Long Pauses

Category: Words

  • Speaking of Writing

    Morning Edition had a fun feature this morning. In conjunction with the publication of The Writing Life, a collection of essays originally published in The Washington Post’s Book World, NPR gathered three of the book’s contributors — Jane Smiley, Michael Chabon, and John Edgar Wideman — to discuss their craft. I always enjoy listening to experts talk about their particular areas of expertise, regardless of the subject, but I have a special fondness for writers, especially those as charismatic and infectious as Smiley and Chabon. (I don’t know a thing about Wideman.)

    This is when I pull on my “This proves I was there, that I heard of them first” T-shirt. Six years ago when I was writing my Master’s thesis — an embarassing mess titled, “The Laugh’s on Us: Ambivalence of Identity in Contemporary Jewish-American Fiction” — I contacted Chabon via his Website, and he was gracious enough to answer my questions (and my follow ups) over the course of a week or two. My favorite of his responses was to an awkward question about the “Jewishness” of his identity (ah, the enthusiasm of the novice pedant). His response:

    This is a question that I can only answer, I think, through my work. Which as you will eventually see, if I can just get this novel done, is taking on more overt Jewish content than it has heretofore.

    I was so pleased when he did get that novel done — The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay — not only because it won the Pulitzer (and deserved it), but because it brought him a larger, much-deserved readership. He seems to be a genuinely nice guy, and he writes some of the best sentences I’ve ever read.

  • The Good Woman of Setzuan

    I’m reading Brecht again. When I first encountered him as an undergrad — It was Galileo, I think — he was a burden and a pretentious bore. Several years later I read Mother Courage in a performance theory seminar, and his seemed to me an interesting, if too rigidly intellectual, project. Now, at 31 and with my political positions in something of a flux, I think I’m finally ready to really read Brecht. (Hopefully at 40 I’ll reread this and laugh at my naivete.)

    The Good Woman of Setzuan (1938-40), written during Brecht’s exile in Scandinavia, tells the story of Shen Te, a young woman forced into prostitution by poverty who is rewarded handsomely after opening her home to three visiting gods. Disproving their contention that no goodness still exists on earth, Shen Te is given a small business by the deities, and from there she struggles to work honestly and to provide for the needy, earning her the moniker, “the Angel of the Slums.” After falling victim to unscrupulous neighbors and a dishonest lover, however, Shen Te is forced to create an alter-ego — that of her business-savy cousin, Mr. Shui Ta. Where Shen Te is trusting, selfless, and naive, Shui Ta is fierce, manipulative, and efficient. As inevitably happens in Brecht’s drama — and, by extension, in our world — the forces of capital and history eventually overwhelm Shen Te, and she is forced to surrender her goodness or starve:

    Since not to eat is to die
    Who can long refuse to be bad?
    As I lay prostrate beneath the weight of good intentions
    Ruin stared me in the face
    It was when I was unjust that I ate good meat

    While browsing this morning, I found a fun review of Good Woman as staged by the fine drama department at my alma mater, Florida State. I say “fun review” because it was so obviously written by a well-intentioned — and absolutely clueless — undergrad. How’s this for a lead?

    The FSU School of Theatre revisits the timeless feud between good and evil in its production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Good Woman of Setzuan.” With a uniquely dazzling set, on-stage chemistry and a moralistic lesson, the play leaves every viewer with something to ponder.

    He or she goes on to say:

    With predominantly outrageous characters, prophetic musical interludes and an amazing abstract mountainous backdrop, balance is occasionally difficult. However, the innocence of the main character, the serious nature of the love story and the open ending leave viewers poised to make logical sense of the production.

    Ignoring for a moment the complete lack of content here (and the misplaced modifier and the wretched abuse of adverbs), I have to take aim at that opening sentence: The chief end of Brecht’s project, in fact, is to strip us (violently, if necessary) of any and all illusions of “timelessness.” Timelessness (like the traditional theatre), he would argue, is a bourgeois daydream — the shiny gloss that covers over the workings and exploitations of capital.

    To free us of those illusions, to expose that machinery, he distances us from the action, never allowing us to identify too closely with the characters or to suspend our disbelief. The Verfremdungseffekt takes a variety of forms: productions of Brecht’s dramas often include projected slides above the stage that directly contradict or comment on the action beneath; characters occasionally address the audience directly; and in Good Woman Shen Te becomes Shui Ta simply by slipping on a mask that, in most productions, is deliberately unrealistic, deliberately theatrical. We’re never allowed to forget that we’re only watching a play.

    Brecht also deflates dramatic tension — though his plays certainly remain tense and tragic — by focusing our attention on those literal transactions that are often elided in traditional story-telling. Money changes hands with tragic consequences. In each exchange someone profits at another’s expense. Shen Te isn’t destroyed by timeless forces of evil or by fate or Providence, but by specific economic systems. I love this scene from the prologue:

    Wong: Everyone knows the province of Kwan is always having floods.
    Second God: Really? How’s that?
    Wong: Why, because they’re so irreligious.
    Second God: Rubbish. It’s because they neglected the dam.

    I wonder how that would play in our current climate.

  • A Good Read

    The only way to be in the world was to write himself there. His thoughts and words were dying. Let him write ten words and he would come into being again.
    — from Don DeLillo’s Mao II (p. 204)

    I’ve been reading quite a bit lately. I tend to go in fits and starts, alternating between binges on books and on films, my twin addictions. Given a choice between the two, I’d take the books. No doubt about it. Reading is a richer, more intimate experience, demanding more from the audience and offering greater rewards in return. On the plane Saturday, flying back from Fort Lauderdale, the woman sitting beside me noticed my book and recognized in me something of a kindred spirit. She asked me about the author, jotted down his name, then offered a quick review of her latest read. Wallace Stegner. Can’t remember the title. “I like people with an intellectual curiosity,” she told me. “I wish more people had it.”

    When I was studying for my comprehensive exams, I often felt like I was training for a marathon. It required the same discipline and exhausting effort. 100-150 pages a day. Everyday. Type up the notes. Check it off the list. Memorize and move on. I’m grateful for that experience now, but I thought it might kill me at the time. I had to take one of them twice, actually — a major disappointment and a story in itself. But I finally got through it all, and it was worth it. On good days, I even feel qualified to hold an opinion.

    On Saturday, on that plane, I was reading Illuminations, a collection of “Essays and Reflections” by Walter Benjamin, the influential, early-20th century German literary critic. In the first essay, “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin exposes himself as another of my kin. Describing the ideal “Bookworm” and his meticulously acquired, obsessively organized library, he writes:

    For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector — and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be — ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.

    Back to the books.

  • Snippets

    When asked by Michael Cunningham (author of The Hours) about one of my favorite scenes in Angels in America — the moment when the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg delivers the Kaddish for Roy Cohn — Tony Kushner had this to say:

    Forgiveness is a very complicated thing. It certainly became, as I wrote Perestroika, the chief issue because it became a big issue in the world, starting with perestroika, and all of these sort of democratic revolutions that were going on, not just in Eastern Europe, but also in Latin America for instance, where people really had to ask themselves, “Can you let go of the past?” Can you forgive somebody that’s done something really, really terrible to you? It’s undertheorized and underdiscussed in the Left. We don’t really have a morality that encompasses it, because Christian morality, which is a complete forgiveness, seems emotionally inadequate to most people. It’s an act of that kind of forgiveness; it’s something that most people aren’t capable of doing. And it also seems unjust in a way.

    After finally seeing Angels performed last fall, I left the theater thinking, “I’ll be damned. I never realized that these plays are about grace.” I wonder how Kushner would respond to that, particularly if he knew what kind of mystery that word holds for me. I hope that he would be encouraged. Along similar lines, Charlie Rose once asked him about “spirituality in America.” Kushner replied:

    I’m very ambivalent and undecided and confused about it. I’m a genuine agnostic. I don’t know, but I think that as we approach the millennium, it becomes clearer and clearer that there are features of human experience that the Left has traditionally not touched upon, including a sense of the miraculous and a sense of the magical. And as the Left develops in the face of whatever kind of world we’re looking at now, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the spiritual has to be factored in. The spiritual has to be examined in a new way. We don’t know how to do that yet, but we’re working toward that.

    That was in May, 1993. I wonder if they’ve made any progress.

  • Kushner on Bush

    Tony Kushner on President Bush and military intervention in Iraq:

    It’s very hard for me to ever say that I think unilateral military action on the part of United States can be a great thing at this point. The idea of the United States armed forces going in and suppressing and controlling a population of any sort is so fraught with history. . . . The minute we start dropping bombs on anybody, everybody feels very good for five minutes. And there is a fantasy sense that we’re still the number one country on earth because we can go in there and kick this person, and we forget we’re talking about this completely decimated country that was annihilated [a few] years ago and has never rebuilt.
    — from an interview with Craig Lucas on January 20, 1993.

    Yep. 1993. He was talking about that President Bush. I’ve just begun working through Tony Kushner in Conversation, edited by Robert Vorlicky. Here’s another interesting tidbit. Turns out that the Reagan administration wasn’t all bad. Kushner describing a federal grant that helped to fund the writing of Angels in America:

    The application for it was very honest. I said I was going to write a play about gay men and Mormons and Roy Cohn, sent it in to the federal government under Reagan, and thought, this will come back immediately with no money attached. Then they gave us this huge check. . . . It was Washington money with an eagle stamped on the check. So I felt, when I was writing it, that it was taxpayers’ money, and I do think that had some impact on the play’s scope.

    I wonder if Jesse Helms — the homophobic, anti-NEA Helms of old; not the kinder, gentler, post-Bono, pro-AIDS relief Helms — ever found out.

  • Rilke’s “The Man Watching”

    Less than an hour until President Bush’s national address, and I’m too tired, too frustrated, and too stunned to think. I know that there’s not much lower on the blog food chain than posting a poem without comment, but, well, a friend sent this to me today, and it’s been a source of welcomed comfort. And besides, great poetry speaks for itself.

    The Man Watching
    by Rainer Maria Rilke

    I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
    so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
    that a storm is coming,
    and I hear the far-off fields say things
    I can’t bear without a friend,
    I can’t love without a sister

    The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
    across the woods and across time,
    and the world looks as if it had no age:
    the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
    is seriousness and weight and eternity.

    What we choose to fight is so tiny!
    What fights us is so great!
    If only we would let ourselves be dominated
    as things do by some immense storm,
    we would become strong too, and not need names.

    When we win it’s with small things,
    and the triumph itself makes us small.
    What is extraordinary and eternal
    does not want to be bent by us.
    I mean the Angel who appeared
    to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
    when the wrestler’s sinews
    grew long like metal strings,
    he felt them under his fingers
    like chords of deep music.

    Whoever was beaten by this Angel
    (who often simply declined the fight)
    went away proud and strengthened
    and great from that harsh hand,
    that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
    Winning does not tempt that man.
    This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
    by constantly greater beings.

    Okay, one comment . . . I’ll never write a line this good:

    the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
    is seriousness and weight and eternity.

    Read it out loud. There is so much dramatic force in those three nouns. The stanza, up until that point, is almost romantic — filled with images of a storm and a mythical landscape. But then you hit the word “seriousness,” and the tone, even the tempo of the line changes. The light, fluid reading is brought to a halt, and we’re forced to confront those words, individually and in relation to one another: “seriousness and weight and eternity.”

    A perfect poem for today, I think.

  • Let America Be America Again

    A friend just passed along this link, which made me laugh. Turns out that Laura Bush just cancelled a planned poetry celebration after learning that one of the invited speakers had encouraged his colleagues to use the event as an opportunity to publicly denounce war on Iraq.

    “It came to the attention of the First Lady’s Office that some invited guests want to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum,” a White House statement said. “While Mrs. Bush understands the right of all Americans to express their political views, this event was designed to celebrate poetry.”

    Why do I find this amusing? Because the event was intended to celebrate the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson, and Langston Hughes — a homosexual, an atheist intellectual, and a radical Old Left Communist (grossly reductionist caricatures, but you get the point). Apparently Mrs. Bush thinks that readings of Whitman, Dickenson, and Hughes at the White House should be devoid of political content.

    Hopefully they’ll work out their differences real soon, though. I’d love to hear President Bush reading Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again.” I mean, can you think of a more patriotic title for a poem?

  • The Rise and Fall of the American Left (1992)

    By John Patrick Diggins

    For Diggins, the first problem facing any historian of the American Left is one of basic terminology. “The characteristics most often used to define the Left,” he writes, “the demand for change; political ideals like justice, equality, and democracy; anticapitalism and the tactic of dissent; the mentalities of rationalism and ideology—are either so broad as to include many other political elements or so narrow as to apply to one American Left and not to others” (39). In the opening chapter of The Rise and Fall of the American Left, Diggins briefly examines each of these assumed traits, exposing the contradictions inherent in each. Finally, he implies that the Left can most appropriately be defined by its admittedly naïve faith in the radical perfectibility of society, or, even more succinctly, by the gap that exists between these two questions: “What is real? What is possible?” (42).

    Of particular interest to Diggins is the strange partnership of intellectuals and the working class that has characterized so much of the history of the American Left. He traces the origins of that partnership to the Pragmatists and to Karl Marx. From people like William James and John Dewey the Left inherited a brand of existential idealism that turned Man into a force capable of “willing” its influence on history. From Marx came a faith in the collective power of the proletariat and the theory that would direct their “inevitable” triumph over capitalism. The partnership, however, has always been a site of conflict and paradox. “By and large,” Diggins writes, “American socialism was a movement not of but on behalf of the working class. Although it presumed to speak for the workers and to articulate their needs, the doctrines and tactics had been developed by intellectuals and party leaders” (90).

    Diggins divides his history into four phases: the Lyrical Left, the Old Left, the New Left, and the Academic Left. The first phase (like the penultimate) was born largely in opposition to all that preceded it. “The young intellectuals,” Diggins argues, “cheerfully presided over the death of the ‘genteel tradition’ as they attacked its Victorian standards, its polite manners and haut-bourgeois tastes, its Puritan heritage and decorous Brahmin literature, and, above all, its condescending certainty that it had found ultimate truth and absolute value” (97). The Lyrical Left grew up from the pre-WWI years when the Socialist Party carried considerable weight in popular American politics, most notably in the figurehead of Eugene Debs. Diggins devotes his energies to profiles of Debs and other important leaders of the movement: John Reed, Emma Goldman, Daniel DeLeon, Big Bill Haywood, along with many of the artists and intellectuals who congregated in Greenwich Village and Harlem, including Mabel Dodge, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer.

    I’m most fascinated by Max Eastman, a novelist, poet, feminist, and editor of Masses, who wrestled constantly with the problems of idealism and pragmatism. When, in the early-1920s, many leftist intellectuals in America became disillusioned by Lenin’s turn to the right and by Stalin’s succession, Eastman turned to a practical analysis of Marxism. “The crux of Eastman’s critique of dialectical materialism,” writes Diggins, “was that belief in the inevitability of communism was a dubious scientific proposition. That capitalism morally ‘ought’ to collapse was no basis for predicting that it would” (123). Decades later some in the New Left would return to Eastman’s analysis, but in the 1920s it was powerless to overcome the combined force of heated domestic pressure (inspired in part by the SP’s official anti-war stance) and the violent suppression of Trotsky and his supporters in the Soviet Union. The Lyrical Left collapsed soon after it began.

    The Old Left should have been born of the widespread proletariat revolt that followed the “inevitable” (orthodox Marxism would argue) collapse of the stock market in 1929, except that no such revolt occurred. Instead, the American worker often blamed himself for his own personal failings. “The extent of this psychic wound,” writes Diggins, “indicates how much America’s working class had absorbed the values of capitalist individualism” (146). The lingering effects of the Great Depression did, however, incite a growing interest in the American Communist Party, but its message and political influence were quickly fractured and diluted by a host of foreign and domestic forces. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s purges, the Moscow Trials, and, in 1939, the forging of a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany deflated the Old Left’s faith in the Comintern and awakened leftist intellectuals to their own naivety. At home, the Popular Front combined with Roosevelt’s New Deal diplomacy to further liberalize socialism. Diggins writes:

    Roosevelt’s ability to steer a middle course between capitalist exploitation and socialist expropriation, while at the same time preserving traditional democratic institutions, seemed more attractive to disillusioned radicals who found a new respect for the politics of moderations as they watched the politics of extremism in Germany and Russia. (189)

    With America’s victory over Fascism in Europe, the lowering of American employment due to the booming postwar economy, and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the Old Left’s traditional tropes were destabilized. As Diggins notes, the Left was forced to throw off Marxist orthodoxy and admit “that democratic freedom and one-party dictatorships are incompatible” (216). The New York Intellectuals and the left-leaning journals of the day—Partisan Review, Commentary, Dissent—suddenly experienced a strange and surprising patriotism (or something like it). Leftist philosophers, historians, economists, theologians, and politicians were all left to explain America’s “exceptionalism,” its unique ability to withstand the pressures of history that Marx had predicted. Instead of collapsing under the weight of proletariat revolt, America’s economy thrived, sending workers into the post-industrial age of conspicuous consumption and suburban alienation.

