The Enduring Popularity of Aslan’s Country, as a Destination of Travel

Narnia, I think, is quite unique among modern fantasies for being an unashamedly Christian story that enjoys the devotion of an irreligious and unchristian readership. Ardent love for Narnia requires the unchristian reader to resolve a conflict between a Christian story they love and a Christianity they don’t. I’ve searched out threads that deal with this conflict, and have found that the resolution tends to consist in either:

• Reading around the Christian bits
• Re-interpreting the Christian bits as life-lessons.

It’s unclear to me what either reading would actually look like, since the author’s Christian worldview is dispensable neither to himself nor to his stories—and so cannot be simply read around. The Silver Chair, for instance, is almost allegorical in its overlaying of the journey of faith onto the literal journey into Underland. It’s probably better to say the journey into Underland is also a journey of faith for Jill and Eustace, which in turn is able to speak (via metaphor) to the Christian journey of faith outside of Narnia. Subtract the stuff about faith and you’re left with an exciting plot, but precious little meaning. Or consider Aslan. If Lewis wrote him to represent the Christian God, what remains of his character when you strip him of anything that sounds too Christian? Read round the Christian bits then, and lose the whole.

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The underlying problem with these readings is one common to a good deal of Narnia’s readership (and of which the Christian part is surely most guilty): the assumption that Christianity sits atop Narnia like a layer of oil atop water, like a code. Decipher the code and you can separate the Christian meaning from the story—to be discarded, or to be milked for all it’s worth. Such readings are illiterate and basically wrong, neglecting as they do to consider that Lewis set out to write literature, not code. Literature is written to mean something, and does so by an artistry of narrative and language. The Christian meaning is in the story and isn’t divisible from it, but is focused by every image and scene. Neither, then, does Lewis satisfy his Christianity by proselytising for a few lines before returning to the real story. As with all art, the meaning is integrated into the whole.

In his biography of Lewis, Alister McGrath makes a valuable distinction between Lewis’s apologetic writing and his fiction:

‘Lewis’s remarkable achievement in the Chronicles of Narnia is to allow his readers to inhabit this [Christian] metanarrative—to get inside the [Christian] story, and feel what it is like to be part of it. Mere Christianity allows us to understand Christian ideas; the Narnia stories allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story, and to judge by its ability to make sense of things, and ‘chime in’ with our deepest intuitions about truth, beauty and goodness.‘ – C.S. Lewis, A Life

According to McGrath, a mature Lewis wrote Narnia as a re-telling of the Christian story as a way to allow the Christian story to make a full and striking impression upon the imagination of his readers. It isn’t a re-telling in the sense that the reader ought to be able to spot Abraham and Christ and Moses. Narnia is the story of how the Christian God may have dealt with another world of his making in a way that reflects his character and behaviour, as known to us through his actions in our world. When you look at it this way, Narnia isn’t an allegory at all. It is instead an imaginative world in which the whole narrative has a thematic, theological meaning, all intended to beautifully illustrate what the Christian story and the Christian life are like. To take just one example of possible hundreds, Eustace’s transformation into a dragon is a reflection on the human condition of sin. He chooses selfishness at every opportunity, and his whole being eventually contorts as a result, manifesting it in his transformation into a dragon atop its hoard. He begins to understand his sin and to bitterly regret it—but the transformation has occurred, and he can’t do anything about it. The God of Narnia must intervene, painfully and tenderly, to heal him and set him back on the path towards life rather than death. If you subtract the Christianity out of all that, you get a story about a selfish boy who becomes a dragon, is sorry, is set right by a magical lion, and becomes a reformed character. If you try to make it a life-lesson, you may learn that it is bad to be selfish. But only the narrative wedded to its essentially Christian meaning is beautiful.

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To all this, I came across the objection that it is possible to ‘enjoy the view without buying the house,’ i.e. if Narnia is a Christian re-telling, it’s possible to appreciate its essentially Christian beauty without taking up, or being convinced by, the Christian faith. And I think that’s pretty much true and essentially reasonable, if I may add to it a caveat.

Everything Lewis wrote in Narnia he believed to be true, and beautiful only because it was true. Lewis believed that all nature would be reconciled under its true King; Lewis believed in Aslan’s Country where the dead are young again; Lewis believed that the only water that can satisfy our thirst is found next to the terrifying paw of the Lion; Lewis believed that belief in the Christian God, in that reality which is truer and more real than the visible one, must be clung to despite the creeping whisper of despair and nihilism. Lewis believed that Peter’s decency, Puddleglum’s courage and Lucy’s faith were all true expressions of the Christian life and responses to the Christian story as ardently believed; that heroic knighthood, love for nature and also the prohibition on females fighting alongside males (even if we may disagree with him on that part) were part of the beautiful whole of the Christian tapestry. Everything attractive in Narnia, Lewis poured into it from his understanding of Christianity, and the only reason Aslan is attractive is that Lewis wrote him to reflect the character of the Christian God. To love Narnia is to be captivated by the Christian vision—only dressed a little differently.

The atheist may love Narnia and reject its worldview as I may a story written by a devotee of scientism. I may reject such a story as a beautiful myth and love it all the same. I may consider it to have failed its duty of true-telling, but I will not be able to reject it on the grounds of ugliness. The atheist may indeed ‘enjoy the view without buying the house,’ but such a view is only consistent if they can do the same with the story of Jesus of Nazareth. The atheist who loves Narnia has been convinced that Christianity is beautiful and that its God is beautiful, and beauty is next-door to truth. The only fallback that remains is an appeal to scientific claims that disqualify God from existence, held tightly against the hot breath and the earthquake-purr of the Great Lion.

Covenants of Old

One of the founding principles of Susanna Clarke’s mythological worldview, borrowed from Inkling Owen Barfield[1] and treated explicitly in her recent book Piranesi, is the idea that the ancients had a substantial, personal connection to the land they inhabited – a covenant which has been transgressed and forgotten since the industrial era. Magic in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell stems from the alliances John Uskglass, the Raven King, once made with the land (i.e. the hills and trees and rivers) of England. Piranesi is set in what is almost the present day, at which point this magic of the natural has flowed out of the world completely, though some work towards its recovery.

In the venerable Inkling tradition, Jonathan Strange is Clarke’s attempt to write a folklore back into England’s past. The academic depth of her alternate history of magic, the vivid character of Fairie and its inhabitants, and the mystique of the North’s golden age of independence under the Raven King – all these attest to her mighty success in that project. Like those of Tolkien and Lewis, Clarke’s myth is also a messianic one: her characters secretly and ardently desire to restore the past order to modern England, and we are caught up with them in fervent hope for the return of John Uskglass whose reappearance will re-open the old roads to Fairie, and bring the trees and stones to remembrance of their old alliances, and bring English magic bursting once more into its summer bloom. This is the culmination of Clarke’s messianic hope: the return to a lost ideal state of communion between humanity and nature. We get only a taste of what that might look like in Jonathan Strange when Stephen Black becomes suddenly privy to the alliances the Raven King has made with nature, and the rocks and hills help him vanquish his foe. This is the climax of the book, a prophecy fulfilled – but alas!, it does not last. A new order is not ushered in; nature discovers Stephen for an impostor; the moment of consummation recedes. It’s a disappointing end to the reader’s inflamed hope: we hold our breath for the Raven King’s return, only for it to be brief, and of little consequence; we anxiously await the outcome of Vinculus’s prophecy, only to find it’s fulfilment in a brief moment, in a rather technical way.

