Unlike with many novels, I have a strong suspicion that the characters in Jude the Obscure have a life outside of their author's conception and intention. Although Jude is a novel of ideas, the major characters rarely nor consistently illustrate an idea. Both Sue and Jude are egotistical creatures beholden to ideas. Both wish to rewrite the givens of their circumstances.
In the introduction, Hardy describes the novel as "an endeavour to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions, the question of their consistency or their discordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness, being regarded as not of the first moment (Penguin Jude, Taylor, p.3-4). Within the novel,shortly after Jude and Sue break off an engagement to be married yet remain living together, the narrator comments,"The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given"(288). Both of these comments suggest that Hardy's intent in writing Jude is not polemical. What Hardy means by impressions is unclear, but Jude is an exploration of the extent to which men and women can step outside the social and define their lives for themselves, according to their own readings of their bents and tastes. Hardy's fiction is set in motion to provide answers, not illustrate them. The characters are not parts of an allegory but instead sources surprise and consistency amidst inconsistency.
There is a disingenuous quality to Hardy's narrator defensively reminding the reader that he is not required to comment on the issues illustrated by the novel. Hardy, or at least the narrative voice, clearly has problems with marriage as both concept and practice. Yet, with a grudging respect for civilization and tradition, he seems unable to own his position.
Although born without connections or resources of any kind, in a rural area, Jude initially believes he can be an Oxford-educated ecclesiastic. Midcourse in his life and the novel, he believes he can become a saintly, altruistic curate. In both cases, he believes he can become learned and holy.
Sue is more complicated and, as with other Hardy women, there seems a great deal more distance between her and the narrator. The narrator insight into Sue is not nearly as clear as his insight into Jude. With Jude, the writing of his character seems to come from experience, from the writer having felt as Jude. Sue seems much more a journalistic creation, a product of a scientific observation born of an intense curiosity. She's exquisitely rendered; yet we never feel inside her head. As with other Hardy novels and their heroines, I wonder how a woman novelist past or present might write the story-over, with a narrator whose vision of the story is more clearly in line with Sue's perspective and experience.
The obliquities in Sue's character certainly lend her mystery. She acts according to impulses that are hard to characterize and define. She remains a mystery not only to Jude and the reader but to herself. She presents a mix of consistency and inconsistency in her character that make her life-like. All of her actions are the product of both noble and base impulses and desires. She is both flawed and too good for this world.
She is even a bit dishonest on the matter she feels about most strongly, the institution of marriage. She presents herself as opposed to it, seeing it as a form of legal, societal coercion that necessarily sullies a true love. Yet, Sue opposition is something more than simply born of ideals. She draws men to her, only to push them away when they become attached to her. Ultimately, she would seem to oppose not only marriage, but monogamous commitment of any kind. In part, her resistance here derives from noble impulses. Commitment limits her ability to love as broadly as she wishes. She derives a psychological satisfaction in being loved by many and a type of power in loving many.
However, her long-time resistance to permanent, committed, sexual relation with both Jude and Phillotson gives her a much more basic power. It allows her to keep two men focused on her and derive the benefits both confer. Phillotson provides stability and economic/social wherewithal. Jude provides romance. Her relation with him allows her to pursue a rich imaginative life as a revolutionary, a tragic lover, a rebel.Sue is a tragic figure: by virtue of her gender and time, she is denied the range of opportunities and powers available to men. With few resources, she avails herself of the one source of power that remains, her sexuality.
Seeking to keep two men within her orbit on a long-term basis, Sue resorts to varied strategems. Early on, when Jude suspects that she and Phillotson have a relationship going, she turns evasive and admits "I know you'll be angry if I tell you everything, and that's why I don't want to!"(134). Yet, when Jude accedes to her wish to remain silent, and in effect announces (however dishonestly) his willingness to relinquish her, Sue shifts tactics and tells of her engagement. Jude still withholds any expression of jealousy or concern. Finally, she threatens him with what they honestly both most fear; a cessation of relation outside of a formal business one. She tells him that they can no longer see each other. This does the trick. Jude emphatically replies, "O yes, we will....your being engaged can make no difference to me whatever"(134).
Avoiding commitment, limiting relation, confers a power on Sue. Yet, tragic as she comes across, she also appears manipulative and almost vengefully cruel. Shortly after her first engagement to Phillotson, she goes off to Melchester and the Teacher's School. Once there, she actively recruits Jude, getting him to move to Melchester, despite the fact that, although she later protests otherwise, she clearly knows Jude has feeling for her. The scenes just previous to her marriage ceremony with Phillotson are particularly sadistic.
An alternative, and possibly complementary, reading of these scenes can be made with Sue as romantic revolutionary, or at least as a sensation-starved want-to-be. Throughout the book, she taunts Jude with Phillotson,as if she is trying to get Jude to express his love in a full, dramatic and death-defying manner that is in keeping with her romantic, Shelleyean notions of love. At points, she fashions herself and is depicted as a tutor, finding a man who she is able to shape into a nobler version of man. On the night they spend debating, she promises Jude that she "won't disturb your convictions.....But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I-shall I confess it?-thought that man might be you." She here pitches her search as a contest; and, her project seems to partake of a second creation.
