Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘reading notes’ category

Reading Writer – writers as mirrors

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I attended a workshop a few months ago conducted by the playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah. Kwei-Armah is an unabashedly political writer with a social agenda and he spent a considerable amount of time discussing the idea that writers are the mirrors of society. I like this idea and agree with it. But I also think that if its true, it makes writing a very difficult exercise indeed.

I like the idea because so much of what I enjoy in fiction is having the world thrown back at me in a way I wouldn’t have formulated myself. I love it when a piece of fiction shows me something about the world that I instantly recognize as “true” but that I hadn’t managed to discover on my own, or understand in exactly the same way. Good fiction reveals. Good writers capture the play between the light and darkness of reflection.

It’s this tension that makes writing so difficult. How do we create something unique out of something that is essentially a revelation of things as they actually are? In this sense, good fiction creates something that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I don’t mean we have to recognize ourselves in each character we read, but often, it is only through a recognition of our shared humanity with a character that a story becomes meaningful.

From Birds of America, “People Like That Are the Only People Here”, Lorrie Moore: What words can be uttered? You turn just slightly and there it is: the death of your child. It is part symbol, part devil, and in your blind spot all along, until, if you are unlucky, it is upon you. Then it is a fierce little country abducting you; it holds you squarely inside itself like a cellar room – the best boundaries of you are the boundaries of it. Are there windows? Sometimes aren’t there windows?

From That Night, Alice McDermott: For after this, after the cars and the sudden spinning onto her lawn, the boys with their chains and the fight and the chilling sound of her boyfriend’s cry, after this, no small scenes could satisfy us, no muffled arguments, no dinner-at-eight celebrations, no sweet, damaged child, could make us believe we were living a vibrant life, that we had ever known anything about love.

From The Echo Maker, Richard Powers: What did it feel like to be Mark Schluter? To live in this town, work in a slaughterhouse, then have the world fracture from one moment to the next. The raw chaos, the absolute bewilderment of the Capgras state twisted Weber’s gut. To see the person closest to you in this world, and feel nothing. But that was the astonishment: nothing inside Mark felt changed. Improvising consciousness saw to that. Mark still felt familiar; only the world had gone strange. He needed his delusions, in order to close that gap. The self’s whole end was self-continuation.

From Occasion for Loving, Nadine Gordimer: He stretched himself out on the sofa, and when Tom finished his work he saw that he was asleep. His head was flung back on a raised arm behind his head. The fingers of the hand moved like tendrils in an effort against cramp that did not break through to consciousness; on the blank face of sleep traces of bewilderment and disgust were not quite erased round the mouth. Tom looked at him for a moment with the curiosity that is always aroused by the opportunity to contemplate suffering without having to respond to the sufferer, and then decided to leave him there, and turned out the light.

The narrators of each of these passages exposes something recognizable about the human condition. I’ve never had any first hand experience with Capgras syndrome yet Powers’s description of the splicing of the psyche after trauma feels horribly familiar, I’ve never experienced anything having to do with pediatric cancer but the desire for denial that Moore presents speaks to me because that is something that humans do – we deny, we rant and rave, we even tell jokes in the dark moments. These passages are all so affecting because they show us who we are, they reflect something particular and it becomes something shared.

These novels are constructed out of a web of these moments, groups of sentences put together by the narrator and wedged in between the dialogue and the action to ensure the novel functions on two levels at all times – The Echo Maker isn’t just about Mark Schluter’s car accident and his sister’s attempt to rehabilitate him, it is also a novel about us and how fragile our minds and identity really are. Nadine Gordimer isn’t just writing about a woman’s love affair with a black man in apartheid South Africa, she is also revealing how we negotiate social inequality in its myriad forms.

Continuing with The Iliad

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The concept of fate in The Iliad is pretty intense. In Chapter Fourteen and Fifteen Hera is upset that the Trojans seem to be winning the war, so she tricks Zeus to sleep so she can help bolster the Achaeans. Zeus wakes up eventually, just after Hector is wounded, and we learn that no matter what she does, Zeus has already planned how the war will end:  

And let Apollo drive Prince Hector back to battle, / breathe power back in his lungs, make him forget / the pains that rack his heart. Let him whip the Achaeans / in a headlong panic rout and roll them back once more, / tumbling back on the oar-swept ships of Peleus’ son Achilles. / And he, he will launch his comrade Patroclus into action / and glorious Hector will cut him down with a spear / in front of Troy, once Patroclus has slaughtered / whole battalions of strong young fighting men / and among them all, my shining son Sarpedon. / But then, enraged for Patroclus / brilliant Achilles will bring Prince Hector down. / And then, from that day on, I’ll turn the tide of war.  