To my mind, Susanna Clarke brings us to the very threshold of the new creation, and can’t but hesitate long enough for the door to close. This, I think, is completely understandable. How can the author hail a changed world when the world around us remains unchanged? To do so would send her readers blinking back out into the harsh daylight of modern life. I think Clarke would prefer we look with fresh eyes on the world around us, to renew our own covenants with the grey skies and with the stones, rather than to be blinded by utopia. In Jonathan Strange, then, the messianic hope for new creation can’t be other than deferred.

The Christian reader of fantasy is, however, accustomed to reading stories in which prophecies of the world’s renewal can be fulfilled, and Clarke’s predecesors, Tolkien and Lewis, were able to tell them because they believed their myths were, in the deepest sense, true. Lewis believed Aslan would appear to set things right at the Last Battle, just as Tolkien believed the rightful King would return to rule the kingdoms of Man. Each spoke of a renewed covenant between humanity and nature because they believed it would come to pass when all things were reconciled in Christ. Neither had any compunction about ending their fantasies in the gloriously perfected future because they intended such a vision to spark a secret and fervent hope in the reader, and because they believed that such a future is present now in seedform – that people can participate in the renewed covenant even now. We can’t know how Clarke intended her story to end, since her unfinished sequel languishes in the tangle worked by her illness.[2] She may indeed want to conclude the story with the restoration of nature and magic. For now, Jonathan Strange ends with a definite emphasis on personal change in an unchanged world: the King’s quiet return seems to leave the promises unfulfilled, but the people caught up in that pivotal event have been flung outwards into their own story arcs, changed, proclaiming that change to others. Perhaps its ending is less of a hesitation and more a mirroring of the biblical story.

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Clarke has spoken about how her Christian faith has been rekindled as she suffered under her illness in the sixteen-odd years between her two novels.[1] Piranesi certainly contains more of an explicit theism than does Jonathan Strange, whose influence succeeds in resolving some of tensions left unresolved in her debut novel. If Clarke’s ideal is the restoration of the relationship between humanity and nature, then Piranesi (the character) is the living embodiment of this new covenant. Due to his long-term imprisonment in the Distributary World he calls the House, which has been made by the outflow of magic from our world, Piranesi has of necessity developed a firsthand relationship of dependency with the elements, which have become to him companionable, and personal. Through long exposure, Piranesi has come to recognise a kind of personhood in every inhabitant of the House (from statues to birds to the flowing waters): they are his friends; he knows their tendencies; he communes with them. This companionship is not the same as a mutual communion between two people, nor is it as fulfilling. Nor, I think, does it stray into pantheism since it works to attune Piranesi to discern the hand of a benevolent creator in the events of his life. Though his beliefs about the House are often mistaken, he is grateful to the House for sustaining him and for populating his world with good things for his benefit. The House is not just benevolent, but active in the care it takes for its inhabitants. He expresses praise for the House, and develops his own kind of ritual religion of upkeep. When all his other identities are stripped from him by others, he identifies ultimately and only as the Beloved Child of the House.

It’s important to note the radical change of emphasis from Jonathan Strange to Piranesi. The latter does not lean upon the messianism of the former to reconstitute the relationship between nature and humanity. Piranesi’s messianics are actually the villains of the novel, deplorables like Laurence Arne-Sayles and Valentine Ketterley who intend to bring the wisdom of the ancients to modern England and usher in a new age of mankind in order to bolster their own reputations and occult powers. These men are like Tolkien’s villains, attempting only to control nature and magic and ending only with violence and death – they make the House nothing but a prison and a tomb. Piranesi couldn’t be more different. He’s a holy fool who, by losing himself in it, is able to see the House’s beauty. He is able to wonder at it, and so to discover the wisdom of the ancients – which, it turns out, is not power, but casual communion with a good world and with the creator who provides it.

Importantly, at the end of the book, Piranesi is able to bring the House’s wisdom into our world, the modern world. In his final entry, Piranesi looks around a park in the city, recognising virtue in an old man and some children from similar statues he has known in the House. He ends by describing a fairly barren, unremarkable scene:

‘I came out of the park. The city streets rose up around me. There was a hotel with a courtyard with metal tables and chairs for people to sit in more clement weather. Today they were snow-strewn and forlorn. A lattice of wire was strung across the courtyard. Paper lanterns were hanging from the wires, spheres of vivid orange that blew and trembled in the snow and the thin wind; the sea-grey clouds raced across the sky and the orange lanterns shivered against them.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.’

In this remarkable ending, Piranesi is clear that there isn’t much to recommend this city: it is forlorn and freezing cold; it is not obviously beautiful. Even still, Piranesi has learnt a deep knowledge, a deep wisdom in the House: that life, that sheer existence is beautiful; that the world is a generous and well-intentioned gift, for those with eyes to see it as such.

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Both Jonathan Strange and Piranesi long for the renewed communion of humanity with nature. Jonathan Strange prophesies a transformed world, but ultimately fails to realise it. In Piranesi, Clarke shows us that this ideal can be recaptured by individuals, chiefly by the act of losing oneself in the natural/magical world. Piranesi visits another world to understand the beauty and wonder of this one, to learn the goodness of its creator. As he returns to our world, he does so changed. And the world is changed around him, made alive, personalised, animated – which, for Clarke’s readers, is both the fulfilment of the promise of Jonathan Strange, and also good practical wisdom for living in a world yet unchanged.

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[1] https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2020/11-december/features/features/susanna-clarke-rescued-by-faith-and-strictly

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/12/susanna-clarke-i-was-cut-off-from-the-world-bound-in-one-place-by-illness

A difficult thing to fathom

I must have been ­in the midteen wilderness, lost, a boy looking desperately for some secure means of being someone whom others would find sparkling on the palate; a boy feeling fiercely that he alone had a true and sophisticated soul which alone reverberated sympathetically with the True Way of the Universe. I remember being caught up in one of those family gatherings I hated so much, which felt like a competition designed to reward everything I could never be. I remember being weary of my own fake smile and upset by the difference between my family and myself, which I perceived as the only salient fact that could exist in reference to us both, and so I remember being quiet. Whether by some watchful benevolence on my mother’s part or some insolence on my own, I remember leaving the room where the hubbub was and going to sit on the floor in from of the television, flicking to Film4, expectations low. When the channel changed, I found myself looking at an animation, a girl sitting companionably with a masked-and-shrouded something, side-by-side on a train that glided on serene tracks across a flat, untroubled lake. This moment, this scene, has left so great an impression upon me that I remember it vividly still. And I think the reason it impressed itself upon me so is that it was a moment of complete visual otherness—it was entirely visually distinct from any film or media I can remember seeing up to that point. It was an animation, but it did not have the rounded, childish features, nor the artificial colour palate of something like Disney or Pixar. It was simply beautiful: in its colours, in its bizarre serenity, in its lingering on characters sitting in silent companionship, in its allowance of the existence of the melancholy shroud and the possibility of togetherness under it—beautiful in a way nothing else was. I was enthralled.