    Diggins’s chapter on the New Left opens with an interesting epigraph from Stephen Spender:

    Nothing is clearer to a later generation than the naivety of an earlier one, just as nothing is clearer to the earlier one than the naivety of the later. (218)

    It’s a nice snapshot of the attitudes that separated the Old Left from the New and that continue to trouble the Left’s search for praxis. Diggins draws connections between the two movements in broad strokes, then focuses his gaze on the leading thinkers of the era—C. Wright Mills, William Williams, Michael Harrington, Herbert Marcuse, and Daniel Bell, in particular—and the related but separate movements that they helped to inspire, including the Beats, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Free Speech Movement, The Progressive Labor Party, hippies, the Black Panthers, and the Weathermen. Ultimately, Diggins argues, the New Left failed because it disregarded the lessons of history. He writes:

    The charge that the New Left lacked a coherent, unified movement seems less an explanation of its defeat than a definition of its essence. Opposing bureaucracy, it relied upon spontaneous activity, and its suspicion of the hierarchical tendencies of organizational structures precluded the possibility that a sense of leadership could emerge with a single voice. The actual reason for its failure was the assumption that it stood for more than itself. History did not come through for the New Left, because the missing ingredient of radical mythology never appeared—the agency of change. The central dilemma that has face all three Lefts in twentieth-century America is the inability to find a social force that would adopt a commitment of active opposition to existing order. (265)

    In the days and years following the debacle at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the New Left’s failure to discover that “social force” was put on display with increasing frequency. Nixon rode into office on the promise of restoring “law and order” to the country. And the one issue around which all of the New Left could once unite, opposition to Vietnam, was so universalized by 1970 that it became a dead dogma. In Diggins’s opinion, the New Left, now without a radical public constituency, was forced to flee to the one institution against which it had most actively revolted: the ivory towers of academia.

    The final chapters of The Rise and Fall of the American Left are devoted to Diggins’s treatment of the Academic Left that has found its voice in critical theory, the goal of which is “to demystify the mechanisms that rule people’s lives under the guise of accepted necessities” (346). Here, Diggins runs through the standard icons of 80s theory—Habbermas and Adorno, Foucault and Derrida, Eagleton and Jameson—emphasizing the problems of relativism that has plagued so much of postmodern though. I got a kick out of this little cheap shot: “Formerly the Left set out to comprehend the world in order to change it and to speak truth to power. The contemporary Academic Left can barely grapple with the ‘undecidability’ of texts” (373).

    Ultimately, though, Diggins argues that the Academic Left is doomed to fail unless they reestablish something of their faith in the Enlightenment, “wherein both liberal pragmatism and Marxian socialism, the major intellectual ingredients in all four Lefts, derived their heritage” (383). For that reason, the only contemporary theorist for which he holds much hope is Richard Rorty, who like Dewey, acknowledged that although “one cannot know truth and reality directly, . . . one can, by keeping intelligence active, cope with experience” (368). It’s a refreshing, if necessarily measured, bit of optimism. Diggins has since written several books on Schlesinger, Weber, and Pragmatism. I wonder if any of that optimism remains.

  • The Agony of the American Left

    By Christopher Lasch

    Spanning the years from the Populist movement of the 1890s to the radical politics of the 1960s, Lasch’s study offers a useful analysis of many of the social, economic, and political forces that have combined to frustrate the American Left in its search for a politically potent mixture of theory and action. Writing during the heydays of the New Left, Lasch argues that such analysis is conspicuously absent from much of the contemporary debate, leading throngs of young radicals toward heroic nihilism and impotent protest, and squelching their potential in the process. Ultimately, though, Lasch’s book, like so much of leftist intellectual thought, is better at theory than action, better at uncovering the faults of past movements than offering workable alternatives. Like the New Left itself, this book peters out near the end, unable to muster the energy for long-term resistance.

    Throughout The Agony of the American Left, Lasch suggests that the promise of the Left lies in the establishment of a new brand of socialism, one modified drastically from those modeled in underdeveloped nations and uniquely capable of exploiting America’s machinelike economy toward collective ends. His argument takes root first in his distinction between late-19th century Populism and Socialism. That division, he feels, created too many missed opportunities. In particular, it prevented the formation of larger coalitions around shared progressive interests. Drawing helpful connections between those past mistakes and Nixon-era America, Lasch writes:

    Organization, in fact, was achieved precisely by eliminating in advance all who could not be organized with a minimum of effort—immigrants, Negroes, sharecroppers, hillbillies; the ‘culturally deprived.’ Poverty has not been eliminated, it has merely been concealed. Because they are both ‘invisible’ and voiceless, the millions of poor have no way of making their presence felt except by violence; but precisely because they are leaderless and unorganized, violence, once it erupts, cannot be directed by radicals toward political objectives. (30)

    As Lasch points out, in the years surrounding WWI, socialism held considerable sway in American politics. “In 1912,” he writes, “the year Eugene V. Debs polled six per cent of the Presidential vote, Socialists held 1,200 offices in 340 cities, including 79 mayors in 24 states. As late as 1918, they elected 32 state legislators. In 1916, they elected Meyer London to Congress and made important gains in the municipal elections of several large cities” (35). But by the mid-20s, perhaps reflecting the combined influence of America’s booming industrialism and the growing isolationism of its foreign policy, the movement had lost its momentum, and “American radicalism had acquired the characteristics it has retained until the present day: sectarianism, marginality, and alienation from American life” (40). Of course, the liberalism and anticommunist sentiment that characterized so much of the political discourse during the post-WWII years only served to further bury the Left.

    In the second and third chapters, Lasch uses two case studies, The Partisan Review and The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), to expose the double-bind facing leftist intellectuals during the most heated of the Cold War years. Members of the CCF, for example, found themselves fighting for “cultural freedom” while maintaining a virulent anticommunist posture, which forced them to stake out an ambivalent position on, say, the Rosenbergs—”[The] pre-eminent fact of the Rosenbergs’ guilt must be openly acknowledged before any appeal for clemency can be regarded as having been made in good faith”—and Arthur Miller, who “had made an unforgivable mistake: he had criticized political interference with art not only in the Soviet Union but in the United States, thereby implying that the two situations were comparable” (87, 90). Ultimately, it was discovered that the CCF’s position was more compromised than anyone had imagined. Like so many other supposed mouth pieces of the Left, the American CCF’s journal, Encounter, was later revealed to have been supported by the CIA. Lasch writes:

    The modern state, among other things, is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing crises and claiming to be the only instrument that can effectively deal with them. This propaganda, in order to be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers, and artists not as paid propagandists or state-censored time-servers but as ‘free’ intellectuals capable of policing their own jurisdictions and of enforcing acceptable standards of responsibility within the various intellectual professions.

    A system like this presupposes two things: a high degree of professional consciousness among intellectuals, and general economic affluence which frees the patrons of intellectual life from the need to account for the money they spend on culture. Once these conditions exist, as they have existed in the United States for some time, intellectuals can be trusted to censor themselves, and crude ‘political’ influence over intellectual life comes to seem passé. (94-95)

    The end result is that American intellectuals found (some would say find) themselves in a Pynchonesque nightmare of absurd miscommunication, all of which masks harsh political realities for the sake of furthering capitalist gains. “’What would a ‘free thinker’ do, asks the Sunday Times of London, ‘when he finds out that his free thought has been subsidized by a ruthlessly aggressive intelligence agency as part of the international cold war?’ According to the curious values that prevail in American society, he should make a redoubled effort to salvage the reputation of organizations that have been compromised, it would seem, beyond redemption.”

    The final chapters of The Agony of the American Left examine the strange ties that bound the Black Power movement with the predominantly white New Left. For Lasch, they were most closely united by their failings. They shared, he writes, “romantic anarchism but several other features as well, none of them (it must be said) conducive to its success—a pronounced distrust of people over thirty, a sense of powerlessness and despair, for which the revolutionary rhetoric serves to compensate, and a tendency to substitute rhetoric for political analysis and defiant gestures for political action” (131). For his analysis of Black Power—a really interesting read, I should mention—Lasch relies heavily on Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, which argues that the movement is marked by a lack of theory and historical understanding. Like the New Left, it is dominated by emotional rhetoric and generic “resistance,” but the solutions it offers evidence a naïve misunderstanding of the economic forces that shape America’s social structures. For instance, Lasch asks the provocative question: Do ghettos exist because “powerful interests have a stake in perpetuating them,” or because “American society can get along so well without black people that there is not motive either to integrate them by getting rid of the ghettos or to allow the ghettos to govern themselves”? (132). That Black Power had no answer, just as the New Left had no specific, sustainable goals in its disruptions of campus life, only exacerbates the Left’s agony.

    For Lasch, the New Left is a failure both for reasons beyond their control and for problems of their own making. Had they been offered glimpses of progress, they may have moved toward more thoughtful analysis and greater cooperation. Instead, their peace movements were met only by further escalations in Vietnam. Their dovish President (Johnson) turned hawk once reelected. Their most promising candidate (RFK) was lost in another in a series of senseless assassinations. And instead, they were left with riots in Chicago and Humphrey as their nomination. Lasch suggests that the last promise of the Left remains in the founding of a new socialist majority. “In other words,” he writes:

    the Left has to begin to function not as a protest movement or a third party but as an alternative political system, drawing on the abilities of people who realize that their talents are often wasted in their present jobs. It has to generate analysis and plans for action in which people of varying commitments to radicalism can take part, while at the same time it must insist that the best hope of creating a decent society in the United States is to evolve a socialism appropriate to American conditions. (200-01)

    But aside from his thoughtful analysis, Lasch offers little insight into how such a socialist consensus might be formed. “In espousing decentralization, local control, and a generally antibureaucratic outlook, and by insisting that these values are at the heart of radicalism, the New Left has shown American socialists the road they must follow” (211). In the margin I wrote, “Is that it?” Like Lasch, I’m seeking praxis. I only wish that he would have put more of his theory into action.

  • Homebody/Kabul

    Instead of beginning my dissertation prospectus, which really should be occupying a larger chunk of my life right now, I’ve discovered all sorts of distractions that can be justified away as “research.” The most recent was Tony Kushner’s play, Homebody/Kabul, which I picked up in hopes that it might be useful when it comes time to write my conclusion — you know, in the spring of 2004. See how it works? By reading a play a year-and-a-half in advance, I avoid feeling guilty for my inexcusable procrastination. The story of my life.

    I’m hesitant to draw any conclusions after only one reading of Homebody/Kabul, except to say that, once again, Kushner has proven that he writes dialog with more magic and beauty and poetry than anyone since Shakespeare. Quite a claim, I know, but I’d defend it against all comers. Only Kushner could weave such a confounding and sublime metaphor from a description of computer networking, spoken by the homebody of the title, a woman disillusioned by loss and her lifeless husband:

    I understand none of it and indeed it’s quite impossible imagining my husband having to do in any real way with processes so . . . speedy, myriad, nervous, miraculous. But that parti-colored cloud of gas there, in that galaxy there so far away, that cloud there so hot and blistered by clustering stars, exhaling protean scads of infinitely irreducible fiery data in the form of energy pulses and streams of slicing, shearing, unseeable light — does that nebula know it nebulates? Most likely not. So my husband.

    87 words from an Act 1, Scene 1 monologue that extends through 21 pages and a full hour of the performance, a monologue that sifts through the 5000 year history of Afghanistan, drawing out the beauty and the barbarity of a nation whose troubles have so recently become enmeshed with our own. Homebody/Kabul began rehearsals at the New York Theatre Workshop in October, 2001. This fact has led so many critics to call the play “eerily prescient” that Kushner’s boyfriend has suggested that he adopt it as a drag persona: Ms. Eara Lee Prescient. It is odd to read the play now, knowing that Kushner’s obsession began years before the rest of us knew what a Taliban was or that such thing as a Northern Alliance even existed. Maybe “cared” is a better word than “knew” for that last sentence.

    Hopefully I’ll have a full response to Homebody/Kabul written some time before Thanksgiving. Anything to keep me from that prospectus.

  • Patrick Marber

    I spent last evening — which, like tonight, was cold and rainy — wrapped up on our living room love seat, reading two fantastic plays by a young British writer named Patrick Marber. My dissertation director recommended them after listening to me ramble on and on about how I was now utterly convinced that Angels in America is actually about grace, whatever that means.

    I began with Howard Katz (2001), the more recent work. It’s the story of a middle-aged talent agent whose life suddenly collapses around him. I’m tempted to describe it as “Death of a Salesman with a happy ending,” but that seems awfully glib. Like Angels, this play forces its characters and its audience to “wrestle with the Almighty” (still my favorite line from Perestroika), and I’m beginning to wonder if this spiritual (if not explicitly Christian) concern can be called a trend. Marber and Kushner are essentially of the same generation. Both should be deeply cynical and ironic, impervious to the barbs of genuine emotion and longing. But here they are, both of them longing for substance. Howard Katz ends with a moment of redemption that, to be honest, doesn’t read particularly well. Successfully staging the scene must require real care, or I imagine that it would slip quickly into melodrama. But the lines themselves are quite beautiful:

    To live.
    I want to live.
    Tell me how to live.

    With Closer (1997) I began to make sense of the frequent comparisons between Marber and Pinter, though the play that most often came to mind was actually Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Closer is likewise built from a cast of four characters, two men, two women, who torment one another with their particular brands of sadism. Like Albee’s masterpiece, Closer creates a brutal, palpable tension by forcing the audience to identify personally with these characters whose actions we often loathe. It’s quite a balancing act. Marber describes it:

    The idea was always to create something that has a formal beauty into which you could shove all this anger and fury. I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure — the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play — and inelegant emotion.

  • Angels in Phoenix

    I’ll eventually get around to writing (much) more about this, but I want to mention quickly that, while vacationing in Phoenix, Joanna and I had the chance to see Tony Kushner’s Angels in America at the Herberger Theater. After reading and rereading these plays over the last four years, after writing about them, after, in fact, creating a dissertation topic just as an excuse to spend more time with these characters and with Kushner’s language, I couldn’t believe my luck when I picked up a Sunday edition of the Arizona Republic and discovered that the Actors Theater was staging both parts on consecutive nights. It was awesome (and I really wish that the common use of that word hadn’t stripped it of its power). I was most looking forward to a scene in which the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg appears to help deliver the Kaddish to Roy Cohn. Like most scenes in these plays, its success depends on the actors and director striking a fine balance of tragedy and humor. I ended up in tears, stunned, once again, by a strange and extraordinary encounter with grace.

  • Life at War

    If there’s such thing as a truly legitimate call for the use of art as a practical means to change the world, then it will probably never find a more sure voice than Denise Levertov’s. In the final throes of preparing for my final comprehensive exam, I found this poem, which was included in her 1966 collection, The Sorrow Dance. I couldn’t imagine a better blog for today.

    “Life at War” by Denise Levertov, 1966

    The disasters numb within us
    caught in the chest, rolling
    in the brain like pebbles. The feeling
    resembles lumps of raw dough

    weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
    Or Rilke said it, ‘My heart. . .
    Could I say of it, it overflows
    with bitterness . . . but no, as though

    its contents were simply balled into
    formless lumps, thus
    do I carry it about.’
    The same war

    continues.
    We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,
    our lungs are pocked with it,
    the mucous membrane of our dreams
    coated with it, the imagination
    filmed over with the gray filth of it:

    the knowledge that humankind,

    delicate Man, whose flesh
    responds to a caress, whose eyes
    are flowers that perceive the stars,

    whose music excels the music of birds,
    whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
    whose understanding manifests designs
    fairer than the spider’s most intricate web,

    still turns without surprise, with mere regret
    to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk
    runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,
    transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,
    implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.

