The Last Days of Hedonism, Part Two

This second part is in honor of Tyler McWilliams, who today set out with Miss Mausner on a journey across the country and the ocean. May his spirit travel farther…

Friday, July 3, Continued

Chad makes a serious offer to have me try the mushrooms but I’m not too sure, remembering Kat’s warning, and I’m more concerned with a girl in a green coat sitting nearby who caught my eye before and I thought she left but she really didn’t. Adam and Kate’s meditation on drugs and the creative process turns into a long debate (how typical for us) on how to get back to our cars, which disintegrates into us talking in fake accents and Adam pestering Kate for a Dostoyevsky summary where she finally snaps “I’m on page 2, you dipshit!” Mike takes charge, still lucid despite plenty of Mickey’s, and leads us out of the park, though not before a man named Don aka Mowgli thanks us for watching his stuff while on a jaunt elsewhere. He offers to give us some cinnamon buns and I tell him if he wants to thank us, he should give them to the homeless. He likes my style. The beer does a number on my stomach, I get nervous about being hungry after two days without proper exercise, and Mike notices my temporary depression, sagely saying that I need to think of food as fuel, not fat, and it’s hard not to see my parents in the mirror but I need to try. I feel really alright, and we share how happy we are to be here, together, now, all of us. At Philz, Liz gives us directions and I change a five for the bus but Mike points out we can just walk down Castro back to Haight so we do and it’s lovely with an old movie theatre and plenty of nice restaurants, including one called Harvey. We start thinking about Michael Jackson and an all-around semi-drunk dance up the hills to the tune of “Billie Jean” takes place. Which turns to “Funeral for a Friend” and “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” as we reach our car. Chad (cold), Kate (not amused), and Adam (still the same) keep going to their car and Tyler, Mike, Matt and I find it and lead the way down Masonic, a small caravan, with us singing “Goodbye Stranger” and toasting to an awesome night ahead. Our drive takes us to the hilltops with views you will never have in any other major American city, Mike still driving after two days and plenty of alcohol and as we go down one steep hill he yells “What if my breaks fail right now? We’re fucked!” But everywhere is great and we love it. Then we arrive at Liz’s house, which is on a certain street a few blocks away from a church used in a certain movie I watched many times as a boy. There are two parking spaces right I nfront of her house with no restrictions until Monday morning! Mike needs an extra inch, asks the man in the BMW ahead of us if he could move up a bit, learns said man is the owner of a thriving hat company he interviewed for the travel website, man acquiesces gracefully. Tyler smokes on the front steps while we wait for the others and a random couple asks when Liz gets off work. At the others’ arrival in Kate’s new rent-a-car, we find a six-bedroom house with room for all of us…it looks like Beth and Andrew’s place, but a touch smaller, though no less cozy and comfortable. Chad and I swipe corn muffins, take a look from the rooftop view, and then I take a shower for the first time since Wednesday morning and shave for the first time since yesterday before we left and just like in Rome eight years ago (damn), there is nothing so revitalizing for a man. I wash my hair twice because it feels so good. We’re all agreeing how sweet Liz is when she walks through her door with a cold case of Corona. Adam, Kate, and Chad all want naps, so the Big Sur contingent and our hostess retire with our beers to the bed-sitting room, a beautiful spot with wicker furniture and a record player with plenty of acoustic rock music on vinyl. I very graciously thank Liz again, then, as I like to do with all my newfound acquaintances, ask for a bit of her background. Turns out she has a degree in classical archaeology but, like me, found a new passion: sustainable food. She is a gourmand who co-manages a farmer’s market and wants to do more, so I, marveling at this bit of serendipity, offer to give her information to Beth at the slow food company. (Which I do once the hustle and bustle of moving is over.) Then Liz starts talking about Alex, at whose elaborate house in Westwood I participated in a booze-fueled jam session shortly after Big Pink was established. Liz, Alex, and Matt have an unstable history involving a certain Joey who died in December. I know nothing about that and feel it’s not my business, and Matt tells Liz about his recent production work and his apartment in Silver Lake, all of which I know, so I fade away to the sounds of Teaser and the Firecat, and eventually Matt and I sing along. Tyler wants to have a few drinks but thinks we need some food, so we wake up Adam and Kate and Chad refuses to climb out of Liz’s bed but she coaxes him out by playing a very rough version of “Amazing Grace” on harmonica. San Francisco is cold at night even in July so I’m wearing undershirt T-shirt hoodie and pullover jacket to keep warm. Liz reveals more of her gourmand side, and when she discovers Adam is a breakfast connoisseur, she writes down two restaurants we have to go to on a napkin. Through the darkness and streetlights, we arrive at where we’d been trying to go before, the actual Mission district with neon and ethnic food establishments everywhere, all of it intriguing. Her insistence we get Mexican food at first disappoints, but I know that her expertise will not lead us to anywhere bad. So we end up at an unprepossessing place whose name I can’t remember, she says she loves going there when she’s drunk and needs to sober up, I find out the next day that it’s rated one of the best Mexican spots in the city. For five dollars I get a veggie burrito with chips and it’s perfect, incredibly spicy, but spicy in a way where I don’t mind! Marvel! Tyler and Mike declare their el pastors the filet mignons of their kind, Matt says something really, REALLY CLEVER but it’s gone the way of that restaurant’s name. Then we go to El Rio, namechecked by Vetiver and Devendra Banhart (I don’t care if I didn’t spell that right.). It’s a beautiful bar with pool tables, old-school air hockey, a great, great, magical outdoor patio with strung up lights and heaters everywhere, just not enough seats. Our order is a combination of Pabst, Guinness, Johnny Walker Black, and for me, a Hendrick’s and tonic for ONLY $6.50 and later a Diet Coke with lime I get for free, the bartender saying it’s on the house because it’s cheap enough to be nothing, but I think it’s because I could swear he called me ma’am when I went to order it. Anyway, like Toby Keith, I love this bar. There’s no seats so I squat down (which I hate) next to Chad who’s having a deep conversation with Liz but subconsciously picks up on my discomfort and works me in. Liz is stunned it’s been almost six years since I met Mike, is a bit stunning. We all agree that we need benchmarks in life and motivation, but Liz and Matt hate Chicago and could never find them there. Personal fulfillment is definitely the key to this equation. When the conversation returns to Alex and Joey aka not my business, I depart with Adam and Kate to fetch more booze, we talk music, and Tyler professes a love for San Francisco after twelve hours knee-deep in it. At one point I have to go to the bathroom, there’s only one and I need to shit so I offer to let the woman behind me go ahead but she insists I go and while I’m in there I hear annoyed little snaps and people laughing. I need to get my head really on straight after that so I walk back to the house with Chad when we thankfully decide to head home. And I get pulled into one of the Chad Eaton conversations I have come to cherish and savor every moment of this one since it’s one of the last. Topic? Hypocrisy in religion, as Chad feels people don’t practice what they preach. I agree and point out that those who do often get killed for it, Jesus Christ and Malcolm X being my prime examples. Chad takes exception to both cases, his arguments based in his unbelief in God (the former) and a cynical view of humanity (the latter). As always, I can’t win, but God, do I love to hear him talk. Matt leaves—reluctantly—and Liz divvies up the rooms, with my humble self getting Christine’s room, and some sweet, sweet golden raspberries. Judging by my impression of her room and its objects, Christine is very nice but very messy (de rigeur here it seems), her floor and couch littered with clothes, photographs, high school AND college graduation mementos, shoes, a hair dryer, a very nice multi-colored bong. Grabbing a before-bed hit of weed, I feel compelled to say how lucky we all are to an agreeing Tyler. Changing into my pajamas, I descend to use the bathroom before bed and run into the only other proper housemate here, Amanda, a short blonde who grabs a Corona right away. I clean up, tramp up, set my alarm just in case, and fall asleep at 1:07, a lucky man who had plenty of good times and knows there’s more to come…and mushrooms actually look like mushrooms!

The Political and the Personal

Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney have played a husband and wife twice on the screen. The first time was in The Nanny Diaries (2007), which I watched on a transcontinental flight thinking I'd get a nice, light, fun movie from the creative team behind the excellent American Splendor. The Nanny Diaries is one of the worst movies of the decade. Linney realizes what a piece of unemotional, insulting, stereotypical dreck the script is and professionally goes through the motions. Giamatti, whose role is thankfully almost a cameo, merely grates.

The second time was a year later, when they played the second president and his "dearest friend" Abigail in Tom Hooper and Kirk Ellis's seven-part HBO adaptation of David McCullough's John Adams.

In the beginning of Part Four, John urges Abigail to come to Paris, where he is helping forge the peace treaty with England after the Revolution...which he spent abroad, alone, trying to be a diplomat and failing because nobody can realte to him and he'll only listen to Abigail. A carriage takes her to the front of the house he's renting. He sheepishly walks through the door, takes her hand, and leads her through the rooms, making occasional, embarrassed comments. Finally, they can bear it no longer...they kiss, rip off their clothes, tenderly clawing at each other the way teenagers do in movies which are celebrating the "good" loss of virginity. Then Abigail stops him short. She's been raising the kids by herself, she never heard from him, and she's angry. John, who has toadied to no one at all, GETS DOWN ON HIS KNEES and confesses his shame of having to write of his failures. She can't stay mad at him. They cling to each other in this empty room...

And I'd stack that scene up against any great movie as a whole. against a million Nanny Diaries, and it would win every time.

So as might be imagined, John Adams as a whole is one of the best American productions of my lifetime and a reminder of why we should thank HBO for understanding how to make exceptional television. At one point Adams says that no one will ever be able to write a history of the Revolution. In regard to this story, a movie could not have done it...it would have rushed through so much of Adams's life and concentrated on whatever spectacle it could find (And the miniseries has European costume drama, naval battles, massacres, cities being constructed...could consulting producer Graham "Speed" Yost have had a hand in this?). Television works because of intimacy, of putting you in a private audience with the characters and seeing them warts and all. When Adams says the Revolution may not be recorded, his fear is that people will not understand the wants and needs and deepest desires of those who wanted independence so badly, will not understand what they were fighting for and why they were fighting. Ellis's teleplays, which pack 57 years into a little over 7 hours, are like ants, burrowing deep into people and events and finding every nook and cranny which made the people, which brought about the event. I feel like I now UNDERSTAND the Revolution after watching John Adams as opposed to only knowing about it....that it was fought by men who had made lives for themselves in a new world, who wanted their children and grandchildren to live lives of their own, as they pleased, and who justly felt they needed above all to shape this destiny with no interference.

