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.

Night at the Sympophony: Berlioz, Gershwin, Ravel, and Dvorak

  Had an opportunity to go to the symphony last night, first show of the season.  Had absolute nosebleed seats due to a strange price hike, hopefully only for the season debut and not a regular change, but they were alright.  Different perspective looking down on the orchestra rather than up at it (I'm usually in the cheaper seats right in front, being hoi polloi), and actually the chairs they had in the upper rings were more comfortable.  May have to consider being up here more often.

Berlioz - Roman Carnival Overture, Op. 9

This first one also made the least impression on me.  Listening to it again this morning I still find it "nice", but also like I'm... not sure.  I can hear story-like parts in the tambourines being tumblers, or the general energy of revelers, but nothing somehow hooks me.  I don't mean that I'm waiting for something to enjoy but that I'm lacking in some kind of understanding.

Berlioz Is a great, one of those you always listen to with pleasure because  you never risk getting. bored.

YouTube comments are always a risk, especially since you can count on every comments section to be full of nothing but rapturous praise that says more about the lack of discernment in the writer than the music, but this one strikes me as having that right level of straightforward groundedness.  As I listen to this song I'm not familiar enough with the music conventions to know that it's surprising; I feel a little jerked about at times when it suddenly changes, but without any deeper means of anticipation than, "It will continue on the same" (a rather basic extrapolation) these sudden tacks are not satisfying as they would be to somebody who knew more.  So I'm going to leave this one on the back burner for now.

Gershwin - Concerto in F

I didn't like this piece particularly either, but unlike above I did feel like I walked out with something more understood.

First, I'm just not a big Gershwin fan.  Not that I've listened to a lot of his, but the feeling I have is that he's very... the phrase I want to use is "above the clavicle" but that requires a bit of explaining.

When I analyze my own emotions one of the general senses I have is where they are experienced in my body, on a scale which descends from the back of my throat downward.  At the top are just the little day-to-day feelings; the mild annoyance at people honking at each other, the enjoyment of a WoW dungeon that went well, etc.  As I descend into the upper chest weightier feelings come into play, whether it be more genuine anger or well-being, or other more nuanced feelings like grandeur (more on that below).  By the time I hit the abdomen it's the deeply-felt sensibilities, like the sadness that seems to trickle down an invisible "heart spine" or those feelings that pool deeply.  They also seem to be moving "backward", felt toward the posterior rather than anterior.  Then there's something a bit below that, and also somehow even more back, below the navel, that I'm going to pass over except to note that I don't think it's a mistake that it's where the root chakra was identified, or why the Greeks called the sacrum ('sacred' bone) the hieron osteon.

Anyway, back to the main topic, the point is that Gershwin never touches in me anything more than the surface, like a bunch of little breezes riffling the water.  Which makes him very fun but also nothing that earns my fervor.  Yet, what I really did get last night was how he used the piano.

While in concertos it's natural that the piano takes a somewhat leading place, in Gershwin it's like it was an... independent place.  I had this distinct sense, especially during the first movement, that the piano was a person and the rest of the orchestra was the city.  The piano would tinkle out its feelings, which were given an extension in the rest of the surroundings; he's leaving home energetically, and entering the bustling crowd the rest of it agrees.  But then there would be times where the orchestra would "say" something and the piano would respond, like the helter-skelter of traffic starting off and resulting in a bit of quick-time panic in the poor pedestrian.  Moreover, the piano isn't lost in the noise, a point that I find rather key.  Urban industrialism is rarely romanticized, and part of that is the anomie it can produce, the sense that one is nothing but a speck in a flood of humans.  But Gershwin's basic optimism prevents this; yeah, the orchestra is big and loud, but it isn't overwhelming.  The individual still maintains his place in it.  Combined with the fun inventiveness of how he could transmute what, in my experience, is rather grating city noise into pleasant notes without losing the essential "beat" of it, romanticizing the heavy beats of machinery, I have to give full credit to what he did accomplish.  Now to go back and watch Fantasia 2000's rendition of Rhapsody in Blue again because it's so much fun.

Ravel - Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess)

My dad and I had an interesting conversation about this afterward.  It was the encore piece from the pianist after the Gershwin, but both our distance and the way it was played had an effect.

