BLOOM’S LITERARY CRITICISM
ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION
SHORT STORY WRITERS AND SHORT STORIES
LITERARY BLOOM’S CRITICISM 20THANNIVERSARY COLLECTION
Dramatists and Dramas
The Epic
Essayists and Prophets
Novelists and Novels
Poets and Poems
Short Story Writers and Short Stories
BLOOM’S LITERAR
Y CRITICISM
ANNIVERSAR
Y COLLECTION
SHORT STORY
WRITERS
AND
SHORT STORIES
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
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©2005 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
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Introduction © 2005 by Harold Bloom.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bloom, Harold.
Short story writers and short stories / Harold Bloom.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s 20th anniversary collection)
ISBN 0-7910-8228-8 HC 0-7910-8367-5 PB
1. Short story.
I. Title.
PN3373.B57 2005
808.83’1—dc22
2005006399
Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi
Cover illustration by David Levine
Layout by EJB Publishing Services
Table of Contents
PREFACE
Harold Bloom
ix
INTRODUCTION
Harold Bloom
xiii
Alexandr Pushkin (1799–1837)
1
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
3
Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875)
12
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
19
Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852)
30
Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883)
32
Herman Melville (1819–1891)
35
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898)
42
Mark Twain (1835–1910)
53
Henry James (1843–1916)
55
Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893)
65
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
69
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)
73
O. Henry (1862–1910)
75
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)
77
Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
82
Jack London (1876–1916)
83
Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941)
85
Stephen Crane (1879–1900)
86
James Joyce (1882–1941)
89
Franz Kafka (1883–1924)
91
D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930)
106
Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)
108
Isaac Babel (1894–1940)
113
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
121
William Faulkner (1897–1962)
123
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
125
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
130
John Steinbeck (1902–1968)
133
Eudora Welty (1909–2001)
135
John Cheever (1912–1982)
145
Julio Cortázar (1914–1984)
146
Shirley Jackson (1919–1965)
148
J.D. Salinger (1919–)
150
Italo Calvino (1923–1985)
152
Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
159
Cynthia Ozick (1928–)
168
John Updike (1932–)
175
Raymond Carver (1938–1988)
176
FURTHER READING 179
INDEX 181
ABOUT THE AUTHOR 188
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Preface
Harold Bloom
I BEGAN EDITING ANTHOLOGIES OF LITERARY CRITICISM FOR CHELSEA
House in early 1984, but the first volume, Edgar Allan Poe: Modern Critical
Views, was published in January, 1985, so this is the twentieth anniversary
of a somewhat Quixotic venture. If asked how many separate books have
been issued in this project, I no longer have a precise answer, since in so
long a span many volumes go out of print, and even whole series have been
discontinued. A rough guess would be more than a thousand individual
anthologies, a perhaps insane panoply to have been collected and introduced
by a single critic.
Some of these books have surfaced in unlikely places: hotel rooms in
Bologna and Valencia, Coimbra and Oslo; used-book stalls in Frankfurt
and Nice; on the shelves of writers wherever I have gone. A batch were sent
by me in answer to a request from a university library in Macedonia, and I
have donated some of them, also by request, to a number of prisoners serving
life sentences in American jails. A thousand books across a score of
years can touch many shores and many lives, and at seventy-four I am a little
bewildered at the strangeness of the endeavor, particularly now that it
has leaped between centuries.
It cannot be said that I have endorsed every critical essay reprinted, as
my editor’s notes have made clear. Yet the books have to be reasonably
reflective of current critical modes and educational fashions, not all of them
provoking my own enthusiasm. But then I am a dinosaur, cheerfully naming
myself as “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator.” I accept only three criteria
for greatness in imaginative literature: aesthetic splendor, cognitive
power, wisdom. What is now called “relevance” will be in the dustbins in
less than a generation, as our society (somewhat tardily) reforms prejudices
ix
PREFACE
and inequities. The fashionable in literature and criticism always ebbs away
into Period Pieces. Old, well-made furniture survives as valuable antiques,
which is not the destiny of badly constructed imaginings and ideological
exhortings.
Time, which decays and then destroys us, is even more merciless in
obliterating weak novels, poems, dramas, and stories, however virtuous
these may be. Wander into a library and regard the masterpieces of thirty
years ago: a handful of forgotten books have value, but the iniquity of
oblivion has rendered most bestsellers instances of time’s revenges. The
other day a friend and former student told me that the first of the Poets
Laureate of twentieth-century America had been Joseph Auslander, concerning
whom even my still retentive memory is vacant. These days, Mrs.
Felecia Hemans is studied and taught by a number of feminist Romantic
scholars. Of the poems of that courageous wisdom, who wrote to support
her brood, I remember only the opening line of “Casabianca” but only
because Mark Twain added one of his very own to form a couplet:
The boy stood on the burning deck
Eating peanuts by the peck.
Nevertheless, I do not seek to affirm the social inutility of literature,
though I admire Oscar Wilde’s grand declaration: “All art is perfectly useless.”
Shakespeare may well stand here for the largest benign effect of the
highest literature: properly appreciated, it can heal part of the violence that
is built into every society whatsoever. In my own judgment, Walt
Whitman is the central writer yet brought forth by the Americas—North,
Central, South, Caribbean—whether in English, Spanish, Portuguese,
French, Yiddish or other tongues. And Walt Whitman is a healer, a poet-
prophet who discovered his pragmatic vocation by serving as a volunteer,
unpaid wound-dresser and nurse in the Civil War hospitals of Washington,
D.C. To read and properly understand Whitman can be an education in
self-reliance and in the cure of your own consciousness.
The function of literary criticism, as I conceive it in my gathering old
age, is primarily appreciation, in Walter Pater’s sense, which fuses analysis
and evaluation. When Pater spoke of “art for art’s sake’ he included in the
undersong of his declaration what D.H. Lawrence meant by “art for life’s
sake,” Lawrence, the most provocative of post-Whitmanian vitalists, has
now suffered a total eclipse in the higher education of the English-speaking
nations. Feminists have outlawed him with their accusations of misogyny,
and they describe him as desiring women to renounce sexual pleasure.
On this supposed basis, students lose the experience of reading one of the
PREFACE
major authors of the twentieth century, at once an unique novelist, storyteller,
poet, critic, and prophet.
An enterprise as vast as Chelsea House Literary Criticism doubtless
reflects both the flaws and the virtues of its editor. Comprehensiveness has
been a goal throughout, and I have (for the most part) attempted to set
aside many of my own literary opinions. I sorrow when the market keeps
an important volume out of print, though I am solaced by the example of
my idol, Dr. Samuel Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets. The booksellers (who
were both publishers and retailers) chose the poets, and Johnson was able
to say exactly what he thought of each. Who remembers such worthies as
Yalden, Sprat, Roscommon, and Stepney? It would be invidious for me to
name the contemporary equivalents, but their name is legion.
I have been more fully educated by this quest for comprehensivness,
which taught me how to write for a larger audience. Literary criticism is
both an individual and communal mode. It has its titans: Johnson,
Coleridge, Lessing, Goethe, Hazlitt, Sainte-Beuve, Pater, Curtius, Valèry,
Frye, Empson, Kenneth Burke are among them. But most of those I
reprint cannot be of that eminence: one makes a heap of all that can be
found. Over a lifetime in reading and teaching one learns so much from so
many that no one can be certain of her or his intellectual debts. Hundreds
of those I have reprinted I never will meet, but they have helped enlighten
me, insofar as I have been capable of learning from a host of other
minds.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Introduction
Harold Bloom
THOUGH THERE ARE COMMENTARIES HERE UPON THIRTY-NINE MASTERS OF
the short story, I regret such absences as Alice Munro, Saki, Edna O’Brien,
A.E. Coppard, Frank O’Connor, Katherine Mansfield and such earlier
magnificences as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist, Tolstoy, Leskov, Hardy—
among many others.
Frank O’Connor wrote a provocative study of the short story, The
Lonely Voice (1963), which still moves me to useful disagreement. It always
puzzles me that O’Connor was marvelous on Shakespeare, yet The Lonely
Voice is nowhere close to the distinction of Shakespeare’s Progress, one of the
admirable literary studies of the greatest of all writers. Perhaps O’Connor was
too close to the art of the short story, which he saw as the lonely voice of
“submerged population groups.” O’Connor somehow had to believe that:
… the short story remains by its very nature remote from the
community—romantic, individualistic, and intransigent.
I can recognize D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce, Hemingway and
Katherine Anne Porter by that description, but not Hans Christian
Andersen, Turgenev, Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Kipling, Isaac Babel. Lyric
poetry from the Renaissance through the Romantics on to W.B. Yeats
emanates from a lovely tower, but short stories do not necessarily reflect
any particular social dialectics.
The short story has no Homer or Shakespeare, Dickens or Proust:
not even Turgenev nor Chekhov, Joyce nor Lawrence, Borges nor Kafka,
Flannery O’Connor nor Edna O’Brien can be said to dominate the form.
If I hear someone name the genre of the epic, I think first of Homer or of
Milton, and almost anyone responds to a mention of verse-drama with
xiii
INTRODUCTION
Hamlet. Is it merely a personal peculiarity that short stories evoke in me an
immediate sense of multiplicity, whereas lyric poems suggest Shelley and
Keats? Is there something more anonymous about the short story as a
form? Frank O’Connor would reject my question: individualism and
intransigence hardly cohere with anonymity. I suspect that there are generic
elements that bind together short stories more closely than do the common
features of poems, plays, and novels.
And yet if I brood upon some of my favorite storytellers of the twentieth
century, say Henry James and D.H. Lawrence, I have little sense that
they are composing in the same genre: Lawrence’s extraordinary vitalism is
expressionistic; James’s nuances are impressionistic. Frank O’Connor, true to
his critical obsession, diagnoses Lawrence as “running away from the submerged
population among which he grew up”, but I think that is a reduction
of Lawrence’s drive to get out of our naturally fallen condition, our “crucifixion
into sex”, as he put it. James stays in the world of his upbringing, while
mixing sexuality and ghostliness into a fascinating compound. What then, as
story writers, did Lawrence and James possess in common?
Lawrence, as a storyteller, derived from Thomas Hardy, while James
blent together Turgenev and Hawthorne. Yet neither Lawrence nor James
was a fantastist, in the mode that includes H.C. Andersen, Poe, Gogol,
Lewis Carroll, Kafka, and Borges. If the primary tradition of the short
story is Chekhovian, the alternate mode is Kafkan-Borgesian, nightmare
phantasmagorias. Lawrence and James have recognizable qualities that are
Chekhovian, and neither were precursors of Borges.
Frank O’Connor thought of the short story as a Chekhovian art,
crowded by a “new submerged population of doctors, teachers, and sometimes
priests”. Yet in reading Chekhov I have the impression that everyone
is submerged, by loneliness and by misunderstanding. Chiding Kipling for
having too much of a sense of the group, O’Connor seems to me scarcely
coherent. Must a short story be about human loneliness if it is to endure?
Mark Twain, Thomas Mann, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Scott
Fitzgerald all knew a great deal about loneliness, but that hardly seems to
me the center of any one of them as a tale-teller. Lawrence told us to trust
the tale, not the artist, and great stories rarely manifest only a single
human characteristic. I wonder which is my favorite among all the stories
commented upon in this volume? Is it Babel’s “How It Was Done in
Odessa” or Hans Christian Andersen’s “Auntie Toothache”? Babel’s Benya
Krik and the demoness Auntie Toothache are anything but submerged
voices. Perhaps short stories are allied to one another only as miracles.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Alexandr Pushkin
(1799–1837)
OF THE PROSE TALES OF PUSHKIN, THE MOST POWERFUL (IN TRANSLATION)
is clearly the novella The Queen of Spades, though the fuller length of The
Captain’s Daughter does reveal some of Pushkin’s more varied narrative
resources. Paul Debreczeny has culminated a Russian critical tradition of
reading The Queen of Spades as a Kabbalistic parable, and to Debreczeny’s
intricate unpacking of the story’s dense symbolism I desire to add nothing.
But as a critical Kabbalist myself, I know that a Kabbalistic parable,
whether in Pushkin or Kafka, shows us that rhetoric, cosmology, and psychology
are not three subjects but three in one, and so I turn to the psychology
of The Queen of Spades.
What is the secret misfortune that the Countess, Queen of Spades,
signifies? Does Hermann frighten her to death, or does she pass on to him
the curse of St. Germain and so only then is able to die? What we know
most surely about the Countess is that she was, is, and will be rancid, a fit
mistress for St. Germain (if that is what she was). What we know most
surely about Hermann is that he is just as rancid, but unlike the Countess
he is trapped in irony every time he speaks. His most extraordinary entrapments
come in the first and last sentences we hear him speak: “The game
fascinates me, but I am not in the position to sacrifice the essentials of life
in the hope of acquiring the luxuries,” and the insane, repetitious mutter,
“Three, seven, ace! Three, seven, queen!” He of course does sacrifice the
true essentials of life, and the identification of the Countess with the Queen
of Spades or death-in-life ironically substitutes for the ace of occult success
the Kabbalistic crown that is at once a pinnacle and the abyss of nothingness.
Psychologically Hermann and the Countess are very similar, each
being compounded of worldly ambition and the diabolic, but the Countess
1
Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection
refuses to accept Hermann as her initiate until after she is dead. While
alive, all that she will say to Hermann is “It was a joke.” It is again a diabolic
irony that Hermann answers, “There’s no joking about it,” since her
final joke will render him insane, the joke being the Kabbalistic substitution
of the Queen of Spades for the ace. Yet the Countess’s apparition
speaks in terms that cannot be reconciled with much in the story’s overdetermined
symbolism:
“I have come to you against my will,” she said in a firm voice,
“but I have been ordered to fulfill your request. Three, seven,
ace, played in that order, will win for you, but only on condition
that you play not more than one card in twenty-four
hours, and that you never play again for the rest of your life. I’ll
forgive you my death if you marry my ward, Lisaveta
Ivanovna.”
Is it St. Germain or the Devil himself, each presumably on the other
side of life, who compels her to come? Whose is the lie, as to the last card,
hers or a power beyond her? Why would she wish the horrible Hermann
upon poor Lisaveta Ivanovna? Is it because she now cares for her ward, or
is it malice towards all concerned? Why three days for the card game
rather than one? I do not think that there are aesthetic answers to these
questions. What matters, aesthetically, is that we are compelled to try to
answer them, that we also are swept into this Kabbalistic narrative of compulsions,
deceptions, betrayals, Napoleonic drives. Pushkin has created an
overdetermined cosmos and placed us firmly within it, subject to the same
frightening forces that his protagonists have to endure.
The trope that governs the cosmos of The Queen of Spades is
Dantesque, purgatorial exile: “You shall learn the salt taste of another’s
bread, and the hard path up and down his stairs.” That is Dante at Ravenna
and Lisaveta Ivanovna in the house of the Countess, but those purgatorial
stairs are ascended also by Hermann and the Countess, both to ill effect.
The power of The Queen of Spades is both purgatorial and infernal, and the
reader, who is exposed to both realms, herself or himself chooses the path
of the parable, a narrow, winding stair up, or the madness of Hermann’s
descent, outwards and downwards into wintry night.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Nathaniel Hawthorne
(1804–1864)
HENRY JAMES’S HAWTHORNE WAS PUBLISHED IN DECEMBER 1879, IN
London, in the English Men of Letters series. Unique among the thirty-
nine volumes of that group, this was a critical study of an American by an
American. Only Hawthorne seemed worthy of being an English man of letters,
and only James seemed capable of being an American critic. Perhaps
this context inhibited James, whose Hawthorne tends to be absurdly overpraised,
or perhaps Hawthorne caused James to feel an anxiety that even
George Eliot could not bring the self-exiled American to experience.
Whatever the reason, James wrote a study that requires to be read between
the lines, as here in its final paragraph:
He was a beautiful, natural, original genius, and his life had been
singularly exempt from worldly preoccupations and vulgar
efforts. It had been as pure, as simple, as unsophisticated, as his
work. He had lived primarily in his domestic affections, which
were of the tenderest kind; and then—without eagerness, without
pretension, but with a great deal of quiet devotion—in his charming
art. His work will remain; it is too original and exquisite to
pass away; among the men of imagination he will always have his
niche. No one has had just that vision of life, and no one has had
a literary form that more successfully expressed his vision. He was
not a moralist, and he was not simply a poet. The moralists are
weightier, denser, richer, in a sense; the poets are more purely
inconclusive and irresponsible. He combined in a singular degree
the spontaneity of the imagination with a haunting care for moral
problems. Man’s conscience was his theme, but he saw it in the
3
Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection
light of a creative fancy which added, out of its own substance,
an interest, and, I may almost say, an importance.
Is The Scarlet Letter pure, simple, and unsophisticated? Is The Marble
Faun a work neither moral nor poetic? Can we accurately assert that man’s
conscience, however lit by creative fancy, is Hawthorne’s characteristic
concern? James’s vision of his American precursor is manifestly distorted
by a need to misread creatively what may hover too close, indeed may
shadow the narrative space that James requires for his own enterprise. In
that space, something beyond shadowing troubles James. Isabel Archer has
her clear affinities with Dorothea Brooke, yet her relation to Hester
Prynne is even more familial, just as Millie Theale will have the lineage of
The Marble Faun’s Hilda ineluctably marked upon her. James’s representations
of women are Hawthornian in ways subtly evasive yet finally unmistakable.
Yet even this influence and its consequent ambivalences do not
seem to be the prime unease that weakens James’s Hawthorne. Rather, the
critical monograph is more embarrassed than it can know by James’s guilt
at having abandoned the American destiny. Elsewhere, James wrote to
some purpose about Emerson (though not so well as his brother William
did), but in Hawthorne the figure of Emerson is unrecognizable and the
dialectics of New England Transcendentalism are weakly abused:
A grapher of Hawthorne might well regret that his hero had
not been more mixed up with the reforming and free-thinking
class, so that he might find a pretext for writing a chapter upon
the state of Boston society forty years ago. A needful warrant
for such regret should be, properly, that the biographer’s own
personal reminiscences should stretch back to that period and
to the persons who animated it. This would be a guarantee of
fulness of knowledge and, presumably, of kindness of tone. It is
difficult to see, indeed, how the generation of which
Hawthorne has given us, in Blithedale, a few portraits, should
not, at this time of day, be spoken of very tenderly and sympathetically.
If irony enter into the allusion, it should be of the
lightest and gentlest. Certainly, for a brief and imperfect
chronicler of these things, a writer just touching them as he
passes, and who has not the advantage of having been a contemporary,
there is only one possible tone. The compiler of
these pages, though his recollections date only from a later
period, has a memory of a certain number of persons who had
been intimately connected, as Hawthorne was not, with the
Short Story Writers and Short Stories
agitations of that interesting time. Something of its interest
adhered to them still—something of its aroma clung to their
garments; there was something about them which seemed to
say that when they were young and enthusiastic, they had been
initiated into moral mysteries, they had played at a wonderful
game. Their usual mark (it is true I can think of exceptions) was
that they seemed excellently good. They appeared unstained by
the world, unfamiliar with worldly desires and standards, and
with those various forms of human depravity which flourish in
some high phases of civilisation; inclined to simple and democratic
ways, destitute of pretensions and affectations, of jealousies,
of cynicisms, of snobbishness. This little epoch of fermentation
has three or four drawbacks for the critics—drawbacks,
however, that may be overlooked by a person for whom
it has an interest of association. It bore, intellectually, the stamp
of provincialism; it was a beginning without a fruition, a dawn
without a noon; and it produced, with a single exception, no
great talents. It produced a great deal of writing, but (always
putting Hawthorne aside, as a contemporary but not a sharer)
only one writer in whom the world at large has interested itself.
The situation was summed up and transfigured in the
admirable and exquisite Emerson. He expressed all that it contained,
and a good deal more, doubtless, besides; he was the
man of genius of the moment; he was the Transcendentalist par
excellence. Emerson expressed, before all things, as was extremely
natural at the hour and in the place, the value and importance
of the individual, the duty of making the most of one’s
self, of living by one’s own personal light, and carrying out
one’s own disposition. He reflected with beautiful irony upon
the exquisite impudence of those institutions which claim to
have appropriated the truth and to dole it out, in proportionate
morsels, in exchange for a subscription. He talked about the
beauty and dignity of life, and about every one who is born into
the world being born to the whole, having an interest and a
stake in the whole. He said “all that is clearly due to-day is not
to lie,” and a great many other things which it would be still
easier to present in a ridiculous light. He insisted upon sincerity
and independence and spontaneity, upon acting in harmony
with one’s nature, and not conforming and compromising for
the sake of being more comfortable. He urged that a man
should await his call, his finding the thing to do which he
Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection
should really believe in doing, and not be urged by the world’s
opinion to do simply the world’s work. “If no call should come
for years, for centuries, then I know that the want of the
Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence.... If I cannot
work, at least I need not lie.” The doctrine of the supremacy
of the individual to himself, of his originality, and, as regards
his own character, unique quality, must have had a great charm
for people living in a society in which introspection—thanks to
the want of other entertainment—played almost the part of a
social resource.
The “admirable and exquisite Emerson” was “as sweet as barbed wire,”
to quote President Giamatti of Yale. Any reader of that great, grim, and most
American of books, The Conduct of Life, ought to have known this. James’s
Emerson, dismissed here by the novelist as a provincial of real charm, had
provoked the senior Henry James to an outburst of more authentic critical
value: “O you man without a handle!” Hawthorne too, in a very different
way, was a man without a handle, not less conscious and subtle an artist than
the younger Henry James himself. The Scarlet Letter, in James’s Hawthorne,
is rightly called the novelist’s masterpiece, but then is accused of “a want of
reality and an abuse of the fanciful element—of a certain superficial symbolism.”
James was too good a reader to have indicted Hawthorne for “a want
of reality,” were it not that Hawthornian representation had begun too well
the process of causing a Jamesian aspect of reality to appear.
II
Hawthorne’s highest achievement is not in The Scarlet Letter and The
Marble Faun, distinguished as they are, but in the best of his tales and
sketches. The last of these, the extraordinary “Feathertop,” sub-titled “A
Moralized Legend,” is as uncanny a story as Kafka’s “Country Doctor” or
“Hunter Gracchus,” and has about it the dark aura of Hawthorne’s valediction,
his farewell to his own art. In its extraordinary strength at representing
an order of reality that intersects our own, neither identical with
the mundane nor quite transcending the way things are, “Feathertop” may
be without rivals in our language.
Mother Rigby, a formidable witch, sets out to create “as lifelike a scarecrow
as ever was seen,” and being weary of making hobgoblins, determines
to give us “something fine, beautiful, and splendid.” An authentic forerunner
of Picasso as sculptor, the witch chooses her materials with bravura:
Short Story Writers and Short Stories
The most important item of all, probably, although it made so
little show, was a certain broomstick, on which Mother Rigby
had taken many an airy gallop at midnight, and which now
served the scarecrow by way of a spinal column, or, as the
unlearned phrase it, a backbone. One of its arms was a disabled
flail, which used to be wielded by Goodman Rigby, before his
spouse worried him out of this troublesome world; the other, if
I mistake not, was composed of the pudding-stick and a broken
rung of a chair, tied loosely together at the elbow. As for its
legs, the right was a hoe-handle, and the left, an undistinguished
and miscellaneous stick from the wood-pile. Its lungs,
stomach, and other affairs of that kind, were nothing better
than a meal-bag stuffed with straw. Thus, we have made out the
skeleton and entire corporosity of the scarecrow, with the
exception of its head; and this was admirably supplied by a
somewhat withered and shrivelled pumpkin in which Mother
Rigby cut two holes for the eyes and a slit for the mouth, leaving
a bluish-colored knob, in the middle, to pass for a nose. It
was really quite a respectable face.
Gaudily attired, the scarecrow so charms its demiurgic creator (“The
more Mother Rigby looked, the better she was pleased”) that she emulates
Jehovah directly, and decides to breathe life into the new Adam by thrusting
her own pipe into his mouth. Once vivified, Mother Rigby’s creature is
urged by her to emulate Milton’s Adam: “Step forth! Thou hast the world
before thee!” Hawthorne does not allow us to doubt the self-critique
involved, as all romance is deliciously mocked:
In obedience to Mother Rigby’s word, and extending its arm as
if to reach her outstretched hand, the figure made a step forward—
a kind of hitch and jerk, however, rather than a step—
then tottered, and almost lost its balance. What could the witch
expect? It was nothing, after all, but a scarecrow, stuck upon
two sticks. But the strong-willed old beldam scowled, and
beckoned, and flung the energy of her purpose so forcibly at
this poor combination of rotten wood, and musty straw, and
ragged garments, that it was compelled to show itself a man, in
spite of the reality of things. So it stept into the bar of sunshine.
There it stood—poor devil of a contrivance that it was!—with
only the thinnest vesture of human similitude about it, through
which was evident the stiff, ricketty, incongruous, faded,
Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection
tattered, good-for-nothing patchwork of its substance, ready to
sink in a heap upon the floor, as conscious of its own unworthiness
to be erect. Shall I confess the truth? At its present
point of vivification, the scarecrow reminds me of some of the
lukewarm and abortive characters, composed of heterogeneous
materials, used for the thousandth time, and never worth using,
with which romance-writers (and myself, no doubt, among the
rest) have so over-peopled the world of fiction.
But the critique surpasses mere writers and attacks the greatest of
romancers, Jehovah himself, as Mother Rigby deliberately frightens her
pathetic creature into speech. Now fully humanized, he is named
Feathertop by his creator, endowed with wealth, and sent forth into the
world to woo the beautiful Polly, daughter of the worshipful Judge
Gookin. There is only the one catch; poor Feathertop must keep puffing
at his pipe, or he will dwindle again to the elements that compose him. All
goes splendidly; Feathertop is a social triumph, and well along to seducing
the delicious Polly, when he is betrayed by glances in a mirror:
By and by, Feathertop paused, and throwing himself into an
imposing attitude, seemed to summon the fair girl to survey his
figure, and resist him longer, if she could. His star, his embroidery,
his buckles, glowed, at that instant, with unutterable
splendor; the picturesque hues of his attire took a richer depth
of coloring; there was a gleam and polish over his whole presence,
betokening the perfect witchery of well-ordered manners.
The maiden raised her eyes, and suffered them to linger
upon her companion with a bashful and admiring gaze. Then,
as if desirous of judging what value her own simple comeliness
might have, side by side with so much brilliancy, she cast a
glance towards the full-length looking-glass, in front of which
they happened to be standing. It was one of the truest plates in
the world, and incapable of flattery. No sooner did the images,
therein reflected, meet Polly’s eye, than she shrieked, shrank
from the stranger’s side, gazed at him, for a moment, in the
wildest dismay, and sank insensible upon the floor. Feathertop,
likewise, had looked towards the mirror, and there beheld, not
the glittering mockery of his outside show, but a picture of the
sordid patchwork of his real composition, stript of all witchcraft.
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Fleeing back to his mother, Feathertop abandons existence in despair
of his reality, and flings the pipe away in a kind of suicide. His epitaph is
spoken by a curiously softened Mother Rigby, as though experience had
rendered her a more maternal demiurge:
“Poor Feathertop!” she continued. “I could easily give him
another chance, and send him forth again to-morrow. But, no!
his feelings are too tender; his sensibilities too deep. He seems
to have too much heart to bustle for his own advantage, in such
an empty and heartless world. Well, well! I’ll make a scarecrow
of him, after all. ‘Tis an innocent and a useful vocation, and will
suit my darling well; and if each of his human brethren had as
fit a one, ‘twould be the better for mankind; and as for this pipe
of tobacco, I need it more than he!”
Gentle and whimsical as this is, it may be Hawthorne’s darkest irony.
The witch is more merciful than the remorseless Jehovah, who always does
send us forth again, into a world that cannot sustain us. Feathertop is closer
to most of us than we are to Hester Prynne. That final dismissal of heroism
is Hawthorne’s ultimate legacy, glowing on still in the romances of
Nathanael West and Thomas Pynchon.
III
There is no single way to characterize Nathaniel Hawthorne’s complex
vision of the American self. I think I have learned some of the intricacies
of the Emersonian self in the Sage of Concord’s work, and in its further
developments (and departures) in Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, and
Melville, all of whom would have been very different had Emerson never
existed. Hawthorne’s relationship to Emerson is far more difficult to perceive
and describe. They were unlikely but fairly frequent walking-companions,
with the essayist probably carrying most of the desultory discourse
along. Except for his wife Lidian and daughter Ellen, Emerson
really needed no one, though he found the taciturn Hawthorne pleasant
enough company, if of little interest as a writer. But then, our national sage
did not much enjoy prose fiction. The Moralia of Plutarch, Montaigne’s
essays, Dante and Shakespeare were Emerson’s preferred reading. He
searched for wit and wisdom, not for moral perplexity. Right and wrong
were unambiguous for the prophet of self-reliance, at home with the God
within, the best and oldest part of his being. Hawthorne, uneasy with
Emerson, nevertheless could never quite evade him. Hester Prynne, like
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Henry James’s Isabel Archer, is the American Eve, and both are
Emersonian, even as Whitman and Thoreau are versions of Emerson’s
American Adam, always early in the morning. Emerson, satirized by a
defensive Melville in Pierre and in The Confidence Man, nevertheless is the
American Plato who informs the Gnostic cosmos of Moby Dick, despite
itself as profoundly Emerson as is the original 1855 Leaves of Grass.
Captain Ahab refuses a role as American Adam, but his Promethean rebellion
against the Creation-Fall of his catastrophic maiming by the snowy
Leviathan allies him to the grim sublimity of Emerson’s masterwork, The
Conduct of Life. Hawthorne, of all the titans of the American Renaissance,
has the subtlest and most surprising relationship to the inescapable
Emersonian self.
“Young Goodman Brown” (1835) is early Hawthorne, composed
when he was about thirty, and just beginning to fully find his mode as a
writer. Poor Brown is not at all self-reliant, but a rather pathetic instance
of societal over-conditioning. Hawthorne neither wants to be or is an
Emersonian, yet he gives us a young “goodman” who badly needs a blood-
transfusion from Hester Prynne, or some other fictive apostle of Emerson.
One of many implicit Hawthornian ironies is that the strong self ’s cost of
confirmation comes too high, while society’s conformities are hopelessly
low, and are not worth even the smallest price. Hawthorne never satirizes
Emersonianism, because he agrees with its dialectic of self-reliance against
societal repression, but he also shudders at Emerson’s casual stance
towards antinomianism. Still, Hawthorne has made his choice: he will not
join Emerson’s Party of Hope, but he has no use whatever for the Party of
Memory. Like his more capable readers, Hawthone falls in love with
Hester Prynne, and consigns the wretched Brown to a silent death-in-life:
Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only
dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?
Be it so, if you will. But, alas! it was a dream of evil omen
for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative,
a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become, from
the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath-day, when the
congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen,
because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear, and
drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from
the pulpit, with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand
on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of
saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or
misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale,
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dreading, lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray
blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awakening suddenly at
midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith, and at morning
or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled,
and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and
turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his
grave, a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and
his children and grand-children, a goodly procession, besides
neighbors, not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his
tomb-stone; for his dying hour was gloom.
Self-damnation could hardly go further, even in a tale by Hawthorne.
What precisely has destroyed Brown? Is it the American Psychosis, as analyzed
in a powerful essay of David Bromwich’s (reprinted in this volume)?
The living death of Brown would thus be another instance of the extinction
of American radical Protestantism, the failed transformation of John
Calvin to these shores. Jonathan Edwards is no longer even a ghostly presence,
while Ralph Waldo Emerson lives on (except for the South). Perhaps
Emerson is even too lively, since we are ruled by Emersonians of the Right,
even as Emersonians of the Left go on destroying our universities in the
name of sacred Resentment, determined to expiate, whatever it costs in
humanistic culture. There are no young Goodman Browns among my
current students, and only a few Hester Prynnes.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Hans Christian Andersen
(1805–1875)
ANDERSEN’S PRIME PRECURSORS WERE SHAKESPEARE AND SIR WALTER
Scott, and his best work can be thought of as an amalgam of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream and the almost as magnificent “Wandering Willie’s Tale”
from Scott’s Redgauntlet, with a certain admixture of Goethe and of the
“Universal Romanticism” of Novalis and E.T.A. Hoffman. Goethean
“renunciation” was central to Andersen’s art, which truly worships only one
god, who can be called Fate. Though Andersen was a grand original in his
fairy tales, he eagerly accepted from folklore its stoic acceptance of fate.
Nietzsche argued that, for the sake of life, origin and aim had to be kept
apart. In Andersen, there was no desire to separate origin and aim. It cost
his life much fulfillment: he never had a home of his own or a lasting love,
but he achieved an extraordinary literary art.
Like Walt Whitman’s, Andersen’s authentic sexual orientation was
homoerotic. Pragmatically, both great writers were autoerotic, though
Andersen’s longings for women were more poignant than Whitman’s largely
literary gestures towards heterosexuality. But Whitman was a poet-prophet,
who offered salvation, hardly Christian. Andersen professed a rather sentimental
devotion to the Christ child, but his art is pagan in nature. His Danish
contemporary, Kierkegaard, shrewdly sensed this early on. From the perspective
of the twenty-first century, Andersen and Kierkegaard strangely divide
between them the aesthetic eminence of Danish literature. In this introduction
to a volume of Andersen-criticism, I want to define precisely the qualities
of Andersen’s stories that go on making them imperishable, as we approach
the bicentennial of his birth in 2005. Kierkegaard himself rightly analyzed his
own project as the illumination of how impossible it is to become a Christian
in an ostensibly Christian society. Andersen covertly had a rather different
project: how to remain a child in an ostensibly adult world.
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I myself see no distinction between children’s literature and good or
great writing for extremely intelligent children of all ages. J.K. Rowling
and Stephen King are equally bad writers, appropriate titans of our new
Dark Age of the Screens: computer, motion pictures, television. One goes
on urging children of all ages to read and reread Andersen and Dickens,
Lewis Carroll and James Joyce, rather than Rowling and King. Sometimes
when I say that in public I am asked afterwards: it is not better to read
Rowling and King, and then go on to Andersen, Dickens, Carroll and
Joyce? The answer is pragmatic: our time here is limited. You necessarily
read and reread at the expense of other books. If we lived for several centuries,
there might be world enough and time, but the reality principle
forces us to choose.
I have just read through the twenty-two Stories of Hans Christian
Andersen, a new translation from the Danish by Diana Crone Frank and
Jeffrey Frank. Andersen called his memoir The Fairy Tale of My Life, and it
makes clear how painful was his emergence from the working class of
Denmark in the early nineteenth century. The driving purpose of his
career was to win fame and honor while not forgetting how hard the way
up had been. His memories of being read to by his father from The Arabian
Nights seem stronger than those of the actual circumstances of his upbringing.
Absorbing the biographies of Andersen is a curious process:
when I stand back from what I have learned I have the impression of a
remarkable directness in the teenage Andersen, who marched into
Copenhagen and collapsed himself upon the kindness of strangers. This
peculiar directness lasted all his life: he went throughout Europe introducing
himself to Heine, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Vigny, Mendelsohn,
Schumann, Dickens, the Brownings, and many others. A hunter of big
names, he hungered above all to become one himself, and won through by
the invention of his fairy tales.
Anderson was an outrageously prolific author in every genre: novels,
travelogues, poetry, stage plays, but he mattered and always will entirely
because of his unique fairy tales, which he transmuted into a creation of his
own, fusing the supernatural and the common life in ways that continue to
surprise me, more even than do the tales of Hoffmann, Gogol, and Kleist,
setting aside the sublimely dreadful but inescapable Poe.
Sexual frustration is Anderson’s pervasive though hidden obsession,
embodied in his witches and icy temptresses, and in his androgynous
princes. The progress of his fairy stories marches through more than forty
years of visions and revisions, and even now has not been fully studied.
Here I will give brief critical impressions and appreciations of six tales:
“The Little Mermaid” (1837), “The Wild Swans (1838), “The Snow
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Queen” (1845), “The Red Shoes” (1845), “The Shadow” (1847), and
“Auntie Toothache” (1872).
On its vivid surfaces “The Little Mermaid” suggests a parable of
renunciation, and yet in my own literary sense of the tale, it is a horror
story, centering upon the very scary figure of the sea witch:
She came to a large slimy clearing in the forest, where big fat
water snakes gamboled and showed off their disgusting yellow-
white undersides. In the middle of the clearing was a house
built out of the white skeletons of shipwrecked humans; that
was where the sea witch sat with a toad that she let eat out of
her mouth the same way that people let a little canary eat sugar.
She called the fat ugly water snakes her little chickens, and let
them frolic on her huge spongy chest.
“I think I know what you want,” the sea witch said. “You are
being very unwise. You can have it your way, but it’s going to
bring you grief, my lovely princess. You want to get rid of your
fish tail and replace it with two stumps to walk on, like a
human, so the young prince will fall in love with you, and you
will have him and an immortal soul.”
At that, the sea witch laughed so loudly and nastily that the
toad and snakes fell to the ground and rolled around. “You came
just in time,” the witch said. “After sunrise tomorrow I wouldn’t
have been able to help you for another year. I’ll make you a
drink, but before the sun comes up, you must swim to land, sit
on the shore, and drink it. Then your tail will split in two and
shrink into what humans call ‘pretty legs.’ But it hurts—it’s like
a sharp sword going through you. Everyone who sees you will
say that you’re the loveliest girl that they have ever seen. You will
keep your gliding walk; no dancer will soar like you. But every
step you take will feel like you are stepping on a sharp knife that
makes you bleed. If you’re willing to suffer all this, I’ll help you.”
“Yes!” the little mermaid said in a quivering voice, and she
thought about the prince and about winning an immortal soul.
“But remember,” the sea witch continued, as soon as you get
a human form, you can’t ever be a mermaid again. You can
never swim down through the water to your sisters and your
father’s castle. And unless you win the prince’s love so that he
forgets his father and mother for your sake and thinks only
about you and lets the pastor put your hands together so that
you become man and wife, you won’t get an immortal soul.
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The first morning after he has married someone else, your
heart will break, and you’ll turn into foam on the sea.”
“I still want to do it,” the little mermaid said. She was pale
as a corpse.
“But you have to pay me too,” the Sea Witch went on, “and
I ask for quite a bit. You have the prettiest voice of anyone on
the bottom of the sea, and I’m sure you imagine that you’ll
charm him. But you have to give me that voice. I want the most
precious thing you own for my precious drink. As you know, I
have to add my own blood to make the drink as sharp as a double-
edged sword.”
“But if you take my voice,” the little mermaid said, “what
will I have left?”
“Your beautiful figure,” the witch said, “your soaring walk,
and your eloquent eyes—with all that you can certainly enchant
a human heart. Well, well—have you lost heart? Stick out your
little tongue. Then I’ll cut it off as payment, and you’ll get my
powerful drink.”
There is a peculiar ghastliness about this, virtually unmatched in literary
fantasy. It has the aesthetic dignity of great art, yet a shudder goes
with it. Andersen’s imagination is as cruel as it is powerful, and “The Little
Mermaid” is least persuasive (to me) in its benign conclusion. The story
should end when the mermaid leaps from ship to sea and feels her body
dissolve into foam. Something in Andersen could not abide in this nihilistic
sacrifice, and so he allows an Ascension in which his heroine joins the
daughters of the air, thus recovering her voice. The aesthetic difficulty is
not sentimentality but sublimation, a defense against the erotic drive that
may work for the rare saint but almost never in imaginative literature.
There is no consistent allegory in “The Little Mermaid,” and whoever
finds a moral in it should be shot, a remark I intend in the spirit of
Mark Twain rather than the mode of Flannery O’Connor. I prefer
Andersen’s revision of a Danish folktale, “The Wild Swans,” which culminates
in utter ambivalence when another mute maiden, the beautiful Elisa,
undergoes a second marriage with a king so doltish he nearly burns her
alive as a witch, at the prompting of an evil archbishop. The weird remarriage
is appropriate in a tale where Elisa’s eleven brothers experience a radical
daily metamorphosis into eleven wild swans:
“We brothers,” the oldest said, “are wild swans as long as the
sun is up. When it sets, we get our human shape back. That’s
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why we always have to make sure that we have solid ground
underfoot when the sun sets. If we were flying among the
clouds, we would, as human beings, plunge into the deep. We
can’t stay here, but there’s a country as beautiful as this one on
the other side of the ocean. It’s a long distance. We have to cross
the big ocean, and there are no islands on the way where we can
stay for the night—only a solitary little rock juts up in the middle
of the sea. It’s just big enough for us to rest on side by side,
and when the sea is rough, the water sprays high above us.
That vision has the strangeness of lasting myth. There are disturbing
overtones here. Are we, in our youth, wild swans by day, and human again
only at night, resting on a solitary spot in the midst of an abyss? Meditating
upon the self of half-a-century ago, at seventy-four I am moved to a
Shakespearean sense of wonder by Andersen’s marvelous extended
metaphor.
In two famous stories of 1845, as he reaches meridian, Andersen
achieved a fresh power of imagination. “The Snow Queen” is called by
Andersen a tale in seven stories, or an “ice puzzle of the mind,” a marvelous
phrase taken from and alluding to the unfinished visionary novel of
Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Its evil troll, the Devil himself, makes a
mirror, eventually fragmented, that is the essence of reductiveness; that is,
what any person or thing is really like is simply the worst way it can be
viewed. At the center of Andersen’s tale are two children who at first defy
all reductiveness: Gerda and Kai. They are poor, but while not sister and
brother, they share fraternal love. The beautiful but icy Snow Queen
abducts Kai, and Gerda goes in quest of him. An old witch, benign but possessive,
appropriates Gerda, who departs for the wide world to continue
her search for Kai. But my summary is a hopeless parody of Andersen’s
blithe irony of a narrative, where even the most menacing entities pass by
in a phantasmagoric rush: talking reindeer, a bandit girl who offers friendship
even as she waves a knife, the Northern Lights, living snowflakes.
When Gerda finds Kai in the Snow Queen’s castle, she warms him with
kisses until he unthaws. Redeemed, they journey home together to a perpetual
summer of happiness, ambiguously sexual.
The fascination of “The Snow Queen” is Gerda’s continuous
resourcefulness and strength, which derives from her freedom or refusal of
all reductiveness. She is an implicit defense of Anderson’s power as a story
teller, his endless self-reliance. Perhaps Gerda is Andersen’s answer to
Kierkegaard, hardly his admirer. Gerda can be set against Kierkegaard at
his uncanniest: The Concept of Dread, The Sickness Unto Death, Fear and
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Trembling, Repetition. The titles themselves belong to the Snow Queen’s
realm, and not to Gerda’s and Andersen’s.
The alarming and famous story, “The Red Shoes,” always has frightened
me. The beautiful red dancing shoes whirl Karen into a cursed existence
of perpetual motion, that cannot be solved even when her feet (with
her consent) are cut off. Only her sanctified death accomplishes liberation.
Darkly enigmatic, Andersen’s tale hints at what Freud called over-determination,
and renders Karen into the antithesis of Gerda.