And thankfully, John Adams does not descend into essay or polemic. Ellis balances Adams's personal story with the grand political events, the story of a family man who had his faults and suffered heartbreak, but died very content after raising fine children, making great friends, and most of all, having a wonderful marriage.

Hooper directs with not much "style" but a certainty of what to do in each scene, and HBO did not skimp on production values...it looks better than a lot of modern movies. But most of all, the miniseries is perfectly cast. Giamatti, an extraordinary actor, has never been better. Without ever descending to the porcine level he waxes eloquent monologue, rages, laughs, cries, and commands our attention...but is he better than Linney, whose eyes stay level and whose voice almost never rises, but speaks every word with nuances upon nuances of intelligence and passion? No wonder John fell for Abigail, and no wonder Giamatti and Linney won every acting award there was. But the same care goes into the supporting cast: reserved, dignified, just-emotional-enough Stephen Dillane, who works all too rarely on these shores, is a superb Thomas Jefferson, Danny Huston a firebrand Sam Adams, Zeljko Ivanec never better with his trademark "all-knowing and far too sad" demeanor as John Dickinson, Rufus Swell dashing and sly as Alexander Hamilton. (Why is he always so villified?) And that great English chameleon Tom Wilkinson portrays the good Dr. Franklin in a way Ben himself would have delighted in, twinkly, racy, irreverent, and sage...and after her Oscar-nominated debut as a filmmaker, it's great to see Sarah Polley in front of the camera again as the only Adams daughter. My one mild complaint is with David Morse, who is very good, but unfortunately his make-up job as Washington draws more attention than the performance itself.

My only other tiny complaint in an otherwise near-perfect saga: when Polley is operated on for cancer, Giamatti is pacing the floor...and Linney coolly says, "For God's sake, John, sit down." And 1776 crashed into my head for what should have been a poignant moment.


Also...it's great to discover a work by one of your favorite artists you were hitherto unfamiliar with. Last night on Y103, I heard the one really successful Bruce Springsteen song I had never caught on the radio before. Asked to make an extra contribution to the chart-topping We Are the World album, Springsteen offered a live version of Jimmy (The Harder They Come) Cliff's "Trapped." Mournful Roy Bittan keyboards, thunder-from-the-mountain Max Weinberg drums, and Springsteen sounding desperate, lovelorn, raging at the entire world, and yet clinging to hope, all in five minutes. What lends "Trapped" extra weight is that Cliff's lyrics could equally refer to a terrible romantic relationship or someone oppressed by the social and political instituions which dominate so many of us. Maybe even both. I listened to it three more times after that on YouTube...it's too beautiful.

"Well it seems like I've been playing the game way too long
And it seems the game I played has made you strong
Well when the game is over, I won't walk out the loser
And someday I'll walk out of here again...

Now it seems like I've been sleeping in your bed too long
And it seems like you've been meaning to do me harm
But I'll teach my eyes to see beyond these walls in front of me
And someday I'll walk out of here again...

But now I'm trapped..."

(Cue yells and instruments-up-to-eleven.)

Bleak House: How Homer, Cervantes, and Monet Help Explain Dickens

One of these things is not like the other things...

87

“In the imaginary battle of homo americus versus homo homericus, the first wins humanity’s prize.” Where Homer shows compassion and pathos, it is of a general sort in the way all emotions Homer uses take second place to “blood puddles and dung heaps on marble.” Nabokov goes on to praise the lasting immortality of Homer’s epics, but while I share his respect, the Iliad and Odyssey have never been works I could see myself re-reading unless absolutely necessary. Homeric heroes may be personifications of the warrior state and of great virtue, but honor, a quality I hold dear, is the only emotion which is allowed to take on a life of its own. Odysseus’s love for Penelope is an abstract sort…he appears more concerned with insuring the patriarchal succession of power than any deeper feelings for her. In the Iliad, the characters are as a rule petty, secretive, quarrelsome, and use women as pawns. Hence my preference for the Aeneid. Virgil writes a long, long poem with as much excitement, action, and manly philosophy in service to the nation, but the Carthaginian episodes and their aftermath rise to the sentimentality I and Nabokov esteem. The Homeric hero may cry, but I cannot picture Achilles or Odysseus crying as Aeneas does when Dido scornfully turns her back on him in the underworld, crying from lost passions and guilt.

“Don Quixote does interfere in the flogging of a child, but Don Quixote is a madman. Cervantes takes the cruel world in his stride, and there is always a belly laugh around the corner of the least pity.” Recall from my last post on Bleak House that empathy requires a mix of feeling and reason, the intellectual capacity to put yourself in the place of others. Don Quixote is a man who has lost intellectual capacity. In fact, the more I think about it, I see him as an analogue for the Homeric hero. In his chivalry obsession, he clings to an ideal of honor, but the world he wants to practice that honor in is no longer a warrior state. It is a state founded on emotional connections, structured civilization, and rules. Quixote transcends the rules in his single-minded pursuit of honor, which is heroic in its way, but it leaves him with no connection to the people around him, and thus may be a contributing factor to his madness by isolating him…Jane Smiley has pointed out how chastity is Quixote’s most unusual feature, separating him from the romantic subplots popping around the rest of the novel and which sometimes push him out of it. When Quixote is persuaded to drop his devotion to chivalry, he regains his sanity and his ability to relate to others, but at the cost of an individualism as pronounced in its way as that of Odysseus. To pull all this back to Bleak House, Quixote’s benevolence is not that of sentiment over a situation which Dickens would have mined a Sutter’s Mill of dramatic gold from but of an individualistic principle, and Cervantes’s novel on the whole does not shy away from pain and suffering but always will reveal the other side (the rejecting lover of the dead shepherd, for instance) or turn a scene to comedy; the work in totum becomes a metaphysical narrative joke by the time it’s over, anyway. This is great for an intellectual exercise and psychological development, but not for Dickensian emotion.

Esther’s choice of a maid. In a sharp observation not used in the lecture, Nabokov notices that Hortense, recognizing Esther’s goodness and generosity, offers her services to Esther after Lady Dedlock dismisses her. Instead, Esther accepts Charley as her maid, referring to her as a “sweet little shadow” at one point. Hortense would have cast her dark, greedy shadow over Bleak House, just as she will in great future-stereotypical noir fashion in the death of Mr. Tulkinghorn.

88

Skimpole urges Mr. Jarndyce to turn Jo out of the house and back to his natural state. When Jo is brought to Bleak House by Esther and Charley after finding him ill, Skimpole insists he be cast out as a sick (and therefore extra-resource-using) creature. In his apathetic view of the world, Skimpole sees people scraping by in the gutters of London every day and chooses to ignore them, give them a bit of pocket money to ease any conscience pangs, and let them die as they live. Jo, for all his disadvantages and lack of book-smarts, is one of the ideal Dickens children: kind, respectful, honest, eager to help out, needing love and capable of stirring love in the hearts of Dickens’s heroes. He is more of a human than Skimpole ever will be.

89

When Mr. Jarndyce, Esther, and Ada visit Skimpole’s home, he compares himself to a caged bird whose wife and daughters (the Beauty, Sentiment, and Comedy daughters) pluck his wings but he keeps on singing. But through this setting and his sustained abilities with metaphor and thought, we realize Skimpole cannot be caged since he has so many friends he can sponge off, and no one with a “child’s mind” would talk like him and adopt such a knowing-yet-cavalier attitude toward his family. Skimpole is a fraud, and his childishness is the dominant part of that fraud. Nabokov called his course “a kind of detective investigation into the mystery of literary structures,” and the house and the daughters represent an apex of the Skimpole structure. Dickens has let us hear Skimpole too much and grow accustomed to him, so when he reclines in his house of “shabby luxury,” shows off his cleverly-named daughters, and still calls himself a “caged bird” (in contrast to the caged birds of Chancery, who are actually trapped—VN again), we realize the two parts of the picture do not go together at all. Skimpole is far too clever to be a child, and he has none of the positive attributes of the real children of the story. In one innocuous, joking paragraph, Skimpole’s danger strikes us with the force of fifty lightning bolts.

“A book is like a trunk tightly packed with things. At the customs an official’s hand plunges perfunctorily into it, but he who seeks treasures examines every thread.” Poetic and true. For much of my reading life I was a customs official who absorbed the story and distinctive features of books but never took the time to reason WHY they had an affect on me, why I wanted to keep reading. There was a point I would have read Bleak House with impatience, skipping over parts which would have bored the old me (probably Lady Dedlock) to get to what I wanted to read. Now, I would only do that if the book is amateurish, and even then probably with the further caveat of the book being assigned. In a good novel, every aspect fits together just as it should, and we can never know what it means to us and to the world until we carefully link up all the words and sentences, understand their relations. The novel is like a Monet painting. Every word/sentence/chapter/paragraph a brushstroke with its own beauty. We look at them up close. Then we step back, order them together with both logic and emotion, and see the beautiful whole.

The Trouble With Tess: Chapter XLVII

It's a cold, wet day for July. I'm sitting in my living room with a can of caffeine-free Diet Coke (don't worry…stronger libations to follow), some Ralph Vaughan Williams on the Bose system, and my computer on my lap. This afternoon will be spent in an attempt to deduce a literary detective story…

This is the opening paragraph from Chapter XLVII, Phase the Sixth ("The Convert"), from Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles:

"It is the threshing of the last wheat-rick at Flintcomb-Ash Farm. The dawn of the March morning is singularly inexpressive, and there is nothing to show where the eastern horizon lies. Against the twilight rises the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood forlornly here through the washing and bleaching of the wintry weather."

Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's beautiful writing, with Hardy's powers of natural observation running on four cylinders. However…when this is the ONLY PARAGRAPH in a 464-page novel which is written in PRESENT TENSE, it makes the curious English Lit student suspicious. What made this paragraph, which has no bearing whatsoever on the main story, a freak in the book's nature?