Good things cannot last when a party is happening around them, and before I could watch much more I was dragged off to submerge myself once more in my own private adolescent misery. It can’t have been long after that before a very similar episode recurred: family gathering, loneliness-among-crowds, refuge within television. Only this time, the family voices were much closer, just in the next room (making it much less likely that I could have gotten away with sneaking off to the TV, but here we are). I think I might have been asked to prepare the TV for my grandparents—if so I did not, and I found again on Film4 by some glorious accident a very similar thing. A man and a boy working a plough together in the sun behind a small cottage, surrounded by fields of the most splendid green and a sky that made my heart leap. Conscious of the proximity of danger, I watched for as long as I could, on mute, on the carpet, until I was reminded of my duties and asked to resume them.

These are my memories of discovering Studio Ghibli: a private, soaring delight, a longing, a Joy. I think it must have been a year afterwards when Film4 next ran their Studio Ghibli Season that I caught glimpses of Chihiro et al. in their trailer for it and put two and two together. I remember that year, my attempts to reconstruct what I’d seen, of researches frustrated by the lack of anything much to go on, of trying to recreate the inciting incident by sneaking off again to the TV, of longing.

I loved Studio Ghibli the first time I laid eyes on any of it. I suppose because I happened upon the films in their moments of melancholy emptiness, the moments in which the characters rest from their involvement in the plot and invite the audience to rest with them. I was captivated because it seemed to me that someone else knew what it was like to be alone and quiet and melancholy. And I loved Studio Ghibli with a fierce and almost entirely interior love, since nobody in my life was willing to venture to share them with me. My Japanese cartoons won me ridicule from friends and family alike, so I kept them quiet and loved them on my own—which was probably a healthy thing for me, identitywise.

It was not for many years after that I discovered Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea—I think it must have been 2017 when I took the first four books on a holiday to the beach, consumed the first one in a compulsive, tearful gulp, and did not read the others for fear that in reading them they would be read. I cannot for the life of me remember with any accuracy what drew me to the shores of Earthsea, but I do have a vague memory of that peculiar call from a nicely illustrated paperback to a prospective reader happening in a bookshop in Waterford. It might be that I sought out the book in the shop on some other recommendation, but I know I did make a very deliberate and very desperate journey to Lisburn to get my copy an hour before we left for that beach-holiday.

All this to say, my loves for Earthsea and Ghibli are distinct entities. Earthsea, by way of the film, bears some measure of responsibility for my love of the Studio which produced it, but in a way that is entirely separate from the books, and which does not go vice versa. I must at some point have made the connection between the two; I know I at some point read Le Guin’s famous blog post – though I can’t remember when for either. I do remember watching the film post- reading the books, at which point I presume I had already made the connection.

Netflix did a wonderful thing in early 2020 in making nearly every Studio Ghibli film instantaneously available to me, solving that age-old problem of how one gets one’s hands on the things. I rewatched Tales from Earthsea, and I learnt a few things about the production history I didn’t previously know, and I’m just a little perplexed at how it came to be that Tales from Earthsea is pretty much Studio Ghibli’s one really bad film (my eyes pass lightly over The Cat Returns). I learnt that Miyazaki considers the Earthsea books to be a seminal work of great personal significance, on which he based an early manga. I learnt that because of Earthsea’s (entirely deserved) status in Japan, everyone involved in its production must have known they were hallowed texts, a special thing. And I learnt that Miyazaki, when the rights were secured and Le Guin eventually convinced, promptly lost all interest in the project and handed it off to his son (who had never before made a film).

With Le Guin, I wonder at the disrespect Miyazaki showed her work and her characters – no one could have dreamt of chopping up, say, Tolkien’s characters in the same way. While anger is here fully appropriate, whenever I think about it I mostly feel grief. I can’t help but think of the squandered potential. Earthsea in the hands of Miyazaki! It would have been the perfect collaboration. He would understand Ged’s slow journeys on Lookfar, would understand Tehanu’s tormented peace – would understand the intimacy of the epic. He would draw a dragon who could dance on the wind like no flying-machine ever could. He would paint the perfect embodied mingling of nature and humanity and supernatural, and he would paint it dancing on such a sky! Le Guin was right that he is the only director who could have made Earthsea into a film – and, for whatever reason, he ceased to care. And so passes a golden opportunity the like of which I will never hear again, to have two of my heart’s dearest delights come together in splendour.

And she would have let him add his own story to the canon! I lament!

A Magic of True Speaking

Consider this fragment from A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin:

‘Quick as he had done at Roke, Ged took the shape of a great hawk: not the sparrowhawk they called him but the Pilgrim Falcon that flies like an arrow, like thought. On barred, sharp, strong wings he flew, pursuing his pursuers. The air darkened and among the clouds stars shone brightening. Ahead he saw the black ragged flock all driving down and in upon one point in mid-air. Beyond that black clot the sea lay, pale with the last ashy gleam of day. Swift and straight the hawk-Ged shot towards the creatures of the Stone, and they scattered as he came amongst them as waterdrops scatter from a cast pebble. But they had caught their prey. Blood was on the beak of this one and white feathers stuck to the claws of another, and no gull skimmed beyond them over the pallid sea.

Already they were turning on Ged again, coming quick and ungainly with iron beaks stretched out agape. He, wheeling once above them, screamed the hawk’s scream of defiant rage, and then shot on across the low beaches of Osskil, out over the breakers of the sea.

The creatures of the Stone circled a while croaking, and one by one beat back ponderously inland over the moors. The Old Powers will not cross over the sea, being bound each to an isle, a certain place, cave or stone or welling spring. Back went the black emanations to the tower-keep, where maybe the Lord of the Terrenon, Benderesk, wept at their return, and maybe laughed. But Ged went on, falcon-winged, falcon-mad, like an unfailing arrow, like an unforgotten thought, over the Osskil Sea and eastward into the wind of winter and the night.’

So I’m here again, full of the vision, the open sea stretching unbroken to the sunset, the painted eyes of Lookfar skimming above the water, the golden dragons on the golden wind, dancing in the peace and the beauty and the truth of Earthsea. I’m reminded of how vast it is, the Archipelago, as the pages of Gollancz’s new edition stretch out to the thousand. I didn’t know there was so much of it, before. Like Ged I’ve travelled to the Farthest Shore, still happily burdened by the untapped mystery, the shrouded bulk of the rest of the world – the countless mist-veiled islands I’m yet to explore. And it’s made more radiant by Charles Vess’s colours, and made more thoughtful by his haunting charcoals.

I read Chapter 7 The Hawk’s Flight before a long drive, and a couple of its phrases got stuck in my head. I kept turning them over and over, a meditation, trying to figure out what makes them so perfect. I’ll pull them out for you:

Ged’s falcon-flight is ‘like an arrow, like thought’, and then later, ‘Ged went on, falcon-winged, falcon-mad, like an unfailing arrow, like an unforgotten thought, over the Osskil Sea and eastward into the wind of winter and the night.’

and also

‘Swift and straight the hawk-Ged shot towards the creatures of the Stone, and they scattered as he came amongst them as waterdrops scatter from a cast pebble.’

