by Judy Jones
Alexey Vronsky (from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina): The dashing young officer for whom Anna Karenina abandons her husband, child, and respectable society life. Vronsky isn’t really a bad sort; he just isn’t neurotic enough to cope with a tragic love affair. He really does seem to take it hard when Anna throws herself under the train that’s taking him away to war. Heck, all the poor guy wanted was a little space.
Emma Woodhouse (from Jane Austen’s Emma): “Handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition,” Emma has “lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” Too bad she’s a terrible snob, an incurable gossip, a cold fish, and utterly blind both to her own faults and to the mess she makes trying to run everyone else’s life.
Stephen Dedalus (from Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses): Well, you can take this one of two ways, as the critics have. On the one hand, Stephen may be a pretentious aesthete, an egomaniacal little prig who only thinks he’s an artist. On the other hand, he may have talent. At any rate, he’s not a bore; he has depth, intelligence, an abundance of Catholic guilt, a driving need to find a father figure, and a striking resemblance to James Joyce.
Eustacia Vye (from Hardy’s The Return of the Native): Caution: Contents Under Pressure. Eustacia is stuck out on the heath with nothing to do and no one to talk to until Clym Yeobright comes home from Paris. Seeing him as her ticket to glamour and adventure, she marries him. Unfortunately, all he wants to do is teach school and spend quiet evenings in front of the fire. After a period of making herself and everyone else miserable, Eustacia drowns herself in a bog.
Marlow (from Conrad’s Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and other tales): The narrator of long stories, usually told late at night over booze and cigars, in which one or another of Conrad’s outcasts works his way through some agonizing and frequently fatal moral dilemma. Although Marlow claims to be baffled by whatever it is that “causes me to run up against men with soft spots, with hard spots, with hidden plague spots, by Jove! and loosens their tongues at the sight of me for their infernal confidences,” he is really a sleuth of the soul, as perpetually on the lookout for a knotty problem as Ted Koppel.
Mrs. Ramsay (from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse): Somebody’s ideal of womanhood. Loving, tender, sensitive, instinctual, compassionate, and efficient, she copes gracefully with eight children, a demanding husband, a steady stream of house-guests, and the village poor—all on a tight budget—and still manages to age so beautifully that everyone who meets her wants to paint her portrait or carry her bundles. If you’re anything like her, give us a call.
Three Important-Sounding Fallacies (and Two Important-Sounding Other Things) You May or May Not Want to Watch Out For PATHETIC FALLACY
A phrase coined by the British critic and essayist John Ruskin to call attention to the tendency on the part of second-rate poets to attribute to nature the emotions and motivations of human beings. Ruskin cites a passage from a poem of the day, “They rowed her in across the rolling foam— / The cruel, crawling foam,” then comments dryly, “The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief.” However, while this practice might have struck Ruskin as morbid, “pathetic fallacy” is now a fairly neutral term used to designate any nature-as-human image, whether convincing (as in the hands of Shakespeare or Keats) or absurd (as above). Look for a lot of pathetic fallacy in the Romantic poets (where mountains mourn and fields smile) and in the novels of Thomas Hardy. INTENTIONAL FALLACY
Or don’t believe everything the author tells you—especially if he’s trying to explain why he’s written the book or play or poem at hand. For instance, Milton, up front in Paradise Lost, tells us he wants to “justify the ways of God to men.” Don’t (according to critics William K. Wimsatt Jr., and Monroe Beardsley, who came up with the term “intentional fallacy”) count on it. And even if it’s true, if that’s precisely why Milton thinks he wrote his epic, so what? Who cares why he thought he wrote it? The Big Critical Issue here: Which counts more, the Author or the Work? Intentional fallacy was a favorite thing of the New Critics of the Forties and Fifties, who, having been force-fed historical and biographical background material when they were kids, now insisted on “close readings of the text.” In other words, forget the Author, forget his Period; it’s you and the night and the music. And the Critic, of course. AFFECTIVE FALLACY
