The Picture

There was a picture I always thought of when I was with her. The picture was not of us –no, we shied away from anything so permanent, believing that our moments, our seconds, of bliss were only so because they would soon be past. No, the picture was of an anonymous woman’s thighs, cleaved together in a shaft of sunlight, with a man’s hand lightly resting in between them. Maybe it was the intimacy, the sexuality, that first held me. I imagined the man’s touch was post-coital, a gesture both casual and fraught with suspended urges. Or maybe it was its implied sadness, its frozen rendering of a deep disconnect. I began to imagine what the picture did not show, what it couldn’t capture. From her position, with her calves tucked under her, she must be looking down on him, on his hand, on his body, thinking…what? How have I just slept with him? Can I continue to love him? And he, his head encased in pillows with eyes closed, thinking nothing at all.

I found myself enacting the picture whenever I could. When she kneeled at my feet, toying with her raven mane, while I lay naked among mountainous covers, I would place my hand on her. I brushed lightly against her cool skin, a result of her notoriously poor circulation, and I tensed my shoulder, never allowing the full weight of my arm to press against her. She looked at me then, her feline eyes brimming with moisture for a single instant, before looking away.

I suppose it was fated to end badly. A coupling born of repetition, of plagiarized gesture and utterance, is far more tenuous then a sloppy and incoherent love affair. Acts of affection, both the impassioned grasps and the butterfly touches, become especially cynical when lifted from unnamed sources. I began quoting movie lines as if they were my own; she created snaking and rhythmic acronyms to obscure her meaning. It was as if we lived in a collage of our own arbitrary design: fragments of Auden, Yeats, and Rich clotted our speech; Godard, our caresses. And despite our desperate effort to combine the jagged edges of our experience, cracks still remained, fissures that would inevitably explode.

It’s no mystery

Daniel Handler, in his jacket leaf blurb for Gregoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, writes, “I woke up the other morning and started to read this marvelous book.  I stayed in bed until I read the last page.  I could not for the life of me think of anything in the world I wanted to do more but read this book.”  

In response: I woke up the other afternoon and started to read this marvelous book.  I stayed in bed until I read the last page.  I could not for the life of me think of anything in the world I wanted to do more but read this book. 

It was perhaps fitting that it was an afternoon nap from which I had awoken when I cracked the spine (literally: every time I turned a page, the binding would creak its assent) of this short, wonderful book, as Bouillier is indulging in the same Sunday past time when a ringing telephone wakes him from his slumber and completely upends his existence. On the phone is an ex-girlfriend from years past — a woman who had left Bouillier, after four years together, without a word, then or since — who has called to invite him to a birthday party for French artist Sophie Calle.  Calle always requests the presence of a “mystery guest” at her parties, a stranger who represents the exciting and unknowable year about to begin, and Bouillier is to be it.

To anyone who has had their heart broken, Bouillier’s neurotic reaction to his ex-girlfriend’s call will seem scarily familiar, as it all too accurately documents the cruel ministrations of a damaged and irrational consciousness. One will recall the immediate aftermath of a break-up, when any contact from the other-who-shall-not-be-named would “plunge me back into a hellish slough that I’d considered well behind me, and that all of a sudden wasn’t, and I fell back into sickening black thoughts I thought I’d exorcised…” 

Bouillier’s extreme reactions belie his greatest achievement: he shows us the amazing stories the average person is able to create, and does create every day. In response to tragedy or trauma, the unfettered imagination will spiral with fabricated connections, impossible coincidences, and over-investitures of meaning, and will vacillate from complete abjection to euphoric revelation and back again in a heartbeat span, leaving its owner exhausted and defeated. Take Bouillier’s flights of fancy after the call as a darkly funny, ultimately cautionary tale: “I wanted to understand, and while I stood there clinging absurdly, instinctively to this desire — to understand — as my sole support and the last vestige of my humanity, it hit me. She’d called late on a Sunday afternoon, and she’d left me in the middle of the afternoon, also on a Sunday. Coincidence? Hardly.” Of course, that is all it is, a coincidence and nothing more. Bouillier believes Michel Leiris’ death, and Sophie Calle’s need for a “mystery guest,” have conspired in some cosmic fashion to necessitate his former other’s call. But these coincidences, without Bouillier’s energetic imagination, are empty vessels without meaning. We force logic on arbitrariness, and create stories from found material.In some sense, all stories are about stories in general.