First, the distance: we just could not get any of the more subtle texture of piano music from our seats.  That's fine for Gershwin who is loud anyway, but for Ravel, who is conveying a kind of diaphanous flow (I had an image of translucent petals kind of folding down repeatedly) it was quite detrimental.  It made the music feel less weighty than it ought to, with only the "pretty" tones reaching us while the subtle sadness did not.

Which is the second point, was that while I'm not familiar with the piece my dad is, and he noted that it was played with a more restrained approach.  It's easy to interpret music about a dead girl in a way that is far too sentimental and sloppy, and so the counter-tendency is to not give into those impulses.  Unfortunately, this may equally rob the piece of its poignancy, and that's what it seems like happened.

So as I listen to it on YouTube I can hear more of what it was meant to be, but through a combination of effects I don't think it was quite what it should have been last night.

Dvorak - Symphony No. 9 "From the New World"

This was the feature attraction, and it did deliver.  It didn't feel like an hour at all, and, aided by previous familiarity, as I listened I had a real "chest sense" of what was going on.

The first movement is energetic, but more than that it is... it gives a distinct sense of opportunity.  Perhaps it's because I've heard this kind of song in the background of pioneer movies (likely copied), but it conveys the energy and rush, the idea (even if fading in Dvorak's time) that there was a West to be won, and that one could go there to achieve it.

The second movement I'll forever associate with Shinsekai Yori as their "going home" song (hence the header image), and with that in mind I can't help but also be reminded of De Tocqueville's commentary on the centrality of domesticity in American life:

Agitated by the tumultuous passions that frequently disturb his dwelling, the European is called by the obedience which the legislative powers of the state exact.  But when the American retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in it the image of order and of peace.

Yes, there's all this crazy energy in the first movement, of absolutely unquenchable acquisitiveness that drives the American attitude toward all things, but there is also this lovely serenade at the end where you really go home.  In the middle of this massive, energetic symphony there is an island of peace.

Speaking of which, the third movement is back with a vengeance and it has... it's like danger without fear.  Some months ago I shared this Remington painting, The Stampede:

 It reminds me of that.  There's undoubtedly danger; it's a stampede during a rain storm, after all.  But the rider isn't terrified.  He's got the knowledge, the skill, and just the guts to remain in command of himself with enough to spare for his half-panicked horse.  It's that sense of overmastering that comes with the optimism and acquisitiveness, one that openly acknowledges the risks but does not shrink from them.

Which is almost what the last movement reminded me of... but not quite.  I had the hardest time characterizing it, because it's dynamic, full of back and forths in a way that would convey something of struggle, of upward swings followed by downward spirals.  It's less-straightforward than the type of heroism above which can simply plunge on in the same manner.  It's met with many setbacks and problems, but as is characteristic of the whole tenor of the symphony, triumphant in the end.

What I finish this with is a kind of curious self-reflection.  I don't think of myself as particularly American, and certainly not holding many traditional American views, but combined with other observations I've read/seen of what is the best form of our vital character, it did give me a bit of pride in what my whole culture is about.  It's a moralizing culture, a religious one in fact, that likes uniting its values to material results.  This can lead to crass consumerism, but it also believes deeply that the world is within one's grasp if you just conduct yourself accordingly.  The optimism in a better future, for the individual and society, is almost deranged, setting no bounds on what cannot be accomplished without sufficient gumption.  Dvorak's selection of themes, weaving in the native tunes but giving them a higher interpretation, seems to me to truly capture this strange mixture.

Anyway, so that was the night at the symphony.  The number of "mehs" that started it out perhaps belie that I did enjoy it throughout, and that even if I wasn't touched by several pieces I still derived something from them.

Masters of the Short Story #3: Flaubert

Flaubert - A Simple Heart

Okay, this one won my heart.  While some of these stories have left me tantalized or reflective, let alone moderately appalled, this one gifted me with tranquility.  After I was done I looked around my apartment full of distractions and realized I had no desire for anything other than a bit of life, so I put my shoes on and walked out the door.

What to say about it?  It's a life.  It's a hard life and in many ways it's a pitiable life.  But it is not a regretful life, and in that there is a peculiar kind of dignity that does not stand on the greatness of her character nor her achievements.  I do not like that some people try to characterize her as 'saintly', because that misses the point.  She was a creature of her place, with good instincts, but let us not lay out the carpet and blare the trumpets before her coming.  I don't think she'd much like that anyway.