The flip side of the intentional fallacy, and likewise introduced by Wimsatt and Beardsley, who now warned against the “confusion between the poem and its result [what it is and what it does]”—i.e., it doesn’t matter whether the night and the music (and the Critic) make you feel amorous, or melancholy, or afraid of the dark. Your emotional response to the poem or story or whatever doesn’t matter any more than how the poet or novelist or whoever felt as he wrote it. How you react isn’t the point; the poem (etc.) is the poem. Is the poem. Note that (1) the affective fallacy is what some critics think happens when somebody puts a lot of emphasis, as Aristotle did, on a goal like catharsis, and (2) both the intentional and affective fallacies are battle cries, not neutral terms like “pathetic fallacy,” and not open-and-shut cases. OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE
T S. Eliot’s idea. It means that a good poet, playwright, or novelist doesn’t write, “Hmm, how sad, even pathetic, that girl looks, the one over there by that rock, who lives, I think, by the River Dove”; he says instead, at least if he’s Wordsworth, “A violet by a mossy stone.” Eliot maintained that the objective correlative—the concrete and specific image—is “the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art,” and he defines it as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion, such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” Whatever; she still looks sad to us. NEGATIVE CAPABILITY
Hard to get a clear definition here, even though everybody from F Scott Fitzgerald to service-magazine journalists behaves as if he knows exactly how and when to deploy it. The phrase is Keats’, and he kept using it in letters to friends in slightly different, and slightly vague, senses. Somebody must have called him on it (not that it did much good), because, in 1817, Keats glosses “negative capability” in yet another letter: “that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Lionel Trilling interpreted this to mean “a way of dealing with life,” “to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts,” to trust the subconscious and not “try too hard in coming at a truth.” F. Scott’s reading of it (in The Crack-Up) was a little different: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” Other people seem to think negative capability is related to empathy. Or integrity. Or objectivity. Anyway, according to Keats, Shakespeare had a lot of it. Who knows? So might you.
Three Twentieth-Century Novels
to Reckon With
Sure they’re long, and none of them’s exactly a cliff-hanger. But that doesn’t mean you have to spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around these monuments of high modernism, one Irish, one French, one German. ULYSSES
(1922) JAMES JOYCE
What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?
New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form, female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed.
If he had smiled why would he have smiled?
To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagini
ng himself to be first, last, only and alone, whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.
The novel as cab ride: potholes, gridlock, minority-group parades, plus the springs are shot and the driver’s smoking a cigar. The trick is to sit back, ignore the meter, and try not to anticipate the destination. Go easy on yourself: Linearity —getting from A to B—was never much on Joyce’s mind, and it doesn’t have to be much on yours either. More than any other, this is a book not to stand on ceremony with.
But it is a book to be careful around. An eyes-in-the-gutter, Life-goes-to-a-bad-dream mutant of a novel, it’s still every bit as off-putting as you found it the first time around. (The passage on the previous page, from the “Ithaca” chapter, in which Leopold Bloom—an advertising-space salesman in 1904 Dublin, exhausted husband to Molly, would-be father to Stephen Dedalus, and twentieth-century analogue to Ulysses, a.k.a. Odysseus, the most down-to-earth yet cunning of the Greek heroes—comes home and goes to bed, is as easy as the going gets.) The basic problem with Ulysses is, of course, that there’s too much in it: The Odyssey-mimicking structure, the linking of each of the eighteen episodes with a different academic discipline and a different bodily organ, the symbols and allusions, the puns and parodies, the cast of dozens (each of them Irish and voluble), the determination to do it all, both expressionistically and documentarily, and in eighteen hours and forty-five minutes of novel time, no less. Then there’s Joyce himself, who, while he may be, as Eliot pronounced, “the greatest master of language in English since Milton,” is also a show-off of the worst, third-grader-with-a-father-who-writes-for-television sort.