He goes on to remind us that he’s promised Thetis, Achilles’s mother, to give Achilles great glory in exchange for his short life.  What I find interesting in all this is the messiness of it all. The gods seem just as unwilling to accept fate as the humans. They connive and take sides. Or interfere as much as they can for their own gratification. Yet, what Zeus has decreed is exactly what will come to pass. And there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about that.  

It seems rather frightening to me to rely on a series of gods who have their own interests at heart. I’m not religious in the conventional sense but I was raised within the Judeo-Christian paradigm and am probably more comfortable with the idea that whatever our conception of God is, he/she/it tends to be looking out for us. Not so with the Greek Gods. The legends and stories about the Greek pantheon are powerful cautionary tales but they don’t come right out with a “here are the rules” philosophy. And the gods certainly don’t seem like role models.  

Yet, in this worldview, gods and humans seem a bit more bound together in the untidiness of life. Everyone is in the same boat, making mistakes and suffering for their transgressions or unfulfilled desires. It’s oddly encouraging to think Zeus is willing to sacrifice one of his sons to satisfy a promise. He could just wave a hand and end the war right then and there. Get the whole thing over with. Spare some lives in the process. But no, he’s got to let the whole story play out. That’s more important than anything else.

Rohinton Mistry – Family Matters

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I am about to finish Rohinton Mistry’s novel, Family Matters, for my March book group meeting next week. This is my first experience with Mistry and I’m still working out how I feel about the book and his particular writing style.  

My initial reaction was pretty negative and if I hadn’t been reading the book for a discussion next week I would have put it down after 80 pages and never looked back. But these are the moments when I have to admit what a picky reader I can be. For the most part, the story is engaging – a wide-ranging exhibit of the frustrations, minor joys and necessary compromises of modern family life in Bombay.  

Family Matters deals specifically with three siblings – Roxana, Coomy and Jal and their shared burden in caring for their step-father/father Nariman who suffers from Parkinson’s. But it’s also about Nariman’s youth and his failed love affair with a woman of a lower caste, a woman he should have married but couldn’t. This doomed relationship ruined Nariman’s marriage with Coomy and Jal’s mother. And if that central story weren’t enough, there is a lot more going on in tangential stories about Roxana’s two children and her husband, about their neighbors and even Bombay politics. 

As you can see, it’s a huge, sweeping novel with great ambition. Unfortunately, I felt the novel just missed the mark somehow. There are lovely, moving scenes scattered throughout the entire book, particularly between Nariman and his grandchildren, but most of the time the narrative cuts too many corners to achieve anything really powerful. There was too much vigorous explaining in the exposition and a lot of awkward dialogue so I could never forget I was reading something and simply lose myself in the story.  

However, I have heard such good things about his first and second novels, Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance and I’d like to give them both a try before I decide Mistry isn’t a writer for me. 

Achilles has a dilemma – Book Nine

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I finished Book Nine of The Iliad last evening. What a significant chapter. One that, I think, really gets to the heart of what The Iliad is really about. 

This book is titled The Embassy to Achilles and it covers the moment when Agamemnon sends his most trusted advisors to broker a treaty with Achilles. At this point, the Achaeans have been fighting pretty seriously for quite some time in the renewed battle and they are exhausted. Achilles has been nursing his rage and wounded pride in his tents. The Achaeans really need him. And Agamemnon comes out with an offer that seems pretty fair. He’s not only willing to give back what he unjustly took from Achilles, he’s willing to bestow a myriad of other gifts as well. In essence, he’s agreeing to magnify Achilles’s kleos to a significant degree.  

It was the loss of this kleos that we are meant to believe is the whole reason why Achilles has been abstaining from the war. Except in this chapter he refuses Agamemnon’s offer and admits to a more troubling reason altogether: 

Mother tells me / the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet / that two fates bear me on to the day of death. / If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, / my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies. / If I voyage back to the fatherland I love, / my pride, my glory dies… / true, but the life that’s left me will be long, / the stroke of death will not come on me quickly. 

What a decision Achilles has to make. Long life and no glory or accept that a glorifying death will come to him soon and he’ll be revered as one of the greatest fighters of all time. I know that Achilles will eventually be impelled to join the fighting when he loses his friend Patrocles, but I find his hesitancy and his fear in these chapters quite touching. Who wouldn’t stop a moment and really think about how to proceed? He hasn’t seen his homeland in nearly ten years, it seems natural to me that he might be more than a little homesick. And that he might kindof prefer the idea of a quiet death surrounded by his loved ones.  

