Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Speaking of individualism, Emersonian Transcendentalism, and women’s rights (see previous post), Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) should surely be noted.

When Emerson wrote “Self-Reliance” one senses he was writing for men.  Self-reliance is “manly” and dependence is “effeminate.”  Margaret Fuller, however, taking her inspiration from the Transcendental roots of Emerson’s essay, called on women to develop their independence and on men to treat women as equals.

However gendered the traditional concept of God, the Transcendental “Oversoul,” suggesting as it does the Hindu concept of Brahma, was more abstract and universal.  Emerson’s theory of two selves, the social self and the “aboriginal self,” made it possible to separate gender, a social category, from the Transcendental selfhood or “soul.” 

Thus Margaret Fuller undergirds her call for women’s social and legal equality with an appeal for Woman’s need “as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common home,” that “home” being our source in the Universal “One.”

At times, Fuller sounds like an essentialist, capitalizing “Woman” (and “Man”) , referring to “Femality,” and presenting “male and female” as a “radical dualism.” Yet, she argues that the “feminine element…is no more the order of nature that it should be incarnated pure in any form” and asserts that “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” Even the ancients are invoked as recognizing the fluidity of gender identity:  “Man partakes of the feminine in the Apollo, Woman of the masculine as Minerva.” 

As transcendental souls, women are the equal of men and as capable of self-reliance (which Fuller also refers to as “self-dependence,” “self-respect,” and “self-help”) as any man.  As for relationships, she says, “Union is only possible to those who are units,” and she strikes a modern note when she calls for the wife to be an “equal partner” with her husband.

Fuller’s faith in transcendental individualism, however, while it gave her the confidence to pursue her own independence, did not prevent her from speaking out for social justice, not only for women, but also for slaves, Native Americans,  the poor, the sick, convicts, and immigrants.  Her own freedom was not to be enjoyed at the expense of her fellow Americans.  As the first American “foreign correspondent” she openly supported the revolutionary movements in Europe in the 1840’s.  Her life and writings, unlike those of Emerson and Ayn Rand (see previous post), offer strong testimony to the compatibility of individualism and communitarianism.

"Self-Reliance" and Anthem

I was thinking I should do a blog post on Ralph Waldo Emerson since I studied his work so much as both an undergraduate and graduate student in American literature, not to mention my affiliation with Unitarian Universalism since 1979.  “Self-Reliance” seemed like the best known essay to take another look at.  At the same time, Paul Ryan was being nominated as Mitt Romney’s running mate and I was hearing a lot about Ayn Rand, who I have never read.  I started wondering if there was any connection between Emerson and Rand besides being known for promoting individualism.  There seems to be some discussion of whether Ayn Rand misrepresented Emerson in one reference to him (http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/essays/emerson.html) and others have compared the two (noting perhaps more differences than similarities). 

Curious, I read an early example of Rand’s fiction, a dystopian novella called Anthem, which kind of reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984.  Others have also compared those two writers, again seeming to find more contrasts than similarities.  Both Rand and Orwell are critiquing totalitarianism, but Rand from a capitalist and Orwell from a democratic socialist stance. 

In Anthem, the narrator, like all members of his collectivist society, refers to himself as “We, “the first-person “I” having been expunged from the language.  When, upon escaping from this society, the narrator discovers manuscripts from an earlier age, he learns the word “I” and promptly rejects the use of “We”: “I am done with the monster of ‘We,’ the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood, and shame.”  In the end, the narrator chooses “the word that is to be my beacon and my banner…The sacred word: EGO.”

This radical individualism is strangely contradicted by the narrator’s need for a lover and life partner, who is pregnant with his child.  One wonders if the word “we” would apply to his family and what would happen to that unit if every member truly placed “ego” ahead of family relationships.  The narrator’s vision calls for him to invite his “friends” to “follow” and join him in building a new future:  “Here on this mountain, I and my sons and my chosen friends shall build our new land and our fort.”  Again, one wonders how one sustains friendship if ego rules, and how successful this venture will be without some degree of cooperation and communitarianism, not to mention governance. 