“The Shadow,” composed during a hot Naples summer of 1847, may
be Andersen’s most evasive masterpiece. The author and his shadow disengage
from one another, in the tradition of tales by Chamisso and
Hoffmann, and Andersen’s shadow is malign and Iago-like. He comes back
to Andersen, and persuades him to be a travel-companion, but as the shadow
of his own shadow, as it were. The reader begins to suffer a metaphysical
bewilderment, augmented by the involvement of a princess who sees
too clearly, yet takes the original shadow as her consort. Andersen threatens
exposure of identity, and is imprisoned by his former shadow, and soon
enough is executed. This crazy and embittered parable prophesies Kafka,
Borges, and Calvino, but more interestingly it returns us to everything
problematic and ambivalent about Andersen’s relation both to himself and
to his art.
My ultimate favorite story by Andersen is his chillingly hilarious
“Auntie Toothache,” composed less than three years before his death. He
may have intended it as his logos or defining Word, and it is spoken by
Andersen himself in the first person. As an inventor of a laughter that
hurts, Andersen follows Shakespeare and prophesies Philip Roth. There is
no figure in Andersen more menacing than Auntie Toothache:
A figure sat on the floor; it was thin and long, like those that
a child draws with a pencil on a slate. It was supposed to look
like a person: Its body was a single thin line; another two lines
made the arms, the legs were single lines too, and the head was
all angles.
The figure soon became clearer. It wore a kind of dress—
very thin, very fine—that showed that the figure belonged to
the female sex.
I heard a humming. Was it her or was it the wind that buzzed
like a horsefly in the crack of the windowpane?
No, it was Madame Toothache herself—Her Frightfulness,
Satania infernalis, God save us from her visit.
“This is a nice place to live,” she hummed. “It’s a good
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neighborhood—swampy, boggy ground. Mosquitoes used to
buzz by here with poison in their sting. Now I’m the one with
the stinger. It has to be sharpened on human teeth, and that fellow
on the bed has such shiny white ones. They’ve held their
own against sweet and sour, hot and cold, nutshells and plum
pits. But I’m going to wiggle them, jiggle them, feed them with
a draft, and chill them at their roots.”
As Her Frightfulness says: “Great poets must have great toothaches;
small poets, small toothaches.” There is a vertigo in the story: we cannot
know whether Auntie Toothache and the amiable Aunt Millie (who
encourages Andersen’s poetry) are one person or two. The penultimate
sentence is: “Everything goes into the trash.”
The accent is of Koheleth (Ecclesiastes): all is vanity. Andersen was a
visionary tale-teller, but his fairy-realm was malign. Of his aesthetic eminence,
I entertain no doubts, but I believe that we still have not learned
how to read him.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Edgar Allan Poe
(1809–1849)
CRITICS, EVEN GOOD ONES, ADMIRE POE’S STORIES FOR SOME OF THE ODDEST
of reasons. Poe, a true Southerner, abominated Emerson, plainly perceiving
that Emerson (like Whitman, like Lincoln) was not a Christian, not a
royalist, not a classicist. Self-reliance, the Emersonian answer to Original
Sin, does not exist in the Poe cosmos, where you necessarily start out
damned, doomed, and dismal. But I think Poe detested Emerson for some
of the same reasons Hawthorne and Melville more subtly resented him,
reasons that persist in the most distinguished living American writer,
Robert Penn Warren, and in many current academic literary critics in our
country. If you dislike Emerson, you probably will like Poe. Emerson
fathered pragmatism; Poe fathered precisely nothing, which is the way he
would have wanted it. Yvor Winters accused Poe of obscurantism, but that
truthful indictment no more damages Poe than does tastelessness and tone
deafness. Emerson, for better and for worse, was and is the mind of
America, but Poe was and is our hysteria, our uncanny unanimity in our
repressions. I certainly do not intend to mean by this that Poe was deeper
than Emerson in any way whatsoever. Emerson cheerfully and consciously
threw out the past. Critics tend to share Poe’s easy historicism; perhaps
without knowing it, they are gratified that every Poe story is, in too clear a
sense, over even as it begins. We don’t have to wait for Madeline Usher and
the house to fall in upon poor Roderick; they have fallen in upon him
already, before the narrator comes upon the place. Emerson exalted freedom,
which he and Thoreau usefully called “wildness.” No one in Poe is or
can be free or wild, and some academic admirers of Poe truly like everything
and everyone to be in bondage to a universal past. To begin is to be
free, godlike and Emersonian-Adamic, or Jeffersonian. But for a writer to
be free is bewildering and even maddening. What American writers and
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their exegetes half-unknowingly love in Poe is his more-than-Freudian
oppressive and curiously original sense and sensation of overdetermination.
Walter Pater once remarked that museums depressed him because
they made him doubt that anyone ever had once been young. No one in a
Poe story ever was young. As D.H. Lawrence angrily observed, everyone
in Poe is a vampire—Poe himself in particular.
II
Among Poe’s tales, the near-exception to what I have been saying is
the longest and most ambitious, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, just
as the best of Poe’s poems is the long prose-poem Eureka. Alas, even these
works are somewhat overvalued, if only because Poe’s critics understandably
become excessively eager to see him vindicated. Pym is readable, but
Eureka is extravagantly repetitious. Auden was quite taken with Eureka,
but could remember very little of it in conversation, and one can doubt
that he read it through, at least in English. Poe’s most advanced critic is
John T. Irwin, in his book American Hieroglyphics. Irwin rightly centers
upon Pym, while defending Eureka as an “aesthetic cosmology” addressed
to what in each of us Freud called the “bodily ego.” Irwin is too shrewd
to assert that Poe’s performance in Eureka fulfills Poe’s extraordinary
intentions:
What the poem Eureka, at once pre-Socratic and post-
Newtonian, asserts is the truth of the feeling, the bodily intuition,
that the diverse objects which the mind discovers in contemplating
external nature form a unity, that they are all parts
of one body which, if not infinite, is so gigantic as to be beyond
both the spatial and temporal limits of human perception. In
Eureka, then, Poe presents us with the paradox of a “unified”
macrocosmic body that is without a totalizing image—an alogical,
intuitive belief whose “truth” rests upon Poe’s sense that
cosmologies and myths of origin are forms of internal geography
that, under the guise of mapping the physical universe,
map the universe of desire.
Irwin might be writing of Blake, or of other visionaries who have
sought to map total forms of desire. What Irwin catches, by implication, is
Poe’s troubling anticipation of what is most difficult in Freud, the “frontier
concepts” between mind and body, such as the bodily ego, the non-
repressive defense of introjection, and above all, the drives or instincts.
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Poe, not just in Eureka and in Pym, but throughout his tales and even in
some of his verse, is peculiarly close to the Freudian speculation upon the
bodily ego. Freud, in The Ego and the Id (1923), resorted to the uncanny
language of E.T.A. Hoffmann (and of Poe) in describing this difficult
notion:
The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a
surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. If we wish
to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with
the “cortical homunculus” of the anatomists, which stands on
its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces backwards and,
as we know, has its speech-area on the left-hand side.
A footnote in the English translation of 1927, authorized by Freud but
never added to the German editions, elucidates the first sentence of this
description in a way analogous to the crucial metaphor in Poe that concludes
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym:
I.e. the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly
from those springing from the surface of the body, besides, as
we have seen above, representing the superficies of the mental
apparatus.
A considerable part of Poe’s mythological power emanates from his
own difficult sense that the ego is always a bodily ego. The characters of
Poe’s tales live out nearly every conceivable fantasy of introjection and
identification, seeking to assuage their melancholia by psychically devouring
the lost objects of their affections. D.H. Lawrence, in his Studies in
Classic American Literature (1923), moralized powerfully against Poe, condemning
him for “the will-to-love and the will-to-consciousness, asserted
against death itself. The pride of human conceit in KNOWLEDGE.” It is illuminating
that Lawrence attacked Poe in much the same spirit as he
attacked Freud, who is interpreted in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious as
somehow urging us to violate the taboo against incest. The interpretation
is as extravagant as Lawrence’s thesis that Poe urged vampirism upon us,
but there remains something suggestive in Lawrence’s violence against
both Freud and Poe. Each placed the elitist individual in jeopardy,
Lawrence implied, by hinting at the primacy of fantasy not just in the sexual
life proper, but in the bodily ego’s constitution of itself through acts of
incorporation and identification.
The cosmology of Eureka and the narrative of Pym alike circle around
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fantasies of incorporation. Eureka’s subtitle is “An Essay on the Material and
Spiritual Universe” and what Poe calls its “general proposition” is heightened
by italics: “In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause
of all Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation.” Freud, in his cosmology,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, posited that the inorganic had preceded
the organic, and also that it was the tendency of all things to return to
their original state. Consequently, the aim of all life was death. The death
drive, which became crucial for Freud’s later dualisms, is nevertheless pure
mythology, since Freud’s only evidence for it was the repetition compulsion,
and it is an extravagant leap from repetition to death. This reliance upon
one’s own mythology may have prompted Freud’s audacity when, in the New
Introductory Lectures, he admitted that the theory of drives was, so to speak,
his own mythology, drives being not only magnificent conceptions but particularly
sublime in their indefiniteness. I wish I could assert that Eureka has
some of the speculative force of Beyond the Pleasure Principle or even of
Freud’s disciple Ferenczi’s startling Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality; but
Eureka does badly enough when compared to Emerson’s Nature, which itself
has only a few passages worthy of what Emerson wrote afterwards. And yet
Valéry in one sense was justified in his praise for Eureka. For certain intellectuals,
Eureka performs a mythological function akin to what Poe’s tales
continue to do for hosts of readers. Eureka is unevenly written, badly repetitious,
and sometimes opaque in its abstractness, but like the tales it seems not
to have been composed by a particular individual. The universalism of a
common nightmare informs it. If the tales lose little, or even gain, when we
retell them to others in our own words, Eureka gains by Valéry’s observations,
or by the summaries of recent critics like John Irwin or Daniel
Hoffman. Translation even into his own language always benefits Poe.
I haven’t the space, or the desire, to summarize Eureka, and no summary
is likely to do anything besides deadening both my readers and
myself. Certainly Poe was never more passionately sincere than in composing
Eureka, of which he affirmed: “What I here propound is true.” But
these are the closing sentences of Eureka:
Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually
merged in the general consciousness—that Man, for example,
ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain
that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence
as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear in mind that all
is Life—Life—Life within Life—the less within the greater,
and all within the Spirit Divine.
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To this, Poe appends a “Note”:
The pain of the consideration that we shall lose our individual
identity, ceases at once when we further reflect that the process,
as above described, is, neither more nor less than that of the
absorption, by each individual intelligence of all other intelligences
(that is, of the Universe) into its own. That God may be
all in all, each must become God.
Allen Tate, not unsympathetic to his cousin, Mr. Poe, remarked of
Poe’s extinction in Eureka that “there is a lurid sublimity in the spectacle
of his taking God along with him into a grave which is not smaller than the
universe.” If we read closely, Poe’s trope is “absorption,” and we are where
we always are in Poe, amid ultimate fantasies of introjection in which the
bodily ego and the cosmos become indistinguishable. Again, I suspect this
judgment hardly weakens Poe, since his strength is no more cognitive than
it is stylistic. Poe’s mythology, like the mythology of psychoanalysis that we
cannot yet bear to acknowledge as primarily a mythology, is peculiarly
appropriate to any modernism, whether you want to call it early, high or
post-modernism. The definitive judgment belongs here to T.W. Adorno,
certainly the most authentic theoretician of all modernisms, in his last
book, Aesthetic Theory. Writing on “reconciliation and mimetic adaptation
to death,” Adorno blends the insights of Jewish negative theology and psychoanalysis:
Whether negativity is the barrier or the truth of art is not for
art to decide. Art works are negative per se because they are subject
to the law of objectification; that is, they kill what they
objectify, tearing it away from its context of immediacy and real
life. They survive because they bring death. This is particularly
true of modern art, where we notice a general mimetic abandonment
to reification, which is the principle of death. Illusion
in art is the attempt to escape from this principle. Baudelaire
marks a watershed, in that art after him seeks to discard illusion
without resigning itself to being a thing among things. The
harbingers of modernism, Poe and Baudelaire, were the first
technocrats of art.
Baudelaire was more than a technocrat of art, as Adorno knew, but
Poe would be only that except for his mythmaking gift. C.S. Lewis may
have been right when he insisted that such a gift could exist even apart
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from other literary endowments. Blake and Freud are inescapable myth-
makers who were also cognitively and stylistically powerful. Poe is a great
fantasist whose thoughts were commonplace and whose metaphors were
dead. Fantasy, mythologically considered, combines the stances of
Narcissus and Prometheus, which are ideologically antithetical to one
another, but figuratively quite compatible. Poe is at once the Narcissus and
the Prometheus of his nation. If that is right, then he is inescapable, even
though his tales contrast weakly with Hawthorne’s, his poems scarcely bear
reading, and his speculative discourses fade away in juxtaposition to
Emerson’s, his despised Northern rival.
III
To define Poe’s mythopoeic inevitability more closely, I turn to his
story “Ligeia” and to the end of Pym. Ligeia, a tall, dark, slender transcendentalist,
dies murmuring a protest against the feeble human will, which
cannot keep us forever alive. Her distraught and nameless widower, the
narrator, endeavors to comfort himself, first with opium, and then with a
second bride, “the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanian, of
Tremaine.” Unfortunately, he has little use for this replacement, and so she
sickens rapidly and dies. Recurrently, the corpse revivifies, only to die yet
again and again. At last, the cerements are stripped away, and the narrator
confronts the undead Ligeia, attired in the death-draperies of her now
evaporated successor.
As a parable of the vampiric will, this works well enough. The
learned Ligeia presumably has completed her training in the will during
her absence, or perhaps merely owes death a substitute, the insufficiently
transcendental Rowena. What is mythopoeically more impressive is the
ambiguous question of the narrator’s will. Poe’s own life, like Walt
Whitman’s, is an American mythology, and what all of us generally
remember about it is that Poe married his first cousin, Virginia Clemm,
before she turned fourteen. She died a little more than ten years later, having
been a semi-invalid for most of that time. Poe himself died less than
three years after her, when he was just forty. “Ligeia,” regarded by Poe as
his best tale, was written a bit more than a year into the marriage. The later
Freud implicitly speculates that there are no accidents; we die because we
will to die, our character being also our fate. In Poe’s myth also, ethos is
the daemon, and the daemon is our destiny. The year after Virginia died,
Poe proposed marriage to the widowed poet Sarah Helen Whitman.
Biographers tell us that the lady’s doubts were caused by rumors of Poe’s
bad character, but perhaps Mrs. Whitman had read “Ligeia”! In any event,
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this marriage did not take place, nor did Poe survive to marry another
widow, his childhood sweetheart Elmira Royster Shelton. Perhaps she too
might have read “Ligeia” and forborne.
The narrator of “Ligeia” has a singularly bad memory, or else a very
curious relationship to his own will, since he begins by telling us that he
married Ligeia without ever having troubled to learn her family name. Her
name itself is legend, or romance, and that was enough. As the story’s second
paragraph hints, the lady was an opium dream with the footfall of a
shadow. The implication may be that there never was such a lady, or even
that if you wish to incarnate your reveries, then you must immolate your
consubstantial Rowena. What is a touch alarming to the narrator is the
intensity of Ligeia’s passion for him, which was manifested however only
by glances and voice so long as the ideal lady lived. Perhaps this baffled
intensity is what kills Ligeia, through a kind of narcissistic dialectic, since
she is dominated not by the will of her lust but by the lust of her will. She
wills her infinite passion towards the necessarily inadequate narrator and
when (by implication) he fails her, she turns the passion of her will against
dying and at last against death. Her dreadful poem, “The Conqueror
Worm,” prophesies her cyclic return from death: “Through a circle that
ever returneth in / To the self-same spot.” But when she does return, the
spot is hardly the same. Poor Rowena only becomes even slightly interesting
to her narrator-husband when she sickens unto death, and her body is
wholly usurped by the revived Ligeia. And yet the wretched narrator is a
touch different, if only because his narcissism is finally out of balance with
his first wife’s grisly Prometheanism. There are no final declarations of
Ligeia’s passion as the story concludes. The triumph of her will is complete,
but we know that the narrator’s will has not blent itself into Ligeia’s.
His renewed obsession with her eyes testifies to a continued sense of her
daemonic power over him, but his final words hint at what the story’s
opening confirms: she will not be back for long—and remains “my lost
love.”
The conclusion of Pym has been brilliantly analyzed by John Irwin,
and so I want to glance only briefly at what is certainly Poe’s most effective
closure:
And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a
chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our
pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions
than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin
of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
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Irwin demonstrates Poe’s reliance here upon the Romantic topos of
the Alpine White Shadow, the magnified projection of the observer himself.
The chasm Pym enters is the familiar Romantic Abyss, not a part of
the natural world but belonging to eternity, before the creation. Reflected
in that abyss, Pym beholds his own shrouded form, perfect in the whiteness
of the natural context. Presumably, this is the original bodily ego, the
Gnostic self before the fall into creation. As at the close of Eureka, Poe
brings Alpha and Omega together in an apocalyptic circle. I suggest we
read Pym’s, which is to say Poe’s, white shadow as the American triumph
of the will, as illusory as Ligeia’s usurpation of Rowena’s corpse.
Poe teaches us, through Pym and Ligeia, that as Americans we are
both subject and object to our own quests. Emerson, in Americanizing the
European sense of the abyss, kept the self and the abyss separate as facts:
“There may be two or three or four steps, according to the genius of each,
but for every seeing soul there are two absorbing facts—I and the Abyss.”
Poe, seeking to avoid Emersonianism, ends with only one fact, and it is
more a wish than a fact: “I will to be the Abyss.” This metaphysical despair
has appealed to the Southern American literary tradition and to its
Northern followers. The appeal cannot be refuted, because it is myth, and
Poe backed the myth with his life as well as his work. If the Northern or
Emersonian myth of our literary culture culminates in the beautiful image
of Walt Whitman as wound-dresser, moving as a mothering father through
the Civil War Washington, D.C., hospitals, then the Southern or countermyth
achieves its perfect stasis at its start, with Poe’s snow-white shadow
shrouding the chasm down which the boat of the soul is about to plunge.
Poe’s genius was for negativity and opposition, and the affirmative force of
Emersonian America gave him the impetus his daemonic will required.
IV
It would be a relief to say that Poe’s achievement as a critic is not
mythological, but the splendid, new and almost complete edition of his
essays, reviews and marginalia testifies otherwise. It shows Poe indeed to
have been Adorno’s “technocrat of art.” Auden defended Poe’s criticism by
contrasting the subjects Baudelaire was granted—Delacroix, Constantin
Guys, Wagner—with the books Poe was given to review, such as The
Christian Florist, The History of Texas, and Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia
Maria Davidson. The answer to Auden is that Poe also wrote about Bryant,
Byron, Coleridge, Dickens, Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Longfellow,
Shelley, and Tennyson; a ninefold providing scope enough for any authentic
critical consciousness. Nothing that Poe had to say about these poets and
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storytellers is in any way memorable or at all an aid to reading them. There
are no critical insights, no original perceptions, no accurate or illuminating
juxtapositions or historical placements. Here is Poe on Tennyson, from his
Marginalia, which generally surpasses his other criticism:
Why do some persons fatigue themselves in attempts to unravel
such phantasy-pieces as the “Lady of Shalott”? ... If the
author did not deliberately propose to himself a suggestive
indefinitiveness of meaning, with the view of bringing about a
definitiveness of vague and therefore of spiritual effect—this, at
least, arose from the silent analytical promptings of that poetic
genius which, in its supreme development, embodies all orders
of intellectual capacity.
I take this as being representative of Poe’s criticism, because it is
uninterestingly just plain wrong about “The Lady of Shalott.” No other
poem, even by the great word-painter Tennyson, is deliberately so definite
in meaning and effect. Everything vague precisely is excluded in this
perhaps most Pre-Raphaelite of all poems, where each detail contributes
to an impression that might be called hard-edged phantasmagoria. If we
take as the three possibilities of nineteenth-century practical criticism the
sequence of Arnold, Pater, and Wilde, we find Poe useless in all three
modes: Arnold’s seeing the object as in itself it really is, Pater’s seeing
accurately one’s own impression of the object, and the divine Oscar’s sublime
seeing of the object as in itself it really is not. If “The Lady of
Shalott” is the object, then Poe does not see anything: the poem as in
itself it is, one’s impression of the poem as that is, or best of all the
Wildean sense of what is missing or excluded from the poem. Poe’s
descriptive terms are “indefinitiveness” and “vague,” but Tennyson’s
poem is just the reverse:
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She looked down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.
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No, Poe as practical critic is a true match for most of his contemporary
subjects, such as S. Anna Lewis, author of The Child of the Sea and
Other Poems (1848). Of her lyric “The Forsaken,” Poe wrote, “We have
read this little poem more than twenty times and always with increasing
admiration. It is inexpressibly beautiful” (Poe’s italics). I quote only the first
of its six stanzas:
It hath been said—for all who die
there is a tear;
Some pining, bleeding heart to sigh
O’er every bier:
But in that hour of pain and dread
Who will draw near
Around my humble couch and shed
One farewell tear?
Well, but there is Poe as theoretician, Valéry has told us. Acute self-
consciousness in Poe was strongly misread by Valéry as the inauguration
and development of severe and skeptical ideas. Presumably, this is the Poe
of three famous essays: “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The Rationale
of Verse,” and “The Poetic Principle.” Having just reread these pieces, I
have no possibility of understanding a letter of Valéry to Mallarmé which
prizes the theories of Poe as being “so profound and so insidiously
learned.” Certainly we prize the theories of Valéry for just those qualities,
and so I have come full circle to where I began, with the mystery of French
Poe. Valéry may be said to have read Poe in the critical modes both of
Pater and of Wilde. He saw his impression of Poe clearly, and he saw Poe’s
essays as in themselves they really were not. Admirable, and so Valéry
brought to culmination the critical myth that is French Poe.
V
Whose head is swinging from the swollen strap?
Whose body smokes along the bitten rails,
Bursts from a smoldering bundle far behind
In back forks of the chasms of the brain—
Puffs from a riven stump far out behind
In interborough fissures of the mind ...?
Hart Crane’s vision of Poe, in the “Tunnel” section of The Bridge,
tells us again why the mythopoeic Poe is inescapable for American literary
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mythology. Poe’s nightmare projections and introjections suggest the New
York City subway as the new underground, where Coleridge’s “deep
Romantic chasm” has been internalized into “the chasms of the brain.”
Whatever his actual failures as poet and critic, whatever the gap between
style and idea in his tales, Poe is central to the American canon, both for
us and for the rest of the world. Hawthorne implicitly and Melville explicitly
made far more powerful critiques of the Emersonian national hope,
but they were by no means wholly negative in regard to Emerson and his
pragmatic vision of American Self-Reliance. Poe was savage in denouncing
minor transcendentalists like Bronson Alcott and William Ellery
Channing, but his explicit rejection of Emerson confined itself to the
untruthful observation that Emerson was indistinguishable from Thomas
Carlyle. Poe should have survived to read Carlyle’s insane and amazing
pamphlet “The Nigger Question,” which he would have adored.
Mythologically, Poe is necessary because all of his work is a hymn to negativity.
Emerson was a great theoretician of literature as of life, a good
practical critic (when he wanted to be, which was not often), a very good
poet (sometimes) and always a major aphorist and essayist. Poe, on a line-
by-line or sentence-by-sentence basis, is hardly a worthy opponent. But
looking in the French way, as T.S. Eliot recommended, “we see a mass of
unique shape and impressive size to which the eye constantly returns.”
Eliot was probably right, in mythopoeic terms.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Nikolai Gogol
(1809–1852)
DOSTOEVSKY FAMOUSLY SAID: “WE ALL CAME OUT FROM UNDER GOGOL’S
‘Overcoat,’” a short story concerning a wretched copying clerk whose new
overcoat is stolen. Disdained by the authorities, to whom he duly protests,
the poor fellow dies, after which his ghost continues to search vainly for
justice. Good as the story is, it is not the best of Gogol, which may be “Old-
World Landowners” or the insane “The Nose,” which begins when a barber,
at breakfast, discovers a customer’s nose inside a loaf of bread freshly
baked by his wife. The spirit of Gogol, subtly alive in much of Nabokov,
achieves its apotheosis in the triumphant “Gogol’s Wife,” by the modern
Italian story-writer Tommaso Landolfi, perhaps the funniest and most
unnerving story that I’ve yet read.
The narrator, Gogol’s friend and biographer, “reluctantly” tells us the
story of Gogol’s wife. The actual Gogol, a religious obsessive, never married,
and deliberately starved himself to death at forty-three or so, after
burning his unpublished manuscripts. But Landolfi’s Gogol (who might
have been invented by Kafka or by Borges) has married a rubber balloon, a
splendidly inflatable dummy who assumes different shapes and sizes at her
husband’s whim. Much in love with his wife, in one of her forms or another,
Gogol enjoys sexual relations with her, and bestows upon her the name
Caracas, after the capital of Venezuela, for reasons known only to the mad
writer.
For some years, all goes well, until Gogol contracts syphilis, which he
rather unfairly blames upon Caracas. Ambivalence towards his silent wife
gains steadily in Gogol through the years. He accuses Caracas of self-gratification,
and even betrayal, so that she becomes bitter and excessively religious.
Finally, the enraged Gogol pumps too much air into Caracas (quite
deliberately) until she bursts and scatters into the air. Collecting the
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remnants of Madame Gogol, the great writer burns them in the fireplace,
where they share the fate of his unpublished works. Into the same fire,
Gogol casts also a rubber doll, the son of Caracas. After this final catastrophe,
the biographer defends Gogol from the charge of wife-beating, and
salutes the memory of the writer’s lofty genius.
The best prelude (or postlude) to reading Landolfi’s “Gogol’s Wife”
is to read some stories by Gogol, on the basis of which we will not doubt
the reality of the unfortunate Caracas. She is as likely a paramour as Gogol
could ever have discovered (or invented) for himself. In contrast, Landolfi
could hardly have composed much the same story and called it
“Maupassant’s Wife,” let alone “Turgenev’s Wife.” No, it has to be Gogol
and Gogol alone, and I rarely doubt Landolfi’s story, particularly just after
each rereading. Caracas has a reality that Borges neither seeks nor achieves
for his Tlön. As Gogol’s only possible bride, she seems to me the ultimate
parody of Frank O’Connor’s insistence that the lonely voice crying out in
the modern short story is that of the Submerged Population. Who could
be more submerged than Gogol’s wife?
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Ivan Turgenev
(1818–1883)
MY FAVORITES AMONG THE SPORTSMAN’S SKETCHES ARE “BEZHIN LEA” AND
“Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands,” but as I have written about them in
How to Read and Why (2000), I turn here to “Forest and Steppe,” the last of
the Sketches.
With Chekhov, Turgenev invented one prevalent mode of the modern
short story, challenged later by the irreality of what could be called the
Kafka-Borges tradition. The aesthetic splendor of Turgenev’s Sketches partly
depends upon the writer’s apprehension of natural beauty: this hunter’s
quarry is not so much game as vista.
“Forest and Steppe” begins by emphasizing the hunter’s solitary joy:
By the time you’ve travelled two miles or so the rim of the sky
is beginning to crimson; in the birches jackdaws are awakening
and clumsily fluttering from branch to branch; sparrows twitter
about the dark hayricks. The air grows brighter, the road clearer,
the sky lightens, suffusing the clouds with whiteness and the
fields with green. Lights burn red in the cottages and sleepy
voices can be heard beyond the gates. In the meantime dawn
has burst into flame; stripes of gold have risen across the sky
and wreaths of mist form in the ravines; to the loud singing of
skylarks and the soughing of the wind before dawn the sun rises,
silent and purple, above the horizon. Light floods over the
world and your heart trembles within you like a bird.
Everything is so fresh, gay and lovely! You can see for miles.
Here a village glimmers beyond the woodland; there, farther
away, is another village with a white church and then a hill with
a birchwood; beyond it is the marsh to which you are driving ...
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Step lively there, horses! Forward at a brisk trot! ... No more
than two miles to go now. The sun is rising quickly, the sky is
clear ... The weather will be perfect. You meet a herd of cattle
coming in a long line from the village. Then you ascend the hill
... What a view! The river winds away for seven miles or more,
a faint blue glimmer through the mist; beyond it are the water-
green meadows: beyond them, low-lying hills; in the distance
lapwings veer and cry above the marsh; through the gleaming
moisture which pervades the air the distance emerges clearly ...
there is no summer haze. How freely one breathes the air into
one’s lungs, how buoyant are one’s limbs, how strong one feels
in the grip of this fresh springtime atmosphere!
The line of descent to Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories is clear: the
issue is solitary freedom, Hemingway’s “living your life all the way up.”
You and your dog are at last alone together in the forest, and you behold a
totality of vision:
You walk along the edge of the forest, keeping your eyes on the
dog, but in the meantime there come to mind beloved images,
beloved faces, the living and the dead, and long-since dormant
impressions unexpectedly awaken; the imagination soars and
dwells on the air like a bird, and everything springs into movement
with such clarity and stands before the eyes. Your heart
either suddenly quivers and starts beating fast, passionately racing
forward, or drowns irretrievably in recollections. The
whole of life unrolls easily and swiftly like a scroll; a man has
possession of his whole past, all his feelings, all his powers, his
entire soul. And nothing in his surroundings can disturb him—
there is no sun, no wind, no noise ...
This vision, however individually total, knows its own limits. Yours is
the freedom of the forest, and not the dismaying sublime of the steppe:
Farther, farther! The steppelands are approaching. You look
down from a hill—what a view! Round, low hillocks, ploughed
waves; ravines overgrown with bushes weave among them;
small woods are scattered here and there like elongated islands;
from village to village run narrow tracks; churches gleam white;
between thickets of willow glitters a small river, its flow
staunched in four places by dams; far off in the field wild cranes
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stick out as they waddle in file; an antiquated landowner’s mansion
with its outbuildings, orchard and threshing floor is settled
comfortably beside a small pond. But you go on travelling, farther
and farther. The hillocks grow shallower and shallower
and there is hardly a tree to be seen. Finally, there it is—the
limitless, enormous steppe no eye can encompass!
The Sketches confine themselves deliberately to what the eye can
encompass. For confronting the steppe, you need to be Tolstoy, yourself a
sublime nature, as strong as what you might behold. With remarkable,
nuanced control, Turgenev subtly implies his own limits, and shows us
again why his Sketches are so modulated a masterpiece.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Herman Melville
(1819–1891)
SHAKESPEARE, FOREMOST OF WRITERS, DEEPLY AFFECTED MELVILLE’SART,
both in Moby-Dick and in the shorter fiction. Captain Ahab broods aloud in
the mode of Macbeth, while Claggart is manifestly a version of Iago. Even
“Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which on its surface owes more to Charles Dickens,
is indebted to Shakespeare’s mastery of ellipsis, the art of leaving-out. What
matters most in Melville’s story is never said; an enormous pathos is hinted,
but is not expressed. Bartleby and the narrator barely can speak to one another,
yet abysses could be explored between them. When the narrator murmurs
that the dead Bartleby is asleep “With kings and counselors,” we are startled
by the aesthetic dignity of the Jobean but thoroughly Shakespearean evocation,
and yet the surprise vanishes upon reflection. Julius Caesar and Brutus,
in what should be their one crucial exchange before the scene of the assassination,
share a banal moment of asking and telling the time of day. Edmund
and King Lear never address one another., and except for one moment in the
wings, Antony and Oeopatra are never left alone together. In the painful scene
where the newly crowned Henry V rejects Falstaff, the emancipated monarch
does not allow the great wit to say anything. This elliptical mode, a far more
prevalent Shakespearean technique than is generally realized, prompts
Melville’s reticences in “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”
“The Encantadas” is overtly Spenserian and Bunyanesque, but more
darkly it refracts The Tempest. In “Sketch Seventh” the Creole Dog-King is
a savage parody of Prospero, ruling his Enchanted Isle not with Ariel and
a band of sprites, but with fierce dogs. “Sketch Ninth” extends the parody,
when the dreadful Oberlus overtly identifies himself with Caliban: “This
island’s mine by Sycorax my mother.” Yet Oberlus is more Timon of Athens
than Caliban, and “The Encantadas” serves for Melville the purpose effected
for Shakespeare by Timon of Athens, the most rancid of tragedies.
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“Benito Cereno” which seems to me the masterpiece of Melville’s
shorter fiction, is a wonderfully enigmatic story in which Captain Delano
and Benito Cereno talk past one another in ways that transcend their difficult
situation, in which Delano cannot know that Cereno and his ship are
the captives of a slave rebellion. Even when the rescue has been accomplished,
the American and the Spanish captains are in different worlds:
“But these mild trades that now fan your cheek. Do they not
come with a human-like healing to you? Warm friends, stead
fast friends are trades.”
“With their steadfastness they but waft me to my tomb,
senor,” was the foreboding response.
“You are saved,” cried Captain Delano, more and more
astonished and pained; “you are saved; what has cast such a
shadow upon you?”
“The negro.”
Prospero tells us that when he is back in Milan, every third thought
shall be his grave, even though the great Magus could not be more triumphant.
It is not Caliban who is Prospero’s shadow of mortality, but the
lost vocation of having been an Hermetic sage. Benito Cereno has more
than the shadow of Babo upon him; his own vocation as sea-captain is lost,
under the shadow that symbolically he terms “the negro.” The inwardness
of Cereno’s reflection, in contrast to Delano’s robust outwardness, is a
Shakespearean contrast. Cereno is now lost in the growing inward self,
most Shakespearean of inventions.
The Adamic Billy Budd is not a Shakespearean figure, which
enhances his helplessness at confronting Iago in Claggart. The “monomania”
of Claggart clearly derives from Iago’s drive to ruin Othello.
“Motiveless malignity,” Coleridge’s phrase for Iago, is far more applicable
to Claggart. It would be difficult to accept Claggart, were it not for our
experience of Iago. The effect of Shakespeare’s Iago upon Melville’s
Claggart is more than a matter of influence; “contamination” would be an
apter word than “influence.” Claggart’s “natural depravity” is an uncanny
transmission from Iago to Melville’s evil genius.
II
Melville’s The Piazza Tales was published in 1856, five years after
Moby-Dick. Two of the six tales—“Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Benito
Cereno”—are commonly and rightly accepted among Melville’s strongest
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works, together with Moby-Dick and (rather more tenuously) The
Confidence-Man and Billy Budd, Sailor. Two others—“The Encantadas, or
Enchanted Isles” and “The Bell-Tower”—seem to me even better, being
equal to the best moments in Moby-Dick. Two of the Piazza Tales are relative
trifles: “The Piazza” and “The Lightning-Rod Man.” A volume of
novellas with four near-masterpieces is an extraordinary achievement, but
particularly poignant if, like Melville, you had lost your reading public after
the early success of Typee and Omoo, the more equivocal reception of Mardi,
and the return to a wider audience with Redburn and even more with White
Jacket. Moby-Dick today is, together with Leaves of Grass and Huckleberry
Finn, one of the three candidates for our national epic, but like Leaves of
Grass it found at first only the one great reader (Hawthorne for Melville,
Emerson for Whitman) and almost no popular response. What was left of
Melville’s early audience was killed off by the dreadful Pierre, a year after
Moby-Dick, and despite various modern salvage attempts Pierre certainly is
unreadable, in the old-fashioned sense of that now critically abused word.
You just cannot get through it, unless you badly want and need to do so.
The best of The Piazza Tales show the post-Pierre Melville writing
for himself, possibly Hawthorne, and a few strangers. Himself the sole support
of wife, four children, mother, and several sisters, Melville was generally
in debt from at least 1855 on, and Hawthorne and Richard Henry
Dana, though they tried, could not get the author of Pierre appointed to a
consulate. In the late 1850s, the tormented and shy Melville attempted the
lecture circuit, but as he was neither a pulpit-pounder like Henry Ward
Beecher, nor a preternaturally eloquent sage like Ralph Waldo Emerson,
he failed rather badly. Unhappily married, mother-ridden, an apparent literary
failure; the author of The Piazza Tales writes out of the depths.
Steeped, as were Carlyle and Ruskin, in the King James Bible, Melville no
more believed in the Bible than did Carlyle and Ruskin. But even as Moby-
Dick found its legitimate and overwhelming precursors in the Bible,
Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, so do The Piazza Tales. Melville’s rejection
of biblical theology, his almost Gnostic distrust of nature and history
alike, finds powerful expression in The Piazza Tales, as it did throughout all
his later fictional prose and his verse.
III
“The Bell-Tower” is a tale of only fifteen pages but it has such resonance
and strength that each rereading gives me the sense that I have experienced
a superb short novel. Bannadonna, “the great mechanician, the
unblest foundling,” seeking to conquer a larger liberty, like Prometheus,
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instead extended the empire of necessity. His great Bell-Tower, intended
to be the noblest in Italy, survives only as “a stone pine,” a “black massed
stump.” It is the new tower of Babel:
Like Babel’s, its base was laid in a high hour of renovated earth,
following the second deluge, when the waters of the Dark Ages
had dried up, and once more the green appeared. No wonder
that, after so long and deep submersion, the jubilant expectation
of the race should, as with Noah’s sons, soar into Shinar
aspiration.
In firm resolve, no man in Europe at that period went
beyond Bannadonna. Enriched through commerce with the
Levant, the state in which he lived voted to have the noblest
Bell-Tower in Italy. His repute assigned him to be architect.
Stone by stone, month by month, the tower rose. Higher,
higher; snail-like in pace, but torch or rocket in its pride.
After the masons would depart, the builder, standing alone
upon its ever-ascending summit, at close of every day, saw that
he overtopped still higher walls and trees. He would tarry till a
late hour there, wrapped in schemes of other and still loftier
piles. Those who of saints’ days thronged the spot—hanging to
the rude poles of scaffolding, like sailors on yards, or bees on
boughs, unmindful of lime and dust, and falling chips of
stone—their homage not the less inspirited him to self-esteem.
At length the holiday of the Tower came. To the sound of
viols, the climax-stone slowly rose in air, and, amid the firing of
ordnance, was laid by Bannadonna’s hands upon the final
course. Then mounting it, he stood erect, alone, with folded
arms, gazing upon the white summits of blue inland Alps, and
whiter crests of bluer Alps off-shore—sights invisible from the
plain. Invisible, too, from thence was that eye he turned below,
when, like the cannon booms, came up to him the people’s
combustions of applause.
That which stirred them so was, seeing with what serenity
the builder stood three hundred feet in air, upon an unrailed
perch. This none but he durst do. But his periodic standing
upon the pile, in each stage of its growth—such discipline had
its last result.
We recognize Captain Ahab in Bannadonna, though Ahab has his
humanities, and the great mechanician lacks all pathos. Ahab plays out an
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avenger’s tragedy, but Bannadonna’s purpose lacks any motivation except
pride. His pride presumably is related to the novelist’s, and the black stump
that is the sole remnant of the Bell-Tower might as well be Pierre, little as
Melville would have welcomed such an identification. The sexual mortification
of the image is palpable, yet adds little to the comprehensiveness of
what will become Bannadonna’s doom, since that necessarily is enacted as
a ritual of castration anyway. Melville’s Prometheans, Ahab and
Bannadonna, have an overtly Gnostic quarrel with the heavens. Melville’s
narratives, at their strongest, know implicitly what Kafka asserted with rare
explicitness in his great parable:
The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens.
Doubtless that is so, but it proves nothing against the
heavens for the heavens signify simply: the impossibility of
crows.
In Melville, the heavens signify simply: the impossibility of Ahab and
of Bannadonna. Ahab is a hunter and not a builder, but to destroy Moby-
Dick or to build the Bell-Tower would be to pile up the Tower of Babel
and get away with it:
If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without
ascending it, the work would have been permitted.
Kafka’s aphorism would be an apt title for Melville’s story, with
Bannadonna who has built his tower partly in order to ascend it and to
stand “three hundred feet in air, upon an unrailed perch.” Kafka could have
told Bannadonna that a labyrinth underground would have been better,
though of course that too would not have been permitted, since the heavens
would have regarded it as the pit of Babel:
What are you building?—I want to dig a subterranean passage.
Some progress must be made. My station up there is much too
high.
We are digging the pit of Babel.
Bannadonna is closest to the most extraordinary of the Kafkan parables
concerning the Tower, in which a scholar maintains that the Great
Wall of China “alone would provide for the first time in the history of
mankind a secure foundation for the new Tower of Babel. First the wall,
therefore, and then the tower.” The final sentence of “The Great Wall and
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the Tower of Babel” could have impressed Melville as the best possible
commentary upon Bannadonna-Melville, both in his project and his fate:
There were many wild ideas in people’s heads at that time—this
scholar’s book is only one example—perhaps simply because so
many were trying to join forces as far as they could for the
achievement of a single aim. Human nature, essentially
changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it
binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it
rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds and its very self.
The fall of Bannadonna commences with the casting of the great
bell:
The unleashed metals bayed like hounds. The workmen
shrunk. Through their fright, fatal harm to the bell was dreaded.
Fearless as Shadrach, Bannadonna, rushing through the
glow, smote the chief culprit with his ponderous ladle. From
the smitten part, a splinter was dashed into the seething mass,
and at once was melted in.
That single blemish is evidently Melville’s personal allegory for
whatever sense of guilt, in his own pained judgment, flawed his own
achievement, even in Moby-Dick. More interesting is Bannadonna’s creation
of a kind of golem or Frankensteinean monster, charmingly called
Haman, doubtless in tribute to the villain of the Book of Esther. Haman,
intended to be the bell-ringer, is meant also “as a partial type of an ulterior
creature,” a titanic helot who would be called Talus, like the rather sinister
iron man who wields an iron flail against the rebellious Irish in the
savage book 5 of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. But Talus is never created;
Haman is quite enough to immolate the ambitious artist, Bannadonna:
And so, for the interval, he was oblivious of his creature; which,
not oblivious of him, and true to its creation, and true to its
heedful winding up, left its post precisely at the given moment;
along its well-oiled route, slid noiselessly towards its mark; and,
aiming at the hand of Una, to ring one clangorous note, dully
smote the intervening brain of Bannadonna, turned backwards
to it; the manacled arms then instantly up-springing to their
hovering poise. The falling body clogged the thing’s return; so
there it stood, still impending over Bannadonna, as if
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whispering some post-mortem terror. The chisel lay dropped
from the hand, but beside the hand; the oil-flask spilled across
the iron track.
Which of his own works destroyed Melville? Juxtapose the story’s
deliberately Addisonian or Johnsonian conclusion with the remarkable
stanza in Hart Crane’s “The Broken Tower” that it helped inspire, and perhaps
a hint emerges, since Crane was a superb interpreter of Melville:
So the blind slave obeyed its blinder lord; but, in obedience,
slew him. So the creator was killed by the creature. So the bell
was too heavy for the tower. So that bell’s main weakness was
where man’s blood had flawed it. And so pride went before the
fall.
The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals ... And I, their sexton slave!
Crane is both Bannadonna and Haman, a complex fate darker even
than Melville’s, who certainly had represented himself as Bannadonna.
The Bell-Tower of Bannadonna perhaps was Pierre but more likely Moby-
Dick itself, Melville’s “long-scattered score / Of broken intervals” even as
The Bridge was Hart Crane’s. This is hardly to suggest that Haman is
Captain Ahab. Yet Melville’s “wicked book,” as he called Moby-Dick in a
famous letter to Hawthorne, indeed may have slain something vital in its
author, if only in his retrospective consciousness.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Lewis Carroll
(1832–1898)
“And yet what a dear little puppy it was!” said Alice, as she leant against a
buttercup to rest herself, and fanned herself with one of the leaves. “I
should have liked teaching it tricks very much, if—if I’d only been the right
size to do it! Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again!”
