Posts Tagged American

He must have regretted it for the rest of his life, but J.D. Salinger perfectly encapsulated the deep affection a reader develops for an author. “What really knocks me out,” Holden Caulfield announces in the third chapter of The Catcher in the Rye, “is a book that, when you’re done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” Herman Melville would certainly have known how Holden felt; his most famous piece of non-fiction, after all, is “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” an effusive sixteen-page paean to the older writer that he was somehow able to parlay into a genuine and intense–though regrettably brief–friendship. Their relationship soured after a few years, for reasons that aren’t quite clear today, but the connection between Hawthorne and Melville was, while it lasted, undoubtedly the most important friendship in American literary history.

When it ended, Melville destroyed every single letter that Hawthorne ever wrote to him, so Hawthorne’s best and most interesting thoughts on the author of Moby-Dick come to us from his notebooks. (The best of these thoughts–and probably the most insightful thing anyone will ever write on the subject of Melville’s religious life, is, “He can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.”) As it happens, however, Melville’s letters to Hawthorne don’t tell us nearly as much as “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” and almost everyone who wants to write about the relationship between the two men starts with this essay.

I am less interested, however, in what Melville has to say specifically about Hawthorne than in what he has to say about writers and writing in general. “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in-between its perhaps too eager praise for Hawthorne and its patriotic dismantling of the literary canon and Shakespeare’s place at the center of it, manages to hit the major notes of one of the biggest critical revolutions of the twentieth century. What’s more, Melville finds a middle ground between the two camps, decades and decades before one of them had even been founded.

The first major blow against the idea of the author as ultimate arbiter of the written text came in the essay “The Intentional Fallacy,” written by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in 1946. Wimsatt and Beardsley argue persuasively, if drily, that extratextual intent on the part of the author of the poem is beside the point in any act of interpretation. For one thing, those intentions are very rarely available to us as readers, but even when they are, they just get in the way. Instead, “Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work.” To deal with biography or authorial intent is nothing but a romantic fantasy, part of “a discipline which one might call the psychology of composition” that must be kept quite separate from literary criticism proper.

Wimsatt and Beardsley–and the New Criticism with which they are associated–put the locus of authority on the text. As they put it, once a poet sends his poem out into the world, “The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge.” They do not mean by this that the public is free to interpret the poem however it wishes, any more than the public is free to assert with impunity that the sun revolves around the earth or that Portugal perpetuated the Holocaust. Rather, there are certain objective facts about the meaning of a poem, just as there are ostensibly certain objective facts about the natural world. Furthermore, we discover these facts by the same method: empirical observation. The scientist/literary critic must comb through the material world of the text without reference to the “supernatural” world of the author.

These religious metaphors are only implicit in “The Intentional Fallacy,” but they become central in the next generation’s volley, Roland Barthes’ 1968 essay “The Death of the Author.” Students of literature have traditionally encountered this essay during the first year of graduate school, and the effect is typically galvanizing; Barthes gives the literary critic carte blanche to do with the text as she pleases. “Once the Author is removed,” he announces, “the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” It’s a given that the author doesn’t matter; Barthes pushes it forward to the point where Wimsatt and Beardsley’s objective/scientific meaning is also lost. The power of the critic is simultaneously expanded and diminished: No longer must the critic bow to outside forces that would determine “correct” interpretation–but neither can she assume that her interpretation is binding for anyone, including herself. The death of the Author results in the birth not of the Reader but of readers, plural.

Barthes’ purposes here are rather explicitly (anti-) theological. The lack of a final or ultimate meaning in his system of criticism corresponds to a parallel lack of final or ultimate meaning in the world itself. And, as Barthes notes, “to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases–reason, science, law.” Barthes may ultimately merely take Wimsatt and Beardsley to their logical conclusion; to disregard the Author is, after all, to suggest a lack of teleology in the text; as Pope puts it, “Whatever is, is right.”

The limitations of the New Critical and poststructuralist approaches to interpretation are apparent with a little further investigation. The New Critics, for their part, collapse wholly into the body of the text, close their eyes, plug their ears, and refuse to look beyond the printed page. Wimsatt and Beardsley use mechanical language to describe what they do; John Crowe Ransom, who coined the term “The New Criticism,” says outright that “Criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic.” Problem is, criticism depends on literature, and literature isn’t in any important sense exactly; it’s always written by a messy and unmechanized human being into a specific social and historical context that will pull the critic further down the rabbit hole so long as he is honest enough to follow the trail. A scientific criticism is possibly only if the critic pretends the part of the iceberg that touches the air is the only part of the iceberg.

Barthes’ poststructuralist alternative, which seemed so promising and exhilarating when I was 23, leads to a different sort of philosophical dead end. Instead of disappearing into the ink on the page, Barthes-as-Critic slides into himself. His 1973 book The Pleasure of the Text demonstrates the endgame of criticism without teleology. The joissance referred to in the French title is the pleasure of orgasm, and Barthes seems to conceive of literary interpretation as a sort of intellectualized auto-erotic asphyxiation. “The pleasure of the text,” he says, “is like that untenable, impossible, purely novelistic instant so relished by Sade’s libertine when he manages to be hanged and then to cut the rope at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss.”

Pleasure, by its very nature, belongs to the individual, so Barthes’ moving the act of reading and interpretation from the realm of truth and ideals into the realm of pleasure (“the whole effort [of the book] consists in materializing the pleasure of the text, in making the text an object of pleasure like the others“) is ipso facto a retreat into utter solipsism. Interpretation is a form of masturbation, performed not to get at any grand or even small truth but to bring pleasure solely to the interpreter.

I’ve come a long, graphic way from “Hawthorne and His Mosses”–or maybe not. Melville is famously fond of ambiguously sexual imagery–Barthes must have loved him if he ever read him–and this essay is no exception. As Melville puts it toward the end:

But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.

The orgasm metaphor remains, but it is the author’s, not the reader’s, and it is not at all masturbatory. Clearly we’re dealing with something quite different from Barthesian joissance here.

But neither would Melville be interested in joining those who would claim–even after Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and the others who in their various ways pronounced the Author dead–that authorial intentionality is the most important ingredient in literary criticism. (These folks do still exist, though maybe not in large numbers in the actual Academy.) Early on in the essay, Melville wishes aloud “that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother, that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors.” He sounds an awful lot like Wimsatt and Beardsley here, eager to put biographical criticism to bed once and for all, eager to praise the text and nothing but the text.

But the subjunctive mood in that sentence says it all. Melville would like to live in a world of texts without authors, but that world does not exist–or at least it is not our world. He is drawn throughout the essay to Hawthorne the man, at times almost the extent of fetishizing his physical body. He says at one point that Hawthorne is “content with the still, rich utterances of a great intellect in respose; and which sends few thoughts into circulation, except they be arterialized at his large warm lungs, and expanded in his honest heart.” At times, he takes a proto-New Critical turn in his skepticism about the ability of biography to aid literary criticism. (“Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to him, a touch of Puritanic gloom–this I cannot altogether tell.”) But then he turns around and expresses better than anyone until Salinger the reader’s deep-seated need to know the author: “No man can read a fine author, and relish him to his very bones, while he reads, without subsequently fancying to himself some ideal image of the man and his mind.”

Melville’s combination of draw toward the great author and skepticism that the author can say anything the text doesn’t creates a tension, one that we might productively compare to a more traditional tension in American literature: that between the personal/individual and the universal/social. For if the New Critics are right, the text is an objective sign that anyone with the proper training can read correctly. If the romantics and biographers are right, the text is a pure expression of a great individual genius, who controls the interpretation and meaning of it. (If Barthes is right, of course, all interpretation is at best the blind leading the blind.) At times, Melville seems to think meaning is personal; other times, he leans toward a universalist interpretation.

In the end, I think, he affirms both by rising above the dichotomy. Shortly after he longs for a text without an author, he makes the following statement:

The names of all fine authors are fictitious ones, far more so than that of Junius–simply standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding Spirit of all beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius.

Melville very nearly affirms Emerson’s Over-Soul here, with the caveat that it is essentially hierarchical, that only “men of genius” belong to it. But it allows him a way out of the quagmire of author-text/individual-universal divide. To praise the text is, in this line of thinking, to praise the author, and to praise the author is to praise the “Spirit of all Beauty” off in the ether somewhere. The author’s biography, like his visage, is encoded into the text, so whether you seek it in other places scarcely matters; it’s coming out, and you’re drawn to it because to be a human being is to be drawn to other human beings. At the same time, the text connects to that higher Spirit of all Beauty and thus moves far beyond authorial intent. One may feel free to say more than the author could have imagined–and simultaneously to avoid the worst excesses of the New Critics and the poststructuralists.

I know of no book more convicting than Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship; read this book closely and seriously enough, and you will likely have to stop calling yourself a Christian. Bonhoeffer’s stark and savage denunciation of Christendom surpasses even Kierkegaard’s and shines a floodlight on the reader’s embrace of civic religion and what Bonhoeffer famously calls “cheap grace.”

The earth-shattering revelation in The Cost of Discipleship is the extent to which suffering is necessary for the Christian life. (Obviously, Bonhoeffer was not the first to point this out, but he points it out more stridently and effectively than anyone else I’ve ever read.) Suffering is for Bonhoeffer the immediate requirement of the Gospel, “not the terrible end to an otherwise godfearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” The Christian life always already demands suffering.

But it’s important to note that it is not merely suffering Christ demands—it is suffering for the sake of others:

While it is true that only the sufferings of Christ are a means of atonement, yet since he has suffered for and borne the sins of the whole world and shares with his disciples the fruits of his passion, the Christian also has to undergo temptation, he too has to bear the sins of others; he too must bear their shame and be driven like a scapegoat from the gate of the city.

The Christian must suffer at the hands of the world for the sake of the world and for the sake of the Gospel. We 21st-century Americans are not great at this sort of suffering, it is true–that’s why we like to scream “PERSECUTION!” when the government takes down the Ten Commandments from its public buildings or when the cashier at Wal*Mart says “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Persecution is, of course, ultimately a good thing for the Christian, as the New Testament makes abundantly clear. Obviously we should embrace it.

Bonhoeffer himself serves as a model for the embracing of suffering. He was famously imprisoned in Germany for speaking against the Nazis and for advocating the assassination of Hitler. He languished in a prison for years before being executed only days before the Allies freed the other prisoners. I don’t want to speak for Bonhoeffer, whom I have not read beyond The Cost of Discipleship, but it seems clear to me that this is a good picture for suffering for the sake of others and for the call. Every Christian cannot be called to be executed by a hostile government–but every Christian must suffer in smaller but significant ways.