Perhaps Rand’s answer would be that so long as relationships, group affiliation, and communal “belonging” is chosen, then, of course, ego naturally adjusts to that choice, but if it is enforced by coercion, law, tradition, or obligation, then ego is bound to assert itself, for true freedom means that “each man will be free to exist for his own sake.”

 One passage in Anthem particularly reminded me of “Self-Reliance.”  The fictional narrator states:

 "I do not surrender my treasures, nor do I share them. The fortune of my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom."

 

In “Self-Reliance” Emerson similarly states:

"Then again, do not tell me as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. …your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies; though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have to manhood to withhold."

Self-reliance did not prevent Emerson from suing his first wife’s family for his inheritance and living with relatives after his resignation from the ministry and a tour of Europe, though he did go on to make his own living as a traveling lecturer and writer. Likewise, Ayn Rand, for all her anti-government views, collected Social Security and applied for Medicare.

Perhaps a more thorough study of Rand’s works would reveal more complexity, but Anthem offers a caricature of the choice between individualism and communitarianism.  The latter is reduced to complete tyranny of society over the individual and the former is elevated to the absolute pursuit of individual happiness, regardless of the expense to social cohesion and the common good.  One would think that a devotee of “rational egoism” would have some appreciation for a moderate middle ground, but, no, at least in Anthem, it seems to be either-or.

By comparison, ‘Self-Reliance” is a study in intricacy and nuance.  For one thing, Emerson distinguishes between the social self, formed by conformity to society and consistency to the past self, and the “aboriginal Self,” which, unlike Rand’s materialistic “Ego,” is part and parcel of the Universal Spirit or “Oversoul,” a concept the atheistic Rand would not be able to countenance.  Far from calling for the elevation of the material Ego, Emerson calls for the liberation of that “aboriginal” spiritual Self from the constraints of materialism and socialization.  And it seems that when one is in touch with that spiritual Self, one loses all individualism and participates in a shared universal truth.  Thus, whether you agree with it or not, Emerson at least has a theory that would provide the basis for communitarianism and social cohesion, a basis in human nature and shared understanding, not governmental power and social control.

In an Emersonian world, it seems, individuals would free themselves from coercion, law, tradition, and obligation, not to mention their own false selves, only to find common cause with each other in social relationships based in authenticity, integrity, mutuality, and spiritual bonds.

Neither Rand nor Emerson show evidence of having any understanding of systemic social injustices such as economic disparity, inherited wealth or poverty, racism, sexism, ableism, or, perish the thought, heterosexism.  They seem to assume that all individuals function on a level playing field with equal ability and resources to assert their individuality.  No doubt the message of individual empowerment is important to the economically disadvantaged and socially subordinated, but Rand fails to allow for the role that material and social inequality play in individual opportunity and achievement, and Emerson fails to recognize a relationship between material well-being and spiritual power.

Though Emerson eschewed collective action, for fear it might compromise his independence, he eventually became more active in the abolitionist movement, suggesting perhaps that he did come to realize that (1) the concept of self-reliance is pretty meaningless to a slave, and (2) in the case of such material conditions as slavery, collective social action may be necessary, not only to material but also to spiritual freedom.

Although Emerson used gendered language in describing self-reliance as “manly,” he also supported the women’s rights movement, describing it as “no whim, but an organic impulse…a right and proper inquiry…honoring to the age.”  One wonders if Ayn Rand would acknowledge any debt to the collective women’s action that earned her the right to speak in public, vote, and participate in the political process, as she did when she worked on behalf of Wendell Wilkie’s presidential campaign in 1940.

Where does this leave us?  It seems both Emerson and Rand’s lives and works are rife with contradictions.  Sometimes they seem to be sounding a similar note, though overall their versions of individualism are quite different, Rand openly espousing individual action based on “the virtue of selfishness” and Emerson defining self-reliance as “self-trust,” more an affirmation of self-esteem and self-worth than a rationale for the active pursuit of self-interest without regard for the well-being of others. 

Despite Emerson’s renunciation of the ministry, his philosophy of individualism really has a religious and moral basis, whereas Rand’s philosophy seems to be based on secular materialism and individual self-interest.

 

Emerson seems to be asserting the value of one's individual self-interest as at least equal to that of others, whereas Rand seems to be asserting it as superior to that of others.