WHATEVER THE PROCESS IS OF RENEWING ONE’S EXPERIENCE OF ALICE’S
Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Hunting of the
Snark, the sensation is neither that of rereading nor of reading as though
for the first time. Lewis Carroll is Shakespearean to the degree that his
writing has become a kind of Scripture for us. Take, quite at random, the
sublimely outrageous chapter 6, “Pig and Pepper,” of Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland. Alice enters a large, smoky kitchen and discovers an atmosphere
permeated with pepper, a sneezing Duchess, and a howling and
sneezing baby, as well as a cook stirring a cauldron of soup, and a large,
grinning Cheshire Cat. Carroll’s prevalent phantasmagoria heightens (if
that is possible) as the cook commences to throw everything within her
reach (fire-irons, saucepans, dishes) at the Duchess and her howling imp,
while the Duchess cries out: “Chop off her head!” and sings a sort of lullaby
to her baby, thoughtfully shaking it (violently) at the end of each line:
“Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.”
CHORUS
(in which the cook and the baby joined):—
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“Wow! wow! wow!”
While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing
the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so,
that Alice could hardly hear the words:—
“I speak severely to my boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
For he can thoroughly enjoy
The pepper when he pleases!”
CHORUS
“Wow! wow! wow!”
“Here! You may nurse it a bit, if you like!” the Duchess said to Alice,
flinging the baby at her as she spoke. “I must go and get ready to
play croquet with the Queen,” and she hurried out of the room. The
cook threw a frying-pan after her as she went, but it just missed her.
Carroll stated the parodist’s principle as choosing the best poems for
model, but here the paradigm is a ghastly children’s poem of the mid-nineteenth
century:
Speak gently to the little child!
Its love be sure to gain;
Teach it in accents soft and mild;
It may not long remain.
That is ghastly enough to be its own parody, but Carroll wants it for his
own dark purposes. The pepper is peculiarly analogous to a sexual stimulant,
and the boy baby turns out to be a pig (presumably because little boys were not
the objects of Carroll’s affections). Alice, like Carroll, has no use for them:
So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see
it trot away quietly into the wood. “If it had grown up,” she said
to herself, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it
makes rather a handsome pig, I think.” And she began thinking
over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs,
and was just saying to herself, “if one only knew the right way
to change them—” when she was a little startled by seeing the
Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.
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The Cheshire Cat is an ironic enigma, typical of many such in
Carroll’s enigmatic or riddling allegory. He is thoroughly unpleasant, but
so, generally, are many of the inhabitants of Wonderland. It is a truism of
criticism to remark that the child Alice is considerably more mature than
any of the inhabitants of Wonderland, but what the Cheshire Cat remarks
is true also:
The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-
natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great
many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.
“Cheshire Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at
all know whether it would like the name: however, it only
grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s pleased so far,” thought Alice,
and she went on. “Would you tell me, please, which way I
ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,”
said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk
long enough.”
Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another
question. “What sort of people live about here?”
“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round,
“lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw,
“lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m
mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come
here.”
Alice didn’t think that proved it at all: however, she went on:
“And how do you know that you’re mad?”
“To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. You grant
that?”
“I suppose so,” said Alice.
“Well, then,” the Cat went on, “you see a dog growls when
it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when
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I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m
mad.”
“I call it purring, not growling,” said Alice.
Is Alice mad, because she has come to Wonderland? When the
Cheshire Cat reappears, it stages a famously slow vanishing, ending with
its grin, which stays on for some time after the rest of it is gone. That ontological
grin is the emblem of the Cheshire Cat’s madness, and is the prelude
to the Mad Tea Party of the next chapter, which in turn is emblematical
of the Alice books, since they can be described, quite accurately, as a
mad tea party, rather than a nonsensical tea party. Lionel Trilling spoke of
“the world of nonsense, that curious invention of the English of the nineteenth
century, of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear,” and confessed that,
critically, nonsense seemed to him inexplicable: “One of the mysteries of
art, perhaps as impenetrable as why tragedy gives pleasure, is why nonsense
commands so fascinated an attention, and why, when it succeeds, it
makes more than sense.”
A critic as distinguished as Trilling, William Empson, sought to solve the
mystery by finding a defense against madness in Alice’s characteristic stance:
Much of the technique of the rudeness of the Mad Hatter has
been learned from Hamlet. It is the ground-bass of this kinship
with insanity, I think, that makes it so clear that the books are
not trifling, and the cool courage with which Alice accepts
madmen that gives them their strength.
(“The Child as Swain,” Some Versions of Pastoral)
It does not seem to me either that Carroll makes nonsense into
“more than sense” or that Alice’s undoubted courage is particularly cool.
Unlike the sublime Edward Lear, Carroll does not read to me as a nonsense
writer. Riddle is not nonsense, and enigmatic allegory does not exalt
courage as the major virtue. Carroll is a Victorian Romantic just as were
his exact contemporaries, the Pre-Raphaelite poets, but his phantasmagoria,
utterly unlike theirs, is a wholly successful defense against, or revision
of, High Romantic Quest. Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market has more in
common with Edward Lear than Carroll does, and Swinburne is an even
defter parodist than Carroll.
Carroll’s parodies, sometimes brilliant though they are, do not transcend
their echoes, do not reverse Carroll’s own burden of literary belatedness.
But the Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark do achieve convincing
originality, while the Pre-Raphaelites sometimes are merely
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involuntary parodies of Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning.
Romantic erotic quest, which ends in the Inferno of Shelley’s The Triumph
of Life, is displaced into the purgatorial sadomasochism of the Pre-
Raphaelite poets. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne, and their critical follower,
Pater, substitute or trope the body for time, and accept the violence
of the will’s revenge against time upon their own bodies.
Carroll evades both sadomasochism and the Romantic erotic quest
by identifying himself with the seven-year-old Alice. Wonderland has only
one reality principle, which is that time has been murdered. Nothing need
be substituted for time, even though only madness can murder time. Alice
is only as mad as she needs to be, which may be her actual legacy from
Hamlet. She will not grow up, or sexually mature, so long as she can get
back into Wonderland, and she can get back out of Wonderland whenever
she needs to. The Pre-Raphaelites and Pater are immersed in the world
of the reality principle, the world of Schopenhauer and Freud.
Psychoanalytic interpretations of Carroll’s works always fail, because they
are necessarily easy and vulgar, and therefore disgusting. Alice does not
deign to be told what she is evading, and Carroll’s books are not exercises
in sublimation. What is repressed in them is his discomfort with culture,
including Wordsworth, the largest precursor of his vision.
II
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
“I won’t!” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her
voice. Nobody moved.
“Who cares for you?” said Alice (she had grown to her full
size by this time). “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”
This is the crisis of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; it asserts Alice’s
freedom from her own phantasmagoria, after which she returns to our
order of reality. The parallel moment in Through the Looking-Glass is a
weak repetition of this splendor:
There was not a moment to be lost. Already several of the
guests were lying down in the dishes, and the soup-ladle was
walking up the table towards Alice’s chair, and beckoning to her
impatiently to get out of its way.
“I can’t stand this any longer!” she cried, as she jumped up
and seized the tablecloth with both hands: one good pull, and
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plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together
in a heap on the floor.
The movement from “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” to “I can’t
stand this any longer!” is a fair representation of the relative aesthetic decline
the reader experiences as she goes from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to
Through the Looking-Glass. Had the first book never existed, our regard for the
second would be unique and immense, which is only another way of admiring
how the first Alice narrative is able to avoid any human affect as mundane as
bitterness. The White Rabbit is an extraordinary parody of Carroll’s own sense
of literary and even erotic belatedness, yet the quality he conveys is an exuberant
vivacity. We are, all of us, now perpetually late for a very important date,
but that apprehension of being late, late is for many among us an anxious
expectation. For Carroll, in his first vision as Alice, everything is again early,
which gives the book its pure and radiant atmosphere of a triumphant fastness.
Bitterness keeps breaking in as we read Through the Looking-Glass,
which may explain how weirdly and perpetually contemporary this second
and somewhat lesser work now seems. Its epitome is that grand poem,
“The Walrus and the Carpenter”:
“‘But wait a bit,’ the Oysters cried,
‘Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!’
‘No hurry!’ said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.
‘A loaf of bread,’ the Walrus said,
‘Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed—
Now, if you’re ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed.’
‘But not on us!’ the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
‘After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!’
‘The night is fine,’ the Walrus said.
‘Do you admire the view?
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‘It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!’
The Carpenter said nothing but
‘Cut us another slice.
I wish you were not quite so deaf—
I’ve had to ask you twice!’
‘It seems a shame,’ the Walrus said,
‘To play them such a trick.
After we’ve brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!’
The Carpenter said nothing but
‘The butter’s spread too thick!’
‘I weep for you,’ the Walrus said:
‘I deeply sympathize.’
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.
‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,
‘You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
But answer came there none—
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.”
In an additional stanza, written for a theatrical presentation of the Alice
narratives, but fortunately not part of our received text, Carroll accuses the
Walrus and the Carpenter of “craft and cruelty,” a judgment in which Alice
joins him when she remarks that “They were both very unpleasant characters—.”
But so are the Sheep, and that pompous egghead Humpty Dumpty,
though we do not receive them as quite the weird representations that actually
they indeed constitute. Carroll’s art renders each of them as totally idiosyncratic,
it being Carroll’s largest enigma that only Alice, in either book,
lacks personality or pathos. In “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” those two
voracious deceivers are neatly distinguished from one another. They are both
weepers, high Victorian sentimentalists, living in a contra-natural midnight
world where the sun outshines the sulky moon, presumably an indication that
this world oddly is natural—all-too-natural—which is to say: hungry.
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The Walrus and the Carpenter weep to increase their appetites, as it
were, but the Walrus, being the orator of the two, is finally so moved by
his own eloquence that he weeps on, even when he is happily satiated.
Though he is more cunning than the Carpenter, he is also less sadistic; we
wince a bit at the Carpenter’s “Shall we be trotting home again?” but we
ought to wince more when the Walrus sobbingly says: “I weep for you. I
deeply sympathize.”
Humpty Dumpty may well be Carroll’s most famous enigma, and his
most Shakespearean. He is also a prophecy of many of our contemporary
literary theorists: “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented—
and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.” “You’re so exactly
like other people,” Humpty Dumpty rather nastily says to Alice, but he
receives his comeuppance just as she pronounces her accurate normative
judgment that he is truly “unsatisfactory.”
The White Knight, at once the most satisfactory and charmingly
pleasant of Carroll’s enigmas, is the figure in Through the Looking-Glass
who returns us vividly to the gentler spirit of Alice’s Adventurer in
Wonderland. There is a critical tradition that the White Knight is a self-
portrait of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the other self of Lewis Carroll in
the world of the reality principle. There may be something to this, but
more palpably the White Knight is a version of the kindly, heroic, and
benignly mad Don Quixote. The White Knight’s madness is like Alice’s
own malady, if the Cheshire Cat was right about Alice. It is the madness of
play, Carroll’s sweet madness, a defense against darker madness.
Carroll’s best poem ever is “The White Knight’s Ballad,” which is a
superb and loving parody of Wordsworth’s great crisis-poem “Resolution
and Independence.” Wordsworth’s near-solipsism, his inability to listen to
what the old Leech-gatherer is saying in answer to the poet’s anguished
question (“How is it that you live, and what is it you do?”) was mocked
rather mercilessly in Carroll’s original version of his poem, published in
1856, fifteen years before Through the Looking-Glass. In the 1856 poem,
“Upon the Lonely Moor,” the poet is outrageously rough and even brutal
to the aged man, who is not just unheard but is kicked, punched, boxed on
the ear, and has his hair tweaked. All this happily is softened in the beautiful
revision that is the song sung by the White Knight:
“It’s long,” said the Knight, “but it’s very, very beautiful.
Everybody that hears me sing it—either it brings the tears into
their eyes, or else—”
“Or else what?” said Alice, for the Knight had made a sud
den pause.
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“Or else it doesn’t, you know. The name of the song is called
‘Haddocks’ Eyes.’”
“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to
feel interested.
“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a lit
tle vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name really is
‘The Aged Aged Man .’”
“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called’?”
Alice corrected herself.
“No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is
called ‘Ways And Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you
know!”
“Well, what is the song, then?” said Alice, who was by this
time completely bewildered.
“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really it
‘A-sitting On A Gate’: and the tune’s my own invention.”
So saying, he stopped his horse and let the reins fall on its
neck: then, slowly beating time with one hand, and with a faint
smile lighting up his gentle foolish face, as if he enjoyed the
music of his song, he began.
Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey
Through The Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always
remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the
whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday—the
mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight—the setting sun
gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze
of light that quite dazzled her—the horse quietly moving
about, with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the
grass at her feet—and the black shadows of the forest behind—
all this she took in like a picture, as, with one hand shading her
eyes, she leant against a tree, watching the strange pair, and listening,
in a half-dream, to the melancholy music of the song.
“But the tune isn’t his own invention,” she said to herself:
“it’s ‘I give thee all, I can no more.’” She stood and listened very
attentively, but no tears came into her eyes.
“I’ll tell thee everything I can:
There’s little to relate.
I saw an aged aged man,
A-sitting on a gate.
‘Who are you, aged man?’ I said.
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‘And how is it you live?’
And his answer trickled through my head,
Like water through a sieve.
He said ‘I look for butterflies
That sleep among the wheat:
I make them into mutton-pies,
And sell them in the street.
I sell them unto men,’ he said,
‘Who sail on stormy seas;
And that’s the way I get my bread—
A trifle, if you please.’
But I was thinking of a plan
To dye one’s whiskers green,
And always use so large a fan
That they could not be seen.
So, having no reply to give
To what the old man said,
I cried ‘Come, tell me how you live!’
And thumped him on the head.
His accents mild took up the tale:
He said ‘I go my ways,
And when I find a mountain-rill,
I set it in a blaze;
And thence they make a stuff they call
Rowland’s Macassar-Oil—
Yet twopence-halfpenny is all
They give me for my toil.’
But I was thinking of a way
To feed oneself on batter,
And so go on from day to day
Getting a little fatter.
I shook him well from side to side,
Until his face was blue:
‘Come, tell me how you live,’ I cried,
‘And what it is you do!’
He said ‘I hunt for haddocks’ eyes
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Among the heather bright,
And work them into waistcoat—
buttons
In the silent night.
And these I do not sell for gold
Or coin of silvery shine,
But for a copper halfpenny,
And that will purchase nine.’”
Thumped and shaken blue, but otherwise undamaged, the aged
hunter for haddocks’ eyes is a belated but less fearful representative of the
reality principle than Wordsworth’s Leech-gatherer. As much as the
Leech-gatherer, the White Knight’s decrepit survivor is “like a man from
some far region sent, / To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.”
The alternative for Carroll, as for Wordsworth, would be despondency and
madness, the waning of the poet’s youthful joy into a death-in-life. But
Carroll, fiercely defending against his own Wordsworthianism, triumphantly
makes it new in a final vision of the aged man that is anything
but Wordsworthian, because it is pure Wonderland:
“And now, if e’er by chance I put
My fingers into glue,
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
Into a left-hand shoe,
Or if I drop upon my toe
A very heavy weight,
I weep, for it reminds me so
Of that old man I used to know—
Whose look was mild, whose speech
was slow,
Whose hair was whiter than the snow,
Whose face was very like a crow,
With eyes, like cinders, all aglow,
Who seemed distracted with his woe,
Who rocked his body to and fro,
And muttered mumblingly and low,
As if his mouth were full of dough,
Who snorted like a buffalo—
That summer evening long ago,
A-sitting on a gate.”
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Mark Twain
(1835–1910)
THE MOST USEFUL CRITICAL STUDY OF MARK TWAIN, FOR ME, REMAINS
James M. Cox’s Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (1966). Cox does not
deal with the short stories but rather with Twain’s major works, including
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Roughing It, and
Innocents Abroad. It is Cox who points out that “Mark Twain” was a
steamboat pilot’s signal for danger, not for safe water. Samuel Clemens,
who became Mark Twain, remains our leading humorist, but his best
work—the short stories included—is replete with signals for danger. Cox
emphasizes also the recurrence in Twain’s writings of the figure of a
Stranger—ironic and mysterious—whose interventions bring about danger,
whether to the established moral order or to our universal lust for
illusions.
Twain, in Cox’s view, fought a lifelong campaign against the censorious
conscience, the Freudian superego. A speculator by nature, Twain was
a great escape artist, like his masterly creation, Huck Finn. The best of
Twain’s short stories are exercises in evasiveness, because the truth, as for
Hamlet, is what kills us. The abyss of nihilism beckons as uncannily in
Mark Twain as it does in Shakespeare, or in Nietzsche.
Twain’s first artistic and commercial success was his early short story
(1865), “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” where the
storyteller, Wheeler, is the ancestor of all the deadpan narrators who are
the glory of Twain’s style. Twain became one of the great performers of his
age; his lectures, mock-solemnly delivered, vied in effectiveness with
Emerson’s visionary addresses and Dickens’s dramatic readings. Wheeler’s
mode of narration became Twain’s platform manner: disarmingly innocent
and yet comically urgent.
In 1876, Twain read aloud, to a select Hartford audience, the
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outrageous “Facts concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in
Connecticut,” a fantasy in which the ironic dwarf, his Conscience, is
destroyed by the narrator as prelude to beginning the world anew:
I killed thirty-eight persons during the first two weeks—all of
them on account of ancient grudges. I burned a dwelling that
interrupted my view. I swindled a widow and some orphans out
of their last cow ...
The war against the superego is carried on much more indirectly in
“The Stolen White Elephant” of 1882, where the parody of detective-fiction
hyperbolically indicts what might be termed the investigative impulse
itself. A fear of madness, at the root of Twain’s genius for humor, translated
into the superb story, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” a
Paradise Lost-in-little, with intimations of Pre-Millennialism (1899).
Hadleyburg, “the most honest and upright little town in all the region
round about,” could be anywhere in the United States as we again
approach the Millennium. The man who “corrupts” it is an archetypal
Mark Twain mysterious or ironic Stranger, a truth-seeking Satan. A small
masterpiece in style and plot, the Fall of Hadleyburg may be Twain’s finest
victory over the hypocrisies of the societal element in the superego.
With “The £1,000,000 Note” of 1893, Twain refined his parable of
corruption. Light as this story continues to be, it has few peers in its revelation
of the illusions of finance. Nihilism, a Gnostic awareness of the illusiveness
of both nature and society, attains its extreme of intensity in the
posthumously published Mysterious Stranger fragments. Little Satan,
Twain’s final hero, indicts the superego or Moral Sense as the true villain
of human existence. God, the deity of Moral Virtue akin to Blake’s Urizen,
is the final culprit, for Mark Twain. An attack upon God, however God is
construed, is a very difficult basis for humor, as Twain realized. At the
outer limits of his art, Twain yielded to despair.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Henry James
(1843–1916)
THE INTENSE CRITICAL ADMIRERS OF HENRY JAMES GO SO FAR AS TO CALL
him the major American writer, or even the most accomplished novelist in
the English language. The first assertion neglects only Walt Whitman,
while the second partly evades the marvelous sequence that moves from
Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa through Jane Austen on to George Eliot, and
the alternative tradition that goes from Fielding through Dickens to Joyce.
James is certainly the crucial American novelist, and in his best works the
true peer of Austen and George Eliot. His precursor, Hawthorne, is more
than fulfilled in the splendors of The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the
Dove, giant descendants of The Marble Faun, while the rival American novelists—
Melville, Mark Twain, Dreiser, Faulkner—survive comparison with
James only by being so totally unlike him. Unlikeness makes Faulkner—
particularly in his great phase—a true if momentary rival, and perhaps if
you are to find a non-Jamesian sense of sustained power in the American
novel, you need to seek out our curious antithetical tradition that moves
between Moby-Dick and its darker descendants: As I Lay Dying, Miss
Lonelyhearts, The Crying of Lot 49. The normative consciousness of our
prose fiction, first prophesied by The Scarlet Letter, was forged by Henry
James, whose spirit lingers not only in palpable disciples like Edith
Wharton in The Age of Innocence and Willa Cather in her superb A Lost
Lady, but more subtly (because merged with Joseph Conrad’s aura) in novelists
as various as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Warren. It seems clear that
the relation of James to American prose fiction is precisely analogous to
Whitman’s relation to our poetry; each is, in his own sphere, what Emerson
prophesied as the Central Man who would come and change all things forever,
in a celebration of the American Newness.
The irony of James’s central position among our novelists is palpable,
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since, like the much smaller figure of T.S. Eliot later on, James abandoned
his nation and eventually became a British subject, after having been born
a citizen in Emerson’s America. But it is a useful commonplace of criticism
that James remained the most American of novelists, not less peculiarly
nationalistic in The Ambassadors than he had been in “Daisy Miller” and
The American. James, a subtle if at times perverse literary critic, understood
very well what we continue to learn and relearn; an American writer can
be Emersonian or anti-Emersonian, but even a negative stance towards
Emerson always leads back again to his formulation of the post-Christian
American religion of Self-Reliance. Overt Emersonians like Thoreau,
Whitman, and Frost are no more pervaded by the Sage of Concord than
are anti-Emersonians like Hawthorne, Melville, and Eliot. Perhaps the
most haunted are those writers who evade Emerson, yet never leave his
dialectical ambiance, a group that includes Emily Dickinson, Henry James,
and Wallace Stevens.
Emerson was for Henry James something of a family tradition,
though that in itself hardly accounts for the plain failure of very nearly
everything that the novelist wrote about the essayist. James invariably
resorts to a tone of ironic indulgence on the subject of Emerson, which is
hardly appropriate to the American prophet of Power, Fate, Illusions, and
Wealth. I suggest that James unknowingly mixed Emerson up with the
sage’s good friend Henry James, Sr., whom we dismiss as a Swedenborgian,
but who might better be characterized as an American Gnostic speculator,
in Emerson’s mode, though closer in eminence to, say, Bronson Alcott
than to the author of The Conduct of Life.
The sane and sacred Emerson was a master of evasions, particularly
when disciples became too pressing, whether upon personal or spiritual
matters. The senior Henry James is remembered now for having fathered
Henry, William, and Alice, and also for his famous outburst against
Emerson, whom he admired on the other side of idolatry: “O you man
without a handle!”
The junior Henry James, overtly celebrating Emerson, nevertheless
remarked: “It is hardly too much, or too little, to say of Emerson’s writings
in general that they were not composed at all.” “Composed” is the crucial
word there, and makes me remember a beautiful moment in Stevens’s
“The Poems of Our Climate”:
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
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Emerson’s mind, never merely restless, indeed was never-resting, as
was the mind of every member of the James family. The writings of
Emerson, not composed at all, constantly come back to what had been so
long composed, to what his admirer Nietzsche called the primordial poem
of mankind, the fiction that we have knocked together and called our cosmos.
James was far too subtle not to have known this. He chose not to
know it, because he needed a provincial Emerson even as he needed a
provincial Hawthorne, just as he needed a New England that never was:
simple, gentle, and isolated, even a little childlike.
The days when T.S. Eliot could wonder why Henry James had not
carved up R.W. Emerson seem safely past, but we ought to remember
Eliot’s odd complaint about James as critic: “Even in handling men whom
he could, one supposes, have carved joint from joint—Emerson or
Norton—his touch is uncertain; there is a desire to be generous, a political
motive, an admission (in dealing with American writers) that under the
circumstances this was the best possible, or that it has fine qualities.” Aside
from appearing to rank Emerson with Charles Eliot Norton (which is
comparable to ranking Freud with Bernard Berenson), this unamiable
judgment reduces Emerson, who was and is merely the mind of America,
to the stature of a figure who might, at most, warrant the condescension of
James (and of Eliot). The cultural polemic involved is obvious, and indeed
obsessive, in Eliot, but though pleasanter in James is really no more
acceptable:
Of the three periods into which his life divides itself, the first
was (as in the case of most men) that of movement, experiment
and selection—that of effort too and painful probation.
Emerson had his message, but he was a good while looking for
his form—the form which, as he himself would have said, he
never completely found and of which it was rather characteristic
of him that his later years (with their growing refusal to give
him the word), wishing to attack him in his most vulnerable
point, where his tenure was least complete, had in some degree
the effect of despoiling him. It all sounds rather bare and stern,
Mr. Cabot’s account of his youth and early manhood, and we
get an impression of a terrible paucity of alternatives. If he
would be neither a farmer nor a trader he could “teach school”;
that was the main resource and a part of the general educative
process of the young New Englander who proposed to devote
himself to the things of the mind. There was an advantage in
the nudity, however, which was that, in Emerson’s case at least,
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the things of the mind did get themselves admirably well considered.
If it be his great distinction and his special sign that he
had a more vivid conception of the moral life than any one else,
it is probably not fanciful to say that he owed it in part to the
limited way in which he saw our capacity for living illustrated.
The plain, God-fearing, practical society which surrounded
him was not fertile in variations: it had great intelligence and
energy, but it moved altogether in the straightforward direction.
On three occasions later—three journeys to Europe—he
was introduced to a more complicated world; but his spirit, his
moral taste, as it were, abode always within the undecorated
walls of his youth. There he could dwell with that ripe unconsciousness
of evil which is one of the most beautiful signs by
which we know him. His early writings are full of quaint animadversion
upon the vices of the place and time, but there is
something charmingly vague, light and general in the arraignment.
Almost the worst he can say is that these vices are negative
and that his fellow-townsmen are not heroic. We feel that
his first impressions were gathered in a community from which
misery and extravagance, and either extreme, of any sort, were
equally absent. What the life of New England fifty years ago
offered to the observer was the common lot, in a kind of
achromatic picture, without particular intensifications. It was
from this table of the usual, the merely typical joys and sorrows
that he proceeded to generalise—a fact that accounts in some
degree for a certain inadequacy and thinness in his enumerations.
But it helps to account also for his direct, intimate vision
of the soul itself—not in its emotions, its contortions and perversions,
but in its passive, exposed, yet healthy form. He
knows the nature of man and the long tradition of its dangers;
but we feel that whereas he can put his finger on the remedies,
lying for the most part, as they do, in the deep recesses of
virtue, of the spirit, he has only a kind of hearsay, uninformed
acquaintance with the disorders. It would require some ingenuity,
the reader may say too much, to trace closely this correspondence
between his genius and the frugal, dutiful, happy
but decidedly lean Boston of the past, where there was a great
deal of will but very little fulcrum—like a ministry without an
opposition.
The genius itself it seems to me impossible to contest—I
mean the genius for seeing character as a real and supreme
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thing. Other writers have arrived at a more complete expression:
Wordsworth and Goethe, for instance, give one a sense of
having found their form, whereas with Emerson we never lose
the sense that he is still seeking it. But no one has had so steady
and constant, and above all so natural, a vision of what we
require and what we are capable of in the way of aspiration and
independence. With Emerson it is ever the special capacity for
moral experience—always that and only that. We have the
impression, somehow, that life had never bribed him to look at
anything but the soul; and indeed in the world in which he
grew up and lived the bribes and lures, the beguilements and
prizes, were few. He was in an admirable position for showing,
what he constantly endeavoured to show, that the prize was
within. Any one who in New England at that time could do
that was sure of success, of listeners and sympathy: most of all,
of course, when it was a question of doing it with such a divine
persuasiveness. Moreover, the way in which Emerson did it
added to the charm—by word of mouth, face to face, with a
rare, irresistible voice and a beautiful mild, modest authority. If
Mr. Arnold is struck with the limited degree in which he was a
man of letters I suppose it is because he is more struck with his
having been, as it were, a man of lectures. But the lecture surely
was never more purged of its grossness—the quality in it that
suggests a strong light and a big brush—than as it issued from
Emerson’s lips; so far from being a vulgarisation, it was simply
the esoteric made audible, and instead of treating the few as the
many, after the usual fashion of gentlemen on platforms, he
treated the many as the few. There was probably no other society
at that time in which he would have got so many persons to
understand that; for we think the better of his audience as we
read him, and wonder where else people would have had so
much moral attention to give. It is to be remembered however
that during the winter of 1847–48, on the occasion of his second
visit to England, he found many listeners in London and
in provincial cities. Mr. Cabot’s volumes are full of evidence of
the satisfactions he offered, the delights and revelations he may
be said to have promised, to a race which had to seek its entertainment,
its rewards and consolations, almost exclusively in
the moral world. But his own writings are fuller still; we find an
instance almost wherever we open them.
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It is astonishing to me that James judged Emerson’s “great distinction”
and “special sign” to be “that he had a more vivid conception of the
moral life than anyone else,” unless “the moral life” has an altogether
Jamesian meaning. I would rather say that the great distinction and special
sign of James’s fiction is that it represents a more vivid conception of the
moral life than even Jane Austen or George Eliot could convey to us.
Emerson is not much more concerned with morals than he is with manners;
his subjects are power, freedom, and fate. As for “that ripe unconsciousness
of evil” that James found in Emerson, I have not been able to
find it myself, after reading Emerson almost daily for the last twenty years,
and I am reminded of Yeats’s late essay on Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, in
which Yeats declares that his skeptical and passionate precursor, great poet
that he certainly was, necessarily lacked the Vision of Evil. The necessity
in both strong mis-readings, James’s and Yeats’s, was to clear more space
for themselves.
Jealous as I am for Emerson, I can recognize that no critic has
matched James in seeing and saying what Emerson’s strongest virtue is:
“But no one has had so steady and constant, and above all so natural, a
vision of what we require and what we are capable of in the way of aspiration
and independence.” No one, that is, except Henry James, for that
surely is the quest of Isabel Archer towards her own quite Emersonian
vision of aspiration and independence. “The moral world” is James’s
phrase and James’s emphasis. Emerson’s own emphasis, I suspect, was considerably
more pragmatic than that of James. When James returned to
America in 1904 on a visit, after twenty years of self-exile, he went back to
Concord and recorded his impressions in The American Scene:
It is odd, and it is also exquisite, that these witnessing ways
should be the last ground on which we feel moved to ponderation
of the “Concord school”—to use, I admit, a futile expression;
or rather, I should doubtless say, it would be odd if there
were not inevitably something absolute in the fact of Emerson’s
all but lifelong connection with them. We may smile a little as
we “drag in” Weimar, but I confess myself, for my part, much
more satisfied than not by our happy equivalent, “in American
money,” for Goethe and Schiller. The money is a potful in the
second case as in the first, and if Goethe, in the one, represents
the gold and Schiller the silver, I find (and quite putting aside
any bimetallic prejudice) the same good relation in the other
between Emerson and Thoreau. I open Emerson for the same
benefit for which I open Goethe, the sense of moving in large
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intellectual space, and that of the gush, here and there, out of
the rock, of the crystalline cupful, in wisdom and poetry, in
Wahrheit and Dichtung; and whatever I open Thoreau for (I
needn’t take space here for the good reasons) I open him oftener
than I open Schiller. Which comes back to our feeling that
the rarity of Emerson’s genius, which has made him so, for the
attentive peoples, the first, and the one really rare, American
spirit in letters, couldn’t have spent his career in a charming
woody, watery place, for so long socially and typically and,
above all, interestingly homogeneous, without an effect as of
the communication to it of something ineffaceable. It was during
his long span his immediate concrete, sufficient world; it
gave him his nearest vision of life, and he drew half his images,
we recognize, from the revolution of its seasons and the play of
its manners. I don’t speak of the other half, which he drew from
elsewhere. It is admirably, to-day, as if we were still seeing these
things in those images, which stir the air like birds, dim in the
eventide, coming home to nest. If one had reached a “time of
life” one had thereby at least heard him lecture; and not a russet
leaf fell for me, while I was there, but fell with an
Emersonian drop.
That is a beautiful study of the nostalgias and tells us, contra T.S.
Eliot, what James’s relation to Emerson actually was. We know how much
that is essential in William James was quarried out of Emerson, particularly
from the essay “Experience,” which gave birth to Pragmatism. Henry
James was not less indebted to Emerson than William James was. The
Portrait of a Lady is hardly an Emersonian novel; perhaps The Scarlet Letter
actually is closer to that. Yet Isabel Archer is Emerson’s daughter, just as
Lambert Strether is Emerson’s heir. The Emersonian aura also lingers on
even in the ghostly tales of Henry James.
II
My own favorite among James’s nouvelles is “The Pupil” (1891), not
a ghostly tale, yet still deeply (if dialectically) Emersonian. “The Pupil”
comes between the culmination of the earlier James in The Bostonians and
The Princess Casamassima (both 1886) and the middle James of The Spoils of
Poynton and What Maisie Knew (both 1897), and The Awkward Age (1899).
In some respects, “The Pupil” seems to me the perfection in shorter form
of James’s earlier mode even as The Portrait of a Lady is its perfection on a
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full scale. Yet “The Pupil” is an enigmatic tale, so nuanced that a single
interpretation is unlikely ever to gain wide credence.
In his “Preface to the New York Edition,” James is suitably remote
on 7 the actual moral drama enacted in “The Pupil.” Writing on What
Maisie Knew, James remarks that: “Small children have many more perceptions
than they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any
moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than
their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary.” Among Jamesian children,
the tragic Morgan is the great exception to this principle; his preternaturally
formidable vocabulary is invariably at the service of his accurate
and comprehensive perceptions. Of Morgan, James affectionately
observes: “My urchin of ‘The Pupil’ has sensibility in abundance; it would
seem—and yet preserves in spite of it, I judge, his strong little male quality.”
It is certainly part of the story’s immense charm that all of us, very
quickly, come to share the author’s (and Pemberton’s) affection for
Morgan, who is one of the grand portraits of the American as a young boy.
I can think of no two American novelists of real eminence who shared as
little as Henry James and Mark Twain, and yet I could imagine a conversation
between Morgan Moreen and Huck Finn, two very different yet
complementary images of the American boy longing for freedom.
In the only reference to Twain I can recall in James, the master rather
nastily remarks (in 1874), that: “In the day of Mark Twain there is no harm
in being reminded that the absence of drollery may, at a stretch, be compensated
by the presence of sublimity.” Well, James said far worse about
Whitman and Dickens, and I myself prefer Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
even to The Portrait of a Lady, but if we strip from James’s observation its
apotropaic gesture, we can grant that “The Pupil” abounds both in
drollery and sublimity, even though clearly inferior to Huckleberry Finn in
both qualities. Poor Morgan, very much a changeling in the Moreen family,
would have benefited more even from Huck Finn as tutor than from
Pemberton, if only Morgan had been robust enough to bear it.
There has been a critical fashion to blame the long-suffering and
devoted Pemberton, as well as the outrageous Moreens, for Morgan’s
death, but this seems to me merely absurd. What after all could the penniless
Pemberton, barely self-supporting even when free of the Moreens,
have done with Morgan? The novella’s final scene is exquisitely subtle, yet
in my reading contains no abandonment of Morgan by Pemberton:
“We’ve struggled, we’ve suffered,” his wife went on; “but
you’ve made him so your own that we’ve already been through
the worst of the sacrifice.”
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Morgan had turned away from his father—he stood looking
at Pemberton with a light in his face. His sense of shame for
their common humiliated state had dropped; the case had
another side—the thing was to clutch at that. He had a moment
of boyish joy, scarcely mitigated by the reflexion that with this
unexpected consecration of his hope—too sudden and too violent;
the turn taken was away from a good boy’s book—the
“escape” was left on their hands. The boyish joy was there an
instant, and Pemberton was almost scared at the rush of gratitude
and affection that broke through his first abasement.
When he stammered “My dear fellow, what do you say to
that?” how could one not say something enthusiastic? But there
was more need for courage at something else that immediately
followed and that made the lad sit down quickly on the nearest
chair. He had turned quite livid and had raised his hand to his
left side. They were all three looking at him, but Mrs. Moreen
suddenly bounded forward. “Ah his darling little heart!” she
broke out; and this time, on her knees before him and without
respect for the idol, she caught him ardently in her arms. “You
walked him too far, you hurried him too fast!” she hurled over
her shoulder at Pemberton. Her son made no protest, and the
next instant, still holding him, she sprang up with her face convulsed
and with the terrified cry “Help, help! he’s going, he’s
gone!” Pemberton saw with equal horror, by Morgan’s own
stricken face, that he was beyond their wildest recall. He pulled
him half out of his mother’s hands, and for a moment, while
they held him together, they looked all their dismay into each
other’s eyes. “He couldn’t stand it with his weak organ,” said
Pemberton—“the shock, the whole scene, the violent emotion.”
“But I thought he wanted to go to you!” wailed Mrs. Moreen.
“I told you he didn’t, my dear,” her husband made answer.
Mr. Moreen was trembling all over and was in his way as deeply
affected as his wife. But after the very first he took his bereavement
as a man of the world.
Morgan, as I read it, dies not of grief at rejection, whether by the
Moreens or Pemberton, but of excess of joy at the prospect of being taken
away by Pemberton. This seems to me strikingly similar to the death of
King Lear, since I agree with Harold Goddard’s interpretation that Lear
dies of joy rather than grief, in the hallucinated conviction that Cordelia’s
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lips still move. What Yeats called “tragic joy” is a Shakespearean quality
not easy to achieve, and it is extraordinary that James attains to that vision
at the close of “The Pupil.” But that still leaves us with the moral question
concerning this great fiction; what could there have been for Morgan in a
world so clearly inadequate to him?
James’s beautiful (and false) objection to our father Emerson was that
the sage had failed to achieve a style, and had to survive “on the strength
of his message alone.” I am hardly among those who find Emerson’s message
to be weak, but I know it to be strong primarily through and by his
style. Wisdom has no authority for us unless and until it has individualized
its rhetorical stance, and what preserves Emerson’s shamanistic charisma is
precisely his style. I find a touch, slight but definite, of that style in “The
Pupil” which is nothing but an Emersonian parable of the fate of freedom
or wildness in an alien context, which is to say, of the tragedy of the
American spirit when it is taken into exile abroad, into the social perversions
and false values of the Old World. James will not say so, in his
“Preface,” but Morgan is a victim of Europe, and of his family’s vain
attempt to domesticate itself in a realm where the Adamic stance has no
proper place.
Read thus, “The Pupil” indeed becomes a sublime drollery, distant
but authentic cousin to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Henry James, who
finally became a subject of King George V, could not tolerate that
admirable American writer, Mark Twain, who once deliciously suggested
that the British ought to replace the House of Hanover by a medley of
royal cats and kittens. But that did not prevent James from writing an
involuntary self-chastisement in “The Pupil,” an eloquent reprise of the
Emersonian warning of the American fate if we did not face west into the
evening-land, abandoning behind us the false dream of becoming men and
women of the European world.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Guy de Maupassant
(1850–1893)
CHEKHOV HAD LEARNED FROM MAUPASSANT HOW TO REPRESENT BANALITY.
Maupassant, who had learned everything, including that, from his master,
Flaubert, rarely matches the genius of Chekhov, or Turgenev, as a storyteller.
Lev Shestov, a remarkable Russian religious thinker of the earlier
twentieth century, expressed this with considerable force:
Chekhov’s wonderful art did not die—his art to kill by a mere
touch, a breath, a glance, everything whereby men live and
wherein they take their pride. And in the art he was constantly
perfecting himself, and he attained to a virtuosity beyond the
reach of any of his rivals in European literature. Maupassant
often had to strain every effort to overcome his victim. The victim
often escaped from Maupassant, though crushed and broken,
yet with his life. In Chekhov’s hands, nothing escaped death.
That is a very dark view and no reader wants to think of herself as a
writer’s victim, and yet Shestov accurately weighs Maupassant against
Chekhov, rather as one might weigh Christopher Marlowe against
Shakespeare. Yet Maupassant is the best of the really “popular” story-writers,
vastly superior to O. Henry (who could be quite good) and greatly preferable
to the abominable Poe. To be an artist of the popular is itself an extraordinary
achievement; we have nothing like it in the United States today.
Chekhov can seem simple, but is always profoundly subtle; many of
Maupassant’s simplicities are merely what they seem to be, yet they are not
shallow. Maupassant had learned from his teacher Flaubert, that “talent is
a prolonged patience” at seeing what others tend not to see. Whether
Maupassant can make us see what we could never have seen without him, I
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very much doubt. That calls for the genius of Shakespeare, or of Chekhov.
There is also the problem that Maupassant, like so many nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century writers of fiction, saw everything through the lens
of Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher of the Will-to-Live. I would just as
soon wear Schopenhauerian as Freudian goggles; both enlarge and both
distort, almost equally. But I am a literary critic, not a story-writer, and
Maupassant would have done better to discard philosophical spectacles
when he contemplated the vagaries of the desires of men and women.
At his best, he is marvelously readable, whether in the humorous
pathos of “Madame Tellier’s Establishment” or in a horror story like “The
Horla,” both of which I shall consider here. Frank O’Connor insisted that
Maupassant’s stories were not satisfactory when compared to those of
Chekhov and Turgenev, but then few story-writers rival the two Russian
masters. O’Connor’s real objection was that he thought “the sexual act
itself turns into a form of murder” in Maupassant. A reader who has just
enjoyed “Madame Tellier’s Establishment” would hardly agree. Flaubert,
who did not live to write it, wished to set his final novel in a provincial
whorehouse, which his son had already done in this robust story.
Everyone in “Madame Tellier’s Establishment” is benign and amiable,
which is part of the story’s authentic charm. Madame Tellier, a
respectable Norman peasant, keeps her establishment as one might run an
inn or even a boarding school. Her five sex-workers (as some call them
now) are vividly, even lovingly described by Madame’s talent for conciliation,
and her incessant good humor.
On an evening in May, none of the regular clients are in good humor,
because the establishment is festooned with notice: CLOSED FOR A FIRST
COMMUNION. Madame and her staff have gone off for this event, the celebrant
being Madame’s niece (and god-daughter). The First Communion
develops into an extraordinary occasion when the prolonged weeping of
the whores, moved to remember their own girlhoods, becomes contagious,
and the entire congregation is swept by an ecstasy of tears. The priest proclaims
that the Holy Christ has descended, and particularly thanks the visitors,
Madame Tellier and her staff.
After a boisterous trip back to their establishment, Madame and her
ladies return to their ordinary evening labors, performed however with
more than the routine zest and in high good spirits. “It isn’t every day we
have something to celebrate,” Madame Tellier concludes the story by
remarking, and only a joyless reader declines to celebrate with her. For
once, at least, Schopenhauer’s disciple has broken loose from gloomy
reflections on the close relations between sex and death.
Exuberance in storytelling is hard to resist, and Maupassant never
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writes with more gusto than in “Madame Tellier’s Establishment.” This
tale of Normandy has warmth, laughter, surprise, and even a kind of spiritual
insight. The Pentecostal ecstasy that burns through the congregation
is as authentic as the weeping of the whores that ignites it. Maupassant’s
irony is markedly kinder (though less subtle) than his master Flaubert’s.
And the story is bawdy, not prurient, in the Shakespearean spirit; it
enlarges life, and diminishes no one.
Maupassant’s own life ended badly; by his late twenties, he was
syphilitic. At thirty-nine, the disease affected his mind, and he spent his
final years locked in an asylum, after a suicide attempt. His most upsetting
horror story, “The Horla,” has a complex and ambiguous relation to his illness
and its consequences. The nameless protagonist of the story is perhaps
a syphilitic going mad, though nothing that Maupassant narrates
actually tells us to make such an inference. A first-person narration, “The
Horla” gives us more clues than we can interpret, because we cannot
understand the narrator, and do not know whether we can trust his impressions,
of which we receive little or no independent verification.
