SABBATH'S THEATER

“Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.” – first paragraph of Sabbath’s Theater

“And he couldn’t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.” – last paragraph of Sabbath’s Theater

In his National Book Award winning novel Sabbath’s Theater Philip Roth gives us a character with very little in the way of redeeming qualities. Roth’s reader cares about Ozzie or Zuckerman or Portnoy without having to be convinced. Sabbath, not so much. When I first bought Sabbath’s Theater, a group of friends had decided that we needed to have a book club where we read awesome new books. All of us were aspiring professional writers, and three out of four of us now teach college-level English, so we were not going to be put off by difficult text or characters. But then the group chose Sabbath. They stopped reading after a hundred pages. I did, also, but only because of peer pressure. Because, to be honest, I absolutely LOVE this book.

The question is, why would I (and the National Book Award committee) love this book? It, like most of Roth’s work, is a character study. And the character is horrid. But the world he sees – Sabbath’s ability to SEE, and to show the reader – that’s amazing. From the center of the novel:

[Sabbath] seated himself heavily on his haunches, pale, perspiring, breathless, while on her own Drenka took over the quest [to achieve thirteen orgasms in a row]. This was like nothing he had ever seen before. He thought, It’s as though she is wrestling with Destiny, or God, or Death; it’s as though, if only she can break through to yet one more, nothing and no one will ever stop her again. She looked to be in some transitional state between woman and goddess – he had the queer feeling of watching someone leaving this world. She was about to ascend, to ascend and ascend, trembling eternally in the ultimate, delirious thrill, but instead something stopped her and a year later she died.

Why does one woman love you madly when she swallows it and another hate your guts if you suggest she even try?

Wow. The sheer emotional intensity and beauty of this vision of Drenka – of “woman” in this powerful moment when she is celebrating life to its fullest. Then the shock of Sabbath’s crudity immediately following it. You want to share Sabbath’s vision – you want in his head – you want to see Drenka’s ascension – but you want to be able to jump out before he drops the next foul bombshell. And you can’t. You have to read every single word in Sabbath’s head. If you don’t, you fear you might miss the best ones.

The first line of the novel is a great example of what Roth does with the character through the entire book: “Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.” Here Roth gives us a character who would use the word “foreswear” in an actual sentence. But then to follow it with “fucking”! The way this line unfolds in the mind is nothing short of brilliant. As a single line, the sentence works poetically, unfolding verbal connections which the reader could not see coming. Yet when it becomes a complete line, the reader knows something valuable about the character telling us the tale. Much like Humbert Humbert’s first few lines ending with “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” Sabbath’s line here shows the reader how his brain works.

It is telling that in a posting about a whole novel I would choose to focus on only a few lines. The density of the prose – the density of Sabbath’s thoughts – demands such close scrutiny. Zuckerman’s mind is growing, changing; it isn’t so full to bursting. And Portnoy is simply yelling at the top of his lungs – the thoughts are all verbalized for Portnoy, and therefore they take longer to express (as all our verbal thoughts take longer to “say” than the ones in our heads). Sabbath lives inside his own head. The rest of the world is his puppet show. I’m reminded of the line from the film Slingblade: “That Frank, he lives inside of his own heart. That's an awful big place to live in.” Sabbath’s head is a huge place to live, containing the entire universe of human sexuality.

About midway through the novel, Roth presents the reader with a puzzler – in a footnote he includes a transcript of a telephone conversation recorded and then broadcast to the world. Introducing the conversation, Roth says that numerous people would simply stop what they were doing and listen to this conversation for half an hour. And in placing it entire in the novel, Roth only uses half the page for the footnote – the top of the page is still the novel. This goes on for twenty pages. The reader checks out of the novel for twenty pages to read this footnote. And there is nothing in it that hasn’t been explained in the novel, except that the footnote is pure, unadulterated, sex. Porn. Flagrant Penthouse Letters kind of porn. There’s the beauty of Roth’s creation of Sabbath: What kind of person would record this exchange? What kind of person would say the things he says during the conversation? Obviously the perverted kind. This kind of character must be someone desperate to live – desperate to celebrate life through the perversion of his sexuality. But who wants to experience such a life secondhand? The other characters must be just like who? You? The reader? Can’t you just hear Sabbath laughing at you as you flip back twenty pages to find your place again?