    We are the humans, men who can make;
    whose language imagines mercy,
    lovingkindness; we have believed one another
    mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—

    who do these acts, who convince ourselves
    it is necessary; these acts are done
    to our own flesh; burned human flesh
    is smelling in Viet Nam as I write.

    Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space
    in our bodies along with all we
    go on knowing of joy, of love;

    our nerve filaments twitch with its presence
    day and night,
    nothing we say has the not the husky phlegm of it in the saying,
    nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness,
    the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

  • The Culture of the Cold War (1991)

    By Stephen J. Whitfield

    As with Thomas Hill Schaub’s study of the era’s fiction, the “Cold War” in the title of Whitfield’s book is somewhat of a misnomer in that he has limited his focus to the period of unprecedented national consensus during the Truman, Eisenhower, and (to a lesser extent) Kennedy administrations. The Culture of the Cold War is divided into chapter-long studies of the major voices of popular culture, each of which, according to Whitfield, reflected and contributed to the polarity that characterized so much of the 1950s. By making case studies of such disparate public figures as Whittaker Chambers, Charlie Chaplin, Billy Graham, Lillian Hellman, and Mickey Spillane (among many, many others), Whitfield exposes the dominant ideologies that shaped the politics, the news media, literature, film, religion, consumer culture, and television of the day.

    Whitfield begins by cutting through the hyperbolic rhetoric that dominates so much writing about the Red Scare, calling the period not a “collective tragedy” but a “disgrace.” “Unable to strike directly at the Russians,” Whitfield writes, “the most vigilant patriots went after the scalps of their countrymen instead. Since Stalin and his successors were out of reach, making life difficult for Americans who admired them was more practical.” The McCarthy era witch hunts divided the country into two distinct parties: honest, patriotic, God-fearing Republicans and Communists, a category that included everyone who, for instance, fought for Civil Rights legislation or worried about American poverty or questioned our involvement in Southeast Asia or failed to attend Christian church services regularly. In fact, for a period of several years, Whitfield convincingly argues, anyone who voiced any doubt whatsoever about the perfection of American society was opening up him- or herself to charges of disloyalty, which could then lead to blacklisting, prison, or, in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, execution.

    The most lamentable product of the hysterical finger-pointing was the silencing of all progressive politics. Whitfield captures the moment with effective understatement: “Because an intense concern with unsolved social problems may have betrayed Soviet influence, policy options thinned.” The Kennedys make for an interesting study of how dominant the anti-Communist ideology had become. JFK, then a young Congressman from Massachusetts, voted with the majority against several key pieces of proposed social legislation, and RFK served alongside Roy Cohn as an influential aid to McCarthy. New Deal programs atrophied when they were loudly denounced as “pink” and when funding was funneled instead toward the building of the Military Industrial Complex and the securing of American financial interests worldwide. America quickly shifted its focus to production and consumption. Whitfield writes: “What the Department of Defense and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were supposed to protect was, above all, a lifestyle intimately associated with the blessings of prosperity. Above all the American experiment meant—at home and abroad-abundance, which was the finest measure of manifest destiny.”

    Typical of Whitfield’s book is the case study that closes it. In the final chapter, “Thawing: A Substitute for Victory,” Whitfield looks more closely at the early years of the 1960s, when cracks began to form in the American consensus. Stanley Kubrick’s films offer some timeline of that development: Paths of Glory (1957) was so strangely ambivalent about war that it was preceded by a disclaimer; Spartacus (1960) was based on a novel by Socialist Howard Fast and employed several blacklisted screenwriters, who were given on-screen credit for the first time in years; and Dr. Strangelove (1963) exposed the absurdity of Cold War policy by blending truth and satire in hilariously uncomfortable ways. Whitfield quotes Kubrick on the genesis of the film, which was originally intended to be a straight-forward adaptation of the novel, Red Alert: “ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous. I kept saying to myself: ‘I can’t do this. People will laugh.’ But after a month or so I began to realize that all the things I was throwing out were the things which were most truthful.” Whitfield pairs Kubrick with Joseph Heller, whose novel Catch-22 likewise took its form from the “disintegrated” days of Korea and the 1950s. Voices like Kubrick’s and Heller’s, Whitfield argues, helped to bring an end, finally, to the hypocrisy: “The culture of the Cold War,” he writes, “decomposed when the moral distinction between East and West lost a bit of its sharpness, when American self-righteousness could be more readily punctured, when the activities of the two superpowers assumed greater symmetry.”

  • American Pastoral (1997)

    By Philip Roth

    Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth’s alter-ego for nearly four decades now, is settling uncomfortably into old age. Now a literary recluse like E.I. Lonoff, the mentor of his youth in The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman has survived prostate cancer (though, given his notorious past, not without ironic complications), and, as the novel begins, has returned once more to his school days in Newark, New Jersey. The device here is a class reunion, a gathering of former athletes, beauties, and outsiders, transformed by time into uncanny snapshots of their own immigrant grandparents. Zuckerman is most surprised to find Jerry Levov there. Now a ruthless, four-times-married Miami surgeon, Jerry had once been important to Nathan only because of the access their friendship afforded him into the private world of Jerry’s older brother, Seymour “Swede” Levov, the finest athlete to ever walk the halls of Weequahic High and Nathan’s lifelong hero. From their brief conversation, Nathan learns that the Swede’s life was forever altered in 1968, when his teenage daughter, Merry, blew up the local post office, along with a local doctor, in protest of the Vietnam War. The rest of the story is left for Zuckerman’s telling.

    The form of American Pastoral is established in two early passages. After his encounter with Jerry, Zuckerman becomes obsessed with the Swede, locking himself away to restore life to his fallen idol. Typical of Roth, the moment is captured in mirror images: “Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day?” After pouring once more over the few “facts” at his disposal, Zuckerman/Roth retreats to fiction, adding, “anything more I wanted to know, I’d have to make up.” And he does just that. One-fifth of the way through the novel, Zuckerman disappears completely, surrendering his own voice to the Swede’s sorrowful lament.

    American Pastoral also finds its structural precedent in The Kid from Tomkinsville, a children’s book the young Nathan had once discovered on the Swede’s bookshelf. It tells the story of a baseball phenomenon whose life is marked equally by stunning success and heart-breaking tragedy. “I was ten and I had never read anything like it,” Nathan says. “The cruelty of life. The injustice of it.” It’s perhaps too literary—too easy—of a device for Roth, but the 400+ page story of the Swede’s fall follows a similar trajectory, as does, Roth implies, the story of America’s recent history. For the Swede is Roth’s finest personification of the post-war American Dream and all the complicated realities that frustrate it. “Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success. Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world.” The Swede’s longed-for American pastoral becomes its grotesque counterpart, “the indigenous American berserk.”

    What most fascinates me about this novel—along, of course, with Roth’s beautiful prose—is its inability, ultimately, to make any sense of the Swede’s tragedy. Those readers who turn to the final page, hoping to find resolution, answers, grace, will find, once again, only the question that haunts every preceding chapter: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” The Swede, though occasionally chastised for lacking requisite self-awareness, is a good man: hard-working, honorable, a loving father and husband, a good-hearted liberal opposed to Vietnam and actively involved in the fight for civil rights. And yet he is unable to escape the violence, the destruction of his family, the rape of his daughter—that rape that haunts him more than the deaths or the explosions or the decay. He is unable to escape the mysterious, inarticulate pain that has become his life. After a reunion with Merry, the Swede returns home to a dinner party, broken by the sight of his frail, filthy daughter, but unable to speak about it. “He was supposed to do this forever,” Roth writes. “However much he might crave to get out, he was to remain stopped dead in the moment in that box. Otherwise the world would explode.”

  • Black Water (1992)

    By Joyce Carol Oates

    On the opening page of Oates’s novella, Kelly Kelleher, an idealistic 26 year old woman, finds herself sitting beside a famous Senator, seat-belted into a car that is filling quickly with black water. “Am I going to die? — like this?” she asks. Kelly finds herself here after spending the day at a Fourth of July party on Greyling Island, just off the coast of Maine. The unnamed Senator is a friend of a friend, who surprises everyone by showing up at the party and by taking an instant interest in the beautiful Kelly, a Brown graduate too star-struck to admit to the Senator that he was the focus of her Senior Thesis, a paper titled, “Jeffersonian Idealism and ‘New Deal’ Pragmatism: Liberal Strategies in Crisis.” After spending much of the day flirting casually and exchanging a private kiss, the two set off in the Senator’s rented Toyota, bound for the privacy of his mainland hotel room. But then they find the water:

    The rented Toyota, driven with such impatient exuberance by The Senator, was speeding along the unpaved unnamed road, taking the turns in giddy skidding slides, and then, with no warning, somehow the car had gone off the road and had overturned in black rushing water, listing to its passenger’s side, rapidly sinking.

    Am I going to die? — like this?

    Any resemblance between this scene and the actual events of June 1969—when Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in the back seat of Ted Kenney’s car after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island—are, of course, completely intentional. However, while Oates demands that we return to that night in ’69 (and apparently she began taking notes for this novel when the news first broke), she refuses to treat it as an isolated historical event, that is, an occurrence of the past, over and done. Instead, she transposes the story to the early ’90s, making The Senator an amalgamation of Kennedy, Gary Hart, and any number of other prominent leaders who have abused their power for sexual gain.

    That so many of those prominent names belong to Democrats seems to be part of the tragedy at the heart of the novel. Like her heroine, Oates is concerned deeply with “Liberal Strategies in Crisis,” with a political and social present that is none the better for so much past promise. She views that past through a lens of ironic nostalgia (or nostalgic irony, I can’t decide): “Bobby Kennedy’s whirlwind campaign, heady nostalgic days of power, purpose, authority, hope, youth in the Democratic Party—when, disastrous as things were, in Vietnam, at home, you did not expect them to worsen.” But things have worsened. The fireworks displays of Kelly’s day are “lavish and explosive in brilliant Technicolor like the TV war in the Persian Gulf,” conservatism reigns victorious, and The Senator, a man whose “humanitarian ideals” were inspired by the same historical events that shaped Oates, has surrendered to the dominant force in American politics: “compromise.”

    But Black Water is first and foremost a novel about Kelly Kelleher and, by analogy, all other women who have been abused, exploited, and discarded by the powerful and by the media that report it. Black Water is so effective (and affecting) because Oates siphons every word of it through the fading consciousness of a dying woman, restoring life and value where both have been too easily forgotten. The last chapters, in particular, when Kelly fights for breath in the small air pocket that remains, when she realizes that The Senator has used her body as leverage so that he might swim to safety, when she clings to the hope that he will return for her, and when she listens helplessly to the short choppy waves “against the slanted roof of this room-snug and safe beneath the covers, Grandma’s crocheted quilt with the pandas around the border,” these last chapters force us to be rightly reoriented from the political to the personal. It’s an important move and an impressive feat from Oates and this stunning short novel.

  • American Fiction in the Cold War

    By Thomas Hill Schaub

    A more appropriate title for Schaub’s study might be The Liberal Narrative in American Fiction of the 1950s. He focuses the majority of his attention on the early post-war years, turning to the New York Intellectuals—Howe, Trilling, and Schlesinger, in particular—for his diagnosis of the crisis at the heart of the American Left at the start of the Cold War. Quoting heavily from C. Wright Mills’s 1952 essay, “Liberal Values in the Modern World,” Schaub writes: “any ‘democratic or liberal-even humanist-ideals . . . are in fact statements of hope or demands or preferences of an intellectual elite psychologically capable of individually fulfilling them, but they are projected for a population which in the twentieth century is not at present capable of fulfilling them.’ The new kinds of social and political organization which have arisen have left liberal values without any footing: ‘the ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization’” (19).

    Schaub argues that American writers of the New Left responded to this crisis—precipitated largely by the revelation of Stalin’s savagery—by returning to a brand of realism better suited to balance their well-intentioned but ultimately naïve faith in the perfectibility of American society with the hard facts of humanity’s obvious failings. Schaub labels this style of writing the “liberal narrative.” Lionel Trilling describes it as such: “Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the free play of the moral imagination” (22). As an example, Schaub often turns to Richard Chase’s 1949 study of Melville, an author who “presents his reader with a vision of life so complexly true that it exposes the ideas of Henry Wallace as hopelessly childish and superficial” (23).

    Facing for the first time in human history the very real possibility of apocalypse, artists shunned the formal sterility of Henry James and turned inward, exposing the problems of consensus culture by examining those most alienated from it. It’s no coincidence, Schaub notes, that much of the best writing of the era was written by African-Americans, Jews, and women. In chapter 4, “The Unhappy Consciousness,” he argues that the “new liberalism” manifested itself in a shift to first person narration: “often autobiographical, a point of view which embodied in one degree or another the isolation of the speaker, while at the same time issuing from the unimpeachable authority of his consciousness and perception” (68). Schaub describes this new narrative as one based on psychology, a narrative voice barely distinguishable from the author’s own mind. Norman Mailer’s first novel, for instance, begins with “an omniscient confidence, . . . but Barbary Shore begins much more uncertainly and has already acquired the characteristic first person, often disturbed voice of the fifties” (72). The Beats likewise turned to technique as a means of exposing the “phoniness” (to borrow a term from another novel of the day, The Catcher in the Rye) that characterized so much of “mass culture.”

    After setting up his argument, Schaub turns his attention to chapter-long studies of four representative “liberal narratives”: Ellison’s Invisible Man, O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, Mailer’s The White Negro, and Barth’s The End of the Road.

  • The Public Burning (1976)

    By Robert Coover

    In the opening pages of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, the narrator, Vice President Richard Nixon, insecure about his notoriously sinister jowls, thinks to himself, “isn’t that a hell of a thing—that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles?” Set during the days immediately preceding the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Coover’s satire explodes the absurd ties that bind infotainment to politics, words to history, and images to morality. Nixon makes a suitable and surprisingly sympathetic anti-hero, then, for he was perhaps America’s first politician to be publicly made, broken, reborn, then destroyed, each act broadcast live on television. Coover assumes our familiarity with those images and puts them to effective use, deliberately sounding echoes of Nixon’s “I am not a crook” Watergate days while revisiting the glorious victory of his “Checkers” speech. Nixon is simultaneously the candidate on stage, sweat-soaked and scruffy beside Kennedy’s sheen, and the President-elect with arms raised, victorious, finally, in ’68.

    “In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind the moralities—why did I keep forgetting that?” The fictional Nixon’s question is at the heart of Coover’s satire, and the heydays of the McCarthy Era give him ample fodder. It’s as if Coover is attempting to embody all of the complicated contradictions of the ’50s in a single novel, often to hilarious affect. Betty Crocker comes to life as the personification of idealized Eisenhower-era domesticity. Hollywood horror creatures walk the streets in 3D Technicolor, living projections of xenophobic hysteria. Walt Disney and Cecille B. DeMille elbow each other aside in their fight for marketing rights to the execution. Eisenhower morphs into Gary Cooper, strutting toward a potentially apocalyptic showdown at High Noon while uttering the lyric verse of Time Magazine (the nation’s Poet Laureate). And, most prominently, the irrational demands of the American populace become a walking, talking, cursing, spitting caricature in the person of Uncle Sam, who wants only to defeat his nebulous arch-villain, The Phantom, an enemy that most closely resembles communism, but is actually anything that might be labeled “un-American,” a loaded term, no doubt, in the early-’50s.

    Knowing something of The Public Burning‘s infamous reputation, I picked it up expecting to read a didactic denouncement of conservative hate-mongering built upon an equally didactic eulogy to the Rosenbergs, those most tragic and useable icons of the Old Left. What I got, instead, was something much more ambivalent and cynical: a satire with targets across the political spectrum. In an onanistic fantasy that would make Portnoy blush, Nixon attacks Ethel’s naïve devotion to an irrelevant idealism, voicing the questions that all on the Left have struggled to answer in post-WWII America: “What about Stalin’s purges? The death camps in Siberia? The massacres in Poland? What about Rudolph Slansky just last fall in Prague? Eh?” Her response is typical of the impotent liberalism that has characterized so much of the New Left. Coover captures this beautifully in an image of Julius and Ethel exchanging letters of praise for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that they root for despite their complete ignorance of baseball. Edith writes: “It is chiefly in their outstanding contribution to eradication of racial prejudice that they have covered themselves with glory.”

