Mary Cassatt

Baby's First Caress, Mary Cassatt (1891)

"The truth is that our value lies in feeling, in intuition, in our vision that is subtler than that of men and we can accomplish a great deal provided that affectation, pedantry, and sentimentalism do not come to spoil everything." - Berthe Morisot to Mary Cassatt

Over the last few years I have become immensely fond of books that focus on a single artist.  While there is something exhilarating in the grand sweep of an intellectual tradition, it has become a firm belief of mine that to truly understand any person of note you must have a chronology of their work, sampled across its various phases.  No great artist or thinker ever stands still, and neither an average nor their mature efforts alone will give a true accounting of their deepest nature.  And so it has become that I do not so much read novels as read authors, not so much view masterpiece paintings as masterful artists in their entirety.  I wish to benefit from their vision, not just admire its results.

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) has been on my radar since attending an exhibit on American artists in France a few years ago at the Denver Art Museum.  She immediately stood out for pictures like the one that head this post: images of mothers and children together, portrayed in ways that were often not flattering yet very moving:

Mother and Child (c1890)

What may not stand out immediately to many viewers, but which struck me strongly, is that the children look right for once.  It takes some context to appreciate this.  Take this Madonna by Raphael for instance:

Madonna del Granduca, Raphael (1507)

It's one of his well-known masterpieces but the baby... it's just not quite right.  The chubbiness is well-observed but the attitude is not.  The placement of the hand is too firm, and the face too full of awareness, for it to be quite right; there is, in essence, a lack of the spontaneity and thoughtlessness that comprises the nature of a young child.  It is still the psychology of an adult scaled down.  It could be argued that much of this is intentional given the subject matter, but you'll find no better treatment in all of Western art; babies and young children may be accurately rendered, but even if they look like an approximation they don't feel like one.  This is where Cassatt shone to me, and after having become quite inured to this state of things over the years, seeing an artist blow this all away made me realize what had been lacking.  When a book on Cassatt showed up at my local used book store it swiftly joined my collection, and having read it I am of the opinion that she is truly the greatest artist in history at her niche, but that she was held back by her intentions rather than aided by them.

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First to start with context: Cassatt was an expat on a mission.  She was born in the US but moved to France early in her adult life.  This was in part due to America being an artistic backwater and in part because France was (a little more) tolerant of women with ambitions.  This latter aspect was a defining mark of her personality: she was a feminist, and felt a proper indignation at the expectation that she do nothing more with her life than make the existence of a husband's more pleasant (Cassatt never married).  Above everything, then, she was driven to show that she could perform at the highest levels, as well as any man could, and by extension to prove her and all women's worthiness to engage in art.  Take this mid-career piece:

In the Loge (1879)

It rather strikes me as a projection of herself as she wishes to be viewed: a serious, intelligent woman who is a consumer of the arts.  She is the focus of the painting not because of her appearance but because of her engagements.  It is with no small amount of spite that Cassatt includes a man comically posed in the background, peering at her through his eyeglasses; a buffoon who in his gawking does not appreciate the gravitas of this woman.

...and yet, I find myself put off by the picture.  It is a bit too posed, and in her emphatic depiction Cassatt has made her figure too "hard"; rather than being led to the vision I crash into it and capsize.  It is a case where I feel a painting has strayed from expression to manifesto.  That is, Cassatt is not so much painting what she deeply feels and believes, which is the wellspring for all great art, but merely what she has consciously decided upon and is trying to prove to us.  It reminds me of a line in Thomas Merton's autobiography, that "...my attitude and my desire of argument [at the time]... implied a fundamental and utter lack of faith... and attachment to my own opinion."  Cassatt is being combative, putting up a fine front for her contemporaries but in doing so hinting at a need in her character.  She is not so certain as she would like to project.

Now, during her time in Europe Cassatt did not merely stay in France.  She first went to Spain and was influenced greatly by the works she saw there, absorbing and reproducing some of their color and realism.  Later she also visited Italy and was swayed by some of the late Renaissance masters with their line and form.  But it is with the Impressionists that she is chiefly associated.  They were the avant garde in Paris at the time, the rule-breakers, the disruptors, the ones talking about freedom from the oppression of imitation and tradition.  It is obvious to see why she would be attracted to them.  As such, she also picked up their techniques and produced a few nice paintings in that style:

Poppies in a Field (1875)

I find this painting quite pleasant, more so in my book than this digital reproduction.  Cassatt has chosen one of the standard set pieces of the Impressionists, a flower field, that allows her to show off the style's strengths of bright light and flecks of color.  And yet, what is most delightful about the image is not the poppies but the child.  Rendered with remarkable simplicity, Cassatt has yet conveyed that simple squat of interest.  They've seen something on the ground and want to have a look at it, or are maybe just gathering some grass together for a bouquet.  It is rather the inverse of the usual Impressionist purpose: the flowers and their color are not the emphasis, but merely an encircling structure that directs our attention to the painting's true focus.  

Which, on the topic of Impressionism and style, we must now come to Degas.  Of all the unlikely pairings, Cassatt was attracted to Degas and was his protege until he died.  It is a bizarre match that I can somewhat understand yet still find completely baffling.  Degas was the most intellectual of the Impressionists and constructed his canvases with a Classical finality that many of the movement were actively working to shake off.  This seems to have appealed to Cassatt.  Yet I can tell you that if he was not downright misogynistic, his attitude toward women was not positive or even quite normal:

The Rehearsal on Stage, Degas (1874)

When I look at a Degas painting like the one above I can see how he has posed the figures, how he has used the female form as a wonderful tool to model the poses and their structure.  Yet they look ghoulish to me, without an inner light of life; the glow that a man would normally get from observing women dancing gracefully is lacking.  As he is famous for saying, his primary interest in painting was "rendering movement and painting pretty clothes"; the females themselves seem to offer not the slightest interest to his senses.  Or take one of his nudes:

The Tub, Degas (1886)

"Women can never forgive me. They hate me, they can feel that I 'm disarming them. I show them without their coquetry, in the states of animals cleaning themselves..."

The image and the statement concur: whatever his reasons for primarily painting the opposite sex it is not due to an overflow of positive sentiment.  Yet for some reason, this is the man that Cassatt's opinions were enthralled to.  And I do mean enthralled.  Take this story relayed by a mutual friend:

The story is that one day, in front of Degas, Miss Cassatt in assessing a well known painter of their acquaintance dared to say: "He lacks style."  At which Degas began to laugh, shrugging his shoulders as if to say: These meddling women who set themselves up as judges!  What do they know about style?

This made Miss Cassatt angry.  She went out and engaged a model who was extremely ugly, a servant-type of the most vulgar kind.  She had her pose in a robe next to her dressing-table, with her left hand at the nape of her neck holding her meagre tresses while she combed them with her right, in the manner of a woman preparing for bed.  The model is seen almost entirely in profile.  Her mouth hangs open.  Her expression is weary and stupid.