Even now that these images have revolved hundreds of times over in my mind, I still don’t really know what makes them perfect. I can try, as the preacher says, to unpack them: how ‘a cast pebble’ conjures up with astounding clarity in my mind the precisely appropriate image of casually achieved speed and definite purpose; or how the scattering of the waterdrops from the pebble seems to describe with dreadful precision the exact way the hurtling hawk would strike the black creatures, forcefully, overpowering them in an instant with the lightning-flash of his will, leaving them to flap and fluster and right themselves in confusion, and so to be caught irresistibly in his slipstream and be pushed behind by the eddies of agitated wind.

Perhaps all it is is the harmonious correspondence between the images – the movement of the waterdrops and the cast pebble – they just work together. When she says them I know precisely what she means. But it’s in the degree of the correspondence, perhaps, and in how it’s all saturated in characterisation – Ged’s decisive action, his purpose, his power, and the scattering triviality, inconsequentiality, pettiness of the foul things that do harm.

I can’t explain it any further than that, so I’ll simply call it what many have before me: magic. It is a wonderful thing that Le Guin, whose system of magic is founded upon power being conferred by the saying of true words, is so devastatingly capable of saying those true words, of subtly crafting and fashioning the true way of saying. Even in the smallest of moments – this rare blip of violence in which the hawk-Ged dives the winged creatures – she finds the way of saying it truly, describing the moment beautifully and rightly.

This is what I love about Earthsea and its author: beautiful, fitting conveyance. It’s probably what Le Guin herself would call ‘accuracy’ and ‘music in the words’. Strange to say, but I can spot some of the artful vagueness of expression in the earlier books that I know all too well from reviewing my own writing. It’s something I often find in an author’s earlier works, something that gives people like me hope, whose creations come only with great labour and pain into the world, and then silently, and briefly. That said, it is a true delight to observe as the great writer increases in skill and accuracy from book to book. And her writing always confers to me a supreme sense of comfort at being caught up in the hands of a master. I aspire to that mastery.

Thankfully, Earthsea is so much more than beautiful word-pictures. The saying is true because it tells a deep truth well.

Both trilogies exposit an unusually rich and moral vision of what true life is. Ged overcomes by understanding, by love and friendship, by spending himself for others. He learns that in losing his life, in dying to power and prestige, he can take up a far better one – a little life, a larger life, a loving and quiet and happy life, a life in which he can cultivate slow righteousness. Le Guin weaves a story about how the world can be righted, how the good king will come to rule with vulnerability under the banner of peace, how the gentle and the mourners and those who thirst for justice will usher in a changed world, and be satisfied. My heart burns within me for her good vision to come real. I can’t help but think that this woman was not far from the Kingdom of Heaven.

One of my favourite accolades for Earthsea comes from the back cover of my now-redundant little green single-volume, (peculiarly) four-book edition. Village Voice have this to say, ‘Composed sparingly, shaped by narratives so basic they must be inscribed upon our cells, they read as if they were not written but found, dug out like jewels from rock.’ I don’t know who you are Village Voice, but thanks for saying it well.

When the heart is not engaged

Thoughts after reading ‘Sons and Lovers’ by DH Lawrence.

Note: This novel was acquired at the recommendation of a faceless literary panel. Described as one of the novels highest in their esteem. Described as one of the ‘great novels’.

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It’s not difficult to recognise the merit of the thing. DH Lawrence lays down some fabulous sentences. Undeniably excellent sentences. Problem: it’s difficult to feel anything particularly strongly about them. Lawrence’s narrative voice is eloquent, but dispassionate. And that’s actually really odd. The man is giving us a generous slice of the lives of two people – heights and depths, joy and despair. And yet at no time does the author convey any sense that the story stirs him in any particular way, nor does he commend us at any point to be stirred. He gives no sense that any event is of particular note, nor does he suggest that we should take note of it.

And so, we the reader can revel in the beauty of the prose ’til the cows do their thing, and drift, unattached, into inevitable boredom. It’s impossible to be interested in a story if the writer isn’t either.

‘Sons and Lovers’ unfortunately functions as one big dispassionate proclamation of human experience. That same indifferent, omniscient narrative voice declares to us throughout that this is how Paul feels, and assumes that you relate to it. S&L tries to universalise every tiny moment of the inner lives of the Morell family. Basically, it’s trying to do too much art.

Lawrence’s insights are accurate, though. I can relate to Paul and Clara, and their hidden feelings. It’s clear to me that DH Lawrence knows the human heart. Problem: he doesn’t seem to think there’s much of value therein. He treats his characters with such dispassion that it can’t help but feel like disdain. It’s as though he had completely and forever unravelled all of the mysteries of the soul, and, after finding it to be not very interesting after all, decided that he was rather disappointed by the whole show.

Lawrence understands the inner lives of people. Lawrence is well able to express his insights with clarity and eloquence. Lawrence is incisive in his extolling of human imperfections.

Lawrence is entirely non-impactful to my heart. Lawrence doesn’t inspire any kind of joy, love, or palpable emotion.

In reading Lawrence, I am oppressed by an entirely unpleasant impression of dry inevitability that everything is known and not much is remarkable. It may well be that that is Lawrence’s exact point. If so, a reasonable person would have chosen a less convoluted method of making it. I think it may be a simple product of Lawrence choosing to describe every internal sensation and emotion of his characters minutely, rather than choosing his words to evoke a sense of what the characters feel, a la Hemingway. Maybe you lose something in describing everything, no matter how beautiful the description. Lawrence’s novel is at once rich and empty, and so I can’t help but dislike it.

‘Sons and Lovers’ is flawless in form, but absent in heart. How can such a thing be great?

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Eternal problem:

1. Impersonal internet recommendations.

Solution:

1. Homogenise the literary tastes of the human race
2. Invent superior paid subscription service for personalised book recommendations

Racism, space monsters and Heart of Darkness

In literature, I am partial to the idea that phenomena exist in this world which are immeasurable, inconceivable, thoroughly beyond our experience and understanding. HP Lovecraft, for example, uses the idea of ancient, improbably appendaged, and (hopefully) fictional beings to strike an awesome terror into the hearts of all and sundry. What’s interesting (to me) about Lovecraft is that his horror comes from a sense of deep unease stemming from the complete otherness of his awful monsters, and not (often) from their intent or actions. It’s horrorful because Lovecraft forces us to reckon with the notion that we, people, are not the pinnacle of existence – nor do we know, or are even capable of knowing (a fragment of) everything that there exists to know. Lovecraft hammers home the basic, conveniently forgettable truth that we aren’t adequately equipped to understand most things which we desire to understand. Our brains dance merrily along, fooling us into believing that we know all there is to know about a thing, when we really know just enough about the thing to convince ourselves that it’s digested and contained entirely and categorically in Mental Box A.

Reader, I really wasn’t expecting to find a similar concept at the core of Joseph Conrad’s miniature classic, Heart of Darkness. From horrible space demons to Joseph Conrad. Smooth.