Chapter XLVIII takes place four years after the story began. What follows this opening description is the coming of a giant machine to Groby's farm, a "red tyrant," to which Tess must feed the stalks of corn for feeding and grain separation. She spends the entire day at this labor, and during the dinner-hour Marian and Izz spot a man in a tweed suit, twirling a cane. Marian brings Tess dinner, debating whether or not to mention anything, when Tess spots him anyway and recognizes him as Alec. Alec, in great excitement and menacing force, informs Tess that he has given up his career as Methodist preacher, partly because of Angel's logical arguments against organized religion which Tess quoted to him at their last meeting, partly because he cannot deny his lust for Tess. He urges her to run away with him, promising to help her and make her his wife. Tess argues in vain, but ultimately grabs her leather glove and slaps him in the face, drawing blood. Alec does not punish her, but instead, grasping her shoulders, tells her that she will be his again one day. As the threshers rise from the floor, Alec departs, and Tess returns to throwing the corn into the feeder "as one in a dream."

I consider the following:

-One of the major conceits of the novel is Tess's shared purity with nature. Until now, the Wessex countryside and its farms have been depicted pastorally, a Georgic idyll of lovely vales and simple agriculture. But at Groby's farm in desolate Flintcomb-Ash, the corn feeder is modern technology of a sort rarely seen in Marlott or the Crick dairy. Also, it is tended by an engineer with a different accent and no interest in the activities of the farm, there only "in the service of his Plutonic master." It is the coming of the future.

-After Tess has been spending hours tending to the corn, during the lunch break, "the old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past days when they had been accustomed to thresh with flails on the oaken barn-floor; when everything, even to winnowing, was effected by hand-labour, which, to their thinking, though slow, produced better results." Meanwhile, Tess labors on without respite.

-After spending phases two through five absent from the novel, Alec returns in phase six, initially as a reformed Methodist minister trying to lead others to repentance. But on seeing Tess again, his religious enthusiasm weakens and he in Chapter XLVII becomes his old self, a rich, aimless man eager to have his way with Tess.

-The chapter ends with Tess slapping Alec, "a scarlet oozing appeared where her blow had alighted." This is the first time Tess has resorted to violence, and it foreshadows Chapter LVI when another scarlet oozing will seep onto the white ceiling of the house in Sandbourne, as Tess hurts Alec for good.

Tess is at one with the natural state of Wessex at this time, but Chapter XLVII sees the destructions of the future and the past converge on her: a future of domineering machines which will disrupt the harmony between man and nature Tess feels so conscientiously, and a past where her happiness and love were destroyed, would be destroyed, by the fierce desires of Alec, who has gone back to his old self…and by his old self's actions ruined Tess's marriage to Angel, her other great harmony. If the past is miserable and the future not looking much better, indeed bringing her own end faster and more dramatic than she thinks, the present must be a time and place of nothingness, where Tess has nothing to look forward to and precious little feelings. Such a time and place is Flintcomb-Ash, where she has been laboring far too long.

Therefore, Hardy may have put the opening paragraph of this crucial chapter in the present tense to emphasize the as-yet-unknown importance of this day in Tess's life, a day where she begins firmly in the present, but will have cause to experience the lost hopes and dismay of the past and taste the even more crushing disaster the future will bring.

Furthermore, one of Hardy's major themes in Tess of the d'Urbervilles is his attack on the moral values held by modern Victorian society: the codes and attitudes of the present which reinforced sexual repression and the Madonna-Whore dichotomy. Chapter XLVII ends with Tess symbolically lashing out at these values by slapping Alec, who seduced her, raped her, tried to self-righteously "save" her, and now places the reasons for his leaving the church on her shoulders (where he even grabs her by) for tempting him back to his old ways. It is a brave, Davidesque stand against a sneering dandy of a Goliath, but it is a fight Tess is destined to lose. Thus, Hardy describing the forlorn, cold, mechanical nothingness of Flintcomb-Ash in the present tense to lead off this chapter is a doubly powerful way of depicting the forces aligned against Tess, an all-too present version of the present.

The paragraph also may make sense as a culmination of Chapter XLVI, which concerns two visits Alec makes to Tess on the farm in February. First, still a preacher, he admits the wrong he has done her (he is genuinely distressed to know her husband left her because of his actions) and urges her to come with him as his wife, so that they may save each other. He even stands up to Groby when the latter has his usual harsh way with her. Still Tess demurs. Alec returns a half-enraged, half-pathetic wreck, who gives up his religious obligations in hope of persuading her to accept him. Tess refuses again, this time quoting Angel's carefully thought-out arguments against organized doctrine which she learned by rote in her time with him. Alec accuses Tess of making him backslide with her temptress ways, then recovers himself and takes leave of Flintcomb-Ash, swearing he will not see her again…only to begin pondering the logic behind Angel's philosophy.

So in Chapter XLVI Hardy depicts a different, striving-for-goodness Alec—and Alec full of plans for the future. Chapter XLVII sees Alec return to the mode of life he had in the past. In this context, the present-tense opening of the chapter may also be symbolic of this structural method of emotionally turning back the clock for a character in dramatic fashion.

Critics such as Irving Howe and Frederick Pinion (from Scott McEathron's Sourcebook) also point out that the threshing machine is symbolic of the modern world as "impersonal…dehumanized" (Howe) and representative of the thoughtless causes and effects which rule the plot, the "It was to be" fate with which Tess and her fellow Wessexians accept their lots (Pinion). And to quote McEathron, "Bruce Johnson gestures more broadly toward the machine as an emblematic threat to the 'primeval energies' that Hardy seems to be associating with Tess [her unity with nature], and thus to 'an ideal mode of consciousness' which has been lost with our modern alienation from nature." The threshing machine, a symbol the wonder of the present and herald of the coming future, is trebly Tess's enemy. What better way to launch her further on the road to her doom than too introduce it in the present tense?

A last bit of evidence for right now. A thorough search online left me with no other scholars who have commented on this sudden break into pure lepsis for Hardy, but according to the original records of the Graphic magazine, Chapter XLVII appeared in the November 28, 1891 issue to LEAD OFF part 20 of the original, censored serialization. Only people who had become completely caught up in Tess's adventures would have stuck by the novel to this point, meaning that Hardy's sudden cutting into present tense would have been a signpost of things to come. Coincidentally, the original, uncensored printing of Tess in novel form occurred the same month.

These would all be excellent jumping-off points, but after a thorough Google book search, it still seems odd to me that nobody has caught this yet and commented on it!

Chalk one up for the files of this lit-loving Philip Marlowe.

“Tess of the d’Urbervilles, A Pure Woman, Faithfully Presented by Thomas Hardy”

Thomas Hardy gave his penultimate novel its subtitle upon publication in 1891, not at its original composition in 1889, when the book was titled Too Late Beloved. He was forced to censor it for newspaper serialization, publishing two chapters as short stories before binding them into book form, Chapter Eleven (the rape) as "Saturday Night in Arcady," and Chapter Fifteen as "A Midnight Baptism." But Hardy could not hold back the purity of his text, even as Tess Durbeyfield could not deny her purity as a woman.

Angel Clare meets a mysterious stranger who travels with him in Brazil, an Englishman who has seen the world, who will rapidly die of fever, but not before hearing Tess's story and declaring that "morality…lay not among things done, but among things willed."

In his Preface to the Fifth Edition, published in July 1892 (eight months after his original preface), Hardy firmly states that he did not mean to use the word "pure" as it is used in Christianity but as it is in Nature. In nature, things happen which are not thought of, which the animals and plants have no control over, but still the trees grow, the flowers bloom, the squirrels and ants collect food for the winter, the birds sing their grand melodies in summer. Life is as it is, but they fulfill their core natures, no matter what. They know what they are and do not try to be what they are not. In this sense, they have no regard for the world.

Tess Durbeyfield is one of only two characters in her novel who is the same way. She knows her heart and mind and refuses to conform to any other notions. She has no pretensions, like Jack. She has no ambitions, like Joan. She has no wish to exploit or affect others, like Alec. She has no grand sense of mission, like Angel and the other Clares. She has no unfostered romantic delusions, like Marian, Izzy, and Retty. She has no thought of fitting into a role in society, like Crick. She simply IS, and she moves through life doing nothing but being herself. The catch is that since Tess is self-possessed and self-identifying to such a grand degree, she is both ambivalent and, paradoxically, susceptible to instruction (as Patricia Ingham of Oxford says). How can someone of such a purity and identity be so swayed, it should be asked? Living a life centered in personal definition without following the plans of others leaves Tess with no plan of her own. She weighs every turning point in her life with consideration and no certainty as to what to do, but by being so in tune with her emotions, she is inclined to respond to situations emotionally rather than intellectually. One of the strongest emotions people feel is guilt, so when Tess feels guilty, she goes along with the plans of the person she thinks she has wronged as a form of personal reckoning. Most crucially, her guilt over the death of Prince leads her to follow her family's wishes and seek out the d'Urbervilles. Another emotion is duty. Since Tess is in rural Wessex and comes from a poor family, she is a hard worker by nature. And of course, there is love. Tess's ambivalence is lost when she realizes the depths of Angel's passion for her. In him, she finds her only sense of certainty, of faithfulness, which will in the end drive her to murder.

It is a purity in tune with that of nature, and Tess is constantly linked to the natural and the free. She is first seen in a ritualistic, natural dance, and last seen in an ethereal peace at Stonehenge. In between, nature overwhelms her (she is raped in a forest), breathes life into her (her emotional recuperation comes in long, long wanderings in the Vales), gives her purpose (her interactions with cows), and places her in full bloom (Angel falls for her after seeing her for months in a pastoral lifestyle). In the constructions of man, she is lost and out of place…she murders Alec in a seaside pleasure village completely artificial, and is slowly seduced on a farm where everything to her is too new. And when Tess is sad or defeated by life (after the rape, the death of Sorrow, her rejection of Angel, Angel's rejection of her, the months of despair at Flintcomb-Ash), her movements become "mechanical" or "automatic" or "unconscious." Soulless as the machines which creep onto the landscape in the final, tragic phases. (Her pleading first letter to Angel ends with a paragraph where her words suggest a lack of communion with nature.)