This schema reminds me of a scene from Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant. Morris Bober, a Jewish shopkeeper in mid-century New York, employs a gentile assistant, Frank Alpine, who, unbeknownst to his employer, steals from him and who was involved in a robbery attempt that left Morris wounded. They talk about their differences, which quickly brings them around to Judaism:

“But tell me why it is that the Jews suffer so damn much, Morris? It seems to me that they like to suffer, don’t they?”

“Do you like to suffer? They suffer because they are Jews.”

“That’s what I mean, they suffer more than they have to.”

“If you live, you suffer. Some people suffer more, but not because they want. But I think if a Jew don’t suffer for the Law, he will suffer for nothing.”

“What do you suffer for, Morris?” Frank said.

“I suffer for you.”

This is an extraordinary scene, one not altogether irrelevant for our discussion of Bonhoeffer. Morris, as a Jew, is meant to suffer for the Law but suffers instead for the sake of another person. He is not a Christian and thus, according to Bonhoeffer, does not know God (Bonhoeffer is quite a bit more theologically conservative than some of the later thinkers who have picked him up, although he’s not what we’d recognize as Evangelical)—but we can learn something about redemptive suffering from him nevertheless. Suffering for the sake of the call and for the sake of others involves being spurned, assaulted, and wronged and allowing it to happen again. The Christian must, like Morris Bober, spiritually employ those who have assaulted him.

Certainly the true Christian should look more like Morris Bober than the sort of self-satisfied, assimilated Christian of today; as Bonhoeffer puts it, “Suffering . . . is the badge of true discipleship,” and “The opposite of discipleship is to be ashamed of Christ and his cross and all the offence which the cross brings in its train.” One must choose: discipleship, with its attendent suffering—or assimilation.

Notice, however, that suffering is a means to an end—and that end, paradoxically, is the end of suffering:

Jesus prays to his Father that the cup may pass from him, and his Father hears his prayer; for the cup of suffering will indeed pass from him—but only by his drinking it. That is the assurance he receives as he kneels for the second time in the garden of Gesthsemane that suffering will indeed pass as he accepts it. That is the only path to victory. The cross has triumph over suffering.

This passage suggests that we will suffer even if we try to assimilate to escape it—true discipleship, with the suffering it entails, is the only real way to eliminate suffering.

Bonhoeffer also demands from followers of Christ a sort of divine alienation: “But in the passion Jesus is a rejected Messiah. His rejection robs the passion of its halo of glory.” In other words, His mere suffering is not enough; He (and with Him, Christians everywhere) must be rejected by the world. Certainly if a Christian fits in with the world around him, he is probably not a real Christian, at least in Bonhoeffer’s economy.

But our world features a complacent Christendom, which cannot even begin to understand the idea of divine alienation: “But this notion has ceased to be intelligible to a Christianity which can no longer see any difference between an ordinary human life and a life committed to Christ.” Take the riches of a worldly Christendom if you will, but don’t confuse them with Christianity.

Alienation ends up having a net positive effect on Christians, as you might expect: “It is Christ’s will that [the disciple] should be thus isolated, and that he should fix his eyes solely upon him.” This is a variation, I believe, on crisis theology—left with no other viable option, the disciple must follow Christ and Christ alone. Bonhoeffer advocates a  leap of faith into obedience to Christ, something that sounds very similar to Kierkegaard’s famous teleological suspension of the ethical. To follow Christ, the disciples “must burn their boats and plunge into absolute insecurity in order to learn the demand and the gift of Christ.” They must leave the world of rational guarantees; if they do not, “the call vanishes into thin air,” and the possibility of faith disappears.

This leap of faith—as Bonhoeffer suggests outright and Kierkegaard at least implies—is inherently alienating. It is something that only an individual can go through: “Every man is called separately, and must follow alone. But men are frightened of solitude, and they try to protect themselves from it by merging themselves in the society of their fellow-men and in their material environment.” And yet it is by this isolating solitude that human beings become true human beings; to assimilate is to remain in the Kierkegaardian ethical sphere and to deny something real and important about who we are. We are called to alienation.

Once the Christian is alienated, he is able to see that he was always already alienated. “The call of Jesus,” says Bonhoeffer, “teaches us that our relation to the world has been built on an illusion. All the time we thought we had enjoyed a direct relation with men and things.” As with suffering, we see that there is no alternative to alienation—it’s just that suffering the proper sort will result in an eventual end to alienation.

Divine alienation results in a completely new model of human-to-human relations. The disciple can no longer relate directly to those around him but must use Christ as an intermediary for his human relations as well as his relationship with God the Father. This has the strange effect of defending the monastic system against a common criticism. As Bonhoeffer puts it, “Intercession is the most promising way to reach our neighbours, and corporate prayer, offered in the name of Christ, the purest form of fellowship.” All of this involves an outrageously and scandalously high Christology on Bonhoeffer’s part: Literally all the disciple has is Christ.

But Bonhoeffer does not advocate a removal from the world; one must, after all, be in it but not of it. The key is that we maintain a realistic view of our horizontal relationships: “There can be no real attachment to the given creation, no genuine responsibility in the world, unless we recognize the breach which already separates us from it.” We give Christ our relationship with the world in order to receive it back from Him, renewed and perfected.

Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the necessity of suffering and alienation is a message today’s Christian world–obsessed with its “rights” and with political action (on both sides of the fence, and don’t even get me started on what Bonhoeffer thinks of political action in the name of Christ)–desperately needs to hear. Until it breaks through to us, we are but self-satisfied and assimilated Christians, not the disciples we’re called to be.

I’ve enjoyed this semester, not least because, for the first time since 2004, I’ve been called on to teach a general survey of literature, in this case Emmanuel College’s English 200 class.  The sort of class is not uncommon at small colleges: all students of all majors take it, and the instructor has a good deal of freedom to pick texts, arrange them, and evaluate students based on a mix of papers and exams.  In other words, it’s about the closest thing to a blank slate that exists in the English-teaching business.

In my own class I decided to arrange the class neither chronologically nor by genre but by four big ideas, and the running thesis of the class has been that certain human realities are in themselves so complex that talking about them in social-scientific or philosophical or even theological terms is going to miss some of the texture and complication and therefore the humanity of those realities.  So in the course of fifteen weeks our class got together twice a week to read love-texts, sin-texts, death-texts, and race-texts.

August Wilson’s Fences, of course, is the perfect wrap-up to such a semester–Wilson is rightly known as a playwright who captures the life of real human beings in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in the twentieth century, and his characters really unfold wonderfully some of the social realities of being Black in the United States, being mortals fated to die and defined by death, being sinners in a world where sins have uneven consequences, and being capable of and sometimes doomed by love.  And the best thing about teaching this text at the end of the Fall 2010 semester was watching my Christian college students visibly upset by the fact that Troy Maxson, a sinner who betrays the woman he loves, goes to heaven at the end of the play.

(Sorry about the spoilers, folks.  More are coming.)

Troy Maxson is undeniably the center of this play, and the line of actors taking his role testifies to its power: among others, James Earl Jones, Laurence Fishburne, and recently Denzel Washington have auditioned to be Troy.  When other characters give speeches filling in the past, it’s always the part of the past that involves Troy.  He’s on the stage for every scene except the last, his own funeral (and we’ll get to that), and his inability to live out his own rigid sense of Stoic duty is the motor that drives the plot forward.  As he lays out his own past over the course of the play (of course his own speeches are about the past as it concerns Troy Maxson), the audience discovers that his own childhood ended on the day when he lost respect for his own father’s authority; that he moved from North Carolina to Pittsburgh only to find no work except for criminals; that he turned to professional sports when his criminal career nearly ended his life;  and that he fell in with the sanitation workers’ union in the years after his baseball career ended.

The scene that caught my attention this go-round (my own first return to the play-text since I read it as a sophomore in college) was the bizarre stage-direction at the play’s end.  As the final scene (the only one where Troy doesn’t have the lion’s share of the lines) opens, Troy has just died, and seven years have passed since the penultimate scene.  Troy’s middle child Cory, back in town from serving with the Marine Corps (the play never says Vietnam, but that’s my guess), refuses to attend the funeral of a man who intimidated him as a child, kept him from pursuing his dreams of playing college football as a high school senior, and ran around on his mother (Troy’s wife).  Troy’s daughter with “the other woman” (who died in childbirth), Raynell, is seven years old and living with the humiliated Rose when the funeral happens.  Rose, the ever-enduring wife of the philanderer Troy Maxson (and the closest character to a Christ-figure in the play), confronts Cory, making him realize that, no matter what evil Troy has wrought in the young man’s life, he’s always going to have just one father, and that one father is always going to be Troy Maxson.  The penultimate “moment” and the last one where characters’ words is most important involves Cory and Raynell, children of the same father by different mothers (Troy’s first child was by a third woman still), singing together the song Troy used to sing about his old Carolina hunting dog.

That the final moment in the script involves stage directions rather than characters’ lines offends my Shakespearean sensibilities, but the stage direction is striking nonetheless.  Troy’s brother Gabriel, whose brain injury sustained in World War II has rendered him unable to work and a nuisance to the neighborhood (he runs around for the duration of the play thinking that he’s the Archangel Gabriel and on one occasion getting arrested for making too much noise chasing off hellhounds), has the last lines and, more importantly, the last dance:

GABRIEL: Hey, Rose.  It’s time.  It’s time to tell St. Peter to open up the gates.  Troy, you ready?  You ready, Troy.  I’m gonna tell St. Peter to open the gates.  You get ready now.  [GABRIEL, with great fanfare, braces himself to blow.  The trumpet is without a mouthpiece.  He puts the end of it into his mouth and blows with great force, like a man who has been waiting some twenty-odd years for this single moment.  No sound comes out of the trumpet.  He braces himself and blows again with the same result.  A third time he blows.  There is a weight of impossible description that falls away and leaves him bare and exposed to a frightful realization.  It is a trauma that a sane and normal mind would be unable to understand.  He begins to dance.  A slow, strange dance, eerie and lifegiving.  A dance of atavistic signature and ritual.  LYONS attempts to embrace him.  GABRIEL pushes LYONS away.  He begins to howl in what is an attempt at song, or perhaps a song turning back into itself in an attempt at speech.  He finishes his dance and the gates of heaven stand open as wide as God's closet.]  That’s the way that go!

[Blackout.]