“The Horla” begins with the narrator—a prosperous young Norman
gentleman—persuading us of his happiness on a beautiful May morning.
He sees a splendid Brazilian three-masted boat flow by his house, and
salutes it. This gesture evidently summons the Horla, an invisible being
that we later learn has been afflicting Brazil with demonic possession and
subsequent madness. Horlas are evidently refined cousins of the vampires;
they drink milk and water, and drain vitality from sleepers, without actually
drawing blood. Whatever has been happening in Brazil, we are free to
doubt precisely what is going on in Normandy. Our narrator eventually
sets fire to his own house, to destroy his Horla, but neglects to tell the servants,
who are consumed with their home. When the tale-teller apprehends
that his Horla is still alive, he concludes by telling us that he will
have to kill himself.
Clearly it is indeed his Horla, whether or not it made the voyage
from Brazil to Normandy. The Horla is the narrator’s madness, and not
just the cause of his madness. Has Maupassant written the story of what it
means to be possessed by syphilis? At one point the sufferer glances in the
mirror and cannot see his reflection. Then he sees himself in a mist at the
back of the mirror. The mist receded until sees himself completely, and of
the mist of or blocking agent he cries out: “I had seen him.”
The narrator says that the Horla’s advent means that the reign of
man is over. Magnetism, hypnotism, suggestion, are all aspects of the
Horla’s will. “He has come,” the victim cries out, and suddenly the interloper
shouts his name in one’s ears: “The Horla ... he has come!”
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Maupassant invents the name Horla; is it an ironic play upon the English
word whore? That seems very remote, unless indeed Maupassant’s venereal
disease is the story’s hidden center.
The horror story is a large and fascinating genre, in which
Maupassant excelled, but never again as powerfully as in “The Horla.” I
think that it is because, on some level, he knew that he prophesied his own
madness and (attempted) suicide. Maupassant is not of the artistic eminence
of Turgenev, Chekhov, Henry James, or Hemingway as a short story
writer, but his immense popularity is well deserved. Someone who created
both “Madame Tellier’s Establishment,” with its amiable ecstasies, and
“The Horla,” with its convincing fright, was a permanent master of the
story. Why read Maupassant? At his best, he will hold you as few others do.
You receive pretty much what his narrative voice gives you. It is not God’s
plenty, but it pleases many and serves as an introduction to the more difficult
pleasures of storytellers subtler than Maupassant.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Joseph Conrad
(1857–1924)
IN CONRAD’S “YOUTH” (1898), MARLOW GIVES US A BRILLIANT DESCRIPTION
of the sinking of the Judea:
“Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely
upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams; upon
a disc of water glittering and sinister. A high, clear flame, an immense
and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its summit the
black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She burned furiously;
mournful and imposing like a funeral pile kindled in the night, surrounded
by the sea, watched over by the stars. A magnificent death
had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the
end of her laborious day. The surrender of her weary ghost to the
keeper of the stars and sea was stirring like the sight of a glorious triumph.
The masts fell just before daybreak, and for a moment there
was a burst and turmoil of sparks that seemed to fill with flying fire
the night patient and watchful, the vast night lying silent upon the
sea. At daylight she was only a charred shell, floating still under a
cloud of smoke and bearing a glowing mass of coal within.
“Then the oars were got out, and the boats forming in a line
moved around her remains as if in procession—the longboat
leading. As we pulled across her stern a slim dart of fire shot out
viciously at us, and suddenly she went down, head first, in a
great hiss of steam. The unconsumed stern was the last to sink;
but the paint had gone, had cracked, had peeled off, and there
were no letters, there was no word, no stubborn device that was
like her soul, to flash at the rising sun her creed and her name.
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The apocalyptic vividness is enhanced by the visual namelessness of
the “unconsumed stern,” as though the creed of Christ’s people maintained
both its traditional refusal to violate the Second Commandment, and its
traditional affirmation of its not-to-be-named God. With the Judea,
Conrad sinks the romance of youth’s illusions, but like all losses in Conrad
this submersion in the destructive element is curiously dialectical, since
only experiential loss allows for the compensation of an imaginative gain
in the representation of artistic truth. Originally the ephebe of Flaubert
and of Flaubert’s “son,” Maupassant, Conrad was reborn as the narrative
disciple of Henry James, the James of The Spoils of Poynton and What Maisie
Knew, rather than the James of the final phase.
Ian Watt convincingly traces the genesis of Marlow to the way that
“James developed the indirect narrative approach through the sensitive
central intelligence of one of the characters.” Marlow, whom James derided
as “that preposterous magic mariner,” actually represents Conrad’s
swerve away from the excessive strength of James’s influence upon him. By
always “mixing himself up with the narrative,” in James’s words, Marlow
guarantees an enigmatic reserve that increases the distance between the
impressionistic techniques of Conrad and James. Though there is little
valid comparison that can be made between Conrad’s greatest achievements
and the hesitant, barely fictional status of Pater’s Marius the
Epicurean, Conrad’s impressionism is as extreme and solipsistic as Pater’s.
There is a definite parallel between the fates of Sebastian Van Storck (in
Pater’s Imaginary Portraits) and Decoud in Nostromo.
In his 1897 “Preface” to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Conrad
famously insisted that his creative task was “before all to make you see.” He
presumably was aware that he thus joined himself to a line of prose seers
whose latest representatives were Carlyle, Ruskin, and Pater. There is a
movement in that group from Carlyle’s exuberant “Natural
Supernaturalism” through Ruskin’s paganization of Evangelical fervor to
Pater’s evasive and skeptical Epicurean materialism, with its eloquent suggestion
that all we can see is the flux of sensations. Conrad exceeds Pater
in the reduction of impressionism to a state of consciousness where the
seeing narrator is hopelessly mixed up with the seen narrative. James may
seem an impressionist when compared to Flaubert, but alongside of
Conrad he is clearly shown to be a kind of Platonist, imposing forms and
resolutions upon the flux of human relations by an exquisite formal geometry
altogether his own.
To observe that Conrad is metaphysically less of an Idealist is hardly
to argue that he is necessarily a stronger novelist than his master, James. It
may suggest though that Conrad’s originality is more disturbing than that
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of James, and may help explain why Conrad, rather than James, became
the dominant influence upon the generation of American novelists that
included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. The cosmos of The Sun
Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, and As I Lay Dying derives from Heart of
Darkness and Nostromo rather than from The Ambassadors and The Golden
Bowl. Darl Bundren is the extreme inheritor of Conrad’s quest to carry
impressionism into its heart of darkness in the human awareness that we
are only a flux of sensations gazing outwards upon a flux of impressions.
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness may always be a critical battleground between readers
who regard it as an aesthetic triumph, and those like myself who doubt its
ability to rescue us from its own hopeless obscurantism. That Marlow
seems, at moments, not to know what he is talking about, is almost certainly
one of the narrative’s deliberate strengths, but if Conrad also seems
finally not to know, then he necessarily loses some of his authority as a storyteller.
Perhaps he loses it to death our death, or our anxiety that he will
not sustain the illusion of his fiction’s duration long enough for us to sublimate
the frustrations it brings us.
These frustrations need not be deprecated. Conrad’s diction, normally
flawless, is notoriously vague throughout Heart of Darkness. E. M.
Forster’s wicked comment on Conrad’s entire work is justified perhaps
only when applied to Heart of Darkness:
Misty in the middle as well as at the edges, the secret cask of his
genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel.... No creed, in fact.
Forster’s misty vapor seems to inhabit such Conradian recurrent
modifiers as “monstrous,” “unspeakable,” “atrocious,” and many more, but
these are minor defects compared to the involuntary self-parody that
Conrad inflicts upon himself. There are moments that sound more like
James Thurber lovingly satirizing Conrad than like Conrad:
“We had carried Kurtz into the pilot house: there was more air
there. Lying on the couch, he stared through the open shutter.
There was an eddy in the mass of human bodies, and the
woman with helmeted head and tawny cheeks rushed out to the
very brink of the stream. She put out her hands, shouted something,
and all that wild mob took up the shout in a roaring chorus
of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance.
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“‘Do you understand this?’ I asked.
“He kept on looking out past me with fiery, longing eyes,
with a mingled expression of wistfulness and hate. He made no
answer, but I saw a smile, a smile of indefinable meaning,
appear on his colorless lips that a moment after twitched convulsively.
‘Do I not?’ he said slowly, gasping, as if the words had
been torn out of him by a supernatural power.
This cannot be defended as an instance of what Frank Kermode calls
a language “needed when Marlow is not equal to the experience
described.” Has the experience been described here? Smiles of “indefinable
meaning” are smiled once too often in a literary text if they are smiled
even once. Heart of Darkness has taken on some of the power of myth, even
if the book is limited by its involuntary obscurantism. It has haunted
American literature from T.S. Eliot’s poetry through our major novelists of
the era 1920 to 1940, on to a line of movies that go from the Citizen Kane
of Orson Welles (a substitute for an abandoned Welles project to film
Heart of Darkness) on to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. In this instance,
Conrad’s formlessness seems to have worked as an aid, so diffusing his conception
as to have made it available to an almost universal audience.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Anton Chekhov
(1860–1904)
NEARLY A CENTURY AFTER HIS DEATH, CHEKHOV REMAINS THE MOST
influential of all short story writers. There is an alternative tradition to the
Chekhovian story, a rival mode invented by Kafka and developed by
Borges. But such varied storytellers as James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence,
Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O’Connor, essentially are part of the
Chekhovian tradition (though Joyce denied it).
This brief volume examines five of Chekhov’s best tales, yet I will
confine this Introduction to “The Darling,” Tolstoy’s particular favorite.
Critics have found in “The Darling” versions of the ancient Greek myths
of Psyche and of Echo, and these allusions are present, but the heart of
Chekhov’s wonderful story is elsewhere. Tolstoy located it best when he
said that the Darling, Olenka, has a soul that is “wonderful and holy.”
Olenka comes alive only when she lives for another, with a love so perfect
that the other’s concerns absorb her completely.
Though you can regard Olenka as childlike, or motherly, it seems
best to follow Tolstoy, who found in her a holy soul.
Maxim Gorky memorably remarked of Chekhov that in his presence
“everyone felt an unconscious desire to be simpler, more truthful, more
himself,” an effect that can be experienced also by Chekhov’s readers. Not
that the skeptical, all-knowing Chekhov is another “holy soul” in Tolstoy’s
sense (though Tolstoy thought so, up to a point), but undoubtedly
Chekhov, like his master Shakespeare, persuades you that you can see with
him what otherwise would never be apparent to you. What then can we see
in “The Darling?” How should we read it, and why?
Can anyone, in reality, be so whole-hearted as Olenka? And yet,
“whole-hearted” is misleading, if only because poor Olenka is reduced to
an absolute emptiness when she does not have someone to love. So extreme
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does her condition become that it requires all of Chekhov’s tact to teach
us, implicitly but firmly, to avoid the vulgarity of conjectures as to her
pathology. She has no opinions of her own, and yet is “a gentle, soft-hearted,
compassionate girl,” who lacks only a sense of self, which she can
acquire only in loving. To see her as the female victim of a patriarchal society
would be absurd: how would you go about raising her consciousness?
There always have been and will be some like her, perhaps many, and men
as well as women. Tolstoy’s religious ideas were very much his own, and yet
one can understand the particular sense in which this Darling or “little
soul” is holy. John Keats said that he believed in nothing but the holiness
of the heart’s affections, and William Blake proclaimed that everything
that lives is holy. Olenka is holy in that way. Keats added that he believed
also in the truth of the imagination, but Olenka cannot imagine without
being guided by the heart’s affections.
Chekhov, like Shakespeare, solves no problems, makes no decisions
for us, and quests for the total truth of the human, in the precise sense of
Shakespeare’s invention of the human. Olenka, though doubtless very
Russian, is also universal. Chekhov’s stance towards her is ironical only in
a Shakespearean way: the wheel comes full circle, and we are here. Life,
which has taken her three men away from Olenka, restitutes her with a foster-
son, for whom she can survive. Shakespeare, as a stage dramatist, could
not afford to represent banality, since even he could not hold an audience
with our ordinary unhappiness. Chekhov, Shakespearean to his core,
employed his stories to do what even his own plays could not do: illuminate
the commonplace, without exalting or distorting it. Three Sisters,
Chekhov’s most remarkable drama, could not afford a character like
Olenka, even in a minor part. It is a kind of literary miracle that Chekhov
could center “The Darling” so fully upon Olenka, who can come alive only
through a complete love for someone else.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
O. Henry
(1862–1910)
WILLIAM SYDNEY PORTER IS A CENTRAL FIGURE IN AMERICAN POPULAR
literature. He has a huge, permanent audience, and is all but identified with
the short story as a genre, though he cannot be considered one of its inventors,
or indeed one of its crucial innovators. His comic gifts are considerable
though limited, and his careful naturalism is almost always shadowed
by that of his precursor, Frank Norris. What matters most about O. Henry
is the audience he has maintained for a century: ordinary readers who find
themselves in his stories, not more truly and more strange, but rather as
they were and are.
O. Henry’s most famous tale, “The Gift of the Magi” always survives
its palpable sentimentalities. The author, lovingly interested in characters
founded upon his wife and himself, presents them with delicacy and compassion.
Love, Dr. Samuel Johnson observed, was the wisdom of fools and
the folly of the wise. That would be an admirable critical perception of
Shakespeare’s King Lear but is too grand and fierce for the gentle “Gift of
the Magi” where the foolishness of love pragmatically manifests itself as a
wisdom.
A more complete vision is manifested in “A Municipal Report” one
of O. Henry’s most complex stories: humorous, paradoxical, even a touch
Borgesian in the personality of Azalea Adair, a survival of the Old South.
Though the author attempts a dispassionate stance, he clearly is glad, as we
are, when Azalea Adair’s exploiter, the dreadful Major Wentworth Caswell,
is discovered dead on a dark street:
The gentle citizens who had known him stood about and
searched their vocabularies to find some good words, if it were
possible, to speak of him. One kind-looking man said, after
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much thought: ‘When “Cas” was about fo’teen he was one of
the best spellers in school.’
“The Furnished Room” very late O. Henry, may be the darkest of all
his stories. Coincidence, almost invariably overworked by the author,
becomes something like a fatality here. The double suicide of lovers is
made plausible by all the griminess of urban decay. A single sentence,
describing a stair carpet, catches memorably the fetid atmosphere of the
rooming-house, in which both lovers have died, or will die:
It seemed to have become vegetable, to have degenerated in
that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew
in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like
organic matter.
This stands between the luxuriant rankness of Tennyson’s Maud and
certain Tennysonian effects in early T.S. Eliot and in Faulkner. A populist
in his art, O. Henry had a repressed Symbolist poet in his spirit, and this
ghostly presence helps to temper the too-evident surprises of his work.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Rudyard Kipling
(1865–1936)
TWENTY YEARS AFTER WRITING HIS ESSAY OF 1943 ON KIPLING (REPRINTED
in The Liberal Imagination, 1951), Lionel Trilling remarked that if he could write
the critique again, he would do it “less censoriously and with more affectionate
admiration.” Trilling, always the representative critic of his era, reflected a
movement in the evaluation of Kipling that still continues in 1987. I suspect that
this movement will coexist with its dialectical countermovement, of recoil
against Kipling, as long as our literary tradition lasts. Kipling is an authentically
popular writer, in every sense of the word. Stories like “The Man Who Would
Be King”; children’s tales from The Jungle Books and the Just So Stories; the novel
Kim, which is clearly Kipling’s masterwork; certain late stories and dozens of
ballads—these survive both as high literature and as perpetual entertainment. It
is as though Kipling had set out to refute the Sublime function of literature,
which is to make us forsake easier pleasures for more difficult pleasures.
In his speech on “Literature,” given in 1906, Kipling sketched a dark
tale of the storyteller’s destiny:
There is an ancient legend which tells us that when a man first
achieved a most notable deed he wished to explain to his Tribe
what he had done. As soon as he began to speak, however, he was
smitten with dumbness, he lacked words, and sat down. Then there
arose—according to the story—a masterless man, one who had
taken no part in the action of his fellow, who had no special virtues,
but who was afflicted—that is the phrase—with the magic of the
necessary word. He saw; he told; he described the merits of the
notable deed in such a fashion, we are assured, that the words
“became alive and walked up and down in the hearts of all his hearers.”
Thereupon, the Tribe seeing that the words were certainly
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alive, and fearing lest the man with the words would hand down
untrue tales about them to their children, took and killed him. But,
later, they saw that the magic was in the words, not in the man.
Seven years later, in the ghastly Primal History Scene of Totem and Taboo’s
fourth chapter, Freud depicted a curiously parallel scene, where a violent primal
father is murdered and devoured by his sons, who thus bring to an end the
patriarchal horde. Kipling’s Primal Storytelling Scene features “a masterless
man” whose only virtue is “the necessary word.” But he too is slain by the Tribe
or primal horde, lest he transmit fictions about the Tribe to its children. Only
later, in Freud, do the sons of the primal father experience remorse, and so “the
dead father became stronger than the living one had been.” Only later, in
Kipling, does the Tribe see “that the magic was in the words, not in the man.”
Freud’s true subject, in his Primal History Scene, was the transference,
the carrying-over from earlier to later attachments of an over-determined
affect. The true subject of Kipling’s Primal Storytelling Scene is not so much
the Tale of the Tribe, or the magic that was in the words, but the storyteller’s
freedom, the masterless man’s vocation that no longer leads to death, but that
can lead to a death-in-life. What Kipling denies is his great fear, which is that
the magic indeed is just as much in the masterless man as it is in the words.
Kipling, with his burly imperialism and his indulgences in anti-intellectualism,
would seem at first out of place in the company of Walter Pater, Oscar
Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. Nevertheless, Kipling writes in the rhetorical
stance of an aesthete, and is very much a Paterian in the metaphysical sense. The
“Conclusion” to Pater’s Renaissance is precisely the credo of Kipling’s protagonists:
Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in
those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic
dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost
and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour
of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we
are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly
have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.
What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new
opinions and courting new impressions.
Frank Kermode observed that Kipling was a writer “who steadfastly
preferred action and machinery to the prevalent Art for Art’s Sake,” but that
is to misread weakly what Pater meant by ending the “Conclusion” to The
Renaissance with what soon became a notorious formula:
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We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some
spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest,
at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song.
For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as
many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions
may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of
love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or
otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is
passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied
consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire
of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to
you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to
your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
Like Pater, like Nietzsche, Kipling sensed that we possess and cherish
fictions because the reductive truth would destroy us. “The love of art for
art’s sake” simply means that we choose to believe in a fiction, while knowing
that it is not true, to adopt Wallace Stevens’s version of the Paterian
credo. And fiction, according to Kipling, was written by daemonic forces
within us, by “some tragic dividing of forces on their ways.” Those forces
are no more meaningful than the tales and ballads they produce. What
Kipling shares finally with Pater is a deep conviction that we are caught
always in a vortex of sensations, a solipsistic concourse of impressions piling
upon one another, with great vividness but little consequence.
II
Kipling was a superb short story writer, who developed a defensive
array of narrative devices that sometimes enhanced his fundamental vitality
as an author, and at other moments perhaps impeded him. His art in
later stories is extraordinarily subtle, marking his transition from the novel
Kim, deeply influenced by Mark Twain, to oblique modes that seem to
have been affected by Joseph Conrad and Henry James.
“The Man Who Would Be King” is probably Kipling’s most popular
story, and the public response is validly based upon the skilled, vivid characterization
of the protagonists, Carnehan and Dravot. I myself find it difficult
to endorse the general critical judgement that this story is an ambivalent
allegory of British colonialism. Though ironical throughout, “The
Man Who Would Be King” essentially is a celebration of the flamboyance
and audacity of Carnehan and Dravot.
The erotic ironies of “Without Benefit of Clergy” and of “Lispeth”
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are tempered by what could be termed Kipling’s own nostalgia for an erotic
idealism that had deserted him. Ameera and Lispeth are antithetical to
one another, in a contrast that depends as much upon personality as on
their diverse experiences of British love. Kipling is sage enough to show us
that Ameera’s fulfilled nature nevertheless provokes an early death, whereas
Lispeth’s survival (into Kim) is secured by her bitterness.
Kipling’s remarkable originality as storyteller triumphs in “The
Church That Was At Antioch,” which is composed in a marvelous prose,
very much Kipling’s invention:
There filed out from behind the Little Circus four blaring trumpets,
a standard, and a dozen Mounted Police. Their wise little
grey Arabs sidled, passaged, shouldered, and nosed softly into the
mob, as though they wanted petting, while the trumpets deafened
the narrow street. An open square, near by, eased the pressure
before long. Here the Patrol broke into fours, and gridironed it,
saluting the images of the gods at each corner and in the centre.
People stopped, as usual, to watch how cleverly the incense was
cast down over the withers into the spouting cressets; children
reached up to pat horses which they said they knew; family groups
re-found each other in the smoky dusk; hawkers offered cooked
suppers; and soon the crowd melted into the main traffic avenues.
That is a very different instrument than the prose of Huckelberry Finn
or of the earlier Henry James. Kipling writes a middle style that seems timeless
but of course consciously inaugurates the inception of the Twentieth
century. It is an apparently plain prose that intimates a hovering darkness,
as here at the close of a true shocker, “Mary Postgate”:
But it was a fact. A woman who had missed these things could
still be useful—more useful than a man in certain respects. She
thumped like a pavoir through the settling ashes at the secret
thrill of it. The rain was damping the fire, but she could feel—it
was too dark to see—that her work was done. There was a dull
red glow at the bottom of the destructor, not enough to char the
wooden lid if she slipped it half over against the driving wet. This
arranged, she leaned on the poker and waited, while an increasing
rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to think. She gave herself
up to feel. Her long pleasure was broken by a sound that she
had waited for in agony several times in her life. She leaned forward
and listened, smiling. There could be no mistake. She
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closed her eyes and drank it in. Once it ceased abruptly.
“Go on,” she murmured, half aloud. “That isn’t the end.”
Then the end came very distinctly in a lull between two rain-
gusts. Mary Postgate drew her breath short between her teeth
and shivered from head to foot. “That’s all right,” said she contentedly,
and went up to the house, where she scandalised the
whole routine by taking a luxurious hot bath before tea, and
came down looking, as Miss Fowler said when she saw her
lying all relaxed on the other sofa, “quite handsome!”
With refined sadistic sexuality, Mary Postgate thus enjoys the slow
death of a downed, badly wounded German aviator, whose agony in the
shrubbery revitalizes her. Kipling perhaps does too much of the work for
the reader, but we shudder anyway at his art. It achieves a more equivocal
triumph in “Mrs. Bathurst,” where we are bewildered yet suborned by
indirect narrations, which come to seem more important than the dark
eros that has destroyed the tale’s protagonists.
When I was a child, I delighted in the Just So Stories, which go on
sustaining me in old age. How could one improve the close of “The Cat
That Walked By Himself”:
Then the Man threw his two books and his little stone axe (that
makes three) at the Cat, and the Cat ran out of the Cave and
the Dog chased him up a tree; and from that day to this, Best
Beloved, three proper Men out of five will always throw things
at a Cat whenever they meet him, and all proper Dogs will
chase him up a tree. But the Cat keeps his side of the bargain
too. He will kill mice and he will be kind to Babies when he is
in the house, just as long as they do not pull his tail too hard.
But when he had done that, and between times, and when the
moon gets up and night comes, he is the Cat that walks by himself,
and all places are alike to him. Then he goes out to the
West Wild Woods or up the Wet Wild Trees or on the Wet
Wild Roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.
Kipling’s mastery of tone and of vision is close to absolute here, and
makes us realize again how many kinds of story he abounds in, and how
many perspectives he creates. Of story writers in the Twentieth century,
Kipling stands just below Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, and James Joyce,
but he compares very adequately with Jorge Luis Borges and Isaac Babel,
as the late Irving Howe justly observed.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Thomas Mann
(1875–1955)
THOMAS MANN’S GREATEST ACHIEVEMENTS WERE HIS NOVELS: THE MAGIC
Mountain, Joseph and his Brothers (particularly Tales of Jacob) and Doctor
Faustus. But his genius is also manifested in his novellas and stories, which
demonstrate—as do the major novels—how he could transform his pervasive
irony into a thousand things. Irony in Mann is not so much the condition
of literary language itself as it is a composite metaphor for all of his
ambivalence towards both self and society.
Death in Venice, no matter how often you reread it, brilliantly refuses
to become a period piece. I suspect this is because of Mann’s marvelous
mask as Aschenbach, who shares both the author’s covert homoeroticism
and his taste for aesthetic decadence. The irony of Aschenbach’s descent
into death is that it is simultaneously his awakening to authentic desire.
Mario and the Magician is now perhaps something of a period piece,
when Fascism has been replaced by Moslem terror as the enemy. And yet
Cipolla lives: he incarnates the dangers of political charisma so permanently
that the novella’s permanence will return.
“Disorder and Early Sorrow” transcends its socioeconomic moment
primarily because its vision of a father’s love for a little daughter balances
irony with an immensely subtle eros.
The novella, “Tonio Kröger,” despite its ironic veneer, does seem to
me to have faded. Its bourgeois nostalgias count for less now, and this once,
anyway, time’s revenges have overcome Mann’s ironic stance.
“Felix Krull” however retains all of its ironic exuberance, as does its
final expansion into Mann’s playful novel of the adventures of Felix Krull,
Confidence Man. The too-prevalent image of the artist-as-deceiver is subsumed
by Mann’s vision of the erotic intensity of the trickster’s life.
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Jack London
(1876–1916)
JACK LONDON DIED AT FORTY IN 1916, POSSIBLY OF A DRUG OVERDOSE. AN
autodidact, the self-named Jack London worked as an oyster pirate, a seaman,
a power plant laborer, but was most himself as a vagrant and a revolutionary,
until he became a professional writer, and then a war correspondent.
A voyager, rancher, Socialist politician, a permanent adventurer, an
incessant writer: London’s energies were beyond measure. He remains
both a phenomenon of our imaginative literature, and a permanent figure
in the American mythology.
His best stories—including “To Build a Fire,” “The She-Wolf,” “For
the Love of a Man,” “The Apostate”—surpass his novels and fantasies in
literary power. The realism of the stories is so extreme and intense that
they border upon hallucinatory phantasmagorias. Dogs transmute into
wolves, if they are not eaten by wolves, and men struggle lest they themselves
be devoured. Death is everywhere in Jack London’s Klondike: freezing,
starvation, wolves fuse into a composite menace.
The Call of the Wild (1903) opens with a section called “Into the
Primitive,” which is a fair motto for Jack London’s literary quest. Here I
want to center upon “The She-Wolf”, the second story or episode in White
Fang (1906). London’s grim sense of determinism haunts the entire book,
whose opening section “The Trail of the Meat”, sums up the metaphysic of
the work:
It is not the way of the Wild to like movement. Life is an
offence to it, for life is movement; and the Wild aims always to
destroy movement. It freezes the water to prevent it running to
the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen in
their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all
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does the Wild harry and crush into submission man—man,
who is the most restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum
that all movement must in the end come to the cessation of
movement.
Jack London writes in the interval between Schopenhauer’s analysis
of the Will to Live and Freud’s uncanny apprehension that the inanimate
is our destination and origin, the vision of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Yet
London, though he gives the Wild his allegiance, retains a kind of last-
ditch humanism. Bill and Henry, hunted by the wolf-pack, “two men who
were not yet dead,” are marked by the dignity of their mutual regard and
their desperate courage. Down to three bullets and six sled-dogs, they are
vastly outnumbered by the wolves. Their particular nemesis is the she-
wolf, a husky sled-dog gone back to the Wild, and now a leader of the
wolf-pack.
In the next episode, Bill joins the dogs as the she-wolf ’s victim, and
Henry is a solitary survivor. It is London’s peculiar power that his empathy
extends equally to the she-wolf and to her human antagonists. In writers of
children’s literature, London’s stance would be more commonplace. I cannot
think of a full analogue, in adult popular literature, to London’s affinity
for animals except for Kipling, who so beautifully blurs the lines
between children’s and adult imagination. Kipling was a far more versatile
and gifted writer than Jack London, and had nothing in him of London’s
savage primitivism. But that worship of the Wild still marks London’s difference
from nearly everyone else, and accounts for London’s permanent
appeal to readers throughout the world.
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Sherwood Anderson
(1876–1941)
HISTORICALLY, SHERWOOD ANDERSON WAS A CONSIDERABLE FIGURE IN
THE development of the American short story during the two decades of
the 1920s and 1930s. Influenced by the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser
and the prose experimentalism of Gertrude Stein, Anderson developed a
narrative art sufficiently his own so that he became a crucial, early influence
upon Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, both of whom rather
ungratefully satirized him.
Anderson’s obsessive “grotesques,” each trapped in his or her own
perspective, are generally the protagonists of his most successful stories.
But my own favorite among Anderson’s tales, “Death in the Woods,” concerns
a lifelong victim, too minimal in consciousness to be considered a
grotesque. A late story, published in 1933, “Death in the Woods” tells the
melancholy saga of Ma Marvin, a poor, isolated old woman who has been
exploited her whole life long. Anderson neither celebrates nor laments her,
but transforms her into his incantatory prose poem: “a thing so complete
has its own beauty.” The narrator, plainly a surrogate for Anderson, experiences
both his own incarnation as an artist and his simultaneous initial
sexual arousal by beholding the frozen body of the old woman, strangely
white and lovely, as though she were a young girl again.
Rereading “Death in the Woods,” after first confronting (and teaching)
it half a century ago, I find myself both impressed and chilled by it. By centering
upon the narrator’s vision of Ma Marvin’s death, Anderson reduces her
life to its aesthetic consequences, serving as material for the story. The narrator
feeds upon the old woman much as humans and animals always have fed
themselves upon her. One looks for some ironic awareness of the artist’s culpability
in “Death in the Woods,” but the irony is not there. Its absence marks
both Anderson’s purity as a storyteller and his limitations as well.
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Stephen Crane
(1879–1900)
STEPHEN CRANE’S PRIMARY CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN LITERATURE
remains his Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage. Yet his talents were
diverse: a handful of his experimental poems continue to be vibrant, and his
three finest stories are perpetually rewarding for lovers of that genre.
A war correspondent by enthusiastic profession, Stephen Crane was the
Hemingway of his era, always in pursuit of material for his narrative art. “The
Open Boat” is directly founded upon Crane’s own experience, while “The
Blue Hotel” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” reflect his travels in the
American West. Crane’s death, from tuberculosis at age twenty-eight, was an
extraordinary loss for American letters, and his three great stories examined in
this brief volume can be regarded as the most promising of his works.
“The Open Boat” intended, as Crane said, to be “after the fact,” but is
very different from “Stephen Crane’s Own Story,” his journalistic account of
surviving the sinking of the Commodore, a cargo ship bearing arms for the
Cuban rebels against Spain in January 1897. Much admired by Joseph
Conrad, “The Open Boat” so handles reality as to render it phantasmagoric.
The four survivors of the Commodore find themselves floating off a coast that
absurdly declines to observe them. Even when people on shore waved to
them, it is without recognition of the survivors’ predicament. Compelled to
make an unaided run to land, the boat is swamped in the icy water, and Crane
swims ashore with the greatest difficulty. “The Open Boat” concludes with a
sentence that memorializes the complex nature of the ordeal:
When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moon
light, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the
men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.
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One thinks of Melville and Conrad as interpreters of the mirror of
the sea; if Stephen Crane is of their visionary company, it can only be in an
outsider’s sense. What Crane conveys is the incomprehensibility of the sea
when seen from a land-perspective. When I think of “The Open Boat,”
what I recall first is the frustrated helplessness of the survivors in the boat,
who cannot communicate to those on shore the precariousness and desperation
of shipwreck. Crane, neither a moralist like Conrad nor a Gnostic
rebel like Melville, cannot quite reveal his interpretation to us.
“The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” is a genial comedy, yet it also turns
upon the absurdity of non-recognition. Scratchy Wilson, the story’s insane
and alcoholic gunman, cannot take in the enormous change that Jack
Potter, town marshal of Yellow Sky, stands before him not only unarmed
but accompanied by his new bride:
“Well,” said Wilson at last, slowly, “I s’pose it’s all off now.”
“It’s all off if you say so, Scratchy. You know I didn’t make
the trouble.” Potter lifted his valise.
“Well, I ‘low it’s off, Jack,” said Wilson. He was looking at
the ground. “Married!” He was not a student of chivalry; it was
merely that in the presence of this foreign condition he was a
simple child of the earlier plains. He picked up his starboard
revolver, and placing both weapons in their holsters, he went
away. His feet made funnel-shaped tracks in the heavy sand.
As in “The Open Boat,” Crane relies upon a total clash of incongruities.
Sea and land are as far apart as marriage and Scratchy Wilson,
who knows only that part of his world has ended forever. Crane acts as
interpreter, and yet keeps his distance from the absurd gap that is very
nearly beyond interpretation.
Crane worked very hard writing “The Blue Hotel,” his masterpiece
of narrative. The Swede is a kind of culmination for Crane: an authentically
unpleasant character, whose reality is so persuasive as to become
oppressive. Lured by the myth of the West, the Swede attempts to incarnate
its code, but individuates himself instead as a bully and an interloper.
His fight with young Scully is a false victory, isolating him totally, until he
provokes the gambler into murdering him. The rest is irony:
The corpse of the Swede, alone in the saloon, had its eyes fixed
upon a dreadful legend that dwelt a-top of the cash machine:
“This registers the amount of the purchase.”
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Yet has the Swede purchased death or been tricked into it? Crane’s
final irony is to reveal that young Scully has been cheating at cards, thus
rightly provoking the Swede to combat. Is the Easterner correct when he
ends the story by asserting that five men, himself included, pragmatically
murdered the Swede? I think that the reader decides differently. The
Swede, and the myth of the West, are the only culprits.
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James Joyce
(1882–1941)
IT IS AN ACCURATE CRITICAL COMMONPLACE TO OBSERVE THAT JOYCE’S
Dubliners is a vision of judgment, both Dantesque and Blakean. “The
Dead,” masterpiece of the volume, is overtly Dantean in design, as Mary
Reynolds first demonstrated. In the final cantos of the Inferno, we are surrounded
by the frozen wastes of Cocytus, where those are buried who have
betrayed country, relatives, friends, benefactors, and guests. Gabriel
Conroy, protagonist of “The Dead,” evidently was viewed by Joyce as such
a betrayer, though in thought and emotion rather than in his actions.
Joyce’s implicit judgment may seem rather harsh, but then Dante was perhaps
the fiercest of all poetic moralists. Gabriel Conroy is weak and parasitical,
a kind of failed artist, yet most of us would not regard him as
damned. But we are not Joyce, or Dante, or Blake, or Milton, and all four
seers—despite their differences—would have judged many among us as
being already in Hell.
Poor Gabriel has some very humane qualities, which he shares with
Joyce himself, and it may be, as many critics have maintained, that the antihero
of “The Dead” is both a Joycean self-portrait and a self-condemnation,
though that is too simple to be adequate for this ambiguous and
exquisite novella. I have never believed in what Sir William Empson called
“the Kenner Smear,” that being the Eliotic attempt by Hugh Kenner to
return Joyce to the Catholic orthodoxy against which the author of
Dubliners was in rebellion. Original depravity is no more a Joycean idea
than it was Blakean. When Gabriel Conroy passes a Last Judgment upon
himself, we need not agree with its severity:
A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He
saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his
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aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians
and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous
fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.
There is something universal in that self-estimate; enough so to
make many readers wince and grimace in recognition. Yet Joyce was gentler
than Dante, and the creator of Poldy Bloom, the Ulysses of Dublin,
was no more a dark moralist than the benign Poldy proved to be.
Sublimely, Poldy was a man without hatred, curious and gentle in all
things. Gabriel Conroy is no Poldy, but neither is he a resident of Dante’s
Inferno, whatever Joyce’s symbolic design. In Ulysses, the symbolic and naturalistic
elements in Joyce’s art fuse, but in Dubliners they tend to pull
apart. Poor Gabriel’s treasons are mundane enough; they are petty, as he
so frequently can be petty. Perhaps he cannot get beyond self-love, and yet
the great vision that concludes “The Dead” argues for a momentary self-
transcendence:
His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts
of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend,
their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was
fading out ...
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Franz Kafka
(1883–1924)
IN HER OBITUARY FOR HER LOVER, FRANZ KAFKA, MILENA JESENSKÁ
sketched a modern Gnostic, a writer whose vision was of the kenoma, the
cosmic emptiness into which we have been thrown:
He was a hermit, a man of insight who was frightened by life.... He
saw the world as being full of invisible demons which assail and
destroy defenseless man.... All his works describe the terror of mysterious
misconceptions and guiltless guilt in human beings.
Milena—brilliant, fearless, and loving—may have subtly distorted
Kafka’s beautifully evasive slidings between normative Jewish and Jewish
Gnostic stances. Max Brod, responding to Kafka’s now-famous remark—
“We are nihilistic thoughts that came into God’s head”—explained to his
friend the Gnostic notion that the Demiurge had made this world both sinful
and evil. “No,” Kafka replied, “I believe we are not such a radical relapse
of God’s, only one of His bad moods. He had a bad day.” Playing straight
man, the faithful Brod asked if this meant there was hope outside our cosmos.
Kafka smiled, and charmingly said: “Plenty of hope—for God—no
end of hope—only not for us.”
Kafka, despite Gershom Scholem’s authoritative attempts to claim him
for Jewish Gnosticism, is both more and less than a Gnostic, as we might
expect. Yahweh can be saved, and the divine degradation that is fundamental
to Gnosticism is not an element in Kafka’s world. But we were fashioned out
of the clay during one of Yahweh’s bad moods; perhaps there was divine dyspepsia,
or sultry weather in the garden that Yahweh had planted in the East.
Yahweh is hope, and we are hopeless. We are the jackdaws or crows, the
kafkas (since that is what the name means, in Czech) whose impossibility is
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what the heavens signify: “The crows maintain that a single crow could
destroy the heavens. Doubtless that is so, but it proves nothing against the
heavens, for the heavens signify simply: the impossibility of crows.”
In Gnosticism, there is an alien, wholly transcendent God, and the
adept, after considerable difficulties, can find the way back to presence and
fullness. Gnosticism therefore is a religion of salvation, though the most
negative of all such saving visions. Kafkan spirituality offers no hope of salvation,
and so is not Gnostic. But Milena Jesenská certainly was right to
emphasize the Kafkan terror that is akin to Gnosticism’s dread of the keno-
ma, which is the world governed by the Archons. Kafka takes the impossible
step beyond Gnosticism, by denying that there is hope for us anywhere at all.
In the aphorisms that Brod rather misleadingly entitled “Reflections on
Sin, Pain, Hope and The True Way,” Kafka wrote: “What is laid upon us is to
accomplish the negative; the positive is already given.” How much Kabbalah
Kafka knew is not clear. Since he wrote a new Kabbalah, the question of Jewish
Gnostic sources can be set aside. Indeed, by what seems a charming oddity
(but I would call it yet another instance of Blake’s insistence that forms of worship
are chosen from poetic tales), our understanding of Kabbalah is Kafkan
anyway, since Kafka profoundly influenced Gershom Scholem, and no one
will be able to get beyond Scholem’s creative or strong misreading of Kabbalah
for decades to come. I repeat this point to emphasize its shock value: we read
Kabbalah, via Scholem, from a Kafkan perspective, even as we read human
personality and its mimetic possibilities by way of Shakespeare’s perspectives,
since essentially Freud mediates Shakespeare for us, yet relies upon him nevertheless.
A Kafkan facticity or contingency now governs our awareness of
whatever in Jewish cultural tradition is other than normative.
In his diaries for 1922, Kafka meditated, on January 16, upon “something
very like a breakdown,” in which it was “impossible to sleep, impossible
to stay awake, impossible to endure life, or, more exactly, the course
of life.” The vessels were breaking for him as his demoniac, writerly inner
world and the outer life “split apart, and they do split apart, or at least clash
in a fearful manner.” Late in the evening, K. arrives at the village, which is
deep in snow. The Castle is in front of him, but even the hill upon which
it stands is veiled in mist and darkness, and there is not a single light visible
to show that the Castle was there. K. stands a long time on a wooden
bridge that leads from the main road to the village, while gazing, not at the
village, but “into the illusory emptiness above him,” where the Castle
should be. He does not know what he will always refuse to learn, which is
that the emptiness is “illusory” in every possible sense, since he does gaze
at the kenoma, which resulted initially from the breaking of the vessels, the
splitting apart of every world, inner and outer.
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Writing the vision of K., Kafka counts the costs of his confirmation,
in a passage prophetic of Scholem, but with a difference that Scholem
sought to negate by combining Zionism and Kabbalah for himself. Kafka
knew better, perhaps only for himself, but perhaps for others as well:
Second: This pursuit, originating in the midst of men, carries
one in a direction away from them. The solitude that for the
most part has been forced on me, in part voluntarily sought by
me—but what was this if not compulsion too?—is now losing
all its ambiguity and approaches its denouement. Where is it
leading? The strongest likelihood is that it may lead to madness;
there is nothing more to say, the pursuit goes right
through me and rends me asunder. Or I can—can I?—manage
to keep my feet somewhat and be carried along in the wild pursuit.
Where, then, shall I be brought? “Pursuit,” indeed, is only
a metaphor. I can also say, “assault on the last earthly frontier,”
an assault, moreover, launched from below, from mankind, and
since this too is a metaphor, I can replace it by the metaphor of
an assault from above, aimed at me from above.
All such writing is an assault on the frontiers; if Zionism had
not intervened, it might easily have developed into a new secret
doctrine, a Kabbalah. There are intimations of this. Though of
course it would require genius of an unimaginable kind to strike
root again in the old centuries, or create the old centuries anew
and not spend itself withal, but only then begin to flower forth.
Consider Kafka’s three metaphors, which he so knowingly substitutes
for one another. The pursuit is of ideas, in that mode of introspection
which is Kafka’s writing. Yet this metaphor of pursuit is also a piercing
“right through me” and a breaking apart of the self. For “pursuit,” Kafka
then substitutes mankind’s assault, from below, on the last earthly frontier.
What is that frontier? It must lie between us and the heavens. Kafka, the
crow or jackdaw, by writing, transgresses the frontier and implicitly maintains
that he could destroy the heavens. By another substitution, the
metaphor changes to “an assault from above, aimed at me from above,” the
aim simply being the signifying function of the heavens, which is to mean
the impossibility of Kafkas or crows. The heavens assault Kafka through his
writing; “all such writing is an assault on the frontiers,” and these must now
be Kafka’s own frontiers. One thinks of Freud’s most complex “frontier
concept,” more complex even than the drive: the bodily ego. The heavens
assault Kafka’s bodily ego, but only through his own writing. Certainly such
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an assault is not un-Jewish, and has as much to do with normative as with
esoteric Jewish tradition.
Yet, according to Kafka, his own writing, were it not for the intervention
of Zionism, might easily have developed into a new Kabbalah.