After all, didn’t you stop to read all twenty pages of the pornographic exchange?

I know I did.

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA

“Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.” – Tennessee Williams

Like Gwendolyn Brooks’ Negro Hero, Tennessee Williams' characters must define their own morality. Living in existential loneliness, each of Williams’ characters craves the temporary connections which life sometimes gives. Tom in Menagerie and Blanche in Streetcar never manage to make meaningful connects. Brick and Big Daddy and then Maggie seem to manage such moments in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but it is Hannah from The Night of the Iguana who perhaps defines the moment best:

HANNAH: No, I’m not hopeless…. In fact, I’ve discovered something to believe in.

SHANNON: Something like… God?

HANNAH: No.

SHANNON: What?

HANNAH: Broken gates between people so they can reach each other, even if it’s just for one night only…. One night… communication between them on a verandah outside their… separate cubicles…. A little understanding exchanged between them, a wanting to help each other through nights like this.

In a play with perhaps less meat to it than the other three Williams’ plays I discuss, he here gives us a character quite as broken as any other, but a character who knows something about the need for human connection. And when there is no longer a god for characters to believe in, what else is left but some human connection?

In Iguana, the viewer is presented with a broken man of faith surrounded by women – some of whom wish him well; some of whom wish him ill. Shannon’s faith has been tested and then lost – that is, his faith in humanity has been lost. However, he’s still trying hard to connect human to human: “I’ve always allowed the ones that were willing to see, to see!... and if they had hearts to be touched, feelings to feel with, I gave them a priceless chance to feel and be touched. And none will ever forget it, none of them, ever, never!” However, Shannon’s impassioned statement is made to a woman without such a heart – a woman who seeks his ruin.

Williams does this – has his characters explain themselves to others who cannot understand – precisely because such moments touch the audience so deeply. We know what it means to not be understood. And Williams knows that we know. Introducing the penguin edition of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Other Plays (which contains Iguana), Williams quotes an earlier statement of his regarding the connection between the playwright and the audience: “We come to each other, gradually, but with love…. With love and with honesty, the embrace is inevitable.” Williams believes in an intimate relationship between himself and his audience: “Their being strangers somehow makes them more familiar and more approachable, easier to talk to.” Clearly Williams sees his plays, his characters, as ways of crying out from his personal solitary cell to those other lonely prisoners in his audience trapped in their own cells for life.

With Shannon and Hannah and the rest of Iguana’s crowd, Williams gives his viewer several contradictory moral statements. And even a few amoral or perhaps nearly immoral ones. In the play there is no loving, caring god; there is no clear compass to salvation. Williams makes one moral path clear, however, and that is the statement of Hannah’s above: the only real thing to believe in is broken gates between people. The breaks are temporary – sometimes only for one night – but the connections are real. They are the modern substitution for a belief in some connection to a caring god in a world where such god is missing.

So, Menagerie and Streetcar present the loneliness of characters for whom the gates never seem to break – at least they don’t break for two characters at once like they do for Shannon and Hannah. Iguana gives a bit of hope for the love that can be found in such breaks, in the recognition of the humanity of another. But for me it is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that shows most powerfully how sublime is Williams personal lyricism as his characters cry out for honesty and love amidst a life of solitary confinement.

Missing few months

Sorry for the missing few months between May and September. I've been reading and reading and reading -- and I'm surrounded by books -- but I haven't been posting. I'm going to begin posting now and work diligently to get these posts up in the next few weeks. Doing the posting will help me remember the characters, plots, theories, and whatnot that make up the material I'll need when I sit for my exams.

Enjoy!

Brooks’ “Negro Hero”

“I loved. And a man will guard when he loves./ Their white gowned democracy was my fair lady./ With her knife lying cold, straight, in the softness of her sweet-flowing sleeve.”