By simply existing, a story is a testament to the human capacity for (or compulsion to) narrative. Bouillier’s magnificent self-delusions become mini-narratives themselves, and at least in the confines of this book, jostle for space with the real and actual events. And this is an integral part of human life: in lieu of facts about our ex-lovers, we fill that absence with fictions that either serve to hurt us more or save our lives (depending on our mood at the time); in lieu of the person, we have pictures and vestigial habits, smells and tastes and touches.

The Mystery Guest shows us how stories are the stuff of human existence, and the climax of the book is Bouillier’s realization of how pervasive fictions are; of how we not only create stories to live, but how we sometimes live the fictions of others. (I won’t ruin this epiphany here, but the literary men and women who read The Mystery Guest will find this section of the book oddly compelling and romantic, as I think Bouillier does.)

Rarely do I have a physical reaction to the things I read: I will laugh out loud at Wodehouse or David Sedaris, but I have never felt the urge to cry; that is, until I read this book.  It is affecting because Bouillier’s voice is affected: it is honest; by turns miserable and exultant. When he tries to play it cool, he lets you know it’s a front; when he uses a cliche, he tells you he’s using it on purpose.  And when he escapes from the depths of despair at the book’s close, when he rises from the ashes so to speak, you feel as if you’ve been through the fire with him.

After reading John Updike’s rules for book reviewing, I feel obligated to quote one long passage here so you, dear Reader, can decide what you think of the book for yourself.  This passage is from when Bouillier first arrives at the party, and his former lover notices him and approaches.  If anything, it is an almost perfect evocation of the jilted lover’s feelings toward his lost other, an other whose greatest cruelty is indifference:

“The mere act of keeping myself in one piece seemed like a kind of magic trick, and I felt a trap door give way beneath my feet when she came up and leaned in to kiss my cheek as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  But this really was the final straw.  How dare she?  It wasn’t just inappropriate, it was obscene, it was phony through and through, as if our story could ever, even conceivably, degenerate into — into what?  Friendship?  Camaraderie?  Whatever she had in mind was out of the question! She could save these affections, these empty shams of hers for other men, or else love meant nothing and our story had never happened and she herself didn’t exist, and just then I could have torn her face off, I could have ripped it from her neck and stamped on it before she uttered a word.”

Can I post without mentioning James Wood? Wait…

…seems like I’ve failed already. (The moratorium on Wood begins after this post!)

In my defense, it’s hard not to talk about Wood when he’s lauded as “our best critic,” (Ozick) and occupies a certain position on literature that I find myopic and somewhat conservative. He is certainly an extraordinary reader, and he takes literature very seriously; and it is his love of literature that makes him simultaneously so compelling, and so frustrating. Compelling because his arguments are passionate, opinionated and well-evidenced; frustrating because they seem to ignore the literary trends of the last 50 years.

In his essay “Hysterical Realism (which, by the way, I’ve spoken about way too much, and will be glad to leave behind, when and if that ever happens), Wood takes to task a number of writers through a close reading of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. To paraphrase what is a fairly brilliant (though disagreeable) essay, Wood argues that the contemporary “big, ambitious novel” is no longer the grand, social critique of Dickens, or the penetrating exegesis of human consciousness of George Eliot, but rather an inevitably parodic attempt at self-aggrandization. The author wishes to show how smart he or she is, and packs their novel with information, characters and stories. (Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest would be a prime example of this tendency.) Wood accuses these novels of being “evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself.” What I would like to propose is that the realism Wood describes pejoratively as “Hysterical” is in fact a newer, more vital realism. The “big, ambitious novel” attempts to encompass our shattered reality, with its technological advance, omnipresent stimuli and ever increasing mediations, into what has become an antiquated and almost irrelevant medium: the book.

In order for the book to stay relevant, it must adapt to the reality it faces. Contemporary reality is the amalgam of a constant influx of information: walk through Times Square and be bombarded by bright light advertisements before retreating to the relative calm of your TV (with its constantly scrolling information bar) and your computer (with its internets [sic]). The silence and stillness Wood longs for in the novel is now rarely a facet of reality. The novel is no longer an arbiter of morality, or a device for disseminating information, as it was in the 19th Century. What it can do is tie things together, show connections where we thought there were none. (Dickens did this as well, though in a less fragmentary milieu; DeLillo is the current sufferer of the acute paranoia of connection.)