That's really how Flaubert honors her, too.  I've never read anything by him, but I can see the realism that he is known for.  It's a type of objectivity which at first may appear clinical, but in depth is true pathos: nothing is imputed to her, good or ill, which she does not warrant.  She is simply shown to us as she is and thereby understood and cared for as just that.  How many people have been like her in history, with an understanding extending not beyond their own experience, and their affections no further than their arms could reach?  Laugh at her should you wish, for she does not even know where Havana is, but what knowledge she does have is her own, earned.

It is the parrot, perhaps, that best exemplifies this hard-won wisdom.  The Holy Spirit has baffled theologians for millennia, and I am in agreement with Kenneth Clark that, "Our concept of the Trinity has been permanently weakened by the fact that art never evolved an adequate symbol of the Holy Ghost."  Without metaphors we are so curiously lost, and while the dove is a lovely abstraction, any real interaction with that species teaches you that it is not quite the ethereal mouthpiece you would imagine.  So why not a parrot?  It can speak, it had a personality, it cared about her and she for it.  The priest might throw up his hands at such simplistic ponderings, but for her it made it real and so she was able to act on it: 

The sowings, the harvests, the wine presses, all these familiar things the Gospel speaks of, were a part of her life; they had been sanctified by God's sojourn on earth... [But] she found it difficult to imagine His person, for He was not only a bird, but a flame as well, and at still other times, a breath.  She thought perhaps it is His light that hovers at night on the edge of the marshes, His breath that moves the clouds, His voice that gives the bells their harmony!  Thus she sat in adoration, delighting in the cool walls and the peacefulness of the church.

As for Church dogmas, she did not understand or even try to understand them.  The priest gave his sermon, the children recited, and she finally fell asleep.  It is that last detail which cements this is no feigned belief.  When she does not understand she can do no other than be human and succumb to drowsiness in comfort.  Saintly?  The word isn't worth bothering with here because it merely obscures the important details.

And it's really the details that sum to something more.  There is realism because one wishes to make a social statement.  There is realism because one wishes to reject supernatural beliefs.  There is realism in the unformed chaos of life, smothering us with details that have no place.  This is realism because it grasps that our lives are just details, and are not less for it.  "Fifteen minutes later, Felicite was settled in her new house."  The house that she would meaningfully live in for the rest of her life, determined by accident and decided without fanfare.  Absurd?  The word isn't worth bothering with here because it merely obscures the important details.

I do not really know how to end this; I feel that despite my efforts I have not really captured it, because to capture it I would have to write it.  Things happened, but they weren't part of a greater drama, and therefore were free to be meaningful just as they were.

Masters of the Short Story #2: Poe and Gogol

 

Poe - The Black Cat

So, surprising nobody, the Poe story is a Gothic horror, full of the uncanny and emotions in extremis.  Following on our [in the Discord's] talk about Frankenstein, I grateful that it was only peppered with them rather than basted, which in a condensed short story was just the right amount to give it the necessary flavor.

That said, supernatural thrill by and large leaves me cold, so while I can objectively comment on these aspects it doesn't really tug on anything in me in a way that I find compelling.  The comparison that comes to mind is with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  I could veritably feel the London fog leaking out of the pages and I have an immense respect for both what Stevenson achieves in a literary sense as well as his thematic core - that after having read several Stevenson books I can see in him a real tug-of-war between what he sees as proper, civilized behavior and a kind of independent, masculine vitality that is being smothered by it.  The part that's really lost when most people talk about that book is that Jekyll without Hyde is really quite milquetoast, and that while the latter is abominable he nonetheless contains that part of Jekyll which is effective and even virile.  It's worth much more than the simple good/bad parts of humanity that it gets portrayed as.

Which returning to The Black Cat, it has a core in PERVERSITY.  That word is even specially bolded when it shows up, such that we can't miss what is on Poe's mind.  That this man is acting in a way contrary to what he knows is good; intentionally acting in that way precisely because he knows it is contrary.  That's the rub, that PERVERSITY is a real human phenomenon, and that it is little accounted for by any rational explanation of human nature.  This is really quite worth something, and definitely worth even more in the time it appeared.  But where Poe then loses me is the connection to the supernatural.

In this story, there is a fundamental link between the PERVERSITY of man and the eerie vengeance of spiritual nature.  It's hard to put a finger on exactly how, but it's a uniting of the sense that there are irrational depths to both humanity and the world, and that the expression of one elicits the action of the other.  If the man had acted rationally nothing would have happened to him, but because he somehow broke through the membrane of his own little rational mind he also broke through the thin barrier between this world and another that lies adjacent, and it took great pleasure in punishing his PERVERSITY for going against the order of things.