If the end of their pedagogical relation is radical, the roles in it are conventional, conforming with traditional Victorian gender norms. Sue is presented and seen as an airy, disembodied, rational creature, and as such virtuous. With a good measure of exasperation, Jude tells Sue that she is such a phantasmal, bodiless creature, one who-if you'll allow me to say it-has so little animal passion in you, that you can act upon reason in the matter, when we poor unfortunate wretches of grosser substance can't'"(260). Jude is earthly, but in her presence and under her tutelage, he is bound to shed his earthiness and attain to her more spiritual condition.
Jude is a disciple of Sue. In their master/disciple relation, when he fails her attempts at elevation, he feels shame. Shortly after his one night stand with Arabella, as a fallen disciple in the presence of his master, Jude sees Sue as the "sweetest and most disinterested comrade that he had ever had, living largely in vivid imaginings, so ethereal a creature that her spirit could be seen trembling through her limbs," and correspondingly "felt heartily ashamed of his earthliness in spending the hours he had spent in Arabella's company"(187). Jude decides not to tell Sue, rationalizing "there was something rude and immoral in thrusting these recent facts of his life upon the mind of one who, to him, was so uncarnate as to seem at times impossible as a human wife to any average man"(187).
Shortly after eloping to Aldbrickham, Jude accepts that the two will live on a platonic footing. In disciple fashion, Jude tells Sue he is happy just to be near her, confessing that "this is more than this earthly wretch called me deserves-you spirit, you disembodied creature, you dear, sweet tantalizing phantom...forgive me for being gross, as you call it!(243).
Sue is seen and represented in the novel as spiritual, or more precisely, disembodied, and as such, a creature of a higher plane. Indeed, according to the governing assumptions of their relationship, proximity to her aerial being lifts his earthly being,but her ethereal being potentially is corrupted by a too close contact with the earthly Jude, or with the earthliness, the body, of any potential love. On their way to Aldbrickham, resisting Jude's entreaties for more physical contact and a more concise definition in their relationship, Sue lectures Jude, "My liking for you is not as some women's perhaps. But it is a delight in being with you, of a supremely delicate kind, and I don't want to go further and risk it by-an attempt to intensify it"(240). A proper and necessary distance to her elevated beauty is suggested later on in the novel, after the distance has been broached, when Sue, Jude and Little Time visit the fair. At the fair, acting in Jude's fashion to her, Sue sniffs an assortment of flowers, and says, "I should like to push my face quite into them-the dears!...But I suppose it is against the rules to touch them'"(297). Of course, it isn't a matter of rules; touching flowers, handling them too much, will kill them.
Suggestion is repeatedly if quietly made that Sue might simply be frigid, or homosexual. Sue herself most often suggest this. Speaking of her marriage to Jude, Sue asks, "Wouldn't the woman for example be very bad natured if she didn't like to live with her husband....merely because she had a personal feeling against it-a physical objection-a fastidiousness, or whatever it might be called..."(210). There is the sad almost comic scene where Sue runs to the second-story window of her bedroom and hops out when Phillotson accidentally enters her bed.
Sue ultimately does establish a sexual relationship with Jude suggesting that her deep aversion may not be to sex itself but to sex with Phillotson. Yet, this is never made entirely clear. The reader is offered little to no insight as to how or why Sue ultimately allows her relation with Jude to proceed to the sexual. In 'sleeping' with Jude, Sue would seem to have surrendered a position that defined her to us and to herself, and yet Hardy presents this surrender as an accomplished fact.
It occurs rather quietly, between the lines, shortly after Arabella pays a visit to their home in Aldbrickham. To prevent Jude from going to see the distraught Arabella who has come seeking his aid, Sue agrees to marry Jude, announcing "If I must, I must!" She then runs across the room, embraces him, and declares "'I am not a cold-natured, sexless creature, am I, for keeping you at a distance? I am sure you don't think so! Wait and see! I do belong to you, don't I? I give in!'" The scene ends emblematically: "[Jude] kissed her on one side, and on the other, and in the middle, and rebolted the front door"(267).
Sexual imagery opens the next passage: "In the moring it was wet"(267). The two are still physical,flirtatious (268). Arabella apparently notices a difference in Sue that a night has brought. She claims Jude wasn't Sue's the day before but now agrees with Sue's assessment to the contrary, mockingly praising Sue: "'You've been quick about it'"(269). Finally, Sue all but declares the consummation of their relationship, telling Jude she is "easier in my mind now than I was" since the supposed cause of her divorce with Richard, sexual infidelity, has now occurred.
Sue insists on drama, even at the risk in the end of punishing herself. She fashions herself a heroine, as larger than life, as the lead in a story. Initially, she is the freedom fighter and seeker. After the loss of her children, she reverses her former opinions, and fashions herself as a Promethean figure, a contender with Gods who has lost and is being punished. At all points in the novel, she refuses to see her life as less than a dramatic story invested with meaning.
Sue can be seen as self-aggrandizing. Seeking meaning and romance, Sue aligns her life with the persons and drama of stories. On their way to Aldbrickham, Sue informs Jude that their relation is not to be conventional; free of their marriages, she is not necessarily interested in setting out on an ordinary relation with Jude. After a spat and Jude's agreeing to a relation on Sue's terms, she makes a request: "'Say those pretty lines, then, from Shelley's "Epipsychidion' as if they meant me!'" Jude at first demures, telling her that he know "'hardly any poetry." This doesn't stop Sue, who recites herself the lines she wanted Jude to offer her, and then claims "'O it is too flattering, so I won't go on! But, say it's me!-say it's me!'" Again acquiescing, Jude perfunctorily reassures her "It is[text's italics] you, dear; exactly like you!'"(245). At which point, she forgives Jude his critical comments made in frustration at her continued refusal to truly elope with him.