Dorie Miller was a real war hero. Played by Cuba Gooding, Jr., he even makes an appearance as perhaps the best part of the terrible film Pearl Harbor. Undertrained and un-respected, Officer’s Cook Miller stood on the deck of a battleship and shot down a Japanese Zero during the attack on Pearl Harbor. After another three years of service as a cook, Miller died at sea. The Navy’s treatment of Miller was contentiously debated during the war. As a hero, he was sent on war bond tours, but when sent back to the front, it was as a cook rather than as a commissioned officer (like at least one similar white Pearl Harbor hero). Brooks poem “Negro Hero” assumes such knowledge. Or perhaps not. Maybe she really is writing about Jesus ;)

Brooks ends the later poem “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” with the line “The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.” And in “the white troops had their orders but the Negroes looked like men” from Gay Chaps at the Bar, Brooks recounts the ridiculousness of trying to separate the war-dead bodies by race before burial: “These Negroes looked like men.” “Negro Hero” predates these works, but the special question of identity faced by “Negroes” during World War II and afterwards is perhaps best examined in this homage to Dorie Miller wherein Brooks connects him with Christ.

Much like a woman or, more pointedly perhaps, a gay man, the hero of the poem must break military law in order to fight the enemy of Democracy. He is glad that he “gave glory,” otherwise he would have been crucified as a black man overstepping his boundaries. Now they praise him; “They are not concerned that it was hardly The Enemy my fight was against/ But them.” The hero is not fighting for the white men who judge his actions; instead, he’s fighting for democracy herself – and finding her knife in his back for his efforts. “Still – am I good enough to die for them, is my blood bright enough to be spilled,” was his question.

Brooks answer:

(In a southern city a white man said

Indeed I’d rather be dead;

Indeed, I’d rather be shot in the head

Or ridden to waste of the back of a flood

Than saved by the drop of a black man’s blood.)

For the hero here, “the important thing is, I help to save them, them and a part of their democracy.” But is that the important thing? Isn’t it, in fact, perhaps more important that his identity. Like the Navajo Code Talkers on Iwo Jima or the Pima Indian Ira Hayes who helped raise the flag there, Miller is considered both an enemy of the U. S. and a hero. Such a split identity is difficult to maintain. How can he fight for the very idea of democracy which he is denied. Like Christ, the hero Miller has to judge himself. He is the only one who can really determine if his sacrifice for democracy is worthy the cost. “And I am feeling well and settled in myself because I believe it was a good job.” Here the hero shows that only his personal judgment can matter in a world where no outside judgment makes moral sense. But the hero ends the poem still worried about the souls of those he saved: would they really prefer the preservation of their prejudiced hatred “To the continuation of their creed/ And their lives”?

What Brooks gives us with the hero is an example of a character who must define his own morality. Like Roth’s Ozzie, the hero is good. He asks the questions that make it clear he knows what “good” means. However, like Ozzie, he will be damned by those outside his experience. Such damning is similar to that of Blanche DuBois or Maggie the Cat in Williams’ plays. Not to bring Nietzsche in here, but these characters really do exist in narratives which go beyond any clear notions of good and evil. In such a world, only the individual can decide morality.

Gwendolyn Brooks’ “the mother”

The problem with trying to write about a book of poetry is the approach. Do you write about one poem? Five? Ten? The so-called themes of the entire life-long collection? I really have no idea, but I do know I can’t do justice to much more than a couple of poems at any one time, so here goes:

“Believe me, I loved you all./ Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I love, I love you/ All.”

The poems are Gwendolyn Brooks are disturbing – some are funny the way Dave Chappell is funny: you know that when you laugh you are really the butt of the joke. And some are bothersome because they challenge you to call your own moral assumptions into question. And some are irritating because you want to rail against the injustice of it all. And a few are almost too sad for words.

“the mother” is almost too sad for words. Here is a poem specifically questioning identity creation through roles. The mother is an archetypal figure who births and then cares for her young and by extension the rest of the world. Brooks’ narrator – being childless – is not this archetypal mother, though it is the role by which she judges herself. In the poem, the mother has aborted her children and is haunted by these abortions: “I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.” These children haunt her because she never became that which the archetype (and the title) demands. How can she possibly be a mother when she chose to abort her children? But how can she not? “…how is the truth to be said?/ You were born, you had body, you died./ It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.”

These children missed life because the mother “stole” them: “Your stilted and lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths.” Her moral judgment is clear. She damns her decisions with her own guilt. But how can she be damned? She “was not deliberate”; she never intended pain. And it is only she who has pain. Finally, the reader cannot bear to judge her when he sees how harshly she judges herself, and the reader is very relieved to hear that even the mother has a defense against her own harsh judgment: she loved them all. And, ultimately, isn’t the love for her children the basic foundation of any mother?

Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews”

“A question shot through his brain. ‘Can this me me?’ For a thirteen-year-old who had just labeled his religious leader a bastard, twice, it was not an improper question. Louder and louder the question came to him – ‘Is it me? It is me?’… ‘Is it me? Is it me Me ME ME ME! It has to be me – but is it!’”

If you know anything at all about Philip Roth, you know that his stories are brilliant. Surely they are blasphemous, they undermine all the conventions of religious and conventional moralities, and they have lots of issues with semi-rebellious men, but WOW! Brilliant.

Before we get into Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer, I’m going to take a look at how his prose works in connection with the modern crisis of identity we’ve seen in Nabokov and Williams. Roth’s story “The Conversion of the Jews” is a good place to start because it specifically concerns itself with that moment when a boy becomes a man, refusing any longer to accept the limits placed on him by the adults who had previously controlled his life (but perhaps not yet realizing that he needs to beware of his own limits as well).

Sartre tell us that his “duty as an intellectual is to think, to think without restriction, even at the risk of blundering. I must set no limits within myself, and I must let no limits be set for me.” Ozzie is now learning that the limits set by others will be consistently wrong for him. He is a good boy, and the reader knows this because Ozzie asks good questions, and he seeks to learn. When the rabbi tries to get him to speed up his Hebrew reading, for instance, “Ozzie said he could read faster but that if he did he was sure not to understand what he was reading.” He asks, as a response to this rabbi, why he would ever seek to limit the power of God: “Why can’t He make anything He wants to make!”… “You don’t know! You don’t know anything about God!” In true existential fashion, Ozzie stands alone in his realization.

Here we see Sartre in Roth: the existential dilemma ending in the realization that “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on Earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this Earth.” I don’t connect the two thinkers lightly. I would not understand Roth as anything except a talented, foul-mouthed wit (as I would similarly not understand Salinger or Mamet) without seeing that Portnoy, Zuckerman, or Sabbath are always trying to reconcile their life experiences with the limits society has placed on and inside them. And it is only when these men become heroic deniers of such limits that they reach anything like their full potentials. However, Roth doesn’t give anyone characters to follow. We shouldn’t want to be Ozzie or Sabbath. Roth’s men are never going to be better than his readers. And there’s the key: Even the reader needs to look inside himself in order to find his personal aim.

What Ozzie discovers is that being good is only possible when one judges oneself as good. Here I’m reminded of the ending of Joyce’s “The Dead.” Gabriel is clearly a “good” husband, as society would judge such things, and Gabriel is very conscious of society’s judgment. But he realizes that he has failed in the role because he knew that he “had never felt that way about any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.” When Gabriel realizes his own shortcoming, he is saddened by it, but he has become himself in this moment BECAUSE he has become his own judge. In Ozzie Roth has created a character who looks outside himself for religious answers and realizes that such answers aren’t to be found outside. Then he finds the answer in the midst of a crisis of identity, and the answer was his all along. He exclaims, “Mamma, don’t you see – you shouldn’t hit me. He shouldn’t hit me. You shouldn’t hit me about God, Mamma. You should never hit anybody about God—…. Promise me, promise me you’ll never hit anybody about God.”

Of course, Roth’s readers know that as soon the rabbi or his mother (both of whom are physically abusive in the story) get their hands on Ozzie, he will be hit. But that violence doesn’t matter now. Or, better, it matters AFTER the story ends because the reader understands that Ozzie’s epiphany is his armor. Now at thirteen, Ozzie knows that he is alone in this world, and it is that fact of being alone which will empower him to be totally himself. This is Huckleberry Finn refusing to turn in Jim: “Alright, then, I’ll go to hell!” and it’s John Prentice dismissing his father: “Got take care of my mother. I’ve got a decision to make, and I’ve got to make it in a hurry.” And Roth ends with Ozzie coming down to be with the people again, but now “into the center of the yellow net that glowed in the evening’s edge like an overgrown halo.” He is saved by his own realization of being alone.

