Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘November, 2008’

Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality

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About a third of the way through Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality*, I nearly threw my pages across the room. Not only because I disagree with his romanticized version of the “savage man” but because I happened to read this:

 

Now it is easy to perceive that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment, engendered by society, and cried up by the women with great care and address in order to establish their empire, and secure command to that sex which ought to obey.

 

It’s very difficult to take someone seriously when he gives so little credit to his own gender and then so little respect to the other. But I kept reading.

 

The discourse on inequality was Rousseau’s attempt to explain why civil society contains such huge gaps between the wealthy and the poor, the strong and the weak, the powerful and the enslaved, and whether this unfortunate situation is naturally occurring. His answer is yes. And he thinks the whole big mess is a direct result of humans leaving their “state of nature” and coming into contact with one another.

 

Rousseau’s assumption is that humans are perfect when they live separately, in nature, when their life revolves around an “amour de soi”, instead of what this becomes when they group together in civil society, “amour-propre”. He juxtaposes these two terms, which literally mean “love of self” and “self-love”, creating two opposing visions of the human soul. Rousseau argues that Love of Self is good because it promotes self-preservation. Self-love, on the other hand, makes us vain, competitive and proud. I like the distinction he makes between the two, but with almost 250 years of research in the natural sciences behind us, his theory of the noble savage just doesn’t hold any currency anymore, which of course weakens everything else he has to say.

 

He is correct in assessing that civil society is potentially fraught with disaster, that humans are horrible to one another more often than not, that most of our poverty (both intellectual and material) is of our own making. His argument against private property is quite compelling, so is his point about the corrupting capacity of power. He also rightly points out that once inequality is present in a society, it becomes a self-perpetuating problem.

 

However, as Rousseau builds his argument, he spends a short moment explaining how humans transitioned away from the state of nature and moved toward civil society. He argues that this change comes about through several inherent human qualities, notably, self-awareness and freedom.

 

Nature speaks to all animals, and beasts obey her voice. Man feels the same impression, but then at the same time perceives that he is free to resist or to acquiesce.

 

Humans are unique in that we have the ability to choose the life we lead. As well as become aware or conscious of our instincts. This consciousness is the key, I think, but unfortunately Rousseau very quickly throws it away. He explains how this very difference is what sparks our evolution toward civil society but then he spends the rest of his time explaining the negatives of the society we end up creating. And he makes it sound very much like once we’re living inside that complex social construct, we’re no longer capable of self-examination or free will. He depicts a society completely out of control, which spirals toward its own destruction.

 

There are days when it is difficult to remain optimistic about the way the world is heading. There is so much violence and poverty out there. Too much. But as far as I can tell, we are still paying attention. We are actively assessing our actions and examining our motives. We are painfully aware of our failings. Our system may be flawed, as Rousseau points out, but we’re not mindless slaves to any system. I think we prove this day after day. So I remain hopeful.

 

 

 

 

*A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind

 

 

Reading Writer – Swift's Last Orders

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Let’s go back to Graham Swift. I’ve been thinking some more about Last Orders. I talked about the story when I wrote up my first post, but I want to spend some time looking at the jumble of voice and structure and detail that transformed this particular story into such a wonderfully-written book.

 

What strikes me only a few lines into the very first paragraph is the particular emotional structure of Ray’s voice. His edgy melancholy and gruff sadness. He is a sappy stoic. Ray is set up right away as our guide to the novel. He opens THE story and signals that this story will also be HIS story. There are a lot of characters introduced across the next few pages and sly allusions to almost every single subplot which means the novel threatens to become confusing. But it stays firmly in Ray’s perspective for 18 pages, long enough for the reader to feel steadied again, before switching to Amy.

 

Amy’s voice is the “chin-up, old girl” variety – a perfect blend of bitter self-pity and desperate pluckiness. She is so angry but she’s trying not to let that anger win. One of the novel’s strengths is its willingness to keep us in suspense as to why. And we’re also meant to wonder about June, the person to whom Amy is talking.