Her text changes with her reverse in fortune. In histrionic fashion, she tells Jude "'whoever or whatever our foe may be, I am cowed into submission. I have no more fighting strength left; no more enterprize. I am beaten, beaten!'" Seeing it as apropos of her own situation, she quotes Paul: "'"We are made a spectacle unto the world and to angels, and to men!"'"(342). Sue still sees herself on a large stage, engaged in a singular combat. Her opponent intends her as a lesson to the world!
Yet, it is easy to be critical and to only see the egotism. Jude shares a great deal of Sue's penchant for drama and self-aggrandizement. His Churchminster dream is a fantasy and it originates with some less than idealistic impulses. He seeks status, class, and titles. He too is capable of self-aggrandizement, as when after calculating his path to a salary of 5,000 pounds a year and a D.D., he aligns himself with Christ and declares, "'Yes, Christminster shall be my Alma Mater; and I'll be her beloved son, in whom she shall be well pleased'"(38).
Yet, in his portrayal of Jude, Hardy clearly traces out noble lines. In Jude's affecting summary speech to the crowd on Remembrance day at Christminster, he worries that he may have been "a paltry victim to the spirit of mental and social restlessness, that makes so many unhappy in these days'"(327). Yet, Jude reveals the noble and ultimate impulse of his Churchminster dream in outlining his failure to achieve it. It hasn't simply been about money or status. He tells the crowd, "And what I appear, a sick and poor man, is not the worse of me. I am in a chaos of principles-groping in the dark-acting by instinct and not after example'"(327).
Ultimately, Jude's original impulse to Churchminster never changes, though he fails it and himself. Clearly, he needed a mentor, a true teacher, somebody who would have been able to see him through his adolescence.
I have a deep affinity for Jude and what moves him despite his failure. Hardy describes the boy Jude: "It had been the yearning of his heart to find something to anchor on, to cling to-for some place which he could call admirable...a spot in which...he could set himself to some mighty undertaking"(25).
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Thursday, May 21, 2009
The Glister by John Burnside
I've liked the handful of poems I've read by the Scottish Writer John Burnside. Burnside's poems often convincingly evoke nature as a portal to, a sign of, a supernatural presence. I recall them having moody, dream-like settings, lush and exalted diction, and wonderfully insistent rhythms. Yet for all their atmospherics, Burnside's poems still work to get an idea across.
Burnside's latest novel, The Glister, shares many of these aspects with his poetry. However, unlike the Burnside poems I've read, this book has a desolate and despairing tone that I never encountered in his poetry.. This is a dreary tale set in a dreary, name-less place. It is rightfully name-less place, a place nobody cares for and in which the citizens live in a kind of fearfully complete isolation from each other. Being buried alive is a central obsession of one of the novel's characters and serves as a nicely descriptive metaphor for the lives of the folks living in this town; they are trapped within themselves, their natures.
The town's parts bear a name. Their is the part of town where the wealthy live, outertown; the bulk and inner portion, innertown; their is the headland upon which sits a vast, derelict chemical plant that has poisoned the city and its surroundings. Nobody knows for certain how or with what the plant poisoned the city, but
Yet a worse malady afflicts this name-less town. Several years prior to the story's start, an adolescent boy goes missing. Constable John Morrison finds him murdered in the woods, in what looks like a ritualistic way. However, Morrison's ordered to keep the murder quiet by the town's bigwig who didn't want any undue attention from the outside world out of fear that outside eyes might detect his misappropriation of public funds dedicated to cleaning up the site of the chemical plant and rejuvenating the city. So, the weak Morrison, owing his job to this bigwig, keeps mum and slowly lets his guilt and well-earned self-hatred eat away at him.
Meanwhile, every year or so, another boy goes missing. Unable to locate any bodies, The police tell the public that the boys must have simply decided to pick up and seek greener pastures. This lame explanation actually seems to suffice for the town. The young boys in the town are more than a little suspicious and angry. Whenever a new boy goes missing, they engage in random acts of petty vandalism: "[wandering] around the town or the wastelands, stealing anything that looks valuable and breaking everything else. It is a mark of the authorities' shame that, no matter what we do, there are no reprecussions. They are guilty, because they know they have failed us"(116-117).
So says the preternaturally wise and poetic Leonard Wilson, the central voice of this novel. Aspects of Leonard are a bit implausible. He is presented as a juvenile delinquent, an adolescent product of the innertown slums. Yet, when we're given the privilege of his thoughts, we encounter an old, wise and poetic soul prone to philosophize in an existentialist vein. Early on in his narrative, Leonard argues, "if you want to stay alive, you have to love something"(51). Leonard once loved his friend Liam Nugent, one of the missing boys. He loved his father, till his father fell into some kind of physical/psychological/spiritual funk rendering him silent. Although he has at one point two girlfriends, he doesn't seem to achieve a loving bond with either. When it comes to finding something to love, Leonard is seeking bigger game.
A searching sort, Leonard reads voraciously. He also develops a mentor type of relationship with the Moth Man, a mysterious and mystical person who visits the headland every couple of months, ostensibly to catch moths. It is Leonard's "impression that he hasn't got a proper home, [but]...just seems to drive from place to place in his van, camping in fields and setting up his nets, his only companions the moths he catches then releases or curious kids like me that he attracts along the way"(107).