The God of Small Things II

In a Book Group discussion of this novel, I bemoaned how sad it is, how hopeless, how lacking in a redemptive message.  Some argued that the reunion of the twins and even their incestuous act, symbolically at least, offered hope for healing, but I was highly skeptical.  To me the incest could just as well be one more nail in the coffin of the Ipe family demise (see previous post).  Unable to find a sign of redemption in the novel, I was tempted to view it as a kind of modern gothic, offering a grotesque view of reality.

A friend who has traveled in India more than once suggested that from an Indian world view, the novel could be deemed realistic rather than gothic.  She said the Indian world view is very fatalistic, accepting the cycle of life and death, success and failure, joy and suffering, love and hate, and of the inevitable turn of events that is beyond human control.  As the narrator repeatedly states, “things can change in a day,” regardless of one’s intentions.  Yet, the narrator also states that a day can be traced back to ancient times, far beyond the control of humans in the present day:  “…it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made.”

All this begins to sound more mythological than historical.  The cycle of myth mimics the seasonal cycle, from the spring of creation and new life; through the summer of maturity, romance, and success; through the autumn of decline; to the winter of death.  In that cycle death, destruction, and apocalypse are followed by rebirth, resurrection, and renewal. From this perspective the last word of The God of Small Things –“Tomorrow”—offers a promise of redemption to follow.

However, though “Tomorrow” is the last word of the novel, it is not the last word of the chronological story.  It is uttered by Ammu and Velutha after their first night of lovemaking.  When we read that word, we have already read of the events that followed—the drowning of Sophie Mol, the false accusation of rape and kidnapping, the brutal beating of Velutha, Estha’s betrayal of his beloved friend, the beating of Ammu, the separation of the twins, the self-exile of Chacko, the death of Ammu, the closing of the pickle factory, and the deterioration of Mammachi and Baby Kochamma, not to mention the twins’ incestuous act.  In such a context “Tomorrow” sounds as much ironic and cynical as hopeful.   It takes a good deal of faith in the mythological cycle to find the redemptive message.

At the same time the final scene of the novel, the lovemaking between Ammu and Velutha, is perhaps the most beautiful in the entire narrative.  That the author chooses to end with that scene and with that word suggests, perhaps, her faith that if “things can change in a day” for ill, they can also change in a day for good.

In a sense the entire mythological cycle is covered in the novel—the young, innocent twins and their child-like perspective on the world represent the newness of creation.  The romance of Margaret and Chacko and later of Ammu and Velutha, the success of the pickle factory, even Baby’s ornamental garden represent the height of romance, maturity, and achievement.  Inevitably, however, the zenith is followed by divorce, failure, trauma, deterioration, and death.  Whether one reads the ending with mythological faith or modern despair may depend more on the reader than anything else.  The narrative seems to leave it open.

A mythic reading locates the novel outside of history, suggesting a universal human experience regardless of time and place.  Like incest, themes of twinship; kinship; coming of age; quest, trial, and ordeal; deities; the scapegoat; tragic loss, death, and destruction can be found cross-culturally in story, song, literature, and legend.

In The God of Small Things the twins themselves carry special symbolic significance.  They are fraternal, not identical, male and female, closely bonded from childhood, yet separated for most of their lives, silent and empty, the same but opposite.  They are but one example of countless dualities in the novel: small things vs. big things; Untouchables vs. Touchables;  Marxists vs. Capitalists; Christians vs. Hindus; Indians vs. Anglos; family unity vs. family discord; marriage vs. divorce; love vs. hate; loyalty vs. betrayal; parents vs. children; sisters vs. brothers; mortals vs. deities;  dreams vs. reality; good vs. evil; history vs. myth.  Like Estha and Rahel , these dualities are opposite and separate, yet closely bonded.

Big things overwhelm small things, as when history, religion, culture, and family “honor” all come crashing down on the private love affair of Ammu and Velutha.  Yet, it was that small thing, that small, private love affair between a Touchable and an Untouchable, a Christian and a Hindu, a member of the bourgeoisie and a Marxist that transgresses culture, religion, politics, and history; destroys a family, disrupts a community, brings down a factory, and leaves a wake of psychological trauma for more than one generation.  Human nature and human experience, it seems, are caught in an endless conflict between twin dualities.