How are we to understand that curious statement about Zionism as the
blocking agent that prevents Franz Kafka from becoming another Isaac
Luria? Kafka darkly and immodestly writes: “There are intimations of
this.” Our teacher Gershom Scholem governs our interpretation here, of
necessity. Those intimations belong to Kafka alone, or perhaps to a select
few in his immediate circle. They cannot be conveyed to Jewry, even to its
elite, because Zionism has taken the place of messianic Kabbalah, including
presumably the heretical Kabbalah of Nathan of Gaza, prophet of
Sabbatai Zvi and of all his followers down to the blasphemous Jacob Frank.
Kafka’s influence upon Scholem is decisive here, for Kafka already has
arrived at Scholem’s central thesis of the link between the Kabbalah of
Isaac Luria, the messianism of the Sabbatarians and Frankists, and the
political Zionism that gave rebirth to Israel.
Kafka goes on, most remarkably, to disown the idea that he possesses
“genius of an unimaginable kind,” one that either would strike root again in
archaic Judaism, presumably of the esoteric sort, or more astonishingly
“create the old centuries anew,” which Scholem insisted Kafka had done.
But can we speak, as Scholem tried to speak, of the Kabbalah of Franz
Kafka? Is there a new secret doctrine in the superb stories and the extraordinary
parables and paradoxes, or did not Kafka spend his genius in the act
of new creation of the old Jewish centuries? Kafka certainly would have
judged himself harshly as one spent withal, rather than as a writer who
“only then began to flower forth.” Kafka died only two and a half years after
this meditative moment, died, alas, just before his forty-first birthday. Yet as
the propounder of a new Kabbalah, he had gone very probably as far as he
(or anyone else) could go. No Kabbalah, be it that of Moses de Leon, Isaac
Luria, Moses Cordovero, Nathan of Gaza or Gershom Scholem, is exactly
easy to interpret, but Kafka’s secret doctrine, if it exists at all, is designedly
uninterpretable. My working principle in reading Kafka is to observe that
he did everything possible to evade interpretation, which only means that
what most needs and demands interpretation in Kafka’s writing is its perversely
deliberate evasion of interpretation. Erich Heller’s formula for getting
at this evasion is: “Ambiguity has never been considered an elemental
force; it is precisely this in the stories of Franz Kafka.” Perhaps, but evasiveness
is not the same literary quality as ambiguity.
Evasiveness is purposive; it writes between the lines, to borrow a fine
trope from Leo Strauss. What does it mean when a quester for a new
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Negative, or perhaps rather a revisionist of an old Negative, resorts to the
evasion of every possible interpretation as his central topic or theme? Kafka
does not doubt guilt, but wishes to make it “possible for men to enjoy sin
without guilt, almost without guilt,” by reading Kafka. To enjoy sin almost
without guilt is to evade interpretation, in exactly the dominant Jewish
sense of interpretation. Jewish tradition, whether normative or esoteric,
never teaches you to ask Nietzsche’s question: “Who is the interpreter, and
what power does he seek to gain over the text?” Instead, Jewish tradition
asks: “Is the interpreter in the line of those who seek to build a hedge about
the Torah in every age?” Kafka’s power of evasiveness is not a power over
his own text, and it does build a hedge about the Torah in our age. Yet no
one before Kafka built up that hedge wholly out of evasiveness, not even
Maimonides or Judah Halevi or even Spinoza. Subtlest and most evasive of
all writers, Kafka remains the severest and most harassing of the belated
sages of what will yet become the Jewish cultural tradition of the future.
II
The jackdaw or crow or Kafka is also the weird figure of the great hunter
Gracchus (whose Latin name also means a crow), who is not alive but dead, yet
who floats, like one living, on his death-bark forever. When the fussy
Burgomaster of Riva knits his brow, asking: “And you have no part in the other
world (das Jenseits)?”, the Hunter replies, with grand defensive irony:
I am forever on the great stair that leads up to it. On that infinitely
wide and spacious stair I clamber about, sometimes up,
sometimes down, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the
left, always in motion. The Hunter has been turned into a butterfly.
Do not laugh.
Like the Burgomaster, we do not laugh. Being a single crow, Gracchus
would be enough to destroy the heavens, but he will never get there. Instead,
the heavens signify his impossibility, the absence of crows or hunters, and so
he has been turned into another butterfly, which is all we can be, from the
perspective of the heavens. And we bear no blame for that:
“I had been glad to live and I was glad to die. Before I stepped
aboard, I joyfully flung away my wretched load of ammunition,
my knapsack, my hunting rifle that I had always been proud to
carry, and I slipped into my winding sheet like a girl into her
marriage dress. I lay and waited. Then came the mishap.”
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“A terrible fate,” said the Burgomaster, raising his hand
defensively. “And you bear no blame for it?”
“None,” said the hunter. “I was a hunter; was there any sin in
that? I followed my calling as a hunter in the Black Forest, where
there were still wolves in those days. I lay in ambush, shot, hit my
mark, flayed the skin from my victims: was there any sin in that?
My labors were blessed. ‘The Great Hunter of Black Forest’ was
the name I was given. Was there any sin in that?”
“I am not called upon to decide that,” said the Burgomaster,
“but to me also there seems to be no sin in such things. But
then, whose is the guilt?”
“The boatman’s,” said the Hunter. “Nobody will read what I
say here, no one will come to help me; even if all the people were
commanded to help me, every door and window would remain
shut, everybody would take to bed and draw the bedclothes over
his head, the whole earth would become an inn for the night. And
there is sense in that, for nobody knows of me, and if anyone
knew he would not know where I could be found, and if he knew
where I could be found, he would not know how to deal with me,
he would not know how to help me. The thought of helping me
is an illness that has to be cured by taking to one’s bed.”
How admirable Gracchus is, even when compared to the Homeric
heroes! They know, or think they know, that to be alive, however miserable,
is preferable to being the foremost among the dead. But Gracchus
wished only to be himself, happy to be a hunter when alive, joyful to be a
corpse when dead: “I slipped into my winding sheet like a girl into her
marriage dress.” So long as everything happened in good order, Gracchus
was more than content. The guilt must be the boatman’s, and may not
exceed mere incompetence. Being dead and yet still articulate, Gracchus is
beyond help: “The thought of helping me is an illness that has to be cured
by taking to one’s bed.”
When he gives the striking trope of the whole earth closing down
like an inn for the night, with the bedclothes drawn over everybody’s head,
Gracchus renders the judgment: “And there is sense in that.” There is
sense in that only because in Kafka’s world as in Freud’s, or in Scholem’s,
or in any world deeply informed by Jewish memory, there is necessarily
sense in everything, total sense, even though Kafka refuses to aid you in
getting at or close to it.
But what kind of a world is that, where there is sense in everything,
where everything seems to demand interpretation? There can be sense in
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everything, as J.H. Van den Berg once wrote against Freud’s theory of
repression, only if everything is already in the past and there never again
can be anything wholly new. That is certainly the world of the great normative
rabbis of the second century of the Common Era, and consequently
it has been the world of most Jews ever since. Torah has been given,
Talmud has risen to complement and interpret it, other interpretations in
the chain of tradition are freshly forged in each generation, but the limits
of Creation and of Revelation are fixed in Jewish memory. There is sense
in everything because all sense is present already in the Hebrew Bible,
which by definition must be totally intelligible, even if its fullest intelligibility
will not shine forth until the Messiah comes.
Gracchus, hunter and jackdaw, is Kafka, pursuer of ideas and jackdaw,
and the endless, hopeless voyage of Gracchus is Kafka’s passage, only
partly through a language not his own, and largely through a life not much
his own. Kafka was studying Hebrew intensively while he wrote “The
Hunter Gracchus,” early in 1917, and I think we may call the voyages of
the dead but never-buried Gracchus a trope for Kafka’s belated study of his
ancestral language. He was still studying Hebrew in the spring of 1923,
with his tuberculosis well advanced, and down to nearly the end he longed
for Zion, dreaming of recovering his health and firmly grounding his identity
by journeying to Palestine. Like Gracchus, he experienced life-indeath,
though unlike Gracchus he achieved the release of total death.
“The Hunter Gracchus” as a story or extended parable is not the narrative
of a Wandering Jew or Flying Dutchman, because Kafka’s trope for his
writing activity is not so much a wandering or even a wavering, but rather a
repetition, labyrinthine and burrow-building. His writing repeats, not itself,
but a Jewish esoteric interpretation of Torah that Kafka himself scarcely
knows, or even needs to know. What this interpretation tells Kafka is that
there is no written Torah but only an oral one. However, Kafka has no one
to tell him what this Oral Torah is. He substitutes his own writing therefore
for the Oral Torah not made available to him. He is precisely in the stance
of the Hunter Gracchus, who concludes by saying, “‘I am here, more than
that I do not know, further than that I cannot go. My ship has no rudder, and
it is driven by the wind that blows in the undermost regions of death.’”
III
“What is the Talmud if not a message from the distance?”, Kafka
wrote to Robert Klopstock, on December 19, 1932. What was all of Jewish
tradition, to Kafka, except a message from an endless distance? That is
surely part of the burden of the famous parable, “An Imperial Message,”
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which concludes with you, the reader, sitting at your window when
evening falls and dreaming to yourself the parable—that God, in his act of
dying, has sent you an individual message. Heinz Politzer read this as a
Nietzschean parable, and so fell into the trap set by the Kafkan evasiveness:
Describing the fate of the parable in a time depleted of metaphysical
truths, the imperial message has turned into the subjective
fantasy of a dreamer who sits at a window with a view on
a darkening world. The only real information imported by this
story is the news of the Emperor’s death. This news Kafka took
over from Nietzsche.
No, for even though you dream the parable, the parable conveys
truth. The Talmud does exist; it really is an Imperial message from the distance.
The distance is too great; it cannot reach you; there is hope, but not
for you. Nor is it so clear that God is dead. He is always dying, yet always
whispers a message into the angel’s ear. It is said to you that: “Nobody
could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man,”
but the Emperor actually does not die in the text of the parable.
Distance is part of Kafka’s crucial notion of the Negative, which is not
a Hegelian nor a Heideggerian Negative, but is very close to Freud’s
Negation and also to the Negative imaging carried out by Scholem’s
Kabbalists. But I want to postpone Kafka’s Jewish version of the Negative
until later. “The Hunter Gracchus” is an extraordinary text, but it is not wholly
characteristic of Kafka at his strongest, at his uncanniest or most sublime.
When he is most himself, Kafka gives us a continuous inventiveness
and originality that rivals Dante, and truly challenges Proust and Joyce as
that of the dominant Western author of our century, setting Freud aside,
since Freud ostensibly is science and not narrative or mythmaking, though
if you believe that, then you can be persuaded of anything. Kafka’s beast
fables are rightly celebrated, but his most remarkable fabulistic being is
neither animal nor human, but is little Odradek, in the curious sketch, less
than a page and a half long, “The Cares of a Family Man,” where the title
might have been translated: “The Sorrows of a Paterfamilias.” The family
man narrates these five paragraphs, each a dialectical lyric in itself, beginning
with one that worries the meaning of the name:
Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to
account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of
German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty
of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that
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neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an
intelligent meaning of the word.
This evasiveness was overcome by the scholar Wilhelm Emrich, who
traced the name Odradek to the Czech word odraditi, meaning to dissuade
anyone from doing anything. Like Edward Gorey’s Doubtful Guest,
Odradek is uninvited yet will not leave, since implicitly he dissuades you
from doing anything about his presence, or rather something about his
very uncanniness advises you to let him alone:
No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if
there were not a creature called Odradek. At first glance it
looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does
seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only
old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of
the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for
a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and
another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of
this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on
the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.
Is Odradek a “thing,” as the bemused family man begins by calling
him, or is he not a childlike creature, a daemon at home in the world of
children? Odradek clearly was made by an inventive and humorous child,
rather in the spirit of the making of Adam out of the moistened red clay by
the J writer’s Yahweh. It is difficult not to read Odradek’s creation as a deliberate
parody when we are told that “the whole thing can stand upright as if
on two legs,” and again when the suggestion is ventured that Odradek, like
Adam, “once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-
down remnant.” If Odradek is fallen, he is still quite jaunty, and cannot be
closely scrutinized, since he “is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid
hold of,” like the story in which he appears. Odradek not only advises you
not to do anything about him, but in some clear sense he is yet another figure
by means of whom Kafka advises you against interpreting Kafka.
One of the loveliest moments in all of Kafka comes when you, the
paterfamilias, encounter Odradek leaning directly beneath you against the
banisters. Being inclined to speak to him, as you would to a child, you
receive a surprise: “‘Well, what’s your name?’ you ask him. ‘Odradek,’ he
says. ‘And where do you live?’ ‘No fixed abode,’ he says and laughs; but it
is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather
like the rustling of fallen leaves.”
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“The ‘I’ is another,” Rimbaud once wrote, adding: “So much the worse
for the wood that finds it is a violin.” So much the worse for the wood that
finds it is Odradek. He laughs at being a vagrant, if only by the bourgeois definition
of having “no fixed abode,” but the laughter, not being human, is
uncanny. And so he provokes the family man to an uncanny reflection, which
may be a Kafkan parody of Freud’s death drive beyond the pleasure principle:
I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him?
Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of
aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that
does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will
always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing
after him, right before the feet of my children? He does no
harm to anyone that I can see, but the idea that he is likely to
survive me I find almost painful.
The aim of life, Freud says, is death, is the return of the organic to
the inorganic, supposedly our earlier state of being. Our activity wears out,
and so we die because, in an uncanny sense, we wish to die. But Odradek,
harmless and charming, is a child’s creation, aimless, and so not subject to
the death drive. Odradek is immortal, being daemonic, and he represents
also a Freudian return of the repressed, of something repressed in the
paterfamilias, something from which the family man is in perpetual flight.
Little Odradek is precisely what Freud calls a cognitive return of the
repressed, while (even as) a complete affective repression is maintained.
The family man introjects Odradek intellectually, but totally projects him
affectively. Odradek, I now suggest, is best understood as Kafka’s synecdoche
for Verneinung; Kafka’s version (not altogether un-Freudian) of
Jewish Negation, a version I hope to adumbrate in what follows.
IV
Why does Kafka have so unique a spiritual authority? Perhaps the
question should be rephrased. What kind of spiritual authority does Kafka
have for us or why are we moved or compelled to read him as one who has
such authority? Why invoke the question of authority at all? Literary
authority, however we define it, has no necessary relation to spiritual authority,
and to speak of a spiritual authority in Jewish writing anyway always has
been to speak rather dubiously. Authority is not a Jewish concept but a
Roman one, and so makes perfect contemporary sense in the context of the
Roman Catholic Church, but little sense in Jewish matters, despite the
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squalors of Israeli politics and the flaccid pieties of American Jewish nostalgias.
There is no authority without hierarchy, and hierarchy is not a very
Jewish concept either. We do not want the rabbis, or anyone else, to tell us
what or who is or is not Jewish. The masks of the normative conceal not only
the eclecticism of Judaism and of Jewish culture, but also the nature of the J
writer’s Yahweh himself. It is absurd to think of Yahweh as having mere
authority. He is no Roman godling who augments human activities, nor a
Homeric god helping to constitute an audience for human heroism.
Yahweh is neither a founder nor an onlooker, though sometimes he
can be mistaken for either or both. His essential trope is fatherhood rather
than foundation, and his interventions are those of a covenanter rather
than of a spectator. You cannot found an authority upon him, because his
benignity is manifested not through augmentation but through creation.
He does not write; he speaks, and he is heard, in time, and what he continues
to create by his speaking is olam, time without boundaries, which is
more than just an augmentation. More of anything else can come through
authority, but more life is the blessing itself, and comes, beyond authority,
to Abraham, to Jacob, and to David. No more than Yahweh, do any of
them have mere authority. Yet Kafka certainly does have literary authority,
and in a troubled way his literary authority is now spiritual also, particularly
in Jewish contexts. I do not think that this is a post-Holocaust phenomenon,
though Jewish Gnosticism, oxymoronic as it may or may not be,
certainly seems appropriate to our time, to many among us. Literary
Gnosticism does not seem to me a time-bound phenomenon, anyway.
Kafka’s The Castle, as Erich Heller has argued, is clearly more Gnostic than
normative in is spiritual temper, but then so is Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and
Blake’s The Four Zoas, and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. We sense a Jewish element
in Kafka’s apparent Gnosticism, even if we are less prepared than
Scholem was to name it as a new Kabbalah. In his 1922 Diaries, Kafka subtly
insinuated that even his espousal of the Negative was dialectical:
The Negative alone, however strong it may be, cannot suffice, as
in my unhappiest moments I believe it can. For if I have gone the
tiniest step upward, won any, be it the most dubious kind of security
for myself, I then stretch out on my step and wait for the
Negative, not to climb up to me, indeed, but to drag me down
from it. Hence it is a defensive instinct in me that won’t tolerate
my having the slightest degree of lasting ease and smashes the
marriage bed, for example, even before it has been set up.
What is the Kafkan Negative, whether in this passage or elsewhere?
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Let us begin by dismissing the Gallic notion that there is anything Hegelian
about it, any more than there is anything Hegelian about the Freudian
Verneinung. Kafka’s Negative, unlike Freud’s, is uneasily and remotely
descended from the ancient tradition of negative theology, and perhaps even
from that most negative of ancient theologies, Gnosticism, and yet Kafka,
despite his yearnings for transcendence, joins Freud in accepting the ultimate
authority of the fact. The given suffers no destruction in Kafka or in
Freud, and this given essentially is the way things are, for everyone, and for
the Jews in particular. If fact is supreme, then the mediation of the Hegelian
Negative becomes an absurdity, and no destructive use of such a Negative is
possible, which is to say that Heidegger becomes impossible, and Derrida,
who is a strong misreading of Heidegger, becomes quite unnecessary.
The Kafkan Negative most simply is his Judaism, which is to say the
spiritual form of Kafka’s self-conscious Jewishness, as exemplified in that
extraordinary aphorism: “What is laid upon us is to accomplish the negative;
the positive is already given.” The positive here is the Law or normative
Judaism; the negative is not so much Kafka’s new Kabbalah, as it is that
which is still laid upon us: the Judaism of the Negative, of the future as it
is always rushing towards us.
His best biographer to date, Ernst Pawel, emphasizes Kafka’s consciousness
“of his identity as a Jew, not in the religious, but in the national
sense.” Still, Kafka was not a Zionist, and perhaps he longed not so much
for Zion as for a Jewish language, be it Yiddish or Hebrew. He could not
see that his astonishing stylistic purity in German was precisely his way of
not betraying his self-identity as a Jew. In his final phase, Kafka thought of
going to Jerusalem, and again intensified his study of Hebrew. Had he
lived, he would probably have gone to Zion, perfected a vernacular
Hebrew, and given us the bewilderment of Kafkan parables and stories in
the language of the J writer and of Judah Halevi.
V
What calls out for interpretation in Kafka is his refusal to be interpreted,
his evasiveness even in the realm of his own Negative. Two of his most
beautifully enigmatical performances, both late, are the parable, “The
Problem of Our Laws,” and the story or testament “Josephine the Singer and
the Mouse Folk.” Each allows a cognitive return of Jewish cultural memory,
while refusing the affective identification that would make either parable or
tale specifically Jewish in either historical or contemporary identification.
“The Problem of Our Laws” is set as a problem in the parable’s first paragraph:
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Our laws are not generally known; they are kept secret by the
small group of nobles who rule us. We are convinced that these
ancient laws are scrupulously administered; nevertheless it is an
extremely painful thing to be ruled by laws that one does not
know. I am not thinking of possible discrepancies that may arise
in the interpretation of the laws, or of the disadvantages
involved when only a few and not the whole people are allowed
to have a say in their interpretation. These disadvantages are
perhaps of no great importance. For the laws are very ancient;
their interpretation has been the work of centuries, and has
itself doubtless acquired the status of law; and though there is
still a possible freedom of interpretation left, it has now
become very restricted. Moreover the nobles have obviously no
cause to be influenced in their interpretation by personal interests
inimical to us, for the laws were made to the advantage of
the nobles from the very beginning, they themselves stand
above the laws, and that seems to be why the laws were entrusted
exclusively into their hands. Of course, there is wisdom in
that—who doubts the wisdom of the ancient laws?—but also
hardship for us; probably that is unavoidable.
In Judaism, the Law is precisely what is generally known, proclaimed,
and taught by the normative sages. The Kabbalah was secret doctrine, but
increasingly was guarded not by the normative rabbis, but by Gnostic sectaries,
Sabbatarians, and Frankists, all of them ideologically descended from
Nathan of Gaza, Sabbatai Zvi’s prophet. Kafka twists askew the relations
between normative and esoteric Judaism, again making a synecdochal representation
impossible. It is not the rabbis or normative sages who stand
above the Torah but the minim, the heretics from Elisha ben Abuyah
through to Jacob Frank, and in some sense, Gershom Scholem as well. To
these Jewish Gnostics, as the parable goes on to insinuate: “The Law is
whatever the nobles do.” So radical a definition tells us “that the tradition
is far from complete,” and that a kind of messianic expectation is therefore
necessary. This view, so comfortless as far as the present is concerned, is
lightened only by the belief that a time will eventually come when the tradition
and our research into it will jointly reach their conclusion, and as it
were gain a breathing space, when everything will have become clear, the
law will belong to the people, and the nobility will vanish.
If the parable at this point were to be translated into early Christian
terms, then “the nobility” would be the Pharisees, and “the people” would
be the Christian believers. But Kafka moves rapidly to stop such a
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translation: “This is not maintained in any spirit of hatred against the
nobility; not at all, and by no one. We are more inclined to hate ourselves,
because we have not yet shown ourselves worthy of being entrusted with
the laws.”
“We” here cannot be either Christians or Jews. Who then are those
who “have not yet shown ourselves worthy of being entrusted with the
laws”? They would appear to be the crows or jackdaws again, a Kafka or a
Hunter Gracchus, wandering about in a state perhaps vulnerable to self-
hatred or self-distrust, waiting for a Torah that will not be revealed.
Audaciously, Kafka then concludes with overt paradox:
Actually one can express the problem only in a sort of paradox:
Any party that would repudiate not only all belief in the laws,
but the nobility as well, would have the whole people behind it;
yet no such party can come into existence, for nobody would
dare to repudiate the nobility. We live on this razor’s edge. A
writer once summed the matter up in this way: The sole visible
and indubitable law that is imposed upon us is the nobility, and
must we ourselves deprive ourselves of that one law?
Why would no one dare to repudiate the nobility, whether we read
them as normative Pharisees, Jewish Gnostic heresiarchs, or whatever?
Though imposed upon us, the sages or the minim are the only visible evidence
of law that we have. Who are we then? How is the parable’s final
question, whether open or rhetorical, to be answered? “Must we ourselves
deprive ourselves of that one law?” Blake’s answer, in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, was: “One Law for the Lion and the Ox is Oppression.”
But what is one law for the crows? Kafka will not tell us whether it is
oppression or not.
Josephine the singer also is a crow or Kafka, rather than a mouse, and
the folk may be interpreted as an entire nation of jackdaws. The spirit of
the Negative, dominant if uneasy in “The Problem of Our Laws,” is loosed
into a terrible freedom in Kafka’s testamentary story. That is to say: in the
parable, the laws could not be Torah, though that analogue flickered near.
But in Josephine’s story, the mouse folk simultaneously are and are not the
Jewish people, and Franz Kafka both is and is not their curious singer.
Cognitively the identifications are possible, as though returned from forgetfulness,
but affectively they certainly are not, unless we can assume that
crucial aspects making up the identifications have been purposefully, if
other than consciously, forgotten. Josephine’s piping is Kafka’s story, and
yet Kafka’s story is hardly Josephine’s piping.
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Can there be a mode of negation neither conscious nor unconscious,
neither Hegelian nor Freudian? Kafka’s genius provides one, exposing
many shades between consciousness and the work of repression, many
demarcations far ghostlier than we could have imagined without him.
Perhaps the ghostliest come at the end of the story:
Josephine’s road, however, must go downhill. The time will
soon come when her last notes sound and die into silence. She
is a small episode in the eternal history of our people, and the
people will get over the loss of her. Not that it will be easy for
us; how can our gatherings take place in utter silence? Still,
were they not silent even when Josephine was present? Was her
actual piping notably louder and more alive than the memory
of it will be? Was it even in her lifetime more than a simply
memory? Was it not rather because Josephine’s singing was
already past losing in this way that our people in their wisdom
prized it so highly?
So perhaps we shall not miss so very much after all, while
Josephine, redeemed from the earthly sorrows which to her
thinking lay in wait for all chosen spirits, will happily lose herself
in the numberless throng of the heroes of our people, and
soon, since we are no historians, will rise to the heights of
redemption and be forgotten like all her brothers.
“I am a Memory come alive,” Kafka wrote in the Diaries. Whether
or not he intended it, he was Jewish memory come alive. “Was it even in
her lifetime more than a simple memory?” Kafka asks, knowing that he too
was past losing. The Jews are no historians, in some sense, because Jewish
memory, as Yosef Yerushalmi has demonstrated, is a normative mode and
not a historical one. Kafka, if he could have prayed, might have prayed to
rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten like most of his brothers
and sisters. But his prayer would not have been answered. When we
think of the Catholic writer, we think of Dante, who nevertheless had the
audacity to enshrine his Beatrice in the hierarchy of Paradise. If we think
of the Protestant writer, we think of Milton, a party or sect of one, who
believed that the soul was mortal, and would be resurrected only in conjunction
with the body. Think of the Jewish writer, and you must think of
Kafka, who evaded his own audacity, and believed nothing, and trusted
only in the Covenant of being a writer.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
D.H. Lawrence
(1885–1930)
D.H. LAWRENCE IS NOW MOSTLY OUT OF FAVOR AND IS PARTICULARLY
resented (with reason) by literary feminists. But he wrote two great novels
in The Rainbow and Women in Love, and he was second only to Thomas
Hardy among English poets of the Twentieth Century (setting aside the
Anglo-Irish Yeats and the self-exiled-to-America Geoffrey Hill). Lawrence
was also a prose-prophet and travel writer, but his most extraordinary
achievement was as a tale-teller, whether in short stories like “The Prussian
Officer” or in novellas like The Man Who Died and The Fox.
“The Prussian Officer” remains profoundly disturbing, and is a masterpiece
of style and narration. It has particular value as a foil to The Fox,
since the homoerotic, largely implicit drama of “The Prussian Officer”
becomes almost wholly explicit in The Fox, a superb short novel of conflict
between a man and a woman who compete for another woman.
The two girls, Banford and March, both nearing thirty, have a
ambiguous relationship, evidently just short of sexual. Henry, the young
soldier—nearly a decade younger than March—is a total antithesis to
Banford. He is what once would have been called natural man: dignified,
graceful, a born hunter, intense, instinctive. The love between March and
Henry is immediate, but her history, her situation, and something recalcitrant
in her nature combine to ensure that their marriage will never be
complete, in his sense of a desired union of souls. Poor Banford—doomed
to defeat and to a near-suicidal death—nevertheless will remain a shadow
upon Henry and March. The art of The Fox is beautifully dispassionate:
Lawrence takes no side in the contest between Banford and Henry. And yet
the storyteller is not disinterested; Lawrence’s stance is defined by the presence
and dark fate of the fox, with whom March associates Henry. One
could argue that the young man wins his wife by slaying the fox, thus
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displacing the imaginative hold that the creature has upon March.
Lawrence is too grand a storyteller to indulge in any obvious symbolism,
and we should not translate the fox into any simplistic reduction.
He is a kind of demon, in the view of the two women, since his depredations
make the existence of their farm dangerously marginal. March cannot
slay him, because: “She was spellbound—she knew he knew her. So he
looked into her eyes, and her soul failed her. He knew her, he was not
daunted.” As the young soldier’s forerunner, he exposes March’s vulnerability
to male force, her almost unconscious discontent at her situation
with Banford.
March’s dreams prophesy the death of Banford, and the assumption
of the fox’s role by Henry. Lawrence is life’s partisan, but he does not
devalue Banford, who is no less life than Henry is. The subtlest portrait
Lawrence gives us here is that of March, rather than of Banford or Henry.
March’s deep force seems more passive than it is. She will not kill the fox,
and she will not renounce Henry irrevocably, but something in her goes
into the dream-coffin with Banford.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Katherine Anne Porter
(1890–1980)
BY THE TIME SHE WAS FIFTY, KATHERINE ANNE PORTER HAD WRITTEN AND
published nearly all the fiction for which she will be remembered. Her single
novel, Ship of Fools (1962), seemed to me an interesting failure when I
first read it, more than twenty years ago, and I now find it very difficult to
read through for a second time. Its critical defenders have been numerous
and distinguished, including Robert Penn Warren (certainly Porter’s best
critic), yet it is one of those books that calls out for defense. Perhaps its
author waited too long to compose Ship of Fools, or perhaps her genius was
so admirably suited to the short novel and the short story that it was condemned
to languish at greater length. What seems clear is that Porter’s lasting
achievement is not in Ship of Fools, but in “Flowering Judas,” “He,”
“Old Mortality,” “Noon Wine,” “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” “The Grave”
and many of their companions. She is a supreme lyricist among story writers,
molding her tales with the care and delicacy that Willa Cather (whom
she greatly admired) gave to such novels as My Ántonia and The Lost Lady.
Like Cather, she found her truest precursor in Henry James, though her
formative work seems to me rather more indebted to Joyce’s Dubliners. But,
again like Cather, her sensibility is very different from that of her male precursors,
and her art, original and vital, swerves away into a rhetorical stance
and moral vision peculiarly her own.
I confess to loving “Flowering Judas” most among her works, though
I recognize that the aesthetic achievement of “Old Mortality,” “Noon
Wine” and the stories grouped as “The Old Order,” is a larger one. “Still,
“Flowering Judas” established Porter and rhetorically set a standard even
she never surpassed. Its two most famous passages retain their aura:
A brown, shock-haired youth came and stood in her patio one
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night and sang like a lost soul for two hours, but Laura could
think of nothing to do about it. The moonlight spread a wash
of gauzy silver over the clear spaces of the garden, and the
shadows were cobalt blue. The scarlet blossoms of the Judas
tree were dull purple, and the names of the colors repeated
themselves automatically in her mind, while she watched not
the boy, but his shadow, fallen like a dark garment across the
fountain rim, trailing in the water.
... No, said Laura, not unless you take my hand, no; and she
clung first to the stair rail, and then to the topmost branch of
the Judas tree that bent down slowly and set her upon the
earth, and then to the rocky ledge of a cliff, and then to the
jagged wave of a sea that was not water but a desert of crumbling
stone. Where are you taking me, she asked in wonder but
without fear. To death, and it is a long way off, and we must
hurry, said Eugenio. No, said Laura, not unless you take my
hand. Then eat these flowers, poor prisoner, said Eugenio in a
voice of pity, take and eat: and from the Judas tree he stripped
the warm bleeding flowers, and held them to her lips. She saw
that his hand was fleshless, a cluster of small white petrified
branches, and his eye sockets were without light, but she ate
the flowers greedily for they satisfied both hunger and thirst.
Murderer! said Eugenio, and Cannibal! This is my body and
my blood. Laura cried No! and at the sound of her own voice,
she awoke trembling, and was afraid to sleep again.
The allusiveness of these passages has been analyzed as being in the
mode of T.S. Eliot; indeed the allusions generally are taken to involve
Eliot’s “Gerontion,” where “Christ the tiger” came: “In depraved May,
dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas, / To be eaten, to be divided, to be
drunk / Among whispers.” But Porter’s story, intensely erotic, is neither a
“Waste Land” allegory, nor a study of Christian nostalgia. Its beautiful,
sleep-walking Laura is neither a betrayer nor a failed believer, but an aesthete,
a storyteller poised upon the threshold of crossing over into her own
art. Porter alternatively dated “Flowering Judas” in December 1929 or
January 1930. She was not much aware of Freud, then or later, but he
seemed to be aware of her, so to speak, in his extraordinary essay of 1914
on narcissism, which can be read, in some places, as a portrait of Porter’s
Laura, the beautiful enigma of “Flowering Judas”:
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... there arises in the woman a certain self-sufficiency (especially
when there is a ripening into beauty) which compensates her
for the social restrictions upon her object-choice. Strictly
speaking, such women love only themselves with an intensity
comparable to that of the man’s love for them. Nor does their
need lie in the direction of loving, but of being loved; and that
man finds favour with them who fulfills this condition. The
importance of this type of woman for the erotic life of mankind
must be recognized as very great.
Freud goes on to observe that “one person’s narcissism has a great
attraction for those others who have renounced part of their own narcissism.”
Laura’s curious coolness, which charms us into a sense of her inaccessibility,
is the product not of her disillusion with either the Revolution
or the Church, but of her childlike narcissism. Much of the lyrical strength
of “Flowering Judas” comes from its superb contrast between the gray-
eyed, grave Laura, who walks as beautifully as a dancer, and her obscene
serenader, the professional revolutionist Braggioni, with his tawny yellow
cat’s eyes, his snarling voice, his gross intensity. Yet Braggioni is accurate
when he tells Laura: “We are more alike than you realize in some things.”
Narcissist and self-loving leader of men share in a pragmatic cruelty, and
in a vanity that negates the reality of all others:
No matter what this stranger says to her, nor what her message
to him, the very cells of her flesh reject knowledge and kinship
in one monotonous word. No. No. No. She draws her strength
from this one holy talismanic word which does not suffer her
to be led into evil. Denying everything, she may walk anywhere
in safety, she looks at everything without amazement.
It is Porter’s art to place Laura beyond judgment. The dream-vision
that ends the story is hardly a representation of a dream, since it is anything
but a wish-fulfillment. It is the narcissist’s ultimate reverie, an image
of the Judas tree representing not betrayal so much as a revelation that the
flowering Judas is oneself, one’s perfect self-sufficiency. Laura, in the supposed
dream or visionary projection, rightly transposes her status to that
of Eugenio, the “poor prisoner,” and greedily eats the Judas flowers “for
they satisfied both hunger and thirst,” as they must, being emblems of narcissistic
self-passion, of the ego established by the self’s investment in itself.
When Eugenio cries out: “This is my body and my blood,” he is mistaken,
and we ought to give credence rather to Laura’s outcry of “No!,” which
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wakens her from her dream. It is again the same “one holy talismanic word
which does not suffer her to be led into evil,” the narcissist’s rejection of
any love-object except herself. It is Laura’s body and Laura’s blood that she
never ceases to absorb, and it does satisfy her hunger and her thirst.
II
Porter is a superb instance of what Frank O’Connor called The Lonely
Voice, his title for his book on the short story, where he begins by rejecting
the traditional term for the genre:
All I can say from reading Turgenev, Chekhov, Katherine Anne
Porter, and others is that the very term “short story” is a misnomer.
A great story is not necessarily short at all, and the conception
of the short story as a miniature art is inherently false.
Basically, the difference between the short story and the novel
is not one of length. It is a difference between pure and applied
storytelling, and in case someone has still failed to get the
point, I am not trying to decry applied storytelling. Pure storytelling
is more artistic, that is all, and in storytelling I am not
sure how much art is preferable to nature.
Porter too was not sure, and she deserves Robert Penn Warren’s
praise that hers “is a poetry that shows a deep attachment to the world’s
body.” I add only that it shows also a deeper attachment to her own body,
but I insist that is all to the good. Narcissism has gotten an absurdly bad
name, but Freud certainly would snort at that, and so should we. A beautiful
lyricist and a beautiful woman necessarily celebrate their own beauty,
and Porter surpassingly was both. Even her stories’ titles haunt me, just as
photographs depicting her hold on in the memory. Warren rather surprisingly
compares her to Faulkner, whose magnificence, unlike hers, generally
does not come in particular phrases. I would prefer to compare her to
Hart Crane, her difficult friend and impossible guest in Mexico, yet her
truest contemporary, in the sense of a profound affinity in art. Porter’s
ambivalent account of Crane is at once a story by Porter and a visionary
lyric of Hart Crane’s:
It was then that he broke into the monotonous obsessed dull
obscenity which was the only language he knew after reaching
a certain point of drunkenness, but this time he cursed things
and elements as well as human beings. His voice at these times
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... stunned the ears and shocked the nerves and caused the heart
to contract. In this voice and with words so foul there is no
question of repeating them, he cursed separately and by name
the moon, and its light: the heliotrope, the heaven-tree, the
sweet-by-night, the star jessamine, and their perfumes. He
cursed the air we breathed together, the pool of water with its
two small ducks huddled at the edge, and the vines on the wall
and house. But those were not the things he hated. He did not
even hate us, for we were nothing to him. He hated and feared
himself.
This is a great poet rushing towards self-destruction, his wounded
narcissism converted into aggressivity against the self, which in turn fuels
the death drive, beyond the pleasure principle. Implicit in Porter’s memory
of Crane is the trauma of betrayed affinity, as one great lyrical artist
watches another take, not her downward path to wisdom, but the way
down and out to death by water. Porter, a survivor, makes the paragraph
into a frighteningly effective elegy for Crane, for that supreme lyricist
whose gift has become a curse, to himself and to others. Like Crane, Porter
concentrated her gift, and her stories match his lyrics in their economy and
in their sublime eloquence. Unlike him, she took care to survive, and perhaps
we should praise her Laura, in “Flowering Judas,” for the wisdom to
survive, rather than condemn her for not offering herself up to be
devoured by a violent though beautiful reality.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Isaac Babel
(1894–1940)
“If you need my life you may have it, but all make mistakes, God
included. A terrible mistake has been made, Aunt Pesya. But wasn’t it
a mistake on the part of God to settle Jews in Russia, for there to be
tormented worse than in Hell? How would it hurt if the Jews lived in
Switzerland, where they would be surrounded by first-class lakes,
mountain air, and nothing but Frenchies? All make mistakes, not God
excepted.”
—“How It Was Done in Odessa”
BENYA KRIK, BABEL’S OUTRAGEOUSLY INSOUCIANT GANGSTER BOSS OF
Jewish Odessa, utters this defense to the bereaved Aunt Pesya, whose
wretched son has just been slain by one of Benya’s hoods in an exuberant
error. The Jewish presence in Russia, then and now, is one of God’s exuberant
errors, and is both the subject and the rhetorical stance of Babel’s
extraordinary art as a writer of short stories. Babel’s precursors were Gogol
and Guy de Maupassant (and Maupassant’s literary “father,” Flaubert) but
repeated rereadings of Babel’s best stories tend to show a very different and
older tradition also at work. Babel’s expressionist and economical art has
unmistakably Jewish literary antecedents. The late Lionel Trilling undoubtedly
was the most distinguished critic to write about Babel in English, but
he underestimated the Jewish element in Babel, and perhaps introduced a
perspective into Babel’s stories that the stories themselves repudiate.
Babel was murdered in a Stalinist purge before he was forty-seven.
His work is not officially forbidden in the Soviet Union, and he was legally
cleared of all charges in 1956, fifteen years after his death. Yet there are
few editions of his stories, and little Soviet criticism is devoted to them.
Presumably Babel’s erotic intensity does not please cultural bureaucrats,
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and so overtly Jewish a writer, in mode and in substance, is an uncomfortable
shadow in a country where teaching Hebrew is currently a legal
offence. Anyone who believes that Babel’s world is wholly lost ought to
wander some Friday evening through “Little Odessa,” as Brighton Beach
in Brooklyn is called these days. Benya Krik’s descendents are alive and
well, a little too well, in Little Odessa. Babel is the storyteller of Jewish
Odessa, the city also of Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Zionist Right,
teacher and inspirer of Menachem Begin and the Irgun Zvai Leumi. The
Odessa of Babel was a great center of Jewish literary culture, the city also
of the Hebrew poet Bialik, and of the Yiddish writer Mendele Mocher
Sforim. Like Bialik and Sforim, Babel writes out of the context of Yiddish-
speaking Odessa, though Babel wrote in Russian.
Trilling ought to have had second thoughts about his characterization
of Babel’s self-representation in Red Cavalry as “a Jew riding as a
Cossack and trying to come to terms with the Cossack ethos.” Lyutov,
Babel’s surrogate, is trying to survive, but hardly at the cost of coming to
terms with the Cossack ethos, terms that Tolstoy in one of his modes
accepted. On the contrary, Babel’s Cossacks are not Tolstoyan noble savages,
but are precisely the Cossacks as the Jews saw them: subhuman and
bestial, mindlessly violent. Trilling imported something of his own nostalgia
for the primitive into Babel, with curious results:
Babel’s view of the Cossack was more consonant with that of
Tolstoy than with the traditional view of his own people. For
him the Cossack was indeed the noble savage, all too savage,
not often noble, yet having in his savagery some quality that
might raise strange questions in a Jewish mind.
But those questions certainly are not raised in Babel’s mind, the mind
of the Odessa Jew, with a perpetually glowing awareness of “how it was
done in Odessa.” That awareness informs his two very different ways of
representing violence, ways that urgently need to be contrasted when we
reflect on Babel’s stories. This is one way:
Then Benya took steps. They came in the night, nine of them,
bearing long poles in their hands. The poles were wrapped
about with pitch-dipped tow. Nine flaming stars flared in
Eichbaum’s cattle yard. Benya beat the locks from the door of
the cowshed and began to lead the cows out one by one. Each
was received by a lad with a knife. He would overturn the cow
with one blow of the fist and plunge his knife into her heart.
Short Story Writers and Short Stories
On the blood-flooded ground the torches bloomed like roses of
fire. Shots rang out. With these shots Benya scared away the
dairymaids who had come hurrying to the cowshed. After him
other bandits began firing in the air. (If you don’t fire in the air
you may kill someone.) And now, when the sixth cow had fallen,
mooing her death-moo, at the feet of the King, into the
courtyard in his underclothes galloped Eichbaum.”
(“The King”)
And meantime misfortune lurked beneath the window like a
pauper at daybreak. Misfortune broke noisily into the office.
And though on this occasion it bore the shape of the Jew Savka
Butsis, this misfortune was as drunk as a water-carrier.
“Ho-hoo-ho,” cried the Jew Savka, “forgive me, Benya, I’m
late.” And he started stamping his feet and waving his arms
about. Then he fired, and the bullet landed in Muginstein’s
belly.
Are words necessary? A man was, and is no more. A harmless
bachelor was living his life like a bird on a bough, and had
to meet a nonsensical end. There came a Jew looking like a
sailor and took a potshot not at some clay pipe or dolly but at
a live man. Are words necessary?
(“How It Was Done in Odessa”)
This is the other way, the violence of the Cossack and not of the Odessa
But I wasn’t going to shoot him. I didn’t owe him a shot anyway,
so I only dragged him upstairs into the parlor. There in
the parlor was Nadezhda Vasilyevna clean off her head, with a
drawn saber in her hand, walking about and looking at herself
in the glass. And when I dragged Nikitinsky into the parlor she
ran and sat down in the armchair. She had a velvet crown on
trimmed with feathers. She sat in the armchair very brisk and
alert and saluted me with the saber. Then I stamped on my
master Nikitinsky, trampled on him for an hour or maybe
more. And in that time I got to know life through and through.
With shooting—I’ll put it this way—with shooting you only
get rid of a chap. Shooting’s letting him off, and too damn easy
for yourself. With shooting you’ll never get at the soul, to
where it is in a fellow and how it shows itself. But I don’t spare
myself, and I’ve more than once trampled an enemy for over an
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hour. You see, I want to get to know what life really is, what
life’s like down our way.