The Moth Man also comes to finish what his father started. His father was an engineer who helped build the chemical plant and also assisted when it was 'decommissioned.' Leonard also is led to believe that the Moth Man's father was working on a machine, deep in the unexplored, locked-away recess of the plant, that has abilities to radically transform ... It's a mystery as to what exactly this machine is capable of, but the Moth Man's here to finish it and make it available.
The Moth Man is a father figure to Leonard who is in search of human connection. He calls him by his full name, asks after his welfare, introduces him to nature. He also makes Leonard's more aware of his alienation. With the help of a mysterious, natural tea, Leonard experiences moments of absolute connection, not to those around him, but to the entire universe. Under the influence of this tea, Leonard
Of course, the downside to this moment of transcendence is the first non-transcendent moment after, when Leonard is again forced to confront his limited and isolated self.
It is this scared, little, alone self that seeks out a gang of delinquents led by Jimmy Van Doren. The wise and sweet Leonard is a little too wise and sweet to ever fall entirely into the bond uniting this group of disaffected numbskulls. Still, when Jimmy's cousin goes missing, Leonard goes along when the group decides a local outcast, Andrew Rivers, is responsible for the abductions and seeks revenge.
River's end is gruesome. However, he's the most affecting character in the book, albeit his moment is limited. Rivers is not the sicko the kids take him for. Instead, he's a bit of a sad-sack. Shy and alienated, he lived as his beloved father's caretaker for many, many years. Now that his father has passed, he's lost all human connection to the world. Painfully shy but in search of connection, he desperately seeks to start a communication with a celebrity mass-murderer.
It is Rivers who most clearly articulates the thematic thrust of the novel: in a world without community, our selves grow too large and monstrous to bear, to the point where death comes to seem a viable relief. River's believes "we tire of the self, of the shape of it, and its slightly exaggerated colors; most of all, we tire of its constant noise and just long for a little quiet"(146). Although he's too meek to seek it, Rivers cooperates quite nicely when death comes for him.
Unfortunately, while "The Glister" intrigues as a novel, it fails as a mystery. Although one gathers that Burnside wishes to not say for certain, it's pretty hard not to conclude that the Moth Man is the child abductor/killer. Burnside doesn't quit trying to throw out decoys in the hopes of distracting the reader, but to little effect. In the end, he never really creates an effective whodunit. Worse, the novel fails to adequately address the more important question: why?
Our wise-beyond-his-years narrator is conflicted when it comes to the general possibility and precise utility or benefit of explanation. Speaking of the town's lost boys, he claims, "It's unforgivable not to know where they are, even if it's impossible to know"(223). Yet, he pooh-poohs explanation as well; speaking of the Moth Man, Leonard says "He didn't sit me down and run through the plot....He didn't explain the mystery because he was the mystery"(220). I find all of this frustrating and murky.
Of course, Leonard believes he has discovered something more about the Moth Man. He comes to suspect he is a supernatural being, in part the angel of death sent down to punish, in part a summoner/gatekeeper who absolves/punishes and delivers his charges to a higher plane. Of course, Leonard is presenting this conception after what appears to be his death at the hands of the Moth Man, and Leonard's story/conception seems a creation/explanation designed to block the horror of his end.
His conception/story seems every bit as facile as the town's official explanation for all the preceding disappearances. Of course, it might be Burnside who is re-imagining this child-killer as the angel of death. One can only hope not. Such a misconception is perhaps excusable in a child and something one is willing to grant a victim. Adults should know better than this. Leonard eloquently argues for proper cognizance. He comes to condemn his town for "the sin of omission, the sin of averting our gaze and not seeing what was going on right in front of our eyes. The sin of not wanting to know; the sin of knowing everything and not doing anything about it. The sin of knowing things on paper but refusing to know them in our heart"(223).
Burnside's latest novel, The Glister, shares many of these aspects with his poetry. However, unlike the Burnside poems I've read, this book has a desolate and despairing tone that I never encountered in his poetry.. This is a dreary tale set in a dreary, name-less place. It is rightfully name-less place, a place nobody cares for and in which the citizens live in a kind of fearfully complete isolation from each other. Being buried alive is a central obsession of one of the novel's characters and serves as a nicely descriptive metaphor for the lives of the folks living in this town; they are trapped within themselves, their natures.
The town's parts bear a name. Their is the part of town where the wealthy live, outertown; the bulk and inner portion, innertown; their is the headland upon which sits a vast, derelict chemical plant that has poisoned the city and its surroundings. Nobody knows for certain how or with what the plant poisoned the city, but
"for as long as the plant existed, the people themselves had not been right. Suddenly, there were unexplained clusters of rare cancers. Children contracted terrible diseases, or they developed mysterious behavioral problems. There was more than the usual share of exotic or untreateable illnesses, a sudden and huge increase in depression, a blossoming of what, in the old days, would have been called madness"(7).
Yet a worse malady afflicts this name-less town. Several years prior to the story's start, an adolescent boy goes missing. Constable John Morrison finds him murdered in the woods, in what looks like a ritualistic way. However, Morrison's ordered to keep the murder quiet by the town's bigwig who didn't want any undue attention from the outside world out of fear that outside eyes might detect his misappropriation of public funds dedicated to cleaning up the site of the chemical plant and rejuvenating the city. So, the weak Morrison, owing his job to this bigwig, keeps mum and slowly lets his guilt and well-earned self-hatred eat away at him.