In HoD, Marlow travels down the Congo, on his way becoming increasingly uneasy at the brooding kind of presence he feels extending out of the African shoreline towards him. It’s a weird sort of personification, conveying the idea that the continent, the trees, the earth – they’re all a singular being, with agency. In fact, Conrad moves ownership of a lot of the active verbs from the native Africans to the jungle itself, making it seem as if Africa, the landmass, is doing all of the antagonising. It goes further – Conrad describes Africa as having a weird kind of mutual cultic relationship with Mr. Kurtz, in which Africa is the dominant partner of the two. Assuredly weird. Upon reception of these rather unexpected continental vibes, Marlow feels (understandably) that Africa is beyond the comprehension of non-native interlopers like himself. They don’t belong here, and Africa is being pretty clear about telegraphing that particular message. Like the explorers at the Mountains of Madness, Marlow’s overriding impulse is to make a quickish break for it.

Let’s talk about racism. In an interesting (and highly commendable) move, Modern Library placed a collection of mini essays discussing Heart of Darkness at the front of my edition by way of introduction to the text. Reading them afterwards (as a spoilerphobe), I was surprised/impressed to find that they’d included a particularly flammable review by Mr. Chinua Achebe, in which the aforementioned brought the proverbial thunder to bear on HoD, decrying it as thoroughly and obnoxiously racist, pro-colonialist, and other terrible things one ought not to be, even if you’re not a book.

Achebe denounces how Conrad treats black people in the story – as inconsequential, basically entirely inferior, unequal with the white man by reason of the incontrovertible order of nature. And, I think that’s fair and accurate (Achebe’s denouncement, I mean). Joseph Conrad may indeed have been racist to the bone, and the reader certainly has license to be disquieted by his shamelessly low opinion of black people, as I was. [Controversial however upcoming].

However, let us consider Conrad’s Africa in isolation from racism for just a second. As soon as the word ‘racist’ is deployed, there is a tendency to think that ‘racist’ is all there is to think about a thing. Truthfully, when I read the book, I didn’t think that racism was the whole story.

My postmodern bias may be showing, but I really thought that Heart of Darkness was trying to deliver an anti-colonialist appeal. A strong Lovecraftian compulsion is sown throughout HoD – Marlow can’t escape from the idea that the Europeans should never have come to Africa, should never have disturbed it. Why? Africa is thoroughly different, completely other from ‘civilised’ Europe – it is not a place where an Englishman can survive, sanity intact, for long. Conrad depicts Africa as alive, and hostile (MAYBE) because he knows that it’s not a place where the Europeans and the natives can peacefully coexist. Africa is other – it does not welcome a European cultural invasion. Native Africans, I imagine, do not wish to be colonialised, and cannot be homogenised into the ‘civilised’ European ideal – they are their own people. And so, Conrad talks as if Africa were acting to violently dispel the foreigners, protecting itself from their ill-motived influence. In the story, Marlow is pretty clear that he doesn’t see how anyone can honestly believe in the moral integrity of colonial evangelism – he recognises the futility of trying to change a whole culture, a living entity, into the image of your hometown. In what I imagine to have been a pretty controversial utterance, Heart of Darkness kind of gives Africans the moral high ground in issues of mining ventures and colonisation. And I think that would have been a pretty valuable message for Victorian Britain to hear.

Over here on the flipside, Achebe sees the otherworldly terror which Conrad attaches to Africa as racist in and of itself – if Africa is portrayed as hostile, malign, and if that filters down into the portrayal of the native Africans, is that not racist? And you know, perhaps it is.

Heart of Darkness may be racist, Conrad may have been thinking racist thoughts as he wrote the thing – it’s rather impossible to tell. The thing is – as soon as we call it racist, it becomes a lot harder for us to access anything additional of value in it. What Heart of Darkness isn’t, is just racist.

More than ever

I have drafted and redrafted this post, attempting to convey something quantifiable about my love for the writing of David Foster Wallace. My problem is this: I am plagued by some kind of sticky ooze-like substance which latches onto my rising thoughts and pulls me way down into a sort of spiritual laziness. When recently I struggled up for a few brief snatches of higher thought, I found that reading Mr. Foster Wallace had me in an emotional flux, oscillating between a longing sort of inspiration and a freefall down to the very depths of despair.

My previous drafts failed because I was trying, earnestly and naïvely, to describe (with my limited vocabulary/communicative ability) the essence of what makes his writing resonate deep, sonorous, in my chest. I’ve tried to approximate it with levity, and I’ve tried to appeal to the emotio-spiritual quality of his work, but I always ended up churning out some unoriginal and formulaic vapour about grammar and style. In his essay on “Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky”, DFW speaks of how literary biographers labour under the pretence that they’re capable of capturing the essence of an author’s work with explanations or analyses or contextses. Learning from this mistake, what I’ll try to do now is just relate why indeed I even feel the need to write about the man in the first place. Fair?

To cut to the heart of the matter, what strikes me about DFW is that he is perfectly and tragically honest – a practical philosopher, intimate with the paradoxes inherent to being human and alive. In reading his essay, I am unhappily forced to discover that I, like the youthful Dostoyevsky, am nothing more than a blank face writing (arguably) clever words without anything at all to say – all my purpose in writing is revealed to be a vain attempt at appealing to some sense of valuable modern cleverness, and so to achieve some degree of literary greatness. Most unfortunately, that’s where the comparisons end. It’s come to my attention that there’s a reason why authors tend to start getting published in their late 30s and 40s – they have lived long enough to have something to say, and garnered enough skill to find some way to say it. It seems unlikely to me that I will ever think enough about something to have something valuable to say about it (recall the aforementioned ooze) – and which someone hasn’t already beaten me to. I am chronically lazy. Lazy in my brain. And that is what I so very appreciate about David Foster Wallace: he is human, he is acquainted with laziness and this special kind of despair – he’s human enough to know what it’s all like. He knows all about, for example, trying to do something great for purely selfish ends, and he has depth and clarity of thought enough to know that such a thing is purposeless.

“But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?”

The man is unpretentious and honest, in all his writing he is an everyman with farsight and a greater intellect than I could hope to gain. And he just slots the above into a book review, and without ceremony.

In the essay he talks about how Dostoyevsky is great not because of his accomplished form or mastery of literary techniques, not even because of his exceptional and profoundly drawn characters, but because he is able to write unashamedly about the moral and spiritual principles he believes are important, and to do so in direct, unflinching, in-text opposition to the toxic ideologies of the day. And I think to myself, “that is one tall order”. And I realise to myself that I want to be able to, like Dostoyevsky, champion gospelic love and faith and grace and justice in a bitterly cynical age, and I realise that that desire is similar (I think) to David Foster Wallace’s. And then I realise, more crushingly this time, that I am truly and honestly in the position of wanting to champion the godly, the righteous, the what-I-believe-in, primarily so that I could take such a championing and fashion it into a great novel, itself primarily the vehicle for my lasting glory. Or at least, partially. And I think DFW wrestled with that, but I think DFW got around it by being truly and actually great in his own right, and distinctively so. And I don’t have that distinctiveness or greatness. The circularity of it all depresses me.