Achilles is a fascinating character because he’s half god and half human. I think The Iliad makes a careful exploration of this idea by rendering him more human as the story gains momentum. Wrath – which removes him from his fellow soldiers, is such a god-like emotion. Fear – which keeps him away, is much more human. And grief – which will eventually drive him right back into the thick of the fighting, is even more so.

Nabokov, Longinus and the tingle

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From Nabokov’s chapter on Bleak House in his Lectures on Literature:  

Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. 

Reading this passage last night reminded me that our reaction to truly great literature is physical rather than cerebral. A fact that writers, philosophers and literary critics have been attempting to dissect and understand for a very long time.  

One of the earliest attempts was by Longinus (first century AD) with his treatise On the Sublime. It has been a few years since I sat down meaningfully with this text so my memory of it needs refreshing. But what I do remember is an eloquent endeavor to appreciate and explain our complicated emotional reaction to words either read or heard.  Longinus discusses writers like Sophocles, Homer, Aeschylus and Euripedes and details their little flashes of genius, those instants when the listener experiences “the tingle”.  

The tingle is the sublime. The moment we lose rational thought and absorb or react to a text with our senses alone. For Longinus the sublime is created by something he calls elevated language. And elevated language is the result of five conditions:  

First and most important is the power of forming great conceptions, as we have elsewhere explained in our remarks on Xenophon. Secondly, there is vehement and inspired passion. These two components of the sublime are for the most part innate. Those which remain are partly the product of art. The due formation of figures deals with two sorts of figures, first those of thought and secondly those of expression. Next there is noble diction, which in turn comprises choice of words, and use of metaphors, and elaboration of language. The fifth cause of elevation–one which is the fitting conclusion of all that have preceded it–is dignified and elevated composition.  

I love how his definition encompasses both innate and learned elements. Which is what makes writing an art form and not simply uncontrolled instinct. To my thinking, literature is too important to be left to such hazard. I want to believe that great writers have worked and reflected and struggled to produce their beautiful objects, but at the same time, they wouldn’t have been able to succeed without some innate gift.

So how does elevated language result in the sublime? Longinus writes: 

The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport.  

Transport. This is exactly what Nabokov is talking about in the introductory essay to his Lectures when he calls a great writer an enchanter. Someone who creates an entirely new world and maintains it without crack or fissure in its enclosure.  

Nabokov echoes Longinus elsewhere in his Bleak House essay when he praises Dickens for his “vivid evocation”, his ability to combine words to extraordinary affect. He cites a moment when Dickens describes an ocean scene through Esther’s eyes – when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea and then just after, she continues to explain the way these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed. Nabokov reminds us that in a few simple words Dickens creates a new image. More than that, he creates a revelation: 

…in comparison to the conventional blue sea of literary tradition these silvery pools in the dark sea offer something that Dickens noted for the very first time with the innocent and sensuous eye of the true artist, saw and immediately put into words. Or more exactly, without the words there would have been no vision; and if one follows the soft, swishing, slightly blurred sound of the sibilants in the description, one will find that the image had to have a voice too in order to live. 

Bleak House contains thousands of similar moments. Tiny word combinations that take us less than a second to read. Our eyes fly across the sentences. But in those perfect instances, the sublime pulls us up short. We stumble, absorb the image or idea with our physical being. We react and the memory of that reaction becomes a physical recollection and therefore that much stronger. It will be hard to let go. 

I want to let Nabokov say this again – Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

Meeting Helen of Troy – Book Three

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I find Helen of Troy one of the most compelling literary characters of all time. I don’t remember when I first became aware of her existence but it was well before I had actually experienced any real Greek mythology, definitely before I’d read The Iliad. It’s fascinating to me how literary characters become a part of our collective memory, how we can know of them before we actually meet them. She is supposed to be the most beautiful woman of all time, the face that launched a thousand ships. Why else would two countries fight for ten years? Why else would hundreds, maybe thousands, of innocent men die? Because a woman, who loved one man first, all of sudden loved another.  

Homer brings Helen to life for the reader for the first time in Book Three of The Iliad. She is not at all what I remembered, nor what I was expecting. She is so incredibly present. So angry and sad. So much more than just a pretty face. When we see her for the first time she is alone in her rooms, weaving a dark red robe out of the fury and tragedy of the battle that has been raging. 

Working into the weft the endless bloody struggles / stallion-breaking Trojans and Argives armed in bronze / had suffered all for her at the god of battle’s hands. 