Meanwhile, every year or so, another boy goes missing. Unable to locate any bodies, The police tell the public that the boys must have simply decided to pick up and seek greener pastures. This lame explanation actually seems to suffice for the town. The young boys in the town are more than a little suspicious and angry. Whenever a new boy goes missing, they engage in random acts of petty vandalism: "[wandering] around the town or the wastelands, stealing anything that looks valuable and breaking everything else. It is a mark of the authorities' shame that, no matter what we do, there are no reprecussions. They are guilty, because they know they have failed us"(116-117).
So says the preternaturally wise and poetic Leonard Wilson, the central voice of this novel. Aspects of Leonard are a bit implausible. He is presented as a juvenile delinquent, an adolescent product of the innertown slums. Yet, when we're given the privilege of his thoughts, we encounter an old, wise and poetic soul prone to philosophize in an existentialist vein. Early on in his narrative, Leonard argues, "if you want to stay alive, you have to love something"(51). Leonard once loved his friend Liam Nugent, one of the missing boys. He loved his father, till his father fell into some kind of physical/psychological/spiritual funk rendering him silent. Although he has at one point two girlfriends, he doesn't seem to achieve a loving bond with either. When it comes to finding something to love, Leonard is seeking bigger game.
A searching sort, Leonard reads voraciously. He also develops a mentor type of relationship with the Moth Man, a mysterious and mystical person who visits the headland every couple of months, ostensibly to catch moths. It is Leonard's "impression that he hasn't got a proper home, [but]...just seems to drive from place to place in his van, camping in fields and setting up his nets, his only companions the moths he catches then releases or curious kids like me that he attracts along the way"(107).
The Moth Man also comes to finish what his father started. His father was an engineer who helped build the chemical plant and also assisted when it was 'decommissioned.' Leonard also is led to believe that the Moth Man's father was working on a machine, deep in the unexplored, locked-away recess of the plant, that has abilities to radically transform ... It's a mystery as to what exactly this machine is capable of, but the Moth Man's here to finish it and make it available.
The Moth Man is a father figure to Leonard who is in search of human connection. He calls him by his full name, asks after his welfare, introduces him to nature. He also makes Leonard's more aware of his alienation. With the help of a mysterious, natural tea, Leonard experiences moments of absolute connection, not to those around him, but to the entire universe. Under the influence of this tea, Leonard
"can see everything around me in perfect, almost dizzying detail, but I can also feel how one thing is connected to the next...or not connected, so much, but all one thing. Everything's one thing. It's not a matter of connections, it's an indivisibility.....It's all continuous and I'm alive with everything that lives."(113)
Of course, the downside to this moment of transcendence is the first non-transcendent moment after, when Leonard is again forced to confront his limited and isolated self.
It is this scared, little, alone self that seeks out a gang of delinquents led by Jimmy Van Doren. The wise and sweet Leonard is a little too wise and sweet to ever fall entirely into the bond uniting this group of disaffected numbskulls. Still, when Jimmy's cousin goes missing, Leonard goes along when the group decides a local outcast, Andrew Rivers, is responsible for the abductions and seeks revenge.
River's end is gruesome. However, he's the most affecting character in the book, albeit his moment is limited. Rivers is not the sicko the kids take him for. Instead, he's a bit of a sad-sack. Shy and alienated, he lived as his beloved father's caretaker for many, many years. Now that his father has passed, he's lost all human connection to the world. Painfully shy but in search of connection, he desperately seeks to start a communication with a celebrity mass-murderer.
It is Rivers who most clearly articulates the thematic thrust of the novel: in a world without community, our selves grow too large and monstrous to bear, to the point where death comes to seem a viable relief. River's believes "we tire of the self, of the shape of it, and its slightly exaggerated colors; most of all, we tire of its constant noise and just long for a little quiet"(146). Although he's too meek to seek it, Rivers cooperates quite nicely when death comes for him.
Unfortunately, while "The Glister" intrigues as a novel, it fails as a mystery. Although one gathers that Burnside wishes to not say for certain, it's pretty hard not to conclude that the Moth Man is the child abductor/killer. Burnside doesn't quit trying to throw out decoys in the hopes of distracting the reader, but to little effect. In the end, he never really creates an effective whodunit. Worse, the novel fails to adequately address the more important question: why?
Our wise-beyond-his-years narrator is conflicted when it comes to the general possibility and precise utility or benefit of explanation. Speaking of the town's lost boys, he claims, "It's unforgivable not to know where they are, even if it's impossible to know"(223). Yet, he pooh-poohs explanation as well; speaking of the Moth Man, Leonard says "He didn't sit me down and run through the plot....He didn't explain the mystery because he was the mystery"(220). I find all of this frustrating and murky.
Of course, Leonard believes he has discovered something more about the Moth Man. He comes to suspect he is a supernatural being, in part the angel of death sent down to punish, in part a summoner/gatekeeper who absolves/punishes and delivers his charges to a higher plane. Of course, Leonard is presenting this conception after what appears to be his death at the hands of the Moth Man, and Leonard's story/conception seems a creation/explanation designed to block the horror of his end.