Wood sees these contemporary efforts at mimesis as “cartoonish.” He claims there are no real people in these novels. Yes, but when has there ever been? The problem of representing human character and consciousness on the page has been discussed at least since the modernist era (Wood acknowledges this), and in essence it is all an exercise in illusion. The reader must suspend his or her disbelief (not only are these characters not real, but what am I actually doing? I’m looking at words on a page…), cede the writer the authority to create a consciousness on the page, and then the reader must allow him- or herself to imagine the character, its thoughts and actions. Some contemporary writers acknowledge the immense amount of complicity needed to create fiction, and therefore call attention to their creations as fictions. Hence, the cartoonish aspects in Rushdie, and White Teeth.

Then, the kicker: what Wood fails to acknowledge is that in our postmodern epoch, people are constantly fictionalizing themselves. (Not that self-delusion is anything new.) With the advent of dating websites, Facebook, Myspace, instant messenging, email, and all the substitutes for actual human contact, human beings are constantly resorting to fictions and mediations to represent themselves to one another. One immediately thinks of emoticons, the cartoon symbols representing various moods and reactions.

As the virtual avatars of human beings increase in importance — job interviewers have reportedly viewed the Facebook pages of prospective candidates — so too does the “unrealistic” aspects of their character. Suddenly, the fictionalized construct — the Myspace/Facebook page — supersedes the actual person. (Baudrillard would have a field day with this.)

So Zadie Smith’s image of Samad, the culturally and morally conflicted Bengali patriarch, being “prised…off the hot glass with a spatula” (a scene at which Wood takes particular umbrage), is slapstick, is cartoonish, but is not necessarily an abandonment of realism; rather, it is the acknowledgement of a fictional image (maybe Wily E. Coyote, smacking into a wall after being once again evaded by Roadrunner) infiltrating reality.

I think these “big, ambitious novels” boast a theory of egalitarianism that is laudable. These novels boast streams of information and intelligence, tons of characters both major and minor; it is as if these authors have a self-flagellating will to inclusion. This can of course be daunting (the novels just keep getting longer!), but it is also an act of realism. With a world of information at one’s mouse-gripping fingertips, how must the novel compete? By echoing the bricolage world in which we live, where illusions and reality coexist and conflate and where coherent moral views are diluted; where the reader will find something not cartoonish, not hysterical, but intensely familiar.

“You should see these people: it’s all Thurber, and Trilling, and…Bunny Wilson.”

For those of you who have seen the film Quiz Show more than 10 times, as I unfortunately or fortunately have, you might recognize the tagline for this post (which may be misquoted). For those of you who have seen it at least once, you know the plot: Charles Van Doren, a Columbia professor from a hyper-intellectual family, receives the answers to questions on America’s most watched quiz show; upstart Congressional investigator Dick Goodwin infiltrates the elitist (re: waspy; Goodwin is Jewish) American upper-crust in the course of interrogating Van Doren only to discover his moral failings; Van Doren eventually confesses and is ignominiously dismissed by Columbia.

One of the most enjoyable parts of Quiz Show is its attention to period detail: the cars, the clothes, the intellectual and social climate. Edmund “Bunny” Wilson is not only referenced in the line quoted above, but makes an appearance at the dinner scene at the Van Doren enclave. (He is the wise-alecky, bowtied gentleman sitting closest to the elder Van Doren.) Wilson, who was born in New Jersey and educated at Princeton, was the preeminent literary critic of the mid-20th century. He was also the trusted friend and literary executor of F. Scott Fitzgerald (they attended Princeton together), who called Wilson his “intellectual conscience.”

Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 is Wilson’s first, and arguably most famous, book of literary criticism. Though he offers seven distinct chapters each devoted to a single writer (the first is an introduction to the term Symbolism and the last is a meditation on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s eponymous character Axel and the French Symbolist Arthur Rimbaud), the book as a whole argues a few different positions: first, that the fecund literary period now defined as Modernism was not an ex nihilo movement, but rather a conflation of prior poetic and prosaic techniques and theories; second, that contrary to Valery, prose is as viable and artistic a literary form as poetry, and is in fact superseding poetry as the epitomic literary form; and third, perhaps most importantly, that Symbolist and Modernist literature, no matter how difficult, is at least worth considering. Conservative critics, whose distaste for experimental fiction is seemingly ingrained, should reread Wilson on Gertrude Stein: “But it is well to remember the mysteriousness of the states with which we respond to the stimulus of works of literature and the primarily suggestive character of the language in which these works are written, on any occasion when we may be tempted to characterize something as “nonsense,” “balderdash” or “gibberish” some new and outlandish-looking piece of writing to which we do not happen to respond. If other persons say they do respond, and derive from doing so pleasure or profit, we must take them at their word.”

I here must make a large disclaimer, which will prevent me from commenting convincingly on several aspects of the book: I am not a reader of French, which Wilson of course was. His quotations of the French poets are given in French and are not generally translated. I won’t argue with this decision, as the French symbolists are notoriously difficult to translate, but it limits my ability to engage with Wilson’s discussion of Mallarme and Valery.

That being said, Symbolism, the French crucible from which modernism developed, is, according to Wilson, the “confusion between the perceptions of the different senses, and…the attempt to make the effects of poetry approximate to those of music.” It is the conflation of the English Romantic poet’s exaltation of his experience and the French aesthetician’s concern with poetic form and effect. It is a reaction to and subversion of both classical poetic forms and 19th century Naturalism.

Well, whoop-dee-do, Wilson, but what does it all mean?

It means that French Symbolists, and their modernist progeny, exhaust prior literary forms in the extreme. For example, Wordsworth adduces his personal experience to describe familiar human experience; he expects his reactions to adhere to some universal human feeling. Symbolism, alteratively, “sometimes had the result of making poetry so much a private concern of the poet’s that it turned out to be incommunicable to the reader.” This type of poetry diagnoses and enacts the insufficiency of language (prior to many of the linguistics-based theories now entrenched in academia): nothing can be plainly stated or communicated; rather, the poet must abstractly, and somewhat circuitously, evoke his feeling “by a succession of words, of images, which will serve to suggest it to the reader.” This of course yields a new type of literature more idiosyncratic than Romanticism and more difficult than Naturalism.

I believe Wilson is accurate in his critique and interpretation of the development of modernism. He is an astute reader of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and in describing the poem, offers what could be a contemporary definition of Modernism: “In our post-War world of shattered institutions, strained nerves and bankrupt ideals, life no longer seems serious or coherent — we have no belief in the things we do and consequently have no heart for them.” He is also willing to criticize harshly: he takes Paul Valery to task for his “snobbish” exaltation of poetry over prose, and accuses both Joyce and Proust of a kind of obnoxious verbosity. Wilson’s author studies are generally divided into multiple parts, beginning with biographical information and plot summary, and gradually moving toward more in-depth critique. And it is this structure of his criticism that I find insufficient.

Though I wouldn’t consider myself an avid supporter of New Criticism, I do believe that its concept of “close reading” is the most edifying tool in literary criticism. I like to think of the text as an autonomous object; independent of its creator and the circumstances in which it was created. The text then creates its own rules, speaks its own coded language that the reader must interpret. This allows for interesting, though sometimes anachronistic, interpretive practices. For example, I had a professor who applied poststructuralist theory to Chaucer with some illuminating results. At any rate, “close reading” removes the text from any sort of limiting context, which allows the critic to offer some wild interpretations.

Wilson was of course writing about 20 years before the advent of New Criticism. His criticism focuses on the author’s biography and its relation to the text, as well as the text’s relationship to its social and literary context. He occasionally references psychoanlytic theory, but never delves deeply enough. He describes the symbolism of Proust without elucidating what the symbols are doing; he explicates the dynamic literary forms of Ulysses without fathoming a legimitimate guess as to how they function. (I say legitimate: he does say that Joyce’s experimental techniques are “mechanical combinations which fail to coalesce…”) What Wilson seems not to acknowledge in his book is the conflation of form and content. He believes that Proust’s meandering, introverted sentences try the reader’s patience; that Joyce’s literary devices belie and dilute the human story beneath. What if these writers consider plot a secondary concern? What if all pretense of realism is abandoned in favor of Gertrude Stein’s language games?

