament
and outlook, see afterwards what they have done and then identify
and name it, and John added that writers are also influenced by
what they've read and admire, but Doug was pretty sure that as far
as Joyce was concerned the whole project was approached with a very
conscious political and literary intention. Of course, with most
writers all of these things are operating to some degree. Joyce's
own family background of reduced fortunes and Home Rule politics
clearly affected his outlook, and so, in my view, would be likely
to affect directly his literary stratagems, but as is well recorded
it also endeared him to Ibsen with his concern with ordinary lives
and led him in turn to be influenced by him, and his letters make
clear that, influenced by the French Symbolists, he developed serious
literary theories for his own writing.
By the end of the meeting, Mark no longer considered the stories
tedious, but he maintained nevertheless that if it hadn't been for
Ulysses, we would not have heard of these stories now,
they would have sunk without trace. As for me, my experience of
trying to rush these stories and getting nowhere, and then approaching
them more circumspectly and finding them rich after all, has confirmed
me in my view that, far from being the literary form suited to the
rushed soundbite age, good and complex short stories need special
close attention and re-reading.
November
2012
Roger Fishbite by Emily Prager
This
is a book, the Lolita story updated to the nineties and recast from
the viewpoint of the 'nymphet', which Trevor has kept mentioning
as brilliant ever since I strongly recommended it to him some time
ago, so finally, to his delight, and to that of Jenny who had also
read it and admired it, I suggested it for our November group discussion.
Whereas Lolita is a fictional memoir narrated by the paedophile
Humbert Humbert awaiting trial for the murder of the man who turned
out to have corrupted the child Lolita before him, this book is
the fictional memoir of the 'nymphet', Lucky Linderhof, awaiting
trial for the murder of the Humbert figure, the man she calls Roger
Fishbite - a reversal which can be seen as a literary redress. Whereas
in Lolita Humbert's desire is fulfilled by the convenient accidental
death of the mother he married in order to gain sexual access to
her twelve-year-old daughter, Roger Fishbite is the purposeful murderous
agent of his wife's death - a comment, as I see it, on the authorial
'killing off' of the women in Lolita, and thus the complicity
of the author. Such literary stratagems have led some critics to
deride Prager's book as an over-simplistic, if not crude recasting
of Lolita which, as we noted in our
discussion of the earlier book, subtly portrays the duality
of both characters and Humbert in particular. However, it seems
to me that the story seen from the viewpoint of the molested child
would inevitably be more black and white: the moral complexities
of a perpetrator caught in romantic obsession with unsullied youth
would be unavailable or only dimly available to the child and indeed
irrelevant to the trauma of her experience. In this case, as our
group agreed, the book is making an important point especially relevant
in our current culture where widespread sexual abuse of young girls,
and the voices of the victims, are for the first time being acknowledged.
The point is that we need to see abuse from the viewpoint of the
child.
In fact, Lucky is a complex character and her feelings
for Fishbite are complicated: even when she is drearily trapped
with him, moving from deserted hotel to deserted hotel, she has
moments of seeing him as the father figure for whom she always longed
(one reason she paid him attention in the first place), and she
is fiercely jealous of the girl she calls 'Evie Naif', the child
beauty queen with whom, it turns out, Fishbite is also sexually
involved.
Was I in love with Fishbite? Sometimes, when the light hit his
shoulder in a certain way, or he made a game of chasing me down
one of the empty corridors, or at a mall when he was paying at the
register, I could forget the iniquity and a wave of warmth would
rush over me and I'd have to kiss him. I did like him, after all.
I always liked him or none of this would have happened.
What the book thus conveys is the way that the needy impulses of
children, both sexual and non-sexual, can make them open to abuse,
and the moral imperative of adults not to abuse those impulses.
Having read the book again in a hurry just before the meeting, I
hadn't quite formulated these thoughts when I came to introduce
the book. What I did say was that I was most impressed with the
narrative voice (which beautifully conveys the complexity of a sassy
and precocious girl caught in a searingly painful situation). I
said also that the book is concerned not just with sexual abuse,
seeing it as one aspect of a wider abuse of children (including
the child slave labour which Lucky and her friend Eg try to expose
in a street theatre and the foot binding of Chinese girls, recalled
in the little shoes collected by Lucky's mother), and everyone agreed.
Jenny then said that once again she had really enjoyed the book,
but that, actually, this time around, she hadn't been quite convinced
by the voice, which seemed to her too adult, conscious and knowledgeable
for a thirteen-year-old. Ann said that that had occurred to her
too, although she had very much enjoyed the book nevertheless. I
didn't agree: it's made quite clear from the start that Lucky has
always been intellectually as well as sexually precocious and is
particularly good with words (she's also had the benefit of an exclusive
private academic education), and her early experience of attracting
sexual attention has given her a wisdom and cynicism beyond her
years. Clare, however, said that the very sassy wise-cracking tone
of the voice had put her right off at the start of the novel, and
although she eventually got used to it, she found herself as a result
less in sympathy with the prose than the rest of us. For instance,
she found unconvincing and erroneous the fact that in dialogue characters
refer to each other by the nicknames Lucky has bestowed on them,
and didn't find it acceptable as a stratagem of Lucky's memoir.
She also questioned Lucky's old-fashioned convention of constantly
addressing 'Readers and Watchers' (Lucky has a dream to get her
own Oprah-style television show to expose stories of child abuse).
Personally I very much like it: by taking overt narrative control
in this way Lucky has triumphed over a situation created through
her childish lack of control over her life. Jenny had said that
although she had found Lolita a very upsetting book, she
hadn't been upset by this at all, even though it was told from the
girl's viewpoint, and I suggested that this was precisely because
the girl is given power by being given narrative control. This led
someone to wonder about the ending, in which Lucky's dream has come
true: it is a kind of epilogue narrated not by Lucky, but the Executive
Producer of the show which Lucky presents from the facility where
she is now incarcerated, having been found guilty. Does this mean
that Lucky really has been not a victim but some kind of clever
manipulator all along? The section addresses this very question:
...people have asked me, 'Warma, is she for real or is she just
a clever killer?
And what I say to them and to you is this: the jury found her guilty
of second degree murder, which makes her a killer. During the trial,
her news conference on the plight of children raised ten million
dollars for global children's charities including her own ... and
completely bankrupted the Pike's Peak sneaker company, which makes
her very clever. And she carries in her purse a little ragged piece
of her infant blanket which she calls 'Peco' and which, when I see
her with it, makes me feel she is very real.'
thus movingly portraying the mix of precociousness, intelligence
and childishness which made Lucky - and can make adolescents generally
- vulnerable to abuse yet unfairly held culpable.
Before this, there had been some discussion of characters' motives,
led by Trevor, who kept saying how brilliant the book was - it 'had
everything'. We also discussed the covers of our different editions,
which we found generally inappropriately titillating and thus unfortunately
proving the book's portrayal of our culture as paedophilic. We were
particularly shocked by one featuring the back view of a young girl
with a plait wearing a pale bathing suit and her feet tucked under
her: from any distance she looks as though she's in a vest with
her knickers pulled down exposing her buttocks, and we did not think
that that was accidental (as far as I can remember, at no point
does Lucky go swimming). Everyone thought the book was very prescient
- the scene where Fishbite gets a crowd of child beauty queens to
surround and stroke him when he falls down in an asthma attack is
horribly reminiscent of footage of Jimmy Saville surrounded by young
girls - and the discussion soon moved on in a spirited way to the
recent scandal and the issue at large.
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