His conception/story seems every bit as facile as the town's official explanation for all the preceding disappearances. Of course, it might be Burnside who is re-imagining this child-killer as the angel of death. One can only hope not. Such a misconception is perhaps excusable in a child and something one is willing to grant a victim. Adults should know better than this. Leonard eloquently argues for proper cognizance. He comes to condemn his town for "the sin of omission, the sin of averting our gaze and not seeing what was going on right in front of our eyes. The sin of not wanting to know; the sin of knowing everything and not doing anything about it. The sin of knowing things on paper but refusing to know them in our heart"(223).
Monday, May 4, 2009
Laura Rider's Masterpiece by Jane Hamilton
It's impossible to imagine Jane Austen writing in and of our day. Yet, Jane Hamilton comes close in her new novel, "Laura Rider's Masterpiece." She brings an Austen-like wit and perception to Austen's interest: manners, love and romance.
The surface details of Hamilton's story are clearly of day. "Laura Rider's Masterpiece" is the story of a threesome that is initiated and conducted in part through email. It is in part an e-pistolary novel? The chief instigator and architect of the romance is Laura. Officially, she and her goofball/hippy husband Charley run a successful nursery/garden in a small-town between Madison and Milwaukee. In truth, domineering Laura is the brains and drive that have made it a success. And, everyone knows it, including Charley. On the surface, she stills loves handsome and lovable Charley, but...she's grown tired of his insatiable sexual appetite and the two sleep in separate rooms. Still, she loves him, she's convinced.
Laura's restless. Something's missing. Although she's never really written, or even really read a whole lot, she keeps fantasizing herself as a writer, an artist, a thinker. The sort of person who might be taken seriously by her idol, public radio talk show host Jenna Faroli (who bears more a passing resemblance to Wisconsin Public Radio host Jean Feraca). Faroli is a pretentious, misanthropic know-it-all, who hides her huge ego, just barely, behind a facade of culture, tolerance and down-to-earthiness. Laura's bought into her personae. She views her as the epitome of sophistication, culture and thought. For Laura, Jenna is a feminine ideal to which she would aspire.
In an effort to get next to her idol/crush Jenna, Laura slowly and subtly maneuvers circumstance so that the charming and handsome Charley is thrown into Jenna's path. She basically arranges an affair between Jenna and Charley. At first, this simply means sitting in on and often ghosting an email exchange the two start up. The pretentious Faroli terms this "an epistolary relationship"(66).
In the end, the most remarkable thing about Charley and Jenna falling in love is Charley and Jenna falling in love. They are not a likely couple. Reversing the gender of Austen's poles, Faroli is the queen of sense. Faroli has never fallen in love, or even experienced too many rich emotions outside of those mediated by art. As to passion and lust, Faroli harbors an unconscious aversion. She's a bit above such vulgar, human foibles. She fashions herself, "Jenna Faroli of the sexy mind...if the multitudes wanted to fuck her, it was her brain they wanted to penetrate, the luscious cranial fruit on those broad shoulders of hers-what hidden folds, so soft, so moist, so yielding. She considered that big fruit, and then the rest of her, the drag of her body, to be the ultimate product of the feminist revolution"(73). Of course, for the sake of appearances, she would claim there's more to her than her mind,that she was whole. But, deep down she doubts it.
In stark contrast, Charley is the simple man of feeling, prone to wonder and emotion, and keenly interested in sex. He thinks of it as a "wordless miracle, just as music was, a dissolving happiness into the cosmos...it was essential, then, to keep singing, to keep making love, to keep creating the songs note by note as the sound, note by note, vanished"(29). In Hamilton's telling of romance, she makes sensibility male and explicitly erotic.
Charley is simple to the point of simplistic. He apparently got through high school due to the kindness of teachers. He is extraordinarily childlike, creepily so. While Laura eats a salad and chicken patty, Charly dines on two corn dogs, a "bowl of tater tots, baby carrots, and a glass of milk(49)" and tosses "his Tater Tots, one by one, into the air,...seeing if he could land them in his mouth"(50-51).
Without ever being fully conscious of it, Laura initiates a relationship between Charley and Jenna. Laura conceives of coupling them as a project, an experiment. Her project/experiment is a study from which she hopes to gain insight into romance (primarily into what Jenna, a woman she admires, thinks of men and romance) so that she might write a romance.
Yet, Laura is also interested in getting close to Jenna via Charley. Laura's Jenna idolatry partakes of a crush, a female version of Eve Kosofsky's homosocial continuum of desire. In this case, that desire is expressed and mediated through a man who seems a blank slate on which they consciously and unconsciously to each other. Charlie brings more to the table than his male anatomy; yet, on some level, both women are interested in him for what he can tell them about the other.
Laura expresses/protests uncertainty as to her intentions in setting up the relationship. In large measure though, she sees Charlie, especially as he expresses himself via emails she authors, as an expression of herself which she offers in hopes of gaining Jenna's love. She gets a charge out of Jenna paying attention to Charley, to her bothering to reply to the emails she authors/co-authors in his name, and "had to remind herself that she was not Laura who was writing, she was Charlie"(103). Jenna's wanting "to communicate with Laura/Charlie was definitely a boost to Laura's self-esteem"(108). In Laura's mind, "Jenna was falling in love with the writer, Charlie, who was actually, in large measure, herself"(130).