PNIN

“Some people – and I am one of them – hate happy ends. We feel cheated…. Had I been reading about this mild old man, instead of writing about him, I would have preferred him…” – Nabokov as narrator of Pnin.

When I discovered that Pnin was Zadie Smith’s favorite book (or a favorite, at least), I was quite surprised. I had not heard that Nabokov’s little novel was anything special. But then, Zadie Smith is quite special, so…. I put Pnin front and center on my readings. Then I started reading it and got a bit confused again. I mean, the opening is kind of humorous. A bit too cute, maybe, with the slapstick comedy of Professor Pnin losing his way, boarding the wrong train, losing touch with his luggage, abandoning a bus, and lurching to a stop in the street while his heart beats itself silly. But then a funny thing happened. Some ridiculous narrator interrupted the story. And the novel began.

Pnin is not about Professor Pnin and his rather boring current life at a fake college, or at least not mostly about him, although the text itself is rather burdened with all the details of that life. Instead, the novel is a mystery. And the mystery is the narrator. This guy has the audacity to interrupt the story every few pages with unnecessary quips about how he doesn’t like happy endings – as if he isn’t the one presenting us with the current narrative. And he insinuates himself into the narrative as Pnin’s friend – doubtful from the first moment it is stated. Why do we doubt the narrator’s statements? Because he knows too much about Pnin from the inside. Too much about his mind, imagination, dreams. No actual “friend” would know these things.

So, irony: We find an unreliable narrator because the narrator knows too much about the story.

And then he admits to being unreliable when he assures us that narrators have a difficult time with telephone dialog or when he says he doesn’t know if Victor loves anyone. But blast it all, who is this man? The knee-jerk reaction – and certainly one not to be trusted – is that the narrator is Nabokov. After all, he’s the guy writing the book. But Nabokov wouldn’t narrate the novel, would he. At least, if he did surely he would know the things he seems not to know, or he would create the endings he would want or he would merely paraphrase some telephone dialog rather than admit a shortcoming, right? And so, knowing that the narrator couldn’t be the author, we are left with the mystery.

The mystery is answered, however. It turns out that Mr. Nabokov – an expert in butterflies as well as English – is, indeed, the narrator. And Pnin doesn’t seem to like him very much.

What?

But isn’t Pnin just a character? Isn’t Waindell a fictional school? And Liza and Victor, they’re just types, right? If it’s all fiction – and Nabokov warns us that we should never desire truth in our fiction – then who is the narrator? And how, by the final chapter, does the narrator take over the action of the story and become the central character.

Nabokov uses Pnin to test his ideas about realism in literature. Here we are reminded of Williams admonition that the unconventional is used to give “a closer approach to the truth.” The narrator is certainly unconventional, but what is Nabokov’s truth? There doesn’t seem to be one. Instead, the novel works as the kind of puzzle which needs rereading. As he tells us in his initial lecture, only in rereading a great work can you see how it’s put together. It is the rereading that shows the structure. And Pnin has a great structure. Everything that happens in the narrative is mundane, while the past of Pnin, his ex-wife, the narrator, etc. all seems so glorious and melodramatic.

Nabokov – and the novel does tell us that the narrator is Nabokov – shows off a tremendous recall ability, even bragging about “the unusual lucidity and strength of my memory”; yet Pnin distrusts this memory. He even argues that Nabokov gets some of the basics of the story wrong. How can we trust a narrator who tells us how good his memory is when his main character is showing us its faults? Too fun!

The tongue-in-cheek nature of the mystery of the narrator is great, but Pnin is not a novel built on a punch line. Such does not account for the vision of the narrator as he describes a puddle: “It was a pity no one saw the display in the empty street, where the auroral breeze wrinkled a large luminous puddle, making of the telephone wires reflected in it illegible lines of black zigzags.” Beautiful writing which draws our attention to a detail that neither Pnin nor Nabokov could have seen. So, who is this narrator? Obviously we can’t trust the bastard.

And then we have Zadie Smith’s favorite line: “The comb, stood on end, resulted in the glass’s seeming to fill with beautifully striped liquid, a zebra cocktail.” (Smith says she read the novel a number of times before actually checking to see if the trick worked, which, of course, it did.) This zebra cocktail could only ever be known to Victor. It was done before he met Pnin (and he never meets the narrator), yet it is described with perfect knowledge. How?