    The warden at Sing-Sing offers an interesting insight into the Rosenbergs: “the problem has been their habit of behaving in what they probably think of as, well, symbolic ways—you know, acting like they’re establishing historical models or precedents or something.” There’s a strange irony to the line, given its context within a novel that, even in its title, treats their execution as a sacrificial rite. As with much postmodern fiction of the ’70s, that irony is often so thick here that it becomes difficult to find a foundation. Are the Rosenbergs heroic martyrs or treasonous dupes? Both, Coover seems to say, and neither. Left and Right, right and wrong all collapse into an absurd political/social/moral quagmire that is put on ridiculous display in the novel’s final pages. At the site of the execution—fantastically transposed from Sing Sing to the middle of Times Square—Nixon appears with his pants around his ankles, fully erect, then brings the crowd to a riotous frenzy as history dissolves around them. Abolitionists, comanches, and redcoats stand shoulder to shoulder with the members of the Supreme Court, who roll around in the piles of shit left there by the Republican elephant. Uncle Sam appears in a flash of light, then bends Nixon over, sodomizing him. “You’re not the same as when I was a boy,” is all the Vice President can muster in reply. It ain’t a pretty scene, but neither is America, Coover screams.

  • Benito Cereno (1855)

    Benito Cereno (1855)

    By Herman Melville

    Note: The following was written for a graduate seminar on the American Renaissance. It is an attempt to apply theories of cinema narrative to prose fiction.

    “That First Comprehensive Glance”: The Cinematic Suspense of Benito Cereno

    But that first comprehensive glance . . . rested but an instant upon them.
    — from Benito Cereno

    Once the body had been rendered immobile and attention had become focused upon the face or gaze, the law, desire and perversion made their way into the cinema.
    — Pascal Bonitzer (18)

    Abstract

    With the impressive body of literary scholarship generated by Formalist analysis and modern narratological studies at our disposal, the idea of applying film narrative theory to literature — particularly to a story like “Benito Cereno,” written forty years before Thomas Edison first screened moving pictures for an American audience — might seem unfounded at best. The influence of the cinema on artists of the twentieth century has been obvious and well-documented, but, as Mike Frank has recently asked, “What might narratology look like if we were to take cinema — particularly ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ — as the paradigmatic instance of storytelling?” [1] In the strange, and often contentious, case of “Benito Cereno,” film theory offers, I will argue, the ideal framework and vocabulary for explaining exactly how Melville’s narrative functions. Mine is only the latest in the long line of such inquiries, but it will reveal that — as has often been the case for readers trapped in “Benito Cereno”‘s world — previous scholars, hoping for answers, have been forced to look in the wrong direction.

    Survey of Scholarship

    In September 1856, a reviewer for Knickerbocker described “Benito Cereno” as “painfully interesting,” concluding: “in reading it we became nervously anxious for the solution of the mystery it involves.” This sentiment is echoed by many of Melville’s contemporary reviewers, who frequently characterize The Piazza Tales as an enjoyable read and as a welcomed return to form after the “unfortunate” and “morbid” appearance of Pierre. [2] The appeal of “Benito Cereno” can be attributed largely to its much-discussed narrative structure, one that implicates the reader in its mysteries, forcing a suspense-filled and continuous process of mis- and re-interpretation. The form of “Benito Cereno” is, in fact, uniquely and inextricably bound to its content. In a story about ambiguously shifting perceptions, the manner by which we view the action is as significant as the action itself. Critics, both formalists and nonformalists alike, have been universally intrigued by Melville’s precise manipulation of point of view, an interest piqued, no doubt, by the obvious fallibility of its “center of perception,” Amaso Delano, and by the text’s unusual moments of objective narration (Seelye 104). While much of “Benito Cereno” is viewed only as it is reflected through the unreliable and subjective gaze of the American captain, an objective narrator does occasionally intrude upon the narrative, revealing its self-reflexive frame: we are told that the text we are reading is, in fact, some unknown third party’s written narrative and that the events depicted within have been confused by memory, told “retrospectively,” and “irregularly given” (255). That “Benito Cereno” ends with an elided legal transcript — which ostensibly, at least, is intended to reveal the “whole truth” — has been of little comfort to those attempting to systematize Melville’s narrative strategy.

    Melville challenges astute readers of “Benito Cereno” to question the reliability of its sources from the opening paragraphs. In what is perhaps the story’s most often-cited passage, Captain Delano is described as:

    a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine. (162)

    In the century and a half that have passed since the original publication of “Benito Cereno,” “the wise” have consistently judged Delano’s quickness and perception to be far less than ordinary. While some consensus has been reached concerning Delano’s role in Melville’s narrative structure — he is generally described as an “unreliable narrator” whose misperceptions drip with irony — critics have struggled to develop a vocabulary capable of explaining exactly how Delano’s point of view interacts with other narrative voices in the story.

    In one of the earliest formalist readings of “Benito Cereno,” “The Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville” (1953), Charles Hoffman accounts for only two of the story’s narrative voices: Delano’s subjective point of view and the objective trial deposition that follows. Hoffman praises the former in Aristotelian terms, claiming, “for dramatic intensity, concentrated action, and structural unity, no better choice could have been made” (426). Delano serves, for Hoffman, as the reader’s surrogate, the “innocent eye” who must make sense of the ambiguous impressions made upon him. This reading echoes through much of the scholarship that has followed. [3]Interestingly, Hoffman describes Delano as “brave and resourceful,” a misinterpretation symptomatic of a highly problematic article. Along with his failure to mention the story’s other narrative voice(s) in any terms, Hoffman skims too quickly over the deposition, calling it a simple rehash of the actual Delano’s original document, an attempt to “gain in verisimilitude,” and an aesthetic failure. “Melville,” he writes, “did not choose or else did not know how to make use of Delano’s point of view as an observer to reveal enough of the mystery so that he might dispense with the cumbersome method of the document” (428).

    Guy Cardwell rejects Hoffman’s overly-simplified reading, claiming that “Benito Cereno” is, ultimately, morally ambiguous, and that the complexity of Melville’s narrative is central to that ambiguity. In “Melville’s Gray Story” (1959), Cardwell criticizes those who have reduced “Benito Cereno” to the level of simple detective story, as if it were “a kind of television melodrama that divides its characters into unequivocally good guys and bad guys” (165). Instead, he sees the world of “Benito Cereno” as one where “optimism and despair are mixed in normal proportions” (164). Cardwell claims that Melville helps us toward this interpretation by “going behind” his characters on two (and only two) specific occasions: the first in the oft-cited description of Delano quoted above; the second just prior to the shaving scene, when Cereno’s assumed affection for Babo is compared to that of Johnson and Byron for their servants. While strangely focused on only two scenes, Cardwell’s discussion is the first to seriously consider a third narrative voice in the story. The consequence, he argues, is the temporary transport of the reader outside of the story, a jarring moment that forces the reader through irony to confront the moral implications of the events he or she is witnessing. “Captain Delano, then,” Cardwell writes, “is not simply the obtuse observer, a detective-story character who watches the plot unfold. He is in a serious sense the perceiving center, . . . With Delano as our guide we see that the world is not neatly dichotomized, does not fall neatly into a simple Manichean dualism” (164). For Cardwell, the deposition serves a similar purpose, pulling us out of a suspense-filled mystery and grounding us in the “real world,” where slavery, xenophobia, and economics are moral issues too complex to be described in black and white terms.

    Cardwell’s differentiation between Delano, as the “perceiving center,” and a separate narrative voice that is able to “go behind” characters is further developed by John Douglas Seelye in Melville: The Ironic Diagram (1970). Echoing earlier scholars, Seelye calls Delano “well-meaning but obtuse,” but then shifts his focus to the narrative voice who is actually directing our reading (104) [4]. “As in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener,’” Seelye writes:

    the center of perception is inadequate, a seafaring version of the lawyer, but here detached from point of view by a delicate operation that allows a third “person” to interpose his wry perspective, shaping Delano’s simple optimism into a vehicle of facetiousness. We see things through the American’s eyes, but as through spectacles whose rose tints seem somehow discomforting. (104)

    By attributing human characteristics to this “third person” — he is “wry” and able to “shape” our understanding of events — Seelye raises an important question: if the “third person” is deliberately manipulating our perception, then what is his motivation for doing so? [5]

    In Melville’s Short Fiction: 1853-1856 (1977), William B. Dillingham ascribes similar agency to Seelye’s “third person.” Dillingham intends to correct the “common misconception” that “Benito Cereno” is told from only two narrative perspectives, and does so by identifying four distinct voices, which he labels the official, the individual, the authorial, and the reportorial (243). The “official” voice is that of the deposition section, which serves as the “legal stamp” that officially settles the affair. However, like Cardwell, Dillingham identifies Melville’s rhetorical use of irony here, claiming that he “transforms the deposition [into] . . . a commentary on the vanity and foolishness of ordinary mankind who cannot see or will not see the sameness of all”(244). The “individual” voice is Delano’s, distinguished from the others by its literalness and by its simplistic figures of speech. According to Dillingham, because Delano is blunt-thinking and incapable of irony, his perception is likewise limited, provoking juvenile similes like his description of the negresses as “unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as doves” (198). Dillingham’s is a subtle, but important, distinction, as it necessarily attributes all of “Benito Cereno”‘s complex metaphoric language to the “authorial” voice. “Its style,” Dillingham writes, “is a metaphor for its message. . . . Melville depicts what Delano sees, but the terms of that depiction, that is, the figures of speech that make the correspondences necessary for the idea of similitude, are usually not Delano’s” (244-45). Instead, the story’s trademark irony — which deliberately targets Delano and, therefore, could not represent his own point of view — is clearly “authorial.” Finally, Dillingham identifies a fourth narrative voice, the “reportorial,” which is distinguished from the “authorial” by its neutral tone and informational function. Dillingham cites the story’s opening paragraph as an example of the “reportorial” voice: “It embodies no worldview or any character’s viewpoint. It furnishes facts and is nonevaluative” (243). Dillingham’s struggle to find (or, in fact, to create) a vocabulary for explaining Melville’s narrative strategy is obviously by no means unique. It is also far from effective, leading him to unnecessarily divide one voice — the narrator’s — into two, the “authorial” and “reportorial.”

    A New Vocabulary

    In my summary of existing scholarship I have intentionally remained faithful to the original authors’ language, a decision that has left this paper littered with sixteen different terms all used to describe the same thing. [6] I would like now to propose a terminology that will hopefully provide both a much-needed clarity and consistency and a better-suited entrance into film narrative theory. In forming this vocabulary I have relied heavily upon Seymour Chatman’s Coming to Terms, a book that builds upon Wayne Booth’s and David Bordwell’s work by examining side-by-side the rhetoric of narrative in fiction and film.

    Chatman would simply use the term narrator to describe Cardwell’s “voice that goes behind,” Seelye’s “third person,” and Dillingham’s “authorial” and “reportorial” voices. For Chatman, the most important distinction is between those within and those outside of the story world, those able to see the action and those able only to narrate it. “The narrator’s task,” Chatman writes, “is not to go strolling with the characters but to narrate what happens to them, whether by telling or showing” (120). Therefore, the narrator of “Benito Cereno” is that unidentified person who has constructed the tale from outside of the story world, who comments ironically on Delano’s “undistrustful good nature,” and who admittedly elides the deposition.

    Because of his distinction between the characters within the story world and the narrator who “tells” or “shows” them, Chatman finds fault with the overused term “point of view.” The very term implies seeing, an act from which the narrator is necessarily excluded because of his/her/its location outside of the story. Instead, Chatman proposes a terminological distinction between the narrator’s and a character’s “points of view.” Slant, for Chatman, captures the “psychological, sociological, and ideological ramifications of the narrator’s attitudes, which may range from neutral to highly charged” (143). Much recent study of “Benito Cereno,” then, has been concerned with uncovering those ramifications as they are revealed by the narrator’s slant. Why, for instance, does the narrator elide the deposition, thereby further silencing Babo? To describe a character’s “point of view,” Chatman settles on filter, a term that captures:

    something of the mediating function of a character’s consciousness-perception, cognition, emotion, reverie-as events are experienced from a space within the story world. . . . [Slant] catches the nuance of the choice made by the implied author about which among the character’s imaginable experiences would best enhance the narration-which areas of the story world the implied author wants to illuminate and which to keep obscure. (144)

    Filter seems a particularly appropriate term for describing Delano’s role in the narrative, as much of the story’s action is “filtered” through the lens of his gaze for obvious dramatic and ironic effect. This metaphor will be examined more closely in the final section of the paper.

    Finally, Chatman makes a useful distinction between the unreliable narrator — a term that for decades has been used interchangeably to describe the problematic “points of view” of both the narrator and characters — and the fallible filter, Chatman’s own term for “a character’s perceptions and conceptions of the story events, the traits of the other characters, and so on.” Unreliable narrator, then, is used only to describe those instances when the narration itself is problematic, “since the word presupposes that there somewhere exists a ‘reliable’ account” (149). Whereas fallible filter describes a character’s “inaccurate, misled, or self-serving perception” (150). For Chatman, “fallible” is a term preferable to “unreliable” because it attributes less culpability to the characters. Captain Delano, after all, does not ask to be a “perceiving center.” He is merely living the story, not representing it.

    Film Narrative and Cinematic Suspense

    The distinctions made above, though subtle, are absolutely vital for explaining the workings of “Benito Cereno,” a story that relies not only on a famously fallible filter, but also on a deceptively unreliable narrator. Simply fixing a single terminology and doing nothing more, however, does little but provide some much-needed clarity and consistency to the discussion (or add more unnecessary jargon to the pile, depending on your opinion). The real value of Chatman’s work (and hopefully, by association, this paper) can be found, instead, in its analysis of the interrelations that exist between fiction and film narrative. In the case of “Benito Cereno,” it is Chatman’s discussion of the latter that, in fact, best explains Melville’s strategy.

    In the early chapters of Coming to Terms, Chatman differentiates between Narrative, Argument, and Description, examining closely how each interacts with the other. To Chatman, Description is the most interesting of the “other text-types” because of the complexity of its relation to Narrative. As Gérard Genette writes, “description might be conceived independently of narration, but in fact it is never found in a so to speak free state. . . . Description is quite naturally ancilla narrationis, the ever-necessary, ever-submissive, never-emancipated slave” (qtd. in Chatman 18). In classical Hollywood cinema, Description and Narrative interact in a different, though no less complex manner. [7] To aid in the discussion, Chatman differentiates between explicit and tacit Description, and offers a scene from Touch of Evil as an example. Detective Quinlan’s first appearance has been described in the published cutting continuity as:

    Very low angle M[edium]S[hot] of Quinlan slowly thrusting open the car door: a grossly corpulent figure in an overcoat, a huge cigar in the middle of his puffy face. (qtd. in Chatman 43)

    Here, in this prose description, the compound adjective “grossly corpulent” explicitly describes Quinlan, fixing a particular trait on him. As readers, we are left with little choice but to imagine him as explicitly “corpulent,” as opposed to “obese,” “heavy,” or only “slightly overweight.” In Touch of Evil, however, Quinlan is described tacitly: we see him thrust open the car door, but our focus is directed toward his actions, rather than his appearance. As Chatman writes, “The film shows only features; it is up to the audience to interpret them — that is, to assign them adjectival names” (43). To Chatman, the cinematic description could only be called explicit if Welles then cut to an extreme close-up of the folds of fat in Quinlan’s face. Even then, though, each viewer would still decide on his or her own if Quinlan were “grossly corpulent” or merely stout. The result, then, is an unavoidable ambiguity in cinematic Description. “Only words,” Chatman writes, “can fix descriptions conclusively” (44).

    That last statement, however, is repeatedly called into question by “Benito Cereno,” a story that consistently frustrates readers by its absolute refusal — excepting a few notable instances — to fix descriptions conclusively. Seelye was one of the first, for instance, to notice how precisely Melville uses diction to obscure description, pointing to the 115 conjectural expressions — ambivalent uses of words like seem, appear, perhaps, possibly, evidently, might, presume, conjecture, imputed, and thought — that appear in the story’s 97 pages. [8] “These phrases, instruments of style,” writes Seelye, “reflect the lamination of false appearances and unanswerable paradoxes that confound perception and inquiry, a fiction in which things are never as the ‘seem’” (105). A similar observation is made by Nancy Roundy in “Present Shadows: Epistemology in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno.’” Roundy notes how the world of “Benito Cereno” becomes blurred by the story’s abundant use of metaphoric language. “A metaphor does not assert that something is,” she writes, “but only that it is like some other thing. Sharp boundaries, certainties, disappear and we are in a world of appearances” (347).