When Degas saw the painting, he wrote to Miss Cassatt: What drawing! What style!

And here it is:

Girl Arranging Her Hair (1886)

Once again, Cassatt needs to argue something, and the result is not conviction but petulance.  His comments enraged her and so she needed to show him that she did have a sense of style, doing so in Degas' own language by producing a Classical pose that would not look out of place on a Venus or undine.  But then Cassatt must also go further: and look how this motif can be done without the normal attractions of a female as well!  She can not just produce a stylish image but do so with an ugly girl, and so emancipate the judgement from any consideration other than that of picture making.  The author of my book tried valiantly to put this in the light of enlightened righteousness, but seeing these and other episodes crop up repeatedly rather gave the impression that Cassatt doth protest too much.  She can paint, there is no doubt about that, but she is still not painting from her core here.  Her uncertainty continues to try to prove itself.

Now, my intent with this is not to skewer Cassatt's character but to make sense of her artistic oddities.  While I mentioned above that she fell in with the Impressionists the truth is that she went through quite a few styles, before and after, such that to the end of her career she pursued new techniques to master.  Impressionism for her was a phase, a toolkit, but not a reason.  If I might make another demonstration of this, let us take one of my favorite paintings of Cassatt's:

Lydia at the Loom (c1881)

Here she has made ample use of the sketchiness which Impressionism was known for yet all it truly does is serve to focus our attention on the head.  Lydia was Cassatt's sister and she loved her dearly; when Lydia passed away (she had always been sickly), all painting ceased for at least a year.  So here is Lydia, just Lydia, observed with a sister's love, the person and the expression captured in painted memory.  The rest is window dressing, and concentrating too long on the lines of the loom or the lower parts of the dress detract from the impact rather than heighten it (though it should be noted that the loom does marvelously help structure the image, bracketing the area with the head and then sloping on the side with the shoulder).  Like with Poppies in a Field above, even if the style came from the Impressionists the motive for painting does not.  Cassatt was only with them because they were young rebels challenging the status quo, like she thought of herself, and she used their techniques to fit in with her social group and, as always, to show off that she could.  But she never did deeply adopt the reason for their art, and when it comes to Lydia's face, the part Cassatt cares about most, it is formed with a precision that is at odds with the rest of the image.

This, then, I feel, is the great weakness of much of Cassatt's art: her technique, her message, and her essence are not in alignment.  She was fundamentally divided within herself, and her motive for doing much of what she did appears to have been no more than a need to prove that she could.  It is as I once said of the anime series Hyouka:

What I was watching, despite the pretense otherwise, was not a story about talent and the growth pains of adolescence but KyoAni's [the animation studio] demonstration of its own prowess.  In other words, Hyouka isn't burning with a desire to say anything in particular, but it is passionate about saying it well.

When Cassatt was trying to show off, which she did an inordinate amount of the time, it was something of a waste.  Such an impulse can provide motivation, but I do not believe that it alone can bring forth great art, and with Cassatt always looking over her shoulder she was bound to produce many works of self-conscious mediocrity.  Yet even from the beginning when she let herself free to speak on that which she felt most tenderly, she excelled:

Reading La Figaro (1878)
(I had to take the picture from my book; the online versions are atrocious)

Here is Cassatt's mother reading the newspaper.  I feel like I am looking at my own mother; if not in exact appearance, yet nonetheless observed with a love for the wrinkles, the slight jowls, and the way the neck meets the chin in an older woman.  She's no longer beautiful in a traditional sense, but that is utterly swept aside in the face of what she means [1].  Or even take a more standard beauty:

Young Woman Sewing in the Garden (c1881)

It is of their maid, and what a lovely piece it is.  It immediately strikes one as being "right".  Our attention goes to the face, where it should be, and the structure underscores this with the colored triangle of the body clearly leading to it with the background forming a frame.  The lightness of the strokes in the folliage match the beautiful flow of her dress.  Everything is aligned and the painting is in harmony.  Even if it is helped along by the attractiveness of the girl, its appeal exists separate of this, and thereby embodies a far more mature statement than Girl Arranging Her Hair ever can.  This only happens when Cassatt forgets what she's trying to say and just speaks instead.  Which, if my examples have not made obvious, I believe is when she is portraying women in traditional, domestic scenes.

This seems to me to be the reason for the lack of alignment in so much of Cassatt's art.  Her ideal was to forge an image of women that was outside of the home, yet the gift she was given was an exquisite sensitivity to the traits of her own sex which have made them the cradle of society.  Indeed, one of the greatest insights I have gained from Cassatt is from how she conveys these other women.  In the history of art one predominantly finds women in two forms: the beauty and the hag.  But these are of course all painted by men, for men, and in the male mind "hot or not" is an innate distinction.  Cassatt's women are rendered with feeling, unlike Degas', but this feeling is not dependent upon their attractiveness:

The Dress Fitting (c1891)

Here the main woman is not a beauty, but she's not ugly either.  She just has human features, one of the many variations that one will find out there amongst the populace, with no impulse to massage them to an ideal (it is also in a consciously Japanese style, yet another thing Cassatt dabbled in, imitated effectively, but I don't believe ever got the essence of).  You can scroll back through all these images and see just how sincerely Cassatt has observed other women as people.  Which is why when she finally brought the women and children together late in her career she was able to draw on her full powers, but not before she overcame a few hurdles.

As Morisot warned her in the quote I used at the top, the danger of gentle, feminine feeling is sentimentality.  If Cassatt's women are tempered by a lack of male-like attraction, her womanly feeling toward children was at perilous risk of ruining the subject.  Take this work for instance:

At the Beach (1884)

It's the sort of painting that you'd put on a postcard for your grandma.  Cassatt has the pudgy little arms and face down, but there's nothing else to do but d'awww at the image (also again notice the shift between the loose background, which is merely an afterthought, and the more clearly-delineated subjects that Cassatt truly cares about).  Or this one, which is even more saccharine:

The Sisters (1885)

We've strayed into sticky-honey-sweet territory now, the girls staring up with a simultaneous impulse to convey cuteness, vulnerability, and affection.  It's everything you'd want out of little girls and when concentrated this way it just becomes gaggy.  Alone, children in Cassatt's hands are just too much of a trap.  But somewhere along the way she had the idea, probably against all of her conscious inclinations, to portray these children with their mothers, the ultimate expression of the female domestic role, and unfortunately for her ideology the result is extraordinarily meaningful:

Young Mother Sewing (1890)

Here is a woman observed as a person, just as she is, engaged in one of the many tasks which make up her life, and the child is no longer emotional flypaper.  Their relationship is immediately clear without pandering, and all the skills of composition and style that Cassatt had mastered serve a purpose [2].  Or, to link the header image again:

Baby's First Caress (1891)

Here is simply a mother with her child.  She is not particularly pretty and he is not particularly adorable.  The child does not gently caress the face but positively squishes his mother's lips and chin in his fumbling grasp.  But she doesn't mind, and even smiles a little bit, kissing that hand back because it is just so precious to her.  Nothing is mocked up and that is why it is perfect.  