 

Eventually, although Ray remains the most frequent POV, each of the men gets a turn leading the narrative – Vince, Lenny, Vic. And Amy shows up a few more times. The effect created is very much like a gathering in a noisy neighborhood pub. Someone starts reminiscing and everyone adds the detail most important to them. The stories intersect but also swiftly diverge. Details start to get cluttered or vague. The voices of the novel’s seven narrators are similar because they all come from the same place and have lived similar lives, a feature of the novel that frustrated me at first, but as I read further, I think Swift manages to differentiate them where it matters – their judgments of others, their interior decisions.

 

Besides Ray, I found myself really drawn to Vic. He speaks directly to the reader only seven times and each time with this kind of fierce pride and solemnity about him. He is the only man in the group who seems to be at peace with himself and his life. Although he’s just a little pompous too. He can’t help feeling the power his job gives him, although he tries to be respectful of it for the most part. I suppose I liked the contradiction in that. A character that recognizes the authority he has over people at their weakest moments and who tries to honor that but who can’t help feeling just a bit superior. That seems very human to me.

 

Part and parcel of the constantly shifting point-of-view in the novel is the way each man describes the others, and his friendship in relation to each and then to all. It was interesting to compare how Vic thought others saw him with the glimpses Swift gives the reader of how they actually did. Same for Ray and Vince and Lenny. Human relationships are so complicated, with so much room for misunderstanding and false impression. The men in Last Orders have known each other for something like forty years and Swift does an excellent job of using a particular blend of their voices to bring all that baggage, both good and bad, into the present moment of their car ride to Margate.

 

This is a novel I could write pages and pages about. And after my first post, so many of you mentioned his other novel Waterlands, which I now have waiting for me on the shelf, along with Shuttlecock, so I’m really looking forward to both.

 

 

Nadine Gordimer – The House Gun

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Rereading Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun over the weekend confirmed to me that it will remain one of my all-time favorites. I think this was the third Gordimer novel I ever read and I sought it out because I had so enjoyed the first two. It is her twelfth novel and was published in 1998, when she was 75 years old. And yet it is a novel with incredible insight into contemporary problems of violence and sexual concerns.

 

In 2006, I wrote this about the novel:

 

In The House Gun Gordimer literally unstitches the seams holding together the lives of her main characters, Claudia and Harald, as they cope with the reality that their only child, their son, has committed a murder. Part One begins with the coy words, Something terrible happened but this is not yet Harald and Claudia’s “terrible”, it is only the news, the busy hum of everyday violence the couple are watching on TV one evening. But then within a paragraph, that hum infiltrates their living room. A messenger arrives. Their lives will never be the same.

 

This dichotomy between the violence “out there” and the violence “within” soon becomes one of the central sources of the novel’s power. Harald and Claudia have lived relatively quiet and happy lives, not so much oblivious to the violence in their society, but discreetly distant from it. They are quick to point out that they didn’t agree with the apartheid system but neither did they risk their life and security fighting against it. Claudia is a doctor and an atheist, while Harald is the director of an insurance company and a contemplative Christian. They are both politically liberal, in theory supportive of equality but yet admittedly still enmeshed in the mores dictated by an earlier cultural system. The unfathomable act committed by their son soon becomes their only point of reference and each aspect of their life must pass through its prism as they try to understand the unthinkable.

 

I would say The House Gun has two main preoccupations – one is Gordimer’s traditional dissection of the legacy of apartheid on the South African pysche (from both sides of the color barrier) but the other takes up the issue of longstanding violence within a community and how that poison, for lack of a better word, seeps into everything. With an incredible amount of sympathy, Gordimer presents Harald and Claudia’s son Duncan as someone who can’t help having assimilated that violence (which is both sexual and physical) because, in essence, everyone in the entire culture has had to do the same. The title emphasizes this fact – the group of young people living with Duncan has this “house gun”, an object of incredible violence that everyone treats as no big deal.