Two tips: Don’t be afraid to browse. Find an episode you like. Then graze: Let Joyce’s precise, unflagging, comic, and consolational portrayal of life take hold. And don’t be proud: A guide, like Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Harry Blamires’ The Bloomsday Book, both of which provide page-by-page assistance, will help you over the rough patches. REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST
(1913-1927)
MARCEL PROUST
[S]ince the accident to her jaw, [Mme. Verdurin] had abandoned the effort involved in real hilarity, and had substituted a kind of symbolical dumb-show which signified, without endangering or even fatiguing her in any way, that she was “laughing until she cried.” At the least witticism aimed by any of the circle against a “bore,” or against a former member of the circle who was now relegated to the limbo of “bores”—and to the utter despair of M. Verdurin, who had always made out that he was just as easily amused as his wife, but who, since his laughter was the “real thing,” was out of breath in a moment, and so was overtaken and vanquished by her device of a feigned but continuous hilarity—she would utter a shrill cry, shut tight her little bird-like eyes, which were beginning to be clouded over by a cataract, and quickly, as though she only just had time to avoid some indecent sight or to parry a mortal blow, burying her face in her hands, which completely engulfed it, and prevented her from seeing anything at all, she would appear to be struggling to suppress, to eradicate a laugh which, were she to give way to it, must inevitably leave her inanimate. So, stupefied with the gaiety of the “faithful,” drunken with comradeship, scandal, and asseveration, Mme. Verdurin, perched on her high seat like a cage-bird whose biscuit has been steeped in mulled wine, would sit aloft and sob with fellow-feeling.
The novel as flotation tank. Except that it feels more like you’re suspended in mayonnaise than floating on water, and, far from sensory deprivation, it’s sensory inundation that the experience winds up being all about. Your host(s): Marcel, a fictitious first-person narrator as well as the author whose name appears on the cover. The length of your session: three thousand pages, distributed over seven dense volumes, five resonant locales, half a dozen impressive drawing rooms, and between seven and ten major love affairs (depending on whether you count Marcel’s infatuation with his mother and his grandmother as one or two, and his passionate discovery of his literary calling, on page two thousand nine hundred and something, at all).
Begin (and, if you must, end) with Swann’s Way, the first volume in the heptology; for conversational purposes, at least, you’ll have read Proust. You won’t meet many people who’ve made it through the whole thing; besides, the narrative eventually comes full circle, and virtually all its important themes and characters are presented here. Shifting back and forth in time and space, the narrator first recalls his childhood in the relatively innocent town of Combray, then goes on to tell of the doomed obsession of Robert Swann, an elegant dilettante, with an unworthy tart named Odette de Crécy. (Later, all the characters will exchange roles and masks until they’re unidentifiable, and everyone you’ve met along the way will either die or turn out to be gay.) This segment will also give you a perfectly adequate take on Proust’s prose style; in fact, by the time you come stumbling back into the sunlight, you’ll feel positively intimate with the interminable, serpentine sentences; the constant, unstoppable metaphors, analyses, and digressions; and the schizophrenic shifts from gloomy reverie to bitchy social comedy—all in a way that you’ll find hard to explain to your roommate.
Chic and snobbish, Proust is nevertheless out to alter consciousness, to make the impossible connections, to demonstrate the relationships, real or illusory, between transcendence and trendiness, art and love, the self and the other, people and birds: His theories of relativity give Einstein’s a run for their money. THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
(1924) THOMAS MANN
They even took Karen, one afternoon, to the Bioscope Theatre in the Platz—she loved it all so very much. The bad air they sat in was offensive to the three, used as they were to breathing the purest; it oppressed their breathing and made their heads feel heavy and dull. Life flitted across the screen before their smarting eyes: life chopped into small sections, fleeting, accelerated; a restless, jerky fluctuation of appearing and disappearing, performed to a thin accompaniment of music, which set its actual tempo to the phantasmagoria of the past, and with the narrowest of means at its command, yet managed to evoke a whole gamut of pomp and solemnity, passion, abandon, and gurgling sensuality. It was a thrilling drama of love and death they saw silently reeled off; the scenes, laid at the court of an oriental despot, galloped past, full of gorgeousness and naked bodies, thirst of power and raving religious self-abnegation; full of cruelty, appetite, and deathly lust, and slowing down to give a full view of the muscular development of the executioner’s arms. Constructed, in short, to cater to the innermost desires of an onlooking international civilization.