This, to my mind, is something new in Western visual art: average motherhood as meaningful but not heroic.  There had been thousands of Madonna-and-Childs before Cassatt, of course, but these were necessarily so elevated as to be ideal.  Without a belief in the Great Christian Drama to support them, few of these paintings are humanly moving.  Which also resulted in a kind of tacit depreciation, for without the great drama motherhood fell far below the level of heroic meaning.  It was just something women did, for which we were fond of our mothers for, but which we were also to grow out of [3].  

"It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs." - Far from the Madding Crowd

Ironically, the quote above was written by Thomas Hardy (a man), but I can't help but think it was expressed to him by a female acquaintance.  Underlying the male ideal of a meaningful life is a sense of what constitutes heroism.  Like with The Old Man and the Sea, at some point one must pit one's will against a formidable, perhaps impossible, goal, even to the point of sacrificing one's life, in an attempt to overcome that opposition and in turn surpass one's own limitations [4].  That is how a great life has been defined, and that is what motherhood has none of.  Struggle of course.  Effort of course.  Sacrifice to the highest degree.  But nothing of the combative, oppositional element that would give it the quality of traditional heroism.

There has of late been an attempt to address this by lionizing motherhood, calling it heroic, but I believe that this is a good intention misapplied.  It is still essentially playing by one sex's rules.  It is for this same reason that I dislike Wonder Woman: you don't truly demonstrate the value of the feminine by showing she can be just like the boys and beat up bad guys too.  That's hammering her into a particular mold, and in doing so admitting that you are still only thinking in those terms (give or take that outfit...).  

But whatever Cassatt's images of mothers and children are, they are not elevated and they are not heroic, and this is precisely what gives them their immense value.  She has captured the essence of the dynamic, its strength and its meaningfulness, without resorting to an outside standard.  Even above her remarkable portraits of other women, I believe this is what she will be remembered for.

Ultimately, I'm not sure Cassatt ever recognized the value of her achievement.  She kept on experimenting with new techniques until she eventually went blind from cataracts.  Perhaps she was never aware that she'd found her taproot, or perhaps she just kept searching because it was habit by then.  Perhaps she never did reconcile the image of herself that she projected with the reality:

The first is a self portrait (1878) and the second a portrait done of her by Degas (c1880-1884).   A calm, fashionable artist versus a nervous, slightly pinched, and extremely self-conscious woman.  She wanted the former, but was the latter (I find this portrait by Degas to be magnificent).  But this is once again said without criticism.  She set out to prove herself in the traditional way, and in the process did so in a manner that was new to Western art, even if she never did approve of it herself.  And for that I'm grateful for her and what she has added to our collective consciousness. 

The Conversation (1896)

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[1] But per her habits, Cassatt has also had to insert a mirror into her Reading Le Figaro.  Its presence is necessary for pictorial construction, but the choice of a reflective surface is a common contrivance that appears in several of her paintings as she shows off her ability to render different perspectives.  Yet, frankly, I didn't even notice it was a mirror the first few times; its nature is just that unimportant.  I love this painting, but I love it in spite of some of the things Cassatt put into it.

[2] The Young Mother Sewing serves as a great contrast to the Figaro in the footnote above.  Here the space behind the mother is a set of windows, but rather than try to show off how well she can render the perspective Cassatt has utilized them to clearly outline the mother's upper body (which as with the maid in the garden is supported by the blue triangle of her dress in a Classically stable composition).  The focus is in the right place, and if the visual reality suffers for it the painting gains.

[3] Writing this line I'm reminded of how Robert Louis Stevenson's books, which are really meditations on being male in various forms, inevitably involve the separation of the boy from his mother.  He needs to get out beyond her protection to engage with the world, endanger himself, but ultimately become a proper man.  

[4] Perhaps the best demonstration of the difference in perspective on this subject comes from a GoodReads review of The Old Man and the Sea:

Oh, my good lord in heaven. Cut your line, land your boat and go to McDonald's! Just as in the case of The Great Gatsby, I understand the book. Yes, I know it changed the way American writers write. I also understand that it celebrates the ridiculous American idea that you're only a REAL man if you've done something entirely purposeless, but really dangerous, in pursuit of making yourself look like the bull with the biggest sexual equipment. Get over it, already! Go home and clean out the refrigerator, or wash the curtains, or vacuum under the furniture. Pick your kids up from school or take your daughter bra shopping. THAT would impress me. Being too dumb to cut your fishing line? Not the mate I would pick...

The only bright spot about the book is if you think of it on a metaphorical level: there is a point at which ALL of us must grit our teeth and hold on in the face of despair. That is the definition of life. However, if that's the point, then the plot situation needs to be one of necessity (like the shipwreck in Life of Pi), instead of stubbornness. 

It is such an accidentally enlightening piece.  The author clearly doesn't get it, doesn't feel in the slightest the draw of the heroic impulse.  What's meaningful to her is something reliable, family-oriented, and quotidian.  Incidentally, I find both Old Man and the Sea and RLS's works to be interesting expressions of heroism dying in the modern world, the last gasps of what it means to be "a man" as the life of industrial suburbia crushes it beneath its workaday wheels.

Masters of the Short Story #6: Vasconcelos, Anderson, and Joyce

Vasconcelos - The Boar Hunt

 This one left me completely cold.  Maybe it was a weak translation, maybe it was an uninteresting theme, maybe it was the total lack of biological reality (I'm sorry, this always gets to me) but the result was that my eyes read over the few pages this story occupied with little engagement or interest.  While I don't want to make subtlety the end-all of writing, I feel like a little subtlety is necessary, or at least appreciated, and this had all the subtlety of a thrown stone.  It makes me afraid I missed something for it to be included in such an auspicious anthology, but given that I can only reasonably write on what I experienced here it is. 

(The biologist in me must note that the top image is a peccary, not a boar; South America doesn't have native boars, and honestly peccaries are rather cute little things.  If the hunters really were slaughtering boars then they were culling a damaging and invasive species and doing all of us a service.)

 

Sherwood Anderson - Sophistication

I feel like I read this story 20 years too late.  It's a strange thing, really, because I know intimately what this means:

With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another.  If he prefers that other to be a woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.

Why else would I be here, effectively writing to a wall, if not for having such a fundamental sense of this desire to simply be understood?  To compare with something I once wrote for Pale Cocoon in a not-so-subtle self-commentary:

With his hand resting comfortably on the chair behind Riko, for a moment it had almost seemed like they were united in their goal.  Though not necessarily a romantic past, there is a sense that they were close once and that he still turns to her in the expectation of being truly understood; it is the most precious type of intimacy for eccentrics.