As an example of how dualities pervade the narrative, consider that when Velutha is accused, pursued, beaten, and arrested, his fingernails are painted red because he had been playing with the children just before the catastrophic events unfold.  The Marxist leader and the police note this anomaly.  A minor detail, perhaps, but one more duality, that of male and female, one that links his beating with that of Ammu and his oppression with that of all women under patriarchy.  Further, the suggestion of androgyny lifts him above history and enscribes him in mythic terms.

Kinship as well as twinship is a major mythic theme of the novel, as both blood and social relations of family over generations create their own legacy, whether it take the form of blessing or curse.

The story of the twins is also a coming of age story, the transition from innocence to experience.  At an early age their childhood innocence is overshadowed by their parents’ divorce, Estha’s sexual molestation, their implication in the death of Sophie Mol, the beating and death of Velutha, Estha’s betrayal of Velutha, and their separation from each other.  The world goes from being a place of goodness and light to one of suffering, evil, and darkness.  The psychic trauma leaves one of them mute and the other, it seems, perpetually depressed.  Their reunion holds out hope for healing and recovery, but their act of incest leaves their future in doubt.  While their plight may not be universal, all of us must make the transition from childhood to adulthood.  Some of us arrive at a healthy maturity, coming to terms with the evil and suffering in the world without losing touch with goodness and joy.  Some of us, like Estha and Rahel, get stuck in pain and guilt.

Like all of us, also, each character is on a quest—for identity, power, love, honor.  Each undergoes his or her trials and ordeals but enjoys only temporary successes.  In the end there are more failed quests than heroic triumphs in this novel.  Whether Estha and Rahel will eventually recover and achieve psychic health and wholeness is left to our imaginations.

While there are references to religion in the narrative the major “deity” referred to is “the God of small things, the God of Loss.”  Here is yet another major duality, for this deification is conferred on Velutha, the Untouchable, the smallest of mortals.  As a child Velutha had artfully made tiny paper objects to entertain Ammu, holding them out to her on the flat of his hand so she could take them without touching him.  Later he becomes a “proletarian” worker in the Ipe pickle factory, and the friend and playmate of Ammu’s small twins.  Ever associated with “small things” and ultimately with utter loss.  Velutha takes on mythic stature as a scapegoat, who carries the sin and bears the punishment for the Ipe family, though they, of course, do not escape their own punishment.  As a “god” he is associated with Osiris in Egyptian, Dionysius in Greek, Quetzacoatl in Aztec, Odin in Norse, and Jesus in Christian myth.

In traditional scapegoat and “dying god” myths, however, the sacrifice serves to “save” or redeem the hero’s people, whether it be a family, community, society, or the whole human race.  And the dying god is typically resurrected to symbolize the return of life, health, goodness, and prosperity.  Velutha’s sacrifice, on the other hand, is followed by no resurrection, rather by yet more punishment and pain.  From a mythic perspective the story seems truly apocaplyptic, as far as the Ipe family is concerned.

In the Christian apocalypse the end of the world is followed by the coming of the Kingdom of God.  In the world of the novel that Kingdom would raise the Untouchable, the proletarian workers, women, children, and the world’s oppressed to their rightful places in an egalitarian global society.  The Hindu apocalypse is merely the low point of the endless mythic cycle from birth to death, and from creation to destruction.  In either case, The God of Small Things ends before the wheel of fortune begins to turn and largely relies on the faith of the reader for any hope of redemption “Tomorrow.”

The God of Small Things I

It has been noted frequently in this blog that there are two broad ways to read literature (and many sub-divisions of both): historical and universal.  Debates abound on their relative validity, but I prefer the both-and approach rather than the either-or dilemma.

Arundhati Roy’s 1997 novel offers an excellent opportunity to compare the two ways of reading and hopefully appreciate both.

The God of Small Things can be read as a post-colonial Indian novel that reflects the blending of cultures (Indian, British, American) and religions (Hinduism, Christianity), the corruption of India’s natural environment by capitalistic ventures, the historical conflict between capitalism and Marxism as it has played out in India and the persistence of ancient Indian traditions in a global environment.