First of all, since I’ve never seen Fences on the stage or screen, I have no idea how in the world anyone would stage that.  Second, I was never aware until I read this play that God had a closet in the first place.  But neither of those matter–what struck me as I planned my lesson was that Wilson here is doing a divine bed-trick, the sort that Dante pulls on Guido da Montefeltro (he thinks he’s going to Purgatory but ends up, at the last minute, going to Hell) and later that Goethe pulls with his version of Faust (he thinks he’s going to Hell, but angels snatch him away to Heaven).  But Wilson is not content with the single reversal–he brings Gabriel onstage to blow his trumpet, faking towards heaven, then has Gabriel’s trumpet fail, double-clutching towards Hell before finishing up with Gabriel’s dance to send Troy Maxson straight through the Heavenly gates. The audience, pleased at first that Gabriel finally gets to usher Troy through the gates of Heaven as he’s always wanted to do, must make peace with the fact that Gabriel is going to be disappointed but that Troy is going to get what’s coming, only to discover that Gabriel’s strange dance brings forth divine favor after all.  Again, I’ve got no idea how a director would do this visually, but in terms of the play-text, it’s the two fake throws that really make the opening of Heaven’s gate hit hard.

The reaction in my class was striking if not surprising.  I’d spent the first part of class building up the compound sins of Troy Maxson, his squelching one son’s dreams of being a musician because Troy considers honest wage-labor superior to the nightclub scene (that son, Lyons, ends up doing time for petty theft in the intervening seven years), then crushing the next son’s dreams of going to college for fear that the world of college sports would treat the young Black athlete as it treated so many old Black athletes, discarding them when their bodies wore out without so much as a dollar, much less a college degree, to show for it (that son ends up in the Marines and probably in Vietnam).  Then, as the second act opens, he proves himself not only self-righteous and fearful but hypocritical, running around with Alberta and getting her pregnant as he follows precisely the impulses towards transcendence that he will not allow in his sons.  When he tells his wife, he gushes on and on about needing to feel alive and loving life when he’s around Alberta, the very things that run counter to the Stoic’s responsibility and duty that he prides himself upon and which he brutally instills in his boys. When I asked the class what they thought of Troy Maxson by the end of act two, the faces told me plenty before any student made any remark: this cat was scum, a hypocrite, a philanderer, and a destroyer of families.  And when I asked them whether they thought Troy’s attempt at self-justification counted for anything, whether they thought he deserved to feel alive, I could actually feel the laser beams coming from my students’ eyes at the very suggestion.

I should also note that, in a class of sixteen, there are three young men on the roll, and one of them was not in class that morning.  And the other two had the good sense to keep their mouths shut while I was digging this hole.

So when I had the class spend the last several minutes on this final stage direction (which, predictably, they had skimmed rather than read and had entirely missed the opening of Heaven’s gate), I couldn’t have done a better job preparing a room full of method-actors to play the roles of Pharisees.  People were scowling, shaking their heads, muttering, and all sorts of things when I declared (with the proper bombastic glee, of course) that a sinner had been forgiven, and even if they didn’t like it, Fences had sent him to Heaven.

I realize this is a whole mess of plot summary for a relatively brief payoff, but this was the sort of moment that makes teaching English worth my time.  I’m sure these students had heard from a dozen preachers that forgiveness is something that offends “the religious,” and I’m sure that some of them had made that statement themselves.  But this was a moment when a really good play script had done the mimetic work that Aristotle saw in the best tragedies: because the betrayal and the fear and the envy and the hypocrisy came at them so quickly, because they had been exposed to a lifetime’s worth of vice in just sixty pages of text, this play actually made them experience what it means to be the older brother watching the father celebrate the prodigal, to be the unforgiving servant who throws a small-time debtor in jail just after celebrating his own forgiveness of debt.  They knew full well that Troy Maxson’s attempts at self-justification were as rubbish, and they couldn’t emotionally handle the possibility that a higher authority had, seemingly arbitrarily, decided to forgive him. The moment was utterly senseless, and although I imagine all of them would agree to the statement that their own sins are horrible before Heaven, I think this moment really made them confront just how awful redemption is.

I’m certain that, a couple months from now, when they’re off doing their major classes, most of my students from English 200 will join in the chorus of those who mock the “useless” and “pointless” English classes they “had to take,” but right now, I think I’ll trade that scorn for the moment when forgiveness finally offended some of them.

That’s the way that go.

Something about nineteenth-century America made great novelists shoot for immense public success by eliminating what it was about their writing that made them great. The most obvious and egregious example is Herman Melville’s follow-up to Moby-Dick, 1852′s little-loved Pierre: Or, the Ambiguities. The official story is that Melville had set out to write a sweet and light domestic novel–he referred to it, in a letter to Sofia Hawthorne, as “a bowl of milk”–then got the negative reviews for Moby-Dick, at which point Pierre became a dark Calvinist beast of a novel: ugly, misanthropic, and terribly plotted.

There is reason to doubt the official story. John Updike explains:

[T]he reviews [of Moby-Dick] weren’t all that bad. Not as bad, certainly, as those which had greeted Mardi two years before. . . . Even those with strong reservations about Moby-Dick spoke respectfully of the author’s talent, and a number of early enthusiasts for this willful and extravagant work were among the reviewers. It is true, Melville did not receive what might have been psychologically useful at this time–a fully generous public salute from a high-minded peer, such as he had given Hawthorne, or as Emerson was to give Whitman (in a private letter that became public) upon receipt of Leaves of Grass. . . . Melville’s critical and popular position after the publication of Moby-Dick was still high; he was commonly written of as a genius, and, in a London New Year’s survey of new presences in American literature, ranked with Hawthorne and the now forgotten Richard Burleigh Kimball and Sylvester Judd. There is nothing in his situation like the obscurity in which, at his age, Hawthorne and Whitman labored, or for that matter in which Joyce, Proust, and Kafka secreted their modern classics.

So much for that excuse, then. But that means we still have to figure out why Pierre took such a dark and disturbing turn. For a clue, I suggest we turn to Stephen Crane’s second follow-up to The Red Badge of Courage, the nearly forgotten The Third Violet. Crane apparently began writing this novel a mere two months after the release of Red Badge, justly one of the most-celebrated books in American literary history. The acclaim was nearly universal and immediate–the novel went through two printings in less than five months, and reviewers fell over themselves praising it on both sides of the Atlantic.

Not so The Third Violet, which flopped like a beached whale in the bookstores and which American critics, anyway, detested. British critics were substantially more positive, but I am not enough of a scholar of late-19th-century England to know why–perhaps realism and naturalism had not gripped Britain as strongly as they had America. The hatred is understandable. The Third Violet is a radical shift from The Red Badge of Courage, which anticipates Hemingway in its understated brutality and misanthropy. (Hemingway would later call Red Badge the finest war novel ever written.)

The Third Violet, on the other hand, at least flirts with every conceivable trope of romantic and domestic novels. Two young people, one (of course) an artist from a poor background, the other an heiress, meet on vacation and fall in love. Fate intervenes to keep them apart, and both return to their wildly disparate lives in New York City, until Fate intervenes once more to bring them together. It could be Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre–less favorably, it could be The Minister’s Wooing or The Wide, Wide World. Katherine Heigl and Ryan Reynolds would star in the movie adaption, which your mother would see in the theater and recommend to you for three months.

The novel is as bad as the movie adaptation makes it sound. Its first half, the vacation scenes, work all right if you pretend the author is someone other than Stephen Crane, but things go south very quickly once everyone hauls it back to Manhattan. The Third Violet isn’t as fantastically bad as Pierre–but it’s much less interesting as well. As Cameron Crowe points out in Elizabethtown, a trainwreck in its own right, “There’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fee-ass-scoe, a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folk tale told to others that makes other people feel more alive because. It. Didn’t. Happen. To. Them.” (Full disclosure: While I saw that movie, I’m taking the general idea of failures vs. fiascos from Nathan Rabin’s excellent “My Year of Flops” series over at The AV Club–now available in book form!) Pierre is a fiasco. The Third Violet is merely a failure. I can’t imagine teaching it except in a class that taught everything Crane ever wrote, or perhaps one that sought to determine the real difference between realism and romanticism.

But there’s the rub. Paul Sorrentino argues (quite convincingly, I think) that The Third Violet is one of the very best places to go to find the tension between literary romanticism and literary realism–the former was mostly dead critically but remained popular among the masses for…well, to this day, and the latter was well into its ascent amongst “serious writers.” The Third Violet reflects this conflict–but not where Sorrentino thinks it does. His mistake is in identifying Crane with the main character, a painter named William Hawker; in fact, Crane’s biography echoes more strongly with the novel’s chief author character, Hollanden.

Hollanden is a distinctively American character type: the artiste who has completely sold out but is aware of it and thus maintains his charm for the reader. As he says to a group of fawning vacationing women,

Well—you must understand—I started my career—my career, you understand—with a determination to be a prophet and, although I have ended in being an acrobat, a trained bear of the magazines, and a juggler of comic paragraphs, there was once carven upon my lips a smile which made many people detest me, for it hung before them like a banshee whenever they tried to be satisfied with themselves.

The naturalist author is meant to be a prophet; he is meant to convict society of its sins. But instead he becomes a clown, doing tricks for them. Surely Crane feared that’s what was happening to him as he wrote The Third Violet, which is so different in tone from Maggie and The Red Badge of Courage.

It’s important to note, by the way, that Hollanden’s self-description echoes Crane’s interview with the godfather of American realism, William Dean Howells: “Ah, this writing merely to amuse people—why, it seems to me altogether vulgar. A man may as well blacken his face and go out and dance on the street for pennies. The author is a sort of trained bear, if you accept certain standards.” The naturalist self-critique here is quite clearly intentional and significant.

The question thus stands: If Crane was so aware of the loathesomeness of the Third Violet project–it would be like Martin Scorsese directing a movie based on a Nicholas Sparks novel–why didn’t he complicate the plot? The novel has a standard romantic ending. The two leads get together and live happily ever after. The answer seems to be that Crane was interested in a more subtle problematizing of the romance genre, thus Hollanden’s bitter self-critique.

Thus also the frequent demonstrations of the difficulties of being the friend or lover of a naturalist artist. At one point, the female lead (and Hawker’s love interest), Miss Fanhall, says to Hollanden, “And yet you—really Hollie, there is something unnatural in you. You are so stupidly keen in looking at people that you do not possess common loyalty to your friends. It is because you are a writer, I suppose.” Indeed, it’s not easy to have a relationship with someone who sees himself as a prophet, much less a fallen one. Hawker seems to agree; he says to Miss Fanhall, “You know what a bear I am sometimes. Hollanden says it is a fixed scowl from trying to see uproarious pinks, yellows and blues.” To tell things as they really are, one apparently must see people mostly in terms of their composition.