But despite the sex and violence which will condemn her, Tess remains pure, for her will is constant and true. Even the rape, though a sin against her, is also the culmination of her sexual awakening (Ingham), and the murder of Alec is reflective of her will to be with Angel, her true love. Only Angel approaches her in purity, in his overriding desire to think for himself, his communion with nature, and his flowing passion. But though Angel has rejected his family's way of life, he still has their righteous sentiments, and so condemns Tess for her "sin," just as Alec will condemn Tess for "tempting him." Their hypocrisies stand in contrast to her goodness, although Angel repents in the end.

Hardy's ardent denial of the purity as Christian is crucial. His next novel, Jude the Obscure, would be his last, as he was unable to stomach people's revulsion to his ideas on male-female relations and organized religion. Tess of the d'Urbervilles is firmly against the Christian-centric morality of Victorian England. Part of Tess's purity and self-possession is that she comes to reject the presence of God for a belief in the spirit of all which surrounds her (similar to Carlyle in Sartor Resartus). At times this grieves her (she cannot join in with her siblings' hymns) but mostly it empowers her. There are three especially powerful chapters in the novel, and the first is the aforementioned "Midnight Baptism" where Tess blesses her dying infant son in front of her siblings, who stand in awe of her presence.

Hardy goes from derision to anger regarding organized religion. He detests the Clares' rigid adherence to their belief system, BUT he respects their sincerity. He rips into Alec for his brief, fashionable repentance as a Methodist preacher, which is destroyed by Tess's logical arguments against faith and his own unquenchable lust for Tess. Otherwise, there are smaller examples: the painter who posts Scripture passages in giant letters by rote, or Crick, who goes from rustic dairyman to a semblance of a fine gentleman (self-denial) on church days.

The conflict between Tess's purity and the outside world is partly expressed in Hardy's structuring the book around seasons and color. Times of verdure and harvest see Tess alive and at peace, while cold, storms, and darkness, times for physical inactivity and restless minds, bring about misery. And the colors…Tess is often dressed in white or surrounded by white or turning pale in the times of her ambivalence, which, as I said, are moments of great purity for her. In opposition to white is red, the red of her mouth which tempts Alec and Angel, the red of blood, Prince's blood as he dies, the blood which flows from Alec first when Tess slaps him, then when she stabs him and it spreads across the white ceiling in the third great chapter. And the name d'Urberville itself, with all its attachments, which Jack brings up in his unrefined English every time he appears. Tess carries the d'Urberville ruthlessness and passion in her (Ingham), unlike the false d'Urberville Alec, but the name both says nothing about her and determines her future life, as her parents, Alec, and Angel are all affected in different ways by her ancestry. She is indeed of the d'Urbervilles, if not by choice.

There is a strong sense of fatalism running through the novel. "It was to be" is one of the common country expressions among the Wessex denizens, and for Tess, who in five years suffers from coincidence and bad timing, there is little she can do but remain herself and make the best of things. Plans and dreams are as important as the name d'Urberville: not at all. And how can there be a God, Hardy implies, if nothing has much meaning behind it?

I could go on about other things, but as Nabokov says, you can only reread a book, not read it. I have only grasped the architecture of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, not its deepest meanings. So for now I leave with the final image of Angel praying over the executed Tess (under a silent black flag) with Liza-Lu, Eliza Louise, the younger sister of whom Tess says "she has all the best of me without the bad of me." She is pure, full of duty and her own conviction. She will stay with Angel, and add her own personal belief in God to the equation.

(The other great chapter, by the way, is when Angel meets Izz Huitt on the first stage of his journey to Brazil. In a few pages of conversation by turns urgent and innocuous, and the surprising denouement, Hardy captures human thought process in a way few writers ever approach.

Dangling Conversations

I spent ninety minutes yesterday talking to three people who helped shape my world in Boardman.

I paid a call on Mr. and Mrs. Lariccia across the street, the two sweetest philanthropists I have ever known, happily married for thirty-five years and giving away an unexaggerated fortune to every worthy cause in Mahoning County. And God bless a world with men like him in it...in Mr. Lariccia's eyes, I can do no wrong, I am "juicy," "more delicious than a Charlie Staples sparerib" (as is his elder daughter Natalie's writing for the Vindicator) and a man to be praised for knwoing so much about the music and films of his generation...the mere mention of my employment on the Universal lot prompted half our talk to be his hearty reminiscence of Douglas Sirk's classic Imitation of Life, from which he could extensively quote dialogue.
God bless this world.

Then came 45 minutes on the phone with Carlee Tressel, who has traveled and will travel from Ohio to Minnesota to New Mexico on a journey through writers' workshops and penning two books of her own, while moving to a new apartment and continuing her graduate program. I had rung her up a few days ago in a moment of crisis regarding my studies in Chicago, and, as only she can, she reaffirmed for me the beauty of my taking a risk and that nothing in life is ever worth it unless we lay something on the line, that God smiles on people like us who follow our hearts and passions. Every time I write or speak with her, my heart turns to soy milk...lighter and sweeter than ever before. She's the sort who deserves reams of posts, only I would never be able to find precisely the right words.

Mark Bauerlin in the Chronicle of Higher Education comments on a different kind of conversation...the grand sharing of knowledge academics and scholars take part in through the publishing. The paradox is that as publishing becomes more of a factor in the tenure decisions I and so many of my new colleagues may face someday...the actual quantity of things WORTH publishing is dropping. The statistics daunt my questing heart and mind: 3,000 books and papers in the last two decades on Milton, Faulkner, and Woolf...APIECE. Almost 19,000 on Shakespeare alone! And almost 2,000 of those on Hamlet! As Bauerlin says, "At what point does common sense step in and cry, 'Whoa! Slow down! Hamlet can't give you anything more.'?" The reason for this was a shift in criticism in the 1980s--the same time Eagleton published his definitive "Introduction"--from asking "What does the text mean?" to "How can I read the text in a way no one else can?" Bauerlin suggests two remedies: limit the number of pages in a review of employment candidacy, and shift the focus onto actual quality of teaching.

I may be a newcomer to this field with less of a voice at the moment, but Professor Bauerlin's ideas make a lot of sense to me. Writing is hard enough...it took eighteen months and fourteen drafts to work the 115 pages or so of my graphic novel into a publication-ready form, and from what I've seen thus far, academic writing is especially hard due to both voluminous standards and a need to say something no one has ever said before. Putting limits on how much the academic can publish for recognition forces careful revision and production of only the cream of our milky flow of ideas...the best and most unique, and therefore most representative, of our thoughts will by necessity be the ones which emerge, thereby ensuring a contribution to the conversation which means something and is not just, to quote Nabokov, "eloquence masking as ignorance." I know I personally never like to contribute to conversations unless I have something worthwhile to say.

Second, as someone who believes in literature as rhetoric and the power of the meaning and insight people acquire from a text, one-on-one interaction and how a teacher motivates and inspires students should be perhaps THE major criteria for collegiate employment. In fact, just as the first point should move back to "What does this mean?," this second point should be centered in "How can I read this?" Everyone will bring their own skills and knowledge to a text, and the exchanging of opinions, convictions, and interpretations will only result in new, deeper meanings...but only if an encouraging, competent teacher is stimulating the discussions. Only if they put in the time and effort to work with their charges. This is how we keep the conversation going.

And academic publishing will go on like Celine Dion's shrieking heart. Indeed, the conversation may expand to become more democractic and accessible thanks to the Internet. And we're all going to find the time to write books...we didn't get into the scholarly world to keep our mouths shut, after all :)

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:http://chronicle.com/article/Diminishing-Returns-in/47107/

The story of John Sexton, the president of NYU, is an inspiring chronicle of higher education in itself. An underprivileged youth, he got into FOrdham on a scholarship, flunked out when his father died, single-handedly set up a debate team at a Catholic girls' school with NO academic reputation and led them to two national titles, and on that earned his way back into college, getting a Ph. D. in religion from Fordham AND a law degree from Harvard. "Because this oblivious, immature, overly confident young man set unreasonable expectations," he says, "the students met them. There was strength in my obliviousness." How many of us might do more than we dreamed simply by ignoring what people say we are able to accomplish? http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090717/REVIEW/707169966


P.S. Marc grilled a heck of a good flank steak yesterday. Some men were born to grill, some were born to use ovens and stoves and crock pots. I'm the latter.

A Few Brief Thoughts on “Blaming and Shaming in Whore’s Memoirs” by Julie Peakman

This was found in History Today and makes for quite the titillating introduction to a fascinating side of the literary spectrum. Peakman, a lecture at the University of London with a focus on sex and literature, has become interested in an 18^th-century genre where prostitutes and women with scandalous reputations wrote what were basically the tell-all memoirs of their times.

It makes me think of James Boswell publishing his diaries unexpurgated in his own time.

Peakman recognizes very modern impulses behind these books. "Whore biographies," she says, not only allowed their authors to make money to support them in an old age where looks and appeal dropped, but also let them "reveal their paramours for what they really were."

From my point of view, a grand literary project could be dreamed up of their relations with the famous authors of their day, or a comparison between how THEY wrote about sex and how MEN wrote about sex.

An interesting double-standard…just as women are often dichotomized into Madonnas and Whores, so the latter are celebrated when they make their exploits public, even rejoiced over by their fallen nature, while the idea of men telling all often comes across as repellent.

Bleak House: An Argument For Sentiment

A Liverpudlian with a dead, idolized mother who did hard labor in German port towns and rose to the top of the world…Dickensian in story and sentiment.

85

Dickens uses the word "heavy" to describe the youngest of the Neckett children, who is in all likelihood not that heavy at an impoverished eighteen months, but Nabokov likes the vocabulary because it "weighs down the sentence at the necessary point." In one well-placed sentence Dickens begins unveiling Skimpole's monstrosity. Neckett, a bailiff Skimpole has nicknamed "Coavinses," dies before he can arrest the "child" as a debtor. Skimpole tells Esther and Mr. Jarndyce that Coavinses was a widower with children…while merrily playing the piano, celebrating his good fortune. In a swift change of scene, Esther seeks out the children and finds them in a cheap room with old furniture, a six year-old boy nursing his infant sibling. It is not the child who is heavy, but the state of affairs compared to the lightness of Skimpole's point of view.