None of these “big things” (culture, history, politics, religion) come off well in the novel, which portrays a world grown putrid with exploitation, oppression, dislocation, and corruption.  Even, especially, the family unit has deteriorated into a hotbed of physical and psychological trauma.  At best the novel can be read as a protest against patriarchy, class and caste,  divisions based on skin color, family “honor,” environmental destruction, the raw exercise of power through social structures, and the corruption even of those (Marxists) who would reverse the power structures and deliver the oppressed from suffering.

Above all, it interrogates the “Love Laws” that determine “Who should be loved.   And how.   And how much.”  The novel demonstrates the destructive effects of both violating the love laws (pedophilia) and of following them (religious restrictions).  In some cases it registers a silent protest against the love laws, as when class, caste, and color forbid the relationship between Ammu and Velutha and the breaking of the taboo leads to violence, deceit, and the exploitation of children in the name of family honor.  In other cases, as when Estha is molested, the love laws are affirmed.  Adultery and divorce seem to pass unjudged. 

The most ambiguous act is the incest between Rahel and Estha, shared not out of “happiness, but hideous grief.”  Whatever aftereffects they might experience are left to our imaginations.  They are not shown to suffer from the act, nor are they shown to benefit, though one can infer they experienced some short term comfort.

Anthropologists have identified incest as an almost universal taboo, though it has been practiced historically in some cultures and has been defined differently in different cultures.  While it occurs in nature, there is evidence that more highly evolved species prefer to mate outside their biological family.

To the close-knit twins the act might feel like an entirely natural coupling (though they had been separated from an early age).  Yet, one wonders to what extent their intimacy may result in yet more guilt and trauma.  Or, perhaps it is their shared childhood guilt and trauma that lead them to turn to each other for comfort.  What is ambiguous is whether that mutual comfort is part of their healing or part of their psychic damage.

For whatever reason, incest is a recurring literary theme, often associated with the tragic fall of a family, whether it be in Greek drama (Oedipus the King), Shakespearean tragedy (Hamlet), gothic fiction (“The Fall of the House of Usher”), or the modern novel (The Sound and the Fury).  In its prime the Ipe family was highly educated, well-respected, and accomplished.  When the patriarch of the family Pappachi fails to get credit for the discovery of a new species of moth, the decline begins, as the family loses its chance for lasting fame.  Pappachi’s bitterness leads him to abuse his family.  Mammachi bears the scars of Pappahi’s beatings and their daughter Ammu enters into a bad marriage to escape the harsh family environment.  Although the family pickle factory is successful, the marriages of both Ammu and her brother Chacko fail, and their aunt, called Baby, who never marries, becomes as bitter and spiteful as Pappachi, grieving over her unrequited love for a priest.

Ammu’s affair with the Untouchable Velutha; the accidental drowning of Chacko’s daughter, Sophie Mol; Baby’s false accusation of rape and kidnapping against Velutha; Estha’s near-coerced betrayal of his beloved Velutha and the latter’s death at the hands of the police; Chacko’s beating of Ammu; the separaton of the twins; and the subsequent failure of the pickle factory leave the family in shambles.  Chacko emigrates to Canada, Ammu dies at age 32, Estha becomes mute, Rahel becomes “empty,” and Baby neglects her ornamental garden as she and Mammachi live out their days watching American television and allowing the house, as well as themselves, to deteriorate.

 In such a context, Estha and Rahel’s act of incest suggests that the family has reached its nadir and that the only hope of a new generation is utterly blighted. 

 As long as we are examining the novel from a historical perspective, we must take note of the History House.  Chacko speaks of the family history as “a long line of Anglophiles,” who have become “trapped outside their own history” by the history of colonialism.  Their true history is found in a metaphorical “History House,” from which they have become alienated. 

The young twins think Chacko is talking about the abandoned house across the river, said to have been the home of an Englishman who had “gone native,” speaking the local language and wearing Indian clothing. Explicit references to “the heart of darkness” refer to both Conrad’s novel (see blog post April, 2010) and the darkness to be found in colonialism.  Ironically, it is not only the colonized who become alienated from their own history and culture, but the colonizers as well.