But the element that Anderson captures is not just the sentiment but the freshness of it at a certain stage of life.  George is just experiencing it for the first time and is uncertain of what he wants or how to address it, and the almost feverish isolation he experiences as a result is the core of the story (along with Helen's accompaniment, although the story definitely favors him).  Because of this there is a natural and necessary lack of additional emotional layers.  That's the genius of the story; even though it begins with many reflections of a more mature mind, as though this story will be about becoming older, it really focuses on just the novice vantage point.  Similarly, though written almost as a reminiscing, it feels like a recent memory, or perhaps a cherished memory, one that despite the years still carries with it all the self-absorbed intensity of adolescence.  That's what makes the story great, is that Anderson has managed to exclude the later moderation that inevitably occurs.  It's like when Shinkai (image above) is at his best, absolutely making you remember those moments when another person seems like the entire world, and that is quite enough.

But that's also the rub for me: that's just no longer where I am, and I admit I've never quite romanticized romance in the same way that allows me to idolize it into later life.  Perhaps I will be forced to eat those words some day but for now this story feels to me like it has its time and season.  Too early and it's not known, too late and it's too well known.  It is written by somebody who knows better but, truthfully, does not quite feel better, and as a result is able to capture the experience fully.

 

 Joyce - The Dead

There's a feeling I get occasionally when I read or watch certain things.  It's a rare sensation, like the shadow of a giant just passed over you.

How to describe it...

We're waiting for something.  Or we're on the lookout for it.  Lily's name comes first, which given this is a story would suggest she's it, but that's ludicrous; what kind of hostess would be on the lookout for their own maid on the night of a dance party?  Of course we're waiting for Gabriel.  He's the star guest who will make everything work and deliver the cinching speech.  It's such a comfort when Gabriel is here.  But we don't discount the idea that maybe Lily's important either, until after a few pages of neglect she is totally forgotten.

Meanwhile, though, we're still waiting.  Waiting for Gabriel to announce himself, to observe this miniature of the human comedy and render us a verdict.  There are types to be had about, in a drunkard, the old man, and now the idealistic student who invites Gabriel west.  Miss Ivors seems to raise herself as a foil, critical of his old-fashioned ideas and getting under his skin in a way nobody else does; perhaps she's a less-cynical parallel of Lily, who also decried the modern state of things.  But that conversation comes to as much nothing as the one with Lily and Miss Ivors retreats hastily from the party, her reasons palpable but unexplained.

Well, not nothing.  Gabriel does find it sticking with him and it finds its way into his speech.  A speech which... says nothing.  We were waiting for it.  It seems as though all these interactions ought to have added to something, and that at the appointed time Gabriel would hold forth some insight drawn from them.  But instead it is merely a gracious sally to his gracious, doddering old hosts, made respectable-sounding with antique references and literary quotes, a sermon to a young woman who is no longer here to hear it.  And then they all go home.

But the action keeps going.  The party's wrapped up, the actors have all made their exits, but for some reason the story doesn't conclude.  Why won't it conclude?  Instead all we have to think on is a quavering song, sung when everybody's gone and heard in memory.  It's enough of a moment to make it an archetype - a woman listening.  Though it's importance isn't obvious at first, as Gabriel reveals himself to just be a man, in love with his wife after all these years, lustful after her all these years, and jealous after her all these years.  Maybe that's the true story.  That he was just a ridiculous figure when seen in a mirror, they were all ridiculous figures, monkeys tottering about and giving to their impulses greater meaning than there ever was.  He is about to show us that dull rage at having his desires thwarted is his true human nature.  Then full stop.  He sees what that song means to his wife.  And the snow keeps falling.

---

 

In Haruhi there is an episode called Some Day in the Rain.  It is the most enigmatic episode of them all, being anime-original, and I have had conversations with people who experienced it as eerie, as peaceful, as Zen, and as nihilistic.  In it nothing really happens; Kyon is sent to pick up a space heater for the club room while Suzumiya engages in her usual terrorizing of Asahina.  And Nagato... Nagato is waiting for something, along with us.

Sitting in an empty room, yet full of props and memories, listening to nonsense spewing out of a radio, but desperately trying to make something of it.  We're confident that if we can figure out the cipher it will make the rest of this episode click into perspective.  Occasionally people pop in and we think this will start something, but it does not.  They're just here for instructions to go elsewhere, and so they come and go, and neither do they explain what is going on.  When she finally stands up the screen cuts to black; nothing came of our waiting.  It's like an episode forgot to happen.

Which is not to say that it is empty.  Nagato is quite the opposite, desperately lonely and waiting for others to notice.  She has an intense inner life, and the episode ends on a note of delicate care, her coat left unassumingly over Kyon to keep him warm.

---

One of my long-running 'jokes' is that Haruhi is the Finnegan's Wake of anime: dense, confusing, intensely referential, the play of a genius mind who is trying to sum up all that came before it and in doing so declaring the 'end' of its genre.  I actually hadn't read a single Joyce when I made that up, but I feel as though I ended up being more prescient than I could have guessed.

In The Dead we have come to a strange place.  Joyce understood the novel and the short story.  He understood them well enough that he could somehow see through them.  When I read The Dead I was carried away by how intensely real the interactions were.  Sure, we find our parallels in art all the time, but there's usually the slight sense that they've been organized, sanitized.  Elevated a bit to fit into art.  But in Joyce?  Nothing of the sort.  The old aunts talking brought to mind my own grandmother's habits, not idealized but actualized.  It was a kind of genius of expression that somehow made absolutely unadorned life fit onto the page without any of the usual trappings.

And the people... in several moments I had this flash of feeling that they were the protagonists of somebody else's short story.  We see Gabriel's thoughts, but I have no doubt that this night could have been written from the perspective of Miss Ivors with just as much texture and depth.  Or perhaps his wife's.  Or maybe even all these strange, random figures who come in and out of the room to listen to the piano being played, and who are still up dancing while Gabriel is giving his speech.  The centerpoint is not "here".  Action is going on all around, here and elsewhere.

How he accomplishes this... it's like Joyce has a grasp of the fundamental units, like he wrote in phonemes rather than words.  Most writing unconsciously draws on our knowledge of genre, of convention, of signs that mean things to convey to us the purpose of what is happening.  This is lovely, but quite frankly also involves itself in a kind of illusion, one where we think that because we are familiar with the symbol we are familiar with the thing itself, but that in truth all that has happened is that we have had either our memories guide us or our imaginations mislead us.  The description of the experience in a book is so often nothing but a recollection of what we thought about it.  But when Gabriel remembers his life with his wife, I felt it.  I, who certainly has not been married for several decades.  I, who only knows romantic arithmetic, was induced to follow Joyce's proof to a surprising new theorem.  This speaks to an utter mastery of the fundamentals, both literary and psychological, all employed without appearing grandiose.  It's as I once wrote about another piece:

Having left the realm of discourse we enter into that of art.  At this stage, the series ceases to obsess over what is being portrayed.  If the content cannot convey the message, it must be found in the form instead, with the ultimate goal to affect change in the recipient directly.  It is the imparting of a type of knowledge that cannot exist separate from the knower.  How this alchemy is performed I do not know, and am in awe that such things exist.