It could be, then, that The Third Violet is Crane’s attempt to integrate with the rest of society–his attempt to move beyond ugly but prophetic naturalism and to make nice with the rest of the world. He recognizes that this attempt is selling out to the magazines and the best-seller list, but part of him obviously thinks it worth the danger. That he sold out without the result achieving either artistic or commercial success must have pushed him permanently back into the naturalist mode.

But as I said, The Third Violet is a failure, a bad novel in a rather uninteresting way. Pierre is a much worse novel in a much more interesting way. There’s an odd twist midway through the novel, which begins as a domestic fantasy and ends in death and destruction: the titular Pierre suddenly becomes a professional writer, albeit a failure. Critics have traditionally seen the point at which this subplot is introduced as the point at which Melville began to read the reviews of Moby-Dick. But if Updike is right and those reviews weren’t all that bad, we need another explanation.

Enter The Third Violet. What if, as I want to suggest, the ugly turn in Pierre has less to do with the world outside of Melville’s house than the world inside his own head? What if Melville genuinely wanted to write the sort of novel Sophia Hawthorne would have liked to read, a sunny domestic caper but part of himself wouldn’t let him? What if the Calvinist God Melville hated and feared had placed in his soul the ability only to write of the dark and angry underbelly of human existence?

My suggestion–and I’m going to have to leave it at a mere suggestion, which is why I’m glad this is a blog entry and not an academic paper–is that Melville began Pierre as a domestic fantasy but that part of him wouldn’t let himself complete it that way. The dark turn in the novel, along with the strange and ineffective authorial subplot, comes from the same place in Melville as Hollanden’s self-critique comes from in Stephen Crane. Something about these authors won’t let them write outside their milieus.

The real question is: Would we have been better off if they hadn’t tried?

Super Sad True Love Story
By Gary Shteyngart
334 pp. Random House. $26.

Gary Shteyngart’s third novel, the awkwardly if endearingly titled Super Sad True Love Story, is a dystopian vision of America’s future. But the dystopia in question is not the one of Brave New World or 1984 or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?–it is too recognizable our own world to really be science fiction, though I suppose that’s the realm in which its genre hovers. It is set in the not-at-all-distant future, just far enough out so that Shteyngart can stretch out the flaws of our age like silly putty–just far enough for the world to be easily mockable yet pathetic, and, in its way, far more chilling than anything Orwell and Huxley dreamed up, simply because we can see its decay and desperation all around us.

Its closest literary analogues are Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins and Don DeLillo’s White Noise, though Shteyngart’s milieu is more futuristic and funnier than DeLillo’s and lacks the urgent Catholicism that always pulses beneath the surface of Percy’s. The nearest thing I can think to compare it to is Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy, though the book is far more serious than the movie. In any case, we’re given a future in which America’s star has been eclipsed and the country has begun a slow, technology-fueled slide into the intellectual Stone Age.

It is a sad and banal world of casual vulgarity. All Americans carry an iPad-esque device that broadcasts their rating for a word that begins with F- and ends with -ability; women wear clothes made of onionskin that display their breasts and genitals to anyone who cares to take a look; and futuristic podcasters are on the air 24/7, talking shamelessly about the abuse they suffered as children and the explicit details of their meaningless sexual encounters. Orwellian doublespeak runs rampant, though it is not imposed on the citizenry by an all-powerful government. Instead, it spreads like a disease on the streets. In one scene, for example, our protagonist, Lenny Abramov, believes his friend Vishnu Cohen has suggested that they commit a lewd act in a Staten Island bar:

“Jeez, cool it, Nee-gro,” I said, already slurring my words. You’ve got a little cutie at home” . . .

“It’s F-A-C,” Vishnu explained. “I said, ‘Let’s F-A-C.’”

“What does that mean?”

“He sounds like my granny in Aventura!” Noah was bellowing. “‘FAC? What’s that? Who am I? Where’s my diaper?’”

“It means, ‘Form A Community,’” Vishnu said. “It’s like, a way to judge people. And let them judge you.”

The social commentary would be hamfisted were it not so horrifyingly true to our own time. One can hear conversations very close to this–sarcasm under the guise of friendship–in hipster bars from Greenpoint to Silver Lake.

Indeed, Shytengart has a particular ear and eye for the speech and lives of hipsters–and in the world he describes in this novel, if you’re not elderly and dying or a soldier and killing, odds are you’re a hipster. There may never be a takedown of the overeducated, oversexed, overironized “creative class” as bitterly accurate as the following, which comes after Lenny’s friends learn about a National Guard attack on the homeless:

Meanwhile, at the Cervix [an impossibly cool Staten Island bar], the stunned silence had already been replaced by a general mood of frivolity mixed with practiced outrage, people throwing around their near-worthless unpegged dollars and crowning themselves with Belgian ales.

Those readers who have stumbled too close to a party thrown by a certain type of humanities graduate student will smell the real world in descriptions like this one: Political activism is knee-jerk and related to sexual conquest, and intellectual self-congratulation mixes with the basest hedonism into a thick, bilious stew.

Lenny skirts close to this attitude, but for the most part he is outside of his circle of insufferable friends. He is saved by a certain cultural conservatism, which is to say that he more readily identifies with the generation before our own, as do many of us. In our day, this conservatism manifests itself as a conscious striving toward a vanished literary culture. Lenny’s protest is at once simpler and more radical than our own: In a world absolutely obsessed with electronic youth, he clings stubbornly to the low-tech past, in the form of books. His peers, and especially people a few years younger than him, cannot read in any meaningful way–even the best liberal-arts colleges teach only “skimming.” Books themselves are malodorous doorstops, and the younger generation can only look at them quizzically, wondering when the interactive animation will start up. Teachers of literature will recognize that this attitude is only barely satire on Shteyngart’s part.

The major plot of the novel involves Lenny’s interaction and romantic entanglement with Eunice Park, a Korean-American fifteen years his junior. Because of the terrible cultural shift, this decade and a half may as well be a lifetime: In Eunice’s eyes, Lenny is ancient and rotting and impossibly square. A child of an ange in which one either looks like a movie star or is regarded as Sasquatch, she is disgusted by Lenny’s physical appearance (average by any fair standard). And yet she is drawn to him for reasons she cannot really understand but which clearly revolve around his being “like what Prof Margaux in Assertiveness Class used to call ‘a real human being.’” Lenny’s attraction to her is his kicking against the grave–he is obsessed with death from the first sentence of the novel–and a product of his needing to be her savior, to rescue her from things she’s not aware she needs to be rescued from.

Their relationship rings true to the sad ambivalence of so many real-life relationships: We’re not sure if Lenny and Eunice love each other, but it’s clear that they need each other in a not-particularly-healthy way. We are inclined to root for them, even as we know that their relationship’s inevitable end will be the best thing for both of them. We know they are doomed (from the title, if nothing else), and we are glad, in a way, even if it breaks our heart.

Meanwhile, America is essentially coming apart at the seams all around them. A privatized National Guard has set up checkpoints all over the city, protecting nothing in particular; the country is at war with Venezuela; and China, sick of propping up another nation’s dying economy, very reasonably demands their money back. Everything coalesces into a catastrophe no less terrifying than DeLillo’s “airborne toxic event,” and it’s a testament to Shyteyngart’s deft handling of the interpersonal aspects of the novel that the reader cares far more about the relationship between Lenny and Eunice than about the firestorm swirling around them. The catastrophe exerts a strange effect on their relationship, and like everything else connected to them, it feels terribly and devastatingly real.

This is the plot–though I have left out a great many lovely and nasty surprises–and it would have been enough to make Super Sad True Love Story interesting. It is made great, or at least very good, by Shteyngart’s amazing powers of description, manifested in particular in two ways. The first is the majestic depictions of New York City. Lenny notes as he takes the Staten Island Ferry back to Manhattan that “Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city?” His answer: “It is. And if it’s not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again.” He suggests a sort of geographic salvation, and he finds it with descriptions like this one:

Noah told me that there’s a day during the summer when the sun hits the broad avenues at such an angle that you experience the sensation of the whole city being flooded by a melancholy twentieth-century light, even the most prosaic, unloved buildings appearing bright and nuclear at the edge of your vision, and that when this happens you want to both cry for something lost and run out there and welcome the decline of the day.

This sentence is an emblem of the entire novel: Beautifully sad, lonely but searching for connection, finding the unlikely moment of grace, however fleeting, in the declining fortunes of a once-great empire. The city redeems Lenny with its soft, hazy light, and Lenny redeems the city with his willingness to comb its tired streets for moments like this one. Parts of the novel read like a love letter to Shteyngart’s adopted hometown, and they underscore the degree to which he belongs to the tradition of Jewish New York humor, which, from Dorothy Parker to Woody Allen to Larry David has always been as sad as it is funny.

It’s no surprise, then, that Shteyngart’s other great skill is finding the supreme and existential sadness coiled around the heart of his supremely funny satire. Most of the novel’s characters are too plugged-in and media-savvy to betray their fundamental loneliness–but it’s obvious that in their rare moments of self-reflection they must feel as empty as does Lenny, whose experience writing in his diary qualifies him to discover other people’s terrible secrets. He notes of his elderly Russian-immigrant father: “Sometimes when he spoke I surmised that, at least in his own mind, he had already ceased to exist, that he thought of himself as just an empty spot cruising through a ridiculous world.” In Shteyngart’s fading empire, everyone who gives it fifteen seconds of thought–a small category, to be sure–must feel this way. Knowing this, we understand why people live their lives through electronic devices and anonymous sex: It’s a way of forgetting, of never remembering in the first place.

In the Heideggerian nightmare of Super Sad True Love Story–a world ruled by technology, a world of sein without the da, a world where death is on the verge of being eliminated, at least for the very rich–Lenny Abramov is the most important sort of rebel. He is willing to look deep into his own being and to be honest about what he finds there. And in a world of electronic ephemera, he writes it down so that future generations can return to it again and again. Shyteyngart, it goes without saying, has done the same.

Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World
By Nick Bunker
Illustrated. 489 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.00.

Two eras of American history seem to be of perpetual interest to readers: the Revolutionary War and the Puritan epoch. Our attraction to the former stems, I think, from our desire both to emulate the bravery of the Founding Fathers and to claim them for our own political ends. We study the Puritans for the opposite reason: We want to avoid making what we view as their mistakes. (There are exceptions to this general rule, of course. Certain members of the religious right admire the Puritans as much as the Revolutionaries; and neo-Calvinists likely admire them more.)

Each year brings a new surge of books attempting to supply us with a new angle on what is a very familiar story, albeit one that has been so heavily mythologized that the average layman would not recognize the truth if he were transported back to the 1620s. Proper history must defuse the convenient and attractive myth; until that happens, further books on the Puritans will be necessary.