Which all this is very interesting, and again from a literary standpoint impressive... but for me it also has little take-home.  The one psychological observation sits like a lone jewel amidst what otherwise feels like a heap of macabre props.

Gogol - The Overcoat

This one I'm still pondering, and apparently just must read Nabokov's essay on.  But before I gain more opinions from others I do like to try and form my own from what I can see.

The first and foremost is that I don't quite know what Gogol's view is.  If I didn't know any better, I'd think he was like some proto-Dickens with this tale, enumerating the woes of the lower class with one of its longsuffering members in this heedless urban society.  But... it doesn't have the right flavor for that.  Dickens' poor people are too often blandly virtuous but Akaky here is... just pathetic.  He's longsuffering, but he's so small minded that his simple joy in copying comes in part from his inability to do anything else, his simple joy in an overcoat coming from his inability to conceive of anything else.  To celebrate the small comforts can be a kind of peasant virtue, but Akaky venerates it; it is raised to such a level that it passes beyond our admiration to concern.  He's a half-dysfunctional little creature that was named on accident. 

Which is what left me puzzling, because the plot is so predictable by today's standards (what, he lost his prized overcoat?!?  No way!) that all I could think on was what it was Gogol was doing.  The small biography included by the editors noted that Gogol was critical of society but wasn't really writing to change things as a social crusader.  That he eventually became a religious fanatic and died under his own self-inflicted privation adds fuel to the sense that whatever Gogol was, he wasn't your usual secular-minded do-gooder.  Is it just pure sensitivity to suffering in these meaningless ways?

Which brings me to Russian supernaturalism.  It left me a little bemused in The Queen of Spades and the the result is the same here too.  This means something to the Russians, a ghost that is far more than a Western ectoplasm, but a corporeal being revenging itself; underneath Russian Orthodoxy, it's as though death is still held in the primitive view, not as ascendance but a continuation where the worst in spirits, rather than their best, comes out.  Akaky in life would never have ripped a coat from somebody else, yet his poltergeist does so with hideous satisfaction.  And the introduction at the end of another ghost gives the sense that the Russian world is full of these things; perhaps full of poor Akakys who have been destroyed by this world, but apparently full of another superstitious level that is at all times exerting a great impact.  There is undoubtedly something here to get about the Russian mind.

So with that, I remain in a state of suspended judgement.  I know The Overcoat is important (I wish I didn't; I hate altering judgements knowing something is important), and that I've got at least one Nabokov essay to read on it before I even attempt to close the book, but that's where it stands.

A reply from somebody:

Ooooh. I'll just check again if I've read this particular Gogol.
And I very much enjoyed reading Black Cat, but I immediately knew before even reading your thoughts that it wouldn't be to your taste. :) The perversity theme is really just Poe himself, he can't help it.
Roald Dahl compares favourably to Poe, I think, as a purveyor of the macabre.
He's perverse as well, but has a surprising breadth of interest and imagination.

Not having read much Poe, it in some way reminds me of Van Gogh.  As one fellow artist (I forget which) said on seeing one his paintings: "You, sir, are insane."  Not in the literal sense, but in a profound maladjustment to this life.  That he was also a remarkable artist (although he aspired to be a preacher first, in inverse of Gogol) then completes the tale.  The narrative people love is that genius and insanity are close to each other, and that there is something somehow exalted yet spooky about somebody who is "plumbing the depths of the mind" to bring us this art.  But I don't think this is correct in how they relate to each other.  Neuroticism can certainly support the artistic temperament (as well as the religious, I might again add), but it isn't a pre-requisite, and I'm not at all convinced that it is necessarily more profound.

As such, when I look at a Van Gogh, with its eerie discoloration of reality that turns our view uneasily inward to his state of mind, there is a genius in his ability to convey but I'm not sure a genius in what he is conveying.  This is how I'm feeling about Poe, although again with admittedly fewer data points to compare.  Compulsive drinker and gambler, dissolute, marries his 14 year old cousin only to have her die young due to the impoverishment he subjected her to, and then passes away shortly later himself.  None of this militates against being a great artist, or even having great insights (thinking of Dostoyevsky here), but I also have a hard time romanticizing this kind of a life and the perspective it led him to.