By her lights, Laura instigates and observes the relationship in hopes of writing a romance featuring and appealing to a modern, powerful, every-woman such as Jenna, such as herself. She clearly views Jenna as a modern, every-woman: evolved, cultured, confident, self-possessed. Her writing project is intended to test the possibility and potential for such a romance.
What sort of role remains or is born for the modern man in her conception of romance.
In Laura's telling, "in traditional romance, the heroine was supposed to be socially, intellectually, and financially inferior to the hero, so that in all areas the love was lifting her up. If Jenna fell for Charlie, it wasn't going to have anything to do with a wish to improve her [Jenna's] status, and it might not be about self-improvement, or self-knowledge"(107). Laura tells herself the "tables could very well be turned in her romance, the woman, by her love, raising up the man to his fullest potential"(109). Laura has clearly fallen out of love with Charlie.
Indeed, Laura's fallen out of love with love. She looks on love, romance and sex with disdain, as a foible and a foolishness, and a vulnerability she hopes she's outgrown. However, another part wonders if one can sensibly fall in love, fall in love but keep a modicum of dignity, self-respect and sanity? Or, as she puts it to Jenna, "I've been trying...to study what....an ideal woman..actually wants in a man, what kind of hero she needs when she's already sort of perfect"(176).Can a modern woman fall in love and be bettered by the experience? In setting up Charlie with her idol of feminine sense, Jenna, Laura seeks the answer to all these questions.
She is bitterly disappointed by Jenna's answer, even if she never is able to admit it to herself. Jenna in love proves to be like most people in love; foolish, sentimental and vulnerable. In reading over their email exchanges, "what struck Laura most was the banality of the exchanges....they were saying things to each other that had been said by lovers through the ages, and yet they seemed to think they were inventing the concepts"(144). Yet, she can't her writing, her research is contingent upon their being a better answer, a sensible romance. So, although Jenna and Charley end up "exposed as...perverted, shallow, obsessed sex-maniacs," Laura the writer believes that they can still get through this stage and via their romance "reclaim their best selves"(196).
Laura is more than simply disappointed that Jenna has failed to present a convincing romantic pathway for the modern woman. Deep down, she is downright pissed-off and seeks revenge. While she would never own her anger, nor the satisfaction deriving from it, it is there. One could argue that it's prompted by more than Jenna's failure to fall sensibly in love with Charlie and reveal his charms to Laura. Although never explicitly stated, Laura clearly harbors a long-standing grudge against her idol, and it's not hard to see why she might wish to take down the arrogant and contemptuous Jenna.
Throughout the novel, Laura acts with an incredible blindness. She is driven by a truly destructive hatred and resentment of her ostensible idol and yet is oblivious to this. Hamilton skillfully brings the reader into Laura's experience on this front. When she blows at the end, it surprises at first, but makes perfect sense upon reflection. As readers, we detect the wrath she harbors without it's ever actually registering in our conscious thoughts.
Despite it's sensational story, Hamilton's book has conservative strains. Laura treads close to a traditional female stereotype: the woman who sees anger as unfeminine, denies it in herself, and in so doing feeds it till it grows into a rage that will be expressed. There is also an implicit conservative nod to traditional values in Hamilton's depicting both women as failed mothers.
The surface details of Hamilton's story are clearly of day. "Laura Rider's Masterpiece" is the story of a threesome that is initiated and conducted in part through email. It is in part an e-pistolary novel? The chief instigator and architect of the romance is Laura. Officially, she and her goofball/hippy husband Charley run a successful nursery/garden in a small-town between Madison and Milwaukee. In truth, domineering Laura is the brains and drive that have made it a success. And, everyone knows it, including Charley. On the surface, she stills loves handsome and lovable Charley, but...she's grown tired of his insatiable sexual appetite and the two sleep in separate rooms. Still, she loves him, she's convinced.
Laura's restless. Something's missing. Although she's never really written, or even really read a whole lot, she keeps fantasizing herself as a writer, an artist, a thinker. The sort of person who might be taken seriously by her idol, public radio talk show host Jenna Faroli (who bears more a passing resemblance to Wisconsin Public Radio host Jean Feraca). Faroli is a pretentious, misanthropic know-it-all, who hides her huge ego, just barely, behind a facade of culture, tolerance and down-to-earthiness. Laura's bought into her personae. She views her as the epitome of sophistication, culture and thought. For Laura, Jenna is a feminine ideal to which she would aspire.
In an effort to get next to her idol/crush Jenna, Laura slowly and subtly maneuvers circumstance so that the charming and handsome Charley is thrown into Jenna's path. She basically arranges an affair between Jenna and Charley. At first, this simply means sitting in on and often ghosting an email exchange the two start up. The pretentious Faroli terms this "an epistolary relationship"(66).
In the end, the most remarkable thing about Charley and Jenna falling in love is Charley and Jenna falling in love. They are not a likely couple. Reversing the gender of Austen's poles, Faroli is the queen of sense. Faroli has never fallen in love, or even experienced too many rich emotions outside of those mediated by art. As to passion and lust, Faroli harbors an unconscious aversion. She's a bit above such vulgar, human foibles. She fashions herself, "Jenna Faroli of the sexy mind...if the multitudes wanted to fuck her, it was her brain they wanted to penetrate, the luscious cranial fruit on those broad shoulders of hers-what hidden folds, so soft, so moist, so yielding. She considered that big fruit, and then the rest of her, the drag of her body, to be the ultimate product of the feminist revolution"(73). Of course, for the sake of appearances, she would claim there's more to her than her mind,that she was whole. But, deep down she doubts it.