The latest book of this sort is Nick Bunker’s Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World. The subtitle–appealing, no doubt, to fans of Brian McLaren–reads “A New History,” a claim that is simultaneously true and false. Bunker gives us much that is new (though he also repeats debunkings that earlier scholars have already performed), but it’s rather misleading to refer to this book as “a history” of anything. Rather, the phrase “and Their World” provides a more accurate summary of the book’s contents. Making Haste contains multitudes and would be more accurately subtitled “New Histories,” for Bunker does his best to discuss everything that went into the voyage of the Mayflower and the founding of Plymouth Plantation. As is so often the case, this expansiveness is both the book’s major strength and the termite that threatens to chew through its foundation.

Among the topics Bunker covers in Making Haste: the comet of 1618; King James’s obsession with health and illness; the Royal Chapel at Whitehall; the geography of Englands Old and New (many, many times); the importance of the beaver hat to 17th-century fashion; Robert Browne, the notorious Separatist; and a violent earthquake that shook England in 1580. All of these topics can inform our understanding of the Mayflower Pilgrims, of course, but most of them could serve as books in their own right, and Bunker’s narrative is continually in danger of collapsing under the collective weight of his diversions.

Much of this danger would be alleviated if Bunker had a clear thesis beyond “Here’s what happened to the Pilgrims,” but most of the time the book feels scattershot. He will return from an excursion in the informational wilderness long enough to discuss Plymouth for a few pages, before heading right back out again. Occasionally he will even jump from diversion to diversion without going back to the Puritans at all, as when he begins a discussion on “The Entrails of the King,” only to immediately head down another rabbit hole: “But before we venture into the depths of his mind, there is a story of surfaces to be told” (150). One closes the book with an image of Russian nesting dolls, a never-ending series of progressively more arcane topics.

The problem with my criticism is that the way Bunker’s book proceeds is, to the best of my knowledge, the way history as a discipline proceeds. (Disclaimer: I’ve never studied history in a professional or an academic way, aside from the two American history courses I took as an undergraduate and the dozen or so history books I’ve read in my capacity as a literary scholar, so if a professional historian reads this and wishes to correct my misconceptions about her field–well, much obliged.) History is by its nature interconnected; to learn one thing properly, one must learn every subject that touches it. So forth and so on, until you’re stuck in a mise-en-abyme, a house of mirrors with no exit. One solution to the problem is to pretend the interconnectedness doesn’t exist. This is how we end up with the so-called “whiggish histories” that propagate the oversimplified myths that in turn clal our for intentional complication, such as we find in Making Haste from Babylon.

What I look for in a history book, then, is the treacherous middle ground. The author must acknowledge the dizzying complications of his discipline–he must stay true to the real world–but he also must make cosmos from the chaos of his materials–he must stay true to the reader. The historian’s task is to draw a narrative where there exist only multiple narratives; the reader of history’s task is to read different accounts of the same events, in order to turn the monolithic myths of her primary school back into the twists and contradictions of real life. But it is very much a two-person job, and both reader and writer must confess to each other their finiteness; that is, they must admit that they cannot possibly cover it all.

This has rapidly turned into the sort of book review I hate, the review that talks about everything in the world except the book at hand. So let’s return to Bunker, who, though he’s bitten off a bit more than he can chew, nevertheless opens up some very interesting aspects of a story most Americans believe themselves to be familiar with. Bunker suggests early on that his being an Englishman gives him a new perspective on things, that heretofore English historians

have done what the Pilgrims did not do, and left America to the Americans. This is why so much of the Pilgrim narrative remains in shadowy monochrome, like a photograph in sepia, or a silent film, deprived of color, light, and sound. (5)

And indeed, this reviewer, at least, learned much that he did not know, most of it taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. Bunker is fastidious in sifting through 16th- and 17th-century records, which he uses as much as or more than he uses canonical histories like William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation. (When he takes a Pilgrim’s side, incidentally, it is usually Bradford’s–and if he disagrees with the governor from time to time, most often he goes a pretty long way toward vindicating Bradford’s opinions.)

By far, Bunker’s most interesting discovery is the role of the beaver in the survival of the Plymouth Colony. Our national story on the Puritans is that they sailed from England to find something abstract like “religious freedom.” Bunker doesn’t disagree, and he spends dozens, maybe hundreds, of pages discussing the theological positions and religious context of the Puritans. But he does add an economic motivation.

As is well-known, the Pilgrims did not leave England and immediately head to the New World. The original plan was for them to live unmolested in the Dutch city of Leiden, a textile powerhouse and world city on the make that Bunker memorably compares to “Chicago in 1890 . . . a new metropolis with the same extremes of inequality, the same volatile politics, and a religious divide” (213). But religion does not seem to have been the major problem for the English refugees in Leiden. Rather, they came to the city and found it exceedingly dangerous for the working classes and especially for immigrants. Leiden was a closed economic system:

In Leiden, wealth and influence belonged to very few. More than half the city’s property was owned by a narrow class of no more than 250 people, led the brewers and overseas merchants. . . . No Englishman could penetrate the clique of oligarchs who ran the towns, and neither could most of the Dutch. (216)

In the 1610s, Leiden was, like the rest of Europe, sliding toward recession, and things were starting to get ugly. Bunker points out that, of the four reasons Bradford gives for leaving Leiden, theology comes last. More important “was what he called ‘the hardness of ye place’: poor conditions, endless work, and a harsh diet” (219). The New World was thus an opportunity for economic rebirth.

The North American beaver, in Bunker’s estimation, is as responsible as any other factor for the survival of the Mayflower colony. He reveals the surprising fact that

At the peak of their activity, in the 1630s, the Mayflower Pilgrims sent more than two thousand beaver belts home to England . . . Without the fur trade, the colony would have failed, and the name of the ship would have faded into oblivion. (233)

The author admits that he is just exapnding on a reference Bernard Bailyn made half a century ago to the importance of the fur trade to the Puritan colony in Massachusetts–and yet his exploration of the subject carries the weight of new revelation because he is, he claims, the first historian since Bailyn to discuss this aspect of the settlement. Determining whether this claim is true is beyond my ability, but I had certainly never heard this part of the story before reading Making Haste from Babylon.

The irony is delicious and unsettling. The Puritans, known above all else for their renunciation of worldly decadence–this is the sect, after all, who banned all visual art from their churches and who stereotypically wear drab outfits of black and gray–were kept alive by selling beaver pelts back to the country they’d left. The pelts had only one use: They were made into beaver hats, luxury items that were the biggest status symbols of the mid-17th century. Some idea of their symbolic value to the era can be gleaned from the fact that Bunker quotes Coco Chanel in order to explain them.

He also discusses two English chapeliers, Richard and Samuel Arnold, noting that while “Later historians have often portrayed Puritan merchants as troubled souls, afflicted by an inner conflict between religion and the stress of conflict[,] this does not seem to have worried men such as the Arnolds” (235). Maybe not–but I would have liked to have heard about how Bradford and the other Mayflower Puritans walked this fine line, proclaiming a simple lifestyle while selling objects that inspired tremendous envy and vanity. As it is, Bunker hints at a complex dialectic of sin and economics, then leaves it for the theologians to untangle.

If there were a unifying thread to the histories Bunker weaves together in Making Haste from Babylon, it would be the role of the beaver, which he brings up many times and discusses at length in at least two chapters. But it’s not enough to provide a unified thesis for this messy, ambitious book, carved up by rabbit trails. This is apparently Bunker’s first book, and it’s not without either interest or promise. But here’s hoping that his next effort will present a better balance of order and multiplicity.

In my last few years of college, when I knew I was headed toward graduate school but didn’t know what the experience would be like, I found myself groping, nearly blindly, for texts that would give me an edge over my future classmates. The best of these was a lengthy and oversized paperback by Frederick R. Karl called American Fictions 1940-1980, which I found in a used bookstore on a trip to Omaha. (The bookstore, if anyone is interested, was called the Antiquarium and was my absolute favorite bookseller anywhere in my very circumscribed world. It has since, I’m afraid, closed down and moved its treasures to another town, leaving only the almost equally terrific Jackson Street Books to hold down the literary fort. But the used bookstores of Eastern Nebraska are a topic for another article.)

What attracted me to Karl’s work—besides the price tag, which was $3.00 for the paperback version of a book whose hardcover now goes for a scant 75 cents on Half.com—was its sense of authority. Karl, it seemed to me at the time, had read every single book of note published by an American author for the forty years claimed by his title and had formulated vast sociological and artistic theories using these books as his raw materials. When he liked a book, I wanted to read it; when he disliked it, his reasoning made sense, even when the author he deprecated was one of my favorites. I tried to read the book on the plane on the way home from Omaha, got sixty pages in, and decided it was over my head. And yet American Fictions 1940-1980 has remained a specter over my academic and literary work ever since. “And why haven’t you,” the interrogating voice in the back of my head frequently asks, “read every major work of fiction from the past forty years? And where are your theories?”

All this is to say that when I read a book from the time period covered by Karl’s survey, I tend to head straight for his book to help me formulate some thoughts on what I’ve just read. Karl remains a sort of preliminary authority on nearly everything I read, and as such I’ve probably quoted him more than any literary blogger on the web, especially when I get to talking about “spatiality,” a concept that blew my mind when I was 21 and still mostly holds my interest seven years later.

Karl is nothing if not provocative; he objects to far more than he admires in American literature, and for a variety of different reasons. He dismisses Frederick Buechner’s early novels, for example, primarily on aesthetic grounds, calling his style “pseudo-James, a kind of religious version of Louis Auchincloss [that] does not lend itself to religious experience.” (He’s right. Buechner wouldn’t hit his novelistic stride until 1971’s Lion Country, which Karl apparently didn’t read. Mostly I’m impressed that he knows Buechner at all—his is the only such survey of American literature I’ve ever seen that engaged with him.)

Elsewhere, he will condemn authors for their political views, particularly if they are facile or if they fit neatly into the massive sweep of the popular opinion of the times. So while he defends Flannery O’Connor against charges of “ignoring all the larger issues—war and peace, science and technology, the financial and industrial world, even normal family life” on the grounds that “the breadth of her observations comes through her ordering of images,” not through her political point of view (whatever that is), he has rather harsh words for a countercultural classic like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:

Inevitably, Kesey touches all the bases of what will be 1960s ideology, but he founders on one shoal after another. Despite brilliant episodes and some inventiveness of scene, the book lacks center because ideologically it is so soft, and in the case of its women, insidious and infantile. . . . The 1960s were, in fact, far more sophisticated and significant than Kesey’s view of the decade would make it appear.