86

Esther and Mr. Jarndyce meet Charley Neckett. "Skimpole is a vile parody of a child, whereas this little girl is a pathetic imitator of an adult woman." A lot happens in this scene. Charlotte Neckett, who gives her age at "over thirteen," a pretty girl wearing woman's clothes and doing woman's work when she should be getting an education and feeling much more carefree, wearily walks in and immediately takes the baby, astonishing Esther with her "steadiness." Consider…

1. Coavinses has given Charley her diminutive nickname, a sign of fatherly love and regard alien to Skimpole's conception of him. With one stroke, Dickens humanizes the dead man.
   


2. From the state of affairs, Charley is laboring mightily to keep herself and her siblings alive and as well as possible, and by her manner and speech (the steadiness) she recognizes the burden but bears it without complaining, acting out of love and empathy. Compare this to Skimpole's narcissistic lifestyle and treatment of a family the reader and Esther do not meet for several hundred pages.
   


3. Mr. Jarndyce's character. The reader should already like him as one of Dickens's benevolent forces, with his good nature and recognizable character tic (the east wind…a wind which could blow clouds to block a sunrise, a wind which produces fog). He has been seen to respect and go out of his way for Esther, Richard, and Ada, and he somehow genuinely likes Skimpole. But when he meets Charley, his cheery, regarding demeanor takes on new hints not yet witnessed but recognized by Esther as "tender, compassionate, mournful," in a man who must turn his face away as he asks Charley, "How do you live?" Mr. Jarndyce, who likes everyone, is overcome when he knows he has met someone who needs his compassion…he will be overcome more when he develops feelings for Esther. But he is struck by emotion in a way Skimpole definitely does not affect him.
   

Dickens is sentimental in a way Homer and Cervantes never were, and his sentiment must be understood and not attacked by the reader. Nabokov had great respect for Homer and something beyond respect for Cervantes…there is an entire volume of his writings on Don Quixote. I myself like Homer (while preferring Virgil) and love Cervantes. Dickens loved Cervantes, and Bleak House contains several allusions and even nominal references to the author and his saga. (Chapter 17, where Esther becomes a Dulcinea figure to the Sancho-like (in his devotion) Mr. Guppy and Allan Woodcourt, so much like Quixote except in his sanity.) The distinction Nabokov is drawing comes from a facet of Dickens which may be the most hard to deal with, and which helped turn me off from Dickens through high school and college.

"People who denounce the sentimental," Nabokov says, "are generally unaware of what sentiment is." I denounced the sentimental in high school, when my devotion to Woody Allen and Monty Python was at its peak, and my first year of college, when I wrote a rather good poem full of wordplay and dry poking fun for my mother's Christmas card and was forced to scrap it and write what I felt was forced-rhyme dreck which she, and everyone else, loved. Then I went to Europe and was separated from my family and home for the first time ever…and discovered just how sentimental I really was.

Sentiment is not about overt displays or dramatic declarations of love and compassion. Sentiment is the ability to care for people to such a degree that you are unable to resist feeling whatever emotion they feel, and the dual force combines within you to make you WANT to express something. You're separated from your family or your significant other and missing them greatly. A person who is aware of sentiment KNOWS that their lover, parent, sibling miss them as well and this translates into extra emotion on top of something already great, like pouring just that more milk and adding that one extra teaspoon of sugar to your coffee cup. It overspills, and in humans it manifests as a reaction.

What is the difference between the sentimental and the empathetic? Empathy is based in reason as much as emotion…an intellectual determination that other individuals have desires and responses, and these must be taken into account when you interact with them. Sentiment is empathy plus love, the love any psychologically sound human being feels for at least SOME others. John Robison, the Asperger's syndrome possessor who wrote the fantastic memoir Look Me In the Eye describes it like this: if you tell him that there's been a train wreck or plane crash which has killed all the people aboard, he understands this is bad and feels empathy because he intellectually recognizes these were people who loved and were loved and did things in which some way benefited society, but it stops there at reason. But when something happens to his wife, child, or friends, or they do something for him because of their emotional response to him, it is enough to move him to physical reaction, be it tears or that beautiful form of human connection (my words), the kiss.

For one last outside comparison: Sir Paul McCartney is often compared unfavorably to John Lennon despite their equal brilliance as songwriters, the yardstick being that Lennon dealt in genuine emotions while McCartney was a sentimental composer of "silly love songs." From my readings of their biographies, Lennon, in my interpretation, was a conflicted man who spent his entire life searching for an ideal love he never exactly found. He cared for others, but his emotions were kept confined to himself and a tight circle. McCartney, on the other hand, for all his flaws, was always upfront as a man who mixed empathy and love. His dictatorial command of the Beatles stemmed from loving both the music and the men he worked with…he fought to keep them together until he realized they were doomed. And when he found a life with a woman he loved and plenty of children, happiness manifested itself in irrepressible ditties…and, in the two albums he made after Linda died, raucous explosions and painfully sad music. ("From a Lover to a Friend" is one of the saddest song I've ever heard.)

So now we come back to Charles Dickens, whose message in Bleak House and so many other books was of empathy's battle with apathy. Dickens so firmly believed in empathy and its effect on society, was so tirelessly outspoken about the need to improve society, was married, had passionate affairs, fathered children in the double-digits…he was in such extreme contact with so many people that sentiment was as natural to him as writing like this is for me.

"Keen, subtle, specialized compassion, with the grading and merging of melting shades, with the very accent of profound pity in the words uttered, and with an artist's choice of the most visible, most audible, most tangible epithets." So says Nabokov. So say I. This is Dickens's sentimentality, and it only enriches Bleak House in a way it should enrich our lives.

Bleak House: Skimpole

Leigh Hunt when not writing about jousts.

83, continued

Horace Skimpole "deceives Mr. Jarndyce into thinking he…is as innocent, as naïve, as carefree as a child. Actually he is nothing of the sort," and his "false childishness" accentuates the miseries of the real children.

"Eventually, Leigh Hunt (he) was immortalized as Horace Skimpole in Bleak House, Dickens confessing to a friend, "I suppose that he is the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words…It is the absolute representation of the real man." Paul Johnson, Intellectuals.

Horace Skimpole is, like Don Quixote (whom Nabokov will later compare him to), Jay Gatsby, and Holden Caulfield, one of those literary creations of whom, once you have read their story, you never forget them. For the first half of Bleak House, Skimpole is hilarious…part of what made me fall in love with Dickens again was reading the absurd ridiculousness of Skimpole's scenes, which made me laugh out loud in public places. In the second half, however, Skimpole, his personality and mannerisms unchanged, seamlessly transitions from comic icon to terrifying figure of destruction. And Dickens never makes a false move in the process.

This is in large part due to Dickens's aesthetic choices. Skimpole is introduced very early in the book, practically from the moment Esther, Ada, and Richard arrive at Bleak House…before the children whose pain will fuel our tragic empathy, Jo and Charley Neckett above all, make their presence known, thus deceiving us into accepting Skimpole at face value. More, if memory serves me well, Skimpole never appears in the 'Charles Dickens' chapters and is only included in Esther Summerson's portion of the narrative. Dickens would have laid merciless waste to him from the start, but Esther, with her gentle soul seeing the best in everybody, gives Skimpole the benefit of the doubt long after his monstrous nature has made itself known.

Jarndyce, who considers children "the finest creatures on Earth,' sees Skimpole as a fine man because of his seeming ingenuity and total devotion to what he believes in: a life of artistic pursuits and little else, to the end where he declares the world can basically go to hell as longs as it "lets Horace Skimpole live!" But he never is shown working at literature, art, or composition. Instead, Skimpole sponges off the generosity of Jarndyce and others while talking up big ideas.

Skimpole's malevolent tendencies are observed early on, and self-described. From the "child's" own testimony, he was fired from his position as a royal doctor because he didn't like to treat anybody. He has a wife and three daughters but spends little time with them and does nothing to support them. And there is a menacing hint behind all our laughter every time Skimpole, in all reasonableness, agrees with his persecutors that yes, he is a debtor, a wastrel, and a dissolute bad example…but don't blame him! He is a child, after all! There was a line in the last season finale of Lost where Frank Lapidus tells Richard Alpert's ragtag group of American allies "I've found that people who have to say they're the good guys usually aren't that good." So with Skimpole's constant self-identification as a child.

Dickens builds these qualities up to a point where Skimpole becomes one of the piece's villains, maybe the worst because, if apathy is the cardinal sin, Skimpole is the most apathetic of all. At least Tulkinghorn is considering Sir Leicester's welfare in his actions and the Smallweeds include each other in their cutthroat striving for success. Skimpole truly believes that as long as Horace Skimpole is alive and well and happy, he has no reason to think of anything else. His incorrigible behavior helps bring about "Coavinses"'s death, orphaning his children. He sends Jo away from Bleak House, where Esther could have taken care of him in his ill, weakened state, so as to avoid Mr. Bucket's attentions and keep his health well. This action will ultimately kill the poor boy. And worst of all, he speeds along the needless trials and death of Richard Carstone. Richard shows a Skimpole-like attitude to life from the beginning in his desultory picking at occupations and willingness to take Mr. Jarndyce's money and resources and consent to marry Ada without giving anything in return. Then he begins listening to Skimpole, who urges him to sue Jarndyce, engage the deadly dispassionate Mr. Vholes, and give no thought to financial resources. Richard's trust in Skimpole becomes so complete that neither can be moved even by the most earnest supplications. When all is said and done, even ESTHER cannot tolerate him, putting down his autobiography (which from context clues has him show no remorse for Jo or Richard) when he calls Mr. Jarndyce one of the most selfish men in the world from the beginning.

When Esther Summerson cannot think well of you, that says something.

Horace Skimpole was one of Dickens's most well-considered characters. The novelist needed a figure with no connection to Chancery who could epitomize the spreading apathy of society…for to only use Krook would have centered apathy in the legal system. Even today, the public is willing to take maladjusted behavior from public figures in stride (the O.J. Simpson case, for instance) because of their abilities to do things which are not socially useful but are creative and, in that way, magnificent. The line between the truly artistic and those who are not really artistic but can reach a semblance of artistic talent or, worse, convincingly pretend they are artistic, is a hard one to draw. Skimpole anticipates celebrity culture and undue worship of the intellectual. "Let Horace Skimpole live!" Why?