Wilson does acknowledge some aspect of non-sensical in his book — with his defense of Stein and his favorable discussion of Dadaism — but there is definitely a conservative streak in his writing. (He sounds eerily like James Wood at times.) This conservatism seems to stem from Wilson’s desire for socially committed literature. He sees the Symbolists and their progeny as gradually retreating from society, making their art increasingly esoteric and opaque, and he wishes for a more popular combination of science and art — one which can appeal to the masses. In the end, he offers two possible outcomes for literature post-1930: either authors go the way of Axel, and retreat from society completely, or follow Rimbaud, who eschewed writing in favor of travel in developing countries; who, in a sense, purposefully removed himself modern Western Civilization and its canonized literature in toto.

I don’t know if either of Wilson’s predictions have come to fruition (or maybe they both have), but that is a subject for another time.

It’s been a long time…

..and I think I should be going? For those who have been reading (and who like Boston), I think I will be posting some kind of minor treatise tomorrow before I take off for Costa Rica.

I’ve been absorbed by (re: forcing myself to read) Edmund Wilson’s classic book of literary criticism, Axel’s Castle. As I pretend to be a lit theory buff, I do have something to say about Wilson’s style of criticism. (His preoccupation with biographical material may be a product of his time, but I plan to harp on it anyway.)

At any rate, I will be writing a little something tomorrow. I apologize for the dearth of snarky lit speak around these parts, but I assure you there’s much more to come.

Until the next time…

River to River Festival, Part Deux (Doo)

So I caught another free show this past weekend, thanks to the River to River Festival. This time it was a double bill at the South Street Seaport, with Black Moth Super Rainbow (a band name I’m perpetually embarrassed to say out loud) and Fujiya & Miyagi, the British electro-folk trio.

Before getting to the music, I have to say that seeing 1)free shows 2)outdoors 3)at the South Street Seaport is just a great time and exactly what summer in New York City is all about. (That, and Shara bringing over a six-pack of 16 ouncers for us.) The weather was beautiful, the clipper on the pier immediately called to mind Clavell or Melville (or White Squall), and the bands were…eh.

We arrived probably 10-15 minutes into Black Moth Super Rainbow’s set. As we were standing stage (far) right, we could only see the bassist in his sweatgear regalia, and an occasional furry ear peeking out over the crowd. It seems that the band plays their keyboards (three of them!) on the floor, and the singer wears a bear hat. I should have expected this type of ramshackle stage set up: when I saw them loading their hitch after a recent show at Irving Plaza, I didn’t notice any keyboard stands. (They didn’t have drum cases either, which is really tempting fate with fragile drum heads.) Speaking of drums, the band’s stickwoman was curiously absent and BMSR was forced to play to prerecorded drum tracks…

After having come around to the use of prerecorded tracks and laptop “sound manipulation” — this mostly due to the Brazilian Girls’ expert use of technology — I’ve (again) realized why I disliked it in the first place. Recorded drum tracks simply cannot substitute for a live drummer. No matter how high-quality the drum tracks, no matter how well-rehearsed the band, without a live drummer the ineffable energy of a live performance always remains at a constant level — it never achieves any kind of intensity. This lack was noticeable in both bands’ sets — though F&M and BMSR are by all accounts mellow bands, which fit the venue and the lazy afternoon atmosphere — the crowd seemed to need the extra oomph to really get moving.

Though the mellow vibe is representative of BMSR’s synth-drenched psychedelia, Fujiya & Miyagi advertise themselves as a dance band. In my humble opinion, they were way too relaxed to get the crowd into it — the bass was low in the mix, and the singer whispered every vocal line in their set. If they wanted to turn the pier into a dance party, they had to bring it a little harder.

At any rate, my compatriots and I were drunk and mildly delirious upon leaving, as dusk set in at our backs and F&M finished their enervated set. We then proceeded to get housed for Mikey’s birthday, and the concert was soon relegated to a distant memory.

Pedantic? No, Pornographic!

Well, I’ve posted my first long, horribly boring essay (on Ibsen no less!), so I thought I’d write about something maybe more fun, like the New Pornographers show I saw this past weekend.