He has a similar complaint—and I’m coming to the actual point here, I promise—about Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The novel is famously “about” the 1945 Allied firebombing of Dresden, though a relatively small portion of the novel actually takes place during that horrific event. We see that world and many others through the eyes of the conspicuously named Billy Pilgrim, who discovers early on in his experience in the European theater that he does not experience time as a linear progression but as a collapsed heap of arbitrary moments.

It’s a brilliant formal strategy for Vonnegut, as it allows the reader to experience Billy’s life as simultaneously non-chronological and chronological; after all, we receive the collected moments of Billy’s life in the same non-chronological order that Billy chronologically experiences them. The time may be out of joint, as Hamlet puts it, but it’s not out of joint the way it is in, say, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. There, the dates and events are scrambled up, but the people whose lives we’re observing are aware of the proper dates. Billy is not—not anymore than us. Slaughterhouse-Five is thus structurally a continuation of the Modernist project of das unheimliche and a repudation of it, a return to straightforward nineteenth-century storytelling. Billy Pilgrim is Huck Finn—except that the river in this novel flows both north and south, and he can’t be sure which way it’s going to go at any given time.

Karl, for his part, agrees that this novel is technically daring and a success on aesthetic grounds. His problem is philosophical:

Billy Pilgrim’s experiences in the Dresden slaughterhouse during the Allied firebombing of the city embodies a multilevel effect: politics, humanity, personal experience, universal caring. Yet their significance in the novel remains diluted, for Vonnegut’s moral frame of reference, first of all, disallows distinctions; and he is eager to group the Dresden bombing with others, i.e., the napalming of Vietnam and the atomic destruction in Japan. Billy’s ability to rove into time past and future enables him to combine wars, as well as personal experiences.

With the collapse of time comes a collapse of values. This is a problem because there may be a substantial philosophical difference between World War II (especially in Europe) and the Vietnam War, and attempts to collapse them, according to Karl, “make sense at political rallies but doom fiction.” So Karl can agree with him that the napalm bombings of Vietnam were dehumanizing for both bomber and bombed but object to such descriptions in a novel about the presumably more noble World War II:

The Dresden firebombing, however, no matter how grotesque, was part of a different war and moral pattern. Arguments may be for or against the bombing, but the act was itself quite distinct from napalm bombing of Vietnam, whose civil war was not threatening America, whereas Germany had become a threat to the very idea of humanity.

The distinction, of course, is the old Christian one between just and unjust war, and I think it’s a legitimate one—even though I hold that Christians should have little to do with all but the most just of just wars. To ignore this distinction, as Karl claims that Vonnegut does, is to turn “human behavior and history into molasses.”

Of course, Slaughterhouse-Five became the underground favorite that it is precisely because it collapses those distinctions. It was published in 1969, near the height of the Vietnam War, and joined any number of other works of art that subtly or not-so-subtly protested our involvement in that war. It was, I have no doubt, given a large part of its resonance from that war that it’s about while not being about it. If collapsing the distinction between Vietnam and World War II melts the novel into an ethical molasses, not doing so robs it of its energy and power to shock and move us.

In this, it reminds me of a much uglier book, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Heller’s novel was published in November 1961, nearly a year before the United States had any troops to speak of in South Vietnam and a full 33 months before the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution signaled our country’s full-scale involvement in that unfortunate war/non-war. The book sold modestly when it was first published but became a cultural force only after the public attitude toward Vietnam had shifted; it thus has the bizarre status of an anti-Vietnam book written before the Vietnam War was much more than a vague idea. The film version, released in 1970, flopped mostly because of its clear similarity and inferiority to another Vietnam/non-Vietnam film, Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. Still, the book remains a classic of the counterculture, and few students make it through high school and college without reading it.

One of the best bodies belonged to the oldest American by far, a high school teacher from Indianapolis. His name was Edgar Derby. He hadn’t been in Billy’s boxcar. He’d been in Roland Weary’s car, had cradled Weary’s head while he died. So it goes. Derby was forty-four years old. He was so old he had a son who was a marine in the Pacific theater of war. . . .

Derby’s son would survive the war. Derby wouldn’t. That good body of his would be filled with holes by a firing squad in sixty-eight days. So it goes.

Heller’s characters, like Vonnegut’s, are engaged in the European theatre during World War II, though his famously operate from the sky and not from the ground. The two authors’ tones are radically different. Vonnegut’s strange time structure allows us to view the action from a distance—I haven’t even mentioned Billy Pilgrim’s strange sojourn in a human zoo on the Planet Trafalmadore—and with a sense of resignation. For this reason, the book’s mantra, repeated 116 times, is “So it goes.” Here is a typical usage:

Those three words express ultimate resignation, a sadness and pain that is beyond the human capacity to express; they are what a person must say, presumably, when he watches nearly everyone he knows die throughout the course of a 275-page novel. The humor in them is gallows humor—if Vonnegut means us to laugh when he repeats the phrase literally ad nauseum, it is a laugh born from our humanism, from our sense that human beings do not deserve to die unremembered as they do in this novel, in this war.

Vonnegut’s tragicomic humanism compares favorably with the humor in Catch-22, which is singularly nasty and grim, without the undercurrent of love that flows always beneath Slaughterhouse-Five. The jokes here are at humanity’s expense, and the only way to escape Heller’s scorn is to be like his protagonist, Yossarian—which is to say, to be coldly self-interested at the price of all social values: “Yossarian was a lead bombadier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether he missed or not. He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.” As such, Yossarian collapses all values except what is most personal. “It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war,” he tells a fellow soldier, “to someone who’s dead.”

This is, it’s true, a similar point to the one that Vonnegut makes in Slaughterhouse-Five, and yet the reader feels for Billy Pilgrim in a way that it is simply not possible to feel for Yossarian, who is incredibly selfish in his disavowal of responsibility for his actions:

“Am I supposed to get my ass shot off just because the colonel wants to be a general?” [he asked]

“What about the men on the mainland?” Clevinger demanded with just as much emotion. “Are they supposed to get their asses shot off just because you don’t want to go? Those men are entitled to air support!”

“But not necessarily by me. Look, they don’t care who knocks out those ammunition dumps.”

Billy Pilgrim is thrust into solipsism; Yossarian chooses it voluntarily, which makes him more of a piece with Kesey’s Randle McMurphy but less attractive to those of us who have seen the ugly fall-out from self-righteous ‘60s “rebellion.” For this reason, Catch-22 starts off riotously funny, but over the course of 463 pages and 42 chapters, sours in one’s mouth. I’m hard-pressed to remember more than a general tone from the novel—a tone of derisive mockery of things that civilization held sacred for millennia: self-sacrifice, courage, and intelligence that reaches beyond the confines of the individual skull.

Heller does, in other words, exactly what Karl accuses Vonnegut of doing: He engages in an act of radical moral equivalency in which the actions of the Americans attempting to stop the Nazis are just as bad as the actions of the Nazis themselves and in which the only righteous figure is Heller’s smart-alec, absurdist stand-in. Catch-22 is an immoral book of the highest order, a swirling black whirlpool of nothingness that can’t mask its nihilism in comedy for very long.

Incredibly, however, Karl lavishes effusive praise on Catch-22; he has hardly a bad thing to say about it and even goes so far as to praise Heller’s moral vision:

At the center of the tragedy is Heller’s awareness of a passing era, an era that perhaps never existed but one that might have if people and situations had measured up. . . . Heller’s is the nostalgia of the idealist: such a writer’s style is usually jazzed up, satirical, somehow surrealistic; the idealist who can never accept that moral values have become insignificant or meaningless in human conduct.

This is an old—and tiresome—defense of the sort of ugly cynicism that Heller displays in Catch-22. “All cynics are really just broken idealists,” we’re often told, usually by cynics who don’t want to feel bad about the black paint they spray over all human interactions. But Heller doesn’t mourn the loss of “moral values”; he revels in it, because it allows him and his stand-in to act completely in self-interest.

Karl is right that true comedy exists in tandem with true tragedy—because true comedy is the overcoming of true tragedy. But Catch-22 is neither. The reason that, as he notes, “Those who have felt the tragic overtones of the novel often find it difficult to place its tragic center” is that the tragic center exists outside of the novel itself, in the reader’s mind—if, that is, the reader is capable of noting that the ugliness of Catch-22’s vision of the world. Tragedy requires nobility, a character who is better than the audience, someone whose fall from grace we truly feel. Failing that Aristotelian requirement, it at least needs someone we don’t look down on. Catch-22 offers us no such person.

On the other hand, Slaughterhouse-Five’s Billy Pilgrim is imminently identifiable. He is the existential tragic hero, thrown into a world he can neither control nor understand (Vonnegut makes excellent use of Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Serenity Prayer,” before noting wryly that “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.”), and so we can understand his retreat into solipsism and abstraction. It is at least a solipsism that does not rely upon the sacrifice of others.

I have tried to avoid, thus far, speaking directly to the philosophical issue at the heart of Karl’s rejection of Vonnegut’s ethics: Is it right to equate the firebombing of Dresden with the napalming of Vietnam? I don’t have an answer for this question except to say that a true pacifist must, in the end, answer in the affirmative. Whether or not Vonnegut and those who have treated Slaughterhouse-Five as an ethics manual of sorts would really like to live with the implications of that sort of radical passifism is another question I cannot answer.

I would like to point out, quickly and contra Karl, that Vonnegut’s purpose in writing Slaughterhouse-Five seems to have been less to make a grandiose statement about this war or all wars than it was to show the very specific effects of that very specific firebombing on one very specific human being. Vonnegut can claim a certain authority on the subject; after all, he says, “I was there, too.” If we read Slaughterhouse-Five with this (supposed) purpose in mind, we have something quite different than a Vietnam protest book or even an all-purpose countercultural text; we have a study of shellshock par excellence, a heartbreaking novel about a young man who is haunted by the effects of his wartime experience throughout the rest of his life. In this case, the (non-) chronological order of the book becomes a sad joke, an escape into fantasy on the behalf of a very sick man.

This would make the book technically less daring but ethically more palatable. Vonnegut could escape Karl’s charges of moral equivalency, and Slaughterhouse-Five would become not a political novel but an existential one—to the degree, of course, that those two categorizations are separable.

I’d suggest, though, that however you read it, it’s leaps and bounds above Catch-22.

Walker Percy, the guy on the far right of our banner, died twenty years ago today. His death was in its way a victory. He’d contracted tuberculosis in the early 1940s and spent much of his young manhood in sanatoriums–where he read vociferously, especially the existentialists, and especially Søren Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel, who converted him to Christianity and provided him with his vocation as a writer. That the tuberculosis didn’t kill him, that he died at the age of 73 of prostate cancer demonstrates a victory over the disease that haunted him his entire life.