I find this first image very powerful. Helen is literally working her fingers into the catastrophe of a war that’s been waging at her expense. It’s such a vivid illustration of her responsibility. But also of her futile attempt to transform it. Her needlework can be seen as her desire to render the warfare beautiful. Or to control it. Both of which we know are impossible.  

The messenger informs Helen that Menelaus (her old husband) and Paris (her current husband) have promised to duel, to settle the outcome of the war (and her fate) once and for all. She races to see what’s going on and finds King Priam (her father-in-law). He calls her to him lovingly and asks her to point out the fighters to him. This small scene highlights another of Helen’s unique qualities. She is one of few people involved in the conflict who know the strengths and weaknesses of both armies. She’s valuable, not just because of her beauty but because of her intimate knowledge of both The Trojans and the Achaeans. 

But Helen doesn’t answer his question right away. Which is good because this is the first time we hear her speak.  

I revere you so, dear father, dread you too / if only death had pleased me then, grim death / that day I followed your son to Troy, forsaking / my marriage bed, my kinsmen and my child, / my favourite, now full-grown / and the lovely comradeship of women my own age. 

Her regret and sorrow are palpable. She’s in mourning and has been in mourning for all she gave up to be with Paris. The conversation continues with King Priam noticing more men and Helen supplying some details about who is who. Until she breaks off onto another reverie of her own. 

I know them all by heart, and I could tell their names… / but two I cannot find, and they’re captains of the armies, / Castor breaker of horses and the hardy boxer Polydeuces / My blood brothers. Mother bore them both. 

She suggests that maybe they never came over to Troy or are refusing to take part in the battle to avoid hearing insults about her but Homer slyly informs the reader that they have both died and Helen doesn’t even know it. Rendering her just that bit more pathetic.  

Book Three returns to the battle scene and Paris and Menelaus do fight. Everyone, including Paris, knows that Menelaus, being a better fighter, will win. But Aphrodite intervenes, creating a series of silly accidents that insure Paris isn’t killed right away. She then envelopes him in a mist and spirits him back to his chambers. At the same time she beckons Helen to go to him.  

The exchange between goddess and woman is fascinating. Aphrodite tempts Helen to Paris’s bed and Helen refuses. She fights the idea of giving in again, after all the damage their lust has caused. And she sounds pretty convincing. Yet Aphrodite warns –  

Don’t provoke me – wretched, headstrong girl / Or in my immortal rage I may just toss you over / hate you as I adore you now – with a vengeance / I might make you the butt of hard, withering hate / from both sides at once, Trojans and Achaeans 

So there it is. Helen can no longer choose between one man or the other, but between all or nothing. This must be terrifying for her. A life even lonelier than the one she has now. She gives in. Goes to Paris. However, the first thing she does is rage at him. Calls him a coward for running away from the battle just to hide in his bed with her. Armed with his Aphrodite-bolstered seductive powers, he placates and woos her until she joins him. And they make love, hidden away in their sealed off chambers while the war outside ignites all over again.  

I love how The Iliad parallels these two powerful emotions – rage and love. Both are presented as a double-edged sword. All consuming passions, each has the power to transform, to protect, to shelter but also, to destroy.  

And I’m simply in awe of Homer and the complex character he’s created in Helen. In essence, she is powerless but at the same time the entire war rests on her head. Her reaction to that situation is complicated and sincere. In this first glimpse of her in Book Three, Helen’s loneliness is absolute. Despite the admiration of the men and women around her. Despite the still-powerful lust she feels for Paris. It’s an intriguing portrait of a mature woman. One who transgressed in her youth – choosing lust and adventure over stability, comfort and love – but who has now grown up and understood the irreversible folly of her decision.   

starting The Iliad

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Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles… 

This month I am reading The Iliad for the 10 yr reading plan. The last time I read The Iliad was about 13 years ago so it definitely feels like the first time all over again. What fun! I love that the story is mostly a surprise to me now but I keep having these flash visions of my tiny gray-haired Greco-Roman Civ teacher jumping around the room and raving about kleos and how it all comes down to kleos.  

Kleos is Greek for honor/glory and in the beginning of The Iliad it is the whole reason why Agamemnon and Achilles get in their fight in the first place. In Homer’s Greece, after a war, whatever the conquering army has managed to steal, loot, and plunder gets divided up between the victorious heroes and adds to each warrior’s kleos. Naturally, the women are some of the highest prizes. (Just an aside, I have often wondered if this is where we get our expression “trophy wife”.) 