I thought that bearing witness to an essay written by my favourite writer in appreciation of my favourite novelist would leave me enthralled. Actually, it leaves me in despair. The genius and depth of Dostoyevsky is unassailable, I knew that already. But having DFW write about him in such a clear, extraordinary depth of insight, hard thinking, real and honest, baring his own fears and insecurities kind-of-way – it serves to add another degree of separation between me and what I love.

More than ever I’m just reminded that I am so utterly and completely average.

 

Postscript, written in a mood of greater optimism:

Hey, I have time on my side. Casual Wikipedia research tells me that authors begin late in life – I’m really just setting out. Contemporary fledglings inform me that if I persist in writing as a discipline, I will see improvement in a shorter space of time than I would expect. David Foster Wallace is a source of encouragement to me in this: he describes (in a different, equally great essay) starting to put effort into his passion for writing at the tender and mutual age of 21. Also, it’s clear to me that he thought himself (laughably, tragically) in a similar boat to my own – appreciating the beauty and skill of others and not considering self able to produce something in which other people would find the same beauty and skill. And he thought that while writing Infinite Jest. What I can in turn think is that maybe all of the above is a lifelong struggle, and that the thing to do is work hard and realise that I will always seem to myself farther from destination x than I am in actuality.

I wonder if DFW’s SNOOTitude made the becoming-a-writer thing easier for him. It’s like the man was gifted with a genetic ability to construct flawless sentences. He had technical knowledge of language that I didn’t even know one could have. For me, it looks like multiple simultaneous strivances lie before me – for technical mastery and creativity and the conquering of apathy. Is it likely that technical mastery isn’t something he had to strive for?

Maybe (maybe) it’s exhilarating to take in the scope of the mountains I didn’t even realise were open for scaling. It is mainly terrifying. But it is good to know that the road is long before one packs one’s bags. And good to set off early in the day.

Source:

• ‘How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart’
• ‘Authority and American Usage’
• ‘Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky’

Source²:

• ‘Consider the Lobster, and other essays’ – David Foster Wallace

Opinions on a Classic

This summer has been a fine summer. A fine summer can most aptly be described as a summer in which lots and lots of books get read, by me. As we do indeed live in an imperfect world, some of these books are a dry and uphill struggle. But take heart! For among the scattering chaff lies the occasional sheaf of wheat which is an unmitigated delight. (Quality book = wheat, get with the metaphor). And yet, as the shelves of my bookcase fill up nicely, I can honestly only describe two of the books I’ve read this summer with such unreserved praise.

It is with sobriety and earnestness of heart that I confess to you the following datum: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a spectacularly good novel.

Yes indeed; call the printing presses – a classic is good. Now, dear reader, believe me when I tell you that I am entirely prepared for your sarcastic retort. I am aware that my obviousity may set your neurons alight with a mild and needling discomfort. But heed me! In sooth, I was really expecting this book to be sub-par. Vague knowledgeable entities say that The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece, an hypothesis supported by the questionable geniuses of eg. Sigmund Freud, who claimed it as the “most magnificent novel ever written”. Keen as I am to distance myself from the luminary lunacies of Mr. Freud, the man has a point. TBK is simply sublime and I love it with a fierce love. So my pre-thoughts towards Crime and Punishment might be summed as “Sure, it’s Dostoyevsky, but how could it compare?”.

And yeah, I get that I’m about to talk about a literary classic, written by a literary genius, and I understand that I’m probably going to say precisely zero new things. But, as I’m entirely blind to what scholars and critics have to say about Crime and Punishment, I’ll at least provide you with an honest zero.

The real question is, “What on earth could I contribute to the discussion of a classic work of literature? What can be said that hasn’t already been said, and better?” Okay, so that was two real questions. As the only known entity who dwells in this particular locus of space and time, I like to think of myself as at a somewhat unique nexus of life experience, with a hopefully maybe unique inner life. And so, I think what’s valuable for me to talk about is the particular things which impressed themselves on me as I read the novel, which I am maybe uniquely placed to appreciate, or at least to maybe appreciate with a unique combination of words, and less hopefully, thoughts. With me?

And so what follows is a matter of semantic alchemy, as I attempt to transform unexpressed emotions and impressions into a discussion which is legible and coherent, and less hopefully, intelligent. Wish me luck.

Enough faff! Here’s what I loved about Crime and Punishment.

Dostoyevsky has a truly masterful command of character. His ability to spin real, breathing individuals into existence with his words, more – to animate them with staunch and messy beliefs – is unparalleled in my reading. The characters he evokes are so vivid as to be almost independent of the narrative he weaves around them, so powerful are their unspoken and confused motivations. Yet Dostoyevsky delights in binding his characters to a kind of narrative providence, each character’s character determining them for a course of action which will inevitably lead to conflict and confrontation with others, all in service to the unfaltering march of the plot. It is this dual subservience of character to plot and plot to character which is inhumanly delightful to the reader (or at least to me), allowing for Dostoyevsky to conjure an indelible sense of tension from the simple and unspoken knowledge that certain characters must interact, must have a confrontation of action and ideals, and that such an event will be a truly spectacular moment for the reader to consume, and with gusto. His characters are fallible in the most relatable fashion, in having an imperfect knowledge of themselves and others. Though we follow Raskolnikov for the majority of the story, Dostoyevsky grants us access only to his actions and his inner turbulence as he wrestles with the implications of his crime, denying us access to the core of his motivations – a fact which reflects Raskolnikov’s own inability to express or accept the factors which motivate him, until they finally crystallise for himself and for the reader near the end of the novel. I must confess a profound love for the character of Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, who spends much of his time in the novel antagonising the main characters in a seemingly frivolous, and therefore indecipherable manner. He’s written in such a blissfully distinct way – just look at the malicious and deliciously otherworldly presence he carries with him when he first enters the novel.

“He drew deep breaths – but how strange! It was as if the dream still continued: the door was wide open, and there was a complete stranger standing on the threshold, studying him closely.
Raskolnikov hadn’t fully opened his eyes yet, and instantly closed them again. He lay prone, without stirring. ‘Am I still dreaming?’ he wondered, and again raised his eyelids a fraction: the stranger was standing on the same spot, still staring at him. Suddenly he stepped warily over the threshold, closed the door carefully behind him, walked over to the table, waited for a minute or so – his eyes fixed on him throughout – and softly, noiselessly sat down on the chair beside the couch. He placed his hat on its side, on the floor, and leant with both hands on his cane, resting his chin on his hands. Clearly, he was prepared to wait a very long time. Insofar as could be seen through blinking eye-lids, this man was no longer young, solidly built and with a thick, light beard that was all but white…
Some ten minutes passed. Though it was still light, evening was closing in. In the room there was complete silence. No sounds even from the stairs. Only the buzzing and knocking of some big fly as it struck the pane in mid-flight. Eventually it became unbearable: Raskolnikov suddenly raised himself and sat up on the couch.
‘Well, go on: what do you want?’
‘Just as I thought: you weren’t sleeping, merely pretending,’ came the stranger’s peculiar reply and easy laugh. ‘Allow me to introduce myself: Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov…'”

This passage is at real tonal odds with the rest of the novel, and its pretty bizarre quality serves to introduce a character whose motivations will be just as obscure for most of the novel. What a guy…

Next on the list, Crime and Punishment showcases Dostoyevsky as master of a balanced prose style which is both truly entertaining and readable, while still being luminous in its wit and skill. Dostoyevsky’s novels are seen by modern eyes as difficult and intellectual, far-removed from what the average person could be expected to read. But these novels were popular in 19th century Russia, and for good reason – Dostoyevsky is accessible, and he uses devices that are common even today. For example, let us consider tension. Crime and Punishment is one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I can remember – it’s so rare for me to be so entirely gripped by a novel that I don’t want to put it down, indeed I read entire books (of which there are six and an epilogue) in one sitting. And that’s because the novel rolls ceaselessly towards long-awaited confrontations between characters. And when those draw near, things get unashamedly tense. Let’s consider the following passage, taken from Book 5 Chapter 4 as Raskolnikov is about to divulge his secret to Sonya.