I did my master’s thesis on two Percy novels (The Last Gentleman and its sequel, The Second Coming), and I’ve read nearly every word he had published, the only author, I think, I can say this about. (I actually haven’t read his book of correspondence with Shelby Foote.) I love Percy’s thought, and so I feel comfortable saying that he’s not a great novelist–his books are poorly plotted, and he does not, let us say, have a way with dialogue.

In a rare moment of cattiness, Frederick Buechner, a writer with whom he shared a great deal in common philosophically, said that all his characters talk the way he imagined Walker Percy to talk. Buechner undershoots it. If you read Percy’s non-fiction or his interviews, you will quickly learn that his own voice is actually much more interesting than those of his characters. Readers who are new to Percy’s oeuvre should not start with the fiction, and least of all should they start with his debut and most famous novel, 1961′s The Moviegoer–unless they already have a taste for the plotless and dull French novel.

I usually recommend that people head first to 1983′s Lost in the Cosmos, a parody of self-help books and a masterpiece of dialectical thought. I bought my copy used, as I buy most of my books. The former owner, I soon discovered, actually answered the “quiz” questions inside the book–the gag is that most of the answers are equally correct, that you’re not supposed to be able to answer. Cosmos is funny and light, and yet it’s still heavy–it also contains passages of fiction that are as or more effective than any of his novels proper.

You could also start with Signposts in a Strange Land, a posthumous collection of his published essays and articles on various topics–really every topic you could think of–including an angry letter to the New York Times asking why they didn’t publish a previous letter he’d sent in. A portrait of the artist as an angry old man.

And Percy was angry. The “Politics” status on my Facebook page has for several years now read “Walker Percy conservative or John Updike liberal,” but “conservative” is not really the right word for Percy’s political thought. Mostly he distrusted human beings, especially in terms of the politics of his novels. His best novel, 1971′s Love in the Ruins, envisions a rather boring apocalyptic future in which the Republican and Democratic parties have splintered so much that each merely parrots idiotic buzzwords continually. The people who identify themselves with these parties are unable to talk to one another and unable to notice that the world may be about to come to an end. Sound familiar?

Percy would no doubt be horrified for me to point out that he was in fact Dr. Walker Percy, having earned his medical degree only to contract tuberculosis and never practice it. What this means, though, is that, much like those of Karl Jaspers, Percy’s critiques of the scientific establishment come from a place as much within that establishment as without it. Percy distrusted not so much science as what gets called scientism, the mystical power science earns among laymen–especially once it gets mixed with the remnants of Judeo-Christian morality. Again, sound familiar?

Percy was, in the end, a diagnostician for his times–and for our times, which occasionally seem to be the 1970s magnified by a power of 40. One turns to his work, fiction and nonfiction alike, to learn about oneself and one’s fellow Christians. We find in books like Lancelot and Lost in the Cosmos the shattering predicament of Modern Man (and Woman)–the things that tear us apart and the things that keep us together for no reason. This article from First Things suggests that Percy’s star is fading (it also makes the same case I do regarding the fiction and the nonfiction, but this was my independent opinion long before I read the article), and that is regrettably true. Do your part and read him as soon as possible.

I first read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita during my second semester of college, reading it furtively and fifty minutes at a time during an Old Testament class. (I would take another course from the same professor a few years later and note, to my shame and guilt, that he’d added to his syllabus a new commandment: “No reading during class.”) I was, to understate the case drastically, not ready for Lolita. If I’d started, as I’d been instructed to, with some of Nabokov’s more obviously experimental fiction (Pale Fire, say, or Ada), I’d have been more inclined to read closely, skeptically. But Lolita, though miles of dark rivers flow beneath its surface, is built on such a straightforward narrative—boy meets girl; boy gets girl; boy loses girl—that it’s easy to lose track of what Nabokov is really up to.

Lolita, we must note, is quite possibly the most revolting novel of the twentieth century. It is also among the most beautiful. Its staggering power comes from its prose, written in English by a man who grew up speaking three languages fluently. (In fact, though he was born and raised in St. Petersberg, he could technically consider English as his first language; he read and wrote it before he could read and write Russian.) Lolita is not even his first novel written in English; after writing ten in Russian, he wrote two—The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister—in the language of his adopted homeland before he produced Lolita. Still, Lolita feels like the work of a man in love with a brand-new language, an impression furthered by Nabokov’s own description of the novel as “the record of my love affair with the . . . English language.” Indeed, his powers of description and analogy are embarrassing to anyone who hopes to describe and compare:

[G]radually the models of those elementary rusticities became stronger and stronger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them. Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roots, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-grey cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist.

This passage of two sentences contains at last nine discrete images; in a lesser writer’s hands they would amount to a literary dissonance, twisting and turning before collaping under their own collected weight. In Nabokov, they blend perfectly, surrendering their discreteness to create a slow, rosy fade from the green and gold “tilled plain” to the translucent whiteness of “distant amorous mist.” Writing qua writing doesn’t get any better than Lolita, and it’s no surprise that one finds echoes of its distinctive tone all through the English-language literature of the intervening decades. (I hear it most strongly, to the point of impersonation, in John Updike’s A Month of Sundays, but it’s there in everyone from Pynchon to Rushdie.

But Nabokov has to write, as Updike puts it, “ecstatically”—the word comes from the Greek ekstasis (ἔκστασις), “to stand outside oneself.” The subject matter fairly demands a standing-outside, not only for author (Nabokov was, it seems, the most well-adjusted of our canonical practitioners of American fiction, miles and miles away from the diseased mind of Edgar Humbert Humbert, whose first-person narration he must nonetheless supply), but also for reader, who is sickened by both the plot of the novel, Humbert’s abduction and sexual relationship with one Dolores Haze, aged twelve to fifteen. We condemn him—we cannot help it; we do it instinctively before we even open the novel. For us to make it through Lolita, we must take Humbert’s advice:

Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinite circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! [He is about to sleep with Lolita for the first time.] Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little.

That plea leads to a postmodern labyrinth of existence/non-existence so twisted that no amount of string can help me find my way back out of it again. But Humbert is right—we must embrace him, however tentatively, if we are to feel the queer and elliptical power of his story. We must transcend ourselves and the moral judgments we instinctually make of Humbert.

The problem is that neither Nabokov nor Humbert will allow us to do so in any kind of full way. Indeed, our narrator repeatedly goes out of his way to remind us that he is both a paedophile and a murderer, and he addresses us on the first page and many other places as “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.” We are invited to judge him—he seems, in fact, to demand it—but then begged not to. He begs us for ekstasis, but confounds any attempt at our doing so.

As if that weren’t enough, the novel proper is preceded by a Foreword, ostensibly written by John Ray, Jr., PhD; it is, of course, pure fiction. Ray pushes for judgment, wishing to make this manuscript into a social lesson: “‘Lolita’ should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.”

Behind this moral stands Nabokov, and he’s either winking at us or sarcastically sticking his finger down his throat. We are smart enough, he seems to tell us, to see beyond John Ray, Jr.’s simple social moralizing, to see it as the mere stringing together of threadbare clichés that it is—and furthermore, we’re smart enough to dismiss this introduction even though we’d like to read the novel the way “Dr. Ray” does. Nabokov thus introduces the “social moral” reading of Humbert’s life in order to dismiss it; and since it’s actually we who must do the dismissing, the point is made all the more strongly.

And yet Humbert Humbert remains a monster, or, as Nabokov himself later put it, “a vain and cruel wretch.” In other words, this beautiful language, the main character’s pleas for understanding, the a priori rejection of moral readings—these do little to make Humbert more appealing; they just make it harder for us to submit our disgust for authorial approval. In this way, Nabokov withdraws from the novel even though he remains a palpable presence in it, not just through the frequently referenced Vivian Darkbloom (an anagram for “Vladimir Nabokov”) but through his position in the white spaces between the printed words, constantly winking at us and wagging his finger. It is to this simultaneous authorial presence and absence, I believe, that people are referring when they offer Lolita as an early postmodern novel.

Lolita’s postmodernism is indeed undeniable and forms a key to any interpretation of the novel. (I will detour here and note that at this early stage in the movement, postmodernist fiction techniques had not yet reached the level of self-reflexivity they would in a novel like John Barth’s LETTERS; Lolita can thus point outside its pages, at least to a certain degree.) Indeed, the horror and disgust we feel at Humbert the child molester is added to by a particularly postmodern uneasiness. To put it simply, Humbert must constantly stay moving, both in a spiritual and a physical sense—but he demands stasis from those around him. His life is Heraclitean, but his soul is Platonic; in other words, he darts around, but the demands he makes on the other characters betray a baseline desire for ultimate spiritual stability. He is a monster because he wants it both ways. He will define the being of those around him, but he will remain quick on his feet so that he will be able to define his own being. This tyranny of definition is the postmodernist’s worst nightmare.

The preface from John Ray, Jr., as you may have guessed, is a red herring. The educated reader—and, movies or not, Lolita has very few uneducated readers—instinctually suspects that he will receive what Nabokov’s countryman Mikhail Bakhtin praises as heteroglossia (разноречие; literally, “different-speech-ness”)—the multiple voices that set the novel apart from other genres. But all we get is Humbert—and even though the book features conversations between him and other characters, he is careful to note (repeatedly) that these are his words, not theirs. We do get Nabokov’s voice, of course, but as mentioned earlier, he’s not much help beyond defusing certain objectionable readings. So this is a monologue, albeit a monologue with unreliable dialogue sprinkled throughout. Humbert completely controls our experience of his world.

And in possession of that control, he dances. He tells his story in diversions, misdirections, flashbacks, puns, double entendres, untranslated French, and purposely hamfisted foreshadowing (“a bad accident is to happen quite soon,” he says at one point). It all adds up to a postmodern jig of sorts, provided we agree with John Barth’s definition of literary postmodernism as “a smiling nihilism.” For the stakes are quite high here—paedophilia, abduction, murder—and Humbert constantly spins around the big black hole in the center. He doesn’t stand still, even or especially when talking about his lover/victim: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.” If the young woman herself feels this confusion of identity, we’re not made privy to those feelings. This is Humbert’s construction, his glorious confounding of selfhood.

Likewise, he revels in the opaque layers of artifice he piles onto his story. For example, he tells us of his stepdaughter’s gaggle of adolescent friends: “There was Opal Something, and Linda Hall, and Avis Chapman, and Mona Dahl.” These names are striking mostly for their normalcy, especially compared to those in other postmodern novels. (Pynchon, of course, springs to mind immediately, but also Vonnegut and Ishmael Reed and newer practitioners of the art, such as Jonathan Lethem.) But then comes the knight’s move, a parenthetical aside that says, “save one, all these names are approximations.” The names have all been changed by John Ray, Jr., anyway—and besides that, we have no idea which of these false names would be real—were it not false.