And it is only because of this utter genius that Joyce can make his non-point.  Having given this intensely real survey of everything that went on, seeing through all the conventions that structure art and life, one comes to... what?  Not to homey happiness being the locus of meaning, for while there is warmth and life, Gabriel's attempt to exalt that in his speech is a clear failure.  But, and this is key, so too is its opposite.  There is no commentary either on superficiality of the partygoers.  It is not that in seeing through social conventions he has "uncovered the real truth" behind human nature, that we're just vicious little beasts lying to each other through our bared teeth.  That's just another story.  And he hasn't uncovered that it's all meaningless either.  Nihilism has a way of asserting itself as an ultimate position, as a kind of fundamental category that exists in itself, but it's as though Joyce has also grasped that nihilism can only exist in stories too.  Or, to put it another way, the lack of a story is a story too, and that's the one thing that this short story (hah) has entirely done away with.  Things happen, and there are reasons for them happening; there are material, formal, and efficient causes... just not a final one.  Which is perhaps nihilism if that's how one wants to define it, but that relies on postulating and then rejecting something that by definition never existed if you're a nihilist.  In other words, you're reacting to a story, not the real thing.

So what does this leave us with?  [Pending revision]

Masters of the Short Story #5: Chekhov and Kipling

 

Chekhov - The House with the Mansard

A while back I was talking to a friend about music, and he was sharing with me some blues that he especially enjoyed (Lush Life, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgbLtG8PBv4).  But it left me almost completely cold, as do almost all blues songs.  Why this is... I can only take a guess, but my speculation is that the blues are always the result of contrast: they had times that were gay and carefree, when romance seemed easy and the wine sweet in the mouth.  But those times have since passed away, and they're left with memories beckoning from all the familiar places but without the ability to join them any longer.  Because of this there is a wistfulness in their reflections, a feeling like they would like to return to the good times, or even if they don't want to return directly nonetheless would like something of the old comradery and warmth to be infused into their current life.

Now, not to sound self-pitying but I've never existed in such a thoughtless state.  Since I hit any semblance of adulthood self-consciousness and anxiety have ruled my experience, and while I have had enjoyable times, friends, and even romance they've never existed in that form of carefree eternity which infuses a blue musing.  As such, at some emotional level, it just doesn't make sense to me, either to want to return to the past or to envision such a life in my future.  You can't mourn what was never alive to you.  Perhaps I'll develop some appreciation of the music in my life, but I'm not sure if the sentiment will ever be more than a distraction.

Coming to Chekhov, then, I wonder if I have a similar problem because after reading several of his stories, which on the surface ought to mean something to me, I just... can't get into.  The editors call the mood he evokes "Chekhovian", a purposefully circular definition because it's really it's own unique flavor that this story in particular exhibits in spades:

When the green garden, still moist with dew, shines in the sun and seems happy, and when the terrace smells of mignonette and oleander, and the young people have just returned from church and drink tea in the garden, and when they are all so gaily dressed and so merry, and when you know that all these healthy, satisfied, beautiful people will do nothing all day long, then you long for all life to be like that. So I thought then as I walked through the garden, quite prepared to drift like that without occupation or purpose, all through the day, all through the summer. 

It is not that I mistake the narrator's view directly for Chekhov's, but that this and other moments are evoked with such a fond clarity that they are part of the weave.  They come to the fore when things are going well, are dwelt upon even in their mundanity during moments that are only sometimes recognized as precious and crucial, but which are all too aware of their own melancholy transitoriness.  For some reason it reminds me of Watteau, where he loved his paintings of social gatherings, especially of women and music, but periodically there appears a painting of distinct sadness that feels practically autobiographical: 

 

As though amidst this revelry the one who ought to be the most amused, the clown, is not swept away at all and instead cuts the most thoughtful figure in the scene.  It gives me the feeling that the two are somewhat alike in that way, Chekhov and Watteau, in that both of them quite intimately feel a joy of life but also aren't quite able to submerge themselves in it:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight
       Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
               Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
       Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
               And be among her cloudy trophies hung. 

Which gets back to the core of why I think Chekhov isn't making sense to me.  I can't burst joy's grape, my experience of melancholy being quite different from his (and Watteau's) as a result.  So when Chekhov reaches the end, and in a blues fashion recollects:

I have already begun to forget about the house with the mansard, and only now and then, when I am working or reading, suddenly--without rhyme or reason--I remember the green light in the window, and the sound of my own footsteps as I walked through the fields that night, when I was in love, rubbing my hands to keep them warm. And even more rarely, when I am sad and lonely, I begin already to recollect and it seems to me that I, too, am being remembered and waited for, and that we shall meet....

Misuce, where are you? 

I feel the stab, the power of Chekhov's ability to condense in mundane prose so much feeling, but it misses my vitals.  I don't quite have enough love for life to regret its passing in the same way, and though I would love to lay claim to all human experience it may be unfortunately that this great author by and large passes me by.

(p.s. I was given a little something I could sink my teeth into with the argument between the narrator and Lyda, but I feel like that is almost a distraction.  It's part of the story, and in fact quite key as it serves to highlight how strangely, the ideology of both sides seems to stand in the way of simple joy even as they endeavor to make life more full, but I think also somehow a diversion, because the ideas seem less real than the Sunday mornings) 

Kipling - The Man Who Would Be King

Well, these two served for quite the back-to-back contrast, Chekhov into Kipling.  If Chekhov is delicately reflective, almost feminine, then Kipling stamps forth in manly army boots. 

I've read a few Kipling short stories in the past as well as his Kim, and what always endears me to them is how I can feel his India.  Despite his own status they are never relayed romantically by some sahib looking out from his veranda, instead immersing you in the full heat and bustle of a subtropical subcontinent.  It's like the British Wild West, now that I think about it: a place removed from the regular, where you can still find incredible people and experience genuine adventure not trammeled by too much civilization. 

Which that last word really strikes at the heart of what I also find confusing about Kipling.  He's an unapologetic imperialist, yet when you read his stories it... doesn't come through in the same way as his other writings.  Here we've got a newspaper correspondent for the Backwoodsman, and there's nothing glamorous about the jostling of power.  He reports with little interest about the deaths of kings and princes, notes but does not praise the grotesque British manipulation, and of course the demise of the man who who would be king to a bit of hubris does little to praise such ventures in savage lands.  Indeed, there's something ominous in that little misadventure, that the "civilization" he brought was that of guns and slavish worship, and that the natives were only temporarily fooled.  And this is to say nothing of Kim, which exhibits a man whose soul seems very sympathetic to spiritual Asia, if not its social squalor.  So as I read this story I find myself wondering what was going on in his head. 