The New Pornographers are probably my favorite band as of late. If you don’t know them, they’re a Canadian indie-supergroup comprised of A.C. Newman, Dan Bejar, Neko Case, Kathryn Calder, John Collins, Blaine Thurier, Kurt Dahle and Todd Fancey. The first three names on that list you might recognize from their solo efforts. (Dan Bejar is also in Destroyer, and Swan Lake, another supergroup of sorts.) Case and Bejar have the most time-consuming commitments outside of TNP, and are often absent from the band’s shows, though the principal songwriters (Newman and Bejar) contributed to TNP’s latest release, “Challengers.” Though I very much enjoy Case’s country musings, and Bejar’s surrealistic crooning, I have to say I enjoy their performances in The New Pornographers much more than their solo work. I guess I’m just a sucker for straight ahead pop-indie-rock songs, especially with female harmony singers. (Neko Case has a fantastic voice, though I thought her and Kathryn Calder clashed at certain points. This kind of makes sense, as Calder generally sings Case’s parts on the older songs when Case is absent.)

The songs sound simpler than they are: A.C. Newman’s prosody and rhythmic sensibility is eccentric, and a good number of their songs have odd time signatures (cf. “The Jessica Numbers”). Mikey and I were standing right next to the soundboard, which allowed me to gawk at the soundguy and quietly judge him. On “The Laws Have Changed,” he boosted the chunking guitars, and completely drowned out the four part organ melody, which makes that song for me. In truth, the guitars were high in the mix for the entirety of the set, despite the presence of a mini-string section, which I guess is just a natural facet of the live setting: more rock, less nuance.

The actual performances strayed only slightly from the recorded versions, which makes for an generally boring live show, though the band’s inbetween song banter was cute, and kind of funny. (Newman quoted a Simpsons line, which immediately raises any band in my esteem.) The band seemed solely concerned with performing each song as accurately as possible, with very little live revisions, much less improvisations.

At one point in the set, after a false start on one of their new songs, Newman cracked a joke that “Kurt’s evil twin is playing drums.” (Or something to that effect.) I couldn’t help but think there was some kind of subtle jab there, considering the drummer’s time was all over the place during the set. “Jackie, Dressed in Cobras,” on which Newman sang for an absent Bejar, was played at hyperspeed, and it seemed like Newman and Fancey had difficulty keeping up. If they sped this up for live performances, it provides no new energy and just sounds rushed. Dahle clearly has the chops, but in the words of Jack Black, he’s a little loosey goosey and needs to tighten up the screws.

The setlist drew heavily from “Twin Cinema,” the band’s 2005 album, and “Challengers,” the soon-to-be-released LP. The standout new tunes were “All the Old Showstoppers,” a up-tempo rocker and “My Rights Versus Yours,” which has a great harmonized refrain to close out the song.

…and now some thoughts

So as I described in a previous post, I’ve been neck-deep in Victorian era literature as of late, and I decided to reread that mainstay of high school English curricula, A Doll’s House, by the 19th Century Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen is often referred to as the originator of realist drama, and is vaunted for his direct treatment of aberrant social behaviors.

After reading the play, I’m not surprised that it is often assigned to high schoolers: the social stakes are pretty obvious, and the social positions occupied by the main players are unambiguous. Since the husband/wife dichotomy has probably been beaten to death — though I will have something to say about it later — I’d like to take a look at something more subtle in the play: the pervasive use of monetary language.

Though the play is often viewed in terms of Nora’s proto-feminist struggle, Ibsen couches his characters’ power in the language of money. The very first scene of the play involves a monetary transaction, for which Nora is condescendingly scolded by Torvald. Then, when Torvald’s “little squirrel is out of temper,” he plies her with a gift of two pounds. We of course later learn why Nora needs the money, but her subservient role seems less due to her gender than to her economic dependency. When Christine Linde arrives, she compliments Nora on her husband’s new appointment at the bank, saying that “it would be delightful to have what one needs,” to which Nora replies, “No, not only what one needs but heaps and heaps of money.” Though one could easily chalk this up to Nora’s crassness, or her preoccpuation with her debt, I think Ibsen is pointing to the classic and preponderant middle-class concern about money. Nora wishes for the security that money provides; it seems that power and security are less gendered in this play than at first glance, and are intimately tied to one’s income.