 

The novel is one of Gordimer’s most compelling narratives, in the traditional sense, in that the story literally keeps you on the edge of your seat. For those of you a bit shy of Gordimer’s sometimes roundabout narrative style, this would be an excellent book to start with. It is simply packed with her discerning prose and vivid descriptions but also with a story that grips you right from the beginning.

 

Nadine Gordimer – None to Accompany Me

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Things have been quiet around here – sorry for the unexpected blogging break but I’m back today with more Nadine Gordimer. I finished her 11th and 12th novels over the weekend – None to Accompany Me and The House Gun. Both excellent – of course you all guessed I would say that right?

 

None to Accompany Me meanders in the way that several of her novels meander. It doesn’t have a precise, focused story. Instead it charts a period of time, following the lives of two women (one black, one white) during South Africa‘s transitional period away from apartheid.

 

One of the things I’ve grown to appreciate with Gordimer is her willingness to put what I can only call “story” onto a smaller stage and let the details and intricacies of the lives of her characters create an effective storyline on their own. On the one hand, both women (and their husbands) are involved in dismantling the apartheid system, on the other, they are concerned with more personal issues – a teen daughter’s pregnancy, the death of a co-worker, a son’s divorce, their own marital commitment, new employment and shifting friendships. And all of this is set against the evolving political landscape into which each of the four must somehow fit or transform their identity.

 

The book made an interesting parallel between apartheid and a certain kind of marriage in which one person holds all the power. The kind of relationship in which one person does all the defining for both halves of the couple. Gordimer makes the point carefully, showing that although it is possible for the parties on opposite sides to connect, even care for one another, until that original imbalance is corrected, the connection remains a false one.

 

I’m finding it difficult here to put together a neat synopsis of the novel because it encompasses such a wide variety of human experience. None to Accompany Me is a fairly complicated and weighty read (with exquisite writing, however, to make things just a little easier). The story is deceptively quiet when in fact it takes on a steady stream of huge issues and treats them each with a particularly painful honesty.

 

 

Eudora Welty – no place for you, my love

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Has everyone read Eudora Welty’s famous short story, No Place for you, my love? Something made me take it out this afternoon for a reread. I love Welty’s sly, subtle humor and bizarre, sometimes even fantastic detail. I also love the way she shifts back and forth between the unnamed man and woman in the story as they take their drive south from New Orleans; she leaves so much for the reader to puzzle over while at the same time creates an unmistakable emotional canvas of each character.

 

Right in the beginning, the man is watching the woman (they’re at an improvised lunch party, both out-of-town guests in New Orleans) and he assumes he has discovered something about her inner-life:

 

The shadow lay between her fingers, between her little square hand and her cheek, like something always best carried about the person. Then suddenly, as she took her hand down; the secret fact was still there – it lighted her.

 

Just after this moment, they speak for the first time and discover an instant kinship in their both being strangers and in what I can only describe as a kind of exasperated ennui. They aren’t attracted to one another. But they move quickly and smoothly toward an afternoon with all the outward trappings of adventure and the possibility of an affair.

 

The drive south is hauntingly beautiful:

 

More and more crayfish and other shell creatures littered their path, scuttling or dragging. These little samples, little jokes of creation, persisted and sometimes perished, the more of them the deeper down the road went. Terrapins and turtles came up steadily over the horizons of the ditches. Back there in the margins were worse – crawling hides you could not penetrate with bullets or quite believe, grins that had come down from the primeval mud.

 

I love the desperation in this image. The man and woman are speeding south, not speaking, just holding themselves limply upright in the dazzling heat and all around them these “little jokes of creation” are committing inadvertant suicide left and right under their wheels.

 

What’s even better, faced with this incredible display, the man is falling asleep at the wheel. The woman has to jar his arm to keep him driving straight on the road.

 

They get on a ferry and the man and woman don’t even make the crossing together. He stays down with the car, and she steps up to the deck to have this thought:

 

She held the hot rail before her. It was like riding a stove. Her shoulders dropping, her hair flying, her skirt buffeted by the sudden strong wind, she stood there, thinking they all must see that with her entire self all she did was wait.