[Answered a phone call]

I realized after that break that I don't have much else to add to what I put above.  I have this sense that Kipling was always of two minds, and that while that doesn't excuse his public proclamations it makes me feel as though his punitive exile from the literary hall of fame masks more complexity than he is commonly given credit for.

Masters of the Short Story #4: Stevenson, Maupassant, and Conrad

Stevenson - The Sire de Maletroit's Door 

Reading Stevenson is such fun, and unlike most of the authors I've been covering I have something of a previous acquaintance with him.  As one introduction once observed, he's an author who has survived effortlessly into the movie era because his actions remains in the action.  That is to say, his outlook has a kind of consonance with how William James described the Greeks:

"The difference between Greek pessimism and the oriental and modern variety is that the Greeks had not yet made the discovery that the pathetic mood may be idealized, and figure as a higher form of sensibility.  Their spirit was still too essentially masculine for pessimism to be elaborated or lengthily dwell on in their classic literature.  They would would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within proper bounds of lachrymosity."

While they certainly think and reflect, Stevenson has no patience for introspection for its own sake in his characters.  It is pondering with a purpose and must be translated into action to be meaningful.  If they are to debate whether one should choose love or death, it is because that option is before them, not because they are sitting around a coffee table and think it great philosophical sport.  This means that something is always happening in his stories, and I think that this often causes him to be underappreciated as anything other than a deft adventure writer.  He is that, but underneath it lies his ideals, what the editors of my own collection describe as his, "code of behavior which moves men to act nobly and unselfishly and with dignity."  It is what he felt deeply, and as a result felt deeply constricted by the advent of industrial urban society.  His characters have to exist in other places and other times because his time and place, and our time and place, are quite deadening to the manly heroic spirit.  To that end, while Stevenson isn't explicitly a moralist his stories are full of events which give the opportunity for his characters to make the right choice as a man (while women do feature in his stories, they are always auxiliary).  Which brings me to the story itself.

First, to reiterate the beginning, it really is just a fun story.  It's got a good pace, quick characterization, and an interesting resolution.  But to keep with my focus above, it also fits into Stevenson's outlook.  We're introduced to Denis de Beaulieu.  He's 22 in 1429; "lads were early formed in that warfaring epoch; and when one has been in a pitched battle and a dozen raids, has killed one's man in an honourable fashion, and knows a thing or two of strategy and mankind, a certain swagger in the gait is surely to be pardoned."  A young male, full of many of the right virtues, appropriate for his time, but prone to some (minor) errors.  It is perhaps why he was a little foolish in going out at night in an unfamiliar town, the story noting that he should have perhaps not done so, or having done so returned before the light went down.  Yet the fact remains, as in so many Stevenson tales, that this critical adventure in his life would not have happened if he had simply played it safe.  

Now, having taken this step, his subsequent journey through the darkened town is one of real danger.  Stevenson doesn't tell us Denis imagines that the town is unfamiliar at night or that he might encounter trouble, it's that Denis truly doesn't know the way and his status as a foreign soldier makes him a target.  But he does have a head on his shoulders, and rather than shudder at his own fear he takes the necessary precautions, scoping out squares and intersections before crossing them and, knowing that his lodgings lie at the top of a ridge, keep himself going up rather than down.  When he does misstep and is detected by the night patrol he is given a choice: he could give himself up to them or take his life into his own hands and flee.  He chooses the latter.  Stevenson cannot conscience meekly submitting to the patrol's authority for no other reason than it is an authority, especially when doing so has such a dubious outcome.  Better to retain one's autonomy to act properly than submit out of fear of the consequences.

Which emphasizes that when Denis does become trapped by the elderly Maletroit he still refuses to bow.  Perhaps he can't hack his way out of the door, but he won't let the old man dictate the terms of their engagement, a position he maintains even when the physical entrapment becomes a mental one: Denis will be killed if he does not do as he is told.  This is a greater danger even than being lost at night, for it threatens to rob him of his agency via his own fear.  But he overcomes that as well, showing with full flair how a generous, heroic spirit should act.

"It is a small love that shies at a little pride."

But the last reversal in his decision is also a Stevenson comment: be forceful, be daring, but don't be bullheaded or stubborn or reckless.  There's a difference, and it's a recurrent theme in his stories that a proper man needs to know it.  As for the resolution, I think it would be too much to read any irony into it; it's a very clever, snappy demonstration of the elderly manipulation, but also that Denis got his just reward.  If he had not resisted the old man then he would have not won her heart, but had he been too insistent he would have been hanged.  Maletroit Sr. got the good nephew he wanted with his little ploy and Denis got a good wife.  As such, it rather nicely toes the line between bland moralizing and a certain sense of realistic karma, and I'll give it a pass if for nothing else than the sense of satisfaction I had on reading it.

Anyway, that was mostly about Stevenson rather than the story, but it is nice to actually read something by somebody I know a lot more about since it gives the work so much more dimension than it would otherwise.

Maupassant - Father and Son

In contrast to Stevenson, I had never heard of this author before.  The editors describe him as a Flaubert disciple, but with a kind of godless misanthropy all his own.  This one sample wasn't enough to get a proper taste of his full view, but I admit what I had a very hard time overcoming was his blatant misogyny.

A brief summary of the plot: Hautot Sr and Hautot Jr live together happily, though perhaps the son is overly subservient to his powerful, domineering father.  Hautot Sr wounds himself in a hunting accident and on his deathbed confesses to Hautot Jr that he's been retaining a mistress for these last six years, having made a promise to his deceased wife that he wouldn't remarry, but admitting with full carnal implication, "Well, you understand.  Man is not made to live alone..."  He exacts from Hautot Jr a promise to notify his mistress Donet of his passing and to provide for her.  The son, though finding his moral sense outraged, goes dutifully locates her and gives her the news.  She is devastated but still hospitably has him stay after she recovers herself, and he learns that she has a child by his father.  At the end of the stay she invites him back; he is reluctant but overcome.  By the end of the second visit he is feeling quite at home and when she invites him back a third time he is happy to accept.  The story ends there, but the future is obvious: she's found a new lover.  Which this would be fine if it were just a general critique of humanity; the big, burly father idiotically got himself killed, the son's spineless morals come to nothing in his likely future, and the sins of the former will be inherited by the latter in a continuing cycle.  But nonetheless, it feels like there's a particular blame laid on the women.  If the first wife hadn't exacted such a jealous promise, the next woman would have been a wife rather than a mistress:

"All the morality we possess, which lies buried at the bottom of our emotions through centuries of hereditary instruction, all that he [Hautot Jr] had been taught since he had learned his catechism about creatures of evil life, the instinctive contempt which every man entertains toward them, even though he may marry one of them... rose up within him"

Um... I'm sorry, I don't entertain an instinctive contempt for women?  Or later, after Donet composes herself hearing the news, she "listened to his story now, perceiving with a woman's keen sensibility, all the sudden changes of fortune which his narrative implied."  Yes, she was genuinely saddened by losing Hautot Sr.... but soon she is more worried about her situation, and "the practical instinct of the housewife, accustomed to think of everything, revived in the young woman's breast."  It is a phrase that is offered before she serves Hautot Jr food, and it is quite bitter - for while it plainly indicates that she is thinking of his hunger, she is thinking more deeply about beginning to ensnare him too.  That he is stupid and docile is his own curse, but it is woman who takes advantage of the weakness of men.