(I knew about Leigh Hunt back in Boardman, when his slightly ridiculous but actually good poem "The Glove and the Lions" was included in my middle-school literature textbook. I remember the message about human selfishness, and that his biography mentioned he was jailed for three years for insulting the Regent. Paul Johnson accuses him of helping to destroy Shelley along the same lines Skimpole destroyed Richard.)

Happy Endings

Happy Ending No. 1: Mom, Marc, and I spent three and a half hours away from home today, but came back from the grocery store…the closest Trader Joe's, with four bags of food and twelve bottles of wine, including some L'Authentique Dad and I drank over buffalo and Mom's wonderful French fries.

Happy Ending No. 2: Today I made a major breakthrough. From an earlier blog entry in February: When I was twelve years old I got a few B's on my report card because I neglected to make up some math assignments due to a family trip and hid progress reports from my parents.  I have never forgotten how my mother sobbed that this was how I thanked them for my opportunities.  That was the last time I ever kept something major from my family, and I went on to a consistent string of Honor Roll and Dean's List...but the shame is still with me over a decade later.  I have never stopped punishing myself for anything which I even THINK MIGHT hurt another human since then.

Turns out Mom and Dad forgot all about this. It feels…liberating. And I weigh 147 ½, so I have no reason to worry about my weight. There is nothing left for me to be upset about. My recent efforts at even-keeledness are working out brilliantly, and now I know how lucky I am to have a wonderful family and a great education in store.

Happy Ending No. 3, Best Of All: I had a fantastic dinner yesterday with Mark Wilson and Russell Waller, the latter one of the most remarkable personages of my life whom I have never written about. Russell Waller was a Socialist who could argue for half an hour as to why this was the ideal state of being, a firm agnostic at least, and the greatest gambler I have ever known, a man who could consider the angles of any casino game or bookmaking operation and figure out how to come out ahead. He made Boardman High a joy for me. Now he's going after a Ph. D. in ultra-complex mathematics…no surprise with his mind.

Robyn Repko was Russ's complete opposite: light, dainty, incredibly sweet-natured and seeing the best in people, from a troubled family where his was stable but never brought down. I adored her without ever seeing her as more than a friend, even when she beat me in my Oscar pool under my own tie-breaker rules. With Russ, she was blonde curls and big eyes to his dark looks and smoldering glare. She was attracted to him and, with Mark's help, convinced him to take her to a high school dance. She drove him crazy…mostly because she was so sensible and patient that she could win arguments by outlasting him. He soon realized this was a good thing, and chemistry had its way.

They went to Grinnell in Iowa together. She studied philosophy in Russia and England. Now they're off to Florida State for doctorates…as an engaged couple. It's the end of one stage in life but a greater beginning, and I pray they have lasting happiness…and that I can attend the wedding.

Mark also has a girlfriend he met swing-dancing. Have to give that a try.

Happy Ending No. 4: According to the London Times, women are getting more beautiful because the most attractive females are the ones doing the reproduction. It's nice to see genetics applied in a more useful way than peas…and it means there's hope for us all, lonely guys!

Havin' a Look at the Thomas Hardy on a Lazy Sunday

Today is going to be a good day. This afternoon I'll be reunited with some very dear friends, but a few observations first...nice to sit back on a lazy Sunday after running 7.2 miles, eating Mom's blueberry pancakes,and finishing the Times crossword for the second week in a row. It's weird not going to church, though. I'm looking forward to joing the Episcopal community in Chicago.

My "Four Great Concerns" was not just literary fancy-shmancy. I have to walk the talk, so I began putting it into practice with my first Thomas Hardy novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. After reading the first phase, I can see myself becoming a Hardy fan. Besides a great tragic love story which turns around my favorite Stephen King adage--coincidence is not the exception in life, but the rule (from "The Langoliers")--it is shaping up to be a completely unified work in terms of rhetoric, structure, and style. Hardy's main concern is about human purity (Tess is a "pure woman") and thus writes in a straightforward style where his prose does not rely on elaborate comparisons to be full of imagery, he uses color symbolically, and drops a very interesting hint. His preface to the fifth edition takes pains to point out that he is not speaking of purity in the Christian sense--human purity is being true to yourself, and for Tess that means careful consideration of how to interpret life and its situations and not following others' sometimes foolish ideas (like the Durbeyfields do) or not thinking about all the considerations and being selfish (Alec Stoke...what a name!). She practices ambivalence and seeing both sides of things, which lends an extra, crucial bit of strength to the final passage of the first phase when Hardy cautiously denies the altruism of God. Belief is personal consideration...and thus human purity.

The Times had an education supplement today where they suggested your starting salary should cover your student loans, which themselves should not exceed 14% of income. Now what do you say to a man like me who has $61,000 in debt but also a bank account large enough to pay over half of it off very slowly? At least I'm young, without a family, and ready for frugality.

Country music and Cliff Richard...that's what going on my iPod the day I run a marathon.

The Joys of Moderation

A wise man told me earlier this week, "You're 24. Start acting like you're 24!" Blunt but true. So now I'm learning to control my emotions a little better, talk less, take stricter command of my finances...and learn a valuable lesson about pleasures in moderation.

Ever since preschool, one of the simplest and best joys in my life was reading a book while eating. But over the years, the following things happened...my love of literature grew to a point where I learned the best way for me to read a book and extract the most riches in thought and sentiment from it, while thanks to my mother and friends, the latter an ever-growing group, I discovered the joys of savoring your food as slowly as possible and in cooking and taking communal meals.

Tonight, I had a bowl of chili to eat on my lonesome and I pulled out Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel for company, and I was not fully enjoying the experience until the neurons in my head sent me a message: my ability to gain pleasure from reading and my ability to gain pleasure through sensible eating had both evolved so fully that I could no longer appreciate them in combination! They needed their own space!

For the first time in twenty years, I have lost all desire to read while eating.

I wish I had arrived at this point sooner, remembering all the years in high school and college sitting alone with a book or feeling ticked off when I had to eat with others. But I am becoming my best self in my own timeframe, and I think I've got a good half-century to catch up on all the human connection I may have missed.

The catch is that I have come to greatly enjoy reading and drinking. Coffee, tea, beer, wine, and diet soda are all flavorful enough to be greatly pleasurable, but simple and less space-taking enough to be enjoyed in tandem with a good book! So from now on, reading while drinking (though not to the point of alcoholism) is the way to go, and reading while eating is a closed chapter, pun intended.

By the way, the Russians are driving me crazy these days. It is not prejudicial for someone to make objective claims about your conduct in World War II! I'm happy you won as much as you are! I just wish you hadn't killed million upon millions of dissenters from Stalin's hard line in the process!

Bleak House: Apathy Triumphant and Opposed, from the Old to the Young

This is a cliched illustration, but we NEED the original Cruikshank from Chapter 32

78

Krook is “perpetually full of gin” and carries within him “a portable hell—this is Mr. Nabokov, not Mr. Dickens.” If Krook is the novel’s direct representative of both Chancery and social apathy, it follows that he must also be apathetic towards himself. By continually being under the influence of alcohol, and gin was a strong drink marketed for the lower classes above all, he shows little regard for his well-being. It is in accordance with John Stuart Mill’s end-of-decade dictum in On Liberty, that Krook in this case harms no one but himself. “Portable hell…” it sounds reminiscent of Pale Fire (which I haven’t read yet).

Tony Jobling, or Weevle, takes the same room in which Captain Hawdon committed suicide. Weevle moves into a room full of death, in a house full of death, and in the great Chapter 32, “The Appointed Time,” will use Hawdon’s death to perpetuate another death in his plan to assist Guppy’s pursuit of Esther by securing Hawdon and Lady Dedlock’s letters from Krook. Weevle has ingratiated himself with Krook, and given him more gin.

“Mark the candle heavily burning with ‘a great cabbage head and a long winding-sheet.’ No use reading Dickens if one cannot visualize that.” A candle is a long, thin object. A cabbage head is bulky, more expansive, the latter quality shared in more delicate style by the winding-sheet. Dickens uses these words to set up the controlled explosion which ends the chapter.

80

Krook’s death is a return to the fog of Chancery from which he came. “The evil within a man has destroyed the man…the metaphor has become a physical fact.” Nabokov carefully recounts all of the events for this sequence, and shows how “The Appointed Time” is an apt title for this chapter. (That is Mr. Rostan, not Mr. Nabokov.) In all of Dickens’s descriptions of Chancery and the neighborhood thus far, he has used imagery of fog, smoke, soot, a “soft black drizzle,” none of it especially heavy on its own but always there to the point of overpowering weight, and all ephemeral, thoughtless and uncaring of whom it subsumes. The atmosphere around Chancery represents Chancery, and thus represents Krook. The difference is that Chancery by its perpetuation shows a regard for itself. Krook now shows no regard for himself, per his alcoholism. The extra apathy is already weakening him when he is given more alcohol…more apathy…as part of a plan to commit what will be a malicious act (for Lady Dedlock, whom Mr. Guppy is not thinking about, and Weevle is only carrying out Mr. Guppy’s orders, so even more apathy here). The quantity of sin is enough to finally have Krook’s portable hell become the actual hell to which he returns in that same smoke. He has died at the appointed time when all of the apathy grows too much for him to bear.

81

Mr. Guppy and Weevle’s “rapid, colloquial…jerky” dialogue contrasts the “eloquent apostrophic tolling” of ‘Charles Dickens’ the narrator. Part of Dickens’s greatness was an ability to keep his characters separated and distinct. This extends to his own third-person narrative voice (or is it third-person…see later), an eloquent, omniscient tone which for all his loquaciousness and verve (and in the end of 32 indeed apostrophic, addressing an imaginary judge), is kept apart and distinguished from Mr. Tulkinghorn, Sir Leicester Dedlock, Mr. Turveydrop, and the other grandiose figures.

Dickens’s style is representative of his contemporary Thomas Carlyle, above all History of the French Revolution. Carlyle’s famed book came out simultaneously with the second half of Dickens’s novelistic debut, The Pickwick Papers. In Bleak House, Dickens shows an exposure to the Carlyle who wrote Revolution and Sartor Resartus. There is a witty verbosity, an earnest defense of what the author sees as good and attack on the bad, and a relentless depiction of character. Apparently, Dickens and Carlyle were good friends, the latter helping inspire A Tale of Two Cities, and immediately before Bleak House Carlyle published his Latter-Day Pamphlets, critiques of the current society and its institutions, including laissez faire capitalism…another great form of apathy. It may be that Dickens was absorbing Carlyle’s style as the two shared opinions.