Elsewhere, he calls attention to the fact that we are reading his words, that ink and paper will always be a mediator between us and him: “Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer.” This instruction has gone unheeded. These layers of artifice are akin to the bobs and weaves of a championship boxer; the hope is to move quickly enough to be not a stationary figure but a blur: unhittable.

The plot itself is a method of escape. It comes in five major divisions (though Nabokov himself gives us 69 chapters in two sections); we might designate them as follows: (1) early and professional life; (2) living with the Hazes; (3) on the road; (4) Beardsley; and (5) Lolita’s escape. (In Nabokov’s divisions, numbers 1 and 2 belong to the first section, and the rest belong to the second.) About the time we seem to be settling comfortably into a period of Humbert’s life, he abruptly changes. So, for example, as we grow used to the tedious puzzles of his academic life, we find ourselves—out of nowhere, almost—living with Charlotte and Dolores Haze. After Humbert marries the mother and waits for the daughter to return from camp so he can begin his systematic defilement of her, we think we can see where this is going: Lolita will be a novel about the suburban monster next door.

But Charlotte suddenly learns of Humbert’s plan, and in what must be the least-satisfying deus ex machina in history, she is abruptly killed, at which point Humbert takes off for the highways and byways of America, with Dolores in tow. They are “lovers,” at this point, to the degree that a middle-aged man can be the lover of a twelve-year-old girl, and Lolita has become a road novel. But even that isn’t enough movement—to keep the pace, Humbert must paradoxically slow down, and he takes a job at a college, where he and his stepdaughter settle into “normal” life. This, as you might have guessed, doesn’t last, either.

All of this is to say that Humbert keeps moving—and yet he doesn’t want to. He is in love with a material form that is by its very definition ephemeral; one can be a nymphet for only so long before one grows into one of the adult women that so disgust Humbert. The solution, of course, is to make a Platonic idol out of Dolores Haze: “I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.” That’s why it’s not really right to refer to Dolores as Lolita except through Humbert’s eyes—“Lolita” is the spiritual ideal of The Nymphet; Dolores Haze is a temporary manifestation. To love the spiritual ideal through Dolores’s bodily reality, Humbert must discard Dolores as a real individual. And so he does.

While he pursues the static spiritual ideal, he keeps moving, and in order to keep others from catching him, he demands the uttermost stillness from them. Thus, characters like Charlotte Haze and Valeria, his first wife, become little more than stock characters. His neighbors in the Haze home and at Beardsley have no real personalities—they are the essence of what my elementary-school teachers called “static characters.”

But the most obvious example of Humbert insisting on stasis comes when Dolores wants to study acting. “I detest the theatre,” Humbert tells us,

as being a primitive and putrid form, historically speaking; a form that smacks of stone-age rites and communal nonsense despite those individual interjections of genius, such as, say, Elizabethan poetry which a closeted reader automatically pumps out of the stuff.

The irony is that he demands a sort of static acting—perhaps the best way of putting it is to say he expects an acting free of improvisation—from those around him. Dolores, of course, must constantly pretend that she is not being subjected to what she clearly views as rape by her stepfather. Elsewhere, he says of his first wife that she “even showed something like irritation at times, which was quite out of keeping with the stock character she was supposed to impersonate.” We can conclude, then, that what he objects to is not acting qua acting—it’s the actress having control over her acting, choosing her own stasis or lack of it.

As it turns out, he has reason to fear this. Dolores Haze escapes him by virtue of the acting she convinces him to let her do. “By permitting Lolita to study acting,” he moans, “I had, fond fool, suffered her to cultivate deceit.” (I need not point out that “fond fool” is itself a phrase from the theatre, specifically Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale.)  More to the point, the “deceit” the theatre brings about allows her to live a life outside of Humbert; after she refers to her childhood, he thinks, “It was the first time . . . she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood,” adding, “perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick.”

The message is clear—to the degree that Lolita, the product of a man who declared that he “detest[ed] symbls and allegories,” can be said to have a message—and it is a distinctly postmodern one. The world, Nabokov seems to tell us, is full of predators who wish to impose their understanding of the world upon us, to pin us like a butterfly in a display case; we must learn to lie, learn to keep moving ourselves, in order to escape them.

With this in mind, the Christian may have more to fear from the philosophical implications of the novel than from any plot-level disgust over paedophilia, but that’s a subject for another post.

Today, February 24, is the birthday of many people, obviously.* I have selected four whom I find especially interesting for personal reasons. Strangely, however, I see an order among them: namely, the act of seeing order itself. I leave these tidbits uninterpreted and undigested–you may find in them what order you like, and attempt a thesis statement in the comments, or simply leave them unassimilated and enjoy each for its own sake. Also, do follow the links: some are quite fun, in a bookish way.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (2.24.1463–11.17.1494): Note those dates and do the math: Pico died about three months shy of his 32 birthday–which means I’ve outlived him by almost five months. Still, Pico managed to cram more into his 31.75 years than I’m likely to, even if I make it past a century. From an early age, Pico studied pretty much everything there was study: all the languages, philosophy, theology, and science his milieu had to offer. So, having learned everything, he then proceeded to try and make it all fit together. (In fact, this was such a consuming interest for Pico that his friends dubbed him “Princeps Concordiae,” or “the Prince of Harmony.”) After laying the foundation for his project with his De hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man), Pico issued 900 theses that attempted to harmonize pretty much every school of thought he knew about. (Here’s a chart of the project.) A problem arose, however, in the form of a papal bull: it seems that along the way, Pico had made a few claims the Pope thought heretical. There was an inquisition, Pico did time in a French jail, and his 900 theses become “the first printed book ever universally banned by the Church.” Less than ten years later, he was dead under suspicious circumstances. Still, 31.75 years was enough: De hominis dignitate became the manifesto of the Italian Renaissance and Pico himself a “founding father” of the humanist endeavor.

Wilhelm Carl Grimm (2.24.1786–12.16.1859): This fellow you should recognize, dear reader, especially when I pair him with his brother, Jacob. Yes, Wilhelm was the younger of the Brothers Grimm, who were famous for collecting fairy tales and, if you believe Terry Gilliam, fighting monsters. (Wilhelm was Matt Damon, if you’re curious.)

For me, though, the important thing about the Grimms is their philological work in Germanic languages, most famously manifest in the eponymous Grimm’s Law. (Usually Jacob alone is credited with this work, but the brothers were partners in all their endeavors, so it seems stingy to deny Wilhelm his share of praise.) Grimm’s Law is an observation about a particular pattern of phonetic changes among diverse Indo-European languages. These phonetic changes were a big part of what made some families of IE languages distinct from others: specifically, Grimm’s Law describes what sets the Germanic languages (German, English, and Scandinavian languages) apart from non-Germanic IE languages like Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. For example, in the shift to Germanic, “p” becomes “f” and “t” becomes “th” (like “thorn”): therefore, the same ancient word that became “pater” in Latin, became “father” in English. Do not be fooled by the dullness of this endeavor: for scholars of the Grimms’ time, this was like lightning from the blue. Think of the possibilities: if the distinctions between languages can be reduced to predictable patterns, why can we not work backwards–reverse Babel, learn the language of Adam, learn the language of God? That may sound too grandiose, but it’s not too far from what did arise out of this work: the reconstruction of the proto-Germanic language. (Want to read a story in proto-Germanic?  Here you go.)

Winslow Homer (2.24.1836–9.29.1910): Perhaps you recognized the painting at the head of this post, dear reader; I certainly hope so. That is The Gulf Stream, painted by Winslow Homer in 1899. It’s a painting from his later years, his so-called “Darwinian” phase, which is typified by brutal realism. And, truly, what could better symbolize man at the mercy of chaotic elements than this lonely boatman, tossed by the tumult of the waves, hunted by a frenzied mob of sharks? But all is not chaos in this painting. Click to expand it, and look again: see the tiny ship in the upper left, opposite the waterspout? Now look back to the central focal point of the picture, the dark cavity of the tiny boat’s hold, with the boatman’s right foot lying on the deck in front of it. Move your gaze from the foot to the ship in the upper left, now across to the waterspout on the right, then back down to the foot. See it? A symmetrical upside-down triangle. There’s a second triangle as well: begin at the waterline in the upper right, and follow the dark line of waves to the center of the left side, then back down the black ridge of shark-infested water to the bottom right. Again, symmetry. Both triangles can be read as thematic, I think. The first shows man in the balance between the might of civilization (the three-masted ship) and the might of nature (the waterspout); also, perhaps, the result of collision between the two, manifest in his own tiny boat with its single broken mast. The second triangle is a more aesthetic effect: an acute triangle of light water in an otherwise black sea, with the darkness ready to snap down jaw-like on the boatman. Did I make those triangles up, or did Homer put them there on purpose? Not sure–I’m just an amateur who can spot a triangle!

August William Derleth (2.24.1909–7.4.1971): Ah, August Derleth–how he frustrates me! I first met this gentlemen after he had introduced himself as someone else. When I bought The Watchers Out of Time, it was because H.P. Lovecraft’s name was on the cover. I became suspicious a couple stories in when it suddenly struck me that both stories I’d read were longer, flabbier versions of Lovecraft tales I liked better. Then I turned to the front of the book and saw the copyright citing August Derleth, and knew I’d been snookered. That bit of imposture is probably the publisher’s fault, not Derleth’s; still, Lovecraft fans do have good reason for holding strong opinions about August Derleth. True, we owe him much: because of Derleth, much of Lovecraft’s work that might have been lost was preserved and stayed in print, initially through Derleth’s own publishing company, Arkham House. On the other hand, he also coined the term “Cthulhu Mythos” to describe the shared universe of Lovecraft’s many stories of eldritch horror. This phrase, catchy albeit unpronounceable, is to some Lovecraftians his greatest offense, for it implies that there is a system, an ur-plot, in a fictional corpus best characterized as a paean to chaos. Derleth believed there was such a system, and in his pastiches of Lovecraft he enthusiastically imposed it, settling Lovecraft’s nihilistic nightmares within a cosmos of ordered good and evil. It is an ill fit, and, to my mind, blunts the force of Lovecraft’s horror. Which is more frightening: the ultimate evil who hates humanity and seeks to destroy it out of actual malice, or an utterly alien being of god-like power who doesn’t even notice when it melts our world? My money is on the latter, and that’s Lovecraft’s brand of horror. So, thanks, August, for all your hard work in preserving Lovecraft for us–but I’ll just read him, thank you. No offense meant!

* It is also Steve Jobs’s birthday, but that’s an entirely different sort of imposed order.