And the literal History House across the river becomes the site for the secret meetings between Ammu and Velutha, the hiding place of the twins after Sophie Mol drowns, and for the brutal beating of Velutha by the local police.  “Darkness” takes on the meanings of forbidden love, secrecy, tragic loss, and savage violence.  The big things (culture, history, politics, religion, the Love Laws) and the small things of individuals, their private feelings, and their human experience all intersect in the History House, both Chacko’s metaphorical one and the twins’ literal one.  And that intersection takes place in “the heart of darkness.”

Is the Ipe family a microcosm of the Indian nation?  In its larger historical context the novel can perhaps be read as a lament for modern India, an indictment of the colonial legacy, or even as a grotesque warning about the coming global catastrophe. The prospect of globalism and a cross-cultural world community offers no solace.  It is difficult to find any promising or redemptive message unless the writing of the novel itself implies some hope that its dystopian vision might be reversed.

In the next post the case for a more optimistic conclusion will be considered in more depth, but a historical reading yields little to be hopeful about.

"Too Much Happiness"

Not only does Alice Munro write short stories as complicated as novels (see blog post May 18, 2012), she wrote a “short story” based on the actual biography of Sophia Kovalevsky, the first woman in Europe to receive a Ph.D. (in mathematics), the first woman to be “appointed to a full professorship in Northern Europe” and “one of the first females to work for a scientific journal as an editor” (Wikipedia).  It would take considerable research to decide to what extent “Too Much Happiness” is really fiction and to what extent it might be classified as “creative non-fiction.” 

Regardless, Sophia Kovalevsky makes a fascinating study.  Not only was she a brilliant mathematician, she was also a novelist, and she co-wrote a play called The Struggle for Happiness, a title which better fits her life than does the title of Alice Munro’s story.  However, “Too much happiness” is said to have been the actual last words of Sophia Kovalevsky.

The phrase is cryptic.  Can there be too much happiness?  Is the tone sincere? Ironic? Is it part of her drug-induced, deathbed delirium?  The story (and the biography) seems to be more about a woman whose pursuit of happiness is repeatedly being derailed.  Denied a university education as a woman in her home country of Russia, she engaged in a marriage of convenience in order to get the required husband’s (or father’s) signature to study abroad.  Though she achieves academic success, as a woman, she is denied employment as a professor until later in life, when she receives a visiting professorship at Stockholm University in Sweden.

After she falls in love with her husband and bears their child, he later commits suicide.  After caring for their daughter for a year, she puts the child in the care of her sister in order to pursue her career in mathematics. 

In middle age she falls in love again, but the relationship is rocky, and though they vow to marry “in the spring” (of 1891), she contracts pneumonia on her train trip back to Stockholm and dies shortly thereafter. 

Her life represents the classic woman’s conflict between professional career and personal relationships.  From a Freudian perspective it is the conflict of ego and power vs. love and pleasure.  Only society seems to be set up so that men can reasonably expect to achieve both, whereas women are expected to choose.  Sophia tries to achieve both, only to be thwarted by social convention, circumstance, and time.

Based on the biographical accounts, it is fair to say that “Too Much Happiness” is factually accurate.  However, Munro gives the story her own shape.  Sophia’s last words have been documented, but the prediction of her own death, however playful, that occurs at the beginning of the story may be fictional.  Strolling through a Paris cemetery with her mid-life lover, Sophia recalls the superstition that visiting a cemetery on New Year’s Day presages one’s death before the end of that year.  “One of us will die this year,"Sophia pronounces, and the story ends with her death on February 10, 1891. 

During her train trip back to Stockholm, she visits her late sister’s husband and son and her academic mentor and his two sisters, all the while flashing back to her first discovery of trigonometry, her efforts to educate herself in mathematics, her marriage, her professional achievements, her family relationships, motherhood, the loss of her husband and sister, and her mid-life affair with Maksim.  Thus her life is presented as a retrospective as she travels from her long-distance lover back to her home and place of work.

The word “happiness” appears four times in the story, once at the end in her deathbed last words and  three times on one page when she writes her friend and former classmate of her impending marriage to Maksim: “…it is to be happiness after all.  Happiness after all.  Happiness.”