(“The Life and Adventures of Matthew Pavlichenko”)
Notices were already posted up announcing that Divisional
Commissar Vinogradov would lecture that evening on the second
congress of the Comintern. Right under my window some
Cossacks were trying to shoot an old silvery-bearded Jew for
spying. The old man was uttering piercing screams and struggling
to get away. Then Kudrya of the machine gun section
took hold of his head and tucked it under his arm. The Jew
stopped screaming and straddled his legs. Kudrya drew out his
dagger with his right hand and carefully, without splashing
himself, cut the old man’s throat. Then he knocked at the
closed window.
“Anyone who cares may come and fetch him,” he said.
“You’re free to do so.”
(“Berestechko”)
The first way is violence stylized as in a child’s vision: “On the blood-
flooded ground the torches bloomed like roses of fire,” and “There came a
Jew looking like a sailor and took a potshot.” The second way is highly stylized
also, but as in the vision of a historical Jewish irony: “With shooting
you’ll never get at the soul, to where it is in a fellow and how it shows itself,”
and “carefully, without splashing himself, cut the old man’s throat.” When
Babel represents the violence of the Jewish gangs of the Moldavanka, he colors
it as he renders Benya Krik’s wardrobe: “He wore an orange suit, beneath
his cuff gleamed a bracelet set with diamonds,” and “aristocrats of the
Moldavanka, they were tightly encased in raspberry waistcoats. Russet jackets
clasped their shoulders, and on their fleshy feet the azure leather
cracked.” But Babel’s representation of “the training of the famous Kniga,
the headstrong Pavlichenko, and the captivating Savitsky,” is quite another
matter. The irony, ferociously subtle, is built up by nuances until the supposed
nostalgia for the virtues of murderous barbarity becomes a kind of
monstrous Jewish in-joke. General Budenny’s fury, when he denounced Red
Cavalry as a slander upon his Cossacks, was not wholly misplaced.
II
Whatever the phrase “a Jewish writer” may be taken to mean, any
meaning assigned to it that excludes Babel will not be very interesting.
Short Story Writers and Short Stories
Maurice Friedberg, the authority on Babel’s relation to Yiddish folklore
and literature, rather strangely remarks of him that: “A leftist, Russian,
Jewish intellectual, particularly one strongly influenced by the adamant
anti-clericalism of the French Left, could hardly be expected to return to
the fold of organized religion.” That Babel did not trust in the Covenant,
in any strict sense, is palpably true, but the nuances of Jewish spirituality,
at any time, are notoriously difficult to ascertain.
Babel’s irony is so pervasive that sometimes it does threaten to turn
into the irony of irony, and yet sometimes it barely masks Babel’s true nostalgia,
which is not exactly for the primitive. Gedali, Babel’s “tiny, lonely
visionary in a black top hat, carrying a big prayerbook under his arm,” may
be as ironic a figure as the “captivating” Savitsky, whose “long legs were
like girls sheathed to the neck in shining riding boots,” but the two ironies
are as different as the two visions of violence, and can be conveyed again
by a textual clash:
We all of us seated ourselves side by side—possessed, liars, and
idlers. In a corner, some broad-shouldered Jews who resembled
fishermen and apostles were moaning over their prayerbooks.
Gedali, in his green frock coat down to the ground, was dozing
by the wall like a little bright bird. And suddenly I caught sight
of a youth behind him, a youth with the face of Spinoza, with
Spinoza’s powerful brow and the wan face of a nun. He was
smoking, shuddering like a recaptured prisoner brought back
to his cell. The ragged Reb Mordecai crept up to him from
behind, snatched the cigarette from his mouth, and ran away to
me.
“That’s Elijah, the Rabbi’s son,” he declared hoarsely, bringing
his bloodshot eyelids close to my face. “That’s the cursed
son, the last son, the unruly son.”
(“The Rabbi”)
His things were strewn about pell-mell—mandates of the propagandist
and notebooks of the Jewish poet, the portraits of
Lenin and Maimonides lay side by side, the knotted iron of
Lenin’s skull beside the dull silk of the portraits of Maimonides.
A lock of woman’s hair lay in a book, the Resolutions of the
Party’s Sixth Congress, and the margins of Communist leaflets
were crowded with crooked lines of ancient Hebrew verse.
They fell upon me in a mean and depressing rain—pages of the
Song of Songs and revolver cartridges. The dreary rain of
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sunset washed the dust in my hair, and I said to the boy who
was dying on a wretched mattress in the corner:
“One Friday evening four months ago, Gedali the oldclothes-
man took me to see your father, Rabbi Motale. But you
didn’t belong to the Party at that time, Bratslavsky.”
(“The Rabbi’s Son”)
And I don’t mind telling you straight that I threw that female
citizen down the railway embankment while the train was still
going. But she, being big and broad, just sat there awhile,
flapped her skirts, and started to go her vile way. And seeing
that scatheless woman going along like that and Russia around
her like I don’t know what, and the peasant fields without an
ear of corn and the outraged girls and the comrades lots of
which go to the front but few return, I had a mind to jump out
of the truck and put an end to my life or else put an end to hers.
But the Cossacks took pity on me and said:
“Give it her with your rifle.”
So I took my faithful rifle off the wall and washed away that
stain from the face of the worker’s land and the republic.
(“Salt”)
The pathos of Elijah the Rabbi’s son is rendered bearable by a purely
defensive irony, the irony of incommensurate juxtapositions, of
Communist leaflets and the Hebrew Song of Songs. Irony in “Salt” dissolves
all pathos, and defends Babel, not from his own affections and identifications,
but from Cossack bestiality. It cannot be that Babel did not
understand his own cultural affections. His first mode of irony is altogether
biblical, and is neither the irony of saying one thing while meaning
another, as in “Salt,” nor the irony that contrasts expectation and fulfillment,
for no expectations remain in “The Rabbi” and “The Rabbi’s Son.”
Babel writes the irony of the Covenant, the incommensurateness of the
Chooser and the chosen. That irony is no less Jewish than the allegory of
“Salt,” but its Jewishness is far more archaic.
III
The best of Babel’s stories are neither in Red Cavalry nor in the Tales of
Odessa, though those are my personal favorites. Babel’s best work is in “The
Story of My Dovecot,” “First Love,” “In the Basement,” “Awakening,” “Guy
de Maupassant,” “Di Grasso”—all tales of Odessa, but with the difference that
Short Story Writers and Short Stories
they are tales of Babel himself, and not of Benya Krik. But if a single story has
in it the center of Babel’s achievement, it is the extraordinary, outrageous, and
ultimately plangent “The End of the Old Folk’s Home.” Restraining himself
from overtly celebrating the raffish inmates of the poorhouse by the Second
Jewish Cemetery in Odessa, Babel nevertheless portrays this motley group of
old men and women with a gusto and exuberance that make them the peers of
Benya Krik the gangster. Gravediggers, cantors, washers of corpses, they live
by their wits and unscrupulousness in hiring out their single oak coffin with a
pall and silver tassles, recycling it through endless burials.
Alas, the Bolsheviks use the coffin to bury one Hersch Lugovoy with
full military honors, pushing away the old men when they attempt to turn
the coffin on its side so as to roll out the flag-draped corpse of the heroic
and faithful Jewish Bolshevik. The rest of the story, an astonishing mixture
of Dickensian pathos and Gogolian humor, portrays the doomed but still
vital antics of the old folk in their final days before they are evicted from the
poorhouse. With the expulsion itself, Babel achieves his finest conclusion:
The tall horse bore him and the manager of the department of
public welfare townwards. On their way they passed the old
folk who had been evicted from the poorhouse. Limping,
bowed beneath their bundles, they plodded along in silence.
Bluff Red Army men were keeping them in line. The little carts
of paralytics squeaked; the whistle of asthma, a humble gurgling
issued from the breasts of retired cantors, jesters at weddings,
cooks at circumcisions, and ancient shop-assistants.
The sun stood high in the sky, and its rays scorched the rags
trailing along the road. Their path lay along a cheerless,
parched and stony highway, past huts of rammed clay, past
stone-cluttered fields, past houses torn open by shells, past the
Plague Mound. An unspeakably sorrowful road once led from
the cemetery to Odessa.
(“The End of the Old Folk’s Home”)
The troping of “road” for the unspeakably sorrowful procession itself
is characteristic of Babel. As for the squeaking, whistling, and “humble
gurgling,” it is the funeral music by which Babel implicitly laments the loss
of a desperate vitalism in the old folk, roisterers who in a sense are coffin-
robbers, but never grave-robbers. These aged scamps are Babel’s heroes
and heroines, even as the Bolshevik bureaucrats and brutal Cossacks are
not. Presumably Babel was another victim of Stalin’s virulent anti-
Semitism, but his best stories transcend his victimization. They give
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nothing away to the anti-Semites, nothing away even to Stalin himself. We
hear in them finally a voice masterly in its ironies, yes, but also a voice of
comic celebration eternally commemorating “the image of the stout and
jovial Jews of the South, bubbling like cheap wine.” Benya Krik’s heroic
funeral for the poor clerk killed by mistake is a superb exemplification of
Babel’s art at its most joyous:
And the funeral was performed the next morning. Ask the
cemetery beggars about that funeral. Ask the shamessim from
the synagogue of the dealers in kosher poultry about it, or the
old women from the Second Almshouse. Odessa had never
before seen such a funeral, the world will never see such a
funeral. On that day the cops wore cotton gloves. In the synagogues,
decked with greenstuff and wide open, the electric
lights were burning. Black plumes swayed on the white horses
harnessed to the hearse. A choir of sixty headed the cortege: a
choir of boys, but they sang with the voice of women. The
Elders of the synagogue of the dealers in kosher poultry helped
Aunt Pesya along. Behind the elders walked members of the
Association of Jewish Shop Assistants, and behind the Jewish
Shop Assistants walked the lawyers, doctors of medicine, and
certified midwives. On one side of Aunt Pesya were the women
who trade in poultry on the Old Market, and on the other side,
draped in orange shawls, were the honorary dairymaids from
Bugayevka. They stamped their feet like gendarmes parading
on a holiday. From their wide hips wafted the odors of the sea
and of milk. And behind them all plodded Ruvim Tartakovsky’s
employees. There were a hundred of them, or two hundred, or
two thousand. They wore black frock coats with silk lapels and
new shoes that squeaked like sacked suckling-pigs.
(“How It Was Done in Odessa”)
Those orange-shawled “honorary dairymaids,” stamping their feet
like gendarmes on parade while “from their wide hips wafted the odors of
the sea and of milk,” are Babel’s true Muses. The entire paragraph becomes
a phantasmagoria, a visionary evocation of a Jewish child’s delight in the
muscular exuberance of the Odessa mob. Babel’s pragmatic sorrow was in
his political context. His joy, fantastic and infectious, was in his nostalgia
for his own childhood, and for the archaic and celebratory force of the
Jewish tradition that claimed him, after all, for its own.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896–1940)
IF ERNEST HEMINGWAY WAS THE LORD BYRON OF OUR CENTURY, SCOTT
Fitzgerald is one of the prime candidates for our John Keats. Hemingway
and Fitzgerald were close friends, unlike Byron and Keats, but despite the
affinities between The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby, the short stories
by the two writers diverge greatly—in mode, stance, and style, though not
always in theme. Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald stemmed in part from
the novelistic procedures of Joseph Conrad, but their American precursors
were very different. Hemingway acknowledged the Mark Twain of
Huckleberry Finn, though stylistically the poetry of his prose owed much to
Walt Whitman, perhaps without self-awareness. Fitzgerald turned to
Henry James and Edith Wharton, whose societal contexts suited his own
dreams of wealth and his Keatsian nostalgia for lost erotic possibilities.
Though Tender Is the Night (its title from “The Ode to a
Nightingale”) opens beautifully, Fitzgerald’s major novel is both uneven
and self-indulgent, and the unfinished The Last Tycoon is of mixed aesthetic
quality. After The Great Gatsby, the best of Fitzgerald is in many of the
short stories. As with Keats’s odes and epic fragments, Fitzgerald’s stories
and novels are parables of election, of achieving or failing the severe tests
of the imagination, which is seen as a power profoundly capable of destruction.
“May Day” ends with Gordon Sterrett’s suicide, a failed artist passing
a last judgment upon himself at the age of twenty-four. A grand fantasy,
“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” achieves closure by accepting “the shabby
gift of disillusion,” with its protagonist urging a “divine drunkenness”
upon his paramour: “let us love for a while, for a year or two, you and me.”
Keats’s affirmation of “the holiness of the heart’s affections” is not mocked,
but certainly it has been distanced.
In its high artistry, “Babylon Revisited” surpasses even The Great
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Gatsby, and compares well with Hemingway’s strongest stories. Babylon is
not so much Paris (in the days of Gertrude Stein and Hemingway) as it is
A.E. Housman’s “land of lost content.” Charlie Wales, a Fitzgerald-surrogate,
is more punished than his minor sins deserve. Widowed and deprived
of his daughter, Wales evokes authentic pathos and suffers nostalgia and
regret. A kind of elegy for the Lost Generation, “Babylon Revisited” is as
adroit and balanced in style as Keats’s odes and Hemingway’s stories, which
hover near, yet at a precise aesthetic distance.
Fitzgerald’s final phase, his Hollywood years, is exemplified by
“Crazy Sunday,” the most finished story to emerge from those years of
decline. Keats’s dialectic of creation and destroying governs “Crazy
Sunday,” where Miles Calman pays for his art by doom-eagerness, and Joel
Coles drifts towards the loss of self. The high theatricality of Stella Walker
Calman is the culmination of Fitzgerald’s visions of a fatal Muse, including
not only Daisy in The Great Gatsby and Nicole in Tender Is the Night, but
the formidable Zelda Fitzgerald herself, the last of the belles.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
William Faulkner
(1897–1962)
WRITING ON FAULKNER A DOZEN YEARS AGO, I UTTERED A SECULAR
prophecy that now requires adumbration:
His grand family is Dickens run mad rather than Conrad run
wild; the hideous saga of the Snopes clan, from the excessively
capable Flem Snopes to the admirably named Wallstreet Panic
Snopes. Flem, as David Minter observes, is refreshingly free of
all influence-anxieties. He belongs in Washington D.C., and by
now has reached there, and helps to staff the White House.
Alas, by now he helps to staff the universities also, and soon will
staff the entire nation, as his spiritual children, the Yuppies,
reach middle age. Ivy League Snopes, Reagan Revolution
Snopes, Jack Kemp Snopes: the possibilities are limitless. His
ruined families, burdened by tradition, are Faulkner’s tribute to
his region. His Snopes clan is his gift to his nation.
Now, in August 1998, a Snopes is Speaker of the House, another
Snopes heads the Senate, and a Snopes (of the other party) is President.
Congress is about equally divided between Snopes and non-Snopes. So
magnificent and comprehensive is the Vision of Snopes that it deserves to
become our national political and economic mythology.
Most of the grand Snopes stories are in The Hamlet and The Town.
“Barn Burning” stands quite apart, though originally Faulkner had intended
it to be the very beginning of the Snopes saga. The young hero of “Barn
Burning,” Sarty Snopes, is a sport or changeling, wholly unlike his grim
father, the horse-thief and barn-burner Abner Snopes. Whereas Ab Snopes
is a kind of Satan, at war with everyone, his son Sarty manifests a finer pride,
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a sense of honor that triumphs over even his loyalty to the demonic Abner.
There is something sublime in the character of the boy Sartoris
Snopes, a quality of a transcendental “beyond” that is not explicable either
upon the basis of heredity or environment. Faulkner, despite his Gothic
intensities, refused to accept any overdetermined views of human nature.
“Barn Burning” is perhaps most memorable for its vivid portrait of Ab
Snopes, the frightening ancestor of all the Snopes who now and permanently
afflict us. But the conclusion is given wholly to young Sartoris
Snopes, who will not go back to his destructive family. To the music of a
whippoorwill, Sarty goes forth to a rebirth:
He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which
the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing—the rapid
and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late
spring night. He did not look back.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Ernest Hemingway
(1899–1961)
HEMINGWAY FREELY PROCLAIMED HIS RELATIONSHIP TO HUCKLEBERRY
Finn, and there is some basis for the assertion, except that there is little in
common between the rhetorical stances of Twain and Hemingway.
Kipling’s Kim, in style and mode, is far closer to Huckleberry Finn than anything
Hemingway wrote. The true accent of Hemingway’s admirable style
is to be found in an even greater and more surprising precursor:
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old moth
ers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
Or again:
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore drips, thinn’d with the
ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with
whip-stocks.
Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become
the wounded person,
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.
Hemingway is scarcely unique in not acknowledging the paternity of
Walt Whitman; T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens are far closer to Whitman
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than William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane were, but literary influence
is a paradoxical and antithetical process, about which we continue to know
all too little. The profound affinities between Hemingway, Eliot, and
Stevens are not accidental, but are family resemblances due to the
repressed but crucial relation each had to Whitman’s work. Hemingway
characteristically boasted (in a letter to Sara Murphy, February 27, 1936)
that he had knocked Stevens down quite handily: “... for statistics sake Mr.
Stevens is 6 feet 2 weighs 225 lbs. and ... when he hits the ground it is highly
spectaculous.” Since this match between the two writers took place in
Key West on February 19, 1936, I am moved, as a loyal Stevensian, for statistics’
sake to point out that the victorious Hemingway was born in 1899,
and the defeated Stevens in 1879, so that the novelist was then going on
thirty-seven, and the poet verging on fifty-seven. The two men doubtless
despised one another, but in the letter celebrating his victory Hemingway
calls Stevens “a damned fine poet” and Stevens always affirmed that
Hemingway was essentially a poet, a judgment concurred in by Robert
Penn Warren when he wrote that Hemingway “is essentially a lyric rather
than a dramatic writer.” Warren compared Hemingway to Wordsworth,
which is feasible, but the resemblance to Whitman is far closer.
Wordsworth would not have written, “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was
there,” but Hemingway almost persuades us he would have achieved that
line had not Whitman set it down first.
II
It is now more than twenty years since Hemingway’s suicide, and
some aspects of his permanent canonical status seem beyond doubt. Only
a few modern American novels seem certain to endure: The Sun Also Rises,
The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Crying of Lot 49, and at least several
by Faulkner, including As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, The
Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! Two dozen stories by Hemingway
could be added to the group, indeed perhaps all of The First Forty-Nine
Stories. Faulkner is an eminence apart, but critics agree that Hemingway
and Fitzgerald are his nearest rivals, largely on the strength of their shorter
fiction. What seems unique is that Hemingway is the only American
writer of prose fiction in this century who, as a stylist, rivals the principal
poets: Stevens, Eliot, Frost, Hart Crane, aspects of Pound, W.C. Williams,
Robert Penn Warren, and Elizabeth Bishop. This is hardly to say that
Hemingway, at his best, fails at narrative or the representation of character.
Rather, his peculiar excellence is closer to Whitman than to Twain,
closer to Stevens than to Faulkner, and even closer to Eliot than to
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Fitzgerald, who was his friend and rival. He is an elegiac poet who mourns
the self, who celebrates the self (rather less effectively) and who suffers
divisions in the self. In the broadest tradition of American literature, he
stems ultimately from the Emersonian reliance on the god within, which
is the line of Whitman, Thoreau, and Dickinson. He arrives late and dark
in this tradition, and is one of its negative theologians, as it were, but as in
Stevens the negations, the cancellings, are never final. Even the most ferocious
of his stories, say “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” or “A Natural
History of the Dead,” can be said to celebrate what we might call the Real
Absence. Doc Fischer, in “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” is a precursor
of Nathanael West’s Shrike in Miss Lonelyhearts, and his savage, implicit
religiosity prophesies not only Shrike’s Satanic stance but the entire
demonic world of Pynchon’s explicitly paranoid or Luddite visions.
Perhaps there was a nostalgia for a Catholic order always abiding in
Hemingway’s consciousness, but the cosmos of his fiction, early and late,
is American Gnostic, as it was in Melville, who first developed so strongly
the negative side of the Emersonian religion of self-reliance.
III
Hemingway notoriously and splendidly was given to overtly agonistic
images whenever he described his relationship to canonical writers,
including Melville, a habit of description in which he has been followed by
his true ephebe, Norman Mailer. In a grand letter (September 6–7, 1949)
to his publisher, Charles Scribner, he charmingly confessed, “Am a man
without any ambition, except to be champion of the world, I wouldn’t fight
Dr. Tolstoi in a 20 round bout because I know he would knock my ears
off.” This modesty passed quickly, to be followed by, “If I can live to 60 I
can beat him. (MAYBE).” Since the rest of the letter counts Turgenev, de
Maupassant, Henry James, even Cervantes, as well as Melville and
Dostoyevski, among the defeated, we can join Hemingway, himself, in
admiring his extraordinary self-confidence. How justified was it, in terms
of his ambitions?
It could be argued persuasively that Hemingway is the best short-
story writer in the English language from Joyce’s Dubliners until the present.
The aesthetic dignity of the short story need not be questioned, and
yet we seem to ask more of a canonical writer. Hemingway wrote The Sun
Also Rises and not Ulysses, which is only to say that his true genius was for
very short stories, and hardly at all for extended narrative. Had he been
primarily a poet, his lyrical gifts would have sufficed: we do not hold it
against Yeats that his poems, not his plays, are his principal glory. Alas, nei
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ther Turgenev nor Henry James, neither Melville nor Mark Twain provide
true agonists for Hemingway. Instead, de Maupassant is the apter rival. Of
Hemingway’s intensity of style in the briefer compass, there is no question,
but even The Sun Also Rises reads now as a series of epiphanies, of brilliant
and memorable vignettes.
Much that has been harshly criticized in Hemingway, particularly in
For Whom the Bell Tolls, results from his difficulty in adjusting his gifts to
the demands of the novel. Robert Penn Warren suggests that Hemingway
is successful when his “system of ironies and understatements is coherent.”
When incoherent, then, Hemingway’s rhetoric fails as persuasion, which is
to say, we read To Have and Have Not or For Whom the Bell Tolls and we are
all too aware that the system of tropes is primarily what we are offered.
Warren believes this not to be true of A Farewell to Arms, yet even the celebrated
close of the novel seems now a worn understatement:
But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off
the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue.
After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked
back to the hotel in the rain.
Contrast this to the close of “Old Man at the Bridge,” a story only
two and a half pages long:
There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and
the Fascists were advancing toward the Ebro. It was a gray
overcast day with a low ceiling so their planes were not up.
That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves
was all the good luck that old man would ever have.
The understatement continues to persuade here because the stoicism
remains coherent, and is admirably fitted by the rhetoric. A very short
story concludes itself by permanently troping the mood of a particular
moment in history. Vignette is Hemingway’s natural mode, or call it hard-
edged vignette: a literary sketch that somehow seems to be the beginning
or end of something longer, yet truly is complete in itself. Hemingway’s
style encloses what ought to be unenclosed, so that the genre remains subtle
yet trades its charm for punch. But a novel of three hundred and forty
pages (A Farewell to Arms) which I have just finished reading again (after
twenty years away from it) cannot sustain itself upon the rhetoric of
vignette. After many understatements, too many, the reader begins to
believe that he is reading a Hemingway imitator, like the accomplished
Short Story Writers and Short Stories
John O’Hara, rather than the master himself. Hemingway’s notorious fault
is the monotony of repetition, which becomes a dulling litany in a somewhat
less accomplished imitator like Nelson Algren, and sometimes seems
self-parody when we must confront it in Hemingway.
Nothing is got for nothing, and a great style generates defenses in us,
particularly when it sets the style of an age, as the Byronic Hemingway did.
As with Byron, the color and variety of the artist’s life becomes something
of a veil between the work and our aesthetic apprehension of it.
Hemingway’s career included four marriages (and three divorces); service
as an ambulance driver for the Italians in World War I (with an honorable
wound); activity as a war correspondent in the Greek-Turkish War (1922),
the Spanish Civil War (1937–39), the Chinese-Japanese War (1941) and
the War against Hitler in Europe (1944–45). Add big-game hunting and
fishing, safaris, expatriation in France and Cuba, bullfighting, the Nobel
prize, and ultimate suicide in Idaho, and you have an absurdly implausible
life, apparently lived in imitation of Hemingway’s own fiction. The final
effect of the work and the life together is not less than mythological, as it
was with Byron and with Whitman and with Oscar Wilde. Hemingway
now is myth, and so is permanent as an image of American heroism, or
perhaps more ruefully the American illusion of heroism. The best of
Hemingway’s work, the stories and The Sun Also Rises, are also a permanent
part of the American mythology. Faulkner, Stevens, Frost, perhaps Eliot,
and Hart Crane were stronger writers than Hemingway, but he alone in
this American century has achieved the enduring status of myth.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Jorge Luis Borges
(1899–1986)
FOR THE GNOSTIC IN BORGES, AS FOR THE HERESIARCH IN HIS MYTHIC
Uqbar, “mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and
disseminate that universe,” the visible but illusory labyrinth of men.
Gnostics rightly feel at ease with Jung, and very unhappy with Freud, as
Borges does, and no one need be surprised when the ordinarily gentlemanly
and subtle Argentine dismisses Freud “either as a charlatan or as a
madman,” for whom “it all boils down to a few rather unpleasant facts.”
Masters of the tale and the parable ought to avoid the tape-recorder, but as
Borges succumbed, an admirer may be grateful for the gleaning of a few
connections between images.
The gnostic gazes into the mirror of the fallen world and sees, not
himself, but his dark double, the shadowy haunter of his phantasmagoria.
Since the ambivalent God of the gnostics balances good and evil in himself,
the writer dominated by agnostic vision is morally ambivalent also.
Borges is imaginatively a gnostic, but intellectually a skeptical and naturalistic
humanist. This division, which has impeded his art, making of him a
far lesser figure than gnostic writers like Yeats and Kafka, nevertheless has
made him also an admirably firm moralist, as these taped conversations
show.
Borges has written largely in the spirit of Emerson’s remark that the
hint of the dialectic is more valuable than the dialectic itself. My own favorite
among his tales, the cabbalistic “Death and the Compass,” traces the destruction
of the Dupin-like Erik Lönnrot, whose “reckless discernment” draws
him into the labyrinthine trap set by Red Scharlach the Dandy, a gangster
worthy to consort with Babel’s Benya Krik. The greatness of Borges is in the
aesthetic dignity both of Lönnrot, who at the point of death criticizes the
labyrinth of his entrapment as having redundant lines, and of Scharlach, who
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just before firing promises the detective a better labyrinth, when he hunts
him in some other incarnation.
The critics of the admirable Borges do him violence by hunting him as
Lönnrot pursued Scharlach, with a compass, but he has obliged us to choose
his own images for analysis. Freud tells us that: “In a psychoanalysis the
physician always gives his patient (sometimes to a greater and sometimes to
a lesser extent) the conscious anticipatory image by the help of which he is
put in a position to recognise and to grasp the unconscious material.” We are
to remember that Freud speaks of therapy, and of the work of altering ourselves,
so that the analogue we may find between the images of physician and
romancer must be an imperfect one. The skillful analyst moreover, on
Freud’s example, gives us a single image, and Borges gives his reader a myriad;
but only mirror, labyrinth, compass will be gazed at here.
Borges remarks of the first story he wrote, “Pierre Menard, Author
of the Quixote,” that it gives a sensation of tiredness and skepticism, of
“coming at the end of a very long literary period.” It is revelatory that this
was his first tale, exposing his weariness of the living labyrinth of fiction
even as he ventured into it. Borges is a great theorist of poetic influence;
he has taught us to read Browning as a precursor of Kafka, and in the spirit
of this teaching we may see Borges himself as another Childe Roland
coming to the Dark Tower, while consciously not desiring to accomplish
the Quest. Are we also condemned to see him finally more as a critic of
romance than as a romancer? When we read Borges—whether his essays,
poems, parables, or tales—do we not read glosses upon romance, and particularly
on the skeptic’s self-protection against the enchantments of
romance?
Borges thinks he has invented one new subject for a poem—in his
poem “Limits”—the subject being the sense of doing something for the
last time, seeing something for the last time. It is extraordinary that so
deeply read a man-of-letters should think this, since most strong poets who
live to be quite old have written on just this subject, though often with displacement
or concealment. But it is profoundly self-revelatory that a theorist
of poetic influence should come to think of this subject as his own
invention, for Borges has been always the celebrator of things-in-theirfarewell,
always a poet of loss. Though he has comforted himself, and his
readers, with the wisdom that we can lose only what we never had, he has
suffered the discomfort also of knowing that we come to recognize only
what we have encountered before, and that all recognition is self-recognition.
All loss is of ourselves, and even the loss of falling-out of love is, as
Borges would say, the pain of returning to others, not to the self. Is this the
wisdom of romance, or of another mode entirely?
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What Borges lacks, despite the illusive cunning of his labyrinths, is
precisely the extravagance of the romancer; he does not trust his own
vagrant impulses. He sees himself as a modestly apt self-marshaller, but he
is another Oedipal self-destroyer. His addiction to the self-protective
economy and overt knowingness of his art is his own variety of the Oedipal
anxiety, and the pattern of his tales betrays throughout an implicit dread of
family-romance. The gnostic mirror of nature reflects for him only
Lönnrot’s labyrinth “of a single line which is invisible and unceasing,” the
line of all those enchanted mean streets that fade into the horizon of the
Buenos Aires of his phantasmagoria. The reckless discerner who is held by
the symmetries of his own mythic compass has never been reckless enough
to lose himself in a story, to our loss, if not to his. His extravagance, if it
still comes, will be a fictive movement away from the theme of recognition,
even against that theme, and towards a larger art. His favorite story, he
says, is Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,” which he describes as being “about the
man who stays away from home all those years.”
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
John Steinbeck
(1902–1968)
EUDORA WELTY, WRITING ABOUT THE SHORT STORIES OF D.H. LAWRENCE,
memorably caught the essential strangeness of Lawrence’s art of representation.
For the truth seems to be that Lawrence’s characters don’t really
speak their words—not conversationally, not to one another—
they are not speaking on the street, but are playing like
fountains or radiating like the moon or storming like the sea, or
their silence is the silence of wicked rocks. It is borne home to
us that Lawrence is writing of our human relationships on earth
in terms of eternity, and these terms set Lawrence’s form. The
author himself appears in authorship in places like the moon,
and sometimes smiles on us while we stand there under him.
Welty was a short story writer almost of Lawrence’s eminence; John
Steinbeck was not. But Steinbeck’s stories owed as much to Lawrence as
Steinbeck’s novels did to Hemingway. Though he resented Hemingway,
Steinbeck wrote a softened version of Hemingway’s famous style. Lawrence
affected Steinbeck very differently; something in Steinbeck implicitly
understood that his own naturalistic reductionism limited his art. D.H.
Lawrence’s heroic vitalism, his ability to endow his character with qualities
“playing like fountains,” appealed to Steinbeck’s repressed transcendentalism.
The best of Steinbeck’s stories are in Lawrence’s mode, and not
Hemingway’s.
“The Chrysanthemums,” which seems to me the most interesting of
Steinbeck’s stories, is far closer to Lawrence’s intense evocations of the soul
than it is to the version of Darwinism that Steinbeck had taken over from
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the marine biologist, Edward Ricketts. Several critics have noted how close
Steinbeck’s Elisa Allen is to Lawrence’s March in The Fox, except that Elisa
is a balked figure from the beginning. Her repressed sexuality, aroused by
the encounter with the wandering tinker, is not likely to be gratified by her
inadequate husband, or indeed by any other man. In Lawrence, Elisa
would become a lover of women, but Steinbeck evades such an intimation,
though the imaginative logic of his story probably argues for such a future.
How much change takes place in Elisa between the start and the conclusion
of the story? When we first see her, she is all potential, a force not
yet exercised although she is in the middle of the journey.
She was cutting down the old year’s chrysanthemum stalks with
a pair of short and powerful scissors. She looked down toward
the men by the tractor shed now and then. Her face was eager
and mature and handsome; even her work with the scissors was
over-eager, over-powerful. The chrysanthemum stems seemed
too small and easy for her energy.
At the story’s close, she is crying weakly, “as if she were an old
woman.” We need to know more if we are to understand whether this is
only a momentary defeat or the reassertion of a pattern. In Lawrence or in
Welty we would know, because both of them were able to write “of our
human relationships on earth in terms of eternity.” Steinbeck as a writer
never could achieve that, not even in The Grapes of Wrath. “The
Chrysanthemums” shows Steinbeck bruising himself against his own
imaginative limitations, unable to bruise himself an exit from himself. The
materia poetica for a larger and more intense art is there in the story, but
Steinbeck could not realize it.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Eudora Welty
(1909–2001)
EUDORA WELTY DIVIDES HER REMARKABLE BRIEF AUTOBIOGRAPHY, ONE
Writer’s Beginnings, into three parts: “Listening,” “Learning to See,”
“Finding A Voice.” Gentle yet admonitory, these titles instruct us in how
to read her stories and novels, a reading that necessarily involves further
growth in our sense of inwardness. Certain of her stories never cease their
process of journeying deep into interior regions we generally reserve only
for personal and experiential memories. Doubtless they differ from reader
to reader; for me they include “A Still Moment” and “The Burning.”
Mark Twain has had so varied a progeny among American writers
that we hardly feel surprise when we reflect that Welty and Hemingway
both emerge from Huckleberry Finn. All that Welty and Hemingway share
as storytellers is Twain’s example. Their obsessive American concern is
Huck’s: the freedom of a solitary joy, intimately allied to a superstitious fear
of solitude. Welty’s people, like Hemingway’s, and like the self-representations
of our major poets—Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Frost, Eliot, Hart
Crane, R.P. Warren, Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Ashbery, Merrill, and
Ammons—all secretly believe themselves to be no part of the creation and
all feel free only when they are quite alone.
In One Writer’s Beginning:, Welty comments upon “A Still Moment”:
“A Still Moment”—another early story—was a fantasy, in which
the separate interior visions guiding three highly individual and
widely differing men marvelously meet and converge upon the
same single exterior object. All my characters were actual persons
who had lived at the same time, who would have been
strangers to one another, but whose lives had actually taken
them at some point to the same neighborhood. The scene was
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in the Mississippi wilderness in the historic year 1811—“anno
mirabilis,” the year the stars fell on Alabama and lemmings, or
squirrels perhaps, rushed straight down the continent and
plunged into the Gulf of Mexico, and an earthquake made the
Mississippi River run backwards and New Madrid, Missouri,
tumbled in and disappeared. My real characters were Lorenzo
Dow the New England evangelist, Murrell the outlaw bandit
and murderer on the Natchez Trace, and Audubon the painter;
and the exterior object on which they all at the same moment
set their eyes is a small heron, feeding.
Welty’s choices—Lorenzo Dow, James Murrell, Audubon—are all
obsessed solitaries. Dow, the circuit rider, presumably ought to be the least
solipsistic of the three, yet his fierce cry as he rides on at top speed—“I
must have souls! And souls I must have!”—is evidence of an emptiness that
never can be filled:
It was the hour of sunset. All the souls that he had saved and all
those he had not took dusky shapes in the mist that hung
between the high banks, and seemed by their great number and
density to block his way, and showed no signs of melting or
changing back into mist, so that he feared his passage was to be
difficult forever. The poor souls that were not saved were darker
and more pitiful than those that were, and still there was not
any of the radiance he would have hoped to see in such a congregation.
As Dow himself observes, his eyes are in a “failing proportion to my
loving heart always,” which makes us doubt his heart. He loves his wife,
Peggy, effortlessly since she is in Massachusetts and he is galloping along
on the Old Natchez Trace. Indeed, their love can be altogether effortless,
consisting as it does of a marriage proposal, accepted as his first words to
her, a few hours of union, and his rapid departure south for evangelical
purposes, pursued by her first letter declaring that she, like her husband,
fears only death, but never mere separation.
This remarkable hunter of souls, intrepid at evading rapacious
Indians or Irish Catholics, can be regarded as a sublime lunatic, or merely
as a pure product of America:
Soon night would descend, and a camp-meeting ground ahead
would fill with its sinners like the sky with its stars. How he
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hungered for them! He looked in prescience with a longing of
love over the throng that waited while the flames of the torches
threw change, change, change over their faces. How could
he bring them enough, if it were not divine love and sufficient
warning of all that could threaten them? He rode on faster. He
was a filler of appointments, and he filled more and more, until
his journeys up and down creation were nothing but a shuttle,
driving back and forth upon the rich expanse of his vision. He
was homeless by his own choice, he must be everywhere at
some time, and somewhere soon. There hastening in the
wilderness on his flying horse he gave the night’s torch-lit
crowd a premature benediction, he could not wait. He spread
his arms out, one at a time for safety, and he wished, when they
would all be gathered in by his tin horn blasts and the inspired
words would go out over their heads, to brood above the entire
and passionate life of the wide world, to become its rightful
part.
He peered ahead. “Inhabitants of Time! The wilderness is
your souls on earth!” he shouted ahead into the treetops. “Look
about you, if you would view the conditions of your spirit, put
here by the good Lord to show you and afright you. These wild
places and these trails of awesome loneliness lie nowhere,
nowhere, but in your heart.”
Dow is his own congregation, and his heart indeed contains the wild
places and awesomely lonesome trails through which he endlessly rushes.
His antithesis is provided by the murderous James Murrell, who suddenly
rides at Dow’s side, without bothering to look at him. If Dow is a mad
angel, Murrell is a scarcely sane devil, talking to slow the evangelist down,
without realizing that the sublimely crazy Lorenzo listens only to the voice
of God:
Murrell riding along with his victim-to-be, Murrell, riding, was
Murrell talking. He told away at his long tales, with always a distance
and a long length of time flowing through them, and all
centered about a silent man. In each the silent man would have
done a piece of evil, a robbery or a murder, in a place of long ago,
and it was all made for the revelation in the end that the silent
man was Murrell himself, and the long story had happened yesterday,
and the place here—the Natchez Trace. It would only take
one dawning look for the victim to see that all of this was
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another story and he himself had listened his way into it, and that
he too was about to recede in time (to where the dread was forgotten)
for some listener and to live for a listener in the long ago.
Destroy the present!—that must have been the first thing that
was whispered in Murrell’s heart—the living moment and the
man that lives in it must die before you can go on. It was his habit
to bring the journey—which might even take days—to a close
with a kind of ceremony. Turning his face at last into the face of
the victim, for he had never seen him before now, he would
tower up with the sudden height of a man no longer the tale
teller but the speechless protagonist, silent at last, one degree
nearer the hero. Then he would murder the man.
Since Murrell is capable of observing nothing whatsoever, he does
not know what the reader knows, which is that Lorenzo is not a potential
victim for this self-dramatizing Satanist. Whatever the confrontation
between angel and devil might have brought (and one’s surmise is that
Murrell might not have survived), the crucial moment is disturbed by the
arrival of a third, the even weirder Audubon:
Audubon said nothing because he had gone without speaking a
word for days. He did not regard his thoughts for the birds and
animals as susceptible, in their first change, to words. His long
playing on the flute was not in its origin a talking to himself.
Rather than speak to order or describe, he would always draw
a deer with a stroke across it to communicate his need of venison
to an Indian. He had only found words when he discovered
that there is much otherwise lost that can be noted down each
item in its own day, and he wrote often now in a journal, not
wanting anything to be lost the way it had been, all the past,
and he would write about a day, “Only sorry that the Sun Sets.”
These three extraordinarily diverse obsessives share a still moment,
in which “a solitary snowy heron flew down not far away and began to feed
beside the marsh water.” To Lorenzo, the heron’s epiphany is God’s love
become visible. To Murrell, it is “only whiteness ensconced in darkness,” a
prophecy of the slave, brigand, and outcast rebellion he hopes to lead in
the Natchez country. To Audubon it is precisely what it is, a white heron
he must slay if he is to be able to paint, a model that must die in order to
become a model. Welty gives us no preference among these three:
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What each of them had wanted was simply all. To save all souls,
to destroy all men, to see and record all life that filled this
world—all, all—but now a single frail yearning seemed to go
out of the three of them for a moment and to stretch toward
this one snowy, shy bird in the marshes. It was as if three whirlwinds
had drawn together at some center, to find there feeding
in peace a snowy heron. Its own slow spiral of flight could take
it away in its own time, but for a little it held them still, it laid
quiet over them, and they stood for a moment unburdened....
To quest for all is to know anything but peace, and “a still moment” is
only shared by these three questers in a phantasmagoria. When the moment
ends with Audubon’s killing of the bird, only Lorenzo’s horrified reaction is
of deep import or interest. Murrell is content to lie back in ambush and await
travelers more innocent, who will suit his Satanic destiny as Lorenzo and
Audubon could not. Audubon is also content to go on, to fulfill his vast
design. But Lorenzo’s epiphany has turned into a negative moment and
though he will go on to gather in the multitudes, he has been darkened:
In the woods that echoed yet in his ears, Lorenzo riding slowly
looked back. The hair rose on his head and his hands began
to shake with cold, and suddenly it seemed to him that God
Himself, just now, thought of the Idea of Separateness. For
surely He had never thought of it before, when the little white
heron was flying down to feed. He could understand God’s giving
Separateness first and then giving Love to follow and heal
in its wonder; but God had reversed this, and given Love first
and then Separateness, as though it did not matter to Him
which came first. Perhaps it was that God never counted the
moments of Time; Lorenzo did that, among his tasks of love.
Time did not occur to God. Therefore—did He even know of
it? How to explain Time and Separateness back to God, Who
had never thought of them, Who could let the whole world
come to grief in a scattering moment?
This is a meditation on the verge of heresy, presumably Gnostic,
rather than on the border of unbelief. Robert Penn Warren, in a classical
early essay on “Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty” (1944), reads the
dialectic of Love and Separateness here as the perhaps Blakean contraries
of Innocence and Experience. On this reading, Welty is an ironist of limits
and of contamination, for whom knowledge destroys love, almost as
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though love could survive only upon enchanted ground. That may underestimate
both Lorenzo and Welty. Pragmatically, Lorenzo has been
unchanged by the still moment of love and its shattering into separateness;
indeed he is as unchanged as Murrell or Audubon. But only Lorenzo
remains haunted by a vision, by a particular beauty greater than he can
account for, and yet never can deny. He will change some day, though
Welty does not pursue that change.
II
The truth of Welty’s fictive cosmos, for all her preternatural gentleness,
is that love always does come first, and always does yield to an
irreparable separateness. Like her true mentor, Twain, she triumphs in
comedy because her deepest awareness is of a nihilistic “unground” beyond
consciousness or metaphysics, and comedy is the only graceful defense
against that cosmological emptiness. Unlike Faulkner and Flannery
O’Connor, she is, by design, a genial writer, but the design is a subtler version
of Twain’s more urgent desperation. “A Still Moment,” despite its
implications, remains a fantasy of the continuities of quest. Rather than
discuss one of her many masterpieces of humorous storytelling, I choose
instead “The Burning,” which flamboyantly displays her gift for a certain
grim sublimity, and which represents her upon her heights, as a stylist and
narrator who can rival Hemingway in representing the discontinuities of
war and disaster.