When Book One opens, Agamemnon and the armies fighting with him have recently divided up some war spoils which include a priest’s daughter named Chryseis, who was given to Agamemnon. Well, Chyseis’s father is so upset at losing her that he comes to Agamemnon with ransom and begs for her release. Agamemnon refuses and the priest calls down the wrath of Apollo onto Agamemnon’s army. 

I can’t help loving the instant justice of this. Agamemnon had the chance to be merciful, he was even offered a ransom in exchange but he refuses and is immediately punished. How nice would it be to just point out someone’s wrongdoing and have some god swoop down and rain arrows on that person for their unnecessary nasty behavior? It would be so satisfying wouldn’t it?  

So after Apollo’s wrath has gone on for a bit too long, Achilles (who is fighting with Agamemnon but heads up his own troops, the Myrmidons) gets a little irritated. Agamemnon’s selfishness is causing a lot of death and destruction for all those around him and Achilles would just like him to step up and be a better man. Instead, Agamemnon says he will only return Chyseis if he can take the woman that Achilles was given. Achilles gets doubly pissed here because really, they are all there fighting this long and awful war just because of Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus (husband of Helen, who has been abducted by Paris).

Achilles loses Briseis (and she certainly doesn’t seem at all happy to be led away to Agamemnon’s tent) and as a result he vows to quit fighting. He calls upon his mother, the goddess Thetis, to convince Zeus to help the Trojans win the war so that Agamemnon and his armies will acknowledge how much they needed Achilles.  

This kleos thing is a pretty big deal after all. As I understand it, for a warrior, their kleos was a tangible, visible measure of their worth as a fighter and/or protector. By taking Briseis, Agamemnon is making it clear that he is worth more than Achilles. Which Achilles argues is simply not true at all. Achilles points out that Agamemnon takes the war spoils for doing basically nothing while Achilles is out getting wounded and beat-up.

whenever we sack some wealthy Trojan stronghold / my arms bear the brunt of the raw, savage fighting, / true, but when it comes to dividing up the plunder / the lion’s share is yours, and back I go to my ships, / clutching some scrap, some pittance that I love, / when I have fought to exhaustion 

Reading Book One last night made me laugh a little – here are all these big, warrior men arguing (I won’t say whining, but I could) about women and recognition. About who gets what and who is more important. And when something goes wrong, Achilles goes running to…his mother. In some sense they sound a bit like spoiled kids fighting over their toys on a playground-battleground. But at the same time, The Iliad is about rage. Real, dangerous, violent and destructive rage. It is about pride and about loss. Homer’s poem makes it clear from the first page that war and tragedy are inseparable, and that glory and honor are kind of beside the point. People, loved ones, will die. What could be worse than that?    

mid-read thoughts on Mrs. Dalloway

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I wanted to post some mid-read thoughts on Mrs. Dalloway this morning. This is my second time reading the book but after quite a long time so much of the text strikes me as though I am reading it for the first time. I might not wait so long for my next reread. Dorothy has some interesting comments on the question of when we reread something and how the proximity of the two readings affects our understanding of it. I like looking at this question, especially after reading Nabokov’s opinion that we never actually read a book, we can only reread it. 

The first read of a wonderful book is quite special, isn’t it? So consuming and intense. New ideas to mull over. New people to wonder about. A new place to investigate. But a second or third read can be an altogether delightful experience as well. A bit like seeing an old friend after several years’ absence – there is the first rush of excitement when you must get all the details out of the way, but then you settle in to a more leisurely moment of appreciation and sharing.  

That’s a bit how I feel reading Mrs. Dalloway this week. What I love most about the book is the way everything seems to just zoom along from one moment to the next. Each page has so much energy. Woolf’s prose has so much force, so much vigor. I get the sense that every little action or event is spectacular, or laced with emotion and meaning. Yet she manages to do this without coming across as overblown. I admit that reading Mrs. Dalloway is, at times, somewhat exhausting. But a very good exhausting.  

Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turn at Greenwich) of man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendeliean theory – away the aeroplane shot. 

Is it possible to put more humanity into a single paragraph? The entire book is like this – each new scene pregnant with ideas and ruminations that go beyond the specific instant described. Where Woolf really gets me is with the details, the splendid and unique reflections that she settles upon the most ordinary moments: 

…could not help wishing to whisper a word to Maisie Johnson; to feel on the creased pouch of her worn old face the kiss of pity. 

Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy’s skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions. 

A book like this makes me want it to go on forever. A huge volume I could read slowly for the rest of my life, paragraph after paragraph, line by line. Always a new surprise, another flash of genius, on the next page. I am halfway finished and already sad that I will eventually reach the last page. This time around, I don’t think I will be waiting very long before I pick it up again and start all over again.