The novel as triathlon, with politics, philosophy, and science where the bike, the water, and the foam-rubber inner sole should be. Not hard to read, exactly: Unlike Joyce and Proust, Mann—ever the burgher, never the bohemian—gives you a crystal-clear picture of the action; while things get strange, they’re never impenetrable. But you do need a whole lot of endurance to get through the lectures on duty and rationalism and Marxism and Eros and vitalism, each delivered by a different Old World spokesperson with an ax to grind.
Itself exhausted, yet moving relentlessly from minute to minute, week to week, and finally year to year, The Magic Mountain keeps its hero, the “unremarkable” Hans Castorp, virtually immobile in a sanitarium for the tubercular, located high in the Alps in the days “before the Great War.” The sanitarium, of course, is Europe, and Castorp’s fellow inmates are Europe’s dispossessed: progressive radicals, reactionary Jesuits, cat-eyed Russians. Everyone’s a patient. And a captive. Ditto the reader. And the amazing thing about the book is that, as a Munich woman wrote to Mann, “I was not bored by your novel, and with every page I read I was astonished that I was not bored.”
If you don’t get bored, it’ll be despite Mann’s craftsmanship (labored, ham-fisted) and storytelling technique (old-fashioned, digressive), and because of his subject, which couldn’t be more to the point: art, alienation, and apocalypse. Mann, an architect (to Proust’s painter, Joy
ce’s sculptor), has taken a condemned site—all that rotting yet reassuring pre–World War I culture—and built a skyscraper on it. And everybody from J. Alfred Prufrock to Woody Allen has had lunch in its ground-floor restaurant.
Gifts from the Greeks HOMERWORK
True, the scholars can’t be sure that he was really blind, that he was really a wandering minstrel, that he really wrote both (or either) the Iliad and the Odyssey, or that he even really existed. For the record, most of the scholars now seem to believe that there were two poets at work here, the Odyssey poet having been preceded (and influenced) by the Iliad poet, and some of them seem to think that homer “was an archaic Greek verb meaning “to set to verse.” Whatever; given how old you—not to mention the poems—are, it’s probably easier just to go on filing them under the name Homer and hoping for the best.
What we do know: that both poems are epics, telling memorable, larger-than-life stories in memorable, larger-than-life language; that both concern the Trojan War (but, even taken together, tell only a small part of the story of that war); that they were almost certainly composed sometime in the eighth century b.c., nearly four hundred years after the events they describe; and that they were meant to be recited, not read.
We also know that Western literature begins here. Not only have the Iliad and the Odyssey, like the Old Testament, never been dropped from the syllabus, they’re the cornerstone for the whole epic tradition: Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, down through—with the emphasis on the “down”—Joyce’s Ulysses. None of which makes for the world’s easiest read; those embarking on same are advised to bear in mind that (1) people in the eighth century b.c. thought of people in the twelfth century b.c. as being bigger, stronger, and better acquainted with the gods than they themselves were (result: a degree of overstatement, and of man/god interaction, that’s less just for effect than it is from the heart), and (2) all those “wine-dark sea”s, “rosy-fingered dawn”s, and “Poseidon, shaker of earth”s, while they might have you nodding off, helped both the poet remember his lines and the audience get into the mood (after all, you didn’t object when Billy Joel sang “uptown girl” a dozen times in the same song).