“‘…Here’s what, Sonya,’ (for some reason he suddenly smiled, in a pale, feeble kind of way for a second or two) ‘do you remember what I wanted to say to you yesterday?’ 
Sonya waited anxiously.
‘I said as I was leaving that I might be saying goodbye to you forever, but that if I came today I’d tell you…who killed Lizaveta.’
Her whole body suddenly began to shake.
‘Well, here I am: I’ve come to tell you.’
‘So you really meant it yesterday…,’ she whispered with difficulty. ‘But why would you know?’ she hurriedly asked, as if suddenly coming to her senses.
Sonya’s breathing became laboured. Her face turned even paler.
‘I know.’
She was silent for about a minute.
‘Has he been found then?’ she timidly asked.
‘No, he hasn’t.’
‘Then how come you know about that?’ she asked, again barely audibly, and again after nearly a minute’s silence.
He turned towards her and fixed her with a steady, steady stare.
‘Guess’, he said, with the same twisted and feeble smile as before.
Convulsions seemed to ripple through her body.
‘But you…Why…? Why are you…frightening me like this?’ she said, smiling like a child.
‘He must be a great friend of mine, then…if I know,’ Raskolnikov went on, continuing to stare at her unrelentingly, as if he no longer had the strength to avert his gaze. ‘That Lizaveta…He didn’t want…to kill her…he killed her…without meaning to…it was the old woman he wanted to kill…when she was alone…and he came…only for Lizaveta to walk in…so then…he killed her.’
Another dreadful minute passed. They were both still looking at each other.
‘So you can’t guess, then?’ he suddenly asked with the sensation of a man throwing himself from a bell tower.
‘N-no,’ whispered Sonya, barely audibly.
‘Well, take a good look.’
No sooner had he said this than once again an old, familiar sensation suddenly turned his soul to ice: he was looking at her and suddenly, in her face, he seemed to see the face of Lizaveta. He remembered vividly the expression on Lizaveta’s face when he was walking towards her then with the axe and she was retreating towards the wall, putting her arm out in front of her, with a quite childish look of fear on her face, just as little children have when something suddenly begins to frighten them, when they fix their gaze anxiously on the thing that’s frightening them, back away and, holding out a little hand, prepare to cry. Almost exactly the same thing happened now to Sonya: she looked at him for a while just as feebly and just as fearfully, then suddenly putting her left arm out in front of her, slightly, just barely, pressed her fingers into his chest and started rising slowly from the bed, backing away from him, further and further, her stare becoming ever more fixed. Her dread suddenly conveyed itself to him as well: exactly the same fear appeared on his face, too, and he began to look at her in exactly the same way, even with almost the same childish smile.
‘Guessed?’ he whispered at last.”

As you can see, Dostoyevsky doesn’t shy away from conventional methods which an author might use to hook his audience, simple methods like shortening sentences, breathless and incoherent speech from characters, a rolling, ceaseless, parenthetical rhythm – methods which a critic might scorn as too obvious or common. But in the hands of the master, even the most common of material is bent into the most effective shapes.

In a similar vein, and next on the list of things Dostoyevsky isn’t afraid of: a flippin’ good twist, followed up by a flippin’ good cliffhanger. The passage below is the paragraph which concludes Chapter 4 of Book 4, just after Raskolnikov and Sonya share a spiritually intimate moment of faith and failing faith, and just after he states his intention to return the next day for the confession we’ve just heard above.

“On the other side of the door – that same door which divided Sonya’s apartment from that of Gertruda Karlovna Resslich – there was an in-between room, long empty, which was part of Mrs Resslich’s apartment and was rented out by her, hence the little notices on the gates and the bits of paper stuck to the panes of the windows that gave onto the Ditch. Sonya had long assumed that the room was unused. Yet all the while, standing quietly by the door in the empty room, Mr Svidrigailov had been listening in. When Raskolnikov left, he stood and thought for a while, tiptoed off to his own room adjoining the empty one, took a chair and carried it noiselessly right up to the door leading to Sonya’s room. He found the conversation both diverting and revealing, and enjoyed it very, very much; in fact, he’d brought the chair in so that in future, say tomorrow, he would no longer have to suffer the inconvenience of spending a whole hour on his feet, but could make himself comfortable and derive every possible pleasure from the experience.”

Delicious! I love how distinct this paragraph is, unassuming, pretending to be nothing at all of consequence, dropping the slow and dawning hint of the name Resslich, we’ve heard it before, somewhere, and it slowly and by degrees dawns upon us in the space of two sentences, one long, one very short. And then Dostoyevsky hits us with the reveal – Svidrigailov is at work here, manipulating the honest designs of our protagonists for his own frivolous pleasure, defiling the private intimacy of Raskolnikov and Sonya, idly acquiring a total power over Raskolnikov as he makes himself comfortable for the advent of his confession. Arkady Ivanovich, you villain!