I would be willing to grant all this under the umbrella of general misanthropy if again it weren't for a few of these phrases that seem to just make the entire story pivot around the manipulation by women.  It's not even that I think what he observes isn't true in some sense, that one of the principle modes of interaction between the sexes is trading resources for sex, and so naturally when one supplier goes out of business you look for another vendor.  But there's just this edge to it, this feeling like Maupassant considers the male failing to be a kind of passive weakness but the female one to be active avarice, that I just had a hard time stomaching.

Anyway, I was going to write on some of its positive attributes but honestly I'd just be giving it generic praise.  It's in a handpicked compendium so of course it's not bereft of artistic merit and it's not like I particularly resent it.  I just instinctively reject his perspective, whether about humanity in general or women in particular, and that is primarily what remains in my memory rather than the craftsmanship.

Conrad - An Outpost of Progress

[Note: I'm not happy with this.  My first attempt to grasp it was simply wrong about Conrad, my second too vicious in a way that doesn't match my outlook.  I'm trying to find the right tone, but when the subject is "human nature" it is so very hard to capture it properly: that part of civilization is overcoming baseness, and part of baseness is fear, and that it is only a facsimile of civilization to operate only out of fear.]

Whew, this was Conrad guns blazing.  I recall once reading a fascinating foreword to a Stevenson book that these two writers were in a similar "vein", one that started with Defoe in Robinson Crusoe: whereas many great authors look at their society from the inside, these men endeavor to look at it from without.  That's the proper perspective in their view, and to do that we must once again go on an "adventure".

"For days the two pioneers of trade and progress would look on their empty courtyard in the vibrating brilliance of vertical sunshine."

And boy does Conrad spare no sentiment for civilization.  But before I go there, I do want to pause on this line.  "Vertical sunshine."  What a strange phrase I can yet perfectly visualize; it's like how I've never forgotten the beach scene in The Stranger.  There's a kind of airless that belies something else missing.  I try to imagine such a story happening at the poles, for instance, and while the darkness and claustrophobia could produce dementia, there is a quality all its own to the tropical variety.  This enlightening little episode could have happened nowhere else, which if Stevenson would have used it to reveal how we should act, Conrad rather wants to say how he thinks we (in the form of the two white managers of the trading station) would act:

They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. 

The fact that I quote this here is evidence that it stuck with me, if at least for its absolutely uncompromising position.  Here is the progenitor of all the later bloodless assertions that society is just a ruse, a belief usually asserted while still attending cocktail parties.  And in its clarity there is a challenge that makes me want to take it up: is this, is, "Kayerts in desperation made a blind rush, head low, like a cornered pig would do..." an accurate summary of it all?

[And unfortunately, I need to go get ready for the day and collect ants.  I also need to think longer on this, for while sometimes as I write I find myself coming to the conclusions in the process, I was pondering this story into the night and I find I'm still not done digesting my rebuttal.]

 

Hrm, I've had another ~24 hours and still struggling with how to begin.  Perhaps with a Clark quote, since I love them so:

"The contrast between [the Apollo and the African mask] means something.  It means that at certain epochs man has felt conscious of something about himself - body and spirit - which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear; and he has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and feeling so that they might approach nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection." - Civilisation

Conrad comes in the latter half of the 19th century, and it is a peculiar time, especially in England.  There's just... so much hypocrisy, but peculiarly for the right reasons, if such a thing can be.  What I mean by that is that the expectations of behavior have outrun the pace of reality, when we expect more out of people but the slow wheel of civilization has not caught up.  There has come into public consciousness the idea that the slave, the poor, the native, the infidel should not be mistreated, but not yet the actuality.  War and imperialism continue as before, yet there is increasingly a need to justify them, to explain why the ruling of other peoples is for their own good (rationalizations were never required in previous empires).  And in the realm of public morals, you have a kind of strange idiocy as Christianity decays but secularism is not fully enacted either.  It reminds me of Manet's Luncheon on the Grass, a mockery of Giorgione's Pastoral Concert: 

 

You have this Academic art that is continuing to copy the Greek/Roman as inherited through the Renaissance, one that does not blush at nudity, situated in a life (especially in England) where the utmost prudery reigns.  For Manet to place these nymphs in a Paris park, as though women stripped in polite company, brings out the absurdity of an art that has long long since stopped reflecting the society that produces it.  It is part of the greater disconnect between the ideals people are constantly referencing and the realities they actually live.

But I think what gets genuine artists even more is the resulting attitude toward it, that most loathsome aspect of the bourgeois values: the moral reasoning that miraculously finds one's state is the highest wisdom and is content with its own mediocrity: 

 So when people have the gall to talk about this being the pinnacle of civilization, and to refer to themselves as civilized as a result, there is something that just revolts in those who have any awareness.

This is where I see Conrad come in, asking the inevitable questions: "What is civilization?  How great is it?  And are we really civilized?"  Kayerts and Carlier are fools, creatures that can only exist in a society that is so detached from reality as to put up with them.  "Makola, taciturn and impenetrable, despised the two white men," and so does Conrad.  But Conrad does not belong to those who believe in the noble savage.  The natives are violent and superstitious, and above all ruled by fear as much as the white men:

The wicked people were gone, but fear remained. Fear always remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and belief, and even doubt; but as long as he clings to life he cannot destroy fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible, that pervades his being; that tinges his thoughts; that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle of his last breath. In his fear, the mild old Gobila offered extra human sacrifices to all the Evil Spirits that had taken possession of his white friends.

Which is where we return to the beginning of today's discussion: does the Apollo truly represent a higher state than the African mask?  Or is it just a pretense and the truth is that civilization and savagery are simply two sides of the same coin, both serving fear but one simply pretends to be better? 

I... do not have an easy answer, but I do wish to argue with Conrad as I understand him from this story.  It seems to me that the key, devastating line is when Carlier notes that he and Kayerts are slave traders.  That's when he drops the pretense, drops the hypocrisy, and states things as they are; that they not only permitted Mukola to trade men for ivory, but that they were inherently helpless to stop it.  That's how the world actually works, and their civilization, their little speck, was this:

They lived like blind men in a large room, aware only of what came in contact with them (and of that only imperfectly), but unable to see the general aspect of things. The river, the forest, all the great land throbbing with life, were like a great emptiness. Even the brilliant sunshine disclosed nothing intelligible. Things appeared and disappeared before their eyes in an unconnected and aimless kind of way. The river seemed to come from nowhere and flow nowhither. It flowed through a void.