Clearly Nabokov sets up his reader with the expected idea of a reliable omniscient narrator. Then he undermines such omniscience by having the narrator doubt his own knowledge. I.e. how could the narrator know about Victor’s comb but not know whether the boy loved anyone. But then, as the novel enters the final third, Nabokov completely disrupts the whole idea of the narrator by having him become a character in the novel. In the final chapter, the narrator has become the English professor whose appointment drives mild-mannered Pnin right out of town. And, in the final line, the novel comes full circle as the story which begins chapter 1 starts again from another point-of-view.

If we are looking at Pnin in order to investigate how Nabokov plays with the modern notion of fractured personal identity, then we have some seriously fertile ground. The character Pnin is wonderful all by himself to deconstruct: a old fuddy-duddy with a history of a great (if one-sided) love and a tendency toward goodness only challenged by bungling librarians, it seems. However, Pnin isn’t important here. Let’s not fool ourselves. Only Nabokov really matters. But who is he? Surely he isn’t the author. He’s a character. But sometimes he’s also the author, right? And how can we know the difference? Is there a difference? Nailing down the character/ narrator/ author Nabokov in Pnin is like trying to figure out exactly who/ what Godot is: we can wait a lifetime, but it isn't going to help.

And there is the beauty of the novel. It isn’t truth. It isn’t a satire on the American college scene (as the dust jacket claims). Rather, it is a study in creation. How close can an author be to a text without making the text “true”? Even if he’s inside it, Nabokov shows us, it’s still only ever going to be fiction.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

“There isn’t a goddam thing but imagination!... And lies and conceit and tricks!”

We can hardly imagine A Streetcar Named Desire divorced from the powerful acting of Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. Brando’s sexy bravado mixed with his dangerous leer and, particularly, his yells of “Stella!” are required viewing in any acting class. However, neither performer could have managed the depth and nuance of these performances without the complicated characters created by Tennessee Williams. Like in Menagerie, Williams creates a small group of characters and then beats them against one another – in Streetcar the beating is just a lot more forceful.

Streetcar traces the “lies and conceit and tricks” of Blanche DuBois as she moves from doting to flirting to loving to hating before her final dive first into honesty (with Mitch) and then into insanity (after being raped). The rape of Blanche DuBois is so disturbing because of the way Williams sets up the reader to judge her (as Mitch does) as an undeserving slut. Stanley’s violent attack of her, and subsequent rape, would normally provoke nothing but hatred of him and sorrow for her in the reader. Yet, Williams has created in Blanche a mockery of humanity. She is certainly someone to pity while Stanley is someone to hate, but neither of them is likeable.

As Nabokov tells us, we shouldn’t identify with either character in the play; however, Williams does want us to judge his characters. And not as real people, but as part of his move toward a society based in mendacity where characters like Blanche, Amanda, and Cat act out the choices such women are given in a society dominated by patriarchal demands for women to embody the Madonna/whore dichotomy. The sexuality of Blanche is particularly problematic because we learn in the play that she has used men for her own advantage – even so far as to have sex with a boy – an illegal (and immoral?) act which seems to be the primary root of her current problems.

So, with Blanche the reader gets a character – a woman – who is both the victim of her society’s abuse of women and an abuser herself. Clearly there is no absolute good or bad in her. The reader is bothered at her attempts to deceive Mitch – but understands that the truth about her age or sexual history can only undermine the security of the life she wishes with him. Would you tell her to lie? If she were your friend you might. And if you were Mitch’s friend you might uncover her lies as Stanley does. There is no absolute morality here, but there is morality.

In “Why the Novel Matters,” D. H. Lawrence claims, “In life, there is right and wrong, good and bad, all the time. But what is right in one case is wrong in another…. Right and wrong is an instinct: but an instinct of the whole consciousness in a man, bodily, mental, spiritual at once. And only in the novel are all things given full play, or at least, they may be given full play, when we realize that life itself, and not inert safety, is the reason for living.” Blanche wants to live. As does Stanley. Streetcar doesn’t have room for them both. In the so-called real world, we can find no excuse for Stanley’s rape of Blanche. In Williams’ play we can see that it has to happen from the very first scene. And we also understand why it must be denied:

Stella: “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley.”