“The Burning” belongs to the dark genre of Southern Gothic, akin
to Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” and O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard
to Find.” Welty, as historical a storyteller as Robert Penn Warren, imagines
an incident from Sherman’s destructive march through Georgia. The
imagining is almost irrealistic in its complexity of tone and indirect representation,
so that “The Burning” is perhaps the most formidable of all
Welty’s stories, with the kind of rhetorical and allusive difficulties we
expect to encounter more frequently in modern poetry than in modern
short stories. Writing on form in D.H. Lawrence’s stories, Welty remarked
on “the unmitigated shapelessness of Lawrence’s narrative” and sharply
noted that his characters would only appear deranged if they began to
speak on the streets as they do in the stories:
For the truth seems to be that Lawrence’s characters don’t really
speak their words—not conversationally, not to one another—
they are not speaking on the street, but are playing like
fountains or radiating like the moon or storming like the sea,
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or their silence is the silence of wicked rocks. It is borne home
to us that Lawrence is writing of our human relationships on
earth in terms of eternity, and these terms set Lawrence’s form.
The author himself appears in authorship in places like the
moon, and sometimes smites us while we stand there under
him.
The characters of Welty’s “The Burning” fit her description of
Lawrence’s men and women; their silence too is the silence of wicked
rocks. Essentially they are only three: two mad sisters, Miss Theo and Miss
Myra, and their slave, called Florabel in the story’s first published version
(Harper’s Bazaar, March, 1951). The two demented high-born ladies are
very different; Miss Theo is deep-voiced and domineering, Miss Myra
gentler and dependent. But little of the story is seen through their eyes or
refracted through either’s consciousness. Florabel, an immensely passive
being, sees and reacts, in a mode not summarized until nearly the end of
the story, in its first printed form:
Florabel, with no last name, was a slave. By the time of that
moment on the hill, her kind had been slaves in a dozen countries
and that of their origin for thousands of years. She let
everything be itself according to its nature—the animate, the
inanimate, the symbol. She did not move to alter any of it, not
unless she was told to and shown how. And so she saw what
happened, the creation and the destruction. She waited on
either one and served it, not expecting anything of it but what
she got; only sooner or later she would seek protection somewhere.
Herself was an unknown, like a queen, somebody she
had heard called, even cried for. As a slave she was earth’s most
detached visitor. The world had not touched her—only possessed
and hurt her, like a man; taken away from her, like a
man; turned another way from her and left her, like a man. Her
vision was clear. She saw what was there and had not sought it,
did not seek it yet. (It was her eyes that were in the back of her
head, her vision that met itself coming the long way back,
unimpeded, like the light of stars.) The command to loot was
one more fading memory. Many commands had been given
her, some even held over from before she was born; delayed
and miscarried and interrupted, they could yet be fulfilled,
though it was safer for one once a slave to hear things a second
time, a third, fourth, hundredth, thousandth, if they were to be
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carried out to the letter. In that noon quiet after conflict there
might have been only the two triumphant, the mirror which
was a symbol in the world and Florabel who was standing there;
it was the rest that had died of it.
The mirror, “a symbol in the world,” is in this first version of “The
Burning” a synecdoche for the fragmented vision of both mad sisters and
their slave. In rewriting the story, Welty uses the mirror more subtly.
Delilah (as Florabel is now named) sees Sherman’s soldiers and their apocalyptic
white horse directly as they enter the house, and she runs to tell
Miss Theo and Miss Myra. They deign to look up and observe the intruders
in the mirror over the fireplace. Throughout the rest of the catastrophic
narrative, the sisters behold everything that transpires as though
in a mirror. Clearly they have spent their lives estranging reality as though
looking in a mirror, and they move to their self-destruction as though they
saw themselves only as images. The violence that prepares for the burning
is thus rendered as phantasmagoria:
The sisters showed no surprise to see soldiers and Negroes
alike (old Ophelia in the way, talking, talking) strike into and
out of the doors of the house, the front now the same as the
back, to carry off beds, tables, candlesticks, washstands, cedar
buckets, china pitchers, with their backs bent double; or the
horses ready to go; or the food of the kitchen bolted down—
and so much of it thrown away, this must be a second dinner;
or the unsilenceable dogs, the old pack mixed with the
strangers and fighting with all their hearts over bones. The last
skinny sacks were thrown on the wagons—the last flour, the
last scraping and clearing from Ophelia’s shelves, even her pepper-
grinder. The silver Delilah could count was counted on
strange blankets and then, knocking against the teapot, rolled
together, tied up like a bag of bones. A drummer boy with his
drum around his neck caught both Miss Theo’s peacocks,
Marco and Polo, and wrung their necks in the yard. Nobody
could look at those bird-corpses; nobody did.
The strangling of the peacocks is a presage of the weirdest sequence in
“The Burning,” in which Miss Theo and Miss Myra hang themselves from
a tree, with Delilah assisting as ordered. It is only when the sisters are dead
that we begin to understand that “The Burning” is more Delilah’s story than
it ever could have been theirs. A baby, Phinny, who had been allowed to
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perish in the fire (Welty does not allow us to know why), turns out to have
been begotten by Miss Theo’s and Miss Myra’s brother Benton upon
Delilah:
The mirror’s cloudy bottom sent up minnows of light to the
brim where now a face pure as a water-lily shadow was floating.
Almost too small and deep down to see, they were quivering,
leaping to life, fighting, aping old things Delilah had seen done
in this world already, sometimes what men had done to Miss
Theo and Miss Myra and the peacocks and to slaves, and sometimes
what a slave had done and what anybody now could do to
anybody. Under the flicker of the sun’s licks, then under its
whole blow and blare, like an unheard scream, like an act of
mercy gone, as the wall-less light and July blaze struck through
from the opened sky, the mirror felled her flat.
She put her arms over her head and waited, for they would
all be coming again, gathering under her and above her, bees
saddled like horses out of the air, butterflies harnessed to one
another, bats with masks on, birds together, all with their
weapons bared. She listened for the blows, and dreaded that
whole army of wings—of flies, birds, serpents, their glowing
enemy faces and bright kings’ dresses, that banner of colors
forked out, all this world that was flying, striking, stricken,
falling, gilded or blackened, mortally splitting and falling apart,
proud turbans unwinding, turning like the spotted dying leaves
of fall, spiraling down to bottomless ash; she dreaded the fury
of all the butterflies and dragonflies in the world riding, blades
unconcealed and at point—descending, and rising again from
the waters below, down under, one whale made of his own
grave, opening his mouth to swallow Jonah one more time.
Jonah!—a homely face to her, that could still look back from
the red lane he’d gone down, even if it was too late to speak. He
was her Jonah, her Phinny, her black monkey; she worshiped him
still, though it was long ago he was taken from her the first time.
Delilah, hysterical with fear, shock, and anguish, has fallen into the mirror
world of the mad sisters, her self-slain mistresses. She is restored to some
sense of reality by her search for Phinny’s bones. Carrying them, and what she
can save of the sisters’ finery, she marches on to what is presented ambiguously
either as her own freedom, or her death, or perhaps both together:
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Following the smell of horses and fire, to men, she kept in the
wheel tracks till they broke down at the river. In the shade
underneath the burned and fallen bridge she sat on a stump and
chewed for a while, without dreams, the comb of a dirtdauber.
Then once more kneeling, she took a drink from the Big Black,
and pulled the shoes off her feet and waded in.
Submerged to the waist, to the breast, stretching her throat
like a sunflower stalk above the river’s opaque skin, she kept on,
her treasure stacked on the roof of her head, hands laced upon
it. She had forgotten how or when she knew, and she did not
know what day this was, but she knew—it would not rain, the
river would not rise, until Saturday.
This extraordinary prose rises to an American sublime that is neither
grotesque nor ironic. Welty, in her On Short Stories, asked the question:
“Where does beauty come from, in the short story?” and answered only
that beauty was a result:
It comes. We are lucky when beauty comes, for often we try and
it should come, it could, we think, but then when the virtues of
our story are counted, beauty is standing behind the door.
I do not propose to count the virtues of “The Burning,” or even of
“A Still Moment.” Both narratives are as thoroughly written through, fully
composed, as the best poems of Wallace Stevens or of Hart Crane, or the
strongest of Hemingway’s stories, or Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. American
writing in the twentieth century touches the sublime mode only in scattered
instances, and always by reaching the frontier where the phantasmagoric,
and the realism of violence, are separated only by ghostlier
demarcations, keener sounds. Welty’s high distinction is that in her the
demarcations are as ghostly, the sounds as keen, as they are in her greatest
narrative contemporaries, Faulkner and Hemingway.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
John Cheever
(1912–1982)
I JOIN THE MANY READERS UNABLE TO ABANDON A PERPETUAL RETURN TO
John Cheever’s “The Country Husband” (1955). One cannot quite name
Cheever as one of the modern American story-writers of the highest eminence:
Hemingway, Faulkner, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, Scott
Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor. Still, Cheever compares
favorably enough with the second order: Sherwood Anderson, Nabokov,
Malamud, Updike, Ozick, Ann Beattie, Carver, the Canadian Alice Munro.
Like them, he lacks the enduring originality of Hemingway and Faulkner,
but Cheever is as assured and finished as Nabokov or Updike.
“The Country Husband” disturbs me intensely with each rereading,
even if it is less universal a vision of failed marriage than clearly it intends
to be. Francis Weed is no Everyman, even though I have encountered (and
taught) many of his potential doubles. Aesthetically, Cheever’s story gains
more than it loses by a certain forlorn inner solitude in Weed, who sometimes
suggests a misplaced writer, like Cheever himself.
Where does one locate the haunting splendor of “The Country
Husband”? Not, I think, in the idea of order that will keep the Weeds
together until death, dubious as their love is for one another. Francis
Weed’s authentic desire hardly is for the babysitter, but for the image in his
memory of the Norman young woman, shorn and stripped as punishment,
with “some invaluable grandeur in her nakedness.” A superb artist, John
Cheever lacquers his surfaces, but the dark power of his best stories’ undersong
is their reliance upon the deviance of the sexual drive into sadomasochism.
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SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Julio Cortázar
(1914–1984)
“BESTIARY” IS A PERMANENT SHORT STORY NOT SO MUCH BECAUSE OF ITS
fantastic tiger, but through its subtle and nuanced presentation of Isabel’s
passion for Rema, a passion that turns murderous and destroys her sadistic
uncle, by means of the tiger.
I don’t see any allegory in the tiger, though one cannot say that sometimes
a tiger is only a tiger. But “Bestiary” is something of a jest, as well as
the account of Isabel’s desire for Rema’s soft touch. The long, stunning
final paragraph of the story, rendered here with great skill by Paul
Blackburn, haunts me frequently:
The Kid was eating already, the newspaper beside him, there
was hardly enough room for Isabel to rest her arm. Luis was the
last to come from his room, contented as he always was at noon.
They ate, Nino was talking about the snails, the snail eggs in
the reeds, the collection itself, the sizes and the colors. He was
going to kill them by himself, it hurt Isabel to do it, they’d put
them to dry on a zinc sheet. After the coffee came and Luis
looked at them with the usual question. Isabel got up first to
look for don Roberto, even though don Roberto had already
told her before. She made the round of the porch and when she
came in again, Rema and Nino had their heads together over
the snail box, it was like a family photograph, only Luis looked
up at her and she said, “It’s in the Kid’s study,” and stayed
watching how the Kid shrugged his shoulders, annoyed, and
Rema who touched a snail with a fingertip, so delicately that her
finger even seemed part snail. Afterwards, Rema got up to go
look for more sugar, and Isabel tailed along behind her babbling
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until they came back in laughing from a joke they’d shared in
the pantry. When Luis said he had no tobacco and ordered
Nino to look in his study, Isabel challenged him that she’d find
the cigarettes first and they went out together. Nino won, they
came back in running and pushing, they almost bumped into
the Kid going to the library to read his newspaper, complaining
because he couldn’t use his study. Isabel came over to look
at the snails, and Luis waiting for her to light his cigarette as
always saw that she was lost, studying the snails which were
beginning to ooze out slowly and move about, looking at Rema
suddenly, but dropping her like a flash, captivated by the snails,
so much so that she didn’t move at the Kid’s first scream, they
were all running and she was still standing over the snails as if
she did not hear the Kid’s new choked cry. Luis beating against
the library door, don Roberto coming in with the dogs, the
Kid’s moans amid the furious barking of the dogs, and Luis saying
over and over again, “But it was in his study! She said it was
in his own study!”, bent over the snails willowy as fingers, like
Rema’s fingers maybe, or it was Rema’s hand on her shoulder,
made her raise her head to look at her, to stand looking at her
for an eternity, broken by her ferocious sob into Rema’s skirt,
her unsettled happiness, and Rema running her hand over her
hair, quieting her with a soft squeeze of her fingers and a murmuring
against her ear, a stuttering as of gratitude, as of an
unnamable acquiescence.
The rhetorical effect here party depends upon montage. Isabel scarcely
can rest either her arm or her desire for Rema, because of the aggressive
presence of the Kid, her threatening uncle. When Isabel and Rema return
together from the pantry, have they shared more than a joke? The superb
final sentence is an ecstasy of sexual happiness, in which Rema accepts
gratefully Isabel’s gift of destroying the Kid, and silently assents to the
assassination. There is something almost infinitely suggestive of a potential,
mutual bliss awaiting Rema and Isabel in Cortázar’s final cadences.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Shirley Jackson
(1919–1965)
ONLY A FEW MONTHS BEFORE I WROTE THIS INTRODUCTION, THE TALIBAN
in Kabul, Afghanistan, stoned to death a woman caught in adultery. As
Islamic fundamentalists, the Taliban follow their interpretation of the
Koran, itself based upon Jewish-Christian sources.
Shirley Jackson’s famous story “The Lottery” is peculiarly horrifying
because it is so artfully affectless. In what seems an upper New England setting,
an annual ritual takes place. We are in a village so small that everyone
appears to know everyone else, and the stoning to death of Mrs.
Hutchinson has no relation to morality or to explicit religion. Perhaps that
adds to the shock effect of “The Lottery,” a story that depends upon tapping
into a universal fear of arbitrary condemnation, and of sanctioned violence.
Like so many of Shirley Jackson’s stories, “The Lottery” makes me
brood upon the element of tendentiousness that renders her so problematic
in aesthetic terms. Jackson always had too palpable a design upon her
readers; her effects are as calculated as Poe’s. Poe alas is inescapable: his
nightmares were and are universal. This salvages him, despite the viciousness
of his prose style, and absence of nuance in his work. Since he is greatly
improved by translation (even into English), Poe has endured, and cannot
be discarded, or even evaded.
“The Lottery,” like most of Jackson’s stories, is crisply written and
cunningly plotted. But it scarcely bears rereading, which is (I think) the test
for canonical literature. Jackson knows too well exactly what she is doing,
and on rereading, so do we. You can learn certain rudiments of narration
from “The Lottery,” and yet the story’s strict economy, which is its overt
strength, is finally something of a stunt. It is as though we are at a magic
show and we can see all the wires that ought to be invisible.
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Literary judgment depends upon comparison, and so it is valid to
contrast “The Lottery” to other stories that frighten us by relying upon
archaic rituals. There is a long American tradition of Gothic narrative,
whose masters include Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor. But
these are masters and disturb us more profoundly than Jackson can,
because they portray the complexities of character and personality without
which we cannot permanently be moved. As fabulists, the masters of
American Gothic carry us on a journey to the interior. Jackson certainly
aspired to be more than an entertainer; her concern with sorceries, ancient
and modern, was authentic and even pragmatic. But her art of narration
stayed on the surface, and could not depict individual identities. Even
“The Lottery” wounds you once, and once only.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
J.D. Salinger
(1919–)
J.D. SALINGER’S PRINCIPAL ACHIEVEMENT IS THE CATCHER IN THE RYE
(1951), a short novel that has attained a kind of mythological status in the
nearly half-century since its publication. His short stories, in book form,
constitute three equally slender volumes: Nine Stories (1953), Franny and
Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An
Introduction (1963). Salinger has been silent for the last 35 years, a silence
that seems only to have enhanced his popularity. Fresh generations of the
young continue to find something of themselves in his work.
Rereading Salinger’s 13 principal stories, after a third of a century, is
a mixed experience, at least for me. All of them have their period-piece
aspect, portraits of a lost New York City, or of New Yorkers elsewhere, in
the post-World War II America that vanished forever in the “cultural revolution”
(to call it that) of the late 1960s. Holden Caulfield and the Glass
siblings charm me now-though sometimes they make me wince—because
they are so archaic. Their humane spirituality, free of dogma and of spite,
has to be refreshing as we drift toward the millennium.
Of the six stories to which this volume is devoted, “Raise High the
Roof Beam, Carpenters” now reads best, not for its “religious pluralism” (as
one critic characterized it) but simply for high good humor. Its representation
of being stuck in a Manhattan traffic jam has an exuberance that Salinger
rarely manifests either in his persons or his plots. Zaniness rather than Zen-
Taoist pluralism saves the story from Salinger’s inverted sentimentalities and
from Glass sibling affections, too frequently emotions in excess of their
objects. Salinger’s ear for dialogue, inherited from Hemingway and
Fitzgerald, is acutely manifested throughout a bizarre narrative in which little
happens, which is to be preferred to Seymour’s suicide in “A Perfect Day
for Bananafish,” or Franny’s fainting fit in the story that bears her name.
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Salinger’s stylistic skills are beyond question; his stories perform precisely
as he intends. And they hold up as storytelling, even if their social
attitudes and spiritual stances frequently now seem archaic or quaint.
Their problem is that the Glass siblings are not exactly memorable as individuals.
Even poor Seymour is more a type than a vivid consciousness in
himself. “Seymour: an Introduction” I find impossible to reread, partly
because his brother Buddy, the narrator, never knows when to stop, and
again who can tolerate this kind of smug spirituality?
Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little
piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong?
A reader might well retort: when is Seymour right? The accuracy of
Seymour’s mystic insight is not the issue. Stories must have narrative values,
or they cease to be stories, and “Seymour: an Introduction” fails to be
a story. That may be why Salinger’s fiction stopped. Contemplation can be
a very valuable mode of being and existence, but it has no stories to tell.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Italo Calvino
(1923–1985)
Invisible Cities
THE ERA OF OUR CONTEMPORARY MODES OF LITERARY CRITICISM WILL PASS;
perhaps already it has passed. Fictions that accommodate themselves too
readily in regard to our modes will pass with them. Nabokov, Borges,
García Márquez, John Barth may seem less available to generations later
than our own. Much of Italo Calvino doubtless will dwindle away also, but
not Invisible Cities, though aspects of the book might almost be judged as
having been written for sensibilities schooled by semiotics and by reader-
response criticism. But those aspects are not central to Invisible Cities, and
this work’s outer armature will not engage me here. Like much of Kafka,
Invisible Cities will survive its admirers’ modes of apprehension, because it
returns us to the pure form of romance, genre of the marvelous, realm of
speculation. With Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, it renews a literature we
require yet can no longer deserve or earn.
Like Kublai Khan, we do not necessarily believe everything that
Marco Polo describes, but we too suffer the emptiness of the evening land
and hope to discern the tracery of some pattern that will compensate us for
our endless errors about life. Doubtless, as Nietzsche remarked, errors
about life are necessary for life, and doubtless also, as Emerson said, we
demand victory, a victory to the senses as well as to the soul. But error and
triumph alike induce emptiness, the cosmological emptiness that
Gnosticism named as the kenoma, the waste land or waste wilderness of all
literary romance. Calvino’s Kublai Khan is a Demiurge inhabiting that,
kenoma, “an endless formless ruin,” in which we know that “corruption’s
gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph
over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.”
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The Invisible Cities dot the kenoma, but are no part of it, being
sparks of the original Abyss, our foremother and forefather, and so the
source of everything still that is best and oldest in us. It is not in the keno-
ma that “the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a
third” or where you find “bergamot, sturgeon roe, astrolabes, amethysts.”
As sparks of the true pneuma or breath-soul, the Invisible Cities are not
psyches or personalities, despite their names. They do not represent
women but rather forewomen, as it were, for in truth all of them are at
once memories, desires, and signs, that is, repressions and the return of the
repressed. Perhaps it is Calvino’s peculiar genius (though he shares it with
Kafka) that we scarcely can distinguish, in his pages, the repressed and its
return, as here in the city called Anastasia:
At the end of three days, moving southward, you come upon
Anastasia, a city with concentric canals watering it and kites flying
over it. I should now list the wares that can profitably be
bought here: agate, onyx, chrysoprase, and other varieties of
chalcedony; I should praise the flesh of the golden pheasant
cooked here over fires of seasoned cherry wood and sprinkled
with much sweet marjoram; and tell of the women I have seen
bathing in the pool of a garden and who sometimes—it is
said—invite the stranger to disrobe with them and chase them
in the water. But with all this, I would not be telling you the
city’s true essence; for while the description of Anastasia awakens
desires one at a time only to force you to stifle them, when
you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your desires
waken all at once and surround you. The city appears to you as
a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and
since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing
but inhabit this desire and be content. Such is the power, sometimes
called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the
treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as
a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labor which gives
form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you
are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave.
That antithetical will, seen by Nietzsche as art’s willed revenge
against time, triumphs here even as it does in Yeats or Kafka. The Great
Khan, Kublai, learns from Marco that his empire is nothing but a summa
of emblems, a zodiac of phantasmagorias. Learning all the emblems will
give Kublai no sense of possession, for on the day of total knowledge, the
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Khan will be an emblem among emblems, at once again the sign of repression
and of return from such defense. Marco’s use, both for himself and for
Kublai, is to teach what he uniquely learns: that the meaning of any
Invisible City can only be another Invisible City, not itself:
And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The
traveler recognizes the little bit that is his, discovering the
much he has not had and will never have.
As Marco’s narration proceeds, the Invisible Cities accomplish the
paradox of growing ever more fantastic, yet ever more pragmatic. Calvino
remembers implicitly Nietzsche’s dark aphorism: we only find words to
describe what we now feel contempt towards, however dearly we once held
it in our hearts. The Khan reminds Marco that he never mentions Venice,
and the traveler reveals the secret of every quester for the Alien God, for
the City forever lost:
“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,”
Polo said, “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I
speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already
lost it, little by little.”
It is fitting that Calvino’s last Invisible City should be his most imaginative,
or perhaps it is merely that he has described my own dream, the
extraordinary Berenice, at once the unjust city, and the city of the just.
Berenice is a nightmare of repetitions, in which the just and the unjust constantly
undergo metamorphoses into one another:
From these data it is possible to deduce an image of the future
Berenice, which will bring you closer to knowing the truth than
any other information about the city as it is seen today. You
must nevertheless bear in mind what I am about to say to you:
in the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in
its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right—and of
being more just than many others who call themselves more just
than the just. This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment;
and the natural desire of revenge on the unjust is colored
by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do. Another
unjust city, though different from the first, is digging out its
space within the double sheath of the unjust and just Berenices.
Having said this, I do not wish your eyes to catch a distorted
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image, so I must draw your attention to an intrinsic quality of this
unjust city germinating secretly inside the secret just city: and this
is the possible awakening—as if in an excited opening of windows—
of a later love for justice, not yet subjected to rules, capable
of reassembling a city still more just than it was before it
became the vessel of injustice. But if you peer deeper into this new
germ of justice you can discern a tiny spot that is spreading like
the mounting tendency to impose what is just through what is
unjust, and perhaps this is the germ of an immense metropolis....
From my words you will have reached the conclusion that
the real Berenice is a temporal succession of different cities,
alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you
about is something else: all the future Berenices are already
present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined,
crammed, inextricable.
This is not merely a parable about the relativity of justice, or the selfish
virtue of self-righteousness, but a vision of the ambivalence of all Eros, since
the just Berenice is an Eros, and the unjust a Thanatos. Just and unjust,
Berenice is the city of jealousy, of natural possessiveness, of the malignant seed
hidden in the heart of Eros. The shadow of our mortality, cast upwards by the
earth into the heavens, stopped at the sphere of Venus, as Shelley liked to
remind us, but in Berenice the shadow never stops. A temporal succession of
love and death, just and unjust, is real enough, and dark enough. But Calvino
gives us a stronger warning: every instant holds all the future Berenices, inextricably
crammed together, death drive and libido confined in one chiasmus,
wrapped one within the other. Fortunately, Invisible Cities ends more amiably,
when Marco insists that the inferno need not be the last landing place, if only
we: “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are
not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” Dante would have
dismissed this with grim irony, but we cannot afford to do so.
As coda, I resort to an extraordinary short story, “The Night Driver,”
in Calvino’s t zero. The narrator, in a telephone argument with Y, his mistress,
tells her he wishes to end their affair. Y replies that she will phone Z,
the narrator’s rival. To save the affair, the narrator undertakes a night drive
on the superhighway that connects his city to that of his beloved. In rain
and darkness, at high speed, the narrator does not know if Z is outspeeding
him towards Y, or if Y herself perhaps started towards his city, with
motives akin to his own. In a mad parody of semiotics, the narrator, Y, and
Z have become signs or signals or messages, weird reductions in a system:
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Naturally, if I were absolutely alone on this superhighway, if I
saw no other cars speeding in either direction, then everything
would be much clearer, I would be certain that Z hasn’t moved
to supplant me, nor has Y moved to make peace with me, facts
I might register as positive or negative in my accounting, but
which would in any case leave no room for doubt. And yet if I
had the power of exchanging my present state of uncertainty
for such a negative certainty, I would refuse the bargain without
hesitation. The ideal condition for excluding every doubt
would prevail if in this part of the world there existed only
three automobiles: mine, Y’s, and Z’s; then no other car could
proceed in my direction except Z’s, and the only car heading in
the opposite direction would surely be Y’s. Instead, among the
hundreds of cars that the night and the rain reduce to anonymous
glimmers, only a motionless observer situated in a favorable
position could distinguish one car from the other and perhaps
recognize who is inside. This is the contradiction in which
I find myself: if I want to receive a message I must give up being
a message myself, but the message I want to receive from Y—
namely, that Y has made herself into a message—has value only
if I in turn am a message, and on the other hand the message I
am has meaning only if Y doesn’t limit herself to receiving it
like any ordinary receiver of messages but if she also is that
message I am waiting to receive from her.
By now to arrive in B, go up to Y’s house, find that she has
remained there with her headache brooding over the causes of
our quarrel, would give me no satisfaction; if then Z were to
arrive also a scene would be the result, histrionic and loathsome;
and if instead I were to find out that Z has prudently stayed home
or that Y didn’t carry out her threat to telephone him, I would
feel I had played the fool. On the other hand, if I had remained
in A, and Y had gone there to apologize to me, I would have seen
Y through different eyes, a weak woman, clinging to me, and
something between us would have changed. I can no longer
accept any situation other than this transformation of ourselves
into the messages of ourselves. And what about Z? Even Z must
not escape our fate, he too must be transformed into the message
of himself; it would be terrible if I were to run to Y jealous of Z
and if Y were running to me, repentant, avoiding Z, while actually
Z hasn’t remotely thought of stirring from his house.
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To be made into a message, or to give up such a making, alike are catastrophe
creations. Calvino’s sublimely funny summary seems to me his finest
sentence ever: “I can no longer accept any situation other than the transformation
of ourselves into the messages of ourselves.” But are we not then back
in the City of Berenice? Y, Z, and the narrator are all residents of that
Invisible City, where the just and the unjust twine into one another, love cannot
be distinguished from jealousy, and repression scarcely can be told from
what returns from it. Night drivers go between Invisible Cities, transforming
memory and desire into homogenous signs, confounding eyes and names,
contaminating the sky with the dead. The alternative to such night driving
indeed is to “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the
inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
Nonexistent Knight
I devote my remarks here to my other favorite in Calvino, the delightful
Nonexistent Knight. Calvino’s triumph in this exquisite and zany fantasy is
that Agilulf, who is only an empty suit of white shining armor, nevertheless
endears himself to the delighted reader. The book’s glory is the development
of Agilulf from a martinet of exemplary will power to a charmingly
devoted quester heroically seeking to restore the authenticity of his
knighthood. When poor Agilulf despairs, and abandons his armor as a
legacy to Raimbaud, he vanishes forever, and we are saddened.
An absurd yet heartening atmosphere of good will pervades The
Nonexistent Knight. All its characters, the Saracens included, have verve and
style. Calvino even is able to invest Charlemagne with a sly sense of humor.
The spirit of Ariosto, Calvino’s true precursor, hovers nearly, and informs
the personalities of Bradamante/Theodora and Raimbaud, and of
Sophronia and Torrismund.
Entirely Calvino’s own are the nonexistent knight Sir Agilulf and his
squire, the uncanny clown Gurduloo, who cannot hold on to the consciousness
that he truly has a body. In a superb contrast, Calvino metaphysically
exploits the difference between knight and squire, and the normative
Raimbaud.
As Agilulf dragged a corpse along he thought, ‘Oh corpse, you
have what I never had or will have: a carcass. Or rather you
have; you are this carcass, that which at times, in moments of
despondency, I find myself envying in men who exist. Fine! I
can truly call myself privileged, I who can live without it and do
all; all, of course, which seems most important to me; many
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things I manage to do better than those who exist, since I lack
their usual defects of coarseness, carelessness, incoherence,
smell. It’s true that someone who exists always has a particular
attitude of his own to things, which I never manage to have.
But if their secret is merely here, in this bag of guts, then I can
do without it. This valley of disintegrating naked corpses disgusts
me no more than does the flesh of living human beings.’
As Gurduloo dragged a corpse along he thought, ‘Corpsy,
your farts stink even more than mine. I don’t know why everyone
mourns you so. What’s it you lack? Before you used to
move, now your movement is passed on to the worms you
nourish. Once you grew nails and hair; now you’ll ooze slime
which will make grass in the field grow higher towards the sun.
You will became grass, then milk for cows which will eat the
grass, blood of the baby that drinks their milk, and so on. Don’t
you see you get more out of life than I do, corpsy?’
As Raimbaud dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Oh
corpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by
the heels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this
mania for battle and for love, when seen from the place where
your staring eyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over
stones? It’s that I think of, oh corpse, it’s that you make me
think of: but does anything change? Nothing. No other days
exist but these of ours before the tomb, both for us the waste
them, not to waste anything of what I am, of what I could be:
to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause: to embrace, to be
embraced by, proud Bradamante. I hope you spent your days
no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already
shown their numbers. For me they are still whirling in the box.
And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace.’
Agilulf is mistaken, in that he does have an attitude all his own, while
Gurduloo is even more off-the-point, since he is simply unaware of his separate
existence. Only Raimbaud is accurate, in love with his own disquiet,
which is life itself. He is fit husband for Bradamante, who closes the book as
she hurries to meet him, forsaking her other identity as Sister Theodora, the
narrative voice. She cries out to the future, in a comic ecstasy:
What unforseeable golden ages art thou preparing, ill-mastered,
indomitable harbinger of treasures dearly paid for, my
kingdom to be conquered, the future ...
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Flannery O’Connor
(1925–1964)
A PROFESSEDLY ROMAN CATHOLIC PROSE ROMANCE BEGINS WITH THE
death of an eighty-four-year-old Southern American Protestant, self-called
prophet, and professional moonshiner, as set forth in this splendidly comprehensive
sentence:
Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a
day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and
a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug
filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table
where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian
way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and
enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.
Flannery O’Connor’s masterwork, The Violent Bear It Away, ends with
the fourteen-year-old Tarwater marching towards the city of destruction,
where his own career as prophet is to be suffered:
Intermittently the boy’s jagged shadow slanted across the road
ahead of him as if it cleared a rough path toward his goal. His
singed eyes, black in their deep sockets, seemed already to envision
the fate that awaited him but he moved steadily on, his face
set toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping.
In Flannery O’Connor’s fierce vision, the children of God, all of us,
always are asleep in the outward life. Young Tarwater, clearly O’Connor’s
surrogate, is in clinical terms a borderline schizophrenic, subject to auditory
hallucinations in which he hears the advice of an imaginary friend who is
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overtly the Christian Devil. But clinical terms are utterly alien to O’Connor,
who accepts only theological namings and unnamings. This is necessarily a
spiritual strength in O’Connor, yet it can be an aesthetic distraction also,
since The Violent Bear It Away is a fiction of preternatural power, and not a
religious tract. Rayber, the antagonist of both prophets, old and young
Tarwater, is an aesthetic disaster, whose defects in representation alone keep
the book from making a strong third with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and
Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. O’Connor despises Rayber, and cannot
bother to make him even minimally persuasive. We wince at his unlikely verbal
mixture of popular sociology and confused psychology, as even Sally
Fitzgerald, O’Connor’s partisan, is compelled to admit:
Her weaknesses—a lack of perfect familiarity with the terminology
of the secular sociologists, psychologists, and rationalists
she often casts as adversary figures, and an evident weighting
of the scales against them all—are present in the character
of Rayber (who combines all three categories).
One hardly believes that a perfect familiarity with the writings say of
David Riesman, Erik Erikson, and Karl Popper would have enabled
O’Connor to make poor Rayber a more plausible caricature of what she
despised. We remember The Violent Bear It Away for its two prophets, and
particularly young Tarwater, who might be called a Gnostic version of
Huckleberry Finn. What makes us free is the Gnosis, according to the
most ancient of heresies. O’Connor, who insisted upon her Catholic
orthodoxy, necessarily believed that what makes us free is baptism in
Christ, and for her the title of her novel was its most important aspect,
since the words are spoken by Jesus himself:
But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? yea, I say unto you,
and more than a prophet.
For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger
before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.
Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women
there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding
he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater
than he.
And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom
of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by
force.
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I have quoted the King James Version of Matt. 11:9–12, where “and
the violent take it by force” is a touch more revealing than O’Connor’s
Catholic version, “and the violent bear it away.” For O’Connor, we are
back in or rather never have left Christ’s time of urgency, and her heart is
with those like the Tarwaters who know that the kingdom of heaven will
suffer them to take it by force:
The lack of realism would be crucial if this were a realistic novel
or if the novel demanded the kind of realism you demand. I don’t
believe it does. The old man is very obviously not a Southern
Baptist, but an independent, a prophet in the true sense. The
true prophet is inspired by the Holy Ghost, not necessarily by
the dominant religion of his region. Further, the traditional
Protestant bodies of the South are evaporating into secularism
and respectability and are being replaced on the grass roots level
by all sorts of strange sects that bear not much resemblance to
traditional Protestantism—Jehovah’s Witnesses, snake-handlers,
Free Thinking Christians, Independent Prophets, the swindlers,
the mad, and sometimes the genuinely inspired. A character has
to be true to his own nature and I think the old man is that. He
was a prophet, not a church-member. As a prophet, he has to be
a natural Catholic. Hawthorne said he didn’t write novels, he
wrote romances; I am one of his descendants.
O’Connor’s only disputable remark in this splendid defense of her
book is the naming of old Tarwater as “a natural Catholic.” Hawthorne’s
descendant she certainly was, by way of Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, and
Nathanael West, but though Hawthorne would have approved her mode,
he would have been shocked by her matter. To ignore what is authentically
shocking about O’Connor is to misread her weakly. It is not her incessant
violence that is troublesome but rather her passionate endorsement of
that violence as the only way to startle her secular readers into a spiritual
awareness. As a visionary writer, she is determined to take us by force, to
bear us away so that we may be open to the possibility of grace. Her unbelieving
reader is represented by the grandmother in the famous story “A
Good Man Is Hard to Find”:
She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were
going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my
babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and
touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a
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snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the
chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off
his glasses and began to clean them.
That murmur of recognition is what matters for O’Connor. The
Misfit speaks for her in his mordant observation: “She would of been a
good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of
her life.” Secular critic as I am, I need to murmur: “Surely that does make
goodness a touch too strenuous?” But O’Connor anticipates our wounded
outcries of nature against grace, since we understandably prefer a vision
that corrects nature without abolishing it. Young Tarwater himself, as finely
recalcitrant a youth as Huckleberry Finn, resists not only Rayber but the
tuition of old Tarwater. A kind of swamp fox, like the Revolutionary hero
for whom he was named, the boy Tarwater waits for his own call, and
accepts his own prophetic election only after he has baptized his idiot
cousin Bishop by drowning him, and even then only in consequence of
having suffered a homosexual rape by the Devil himself. O’Connor’s
audacity reminds us of the Faulkner of Sanctuary and the West of A Cool
Million. Her theology purports to be Roman Catholicism, but her sensibility
is Southern Gothic, Jacobean in the mode of the early T.S. Eliot, and
even Gnostic, in the rough manner of Carlyle, a writer she is likely never
to have read.
I myself find it a critical puzzle to read her two novels, Wise Blood and
The Violent Bear It Away, and her two books of stories, A Good Man Is Hard
to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, and then to turn from her
fiction to her occasional prose in Mystery and Manners, and her letters in
The Habit of Being. The essayist and letter-writer denounces Manichaeism,
Jansenism, and all other deviations from normative Roman Catholicism,
while the storyteller seems a curious blend of the ideologies of Simone
Weil reading the New Testament into the Iliad’s “poem of force” and of
René Girard assuring us that there can be no return of the sacred without
violence. Yet the actual O’Connor, in her letters, found Weil “comic and
terrible,” portraying the perpetual waiter for grace as an “angular intellectual
proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth,” and
I suspect she would have been as funny about the violent thematicism of
Girard.
To find something of a gap between O’Connor as lay theologue and
O’Connor as a storyteller verging upon greatness may or may not be accurate
but in any case intends to undervalue neither the belief nor the fiction.
I suspect though that the fiction’s implicit theology is very different from
what O’Connor thought it to be, a difference that actually enhances the
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power of the novels and stories. It is not accidental that As I Lay Dying and
Miss Lonelyhearts were the only works of fiction that O’Connor urged upon
Robert Fitzgerald, or that her own prose cadences were haunted always by
the earlier rather than the later Eliot. The Waste Land, As I Lay Dying, and
Miss Lonelyhearts are not works of the Catholic imagination but rather of
that Gnostic pattern Gershom Scholem termed “redemption through sin.”
Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, and stories like “A Good Man Is Hard
to Find” and the merciless “Parker’s Back,” take place in the same cosmos
as The Waste Land, As I Lay Dying, and Miss Lonelyhearts. This world is the
American version of the cosmological emptiness that the ancient Gnostics
called the kenoma, a sphere ruled by a demiurge who has usurped the alien
God, and who has exiled God out of history and beyond the reach of our
prayers.
II
In recognizing O’Connor’s fictive universe as being essentially
Gnostic, I dissent not only from her own repudiation of heresy but from
the sensitive reading of Jefferson Humphries, who links O’Connor to
Proust in an “aesthetic of violence”:
For O’Connor, man has been his own demiurge, the author of
his own fall, the keeper of his own cell....
The chief consequence of this partly willful, partly inherit
ed alienation from the sacred is that the sacred can only intrude
upon human perception as a violence, a rending of the fabric of
daily life.
On this account, which remains normative, whether Hebraic or
Catholic, we are fallen into the kenoma through our own culpability. In the
Gnostic formulation, creation and fall were one and the same event, and
all that can save us is a certain spark within us, a spark that is no part of the
creation but rather goes back to the original abyss. The grandeur or sublimity
that shines through the ruined creation is a kind of abyss-radiance,
whether in Blake or Carlyle or the early Eliot or in such novelistic masters
of the grotesque as Faulkner, West, and O’Connor.
The ugliest of O’Connor’s stories, yet one of the strongest, is “A
View of the Woods” in Everything That Rises Must Converge. Its central
characters are the seventy-nine-year-old Mr. Fortune, and his nine-yearold
granddaughter, Mary Fortune Pitts. I am uncertain which of the two is
the more abominable moral character or hideous human personality,
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partly because they resemble one another so closely in selfishness, obduracy,
false pride, sullenness, and just plain meanness. At the story’s close, a
physical battle between the two leaves the little girl a corpse, throttled and
with her head smashed upon a rock, while her grandfather suffers a heart
attack, during which he has his final “view of the woods,” in one of
O’Connor’s typically devastating final paragraphs:
Then he fell on his back and looked up helplessly along the bare
trunks into the tops of the pines and his heart expanded once
more with a convulsive motion. It expanded so fast that the old
man felt as if he were being pulled after it through the woods,
felt as if he were running as fast as he could with the ugly pines
toward the lake. He perceived that there would be a little opening
there, a little place where he could escape and leave the
woods behind him. He could see it in the distance already, a little
opening where the white sky was reflected in the water. It
grew as he ran toward it until suddenly the whole lake opened
up before him, riding majestically in little corrugated folds
toward his feet. He realized suddenly that he could not swim
and that he had not bought the boat. On both sides of him he
saw that the gaunt trees had thickened into mysterious dark files
that were marching across the water and away into the distance.
He looked around desperately for someone to help him but the
place was deserted except for one huge yellow monster which
sat to the side, as stationary as he was, gorging itself on clay.
The huge yellow monster is a bulldozer, and so is the dying Mr.
Fortune, and so was the dead Mary Fortune Pitts. What sustains our interest
in such antipathetic figures in so grossly unsympathetic a world?
O’Connor’s own commentary does not help answer the question, and
introduces a bafflement quite its own:
The woods, if anything, are the Christ symbol. They walk
across the water, they are bathed in a red light, and they in the
end escape the old man’s vision and march off over the hills.
The name of the story is a view of the woods and the woods
alone are pure enough to be a Christ symbol if anything is. Part
of the tension of the story is created by Mary Fortune and the
old man being images of each other but opposite in the end.
One is saved and the other is dammed [sic] and there is no way
out of it, it must be pointed out and underlined. Their fates are
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different. One has to die first because one kills the other, but
you have read it wrong if you think they die in different places.
The old man dies by her side; he only thinks he runs to the
edge of the lake, that is his vision.
What divine morality it can be that saves May Fortune and damns her
wretched grandfather is beyond my ken, but the peculiarities of O’Connor’s
sense of the four last things transcend me at all times, anyway. What is more
interesting is O’Connor’s own final view of the woods. Her sacramental
vision enables her to see Christ in “the gaunt trees [that] had thickened into
mysterious dark files that were marching across the water and away into the
distance.” Presumably their marching away is emblematic of Mr. Fortune’s
damnation, so far as O’Connor is concerned. As a reader of herself, I cannot
rank O’Connor very high here. Surely Mary Fortune is as damnable
and damned as her grandfather, and the woods are damnable and damned
also. They resemble not the normative Christ but the Jesus of the Gnostic
texts, whose phantom only suffers upon the cross while the true Christ
laughs far off in the alien heavens, in the ultimate abyss.
O’Connor’s final visions are more equivocal than she evidently
intended. Here is the conclusion of “Revelation”:
Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin
remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were
absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted
her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting
through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the
highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from
the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary
light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging
bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of
living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward
heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for
the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white
robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping
and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession
was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as
those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of
everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned
forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind
the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always
been for good order and common sense and respectable
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behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their
shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being
burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the
hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay
ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where
she was, immobile.
At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made
her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods
around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but
what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward
into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.
This is meant to burn away false or apparent virtues, and yet consumes
not less than everything. In O’Connor’s mixed realm, which is neither nature
nor grace, Southern reality nor private phantasmagoria, all are necessarily
damned, not by an aesthetic of violence but by a Gnostic aesthetic in which
there is no knowing unless the knower becomes one with the known. Her
Catholic moralism masked from O’Connor something of her own aesthetic
of the grotesque. Certainly her essay on “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in
Southern Fiction” evades what is central in her own praxis:
Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a
penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still
able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have
to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South
the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.
That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for
almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in
the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject
from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say
that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly
Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of
it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the
image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and
instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature.
In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure
for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in
literature.
The freakish displacement here is from “wholeness,” which is then
described as the state of having been made in the image or likeness of God.
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But that mode, displacement, is not what is operative in O’Connor’s fiction.