 

I will try not to give everything away. But just next is a scene with an alligator some of the ferry help has captured. Welty juxtaposes the man’s and woman’s thoughts about this creature so delicately, so subtly, it becomes an occasion for mutual misunderstanding. And then she delivers this line – which I leave without context to force you all to find a copy of the story and read it for yourselves:

 

Deliver us all from the naked in heart.

 

They make it to their destination, have some food, dance together. All without really speaking or engaging directly with one another. And behind their few words and gestures is this feeling that both of them are reacting to the complications in the lives they’ve left behind for this short escapade. Lurking over the entire story is a kind of violence or danger.

 

In a very limited sense, their adventure is confirmed. Their affair realized. And then they drive back. Welty’s image of this drive is so bizarre and beautiful:

 

Later, crossing a large open distance, he saw at the same time two fires. He had the feeling that they had been riding for a long time across a face – great, wide and upturned. In its eyes and open mouth were those fires they had had glimpses of, where the cattle had drawn together: a face, a head, far down here in the South – south of South, below it. A whole giant body sprawled downward then, on and on, always, constant as a constellation or an angel. Flaming and perhaps falling, he thought.

 

Isn’t that stunning? I love the image of this dark, hollow face, burning from within. A mirror of the nameless man and woman of the story. Both similarly empty but dark, their emotions smoldering, their fiery insides only visible in their tense gestures and careful words.

 

 

Deborah Lawrenson – Songs of Blue and Gold

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Over at Tales from the Reading Room, Litlove has posted an interesting and informative interview with author Deborah Lawrenson. I enjoyed reading the interview yesterday, not just because Lawrenson reveals herself to be a thoughtful and dedicated writer but because in her responses she actually addresses some of the questions I had in reaction to my recent reading of her novel Songs of Blue and Gold.

 

For those of you who haven’t read the novel, Songs of Blue and Gold is a quiet but serious book. It tells two stories, the first following Melissa Quiller as she searches for answers related to her mother’s past while experiencing a difficult passage in her own marriage, while the second tells the story of Melissa’s mother, Elizabeth, and her relationship with a renowned writer, Julian Adie. Melissa moves between Greece and England and France hunting for clues to a past she didn’t know her mother had and hoping to understand, through that process, what decisions she might have to take in her own life. The two stories communicate on several levels – how is trust built between two individuals, how do men and women need and use one another, how do we define ourselves in relation to our parents, what does it mean to be generous in love, how do we manage the shifting details of our parents lives as we grow to understand and appreciate them as people in their own right, separate from our relationship with them as our parents.

 

On the one hand, the book follows closely the mystery of Elizabeth’s past and Melissa’s quest for information and understanding. She investigates, talks to people, searches for clues. In this sense, it has the aesthetic of a more conventional, plotted novel with an equally conventional emotional structure and writing. On the other hand, there is a consistent and compelling element of unique, specific description and careful interior exploration.

 

These two elements of the novel meant that my reaction to Songs of Blue and Gold became a little complicated. Readers read for different things. My particular reading bias means that most often I could honestly care less about plot because I’m looking for sentences and words put together in a new way, for scenes and dialogue that reveal exactly how complicated human beings really are. I certainly won’t accept incoherence or the complete absence of plot but I’m more interested in an emotional or philosophical movement within a story, than a specific or logical series of events.

 

So my experience with Songs of Blue and Gold was that I would get happily lost in a section of brilliant writing, in looking at Melissa or Elizabeth’s particular interior processing and then suddenly be brought up a little short by a reminder that there was a larger story at work that needed to be brought to conclusion. But I struggled with that reaction because it reminded me why I dislike literary criticism that attempts to label fiction as either good or bad. Ignoring extreme examples, fiction must exist outside simple qualifiers like good or bad. If we are to let fiction work its magic, we have to recognize that fiction is experienced one person at a time. A novel creates a one-of-a-kind relationship with an individual reader. And then goes on to create another, different relationship with another reader.