Finally, and most personally, I love how Dostoyevsky handles the central theme of human greatness, laying bare the primal and innermost fears of man – that I am simply average and will not be remembered for my good or my ill. It is primal, a theme more excavated than written; age makes it resonant, and I suspect it resonates not solely with me. Raskolnikov, by virtue of being a person (and by curse of the inescapable burden of titanic motherly expectation laid upon him from an early age), cannot evade the belief so inherent to him – that he is a man apart from other men, a great man. And inevitably, he’s confronted by the reality that he is probably just ordinary – a belief he thinks proved by his reticent and imperfect crime, by his unwillingness to commit to a policy of crushing undeserving and problematic others beneath his heel in order to accelerate his path to greatness. Convinced of his lesser nature, he lives a tortured life in Siberia, ashamed of his lack of determination to force greatness on himself through unrepentant and unrelenting violence. But it’s in his despair that unassuming, meek, Sonya tends to Raskolnikov, softening his heart to love other people, softening his heart to God through her unfailing kindness. And it’s this love, love and not an unabashed propensity for violence, that makes him great. And that’d be enough for getting on with for one superb novel. But what I adore about Crime and Punishment is how Raskolnikov’s struggle finds a dark reflection in Svidrigailov. Svidrigailov is also in pursuit of greatness – he is so very bored with his mundane and comfortable life, so very bored with the pleasures of the flesh too. Svidrigailov knows greatness firsthand, he can’t forget the one taste of greatness he’s had – the flash, the fire in Dunya’s eyes. Svidrigailov is intimately acquainted with just how rare greatness is, and so he delights in Raskolnikov’s angsty crises because he can see that the youth thinks himself to be great, different from everyone else – something very amusing to Svidrigailov, somewhat distracting, a pleasant diversion. Svidrigailov is so haunted by the splendour he has glimpsed in Dunya, so perfectly obsessed with it as the only conceivable thing of value in his mundane life, that he is compulsively driven to possess it, or failing that to live as a slave to Dunya, or failing that, to die. With tragic inevitability, it’s Dunya’s righteous fire that disallows the first two possibilities – she won’t belong to him and she won’t dominate him – she won’t even kill him. And so, his pursuit of greatness ends with Dunya’s denial. What Svidrigailov needs is a Sonya to teach him the self-sacrificing love for others, to teach him the true path to a quiet greatness that he wouldn’t understand. He can live a happy but thoroughly ordinary life in the arms of his adoring young bride, or he can end his quest with a bullet to the head. But above all, Svidrigailov unerringly fails to settle for anything below greatness. Does that, in some way, make him great?

I think the point has reached at which I’ve said all I’m going to say.

As I was reading Crime and Punishment on my holiday down into Ireland proper, the fairly nuts homeowner we stayed with offered up her reading routine to me within a dread conversational torrent: she compulsively reads all books by a designated author, and comes out the other end as a lay-expert on designated designated author. While Dostoyevsky has left, like, a lifetime of written work behind him, I’ve discovered that he wrote four great works after his spiritual experience of sudden non-execution and subsequently living in exile and hard labour in Siberia. Four minus one, minus TBK equals Demons and The Idiot. Now all I have to do is scavenge for some beautiful editions. Thanks, crazy Irish lady!

Shortform Opinion: the Delayed Interconnectedness of Characters

I read The Man in the High Castle, here’s what it made me think.

The effectiveness of certain narrative devices are something to behold. TMitHC puts to use what I will henceforth name the Delayed Interconnectedness of Characters. Objections? No? Great. In a choice between acronyms DIC and DIoC, safety dictates that we opt for DIoC. 

DIoC is probably familiar to y’all. It’s when an author sets up different characters in separate geo-social circles, each with their own subplot, and then unexpectedly brings them into contact in spectacular subplotic convergence. Eg. High Castle has Mr. Tagomi make a distraught voyage into Robert Childen’s antique shop, whereupon Tagomi tries to sell him a pistol from the American Civil War (which Childen refuses because of prior events in his subplot), and Childen tries to interest Tagomi in his new range of un-antique jewellery (motivated by prior events in his subplot). The significance here being that these characters have previously lived in almost entirely separate plots, and have no further interactions before the end of the book.

Note: Autocorrect ingenuously rendered Mr. Tagomi as Mr. Tagliatelle before I had to intervene, which was too funny to exclude. I’m waiting on your novel, Autocorrect. 

The only other novel I can remember DIoC featuring majorly in is the highly exalted and most wondrous Infinite Jest. If memory serves, DIoC occurs in a very limited fashion in Infinite Jest, with most of the commingling of characters happening in an implied narrative beyond the pages of the book, as DFW sets plot threads in motion which will inevitably lead to a DIoC scenario at some point in the future. Oh how very easily I could turn this post into an appreciation of the many virtues of Infinite Jest, but that’s not why I’m here.

In both High Castle and Infinite Jest, DIoC works to create a kind of internal nostalgia in which the reader (if I am a representative sample) feels the satisfying pleasure of enhanced intimacy with each character in the scene. We get a kick out of knowing that a certain character will behave and speak in a certain way, a further kick out of knowing how his beliefs will conflict in an entirely predicted manner with hers, and a knowing smile spreads across our faces when we’re proven right.

On reflection, DIoC is kind of like your typical blockbuster sequel. Both activate that same nostalgia gland, squeezing out some of the same chemical pleasure we get when we’re on the inside of the joke, made to feel clever because we know the characters and we understand the humour. Except DIoC earns the chemical release, because the author has to work to make a compelling, sensical plot which justifies putting these two characters in the same room, which allows for an emotionally satisfying encounter, and which actually functions to further the plot. Each of these things are increasingly unnecessary in movies, it would seem. 

So, the Delayed Interconnectedness of Characters. When executed well, it is a wonder to behold. Especially in Infinite Jest – you just feel like the whole mammoth book is building towards a crossover between the storylines. And Infinite Jest hijacks DIoC somewhat by making the separate character developments enrich your understanding of other characters in different subplots through a shared history or future or relationship. 

Basically, remind me to talk about Infinite Jest sometime. Was this post an excuse to talk about Infinite Jest? Basically, remind me to talk about Infinite Jest sometime.

Duct Tape Book Club

It’s kinda like the Dead Poets’ Society, except with more duct tape and less mania. That’s what I’d say if I were to try to inflate my sense of self-coolness. 

I’ve wanted to be in a book club since ages, I suppose because none of my friends understand me, man. They just don’t care about books like I do. Even my gf doesn’t jam to this particular vibe of mine. She likes books that she likes and hates books that I do. So I’ve had to give up on talking to her about my books, because she won’t read them. And if she did, so much the worse –  her apathy would be terrible to behold. So having a book club is an experiment. I’ve gotta see if these folks’ll be as literary-passionate as I am, and I’ve gotta see if the format of a book club’ll work for me. 

I don’t really know any of the members, bar two brothers and a friend. I was invited unexpectedly, agreed impulsively, am somewhat on the fringe of things.

The idea is this: each member brings a book of their choice to the group, thoroughly duct-taped so that all recognisable features are disguised by stickiness and chrome. Thusly masqued, books are distributed randomly among those present, so that each contributes and receives a random, unknown book. 

Sounds great, don’t it? It’s the ultimate in Shrek-style wisdom, we’re getting a chance to judge a story based on the actual story rather than allowing our pre-conceived notions to skew.

Alas for good intentions! This month’s book rather defeated the point of the thing. I knew what it was upon first inspection, being familiar with some of the nomenclature and style present in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Still, this is a book I’ve always wanted to read and consequently, I devoured it wholesale in a day or two. Suffice it to say that I’m definitely going to get the remaining parts of the series over the summer (and I might talk about it more fully then). It’s refreshing to find a book which lives up to its reputation.

So although the purpose was defeated, I think I can still draw a useful conclusion. Way back around Christmas I posted about how the shoddy presentation of one ‘A Death in the Family’ 100% messed with the otherwise positive vibes received from the book, leaving me with a sour taste in my mouth and an arsonist’s passion for the thing. I was somewhat afeared that reading a book bound in ugly, smelly duct tape would do similar things to my book-enjoyment skills. Today I’m happy to disavow this notion. Unless it was an issue compensated for by my enthusiasm for reading HHGTTG. 

I guess we’ll see what happens next time. Patience is the only way to enlarge this particular data set.