    Another method used by Melville to avoid fixing descriptions conclusively is the double negative, a sentence construction that describes what something is not, thereby forcing the reader to assign his or her own unique adjectival name to that thing that is being described. Examples of this practice occur with astounding regularity throughout the first two-thirds of the story, most notably in the narrator’s description of Delano’s “undistrustful good nature, [he was] not liable . . . to indulge in personal alarms.” But a particularly impressive display of double negatives describes (or, does not describe) Delano’s first impressions of Benito Cereno and Babo:

    But the good conduct of Babo, hardly more than the ill-behaviour of others, seemed to withdraw the half-lunatic Don Benito from his cloudy languor. Not that such precisely was the impression made by the Spaniard on the mind of his visitor. The Spaniard’s individual unrest was, for the present, but noted as a conspicuous feature in the ship’s general affliction. Still, Captain Delano was not a little concerned at what he could not help taking for the time to be Don Benito’s unfriendly indifference toward himself. The Spaniard’s manner, too, conveyed a sort of sour and gloomy disdain, which he seemed at no pains to disguise [my italics]. (169-70)

    That second sentence, in particular, deliberately resists fixing an explicit description on the scene, showing us only the precise impression that was not made on our filter. From the opening of “Benito Cereno” until the point when the scales drop from Delano’s eyes, the word “not” is used more than 170 times. In nearly half of those instances, it is used in a double-negative construction, such as, “not unlike,” “not unwilling,” or “not uncharacteristic.” [9]

    The cumulative effect of Melville”s diction is, as Roundy says, the creation of a “world of appearances.” But it’s a world where even appearance is blurred, a world almost completely devoid of explicit description. Chatman’s discussion of film description again offers an appropriate analogy: as with the diction of “Benito Cereno,” “Film gives us plenitude without specificity. Its descriptive offerings are at once visually rich and verbally impoverished” (39). Like film viewers forced to ascribe particular adjectival descriptions to Detective Quinlan, readers of “Benito Cereno” must actively create its story world with only confounding images as cues.

    But “Benito Cereno” is not completely free of explicit description. Several scholars have pointed to the story’s opening paragraphs as the work of an omniscient narrator who grounds the reader in a world of fact. [10] The narrator returns occasionally to this non-evaluative, non-ironic tone, notably in his description of the cuddy in the opening paragraphs of the shaving scene, and in those moments when we are shown things — such as the two black men who stare intently at Delano — that are “unperceived by the American” (224). There are countless examples of an equivalent narrative voice in film. The opening establishing shots of several Hitchcock films — Rear Window and Psycho, in particular — are frequently cited by narratologists, including Chatman. Rear Window, for instance, opens with a shot of window blinds being raised, followed by several complex extreme long shots, as the camera moves through the window and “randomly” examines the daily activities of the neighborhood. As Chatman notes, were the film to continue in this manner, it might be mistaken for a documentary on city life (46). We as viewers accept this nonhuman agent, this camera, and trust it in much the same way that we trust the narrator of “Benito Cereno.” Just as we believe that Rear Window begins on a hot (94 degrees according to a close-up of a thermometer) morning (we see the composer shaving, the childless couple waking to the sound of an alarm clock), we trust that “Benito Cereno” begins in 1799 and that Delano is from Duxbury, Massachusetts.

    But while many have examined the slant of “Benito Cereno”‘s narrator, few have questioned his reliability much beyond brief mentions of his “retrospective” and “irregularly given” narrating of the story. However, in one passage that has been conspicuously overlooked by previous scholars, the narrator, making manipulative use of his established credibility, deliberately deceives us. In the opening pages of “Benito Cereno,” Delano stands with Cereno and Babo, listening to the Spanish captain tell of his harrowing voyage. Overcome by coughing fits, Cereno has difficulty recounting his tale. Finally, the narrator steps in: “as this portion of the story was very brokenly delivered, the substance only will here be set down” (174). What follows is a long (321 words) paragraph written in the objective, nonironic style of the story’s opening paragraphs. While the passage is clearly marked as Cereno’s telling, the effect of the shift in diction and tone is unmistakable. Already immersed in a world of shifting visions and “modified” appearances, readers cling for stability to the explicit descriptions of the trusted narrator.

    At the time of the publication of Coming to Terms, Chatman had only one famous example with which to illustrate unreliable narration in film. [11] It serves, however, as a helpful analogy to the deceptive shift of tone in “Benito Cereno.” Stage Fright (1950) is another of Hitchcock’s experiments with suspense and cinematic narrative, a film in which the supposedly objective camera serves complicity in the crime. Stage Fright opens as Johnny and Eve speed to Eve’s father’s house. Johnny is telling Eve of his discovery of a murder committed by his lover, Charlotte. “I had to help her,” Johnny says. “Anybody would.” As he begins narrating his story to Eve, the frame dissolves into a “lying flashback,” in which we are shown Johnny’s version of what “really” happened. It is only later, when we learn of his criminal tendencies, that we begin to doubt Johnny’s story. What makes Stage Fright unique is that for the first half of the film, we are given absolutely no reason to question the validity of what the narrator is showing us. As film-goers, we have learned to accept the camera’s rendering of the world as truth, as if it were a binding contract. However, as in “Benito Cereno,” the narrator of Stage Fright has deliberately broken that contract, manipulating our trust for dramatic effect. Again, Chatman’s insights into film are suitably applicable to “Benito Cereno”: when the story’s narrator takes over from Cereno in the telling of his tale, “seeing is precisely not believing” (131).

    In “Benito Cereno,” however, it is not only the narrator who misleads us, a fact that has hardly gone unnoticed. Delano’s fallibility as a filter, as I’ve already shown, is the focus of many of the early analyses of the story. But the existing literature does little more than name Delano’s “unreliability” as such. It is in explaining Melville’s use of perceptual subjectivity that film theory offers its most useful insight into “Benito Cereno.” For while the filter in film still emerges from the perceptual consciousness of a character (as in prose), it does so using different methods, most notably the eyeline match and close-up. Rear Window again serves as a classic (and well-worn) example. After surveying the courtyard outside of the window, the camera then tracks back, revealing the film’s protagonist, Jimmy Stewart’s L. B. Jeffries. He is, we assume, asleep: he is lying, with eyes closed, in a wheelchair, one leg elevated in a hard cast. Hitchcock then elides time by fading-in to a medium shot of Jeffries, who is now sitting up and reaching to answer a telephone. As he speaks to a friend, Jeffries lifts his gaze from the phone to something out of frame, presumably to something behind the camera. Hitchcock then cuts, in an eyeline match, to the familiar long shot of the courtyard. [12] Now, however, it is Jeffries’s view of his neighbors that we see. Now, it is Jeffries who is watching Miss Torso stretch and the sun-bathers disrobe, not the objective narrator.

    The impact of the eyeline match has been of interest to filmmakers and film theorists since D. W. Griffith first began to experiment with the use of close-ups in his early shorts. Soviet filmmakers of the late-1910s pushed the technique even further in their explorations of the emotional impact of montage. Hitchcock, in an interview with Francois Truffaut, described the most famous of the Soviet experiments— that conducted by Kuleshov — and its impact on his own filmmaking:

    You see a close-up of the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine. This is followed immediately by a shot of a dead baby. Back to Mosjoukine again and you read compassion on his face. Then you take away the dead baby and you show a plate of soup, and now, when you go back to Mosjoukine, he looks hungry. Yet, in both cases, they used the same shot of the actor; his face was exactly the same.

    In the same way, let’s take a close-up of Stewart looking out of the window at a little dog that’s being lowered in a basket. Back to Stewart, who has a kindly smile. But in the place of the little dog you show a half-naked girl exercising in front of her open window, and you go back to a smiling Stewart again, this time he’s seen as a dirty old man! (215-16)

    This concept, long accepted in film theory, seems equally applicable to fiction, assuming that the text resists fixing conclusive descriptions. The above example would obviously fail if it were transcribed as, “Stewart looks at the half-naked girl with complete indifference.” But “Benito Cereno,” as I’ve already shown, does resist explicit description, and operates in a manner remarkably similar to a classical Hollywood suspense film. In “Hitchcockian Suspense,” Pascal Bonitzer writes, “The weight of death, murder and crime have meaning only though the proximity of a gaze. All Hitchcock has done in his films is to make the best possible use, where staging is concerned, of the function of the gaze laid bare by crime” (18). Just as Hitchcock filters our experience of Rear Window through Jeffries’s neutral gaze, so does Melville through Delano’s in “Benito Cereno.”

    Again, the opening pages of the story are a fitting example. After the narrator establishes several facts in the first three paragraphs, the narration shifts to Delano’s filter with the first sentence of the fourth paragraph: “To Captain Delano’s surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colors [my italics]” (161). While the similarities between Delano’s “glass” and Jeffries’s binoculars and telephoto lens are interesting to mention in passing, the significance of the sentence lies in the verb, viewed. Melville’s method for establishing and maintaining his filter is atypical. He does not simply change the tone or syntax of the narration as Joyce does in Dubliners, nor does he create a stream-of-consciousness like Woolf or Faulkner. Instead, he quite cinematically “cuts” between close-ups of Delano’s frustratingly neutral face and the mysterious images that bombard him.

    There is an almost limitless supply of examples with which to illustrate this point. Upon first seeing Cereno’s ship: “Captain Delano continued to watch her — a proceeding not much facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, . . . It might have been but a deception of the vapors, but, the longer the stranger was watched the more singular appeared her manoeuvres [sic]” (162). Later, after being startled by something moving in the chains: “He rubbed his eyes, and looked hard” (200). Then, when he has become convinced of Cereno’s guilt: “Captain Delano glanced towards Don Benito. As he saw his meagre [sic] form in the act of recovering itself from reclining in the servant’s arms, . . . he could not but marvel at the panic by which himself had been surprised” (207).

    It is in the shaving scene, though, that Melville’s cinematic narrative is best illustrated. The cuddy is first glimpsed through the nonironic, nonevaluative lens of the narrator. The diction is simple and relatively free from metaphoric language. “The floor of the cuddy was matted,” the narrator informs us. “Overhead, four or five old muskets were stuck into horizontal holes along the beams. On one side was a claw-footed old table lashed to the deck” (211). The description here is explicit: there are no conjectural expressions; seems and appears are replaced with was and were. The narrator simply shows us the room, “randomly” describing the setting like Hitchcock’s camera randomly describes a New York neighborhood.

    In the first four paragraphs of the shaving scene, only once does the narrator’s tone shift. Two settees are described as “black with age, and uncomfortable to look at as inquisitors’ racks, with a large, misshapen arm-chair, which, furnished with a rude barber’s crotch at the back, working with a screw, seemed some grotesque engine of torment” (211). This isolated sentence draws our attention both by the menacing nature of the similes employed and by the return of conjectural verbs. Again, this shift can be explained in cinematic terms. Bonitzer borrows Gilles Deleuze’s term stain to describe the inexplicable element which creates disorder in an otherwise orderly, natural world. “Hitchcockian narrative,” Bonitzer writes:

    obeys the law that the more a situation is somewhat a priori, familiar, or conventional, the more it is liable to become disturbing or uncanny, once one of its constituent elements begins to “turn against the wind”. . . . The staging and editing of the suspense serve to draw the audience’s attention to the perverse element. The film’s movement invariably proceeds from landscape to stain, from overall shot to close-up, and this movement invariably prepares the spectator for the event. (23)

    And this is, in fact, exactly how the shaving scene operates. After describing the relatively natural furnishings of the cuddy (his familiarity with rooms like it put Delano “at ease”), the narrator draws our attention to the stain — the torturous-looking settees that will soon feature prominently in the story’s most suspense-filled scene. After moving from landscape to stain, the narrator then cuts to a close-up of Delano, reestablishing his fallible filter: “Glancing towards the hammock as he entered, . . .” (211). The remainder of the scene, including the racist meditation on slavery and the terrifying shaving itself, is filtered through the “familiarly and humorously” benign nature of the American (213). Thus, as in Hitchcock’s films, suspense is achieved in “Benito Cereno” through editing and staging, a process that is “sustained by the gaze, itself evoked by a third element, a perverse object or stain” (Bonitzer 28).

    The penultimate instance of an eyeline match occurs at the emotional climax of “Benito Cereno,” when Delano finally realizes the tragic truth of the episode: “Captain Delano, now with scales dropped from his eyes, saw the negroes, not in misrule, not in tumult, not as if frantically concerned for Don Benito, but with mask torn away, flourishing hatchets and knives, in ferocious piratical revolt” (233). Until this point (only 72 pages), verbs synonymous with “to see” are used an astounding 244 times. [13] As Rohrberger has noted, Delano’s filter is necessary in order to fully involve the reader in the mystery of the story, but is quickly discarded once that mystery has been revealed. In the remainder of “Benito Cereno,” see verbs are used only four times: “there is no equivocation, no use of suggestive metaphor. Gone are the shadows and the vapors and the air of unreality” (545). Instead, the narrator’s objective slant returns to narrate the final events aboard the ships, to introduce and present the deposition, and to recount the final conversation between Delano and Cereno. [14]

    In the final two paragraphs of “Benito Cereno,” Melville cuts, for the first time, to close-ups of Cereno and Babo. In the former case, he deliberately avoids establishing the character as a filter. We are given one final shot of Cereno, but refused entrance into his subjectivity. Cereno steadfastly refuses to “look” at Babo, even fainting when pressed by the judges to do so. However, the final “gaze” we appropriate is that of Babo’s decapitated head, “that hive of subtlety” (258). That “subtlety” is mirrored in the diction of the 84-word final sentence. Although it is through Babo’s lifeless eyes that we meet the “gaze of the whites” and look upon St. Bartholomew’s church, our vision is once again blurred, preventing us from finally and conclusively unveiling the mystery of ‘The negro.’”

    — Presented at Florida State Film & Literature Conference
    January, 2002

    Footnotes

    [1] From Frank’s call-for-papers for the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, MLA Newsletter 32.1 (2000): 33. I realize that citing a call-for-papers is unorthodox, but Frank’s question has been very helpful as I’ve struggled to form my own position. [return]

    [2] See Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, American Critical Archives 6 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995). Criterion recommends The Piazza Tales for “a companion under the broad branches of an old elm in the hot summer days” (472). Churchman claims that The Piazza Tales “are destined to be read in many a pleasant country house, at watering-places, by the seashores, and among the mountains, during the coming summer heats” (475). And Transcripts predicts the collection will “be a favorite book at the watering places and in the rural districts this season” (476). Reviewers from both the Southern Literary Journal (472) and the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (474) praise The Piazza Tales in comparison to Pierre. [return]

    [3] See also Richard Harter Fogle, Melville’s Shorter Tales, (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1960). Fogle, like Hoffman, mentions only Delano’s point-of-view, which he describes as a “struggle to comprehend” (120), and the deposition. Fogle also echoes Hoffman’s praise of the opening section’s structure, which he calls “simply projected in the unities of time, place, and action”(122). [return]

    [4] See also Robert Bruce Bickley, The Method of Melville’s Short Fiction (Durham: Duke UP, 1975). Bickley makes a similar distinction between Delano’s point-of-view and “a limited-omniscient narrator, one privileged to enter Delano’s mind alone, but also permitted to draw partially aside the masks that conceal the identities of Babo and Cereno” (101). [return]

    [5] This question is obviously too large to be adequately addressed here. Recently, the focus of narratological studies of “Benito Cereno,” like that of much of Melville criticism, has turned to Post-Colonial and materialist readings. In “Narrative Self-Justification: Melville and Amasa Delano,” Studies in American Fiction 23:1 (1995): 35-53, Richard McLamore argues that both Melville’s and Amasa Delano’s narratives are constructed so as to deflect the “naïve” reader’s attention from the American captain’s economic motivations. McLamore claims that by transforming Delano’s travel narrative into a “fantastic pirate suspense-story” Melville is, in fact, covertly satirizing “Delano’s evasive, contradictory, and greedily hypocritical narrative” (40, 35). [return]

    [6] point of view, center of perception, objective narration, subjective gaze, unreliable narrator, narrative voice, innocent eye, Melville’s narrative, going behind, perceiving center, third person, narrative perspective, the official, the individual, the reportorial, and the authorial. [return]

    [7] Film does, however, offer the unique opportunity for Descriptive emancipation. Christian Metz, in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford university Press, 1974), offers the example of a landscape described by “a tree, followed by a shot of a stream running next to the tree, followed by a view of a hill in the distance” (127-28). Chatman responds, “The shot sequence forms a narrative pause. The sign of the pause is precisely the temporally unmotivated shifting from tree to stream to hill” (42). [return]

    [8] See also Dillingham, 245, and Mary Rohrberger, “Point of View in ‘Benito Cereno’: Machinations and Deceptions,” College English 27 (1965), 544. [return]

    [9] With this knowledge, the “knot” of the story takes on an even greater symbolic significance. Some form of “knot” or “knotter” appears 29 times in the same span of pages. [return]

    [10] See Rohrberger, 542-43. She counts twenty-five facts in the story’s first eight sentences. [return]

    [11] Along with the famous example of Robert Weine’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995) operates in a similar manner. Verbal Kint, we learn at the end of the film, is a fallible filter. But the camera has also served as an unreliable narrator, describing the lying flashback from a supposedly objective and trustworthy distance. [return]

    [12] The eyeline match is one of five standard techniques in continuity editing of the classical Hollywood cinema. The others are the 180 degree rule, establishing shot/breakdown, shot/reverse shot, and match on action. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). [return]

    [13] “Benito Cereno,” in this light, reads like a thesaurus: appear, eye, gaze, glance, glare, glimpse, image, impress, look, mark, notice, observe, peer, perceive, regard, remark, scrutinize, see, sight, spectacle, spy, stare, survey, turn, view, watch, witness. [return]

    [14] Film theory might also offer a better explanation for the sudden drop of Delano’s filter and the shift to an objective slant. While the analogy is not perfect, it seems that the conclusion of Psycho operates in a very similar manner. When Lillian Crane discovers Mrs. Bates’ corpse in the fruit cellar and Norman emerges with the knife, the film suddenly drops Norman’s filter, as the mystery it has obscured has been suddenly revealed. The switch to the deposition in “Benito Cereno” is likewise similar to the psychiatrist’s analysis of Norman. See Christopher D. Morris, “Psycho’s Allegory of Seeing,” Literature Film Quarterly 24.1 (1996), 48. Finally, the return to Norman’s/Mother’s filter in the film’s final images mirrors the momentary return to subjectivity in the final paragraph of “Benito Cereno.” [return]

    Works Cited

    Bonitzer, Pascal. “Hitchcockian Suspense.” Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). Ed. Slavoj Zizek. London: Verso, 1992. 15-30.