The names surrounding Chancery are apropos. Krook lives in his name what the people surrounding Chancery really are…the unlawful. Miss Flite is concerned with freedom, of birds soaring above the madness, while she is on a permanent “flight of fancy.” And as Dickens keeps evoking the fog and mud, so the lawyers in Chancery keep reducing “MY Lord” to “M’lud” to “Mud.” As with that great figure in fiction, the idiot-savant who sees all clearly in his lesser mind, the lawyers whose wits are dulled by Chancery refer to its heads as exactly what they are.

83

Krook and Chancery both meet logical ends. Krook dies when the apathy which characterizes Chancery takes full control and returns him to the fog. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is finally resolved when Chancery, in turn, is overwhelmed by itself. The lawyers’ fees have over time eaten up the entire cost of the estate, so there is nothing left to sue over…the case is absorbed into the same fog as Krook, apathy now working its way over a controlled period of time. Thus the end of the suit is less dramatic than Krook’s death, but it carries the same logic and the same absurdity. No wonder the lawyers laugh upon hearing the final decision: they have defeated themselves! But as Nabokov sagely says, “Only the dead do not laugh.” Richard’s reaction is sorrow and regret that he has gotten caught up in the absurdity, and it is by this that God gracefully allows his forgiveness by Mr. Jarndyce and Ada

John Jarndyce calls a child “the finest creature on earth,” and for Dickens it was so because children were good, innocent, not yet wise to the worst of the world, and Nabokov says he was at his best documenting the simple pathos and cruel miseries of children.” We now leave Chancery behind to come to the child theme, which is crucial to Bleak House.

In my introduction, I discussed how being oversaturated with Dickens caused me to lay him aside for a long time, but Nabokov is right, and it is a beautiful torture that this is the case: Dickens’s most known and most clichéd trademark was also what he did best. The entire world knows (or should know) about not just Oliver Twist and Tiny Tim but also Smike, the young David Copperfield, Pip, and those two lovely Little girls Nell and Dorrit. In writing their melodramas and tragic or gloriously uplifting endings, he WAS perhaps the best English writer since Shakespeare. The secret was his ability at making things RELATIVE. I compare this to when I watched Nanette Burstein’s excellent documentary American Teen, where my irritation with her subjects’ goals and drama and sadness over “unimportant things” gave way to epiphany that when I was in high school, I cared about those “unimportant things” just as much. Dickens knew that for a child just learning about the world, they had cares, joys, loves, hopes, and fears very different from those of adults, and he wrote about these emotions with empathy and realism. Empathy…that is what Dickens’s best children possess most of all. They are loyal, generous, and loving to mankind because they haven’t “learned” enough to know it’s possible to be otherwise! They are the natural opposition to the apathy of Bleak House, which is why not only in this novel do they suffer more trials than Clarence Darrow and F. Lee Bailey combined would have ever wanted to go through…but also why he was able to create one of the greatest comic villains of all literature…whom I shall get to in the next post.

For right now, all I can say is that all of the negative sides of humanity in Bleak House are always countered by the gentle goodness of its “real” children, and that our heroine Esther and her two best partners, Allan and Mr. Jardnyce, are the adults who have held fast to that goodness and go out of their way to practice empathy…especially towards children from Jo to Ada who are afflicted most of all.

The Four Great Concerns of Fiction

With all credit going to Gerard Genette, Vladimir Nabokov, and Terry Eagleton. Only the mistakes have been mine.

RHETORIC
What is the meaning, conscious or subconscious, the author wishes us to extract from this book, and how does that meaning relate to plot and theme?

STRUCTURE
How does the author introduce, develop, and conclude the main plot and the subplots? Introduce and develop the characters through to the conclusion of their arc? Introduce and develop the themes of the novel?
How do the plots, characters, and themes interact with each other?
How does structural development and interaction add to or create rhetorical meaning?

STYLE
What are the author’s mannerisms in grammar and vocabulary? How does the author write dialogue and description? What are their preferred uses of imagery, comparison, and literary device? How does style add to meaning?

NARRATIVE
What is the order of the narrated events? Are the events narrated chronologically (analepsis), simultaneously, in anticipation (prolepsis), or anachronistically?
What is the frequency of the narrated event? Once (singular, “Today I went to the shop.”), n with one narration (iterative, “I used to go to the shop.”), once with n narration (repetitive, “Today I went to the shop, he went to the shop, etc.”), or nce with n narration (multiple “I used to go the shop, he used to go the shop, I went to the shop yesterday, etc.”)?
What is the duration both of the narrative time and the narrated time? What is summarized, elided, or expanded? When does the author choose to stop time? (“Five years passed” takes a second to read. Ulysses occurs over 24 hours, but it takes longer than that to read.)
In terms of mood, first, what is the narrative distance? Is the speech narrated, transposed, or reported? Is it a diagetic recounting or a mimetic interpretation? Is the speech direct, indirect, or free-associative?
Second, what is the narrative perspective or focalization? Does the narrator know more than, less than, or the same amount as the characters? Is the narrator omniscient (non-focalized), a character or characters recounting the events from their own possibly moving position (internally focalized), or someone knowing less than anyone else (externally focalized)?
What is the narrative voice? Is it intradiegetic (inside the text) or extradiegetic (outside the text)? Is it heterodiegetic (narrator absent) or homodiegetic (narrator present)? If the last, is the narrator also autodiegetic (the principal character)? For all cases, are the events being narrated before, after, or while (as in the epistolary letter) they happen?
Finally, what is the difference between narration and narrative? Between what someone is telling and what is being told? And how do all of the above incorporate into the structure and style to create a rhetorical meaning?

Commencing the Diary

Most of the commentary in this and similar future posts wil be found on Arts and Letters Daily (.com), for which I thank that wonderfully generous man, Jordan Beck, M.A. Chicago '09. May he and Rebecca be living a hard-working, blissful life and eating plenty of homemade kugel.

John Harris's Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House is aptly named. A comprehensive but not mind-numbing chronicle of the 42nd presidency, Harris's thesis is that Clinton earned popularity, re-election, and the staving off of being forced out of office during the impeachment trials by a leadership style which wasn't truly bold or visionary...he tempered his vision after two years of clashing with Republicans. Rather, Clinton "survived" by not seizing control of situations but reacting to them, carefully deliberating and seeking a consensus in decisions. With perception and fairness, Harris credits this learning process and its results with Clinton's successes (foreign policy, Kosovo above all, and the balancing of the budget by adopting many different plans following the defeats of his economic stratagem and health care bill) and his failures (the aforementioned early plans, his reaction to Whitewater. his inability to handle Bin Laden). Harris also fills the book with lively biographical portraits from Clinton to the shadowy Dick Morris to the troubled Vincent Foster, and in the end comes out just ahead for the Clinton style...the implication in one of the final chapters is that the greatest chance ever for Middle Eastern piece was lost when neither Barak nor Arafat could stomach the bargain Clinton labored for in 1999. The book even convinced me that Bill and Hillary were meant to be together for life. I can't remember where I read it was the best book of his presidency, but it's a fine one for any politico to peruse.

What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew is another must-have for a certain audience, as Daniel Pool explains everything the lover of Victorian lit might be confused over--money, titles, government structure, servants, etc. There is a subtle exploration of the coming of modern society after 1830, and it also left me with a new perception on Trollope, who for all his realism never stooped as well as Dickens did to documenting the lower classes.

I cooked chicken and biscuits for the family today...an absolutely delicious and much-praised meal. Warmed my heart to finally be able to cook for them, and to stick to my guns when Mom and I differed on a technique I had in concluding the recipe. (Turns out we were both right, but I was distracted enough to make the wrong vegetables.)

Hugo Chavez has something of a point when he accuses the Israelis of getting closer to the status of those who almost slaughtered them. But his reaction to the Tiferet Israel synagogue desecration removes every last shred of credibility he had as a revolutionary. You CANNOT preach democratic socialism while practicing anti-Semitism, anti-homosexuality, and religious intolerance, toadying to corporations, and controlling the media. Say what you will about Berlusconi (another media maven in charge), he has not yet stooped to blaming problems on ethnic and religious minorities.

Lenore Skenazy is called "America's Worst Mom" because she let her nine year-old take the NYC subway alone. I call her an optimist who thinks we are being overly protective by forgetting common sense...and as someone who finally got to leap across a river on stepping stones, I wish I'd had the days when children could roam free until dark having somewhat troublesome adventures and no fear on either side.

AND TO LAY DOWN WITH DREAMS IN MY HEAD...Bjorn Lomborg of Copenhagen has this brilliant point when responding to Paul Krugman's assertion that those against Al Gore's plans for controlling carbon in the name of global warming are as treasonous as McCarthy accused those he baited of being in the 1950's. Their pet project, Waxman-Markey, will cost current taxpayers billions upon billions, with NO RESULTS VISIBLE for ANOTHER CENTURY, and that will be a 0.11 degree Celsius drop!. I'm all for environmental saving and live as green as possible, but for projects like this, we need to keep a free exchange of voices going to find the best solution, and somehow, bickerin over 0.2 degrees in the F which our grandchildren may never even see is not enough to be accused of disloyalty over.

Bleak House: I’ve Got the Feeling…Oh, No, No

The Picture of Apathy

76

"When all was still, at a late hour, poor crazed Miss Flite came weeping to me, and told me she had given the birds their liberty." The closing sentence in the penultimate chapter for Esther. Miss Flite frees the birds only when youth, hope, and beauty have triumphed. Mr. Jarndyce has no need to think of the suit ever again, Richard and Ada are reunited in his death, and Esther has found a husband who loves her and her true place in the world. However, yes, Richard has to die. Miss Flite is not evil or malicious herself—she IS one of Esther's most-loved acquaintances, after all—but her complicity in the murkiness of Chancery requires some necessary side effects to her breaking free of it, and Richard's fate has become bound to hers, and his youth, hope, and beauty are fair game. (Also, after Miss Flite releases the birds into the world, Esther apparently receives Beauty again, going by Allan's last words.)