 

This doesn’t mean criticism, even the kind that revels in its definitive judgments, isn’t useful or interesting or worthwhile. Criticism provides a particular critic’s exploded view of the inner mechanics or hidden meaning of a work of fiction, and often to the benefit of the reader. But what it does mean is that my immediate knee-jerk reaction of wanting to dismiss or ignore the more commercial elements in Songs of Blue and Gold is flawed. It’s based on my accepting a bit too easily the rigid categories defined by someone else for me.

 

In Lawrenson’s interview with Litlove, she mentions that it was difficult to place her fourth book, The Art of Falling, with a publisher because it didn’t fit into either of the generally accepted categories of commercial or literary fiction. I haven’t read The Art of Falling but I would say that Songs of Blue and Gold also walks that line – although I felt it leaned decidedly further over the literary side of the fence. But this isn’t what should define the book, even if I was slow to come around to that understanding. A novel shouldn’t have to be one or the other. Readers are much more intelligent and nuanced than this.

 

Lawrenson has written a thoughtful, lovely, well-researched and interesting book that draws on elements of journalism, mystery writing, real-life inspiration and literary fiction. That unique blend meant I engaged with it on a variety of levels. I fell in love with certain passages, I got caught up in the vivid descriptions of the novel’s geography, I experienced a few minor frustrations, I was confronted with a number of questions and I was engaged, as a writer, to study Lawrenson’s technical choices.

 

I look forward to reading The Art of Falling and I will certainly be on the lookout for Lawrenson’s next book.

 

Graham Swift – Last Orders

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I can no longer remember who recommended Graham Swift’s Last Orders. It may have been Stephen…is that right? But in any case, whoever suggested this wonderful book deserves a huge thank you. What a gem. What a treat to read.

 

I love complicated books with multiple points-of-view and an intricate timeline. Books which are hard to put down because of a real risk of losing the thread. The main, forward action of Last Orders takes place in a single day but the story jumps around from person to person, covering a lifetime of short scenes and powerful experiences. A hodge-podge collection of the moments which gave meaning to each character’s life and which led them all to this particular day.

 

The day in question is not an easy one. Jack Dodds has recently passed away and a group of his friends – Ray, Lenny and Vic – along with his son Vince are on a road trip from London to scatter his ashes on the sea. Swift takes a single car journey and transforms it into the ride of a lifetime. Heartbreak, friendship, treachery, sorrow, luck and joy and everything else you can imagine a person’s life can contain all hitchhike along with the four men as they carry out Jack’s last request.

 

Behind Jack’s story is another, more subtle one. The loud, bravado-filled presence of the four men in the car is made conspicuous by the absence of the women who should be with them – Ray’s wife and daughter, Lenny’s daughter, Jack’s wife and daughter, Vince’s daughter. These are men who have suffered heavy losses. Their sorrow at losing Jack is really the tip of the iceberg, an accumulation of losing much more across a lifetime.

 

Ray has a more central role in the novel and his story is one of the more compelling narratives. His life was intertwined with Jack’s to an incredible degree, for both better and worse. Witnessing the arc of his grief as the four men journey toward the seashore is a wonderfully complicated and riveting experience. I think Swift really gets at the heart of what makes grieving such a horrible process – if it were a simple feeling we would know how to deal with it. But grief surges forth out of the messiness of our day to day and the convoluted details of our relationships. It will never be simple or easy.

 

There is so much going on in this novel – differences between the four men, fathers and daughters, love lost and love found, abandonment, and even a look at social class. Not to mention Swift’s structural and narrative choices. I think Last Orders is a great candidate for a Reading Writer post, because from a writing technique perspective there is a lot to look at and examine. I’ll have to save that for another day.

 

This was my first experience reading Graham Swift and it goes without saying that I really enjoyed it. Has anyone else read anything else by him – any suggestions? I just went and bookmooched his second novel Shuttlecock and his third novel Waterland so will be looking forward to those.