    Cardwell, Guy A. “Melville’s Gray Story.” Bucknell Review 8.3 (1959): 154-67.

    Chatman, Syemour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

    Dillingham, William B. Melville’s Short fiction: 1853-1856. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1977.

    Hoffman, Charles G. “The Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville.” South Atlantic Quarterly 52 (1953): 414-30.

    Melville, Herman. “Benito Cereno.” Billy Budd and Other Stories. New York, Penguin. 1986.

    Rohrberger, Mary. “Point of View in ‘Benito Cereno’: Machinations and Deceptions.” College English 27 (1965): 541-46.

    Roundy, Nancy. “Present Shadows: Epistemology in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno.’” Arizona Quarterly 34 (1978): 344-50.

    Seelye, John Douglas. Melville: The Ironic Diagram. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1970. 104-11.

    Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. Rev. ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

  • The Woman Warrior (1975)

    By Maxine Hong Kingston

    Reading The Woman Warrior now, twenty-five years after its original publication, I find it difficult to separate the actual text from the cultural milieu in which it was written. This is very much a book of the 1970s — a creative memoir that, even in its title, gives voice to feminist and multiculturalist concerns. It is equal parts bildungsroman, fable, journal, poem, and immigrant story. At times, it is also really, really good.

    Kingston’s main concern here is with language. Words and their power to construct meaning, history, and identity are at the heart of each of the five tales. Words become Kingston’s weapon for writing a disgraced aunt back into the family history. Words of vengeance are carved into a warrior’s back. Words of Chinese talk-stories serve as a bond between mother and daughter. And, finally, words become the means by which Kingston comes of age.

    It’s only fitting, then, that Kingston’s own use of words is so impressive. I enjoyed the language of The Woman Warrior for the same reason that I’m so enamored of Tarkovsky’s films: Kingston has a gift for capturing images that speak (quite poetically and eloquently) for themselves. In the first story, “No Name Woman,” she imagines the struggle for individuality that her aunt and other women like her must have fought daily in the fields and small towns of China. “Still there must have been a marvelous freeing of beauty,” she writes, “when a worker laid down her burden and stretched and arched.” Then, in “Shaman,” she recreates the moment when her mother first tasted independence. Her arrival at a medical school is like a scene straight from Virginia Woolf: “The women who had arrived early did not offer to help unpack, not wanting to interfere with the pleasure and the privacy of it. Not many women got to live out the daydream of women — to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself.”

    “No Name Woman” and “White Tigers” are the two sections most often anthologized and deservedly so. The third and fourth stories, which deal more specifically with Kingston’s own family, are less effective. The Woman Warrior is redeemed, though, in its final pages when Kingston melds two beautiful stories. One is an ancient tale of a Chinese woman held captive, who finally returns to her village and brings with her the songs of her captors. The second is the story of Kingston’s own coming of age. The juxtaposition of the two stories is handled brilliantly, reminding us of the value born from the fruitful blending of cultures.

    No Name Woman — the story of Kingston’s aunt, a woman who committed suicide after disgracing the family by having an illegitimate child (though she was likely raped). Kingston attempts to right the great tragedy of the story — the family’s decision to erase her from their collective memory. Kingston gives the “no name woman” depth – love, emotion, shame, pride — by rewriting her into history.

    White Tigers — The story of Fa Mu Lan, the famous Chinese swordswoman who was taken away as child to be trained as a warrior before returning home to take her father’s place in battle and leading an army to victory. Again, Kingston places emphasis on the power of words — the words of vengeance carved into her back, the words casually used by Chinese to dehumanize their daughters, the words of her mother’s talk-stories. Kingston then tries to imagine herself as a contemporary woman warrior in America.

    Shaman — The story of the life of Kingston’s mother, in both China and America. A nice portrait of that frustrating ambivalence we feel toward family, which makes us both proud and embarrassed, wanting to both cling to our heritage and to define ourselves apart from it.

    At the Western Plaza — Brave Orchid’ sister, Moon Orchid, arrives in America to confront the husband who never sent for her. When she does finally meet him, he refuses to allow her back into his life, having found a new life and a new wife in America. Moon Orchid is broken by the move and the betrayal, finally finding something like peace in an asylum.

    A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe — The title of this section comes from the short story that ends the novel. It’s the story of a Chinese woman captured by barbarians with whom she lives for twelve years. When she returns to the Chinese, she brings with her new songs that were formed from the blending of the two cultures. The story could likewise be applied to this entire novel. The final section is about Kingston’s struggle to find her own voice. At one point, she torments another young Chinese girl who absolutely refuses to speak. Kingston finds her voice in a furious outburst at the dinner table.

  • Another Country (1962)

     

    By James Baldwin

    At its best, James Baldwin’s fiction is lyrical, intense, poetic, outrageous, improvisatory, brutal, and transcendent. The first time I read his short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” I was sitting in one of those massive chain bookstores, drinking coffee and trying to block out the pabulum coming from the Muzak. Imagine my surprise when I suddenly found myself choking back tears. The last three pages of “Sonny’s Blues” are as good as it gets: Sonny breaks into a blistering piano solo, finally finding a voice for his repressed pain. Baldwin follows suit — capturing the rhythms, the longing, the give and take of the best jazz — in some of the most stunning prose I’ve encountered.

    Unfortunately, Another Country is not Baldwin at his best. In fact, it’s possibly the most frustrating novel I’ve ever read. Here, Baldwin is so determined to explode the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality — and judging by the variety of sexual relationships on display here, he must have plotted those intersections on graph paper before sitting down to write — that he makes a fatal mistake: instead of being particularly insightful or even shocking, Another Country is preachy, sentimental, and, worst of all, boring.

    Rufus Scott is a young black man who makes his living playing drums in Harlem jazz clubs. When we first meet Rufus, he is wandering the streets, suffering from guilt over his treatment of Leona, a woman we later meet through flashbacks. Leona’s and Rufus’s relationship is based on a shared self-loathing: he feels unworthy of the love of a white woman; she has known only brutal relationships, having come to New York after escaping from an abusive marriage in the South. Rufus’s brutality eventually sends her to an asylum, an event that plagues Rufus, leading him to jump from the George Washington bridge at the end of chapter one. The remainder of the novel charts the effects of Rufus’s suicide on the lives of those closest to him.

    The most interesting relationship is between Ida, Rufus’s younger sister, and Vivaldo, his best friend. Both are struggling artists: she a singer, he a novelist. In Baldwin’s hands, they become a platform for long discourses on the legacies of racism. Before meeting Ida, Vivaldo has known black women only as sexual objects — the cheap whores he frequented in Harlem. Ida has likewise known white men only as victimizers — the men who leered at her and who broke her brother’s spirit. At moments, Vivaldo and Ida come alive in Baldwin’s prose. The flashback to their first meeting, for instance, is handled gracefully. But too often they act as little more than mouthpieces, uttering sappy lines like, “How’s one going to get through it all? How can you live if you can’t love? And how can you live if you do?” Baldwin wisely leaves their relationship in limbo at the end of the novel, offering some hope for reconciliation between the races, but promising nothing.

    Richard and Cass are another interesting couple. Married with children, they struggle to maintain their “traditional” roles amidst the sexual and social tumult (not to mention the heavy drinking) that surrounds them. Richard is also a novelist, but has “sold out,” making him a failure in his wife’s eyes. She escapes to an affair with Eric, an actor friend who has recently returned from Paris, but it brings her little comfort. “I’m beginning to think,” she gushes, “that growing just means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet — you drink a little of it every day.” It’s perhaps in this relationship that Baldwin does the most moralizing. Near the very end of the novel he finally enters Richard’s point of view, giving voice to the character who, until this point, had been little more than a personification of failed artistic ambition. Richard’s pain, however, rings more true than that of others in the novel because Baldwin allows readers to experience it in the moment, instead of subjecting us to endless discussions of that pain.

    My frustration with this novel is fueled largely by its obvious, unrealized potential. Baldwin populates Another Country with artists of all sorts and provides them with fabulously romanticized lives in Greenwich Village and Paris. He sets out to deliberately create another “lost generation,” but never seems able to elevate his characters above the prescribed roles they play.

  • Broom of the System (1987)

     

    By David Foster Wallace

    Lenore Beadsman’s life is complicated. The 24 year old heir to the Beadsman baby food empire struggles to balance her career as a call center operator — where the lines of communication seem perpetually crossed — with her, um, complex relationship with her boss, Rick Vigorous, of Frequent and Vigorous Publishing. She also worries about her younger bother, who refers to himself as the Antichrist; her bird, Vlad the Impaler, which has a tendency to curse and prophesy; and her grandmother, a former student of Wittgenstein who has suddenly gone missing from her retirement home.

    The majority of Broom of the System, first published in 1987, takes place in the future (1990, actually), which allows Wallace the freedom to distort the otherwise recognizable landscape of his northern Ohio. Here, popular culture has literally shaped life: an entire city has, in fact, been designed to resemble Jayne Mansfield from above. College students meet to watch Bob Newhart and play drinking games; others gather at a bar built around a Gilligan’s Island theme. Wallace, a former philosophy major, had obviously been reading Baudrillard, as he has great linguistic fun interrogating the simulacrum — the copies of copies of copies that have come to replace actual experience in contemporary American culture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D.), a man-made blot intended to serve as “A point of reference for the good people of Ohio. A place to fear and love. A blasted region. Something to remind us of what we hewed out of. A place without malls. An Other for Ohio’s Self.”

    Wallace’s first novel, written as his MFA thesis, is obviously heavily indebted to (but not entirely derivative of) Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Both are detective stories of a Post-Modern, epistemological bent, more concerned with the language that constructs meaning — both in their stories and in the world — than with the literal “truth” that their heroines pursue. And both authors push the conceit to hilariously absurd ends. Wallace even one-ups Pynchon’s famous final scene — Oedipa Maas sits, waiting like we do, for the mystery to be revealed — by actually ending Broom of the System mid-sentence. It’s perhaps too easy of a trick, and one that must surely make the more mature Wallace cringe, but it feels perfectly appropriate here.

  • Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

    Zora Neale Hurston

    In the opening chapters of Their Eyes Were Watching God, an elderly African-American woman sits down with her granddaughter and explains the main lesson she has learned during her difficult life, one that has spanned from the final years of slavery to the more promising days of the twentieth century:

    Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nuthin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.

    When Zora Neale Hurston’s greatest novel was rediscovered in the mid-1970s, readers once again heard voices that for years had been silenced by neglect. Hurston, a college educated anthropologist, spent the early years of her adult life collecting stories from the South, “folklore” that she would then transform and elevate into art. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has written, Hurston has a “Negro way of saying.” By writing in the dialect of rural and often poor African-Americans, a device that for decades had been employed famously by white writers such as Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hurston took ownership of that voice, made it authentic, and gave it poetry.

    Through the course of the novel, we watch that little girl, who once listened so attentively to her grandmother’s advice, grow into a woman capable of ideas and feelings beyond the elder’s realm of experience. Janie Crawford is a beautiful young woman of mixed race, who was startled to discover as a child that she was different from the white children with whom she was raised. Hurston frequently emphasizes Janie’s light skin and her long, soft hair that make her a constant object of desire by men, both black and white. And it’s through her relationships with those men that Hurston charts Janie’s coming of age.

    As a teen, Janie is married off to Logan Killicks, a much older white man who cares for his wife (in his own way), but realizes that he will never keep her. Their marriage is arranged by Janie’s grandmother, a former slave whose notions of happiness revolve around wealth and security. If the black woman is “de mule uh de world,” then the best she can hope for is some comfort among the toil. For Janie, who at first assumes that love is the inevitable product of marriage, her life with Killicks provides a brutal awakening. Hurston writes: “Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”

    Janie leaves Killick to follow Jody Starks, a boisterous and ambitious young man, to Eatonville, where he plans to become mayor of the all black town. The couple spend twenty years together there, watching distantly as Jody’s dreams come to fruition. But despite their superficial success, Janie fails to find either love or contentment with Jodie, whose condescending treatment of her and the other townsfolk leave little distinction between himself and her first husband. Hurston transforms Janie’s dreams of a fuller life into a pear tree and a cool breeze: “Then one day she sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes. Somebody near about making summertime out of lonesomeness.”

    After Jody’s death, Janie once again leaves, this time with a younger man named Vergible Woods. “Tea Cake” takes his new bride to the swamps of Florida, where they work the fields as migrant farmers. As some critics have noted, Janie’s path is, in some ways, a journey into “blackness,” a gradual move from white to black community. With Tea Cake and the other workers, Janie finally finds love, fellowship, and self-realization. Hurston’s description of their love-making — the only such description in the book — is passionate and beautiful: “He drifted into sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.” Janie’s awakening is so wonderfully rendered that even Tea Cake’s sudden death, though undeniably moving, feels less tragic than would be expected. Janie returns to Eatonville, to its staring eyes and gossiping mouths, with remarkable grace.

    Of course, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a landmark novel because of its unsentimental exposure of a black woman’s inner life — and it’s probably the first and still the best American novel to do so — but what most amazes me about it is the beauty of it all. Hurston’s prose at times is awesome (I hesitate to use that adjective only because it has been tarnished by misuse). She writes:

    There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

    And later, when describing a hurricane:

    The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

    For obvious reasons, I will never be able to fully understand the experience of an African-American woman. I can, however touch something of our shared experience through art like Hurston’s. What better reason do you need?

  • O Pioneers (1913)

    By Willa Cather

    Willa Cather was nearly 40 years old in 1913 when she published O Pioneers!, her second novel. It’s difficult, then, to overlook the obvious similarities between her own life and that of her heroine, Alexandra Bergson. At this point, both women had devoted their lives to a single pursuit, sacrificing personal relationships — or, at least those of a romantic nature — for the cause. As she left no autobiography, no memoir, and few letters, we can only speculate about Cather’s personal life. Some have postulated that she was a closeted lesbian, but, as with all such claims, it is only that: speculation. What we do know is that she never married or had children, and that she devoted the majority of her energies during her adult life to writing and to seeing those writings published. It was quite a feat: she left a legacy of 13 novels and more than 60 short stories, which have helped to secure her place now in the company of her more famous contemporaries: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner.