Krook advertises that he will buy and resell bones and wardrobes. Used clothing is rags, so he sells the same bones and rags which Chancery turns its suitors into. The rest of his shop is rotting junk, like rotting laws. Nabokov draws a tight line between Krook and Chancery. On the surface, Krook is a typical Dickens eccentric like Jingle or Micawber, a rumbling, outsized, ultimately harmless personage who keeps a rambling warehouse and tends to his cat. However…

77

"Krook calls the Lord Chancellor his brother—his brother in rust and dust, in madness and mud." Krook is the symbolic representative of the social ills plaguing British society. He looks like a sick man, white-haired, gnarled, and misshapen. The implication of his warehouse is that he will give people pennies for their goods to ensure he makes a profit by selling what is really junk back to others who probably deserve better but can only really afford his wares…he continues a vicious cycle of social oppression just as Chancery is a vicious cycle of legal (and social as well) oppression. And as mentioned, everyone who comes into his warehouse either dies or goes insane. The real tragedy is that Krook never comes across as any more devilish than sweet Miss Flite. He has found a niche where he is on the top rung of a system and has no interest in halting its perpetuation…just as the Lord Chancellor is in charge of an outmoded, fiendishly complex system that works well enough for him and the lawyers under him for no thought of change to enter his head.

Apathy is one of the great sins in the Dickensian world view, and Bleak House is in part a portrait of a world where few take the time to truly understand others. As maddening as Esther can be, Dickens likes her and elevates her because she has empathy for others. Allan Woodcourt and Mr. Jarndyce fall into the same category, and the Dedlocks are redeemed by empathy. The villains of the book are either unthinking (Krook) or deliberate (Skimpole and the Smallweeds) or just turn out that way by cynical nature (Mr. Tulkinghorn, who does not set out to wreck peoples' lives but does so anyway in the name of legal business…has there ever been anyone since Shakespeare who makes a case for killing all the lawyers as well as Dickens?), but they share one trait: a cool unwillingness to think of others. Even philanthropists like Mrs. Jellyby suffer from apathy, performing their acts out of self-righteousness and not Christian charity. The three plots of the book all turn around apathy. The murder happens because Mr. Tulkinghorn refuses to consider the points of view of all his potential killers, the children, Jo and the Necketts above all, are tortured or die from people making self-interested decisions (Skimpole is the worst), and Chancery is the apex of apathy, a court system…and law is for the protection of the people…where the aggrieved are barely allowed to speak and the most impersonal spokesmen of all do everything. Krook seems to have very few thoughts in his head and never does any act, good or ill, for anyone. A fine brother for the Lord Chancellor!

Richard identifies the bones in Krook's warehouse as a potential assemblage for a Chancery client…the same sort of man he will become in the end thanks to a "temperamental flaw in his nature" which leaves him jobless and ultimately obsessed with Chancery. Let me illustrate this point with a personal story. One of the best and most loving friends I have ever had has a rather notable father whom my Dad really doesn't like. Last year, my friend went out of her way to do something extraordinarily heartfelt for me, and when Dad heard about it, he said he would try not to openly criticize her father in the future, because the way he raised his daughter meant he did one thing right in his life. Similarly, Dickens does not want us to think of Richard as a figure to despise, for he does at least one thing right: he is genuinely good enough to win the love and devotion of Ada, the sweetest figure in the story, who believes in him and ultimately has her beliefs confirmed. But Richard is indeed a collection of bones: he has many qualities, most of them decent, some very good, but the flaw is that he lacks a connecting tissue (like skin) to bind and focus his qualities together. Thus he is restless and impetuous, rejecting medicine, law, and the army in turn, then deciding that the only way to take care of Ada (he always carries empathy for Ada, which keeps him on the right side of Dickens) is to win the suit, separating him from Mr. Jarndyce and putting him on the path to the boneyard.

When Krook is introduced, Esther sees something in his eyes "as if he were on fire within." If this isn't the most clever foreshadowing imaginable for an event we could never have predicted, tell me what is. Krook is on fire—hellfire—for his continual ignorant sin, and the reckoning comes in Chapter 32 when he comes into possession of some of the most destructive artifacts in the novel, the letters between Hawdon and Lady Dedlock, letters to pure for a sullied man to touch or deal with.

Krook and his cat, a tiger of a pet, are "waiting for the birds to leave their cages," for "only death can liberate a Chancery suitor" such as Gridley, Richard, and Tom Jarndyce, whom Krook quotes as comparing the suit to "a slow fire." I think I've said enough about Chancery leading to either liberating death or, worse, liberating insanity, but two points stand out: Krook's deliberate equation of Chancery and burning, and the cat, a beast who scares Esther and the natural predator of the bird. There is always a chance the cat can get into the cages, and Dickens further compares the cat to those other oppressors, the dry, money-minded Smallweeds who help in the persecution of the helpless good.

Bleak House: Miss Flite’s Birds and a Broadway Heroine

Stephen Sondheim...iconoclast, genius, and follower of Dickensian Thought (No wonder he loves English crosswords!)

72

"a soft black drizzle": Dickens uses this phrase to describe the smoke from Chancery's chimneys, the same smoke which Krook will die in. The phrase is even more appropriate for Krook, whose spontaneous combustion occurs indoors in a gentle smokiness noticed only by its burning. The use of such an apt comparison for a place which will be bound to a person for whom, several hundred pages later, the comparison will re-apply is not an accident. It is Dickens at his most all-seeing.

Dickens creatively uses alliteration in Chapter One. Dickens's opening description of the mud uses the cliché of "slipping and sliding," but he follows with "Chizzle, Mizzle, and Drizzle," the law firm,m who are "shirking and sharking." Nabokov points out that shirking and sharking are not just proper descriptive words for how lawyers struggle to gain control of legal situations, but they also can be used to describe how people move through mud, the mud of the streets of London or the metaphorical mud of Chancery.

73

The connection between Richard and Miss Flite. When Richard, Ada, and Esther meet Miss Flite outside Chancery, the first word out of Richard's mouth being exposed to her trademark rambling is "Mad!" It is an apt description obvious to anyone with sense. Richard will by novel's end be living in the same quarters as Miss Flite, call her a friend, his reason lost by the same exposure to Chancery which has affected her.

74

Miss Flite continually uses the words "youth, hope, beauty," which turn out to be the names of the three of her many pet birds. Miss Flite adores birds and seeing them fly, but keeps her multiple pets locked up in cages. Her explanation makes twisted sense…she is IN Chancery but does not understand it, is not OF it, as I mentioned in the previous part of commentary. In an attempt to gain more of an understanding of Chancery, which drove her to madness, she decides to wield the power of a judge (in the same establishment of the similar pretender Krook, the "Lord Chancellor") by keeping the birds in cages until the appropriate time to set them free. Like the suitors in Chancery, it is highly doubtful the birds' time will ever come under such a combination of sense and nonsense. For Miss Flite has sense. In that same first meeting with Esther, Richard, and Ada, she lists youth, hope, and beauty in the same breath as Chancery and Conversation Kenge, the garrulous attorney who brings the heroine and her allies into the business. Her last words are "Ha! Pray accept my blessing." Miss Flite knows that youth, hope, and beauty stand very little chance of winning over a system which cares for nothing but intricate logistics based in arcane knowledge (the opposite of youth). She identifies with this by practicing similar oppression, holding the birds with virtuous names in cages. Also, that keen natural observer Nabokov knows the symbolism behind the three species of birds she keeps: larks represent youth, linnets hope, and goldfinches beauty.

(Almost 130 years later in 1979, Stephen Sondheim used this same imagery in his masterpiece Sweeney Todd. Johanna's solo, sung in the room Judge Turpin keeps her locked in and from which Anthony first falls in love with her, is "Green Finch and Linnet Bird." Hope and beauty, the two qualities she and Anthony possess which Todd, Turpin, Mrs. Lovett, and the others lack…and note the GREEN finch. Green for jealousy, the jealousy which drives Turpin to take control of Johanna and her mother and send Benjamin Barker to the fate which sparks the murders. Sondheim and Dickens know how much sadness can be mixed with the best qualities in life.)

Caddy, another captive child, has a meeting with Prince in Miss Flite's room. A foreshadowing of the hopeful-tragic ending of Bleak House. Caddy and Prince, who is in his own way locked into a mode of living, have a great pre-wedding tryst in the Miss Flite's room precisely because of its oppressive qualities, but there they find a measure of freedom and strength. An oblique hint that the birds will one day be free.

Krook lists the names of Miss Flite's birds for Esther, Ada, Richard, and Mr. Jarndyce but leaves out "Beauty," and beauty will be the one thing Esther loses in the book. And of course, Esther's loss is solely due to her unselfish nature at odds with Krook's money-grubbing and Chancery. "Beauty" may slip Krook's mind because he has no notion of what the word really means, spending all of his time with oppressed suitors and unhappy and/or crazy people. There are twenty-six birds altogether (An alphabet of negativity…a comprehension?) and Krook names twenty-five. His audience possesses twenty-three of the names when we think about it before the novel is over, the exceptions being "Wigs" and "Rags," unless we can say for sure Jarndyce wears a wig (as was custom, especially in the courts) and at one point Esther may have rags while tending to Jo and then nursing herself.

75

"He never thought…what a fatal link was riveting between his fresh youth and her faded age; between his free hopes and her caged birds, and her hungry garret, and her wandering mind." Leaving out a few typical histrionics, Esther's sad observation of the link between Richard and Miss Flite is accurate. Youth, hope, and beauty are subsumed to her and the powers of Chancery. Richard sees Miss Flite every day, does good deeds for her, and takes pity on her, but the good feeling he uses in describing this to Esther implies that he sees her as anyone would see a figure of sympathy…sympathy in the brutality of Chancery. I personally admire how Dickens uses the word "hungry." Krook's warehouse is indeed a consuming monstrosity, eating youth, hope, and beauty and sewing death (Captain Hawdon and Krook himself), depression (Mr. Gridley), and insanity. And Miss Flite takes a propriety interest in all who pass by her. Not Krook, her landlord, but certainly with Richard and Gridley, whom she grief-strickenly cries out died without her blessing.