And having been plugged into the Matrix for so long, they just couldn't stand to be separated from it.  Which is what makes this story more interesting, that this isn't simply about piercing civilization's hypocrisy to see the truth:

Night came, and Kayerts sat unmoving on his chair. He sat quiet as if he had taken a dose of opium. The violence of the emotions he had passed through produced a feeling of exhausted serenity. He had plumbed in one short afternoon the depths of horror and despair, and now found repose in the conviction that life had no more secrets for him: neither had death! He sat by the corpse thinking; thinking very actively, thinking very new thoughts. He seemed to have broken loose from himself altogether. His old thoughts, convictions, likes and dislikes, things he respected and things he abhorred, appeared in their true light at last! Appeared contemptible and childish, false and ridiculous. He revelled in his new wisdom while he sat by the man he had killed. He argued with himself about all things under heaven with that kind of wrong-headed lucidity which may be observed in some lunatics.

Kayerts isn't enlightened after he kills Carlier, he is deranged.  The jungle has worked its effect on him, but hardly for the better; in the end he can't escape the whisper of the higher ideals he was imperfectly acquainted with and hangs himself, out of fear or shame or guilt, left only to stick his tongue out at the representative of "progress" come to fetch him.

So much of life is fear.  Perhaps it is because I am overly-acquainted with that emotion that I attribute to it so much importance, but when Conrad said, "fear always remains" I knew what he meant.

And I think he is wrong.

Recently @Wishes finished GSG, and while watching it he noted: "I must say, I understand why you have [Claes] as your PFP.  I enjoy her detached, intellectual look."  I had to say it was a bit more complicated than that, and at this juncture I can take a moment to explain (part of) why.

"Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate.  She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract by her conduct her favourite maxims." - S&S

Claes is proud.  When called upon to act as a decoy she submits merely saying it is her duty and that she is doing nothing more remarkable. To be ruled by her fear is beneath her, she thinks, and though she goes forth into danger she puts up the pretense that it is nothing remarkable.  But what she finds when things go wrong is that she is not so confident; the hours tick by and her pretenses are stripped away (rather like the months at the station in Conrad), leaving her to face the inescapability of her own death: 

 

Perhaps in her mind she had told herself that she was resigned to it.  That she was above that fear or had come to terms with it.  But she was not, and when rescue finally did arrive she lost herself.  She took off her glasses, dropped Raballo's gentle Claes, and went on the prowl to the tune of Rabbia ("Rabid") if there was even the slightest chance that she could survive.  In short, she lost control of herself, and without that she had nothing.  Or, she thought she had nothing, and it is on this point that my difference with Conrad turns.

What I believe is being observed in An Outpost of Progress is that civilization is fragile, not that it is illusory, and that reason alone does not carry us to our highest limits.  It is absolutely true that when pressed we fall back on instinct; it is there, always there, waiting and ready.  But I think it is a mistake to believe that is our "true" self just because of that.  The indignity of Kayerts and Carlier lies in their hypocrisy, in their mediocrity, and in their inability to reconcile with reality.  That's what is plaguing 19th century England, and what is frankly plaguing us today.  But it seems quite the mistake to take as wholly representative two such specimens of humanity.  They serve to accuse the self-satisfied mid-level manager, but not a greater spirit, and I do believe Claes is a greater spirit:

She had sought to overcome the world and herself, using the best in herself, and found that she could not.  It is only in the end, distraught and humbled, that she submits to the truth: she is only human.  It is not an easy admission, but it comes with a smile that no longer avoiding the truth brings, and there is a paradoxical affirmation of her greatness in that moment when she finally accepts that she can be no greater.

As for what I think lies beyond that realization, I leave for another time.

Which having gone over hill and dale in my discussion, I return to the story.  I always find that my greatest writing is elicited in response to things I think are great; it's a kind of resonance that I find a more reliable tell than a conscious estimation.  The lovely thing about writing, as Flaubert notes, is that you discover what you believe.  I have purposefully been rough with my discussion here, not wishing to be hung up for too long, but I think this qualifies as a case worth noting, that Conrad represents a strong enough position, eloquently expressed, that it calls forth an equally dignified response.  And as always, for the existence of such things, for civilization you might say, I am grateful.

---------

Still thinking over An Outpost of Progress, and after all my writing I wonder if I slightly missed the mark on Conrad.  Re-reading the selections, I see that he is not so much after civilization as "civilized man", no so much the ideas and principles as their embodiment (or lack thereof) in the average citizen.  I wandered closer to the mark with my comment, "The indignity of Kayerts and Carlier lies in their hypocrisy, in their mediocrity, and in their inability to reconcile with reality." 

Because what I didn't quite explain well above was how well this captures it:

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion.

I have this sense when I listen to people talking about a better world that what they mean is a safer world.  They don't want bad things to happen to them, they want to be able to go through life without risk or uncertainty, promised by their society that it will all turn out.  It's as Aristotle observes in one of my favorite little quotes:

"Our pity is excited by misfortunes undeservedly suffered, and our terror by some resemblance between the sufferer and ourselves."

But pity is an emotion of those in a superior position, and so we don't mind indulging in it.  It makes us feel good about ourselves to be outraged about bad things happening to people we've decided are the victims.  We sit here behind our screens typing loudly about events halfway around the world that, ultimately, we little understand and which do not affect us.  They're safe that way; it's sports on a grand stage.

Which is why when misfortune visits closer to home the reaction is fear.  Our institutions are all we have to swaddle us from unsafety, and so every negative event, even random accidents, must be ascribed to an institution failing, and institutional failings Must Be Fixed.  I don't mean in a reasonable way, in the acknowledgement that there are flaws and that we must assess whether we can perhaps improve them.  I mean in the immediate, knee-jerk reaction at the thought of it being you that it failed.

Therein lies the root feeling, the fear, the terror that it might have been you and the urgent need to prevent that from ever happening.  For all their "civilization" Kayerts and Carlier could have just as easily been sold into slavery, in thrall to these men from the coast, a realization they can only come to when removed from it.  It reminds me the quip that proficient workers believe in compensation based on merit while mediocre ones talk of equal pay.  We talk mightily of the importance of social fairness, but what we fear is being out-competed and preyed on by people who are more capable than we.  Delacroix was likened to a tiger while he was alive, and this is how Clark talks of Rodin's Balzac:

"Hostile critics said it was like a snowman, an owl, a heathen god.  All quite true, but we no longer regard them as terms of abuse.  Balzac's body has the timelessness of a prehistoric stone, and his head is like a bird of prey.  And the real reason that he made people so angry is the feeling that he can gobble them all up and doesn't care a damn for their opinions."

Please, institutions, protect us from anything like this.  Protect us from violence because we cannot defend ourselves.  Protect us from accidents because we cannot watch ourselves.  Protect us from quandaries because we cannot think ourselves.  And above all, protect us from other people who can, because we cannot do these things ourselves.

And call it a kindness.