    O Pioneers! is a wonderful novel and one that, I must admit, I have put off reading for years simply because its title has always reminded me of those sentimental prairie novels that twelve year old girls seem so fond of. That excuse, as unforgivably lame as it sounds, is not completely unjustified. Like much of Cather’s work, O Pioneers! is inspired by the years that she and her family spent in Nebraska, where she lived among Scandinavian, French, and Bohemain immigrants and where she witnessed first hand the back-breaking work of plains farming. What separates this novel from the pack, though, is Cather’s remarkable blend of lyricism and honest insight. O Pioneers! is an interesting transition piece, a novel caught between the Midwest naturalism of Hamlin Garland and the epistemological experiments of the modernists. While the fate of many of Cather’s characters are determined by forces beyond their control, the novelist holds on to some hope — a hope for real personal happiness and a more perfect future.

    The Bergsons are typical of the immigrant families Cather had known in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The mother and father are first-generation Americans who settled with the hope of owning land and of securing better lives for their children. John Bergson dies young, too soon to experience the fruits of his labors, but soon enough, for “he would not have had it again if he could, not he! He knew the end too well to wish to begin again. He knew where it all went to, what it all became.” His children, however, personify the American Dream. Alexandra, through hard work and ingenuity, breaks the land and watches it flourish. Lou and Oscar enjoy their wealth, marry well, and find success in business and politics. The youngest, Emil, graduates from college, sees the world, and welcomes opportunity and freedom, the dreams of every immigrant.

    Their lives, however, do not completely escape the suffering and alienation that so preoccupied artists at the turn of the century. Like Cather, Alexandra chooses to sacrifice her own love and happiness to a single-minded pursuit, in her case the education and unrealized potential of her brother, Emil. It is a “choice,” Cather argues, that many women are forced to make. She captures this plight in a beautiful image of Marie, the Berson’s young neighbor, whose loveless marriage and hopeless pining for Emil slowly destroys her vitality. The passage is typical of Cather’s preoccupation with the connection between her characters and the land they work:

    The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain, until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.

    It’s an ominous passage that prepares us for the tragic end to Emil’s and Marie’s love. Separated by the laws of their land and their churches, they die too soon, killed by Marie’s jealous husband. Cather describes their deaths in brutal detail, but refuses to cast blame. Here, Alexandra becomes a naturalist heroine and Cather’s surrogate: “Being what he was, she felt, [Marie’s husband] could not have acted otherwise.”

    But despite the novel’s tragedy, Cather distinguishes herself from Norris, Dreiser, and Crane by painting the conclusion of O Pioneers! with a tint of optimism. Broken and beaten by Emil’s death, whose fate seems to make her life’s efforts futile, Alexandra is restored by the return of Carl, the man she has loved since childhood. What I find most interesting about this turn is that their saving relationship is built on selfless love, a conceit that her more cynical and disillusioned contemporaries would have likely scoffed as a romantic fiction. It works here, though, saving the novel from the reductive determinism of so much naturalist fiction.

  • Sculpting in Time

    Sculpting in Time

    By Andrei Tarkovsky

    My hope is that those readers whom I manage to convince, if not entirely then at least in part, may become my kindred spirits, if only in recognition of the fact that I have no secrets from them. — Tarkovsky

    I’ve never read another book like Sculpting in Time. In it Tarkovsky speaks as eloquently about art as he does faith and philosophy, and does so in a remarkably kind, concerned voice. To him, his subject —the unique ability of the cinematic image to touch the soul and inspire spiritual improvement — is quite literally a matter of life and death. “The goal for all art,” he writes, “unless of course it is aimed at the ‘consumer’, like a saleable commodity, is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence. To explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet; or if not to explain, at least to pose the question” (36). And again: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning it to good” (43).

    That we understand the gravity of this statement is more than a simple intellectual or rhetorical exercise for Tarkovsky. Throughout the book (but most notably in its “Conclusion”) he speaks in the voice of a trusted elder, as if determined to pass along the wisdom gained from experience and inspiration while time allows. That he was already suffering from terminal cancer when completing the book makes it all the more affecting.

    In the closing paragraph of Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky makes his final appeal, speaking to us as confidants:

    Finally, I would enjoin the reader — confiding in him utterly — to believe that the one thing that mankind has ever created in a spirit of self-surrender is the artistic image. Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God? — Tarkovsky

    In the margin of my copy I scribbled, “Now that is how to finish a book.” Although my own appreciation of his sentiment is due, in large part, to our shared religious faith, I trust that such a faith is by no means a prerequisite for his readers. I can’t stress enough how refreshing it is to read a filmmaker speak of his craft using terms like “truth,” “love,” “sacrifice,” and (especially) “beauty.” Tarkovsky writes, “We have almost totally lost sight of the beautiful as a criterion of art” (168). It’s a criticism of the commercial cinema that is both blatant and absurd — in an era when weekend box office grosses have become the stuff of water-cooler conversations, the word “beauty” is as alien to “movies” as Tarkovsky himself is to most American movie-goers.

    The greatest compliment I can give Sculpting in Time is to say that when I finished reading it I took a deep breath and watched his film, The Mirror, three times. Forgive my hyperbole, but Tarkovsky has quite honestly challenged me to adjust my entire understanding of film and of its potential.

    Much of Sculpting in Time is devoted to Tarkovsky’s fascinating and detailed explanation of his methods as a filmmaker. He addresses both his stylistic techniques and, more specifically, how he put them into practice in each of his seven films (Ivan’s Childhood, The Mirror, and The Sacrifice are given the most attention; Stalker and Solaris the least). Chapter V is the longest chapter and should probably be the starting point for anyone who is interested in Tarkovsky, but not in reading the entire book. The chapter is broken into six film elements:

    The Film Image

    Tarkovsky begins the chapter by acknowledging that a concept like “artistic image” could never be “expressed in a precise thesis, easily formulated and understandable” (104). And that is precisely the point. For him, the potential of cinema lies in the unique ability of the film image to communicate Truth more effectively (or affectively) than language. The image is able to reveal the totality of the universe and allows the viewer to experience simultaneously complex and contradictory feelings.

    Tarkovsky argues that such an image is captured only when the director abandons all attempts at objectivity, building instead from his own personal storehouse of memory and experience. The Mirror is the most obvious example of this principle put to practice — it is a film filled with images from Tarkovsky’s own childhood. His approach to the film image (in a nutshell) is that an image based on Truth (even a completely subjective truth) will resonate much more strongly with an audience than will a cliched image that comes pre-loaded with supposedly objective symbolism. Works for me. I can barely make it through The Mirror without crying.

    Time, Rhythm and Editing

    “Sculpting in time” is Tarkovsky’s metaphor for the construction of a film’s rhythm. Notice that the emphasis is put on time and rhythm, rather than on editing, which Tarkovsky considers little more than an assembly process. This distinction clearly separates him from his Soviet predecessors like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov, whose experiments in montage Tarkovsky refers to as “puzzles and riddles,” intellectual exercises that require too little of the audience.

    Instead, he writes, “rhythm . . . is the main formative element of cinema” (119). He uses a short film by Pascal Aubier to illustrate his point. The ten-minute film contains only one shot: the camera begins on a wide landscape, then zooms in slowly to reveal a man on a hill. As the camera gets closer, we learn first that the man is dead, then that he has been killed. “The film has no editing, no acting and no decor,” Tarkovsky writes. “But the rhythm of the movement of time is there within the frame, as the sole organising force of the — quite complex — dramatic development” (114). Like the Aubier example, Tarkovsky’s films are marked by long takes (most notably in the bookends of The Sacrifice) and slow, beautifully choreographed camera movements.

    Scenario and Shooting Script

    For Tarkovsky, the greatest challenge associated with developing a script is maintaining the integrity of the film’s inspiration — “it almost seems as if circumstances have been deliberately calculated to make [the director] forget why it was that he started working on the picture” (125). For this reason, he argues that the director must also be the writer, or he must develop a partnership that is founded on complete trust. The majority of this section is devoted to The Mirror — Tarkovsky uses it as a case study of his method. Fascinating reading.

    The Film’s Graphic Realisation

    This section offers a glimpse of how Tarkovsky worked on set, describing his approach to collaboration. “It is essential that [the crew] should not be in any way mere functionaries; they have to participate as creative artists in their own right, and be allowed to share in all your feelings and thoughts” (135). He talks specifically about his relationship with the camera-man, who he refers to as a “co-author,” and explains how he worked with Georgi Rerberg and Vadim Yusov. This section is featured prominently in Directed by Andrey Tarkovsky, the documentary that is included on The Sacrifice DVD.

    The Film Actor

    Again, Tarkovsky’s approach (in this case, to directing actors) is a distinct break from the Soviet tradition, particularly that of Stanislawski. While he sees much value for the theater in what has become known as method acting, he argues that film actors, like their directors, should find inspiration in subjective experience. “The one thing the film actor has to do is express in particular circumstances a psychological state peculiar to him alone, and do so naturally, true to his own emotional and intellectual make-up, and in the form that is only right for him” (141). Free to perform without restraint, the actors then provide the director true experience from which he selects the “stuff” of his film.

    Music and Noises

    Tarkovsky’s discussion of sound, not surprisingly, begins with its relationship to the cinematic image: “But music is not just an appendage . . . It must be an essential element of the realisation of the concept as a whole . . . it must be so completely one with the visual image that if it were to be removed from a particular episode, the visual image would not just be weaker in its idea and impact, it would be qualitatively different” (158). As is often the case when one attempts to write about music (who said it’s like “dancing about architecture”?), Tarkovsky slips more noticeably here into poetic (rather than hard, practical) language. It makes for wonderful reading, but I’m still unsure about his exact approach: “Above all,” he writes, “I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could learn to listen to them properly, cinema would have no need of music at all” (162).

    My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him. — Tarkovsky

    As I mentioned above, I realize that I’ve slipped occassionally into hyperbole here, but since finishing Sculpting in Time last week, I’ve found myself viewing film (and all art in general) from a new perspective. We see this debate all the time: Film as “just entertainment” vs. film as “something more.” I’d been leaning towards the latter for several years; this book has completed that shift.

  • Sculpting in Time (1987)

    By Andrei Tarkovsky

    My hope is that those readers whom I manage to convince, if not entirely then at least in part, may become my kindred spirits, if only in recognition of the fact that I have no secrets from them. — Tarkovsky

    I’ve never read another book like Sculpting in Time. In it Tarkovsky speaks as eloquently about art as he does faith and philosophy, and does so in a remarkably kind, concerned voice. To him, his subject —the unique ability of the cinematic image to touch the soul and inspire spiritual improvement — is quite literally a matter of life and death. “The goal for all art,” he writes, “unless of course it is aimed at the ‘consumer’, like a saleable commodity, is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence. To explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet; or if not to explain, at least to pose the question” (36). And again: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning it to good” (43).

    That we understand the gravity of this statement is more than a simple intellectual or rhetorical exercise for Tarkovsky. Throughout the book (but most notably in its “Conclusion”) he speaks in the voice of a trusted elder, as if determined to pass along the wisdom gained from experience and inspiration while time allows. That he was already suffering from terminal cancer when completing the book makes it all the more affecting.

    In the closing paragraph of Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky makes his final appeal, speaking to us as confidants:

    Finally, I would enjoin the reader — confiding in him utterly — to believe that the one thing that mankind has ever created in a spirit of self-surrender is the artistic image. Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God? — Tarkovsky

    In the margin of my copy I scribbled, “Now that is how to finish a book.” Although my own appreciation of his sentiment is due, in large part, to our shared religious faith, I trust that such a faith is by no means a prerequisite for his readers. I can’t stress enough how refreshing it is to read a filmmaker speak of his craft using terms like “truth,” “love,” “sacrifice,” and (especially) “beauty.” Tarkovsky writes, “We have almost totally lost sight of the beautiful as a criterion of art” (168). It’s a criticism of the commercial cinema that is both blatant and absurd — in an era when weekend box office grosses have become the stuff of water-cooler conversations, the word “beauty” is as alien to “movies” as Tarkovsky himself is to most American movie-goers.

    The greatest compliment I can give Sculpting in Time is to say that when I finished reading it I took a deep breath and watched his film, The Mirror, three times. Forgive my hyperbole, but Tarkovsky has quite honestly challenged me to adjust my entire understanding of film and of its potential.

    Much of Sculpting in Time is devoted to Tarkovsky’s fascinating and detailed explanation of his methods as a filmmaker. He addresses both his stylistic techniques and, more specifically, how he put them into practice in each of his seven films (Ivan’s Childhood, The Mirror, and The Sacrifice are given the most attention; Stalker and Solaris the least). Chapter V is the longest chapter and should probably be the starting point for anyone who is interested in Tarkovsky, but not in reading the entire book. The chapter is broken into six film elements:

    The Film Image

    Tarkovsky begins the chapter by acknowledging that a concept like “artistic image” could never be “expressed in a precise thesis, easily formulated and understandable” (104). And that is precisely the point. For him, the potential of cinema lies in the unique ability of the film image to communicate Truth more effectively (or affectively) than language. The image is able to reveal the totality of the universe and allows the viewer to experience simultaneously complex and contradictory feelings.

    Tarkovsky argues that such an image is captured only when the director abandons all attempts at objectivity, building instead from his own personal storehouse of memory and experience. The Mirror is the most obvious example of this principle put to practice — it is a film filled with images from Tarkovsky’s own childhood. His approach to the film image (in a nutshell) is that an image based on Truth (even a completely subjective truth) will resonate much more strongly with an audience than will a cliched image that comes pre-loaded with supposedly objective symbolism. Works for me. I can barely make it through The Mirror without crying.

    Time, Rhythm and Editing

    “Sculpting in time” is Tarkovsky’s metaphor for the construction of a film’s rhythm. Notice that the emphasis is put on time and rhythm, rather than on editing, which Tarkovsky considers little more than an assembly process. This distinction clearly separates him from his Soviet predecessors like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov, whose experiments in montage Tarkovsky refers to as “puzzles and riddles,” intellectual exercises that require too little of the audience.

    Instead, he writes, “rhythm . . . is the main formative element of cinema” (119). He uses a short film by Pascal Aubier to illustrate his point. The ten-minute film contains only one shot: the camera begins on a wide landscape, then zooms in slowly to reveal a man on a hill. As the camera gets closer, we learn first that the man is dead, then that he has been killed. “The film has no editing, no acting and no decor,” Tarkovsky writes. “But the rhythm of the movement of time is there within the frame, as the sole organising force of the — quite complex — dramatic development” (114). Like the Aubier example, Tarkovsky’s films are marked by long takes (most notably in the bookends of The Sacrifice) and slow, beautifully choreographed camera movements.

    Scenario and Shooting Script

    For Tarkovsky, the greatest challenge associated with developing a script is maintaining the integrity of the film’s inspiration — “it almost seems as if circumstances have been deliberately calculated to make [the director] forget why it was that he started working on the picture” (125). For this reason, he argues that the director must also be the writer, or he must develop a partnership that is founded on complete trust. The majority of this section is devoted to The Mirror — Tarkovsky uses it as a case study of his method. Fascinating reading.

    The Film’s Graphic Realisation

    This section offers a glimpse of how Tarkovsky worked on set, describing his approach to collaboration. “It is essential that [the crew] should not be in any way mere functionaries; they have to participate as creative artists in their own right, and be allowed to share in all your feelings and thoughts” (135). He talks specifically about his relationship with the camera-man, who he refers to as a “co-author,” and explains how he worked with Georgi Rerberg and Vadim Yusov. This section is featured prominently in Directed by Andrey Tarkovsky, the documentary that is included on The Sacrifice DVD.

    The Film Actor

    Again, Tarkovsky’s approach (in this case, to directing actors) is a distinct break from the Soviet tradition, particularly that of Stanislawski. While he sees much value for the theater in what has become known as method acting, he argues that film actors, like their directors, should find inspiration in subjective experience. “The one thing the film actor has to do is express in particular circumstances a psychological state peculiar to him alone, and do so naturally, true to his own emotional and intellectual make-up, and in the form that is only right for him” (141). Free to perform without restraint, the actors then provide the director true experience from which he selects the “stuff” of his film.