Eunice: “Don’t ever believe it. Life has got to go on. No matter what happens, you’ve got to keep on going.”

Eunice must mean that only through imagination – through “lies and conceit and tricks” – are humans even able to go on living. That’s a dark truth, but one recognized by any Existentialist. We are here. We are each alone. No one and nothing cares, ultimately. Now, lie to yourself and convince yourself that life does have meaning. It does, but only once you’ve managed to imagine it.

THE GLASS MENAGERIE

“Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth…. [Unconventional drama] should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are…. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation.” – Tennessee Williams

To give Nabokov a break before diving into the novels, let’s take a look at a couple of Tennessee Williams’ plays, beginning with The Glass Menagerie. Here we are given four Williams’ characters with which he seeks to give “a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are” mainly by holing the characters and audience up in a claustrophobic apartment and forcing all of them to listen to the matriarch Amanda.

Amanda is not morally bad or morally good – are any of Williams’ characters so simply defined? She certainly is overbearing, however. For instance, when she discovers that Laura has been skipping school, she enters the room chanting “Deception? Deception?” – the kind of repetition that Williams uses again with “Stella” and “Mendacity” to focus the audience’s attention on something resembling a message. But Laura’s deception is so mild compared to that Tom is planning – he’ll abandon mother and sister to chase his dreams. Is that good? Bad? Who knows. But who would ever ask him to talk with Amanda about it.

Although Williams gives us characters without clearly judging them himself, he certainly expects our judgment. In Menagerie, he uses Jim – good, honest Jim to caution his reader against these judgments he expects: “People are not so dreadful when you know them. That’s what you have to remember! And everybody has problems, not just you, but practically everybody has got some problems.” And surely Laura, Tom, and Amanda do have problems. Jim actually seems void of them, but he does kiss Laura – maybe that’s a step too far? He certainly thinks it is.

Perhaps what we get most clearly from Menagerie is a clear statement of the Modern idea (here from D. H. Lawrence’s “Why the Novel Matters”) that “There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute. The whole is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts, slipping past one another.” We see this lack of absolute morality repeated in each of Williams’ plays. Like Philip Roth, Williams seems to find truth in the lived experience of the life of his characters – but that life is actually what he calls transformation. With Amanda or Laura or Tom (or Stanley or Cat), we are given compressed types. The characters virtually explode with all that they contain about the truth of humanity, yet it is like Lawrence suggests: never absolutely true.

But still we must believe in ourselves or we disappear (like Stella). In Menagerie, Jim says, “You know what my strong advice to you is? Think of yourself as superior in some way!... Why, man alive Laura! Just look about you a little. What do you see? A world full of common people!... Which of them has one-tenth of your good points! Or mine! Or anyone else’s…. Everybody excels in some one thing…. All you’ve got to do is discover in what!” Again, this is a Williams’ truth highlighted by the artificial compression of a conversation that simply wouldn’t take place. (Like his followers David Mamet or Tony Kushner, Williams has a way of creating false language and making it seem real.)

I think the key to Menagerie is the “closer approach” which Williams uses literally. Here he focuses on his characters with a microscope and, as in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or A Streetcar Named Desire, he locks his characters in a single apartment or house and beats them against each other to see what kinds of fires the sparks will start. And they are such fun fires.

“Good Writers and Good Readers” 2: “Fiction is Fiction”

"Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature.... The writer of fiction only follows Nature's lead." -- Nabokov

In order for a reader to really appreciate a great novel, the reader needs to cultivate a mind capable of that appreciation: “the best temperament for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one.” Such a temperament will provide a reader with the tools to appreciate the art of the author and to aid in the creation of the novel in the imagination.

A writer can approach his/her craft in three ways: “as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter.” Obviously many readers turn to a storyteller for entertainment. And the laughter that accompanies a reading of Portnoy’s Complaint or shares the joy of Pnin’s new teeth are good examples. Teaching is also valuable, of course, as the reader learns much about puppet theater from Sabbath or about Middle Class American values from Humbert Humbert. But Nabokov is correct to really look for the enchanter in his authors: “it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the patter of his novels or poems.”