Her own favorite, among her people, is young Tarwater, who is not a
freak, and who is so likeable because he values his own freedom above
everything and anyone, even his call as a prophet. We are moved by
Tarwater because of his recalcitrance, because he is the Huck Finn of
visionaries. But he moves O’Connor, even to identification, because of his
inescapable prophetic vocation. It is the interplay between Tarwater fighting
to be humanly free, and Tarwater besieged by his great-uncle’s training,
by the internalized Devil, and most of all by O’Connor’s own ferocious
religious zeal, that constitutes O’Connor’s extraordinary artistry. Her
pious admirers to the contrary, O’Connor would have bequeathed us even
stronger novels and stories, of the eminence of Faulkner’s, if she had been
able to restrain her spiritual tendentiousness.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Cynthia Ozick
(1928–)
“THE RECOVERY OF COVENANT CAN BE ATTAINED ONLY IN THE LIVING-OUT
of the living Covenant; never among the shamanistic toys of literature.”
Such a sentence, typical of Cynthia Ozick’s critical speculations, is fortunately
contradicted by her narrative art. The author of “Envy; or, Yiddish
in America” and of “Usurpation (Other People’s Stories),” two novellas
unequalled in her own generation, has recovered her version of Covenant
among the tropes (or “shamanistic toys”) of literature. Doubtless she lives
out her own trust in a living Covenant also, since she is an authentic sharer
in the normative tradition that, above all others in the West, bids us
honor our mothers and our fathers, and more precisely, honor their
virtues. But Ozick is neither a theologian, nor a literary critic, nor a
Jewish historian. She does not deign to begin with a consciousness of rupture
between normative Hebraism and her own vision. So decisive a
denial of rupture must be honored as the given of her fiction, even as the
fierce Catholicism of Flannery O’Connor must be accepted as the ground
from which everything rises and converges in the author of The Violent
Bear It Away.
Ozick’s true precursor as a writer is Bernard Malamud, who hovers
rather uneasily close in stories like “The Pagan Rabbi” and “The Dock-
Witch,” but who is triumphantly absorbed and transformed in Ozick’s
stronger works, including “Usurpation (Other People’s Stories).”
“Usurpation” is Ozick’s central story, the key signature of her quest as a
writer, just as her most brilliant nonfictional prose (except for the poignant
“A Drugstore in Winter”) is her “Preface” to Bloodshed and Three Novellas
(1976), which essentially is an introduction to “Usurpation.”
The “Preface” lists the other people’s stories:
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The tale called “The Magic Crown” in my story is a paraphrase,
except for a twist in its ending, of Malamud’s “The
Silver Crown”; the account of the disappointed messiah is
Agnon’s; and David Stern’s “Agnon, A Story” is the mischievous
seed of my metamorphosis of the Nobel Prize Winner.
The enumeration of Malamud, Agnon, and Stern here is anything
but an indication of an anxiety. But then Ozick does confess what she
wishes us to believe is a literary anxiety, or perhaps rather a scruple or
reservation:
“These words.” They are English words. I have no other language.
Since my slave-ancestors left off building the Pyramids
to wander in the wilderness of Sinai, they have spoken a handful
of generally obscure languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, twelfth-
century French perhaps, Yiddish for a thousand years. Since
the coming forth from Egypt five millennia ago, mine is the
first generation to think and speak and write wholly in English.
To say that I have been thoroughly assimilated into English
would of course be the grossest understatement—what is the
English language (and its poetry) if not my passion, my blood,
my life? But that perhaps is overstatement. A language while
we are zealously acquiring it can become a passion and a life. A
language owned in the root of the tongue is loved without
being the object of love: there is no sense of separateness from
it. Do I love my eyeballs? No; but sight is everything.
Still, though English is my everything, now and then I feel
cramped by it. I have come to it with notions it is too parochial
to recognize. A language, like a people, has a history of ideas;
but not all ideas; only those known to its experience. Not surprisingly,
English is a Christian language. When I write
English, I live in Christendom.
Ozick ostensibly defends herself from a nameless critic who evidently
was not antithetical enough to understand her sense of the agonistic element
in her writing. She goes so far as to add: “I had written ‘Usurpation’
in the language of a civilization that cannot imagine its thesis.” This is eloquent,
but her perspective is a touch foreshortened, and nowhere more
than when she writes: “the theme that obsesses my tale ... the worry is this:
whether Jews ought to be storytellers. Conceive of Chaucer fretting over
whether Englishmen should be storytellers!”
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Well, here is Chaucer, more than fretting over whether the
Englishman Chaucer should be a storyteller:
For our Book says “All that is written is for our doctrine” and
that is my intention. Wherefore I beseech you meekly, for the
mercy of God, that you pray for me that Christ have mercy on
me and forgive me my guilts and namely of my translations and
editings of worldly vanities, that which I revoke in my retrac
tions.
[modernized]
With this as prelude, Chaucer proceeds to retract Troilus and The
Canterbury Tales. Supposedly that is Chaucer on his deathbed, but at the
close of Troilus itself he says much the same. The conflict or anxiety Ozick
describes is at least as much Christian as it is Jewish, and the English language
she calls Christian is no more Christian than it is Jewish or Buddhist.
Like all language, it is steeped in anterior images, and any wresting of a
strong new achievement from it must be what Ozick accurately calls a
“usurpation” of an old story by a new one, whether the storyteller be
Christian or Jewish. All belated stories, and not just her “Usurpation,” are
in one sense written, as she says, “against story-writing,” as all belated
poems are written against poetry and even against poem-making. The phenomenon
Ozick addresses with great vigor and freshness is a very old phenomenon,
as old as Hellenistic Alexandria, home of the first of the many
recurrent literary “modernisms.”
Ozick’s concern, that is to say, is critically as old as Alexandria,
Gentile and Jewish, and religiously as old as Gnosticism, again Gentile and
Jewish, as Gershom Scholem massively demonstrated. In “Usurpation,”
Ozick has Agnon appropriately denounce Gnosticism, but she herself, as a
storyteller, not as a Jew, is certainly just as Gnostic as Kafka or as Balzac.
As she remarks, she lusts after forbidden or Jewish magic. This is why she
is preoccupied with the troublesome Kabbalistic Keter or silver crown that
is her peculiar twist or trope away from Malamud in “Usurpation.” Thus
she makes Agnon say: “When a writer wishes to usurp the place and power
of another writer, he simply puts it on.” As Ozick triumphantly shows, that
“simply” is madly dialectical. Very powerfully, she has the ghost of the
great modern Hebrew poet, the paganizing Tchernikhovsky, say: “In Eden
there’s nothing but lust,” where “lust” is a comprehensive metaphor that
includes the ambition that makes for agonistic strivings between writers.
These are indeed what Blake called the wars of Eden, the Mental Fight
that constitutes Eternity.
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Ozick’s most profound insight into her own ambivalence in this area is
a superb starting point for the Gnosis she condemns as the religion of art, or
worship of Moloch, and is manifested when she asks herself the agonistic
question that governs the incarnation of every strong writer: “Why do we
become what we most desire to contend with?” Her immensely bitter reply
is made in the closing paragraph of “Usurpation (Other People’s Stories)”:
Only Tchernikhovsky and the shy old writer of Jerusalem have
ascended. The old writer of Jerusalem is a fiction; murmuring
psalms, he snacks on leviathan and polishes his Prize with the
cuff of his sleeve. Tchernikhovsky eats nude at the table of the
nude gods, clean-shaven now, his limbs radiant, his youth
restored, his sex splendidly erect, the discs of his white ears
sparkling, a convivial fellow; he eats without self-restraint from
the celestial menu, and when the Sabbath comes (the Sabbath
of Sabbaths, which flowers every seven centuries in the perpetual
Sabbath of Eden), as usual he avoids the congregation of
the faithful before the Footstool and the Throne. Then the taciturn
little Canaanite idols call him, in the language of the
spheres, kike.
It would be a more effective conclusion, I think, if the last sentence
were omitted. But nothing is got for nothing, and Ozick’s emotional
directness remains one of her imaginative virtues, even if it sometimes renders
her dialectical ironies less immediately effective.
II
Art & Ardor, Ozick’s gathering of her essays, has a curiously mixed
performance courageously entitled “Toward a New Yiddish.” Its argument
again exposes Ozick to a creative blindness concerning the sharing of precisely
the same dilemmas by any literature aspiring to be either specifically
Christian or specifically Jewish:
By “centrally Jewish” I mean, for literature, whatever touches
on the liturgical. Obviously this does not refer only to prayer.
It refers to a type of literature and to a type of perception.
There is a critical difference between liturgy and a poem.
Liturgy is in command of the reciprocal moral imagination
rather than of the isolated lyrical imagination. A poem is a private
flattery: it moves the private heart, but to no end other
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than being moved. A poem is a decoration of the heart, the art
of the instant. It is what Yehudah Halevi called flowers without
fruit. Liturgy is also a poem, but it is meant not to have only a
private voice. Liturgy has a choral voice, a communal voice: the
echo of the voice of the Lord of History. Poetry shuns judgment
and memory and seizes the moment. In all of history the
literature that has lasted for Jews has been liturgical. The secular
Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he
is no longer a Jew. This is especially true for makers of literature.
It was not only an injunction that Moses uttered when he
said we would be a people attentive to holiness: it was a description
and a destiny.
It takes a kind of moral courage to say that, “Poetry shuns judgment
and memory and seizes the moment,” but I am distressed to hear Ozick
sounding like W.H. Auden at his most self-deceived:
The Incarnation, the coming of Christ in the form of a servant
who cannot be recognized by the eye of flesh and blood, but
only by the eye of faith, puts an end to all claims of the imagination
to be the faculty which decides what is truly sacred and
what is profane. A pagan god can appear on earth in disguise
but, so long as he wears his disguise, no man is expected to recognize
him nor can. But Christ appears looking just like any
other man, yet claims that He is the Way, the Truth and the
Life, and that no man can come to God the Father except
through Him. The contradiction between the profane appearance
and the sacred assertion is impassible to the imagination.
Ozick and Auden alike repeat T.S. Eliot’s prime error, which was and
is a failing to see that there are only political or societal distinctions
between supposedly secular and supposedly sacred literatures.
Secularization is never an imaginative process, whereas canonization is.
Fictions remain stubbornly archaic and idolatrous, to the scandal of Eliot
and Auden as pious Christians, and of Ozick as a pious Jew, but very much
to the delight of Eliot and Auden as poets and dramatists, and of Ozick as
story-writer and novelist. You do not defend yourself, or anyone else, from
the archaic by writing a poem or a novella. Rather, instead of choosing a
form of worship from a poetic tale, you attempt to write another poetic tale
that can usurp its precursors’ space, their claim upon our limited and waning
attention. Devotional short stories are as dubious as devotional poems,
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despite say Flannery O’Connor’s weird self-deception that her superbly
brutal “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” was a Catholic narrative, or Ozick’s
equally strange conviction that the savage and sublime “Envy; or, Yiddish
in America” somehow might become a contribution “Toward a New
Yiddish,” toward a survival that Ozick wistfully but wrongly identifies with
Jewish liturgy.
Ozick, I would wish to emphasize, is all the stronger a writer for
being so self-deceived a reader, including a misreader of the fictions of
Cynthia Ozick. Denouncing the archaic, she slyly immerses herself in its
destructive element, knowing as she does that her daemon tells the stories,
while it cheerfully allows Ozick our rabbi and teacher to write the essays.
I have just reread “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” for the twentieth or so
time since its initial magazine appearance, and have found it as vital, crazily
funny, and ultimately tragic a novella as it seemed to me in November
1969, more than sixteen years ago. If I live, I will find it as fresh and wise
in 2009 as I do now. Nothing else since Isaac Babel in modern Jewish fiction
challenges the Philip Roth of The Anatomy Lesson and “The Prague
Orgy” as an instance of that peculiarly Jewish laughter that cleanses us
even as it pains us. I remember always in particular the scene of mutual
rejection between Edelshtein, untranslated poet, and young Hannah, who
will not translate him:
Edelshtein’s hand, the cushiony underside of it, blazed from
giving the blow. “You,” he said, “you have no ideas, what are
you?” A shred of learning flaked from him, what the sages said
of Job ripped from his tongue like a peeling of the tongue
itself, he never was, he never existed. “You were never born, you
were never created!” he yelled. “Let me tell you, a dead man
tells you this, at least I had a life, at least I understood something!”
“Die,” she told him. “Die now, all you old men, what are
you waiting for? Hanging on my neck, him and now you, the
whole bunch of you, parasites, hurry up and die.”
His palm burned, it was the first time he had ever slapped a
child. He felt like a father. Her mouth lay back naked on her
face. Out of spite, against instinct, she kept her hands from the
bruise—he could see the shape of her teeth, turned a little one
on the other, imperfect, again vulnerable. From fury her nose
streamed. He had put a bulge in her lip.
“Forget Yiddish!” he screamed at her. “Wipe it out of your
brain! Extirpate it! Go get a memory operation! You have no
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right to it, you have no right to an uncle, a grandfather! No one
ever came before you, you were never born! A vacuum!”
“You old atheists,” she called after him. “You dead old socialists.
Boring! You bore me to death. You hate magic, you hate
imagination, you talk God and you hate God, you despise, you
bore, you envy, you eat people up with your disgusting old
age—cannibals, all you care about is your own youth, you’re
finished, give somebody else a turn!”
As a dialogue between the generations, it hurts magnificently, with
the immanent strength of a recurrent vision of reality. Ozick herself is on
both sides and on neither, as a storyteller, and it is as storyteller that she
presents us with Edelshtein’s closing hysteria, when he shouts his whole
self-violated being into a phone call to “Christ’s Five-Day Inexpensive
Elect-Plan,” a call-service prefiguring the Moral Majority:
Edelshtein shouted into the telephone, “Amalekite! Titus!
Nazi! The whole world is infected by you anti-Semites! On
account of you children become corrupted! On account of you
I lost everything, my whole life! On account of you I have no
translator!”
The high comedy of this invective depends upon Edelshtein’s not
altogether pathetic insistence that he is an authentic representative of waning
Yiddish culture. Like Malamud, Ozick captures both the humane
pathos and the ironic ethos of Yiddish culture in its tragicomic predicament.
In a mode that is now authentically her own, she trusts in the storyteller’s
only covenant, working to defer a future in which stories no longer
could be told. This is not the Covenant she seeks to celebrate, but that
does not disturb the aesthetic dignity of her best work. As person, she
trusts in the Covenant between God and his people, Israel. As writer, she
trusts the covenant between her stories and other people’s stories, between
her own strength of usurpation and the narrative tradition’s power to both
absorb and renew her.
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
John Updike
(1932–)
JOHN UPDIKE IS A MAJOR STYLIST, WHOSE LITERARY PRODUCTION HAS BEEN
vast and varied. He may be most himself in his short stories, where style
itself can constitute a mode of vision. No novel by Updike persuades me as
fully as do stories like “A&P” and “Pigeon Feathers,” if only because the
novelist so overtly contaminates his principal longer narratives with his
own beliefs and opinions. Frequently, these judgments and views are of
considerable interest in themselves, but they can distract the reader’s attention
from persons, places, and events.
In “A&P” there are no distractions, and Updike’s art is as subtle as
Joyce’s in Dubliners. Sammy, nineteen and very limited in education and
social understanding, falls into a passion for “Queenie,” a young beauty
who never will be available to someone of his social class. He makes the
Quixotic gesture of quitting his job at the A&P, though “Queenie” never
will know that he has protested against her embarrassment by the store
manager. Updike deftly conveys that Sammy’s action is more a pose than a
gesture, though Sammy says: “it seems to me that once you begin a gesture
it’s fatal not to go through with it.”
The sad reality is that gestures are for those who can afford them, and
Sammy cannot. Updike accurately can be praised for profound social
insight in “A&P,” but the story, like Joyce’s “Two Gallants” or “Araby,” is
imaginatively richer than social understanding tends to be by itself. In less
than half-a-dozen pages, Updike condenses a life, up to its nineteenth year,
and also intimates how unlikely that life is to develop in any way that might
satisfy its dream of erotic fulfillment. The economy of “A&P,” and its consistent
verbal rightness, testify to a superb artist in the short-story form.
175
SHORT ST OR Y WRITERS AND SHORT ST ORIES
Raymond Carver
(1938–1988)
I HAVE AN IMPERFECT SYMPATHY FOR RAYMOND CARVER’S STORIES, THOUGH
I agree with such eminent critics as Frank Kermode and Irving Howe that
Carver was a master within the limits he imposed upon himself. So overwhelming
was Hemingway’s influence upon Carver’s earlier stories that the
later writer wisely fended Hemingway off by an askesis that went well
beyond the elliptical style practiced by the author of The First Forty-Nine
Stories. In his own, final phase, Carver began to develop beyond an art so
largely reliant upon leaving things out. “Cathedral” is my favorite story by
Carver, but it involves the fully aware reader in some perplexity, because of
its puzzling relationship to D.H. Lawrence’s magnificent short story, “The
Blind Man.” It seems hardly possible that Carver did not know how much
“Cathedral” owed to “The Blind Man,” but literary influence is a labyrinth,
and good writers can become remarkably schooled at repression, or unconsciously
purposeful forgetting.
Keith Cushman first noted Carver’s debt, which Cushman wittily
termed “blind intertextuality.” In Lawrence’s story, the visiting friend who
comes from afar can see; it is the husband who is blind. Carver’s story is
based upon a visit from a blind friend of Tess Gallagher’s, and ends with an
overcoming of the narrator’s jealousy of the visitor:
So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my
hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up
to now.
Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he said.
“Take a look. What do you think?”
But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way
for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.
176
Short Story Writers and Short Stories
“Well?” he said. “Are you looking?”
My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that.
But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.
“It’s really something,” I said.
This poignant opening to otherness is overmatched by the parallel
passage in Lawrence, when the blind husband establishes contact with the
terrified visitor:
“Your head seems tender, as if you were young,” Maurice
repeated. “So do your hands. Touch my eyes, will you?—touch
my scar.”
Now Bertie quivered with revulsion. Yet he was under the
power of the blind man, as if hypnotised. He lifted his hand,
and laid the fingers on the scar, on the scarred eyes. Maurice
suddenly covered them with his own hand, pressed the fingers
of the other man upon his disfigured eye-sockets, trembling in
every fibre, and rocking slightly, slowly, from side to side. He
remained thus for a minute or more, whilst Bertie stood as if in
a swoon, unconscious, imprisoned.
Then suddenly Maurice removed the hand of the other man
from his brow, and stood holding it in his own.
“Oh, my God,” he said, “we shall know each other now,
shan’t we? We shall know each other now.”
Bertie could not answer. He gazed mute and terror-struck,
overcome by his own weakness. He knew he could not answer.
He had an unreasonable fear, lest the other man should suddenly
destroy him. Whereas Maurice was actually filled with
hot, poignant love, the passion of friendship. Perhaps it was
this very passion of friendship which Bertie shrank from most.
“We’re all right together now, aren’t we?” said Maurice. “It’s
all right now, as long as we live, so far as we’re concerned.”
“Yes,” said Bertie, trying by any means to escape.
This is scarcely a comparison that Carver can sustain, but then
Lawrence is extraordinary in his short stories, fully the peer of Turgenev,
Chekhov, Joyce, Isaac Babel, and Hemingway. Carver, whom perhaps we
have over praised, died before he could realize the larger possibilities of his
art. In “The Blind Man” there is a homoerotic element, but it is secondary.
Blind Maurice is admitting Bertie to the interiority that is shared only
with his wife, but Bertie cannot bear intimacy: he has been seared by the
Bloom’s Literary Criticism 20th Anniversary Collection
touch. There is a reverberation in Lawrence’s story that carries us into the
high madness of great art. Carver, though a very fine artist, cannot carry
us there.
Further Reading
Allen, Walter. The Short Story in English. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.
Aycock, Wendell M., ed. The Teller and the Tale: Aspects of the Short Story.
Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1982.
Bates, H.E. The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey, London: Joseph,
1972.
Beachcroft, Thomas O. The English Short Story. London: Longmans,
Green, 1964.
———. The Modest Art: A Survey of the Short Story in English. London:
Oxford University Press, 1968.
Beale, Robert Cecil. The Development of the Short Story in the South.
Philadelphia: R. West, 1977.
Bloom, Harold. How to Read and Why. New York: Scribner, 2000.
Current-Garcia, Eugene, ed. The American Short Story Before 1850: A
Critical History. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
Current-Garcia, Eugene and Walton R. Patrick. What Is the Short Story?
Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1974.
Dunn, Maggie and Ann Morris. The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle
in Transition. Farmington Hills: The Gale Group, 1995.
Evans, Robert C., Barbara Wiedemann, and Anne C. Little. Short Fiction:
A Critical Companion. West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 1997.
Flora, Joseph M., ed. The English Short Story, 1880–1945: A Critical History.
Boston: Twayne, 1985.
Gerwig, George William. The Art of the Short Story. Philadelphia: R. West,
1977.
Goodman, Henry, ed. Creating the Short Story. New York: Harcourt, Brace
& Co., 1929.
Hanson, Clare, ed. Rereading the Short Story. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1989.
———. Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–1980, New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1985.
Iftekharrudin, Farhat, et. al., ed. The Postmodern Short Story: Forms and
Issues. Westport: Praeger, 2003.
179
FURTHER READING
Levy, Andrew. The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Mann, Susan Garland. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and
Reference Guide. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1989.
Martin, Wendy. The Art of the Short Story. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2005.
Nagel, James. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic
Resonance of Genre. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2001.
O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Hoboken:
Melville House Publishing, 2004.
Orel, Harold. The Victorian Short Story: Development and Triumph of a
Literary Genre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. New York: Longman,
1983.
Voss, Arthur. American Short Story: A Critical Survey. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1973.
Ward, A.C. Aspects of the Modern Short Story: English and American.
Philadelphia: R. West, 1977.
Index
Absalom, Absolom!, (Faulkner)
and enduring, 126
Abuyah, Elisha ben, 103
Adorno, T.W., 23, 26
Aesthetic Theory, (Adorno), 23
Age of Innocence, The, (Wharton), 55
Agnon, 168–169, 170
Agnon, A Story, (Stern), 168–169
Alcott, Bronson, 29, 56
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
(Carroll), 42–47
Ambassadors, The, (James), 56, 71
American, The, (James), 56
American Hieroglyphics, (Irwin), 20
American Scene, The, (James), 60–61
Anatomy Lesson, The, (Roth), 173
Andersen, Hans Christian,
on fate, 12
introducing himself to big names, 13
a visionary tale-teller, 18
Anderson, Sherwood, 85, 145
A & P, (Updike)
social insight in, 175
Apocalypse Now, (movie), 72
Apostate, The, (London), 83
Araby, (Joyce), 175
Ariosto, 157
Arnold, 27
Art & Ardor, (Ozick), 171
As I Lay Dying, (Faulkner), 55, 71, 144,
160, 163
as enduring, 126
Auden, W.H., 20, 26, 172
Auntie Toothache, (Andersen), 14, 17–18
Austen, Jane, 55, 60
Awakening, (Babel), 118–119
Awkward Age, The, (James), 61
Babel, Isaac, 81, 113–120, 173, 177
Babylon Revisited, (Fitzgerald), 121–122
Balzac, 170
Barn Burning, (Faulkner), 123, 124
Bartleby the Scrivener, (Melville), 36–37
Basement, In the, (Babel), 118
Baudelaire, 23–24, 26
Beattie, Ann, 145
Beecher, Henry Ward, 37
Begin, Menachem, 114
Bell Tower, The, (Melville), 37–41
Benito Cereno, (Melville), 36–37
Berenson, Bernard, 57
Bestiary, (Cortazar)
and final paragraph, 146–147
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, (Freud), 22,
84
Bialik, 114
Billy Budd, Sailor, (Melville), 36–37
Bishop, Elizabeth, 126
Blake, 24, 74, 101, 104, 163, 170
Blind Man, The, (Lawrence), 176,
177–178
Bloodshed and Three Novellas, (Ozick),
168
Blue Hotel, The, (S. Crane), 86, 87, 88
Borges, J.L., 31, 73, 81, 130–132
Bostonians, The, (James), 61
Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, The,
(S. Crane), 86, 87
Bridge, The, (Crane), 28–29, 41
Brod, Max, 91, 92
Bromwich, David, 11
Build a Fire, To, (London), 83
Bundren, Darl, 71
Burning, The, (Welty), 135, 140,
142–144
characters of, 141
Byron, 129
Call of the Wild, The, (London), 83
Calvin, John, 11
Calvino, Italo, 152–158
Canterbury Tales, The, (Chaucer), 170
Captain’s Daughter, The, (Pushkin), 1
Carlyle, Thomas, 29, 37, 70, 101, 163
181
182 INDEX
Carroll, Lewis, 13, 42–52
Carver, Raymond, 176–178
Castle, The, (Kafka), 101
Catcher in the Rye, The, (Salinger), 150
Cathedral, (Carver), 176
Cather, Willa, 55, 108, 145
Cat That Walked By Himself, The,
(Kipling), 81
Caulfield, Holden, 150
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County, The, (Twain), 53
Cervantes, 127
Chaucer, 169, 170
Cheever, John
and compared to other writers, 145
Chekhov, 65, 66, 68, 73–74, 177
Child of the Sea and Other Poems,
(S. Lewis), 28
Chrysanthemums, (Steinbeck),
133–134
Church That Was At Antioch, The,
(Kipling), 80
Citizen Kane, (movie), 72
Clarissa, (Richardson), 55
Commodore, (Ship), 86
Concept of Dread, The, (Kierkegaard),
16–17
Conduct of Life, The, (Emerson), 6, 10, 56
Confidence Man, The, (Melville), 10,
36–37
Conrad, Joseph, 69–71, 79, 86, 87
his formlessness, 72
his originality, 70–71
Cool Million, A, (West), 162
Coppola, 72
Cortazar, Julio, 146–147
Country Doctor, (Kafka), 6
Country Husband, The, (Cheever), 145
Cox, James M.
on Twain, 53
Crane, Hart, 28–29, 41, 111, 112,
125–126, 144
Crane, Stephen, 86–88
Crazy Sunday, (Fitzgerald), 122
Crying of Lot 49, The, (Pynchon), 55
and enduring, 126
Cushman, Keith, 176
Daisy Miller, (James), 56
Dana, Richard Henry, 37
Dante, 9, 89, 90, 98, 105
Darling, The, (Chekhov), 73–74
Death and the Compass, (Borges), 130
Death in Venice, (Mann), 82
Death in the Woods, (Anderson), 85
Debreczeny, Paul, 1
Diamond as Big as the Ritz, The,
(Fitzgerald), 121
Dickens, 13, 35, 53, 55
Dickinson, 9, 127
Digrasso, (Babel), 118–119
Disorder and Early Sorrow, (Mann), 82
Dock-Witch, The, (Ozick), 138
Doctor Faustus, (Mann), 82
Dostoevsky, 30
Dreiser, Theodore, 85
Drugstore in Winter, A, (Ozick), 168
Dubliners, (Joyce), 89, 90, 108, 127, 175
Edwards, Jonathan, 11
Ego and the Id, (Freud), 21
Eliot, George, 3, 55, 60
Eliot, T.S., 29, 55–56, 57, 72, 76, 109,
125–126, 161, 163, 172
Ellery, William, 29
Emerson, 4, 6, 11, 24, 26, 29, 37, 56,
57, 61, 64
fathered pragmatism, 19
the importance of the individual, 5
the moral experience, 59
his preferred reading, 9
Empson, William, 45
Emrich, Wilhelm, 99
Encantadas, (Melville), 35, 36–37
Envy; or, Yiddish in America, (Ozick),
168, 172–173
Erikson, Erik, 160
Eureka, (Poe), 20, 21, 23, 26
closing of, 22
Everything That Rises Must Converge,
(O’Connor), 162, 163–167
Experience, (Emerson), 61
Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of
Crime on Connecticut, (Twain), 53–54
Faerie Queene, The, (Spenser), 40
INDEX 183
Fairy Tale of My Life, The, (Andersen),
13
Faulkner, 55, 71, 76, 85, 123–124, 126,
140, 144, 145, 160, 162
Fear and Trembling, (Kierkegaard),
16–17
Feathertop, (Hawthorne), 6–9
Felix Krull, (Mann), 82
Fielding, 55
Finding A Voice, (Welty), 135
First Forty-Nine Stories, The,
(Hemingway), 176
as enduring, 126
First Love, (Babel), 118–119
Fitzgerald, F. S., 71, 121, 126–127
Flaubert, 65, 66, 67, 70, 113
Flowering Judas, (Porter), 108, 109–110,
112
For the Love of A Man, (London), 83
“Forsaken,” (S Lewis), 28
Forster, E.M., 71
Four Zoas, The, (Blake), 101
Fox, The, (Lawrence), 106–107, 134
Frank, Diana C., 13
Frank, Jacob, 103
Frank, Jeffrey, 13
Franny and Zooey, (Salinger), 150
Freud, 17, 20, 21, 22, 24, 46, 78, 93,
130
the aim of life, 100
on narcissism, 110
Friedberg, Maurice, 117
Furnished Room, The, (Henry)
a dark story, 76
Giamatti, 6
Gift of Magi, The, (Henry), 75
Gnosticism, 91, 92, 101, 152, 163, 170
Goblin Market, (Rossetti), 45
Goddard, Harold, 63–64
God Rest You Merry Gentlemen,
(Hemingway), 127
Goethe, 59
Gogol, 13, 30–31, 113
Gogol’s Wife, (Landolfi), 30–31
Golden Bowl, The, (James), 71
Good Man is Hard to Find, A,
(O’Connor), 140, 161–162, 63
and Catholic narrative, 172–173
Gorky, Maxim, 73
Gothic narrative, 149
Grapes of Wrath, The, (Steinbeck), 134
Grave, The, (Porter), 108
Great Gatsby, The, (Fitzgerald), 71,
121–122
and enduring, 126
Great Wall of China, The, (Kafka), 152
Habit of Being, The, (O’Connor), 162
Hamlet, The, (Faulkner), 123
Hardy, Thomas, 106
Have and Have Not, To, (Hemingway),
128
Hawthorne, (James), 3–6, 7
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 3–6, 19, 29, 37,
41, 55, 161
the American self, 9
He, (Porter), 108
Heart of Darkness, (Conrad), 71, 72
Heinrich von Ofterdingen, (Novalis), 16
Heller, Erich, 94, 101
Hemingway, Ernest, 33, 55, 68, 71, 73,
85, 121, 122, 133, 135, 144
his career, 129
his influence on Carver, 176
a short story genius, 127, 128
his style, 125
Henry, O., (William Sydney Porter),
75–76
Hill, G., 106
Hoffman, Daniel, 22
Hoffman, E.T.A., 12, 13, 21
Horla, The, (Maupassant), 66, 68
story of, 67
Housman, A.E., 122
Howe, Irving, 81
on Carver, 176
How to Read and Why, (Bloom), 32
Huckleberry Finn, (Twain), 37, 53, 62,
80, 121, 125, 135
Humphries, Jefferson, 163
Hunter Gracchus, (Kafka), 6, 95–97, 98
Hunting of the Snark, The, (Carroll), 42,
45–46
Imaginary Portraits, (Pater), 70
184 INDEX
Inferno, (Dante), 89
Innocents Abroad, (Twain), 53
Invisible Cities, (Calvino), 152
Irwin, John T., 20, 22, 25, 26
Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 114
Jackson, Shirley, 148–149
James, Henry, 3, 4, 9–10, 55–64, 68, 70,
79, 80, 81, 108, 121, 127
and relation to Emerson, 60–61
James, William, 61
Johnson, Samuel, 75
Joseph and his Brothers, (Mann), 82
Josephine the Singer and the Mouse Folk,
(Kafka), 102, 104, 105
Joyce, James, 13, 55, 73, 81, 98, 108,
175
Judaism, 103
Jungle Books, The, (Kipling), 77
Just So Stories, (Kipling), 77, 81
Kabbalah, 92, 101
Kafka, Franz, 1, 6, 73, 91–104, 130,
152, 153
his evasiveness, 102, 105
and spirituality, 92, 100–101
his three metaphors, 93
Keats, John, 74, 121
Kenoma, 91, 152, 153
Kermode, Frank, 72, 176
on Kipling, 78–79
Keter, 170
Kierkegaard, 12, 16
Kim, (Kipling), 77, 79, 125
King Lear, (Shakespeare), 75
King, Stephen, 13
Kipling, Rudyard, 77–81, 84, 125
Kleist, 13
Klopstock, Robert, 97
Landolfi, Tommaso, 30
Last Tycoon, The, (Fitzgerald), 121
Lawrence, D.H., 20, 73, 81, 106–107,
133, 134, 140, 176, 177
on Poe, 21
Learning to See, (Welty), 135
Leaves of Grass, (Whitman), 10, 37
Leumi, Irgun Zvai, 114
Lewis, C.S., 23–24
Lewis, S., Anna, 28
Liberal Imagination, The (Trillling), 77
Ligeia, (Poe), 24, 25
Light in August, (Faulkner)
and enduring, 126
“Limits,” (Borges), 131
Lispeth, (Kipling), 79–80
Listening, (Welty), 135
Literature, (speech), Kipling, 77–78
Little Mermaid, The, (Andersen), 13–15
London, Jack, 83–84
Lonely Voice, The, (O’Connor), 111
Lost Lady, A, (Cather), 55, 108
Lottery, The, (Jackson), 148, 149
Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty,
(Warren), 139–140
Macbeth, (Shakespeare), 101
Madame Tellier’s Establishment,
(Maupassant), 66
Magic Mountain, The, (Mann), 82
Mailer, Norman, 127
Malamud, Bernard, 145, 168, 170, 174
Mann, Thomas, 82
Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, The,
(Twain), 54
Man Who Died, The, (Lawrence), 106
Man Who Would Be King, The,
(Kipling), 77, 79
Marble Faun, The, (Hawthorne), 4, 55
Mardi, (Melville), 37
Marginalia, (Poe), 27
Mario and the Magician, (Mann), 82
Marius the Epicurean, (Pater), 70
Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, (Cox),
53
Marlowe, Christopher, 65, 69
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The,
(Blake), 104
Mary Postgate, (Kipling), 81–82
Maupassant, Guy de, 65–68, 113, 127,
128
May Day, (Fitzgerald), 121
Melville, Herman, 9, 10, 19, 29, 35–41,
55, 87, 127
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A,
(Shakespeare), 12
INDEX 185
Milton, 37, 105
Miss Lonelyhearts, (West), 55, 127, 160,
163
as enduring, 126
Moby Dick, (Melville), 10, 35, 36–37, 41,
55
Moloch, 171
Montaigne, 9
Moralia, (Plutarch), 9
Mother Rigby, (character in Feathertop),
6, 7, 8, 9
Mrs. Bathurst, (Kipling), 81
Municipal Report, A, (Henry), 75–76
Munro, Alice, 145
My Ántonia, (Cather), 108
Mysterious Stranger, The, (Twain), 54
Mystery and Manners, (O’Connor), 162
Nabokov, 30, 145
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The,
(Poe), 20, 21, 22
Natural History of the Dead, A,
(Hemingway), 127
Nature, (Emerson), 22
New England Transcendentalism, 4, 5
New Introductory Lectures, (Freud), 22
Nietzsche, 12, 53, 79, 95, 153
Nigger of the Narcissus, The, (Conrad),
70
Nigger Question, The, (Carlyle), 29
Night Driver, The, (Calvino), 155–156,
157
Nine Stories, (Salinger), 150
Nonexistent Knight, The, (Calvino)
and characters, 157–158
Noon Wine, (Porter), 108
Norris, Frank, 75
Norton, C.E., 57
Nose, The, (Gogol), 30
Nostromo, (Conrad), 70, 71
Novalis, 12, 16
O’Connor, Flannery, 73, 140, 159–167,
168, 172–173
O’Connor, Frank, xiii–xiv, 31, 66, 111
Old Man at the Bridge, (Hemingway),
128
Old Mortality, (Porter), 108
Old Order, The, (Porter), 108
Old-World Landowners, (Gogol), 30
Omoo, (Melville), 37
£1,000,000 Note, The, (Twain), 54
One Writer’s Beginnings, (Welty),
135–140
Open Boat, The, (S. Crane), 86, 87
Overcoat, The, (Gogol), 30
Ozick, Cynthia, 145, 168–174
Pagan Rabbi, The, (Ozick), 168
Pale Horse, Pale Rider, (Porter), 108
Parker’s Back, (O’Connor), 163
Pater, Walter, 20, 27, 46, 70, 78, 79
Pawel, Ernst, 102
Perfect Day for Bananafish, (Salinger),
150
Piazza Tales, The, (Melville), 36–37
Pierre, (Melville), 10, 37
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,
(essay), Borges, 131
Pigeon Feathers, (Updike), 175
Plutarch, 9
Poe, E.A., 13, 23, 25, 26, 27, 65, 148
disliked Emerson, 19
Poems of Our Climate, The, (Stevens), 56
Politzer, Heinz, 98
Popper, Karl, 160
Porter, Katherine Anne, 108–112, 145
Portrait of a Lady, The, (James), 55,
61–62
Pound, 126
Prague Orgy, The, (Roth), 173
Princess Casamassima, The, (James), 61
Problem of Our Laws, The, (Kafka),
102–103, 104
Prometheus Unbound, (Shelley), 60
Proust, 98, 163
Prussian Officer, The, (Lawrence), 106
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious,
(Lawrence), 21
Pudd’nhead Wilson, (Twain), 53
Pupil, The, (James), 61–62,
63–64
Pushkin, Alexandr, 1
Pynchon, Thomas, 9, 55
Queen of Spades, The, (Pushkin)
power of, 2
psychology of, 1–2
Rainbow and Women in Love, The,
(Lawrence), 106
Raise High the Roof Beam, (Salinger),
150
Red Badge of Courage, The, (S. Crane),
86
Redburn, (Melville), 37
Red Calvary, (Babel), 114–116, 118
Redgauntlet, (Scott), 12
Red Shoes, The, (Andersen), 13–14, 17
Renaissance, (Pater), 78
Revelation, (O’Connor)
conclusion of, 165–166
Richardson, Samuel, 55
Riesman, David, 160
Rose for Emily, A, (Faulkner), 140
Rossetti, Christina, 45
Roth, Philip, 17, 173
Roughing It, (Twain), 53
Rowling, J.K., 13
Ruskin, 37, 70
Salinger, J.D., 150, 151
Sanctuary, (Faulkner), 162
as enduring, 126
Sandor, F., 22
Sartor Resartus, (Carlyle), 101
Scarecrow, ( in Feathertop), 6, 7
Scarlet Letter, The, (Hawthorne), 4, 6,
55, 61
Scholem, Gershom, 91, 92, 93, 101,
103, 170
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 66
Scott, Sir Walter, 12
Scribner, Charles, 126
Seymour: an Introduction, (Salinger), 151
Sforim, Mendele Mocher, 114
Shadow, The, (Andersen), 13–14, 17
Shakespeare, 9, 12, 17, 37, 53, 65, 66,
73, 75, 101
and affected Melville’s art, 35
Shelley, P.B., 45–46
Shestov, Lev, 65
She-Wolf, The, (London), 83
Ship of Fools, (Porter), 108
INDEX
Short Stories, On, (Welty), 144
Sickness Unto Death, The, (Kierkegaard),
16–17
Silver Crown, The, (Malamud), 168–169
Snow Queen, The, (Andersen), 13–14
story of, 16–17
Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern
Fiction, (essay), O’Connor, 166
Sound and Fury, The, (Faulkner)
as enduring, 126
Spenser, 37, 40
Spoils of Poynton, The, (James), 61, 70
Sportsman’s Sketches, (Turgenev), 32–34
Steinbeck, John, 133–134
Stein, Gertrude, 85
Stern, David, 168–169
Stevens, Wallace, 56, 79, 125–126
Still Moment, A, (Welty), 135–136, 140
Stolen White Elephant, The, (Twain), 54
Stories of Hans Christian Andersen,
(Andersen), 13
Story of My Dovecot, The, (Babel),
118–119
Studies in Classic American Literature,
(Lawrence), 21
Sun Also Rises, The, (Hemingway), 71,
121, 126, 127, 128, 129
Swinburne, 45, 46
Tales of Odessa, (Babel), 118–119
Tate, Allen, 23
Tempest, The, (Shakespeare), 35
Tender is the Night, (Fitzgerald), 121,
122
Tennyson, 26, 27, 45–46, 76
Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality,
(Sandor), 22
Thoreau, 9, 56, 127
Three Sisters, (Chekhov), 74
Through the Looking Glass, (Carroll), 42,
46, 47–48, 49
Tolstoy, 34, 74
on The Darling, 73
Tonio Kroger, (Mann), 82
Totem and Taboo, (Freud), 78
Toward a New Yiddish, (Ozick), 171–173
Town, The, (Faulkner), 123
Trail of the Meat, The, (London), 83–84
INDEX 187
Trilling, Lionel, 45, 77, 113
Triumph of Life, The, (Shelley), 46
Troilus, (Chaucer), 170
Turgenev, Ivan, 32–34, 65, 68, 127, 177
Twain, Mark, 53–54, 55, 62, 79, 121
Two Gallants, (Joyce), 175
Typee, (Melville), 37
t zero, (Calvino), 155, 156, 157
Ulysses, (Joyce), 90, 127
Updike, John, 145, 175
“Upon the Lonely Moor,” (Carroll), 49
Usurpation, (Ozick), 168, 170, 171
Valery, 28
Van den Berg, J.H., 96–97
View of the Woods, A, (O’Connor),
165–167
a strong story, 163–164
Violent Bear It Away, The, (O’Connor),
159, 162, 168
preternatural power in, 160
theme of, 159–160
Wakefield, (Hawthorne), 132
Wandering Willie’s Tale, (Scott), 12
Warren, Robert Penn, 19, 55, 108, 111,
126, 139, 140
on Hemingway, 126, 128
Wasteland, The, (T.S. Eliot), 163
Watt, Ian, 70
Welles, Orson, 72
Welty, Eudora, 134, 135–144
on Lawrence, 133
West, Nathanael, 9, 55, 127, 160, 162
Wharton, Edith, 55, 121
What Maisie Knew, (James), 61, 62, 70
White Fang, (London), 83
White Jacket, (Melville), 37
“White Knight’s Ballad, The,”
(Carroll), 49–50
Whitman, Walt, 9, 10, 26, 55, 121,
125–126, 127
Wilde, Oscar, 27, 78
Wild Swans, The, (Andersen), 13–14,
15–16
Williams, William Carlos, 125–126
Wings of the Dove, The, (James), 55
Winters, Yvor, 19
Wise Blood, (O’Connor), 162
Without Benefit of Clergy, (Kipling),
79–80
Wordsworth, 46, 52, 59, 126
Yeats, 60, 64, 78, 106, 130, 153
Yerushalmi, Yosef, 105
Young Goodman Brown, (Hawthorne),
10–11
Youth, (Conrad), 69
Zionism, 94
188 INDEX
About the Author
HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale
University. He is the author of over 20 books, including Shelley’s
Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse
(1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism
(1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion
(1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of
Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets
forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships
between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books
include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National
Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One
Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003),
and Where Shall Wisdom be Found (2004). In 1999, Professor Bloom
received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold
Medal for Criticism, and in 2002 he received the Catalonia International
Prize.
189
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