    Music and Noises

    Tarkovsky’s discussion of sound, not surprisingly, begins with its relationship to the cinematic image: “But music is not just an appendage . . . It must be an essential element of the realisation of the concept as a whole . . . it must be so completely one with the visual image that if it were to be removed from a particular episode, the visual image would not just be weaker in its idea and impact, it would be qualitatively different” (158). As is often the case when one attempts to write about music (who said it’s like “dancing about architecture”?), Tarkovsky slips more noticeably here into poetic (rather than hard, practical) language. It makes for wonderful reading, but I’m still unsure about his exact approach: “Above all,” he writes, “I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could learn to listen to them properly, cinema would have no need of music at all” (162).

    My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him. — Tarkovsky

    As I mentioned above, I realize that I’ve slipped occassionally into hyperbole here, but since finishing Sculpting in Time last week, I’ve found myself viewing film (and all art in general) from a new perspective. We see this debate all the time: Film as “just entertainment” vs. film as “something more.” I’d been leaning towards the latter for several years; this book has completed that shift.

  • New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)

    By Thomas Merton

    Like “Making Peace,” the Denise Levertov poem that inspired this site, Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation is concerned with the destructive influences of greed, superficiality, and passivity on our hectic, disjointed lives. Levertov’s poem is a call to both the poet/artist — whose duty, she argues, is to inspire an “imagination of peace” — and to us, her readers. For making peace is active, a deliberate decision that each of us must make in order for us to affect change, first in our lives, then in the world. Although Levertov never explicitly identifies whose “voice from the dark” calls out, the humanist, the aesthete, and the Christian in me are all in perfect agreement: if that voice is not divine, then why should I listen?

    For Merton, a 20th century American monk, making peace is a lifelong project through which we find perfect communion with God. Sanctification — or, “contemplation,” as he calls it — is the only source of genuine peace, for it is the only means by which we may escape our natural state of alienation. Merton actually sounds a bit like Lacan at times, critiquing Man for his futile attempts to “clothe his false self” in power and pleasures. The obvious difference, of course, is that Merton posits a solution, selfless submission to God’s will, where Lacan and other Post-Modern seekers of meaning can find only nihilism. “The real purpose of meditation,” Merton writes, “is this: to teach a man how to work himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow, and enter into a conscious and loving contact with God” (217).

    New Seeds of Contemplation is an impressive book, and one that has effected me more profoundly than any other contemporary theological study. In an age when “Christian literature” is sold in bulk at Sam’s Clubs, Merton’s book is refreshingly intelligent and devoid of the empty rhetoric that plagues so much of the dialogue in Christian America (and its churches) today. This deliberate move away from “old worn-out words, clichés, slogans, rationalizations . . . hackneyed analogies and metaphors that are so feeble that they make you think there is something the matter with religion” is actually an important stage in every contemplative’s life, Merton claims, a step that can be quite unnerving. “The worst of it,” he writes:

    is that even apparently holy conceptions are consumed along with the rest. It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to be left empty: the center, the existential altar which simply “is.” In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is.

    I can picture the Christians who would recoil at such a suggestion, as they would at many of his other claims, including his equating of the work of the Church with an ideal communism and his belief that God may have blessed us with wealth in order that we “might find joy and perfection by giving it all away.” (I’ll be sure to look for that plank in the platform of the next politician who claims to be representing my Christian interests.) I would label Merton a radical if he weren’t simply reflecting the mission of the early Church as described in Acts.

    But we’re Americans, and Americans don’t care for selflessness. To aid in this radical reordering of our priorities, Merton, like Levertov, points to our need for solitude (meditation or long pauses) as a temporary but necessary escape from the “social machine” in which we’re trapped. I love his description of this trap — it would have made a perfect epigraph for Don DeLillo’s White Noise:

    The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible. Each individual in the mass is insulated by thick layers of insensibility. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t hear, he doesn’t think. He does not act, he is pushed. He does not talk, he produces conventional sounds when stimulated by appropriate noises. He does not think, he secretes clichés. . . . But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless.

    Every time I read that, I think of Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanite, a film that erodes, quite uncomfortably at times, those layers of insulation and forces us to patiently experience the pain of another’s life. (Unfortunately, very few Christians in America will see L’Humanite, both because it is French and because of its explicit sexual content.) Of course, when I read Merton’s description, I am also struck by my own pain-free isolation. But that is precisely the point of this web site. I am learning, as Merton suggests, to “meditate on paper . . . to contemplate works of art.” I am trying to “keep still, and let Him do some work.”

    This response has been a bit erratic, little more than a steady stream of quotations. As this is a site dedicated largely to the arts, I’ll finish with one more, then do my best to refrain from adding sarcastic comment:

    A Catholic poet should be an apostle by being first of all a poet, not try to be a poet by being first of all an apostle. For if he presents himself to people as a poet, he is going to be judged by people as a poet and if he is not a good one his apostolate will be ridiculed.

    Good advice. I wish I could name more Christian artists who follow it.

  • The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue (1994)

    By Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie

    Johnson’s and Petrie’s study is that extremely rare beast: an academic study that is informative, objective (or as close as anyone can get), and readable. They work from an interesting thesis:

    Tarkovsky certainly saw himself as a martyr in his last years and . . . helped to foster a myth of his own persecution that was rather uncritically accepted at face value by well-meaning foreigners. . . . Yet, even if one must reject the more extreme claims of martyrdom, there is no reason not to acknowledge the very real struggles and sacrifices he made for his art.

    I’m convinced. Unlike Annette Insdorf’s study of Kieslowski, this one is very much grounded in the particular context within which the director worked. In this case, Johnson and Petrie expose the inner workings of the Soviet film industry, though not in such unnecessary detail as to distract from their discussion of Tarkovsky himself. In doing so, they reveal him to be both the martyred artist he (often) claimed to be and a director allowed unprecedented creative freedom. As a Soviet “employee,” Tarkovsky was forced to maneuver considerable bureaucratic hurdles in pre- and post-production, but during filming he was given complete independence, allowing him to make difficult films free from the economic concerns experienced in the West. Johnson and Petrie wonder what Orson Welles might have accomplished had he been afforded the same budgets and freedom given to Tarkovsky while under the “yoke” of Communism.

    The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky is divided into 14 chapters: the first three provide a fascinating overview of Tarkovsky’s persona, his aesthetics, and his working methods; the second section includes close studies of each of the eight films (including The Steamroller and the Violin); and the final four chapters examine recurring images and themes in Tarkovsky’s work. One note: the chapter-long studies of each film are very insightful and well-organized. Each provides a production history, an examination of the critical reception, and a formal analysis by the authors. Johnson and Petrie hold no punches, particularly when dealing with the mostly Western critics who they feel have misinterpreted Tarkovsky’s oeuvre due to ignorance of Soviet culture.

    Johnson and Petrie are also quite rough with Tarkovsky, particularly in the chapters on Nostalghia and The Sacrifice. I have to agree with their main criticism. Although both films contain some striking imagery (I especially love the b&w apocalyptic vision in The Sacrifice), neither exactly breaks new ground for the director. In fact, The Sacrifice seems to contradict one of his main tenants — let the images do the talking.

  • Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski (1999)

    By Annette Insdorf

    Insdorf’s is a terribly frustrating book. She seems the perfect candidate for the job of writing such an auteur study. As a professor in Columbia University’s Graduate Film Division and a personal translator and friend of Kieslowski, she has the experience, vocabulary, and intimate acquaintance necessary for successfully melding biography, research, and analysis.

    She also sets out with the right questions in mind: How was Kieslowski’s body of work shaped by personal experience, particularly by his life under Communism? What other directors, artists, and thinkers shaped his aesthetic? What preoccupations, both ideological and stylistic, form the backbone of his work? What precipitated his move from documentary to narrative film, and how did each influence the other?

    Unfortunately, in attempting to answer all of these questions (and in only 180 pages), Insdorf fails to address any of them adequately. My main beef with the book is that I can’t figure out who it was written for. It reads like Kieslowski for Dummies, but I find it difficult to imagine the “Dummies” audience investing the time and energy required of a work like, say, The Decalogue. I would imagine that those of us willing to wrestle with the complexities of Kieslowski’s films will typically study his life with a similar rigor.

    One more (admittedly petty) complaint: Insdorf’s writing can be plain maddening at times. Lines like this just make me cringe:

    For events unfolding in the present, theater is perhaps the most fitting artistic medium. And for a story told in the past, the novel is the perfect form. Motion pictures have certainly carved out a special niche for dealing with the future. (53)

    My experience with Insdorf’s book has not been all bad, however. I would actually recommend it, in fact, for certain purposes. The majority of Double Lives, Second Chances is devoted to Insdorf’s own formal analysis of each film. While I find the latter chapters fairly useless, her discussion of his documentary work and early fiction is invaluable for the simple reason that those films are not available in America, nor are they likely to be any time soon. She provides a short summary and stylistic analysis of each film.

    I guess I should also compliment Insdorf (in a back-handed way) for inspiring me to learn more about the film industry under Communism. She often refers casually to other Eastern European filmmakers who I am now curious to study. And her inclusion of some interesting quotes from Kieslowski reinforce what I suspected even before beginning the book. I pulled the wrong one from my shelf. I should have begun with Kieslowski on Kieslowski.

    [The Calm] has nothing to do with politics. It simply tells the story of a man who wants very little and can’t get it. – Kieslowski

    Addendum: I realize that I might have unfairly criticized Insdorf for simply not giving me the book that I wanted to read. I wanted a fairly objective study that interspersed more biographical and political context into the formal analysis. I wonder if Insdorf’s personal relationship with Kieslowski — she recounts a very touching story of his picking her and her mother up at the Warsaw airport and driving them two hours to visit Krakow — may have left her somewhat biased. She “sounds” at times like a big fan, unwilling to criticize him or his work when he perhaps deserves it. I imagine she would be wonderful to listen to, though, with wonderful stories to tell. She also translated for Truffaut at times.

  • Buried Child (1978)

    By Sam Shepard

    In his introduction to Seven Plays, Richard Gilman writes, “the real difficulty I share with many critics [who study Shepard] isn’t so much deciding what the work is as knowing how to write about what it is.” Two sentences into this response, and I’m already beginning to appreciate the precision of that distinction. And yet, despite the skill with which Gilman explores Shepard’s work (his introduction has that accessible insight that seems lacking in the voice of much academic writing), I don’t think he ever solves his original problem. As I read, I underlined sentences like, “[His plays] spill over, they leak. They change chameleon-like, in self-protection as we look at them,” and “Above all, it’s about performing, and here the relations between art and life become particularly close.” Gilman’s observations sound wonderful, poetic-almost, the type of critical writing I strive to produce. But I’m not sure if wielding “a critical vocabulary that won’t be composed of cliches and stock phrases” brings him any closer to Shepard. Perhaps it’s my own lack of experience with Shepard’s work. I don’t yet see him as a “dramatist who slips out of all the categories,” and am therefore unwilling to concede a need to “devise a strategy of discourse” specifically for him. Instead (and I realize that this has probably been done many times before, even, I think, by Gilman himself), it seems that Shepard’s plays, particularly a family drama like Buried Child, can be placed on a categorical timeline, one point in the evolution of a form. How far is it, really, from O’Neill’s Tyrone to Shepard’s Dodge?

    Gilman admits that “the trevail of the family” is a theme central to many of Shepard’s plays. In Buried Child, Shepard updates the family drama, situating it amidst the cultural upheaval of late-70s America. As the curtain rises, we find Dodge, the family patriarch, staring blankly at a television, his face illuminated by only the blue flickering of the picture tube. For Shepard, TV seems to offer an alternative to real interaction and communication. When Halie questions Dodge from upstairs, he just continues staring, sitting silently in morose resignation and isolation. He is a chilling character, more an extension of the couch than a father. When Tilden arrives with the mysterious corn, Dodge exposes his own hopeless isolation. “I haven’t had trouble with neighbors here for fifty-seven years,” he screams. “I don’t even know who the neighbors are! And I don’t want to know!”When Dodge finally does respond to his wife’s repeated calls, their communication is hampered by distance. “Dodge, are you watching baseball?” she asks. “No.” “What?” she asks. This (“What?”) becomes a common refrain for Halie, revealing her inability to actually hear him (or perhaps her lack of desire to do so).

    Dodge’s and Halie’s conversations (like many others in the play) are superficial and ritualistic, consisting mostly of trivial discussions of the weather and the children. Their roles seem well rehearsed. She asks him if he needs a pill; he says no. She tells him to keep an eye on Tilden; he says things will be fine. She leaves to meet Father Dewis; he takes another sip from his hidden whiskey bottle. Shepard does complicate their interaction, though, with strange (at times, almost absurdist) moments of tension. The first occurs when Halie mentions the man who took her to the New Year’s Day races. It is the first statement that elicits an emotional response from Dodge. “I bet he taught you a thing or two huh?” he says bitterly. “Gave you a good turn around the old stable.” As in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Shepard provides hints about his play’s sub-text early in the opening act. Dodge’s bitterness is, of course, later explained by Halie’s infidelities and the resulting pregnancy.

    Another, and much stranger, cause of tension between Halie and Dodge is their debate over whether or not their son, Bradley, should be allowed to cut his father’s hair. It is scenes like this, I’m sure, that Gilman would say “spill over” and “leak,” complicating any simple reading. I’ll freely admit my difficulty with the scene, and with the one in which Bradley does, in fact, shave Dodge’s head, cutting him and drawing blood. It seems ripe for Freudian analysis, an Oedipal conflict realized in the threatening actions of a powerless son. It also reinforces the corporeal nature of Dodge’s body. Halie often mentions the stench of his decaying frame, and in their discussion, Dodge describes the last time she allowed Bradley to cut his hair, saying, “Time to dress up the corpse for company! Lower the ears a little! Put up a little front! . . . My appearance is out of his domain! It’s even out of mine! In fact, its’ disappeared! I’m an invisible man!” Once we learn the story of the buried child, Bradley’s violence against his father also becomes strangely justifiable, an act of outward concern (for his father’s appearance) and subconscious revenge.

    Gilman mentions “the search for roots” as another central motif in Shepard’s work. This search is characterized in Buried Child by Tilden and Vincent, a father and son who both return to the family in hopes of creating meaning in their lives. Shepard first describes Tilden as “profoundly burned out and displaced.” He has recently returned home after getting in some trouble in New Mexico, but claims that his reason for returning was simply that he was lonely, “more lonely than I’ve ever been before.” But Tilden is hardly welcomed as a prodigal son. He is instead seen only as a disappointment, a shadow of his lost potential. He seems to take on a ghost-like quality throughout the play, particularly in its final scene, as he emerges with the decaying corpse of his murdered brother (his murdered child?) in his arms. He also seems to have the magical ability to produce vegetables from air, those strange buckets of corn and carrots that so preoccupy him during the first two acts. Like Bradley and his clippers, the scenes involving Tilden and his vegetables throw off simple explanation. In his introduction, Gilman acknowledges those supporters who claim that Shepard has one creative foot within avant-garde circles, that he isn’t “talking about anything but rather making something.” The images here, particularly that of Tilden burying his sleeping father in cornstalks, is fascinating and lasting. Obviously, Shepard designed that image as a challenge. But the image is laced with too many resonating elements—the “milking stool” with its inherent maternal overtones, the fertility of the backyard burial ground, the “roots” of the fruitful crop, the burial of Dodge under the product of that crop—to be explained away as simply a message to the eyes, rather than one to the mind (to use Gilman’s terminology).

    Vince adds another level of difficulty to a reading of Buried Child. Like his father, Vince has also returned to Halie’s and Dodge’s home in hopes of uncovering his roots. What he finds instead is a family who has forgotten him. (“It’s much better not to know anything,” says Dodge.) Even his own father is unable to remember Vince. “I had a son once,” Tilden says, “but we buried him.” Vince actually spends little time on stage—his trip to fetch Dodge a bottle of whiskey becomes a night-long drive and drinking binge. Shepard instead shows us Vince’s perspective through an outsider’s point of view. Shelley is an interesting addition to the mix. She is the only character with “some kind of future”; she is a creature made of “faith” and “hope” (it seems that “love” is conspicuously absent, perhaps only from Dodge’s vocabulary). So when she describes Vince’s quest, it is one made of stops at drive-ins and football fields, a nostalgic trip through pleasant memories. His violent re-emergence, that crash through the screen door, is all the more shocking after Shelley’s quiet innocence. With his return, Vince takes on his legacy, the house itself and the secrets buried around and within it. He also takes on its pain, thereby sending Shelley away.