Nabokov looks to Ulysses as a great enchantment in his lectures. Reading Zuckerman Bound, you also see such enchantment. Roth gives us a simple story about a simple guy with regular ideas and ideals but where “the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story.” Such magic is key to modern drama, I would argue. What is there in Death of a Salesman, Glenngary Glen Ross, or Fences that is anything other than ordinary? Yet the experience of these works is, like the life of poor Prufrock, moving in its mundanity.

The plays of Tennessee Williams work to highlight such a magic of art shared by author and viewer/reader as a creative act. The wave-like structure of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or the way tension builds like the construction of a brick wall in A Streetcar Named Desire can only work if the reader is willing and able to be enchanted. But perhaps the best example of such enchantment is when the reader is willing – eager, even – to understand the story of a pedophile “with a fancy prose style” in Lolita.

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It is unarguable that Nabokov expects a great deal from readers. He demands attention, close reading, even a bit of detective work. And he repays these efforts with moments of powerful emotion (yes, emotion) – the great tingling at the top of the spine that signifies when all the mind is engaged in the magic of the art. Such a moment happens when reading Sophie’s Choice. Styron opens the book with Stingo, a narrator who, like Sabbath or Portnoy, spends an awful lot of time focused on masturbation. Getting into the novel, however, the reader finds Sophie, and her heartache is palpable. And finally, after the reader is well past Stingo’s crusty pillow, Styron hits the reader with Sophie arriving at the concentration camp, with her choice. And the reader’s world ends. Completely.

That is a perfect moment of art.

"Good Writers and Good Readers"

"What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books" -- Flaubert

It was just over a year ago that I first read Nabokov's introductory lecture "Good Writers and Good Readers" from his Lectures on Literature. This lecture was meant to be the first reading I completed for a directed reading in Modernism and Identity in 20th Century American Literature. I was also planning to post on it over a year ago. But then my health had other plans. Now, finally, I'm getting the posting up.

In this first lecture, Nabokov defines great readers and great writers:

• The great reader is a rereader. Because the first reading of a book must be linear, it is only on second or third reading that the writer really understands the structure of the work (and hence the genius of it).
• The mind is the only part of the reader that should come to bear on a book. Avoid bringing emotion or connection to your reading, but bring imagination. Disbelief must be suspended .
• Never identify with a character!: “this is the worst thing a reader can do.”
• “What should be established… is a harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind.”
• “Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective.”

And what do I think of Nabokov’s reader? I agree with him, for the most part. Surely rereading a great work is important, and without a willing imagination, how could the reader ever appreciate the author’s art as creation. I also agree that bringing to much personal emotion to a book can damage one’s appreciation – how could the sexually molested girl ever read Lolita with an appreciation for its artistic prose? To be contrary, I do see value in identifying with a reader when that identification is part of what the author asks of the reader (such as in Salinger’s work – the identification with Franny is especially important to really understand how the conversation with Zooey works). However, only a masochistic reader would seek to identify with most of Roth’s characters, or with Nabokov’s own Pnin, Humbert Humbert, or Lolita herself.

What I find most valuable about Nabokov’s injunction for the reader is his insistence on the creative act as a joint act between the reader and the author. The basic rhetorical triangle suggests this approach, but many literary critics want to either divorce the work from the author or from the reader or, god-forbid, from both. Still, Nabokov is not suggesting that his biography is what matters when one reads Pnin; rather, the balance between the author and reader is one of the creative act of the mind. To really “get” a work, the reader must attempt to share in the author’s experience of creating it – to see “how it works” – something akin to an art student spending hours copying a Van Gogh to better understand the master’s brushstrokes.

Purpose of My Readings

Here begins my blogging about what I'm reading and studying for my comprehensive exams (PhD in English Literature) and what I'm discovering in my research.

My initial focus is on how identity is created in 20th Century Anglophone (mainly American) writing (fiction, poetry, drama, and even a bit of non-fiction). I'm beginning with some work on Nabokov, Tennessee Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, H. D., and Philip Roth. I'm going to work on trying to tie these disparate authors together by focusing on how they create and undermine character identity -- and I'm going to try to remember that they are writing about characters (and not themselves), even when those characters are based on real people.

Wish me luck.