So yes, to observe that PERVERSITY is a thing is a piece of psychology worth noting, especially for anybody who would be overzealous in reducing us to rational or evolutionary or any other simplified axioms.  Humans are just a bit odder than that.  But the resonance it has with the everything else, the exaltation of extreme emotion, even negative ones, as insight in itself, is something I do just reject.

[Addendum: read the Nabokov essay on The Overcoat, but not feeling enlightened by it unfortunately.  Mostly just reminded of how insufferable I find him.]

Reply again:

Agreed. I think the popular notion of insanity being inextricably linked to creativity is  fallacious; in Russia's golden period you had madmen like Gogol and Dosoyevsky but also paragons of sanity like Chekhov. But what is true is that morbidity does seem to support a worldview conducive to art of a particular kind.

I wouldn't put Gogol and Dostoevsky into the same category of 'madmen'.

But that aside, what I think a dose of neuroticism supports is the quest for meaning.  The basic search, philosophical, moral, or religious, starts when something is not right with the world; something doesn't fit, like a dislocated shoulder, and the continual pain drives the need to put it back in its place.  The problem to me seems that being completely smothered in anxious, paranoid fear, or superstitious mania, or total dissociation from one's surroundings and body, tends to prevent proper progress either.

Take Gogol.  Going by The Overcoat, and Nabokov's analysis of it, it's absurd.  But it's absurd in a very particular way, one in which there is a sense that there is only a thin skein of rationality overlaying a malicious irrational nothingness.  In his later life he snaps into religious extremism, begins styling himself as the mouthpiece of Jesus Christ, and fasts himself into unwellness and death.  Clearly he had more than "a dose" of neuroticism; he was completely steeped in what we would regard as mental illness, his "breaking through" to another state of mind only being commemorated because of his supreme artistic ability to share it.  The actual mental life he experienced is not one I think anybody actually wants, except in idle-ignorant moments thinking it would so very romantic to have a life so, erm, vivid.

Masters of the Short Story #1: Balzac, Pushkin, Merimée, and Hawthorne

 Finding my mind blocked by an inexplicable haze when trying to read my current books, I picked up a 1972 compendium, Masters of the Short Story sitting on my shelf which had been purchased and abandoned here by my father when he had previously visited.  His bookmark was still placed in the middle.  I decided to start at the beginning which, owing to my general ignorance of the topic, I presume to be roughly chronological.  At least, it begins with Balzac and ends with Camus, and it seems quite unlikely that "27 great stories" are authored by people whose names would fit between them alphabetically.  Either way, just finished the first few and thought I'd sketch down some thoughts.

Balzac - A Passion in the Desert

He smiled, shook his head knowingly, and said, "Well known."
"How 'well known'?" I said.  If you would only explain to me the mystery I should be vastly obliged.

Once when I was writing my analysis of Pale Cocoon it came into my head to title it, "What Was She Looking At?"  It was a bit of an inspired choice, if I do say so myself, because the entire work centers around giving context to an "answer" which cannot be understood otherwise.

Passion has this same element.  Before us ostensibly is the answer, but what we lack is the vision to make it comprehensible.  That's the purpose of the story, and I admit it surprised me because what rudimentary knowledge I had of Balzac had him painted in my mind as a man of society.  He was writing The Human Comedy after all, with the implication in my mind that I would be hearing a lot about the socialites of Paris.  Instead we're stranded far from any of that with none of the usual props used to maintain our interest.  It's the reminisce of an old man, so we know he survives, and the events which would normally form the height of the tension are glossed over.  His capture is prelude, his killing the leopard and subsequent rescue a postscript.  Which is another way of saying the real focus, the real "action", lies elsewhere, and lends to the story a kind of contemplativeness despite the thrilling adventure it recounts:

"Yes, but explain---"
"Well," he said, with an impatient gesture, "it is God without mankind."

Then the final lines, which make it complete.  It is to the story's credit that I'm still trying to formulate the relationship of it all.  It is somehow a reflection on the start, an event which hushes the beginning chatter and despairs of explaining itself to the impertinently ignorant.  These man and woman are making table talk of something that is quite beyond them, and the old soldier is like a Zen master who knows that his second answer will be as cryptic as the first to the uninitiated.