The linkage between working for wages and individuality is furthered during Nora’s discussions with Linde. Linde is a widow who has had to work to keep her family afloat, and it is clear that Nora envies her freedom. At one point in their meeting, after Nora has divulged her secret about the loan, she admits that “[she has] found other ways of earning money…Many a time I was desperately tired, but all the same it was a tremendous pleasure to sit there working and earning money. It was like being a man.” Here again power is not necessarily gendered; rather it is earning potential that is gendered. Christine, who works and provides for herself, is not nearly as powerless as Nora, and is actually able to effect a favorable outcome for the Torvalds at the end of the play. She later tells Krogstad, “I could not endure life without work…I have worked, and it has been my greatest and only pleasure.”

The play’s saturation with monetary language has its apogee in a single exclamation of Dr. Rank’s. He arrives at the Torvald house to tell them of his impending death, and explains to Nora that “Lately I have been taking stock of my internal economy. Bankrupt!” Though Rank clearly means his health, “internal economy” also seems to include some kind of moral deficiency; this evidenced by Rank’s proposition to Nora. Rank describes his failing body in economic terms, thereby equating virility with wealth. In this sense, money becomes associated with both social standing and physical health.

The readings of this play that laud Nora for her proto-feminism are certainly correct, though somewhat facile. I think the play is in fact less sexist (or at least less a commentary on sexism) than one might think. Christine Linde holds a position of power over Krogstad, as well as the fate of the Torvalds, because she is economically independent. Nora’s unemployment and economic dependency are what cause her oppression, not her gender.

Ibsen is not alone in his preoccupation with money: Dickens’ Little Dorrit is all about the horrors of debt, and Vanity Fair describes the ever precarious economic fortunes of its characters. (It seems pertinent here to mention that strong, independent women are featured in both of these novels; Becky Sharp being the quintessential “deceitful woman.”) In the 19th Century, artificial stock bubbles were commonplace, and investors would gain and lose fortunes in a heartbeat. It seems that wealth’s importance — both for independence and for survival — penetrated Ibsen’s realist drama as well.

A disclaimer…

I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine about the acceptable behavior of a writer. We agreed that a “real writer,” i.e. a writer with talent, would never say, “Yes, I’m a writer, and a fine one at that.” It seems to me that along with literary talent comes an almost debilitating self-consciousness; a humility born not of social mores, but rather an omnipresent feeling of insecurity.

This is of course not the case for all writers. Hemingway prided himself on his hauteur, though I think his public persona, as well as his alcoholism, masked much of his shaky confidence. His friend F. Scott Fitzgerald on the other hand was notoriously insecure — the impromptu check-up described by Hemingway in A Movable Feast says it all — and his attendant alcoholism destroyed him.

So where am I going with all this? Basically, I too have been having a certain crisis of confidence. Who am I to expound on the glories of literature? Who am I to use words like “expound,” and phrases like “glories of literature?” It is my presumption that this blog, and my writing, is halfway decent, and that people may want to read it. I don’t profess to be authoritative in my opinions in any way; a lay reader’s visceral response to a book is as valid as anything I could say here. I simply hope that I notice some things a lay reader might miss on a first reading, and maybe these observations can at least surprise, if not edify.

What’s on deck?

Well, now that I know I have at least one reader (big up Celine), I feel obligated to give some idea of what’s on the agenda for the coming weeks so you can plan your vacations and other activities around checking Enfield:

1)I am currently reading “Vanity Fair” in order to complete the reading for my “Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot” class. (This about two months after having graduated.) I will probably write something on the 19th Century British novel, focusing on “Vanity Fair.” Whether this will interest any of you remains to be seen…I’m still deciding if I’m even interested.

2)I’ve been ogling “Pedro Paramo” by Juan Rulfo for a few weeks now, as it has been on my shelf since my freshman year writing seminar at Cornell. It’s short, which I think will be a nice change after slogging through 900 pages of Victorian prose.

3)My dearest reader, Celine, has asked whether people can request book reviews. To this I say “Of course!” But here’s the thing: you should write them yourselves! If any of you guys want to contribute to Enfield, just drop me a line and I’ll hook you up with an administrator password/login thing. Also, submissions need not be book reviews, you can write about pretty much anything and I’ll put it up here.