In stark contrast, Charley is the simple man of feeling, prone to wonder and emotion, and keenly interested in sex. He thinks of it as a "wordless miracle, just as music was, a dissolving happiness into the cosmos...it was essential, then, to keep singing, to keep making love, to keep creating the songs note by note as the sound, note by note, vanished"(29). In Hamilton's telling of romance, she makes sensibility male and explicitly erotic.
Charley is simple to the point of simplistic. He apparently got through high school due to the kindness of teachers. He is extraordinarily childlike, creepily so. While Laura eats a salad and chicken patty, Charly dines on two corn dogs, a "bowl of tater tots, baby carrots, and a glass of milk(49)" and tosses "his Tater Tots, one by one, into the air,...seeing if he could land them in his mouth"(50-51).
Without ever being fully conscious of it, Laura initiates a relationship between Charley and Jenna. Laura conceives of coupling them as a project, an experiment. Her project/experiment is a study from which she hopes to gain insight into romance (primarily into what Jenna, a woman she admires, thinks of men and romance) so that she might write a romance.
Yet, Laura is also interested in getting close to Jenna via Charley. Laura's Jenna idolatry partakes of a crush, a female version of Eve Kosofsky's homosocial continuum of desire. In this case, that desire is expressed and mediated through a man who seems a blank slate on which they consciously and unconsciously to each other. Charlie brings more to the table than his male anatomy; yet, on some level, both women are interested in him for what he can tell them about the other.
Laura expresses/protests uncertainty as to her intentions in setting up the relationship. In large measure though, she sees Charlie, especially as he expresses himself via emails she authors, as an expression of herself which she offers in hopes of gaining Jenna's love. She gets a charge out of Jenna paying attention to Charley, to her bothering to reply to the emails she authors/co-authors in his name, and "had to remind herself that she was not Laura who was writing, she was Charlie"(103). Jenna's wanting "to communicate with Laura/Charlie was definitely a boost to Laura's self-esteem"(108). In Laura's mind, "Jenna was falling in love with the writer, Charlie, who was actually, in large measure, herself"(130).
By her lights, Laura instigates and observes the relationship in hopes of writing a romance featuring and appealing to a modern, powerful, every-woman such as Jenna, such as herself. She clearly views Jenna as a modern, every-woman: evolved, cultured, confident, self-possessed. Her writing project is intended to test the possibility and potential for such a romance.
What sort of role remains or is born for the modern man in her conception of romance.
In Laura's telling, "in traditional romance, the heroine was supposed to be socially, intellectually, and financially inferior to the hero, so that in all areas the love was lifting her up. If Jenna fell for Charlie, it wasn't going to have anything to do with a wish to improve her [Jenna's] status, and it might not be about self-improvement, or self-knowledge"(107). Laura tells herself the "tables could very well be turned in her romance, the woman, by her love, raising up the man to his fullest potential"(109). Laura has clearly fallen out of love with Charlie.
Indeed, Laura's fallen out of love with love. She looks on love, romance and sex with disdain, as a foible and a foolishness, and a vulnerability she hopes she's outgrown. However, another part wonders if one can sensibly fall in love, fall in love but keep a modicum of dignity, self-respect and sanity? Or, as she puts it to Jenna, "I've been trying...to study what....an ideal woman..actually wants in a man, what kind of hero she needs when she's already sort of perfect"(176).Can a modern woman fall in love and be bettered by the experience? In setting up Charlie with her idol of feminine sense, Jenna, Laura seeks the answer to all these questions.
She is bitterly disappointed by Jenna's answer, even if she never is able to admit it to herself. Jenna in love proves to be like most people in love; foolish, sentimental and vulnerable. In reading over their email exchanges, "what struck Laura most was the banality of the exchanges....they were saying things to each other that had been said by lovers through the ages, and yet they seemed to think they were inventing the concepts"(144). Yet, she can't her writing, her research is contingent upon their being a better answer, a sensible romance. So, although Jenna and Charley end up "exposed as...perverted, shallow, obsessed sex-maniacs," Laura the writer believes that they can still get through this stage and via their romance "reclaim their best selves"(196).
Laura is more than simply disappointed that Jenna has failed to present a convincing romantic pathway for the modern woman. Deep down, she is downright pissed-off and seeks revenge. While she would never own her anger, nor the satisfaction deriving from it, it is there. One could argue that it's prompted by more than Jenna's failure to fall sensibly in love with Charlie and reveal his charms to Laura. Although never explicitly stated, Laura clearly harbors a long-standing grudge against her idol, and it's not hard to see why she might wish to take down the arrogant and contemptuous Jenna.
Throughout the novel, Laura acts with an incredible blindness. She is driven by a truly destructive hatred and resentment of her ostensible idol and yet is oblivious to this. Hamilton skillfully brings the reader into Laura's experience on this front. When she blows at the end, it surprises at first, but makes perfect sense upon reflection. As readers, we detect the wrath she harbors without it's ever actually registering in our conscious thoughts.
Despite it's sensational story, Hamilton's book has conservative strains. Laura treads close to a traditional female stereotype: the woman who sees anger as unfeminine, denies it in herself, and in so doing feeds it till it grows into a rage that will be expressed. There is also an implicit conservative nod to traditional values in Hamilton's depicting both women as failed mothers.
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