[Addition since I have read a few more: it reminds me of the stories of Stevenson and Conrad.  Balzac, having mastered the human scene, seems in this unusual moment to also trace its limits and give a small glimpse of what he thinks lies beyond.  And it is only in the desert, away from other people, that we can come to such a view.]

Pushkin - The Queen of Spades

I have little to say about this one.  The editors' preface describes it as eminently Romantic, and Romantic it is, with strong vices, midnight confrontations, death, specters, and insanity.  This is a case where I was carried along more by the art of the writing than what was said, and indeed I found myself rather enjoying the characterization of the side-flavor Tomsky more than the main actors.  It really was a bit of genius how this personality, who plays no larger role in the story except to connect through rumor the main characters, nonetheless is granted a kind of detailed shallowness that is memorable.

Mérimée - Mateo Falcone

Simple, spare, short, but with economical clarity... and unfortunately the editors spoiled it for me.  Their opening description tell you exactly what is going to happen, and this is a tale where you are best going into it blind.  It's not that it's bad otherwise, since I think works that rely wholly on their "twist" are short-lived, but that its point is not punctuated as clearly.

Namely, I knew the son was going to be killed by the father from the beginning.  But what get us is the grim dawning of what is happening at the end, because even knowing what was coming I half didn't believe it based on how the father was acting.  It's not that he was misleading, but that he was so unerringly committed to it; no doubts, no qualms.  If he had sadness, it was nothing compared to his unwavering values.  He is a supreme creature of his place and time, and like Brutus (not the Caesar-killing one) he was perfectly content to have his offspring sacrificed for transgression what he believes is right.

The women weep, but he is not swayed in his choice.  While revulsion is the natural reaction, I can't help but find that Mérimée has captured something more than heartless brutality.  He lives on the edge of the outlaw area, but is not one; his skill in marksmanship somehow tied to his perfect adaptation to his role.  It's like how Tolstoy leads off Hadji Marad by likening him to a thistle he finds by the side of the road, a hearty plant that has made that place its home.  Again, I just wish it hadn't been spoiled.

Hawthorne - Wakefield

I admit, I went into this one with a bias: I don't have fond memories of A Scarlet Letter.  There's something abjectly didactic about Hawthorne that even I, who doesn't mind a bit of moralizing in my stories, still have trouble digesting.  It's the strong flavor of Puritanism that hasn't been really shaken off, even if he doesn't quite share the old values.  But as it went on he conquered my prejudice, and I can even point to the line where my opinion turned a corner:

"A morbid vanity, therefore, lies nearest the bottom of the affair."

What's remarkable about this story is that it's an unremarkable person doing a remarkable thing for believably unremarkable reasons.  That's... I'm not sure I've encountered that as effectively before this.  We can credit to this act a strange accident of character.  His 'quiet selfishness, that had rusted into his inactive mind', 'a peculiar sort of vanity', and 'a disposition to craft, which had seldom produced more positive effects than the keeping of petty secrets, hardly worth revealing.'  None of these elements are noteworthy in themselves, but they conspire together with circumstance, and it's that which really speaks to me, for even if Hawthorne and I are worlds apart in many ways, we're the same in our sense of contingency in human life.

Poor Wakefield!  Little knowest thou thine own insignificance in this great world!"

Here is this man who just... somehow wants to emphasize that he matters.  That he will go away and watch as the world changes, like an inverse It's a Wonderful Life wherein nothing really changes but he feels strangely confirmed in it anyway.  That he thinks he can step back into it at the end is the height of folly, as though somehow the world revolves around him and therefore couldn't possibly ever fail to incorporate him.  Which I don't know Hawthorne's total view, but there are flickers here that he's onto a fear of a world without God.  That a man like Wakefield can remove himself from context and just... vanish, and that this usual bustle of connections only falsely confirms us as having orientation.  Just Wakefield is too small-minded to grasp the implications while we're left to wonder about them.

[Another addendum: after writing this I spoke with several people about it and developed my thoughts more fully.  I came to appreciate that this story has the structure of a morality play but none of its content, that Hawthorne's decrying and exclamations were like a Greek chorus, coming in to offer their comment on the story in a ritualistic fashion where his readers would expect them to speak up, but that without the usual actors of God, the devil, etc. they are curiously misplaced.  Even if Hawthorne is no longer a Puritan he still possesses a fascination with our sinfulness, here demonstrated as an acme of smallmindedness acting out its unreflected impulses, an extreme case of what are otherwise the normal operations of the human mind.]