The word “happy” appears four times:  On an occasion when Maksim rejects her saying she “should make her way back to Sweden…she should be happy where her friends were waiting for her,” ending with a “jab” that her “little daughter” would have need of her.  On another when her teenage nephew expresses no more ambition in life than to “be an omnibus boy and call out the stations,” and Sophia replies, “Perhaps you would not always be happy calling out the stations.”  Again, when telling her former mentor of her upcoming marriage, she says, “Meine Liebe, I order you, order you to be happy for me.”  And finally, in a flashback to her first discovery of trigonometry when she recalls, “She was not surprised then, though intensely happy.”

Two of the four uses of “happy” refer to her personal life and two to the happiness found in work, as if true happiness is found in balancing both.  The repetition of “happiness” when writing to her friend about marrying Maksim seems to tip the scale in favor of the personal. Had she found “too much happiness” in her work to the detriment of her personal life?  Was the hope of finding happiness in both “too much” to wish for? We can speculate on the meaning of her last words, but the title of Munro’s story seems ironic, for, more often than not, Sophia seems to fall far short of “too much happiness.”

And there is always the possibility that the drug a doctor gives her on the train, a drug which “brought solace…when necessary, to him,” might have elevated her mood to a state of euphoria, such that, indeed, just before her death, it felt like “too much happiness.”

Her final delirium also included references to her “husband,” confused with Bothwell, who had been accused but acquitted of murdering the consort of Mary Queen of Scots before marrying her himself, possibly by force and subterfuge.  Is this an association of marriage with the deception, violence, and distrust that had accompanied her own actual and hoped for marriages?

She also talked about her novel and a “new story,” in which she hoped to “discover what went on” under the “pulse in life,” something “Invented, but not.”  She found herself “overflowing with ideas…of a whole new breadth and importance and yet so natural and self-evident that she couldn’t help laughing.”  The language suggests, not only the euphoria of literary creation, but also, perhaps, that “intense” happiness she associated with mathematical discovery.

Kovalevsky had made the connection between art and science in a quote which Alice Munro uses as a headnote to her story:  “Many persons who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science.  Actually, however, this science requires great fantasy.”

Is there any wonder that the literary Alice Munro would find fodder for fiction in the actual biography of a mathematician who, not only linked fantasy and science, but was also a novelist and playwright? Thus does the real become unreal and the unreal become real, the truth become fiction and fiction become truth.

Walt Whitman

Along with Emily Dickinson Walt Whitman was the most experimental and technically innovative American poet of the 19^th century (see blog post Sept. 20, 2009).  While Dickinson disrupted conventional metrics, rhyme, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar, Whitman basically threw conventional poetic meter out the window and invented a whole new form—free verse.

Many readers think free verse is verse that doesn’t rhyme, or they get it confused with “blank verse.”  Blank verse is actually unrhymed iambic pentameter.  Shakespeare used it a lot.  Free verse may or may not rhyme, but it is completely free of meter that can be scanned, counted, and labeled as iambic, trochaic, anapestic, or dactylic.  Whitman created a completely new way of achieving rhythmic effects in poetry.  He actually used grammar instead of the stressed and unstressed syllable patterns used in the conventional poetry of his time.

In 1855 he published Leaves of Grass and revolutionized the writing of poetry, dispensing with rhyme, as well as meter and regular verse forms.  Yet his poetry still had rhythm, as well as other sound effects, such as assonance, consonance, and alliteration.  What was revolutionary was his use of parallelism or repetition of grammatical structures to create rhythm.

It sounds so tame, but readers and critics alike were shocked, saying that his sprawling lines bore no resemblance to anything recognizable as poetry.  Ironically, later critics have traced Whitman’s use of parallelism to the Bible, a text that those shocked readers would probably have been very familiar with.  But in those days Biblical “prose,” no matter how rhythmic, was not considered to be in the same category as “poetry.”

Lest anyone think Whitman’s innovation was a matter of chance or accident, the opening poem in Leaves of Grass reveals Whitman’s consciousness, whether his use of parallelism was Biblically-based or not, that he was doing something different, new, and “modern.”

One’s-Self I Sing

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Of physiology from top to toe I sing,

Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,

Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.

The kernel structure of the poem is the inverted sentence “_________I sing,” which is repeated four times, establishing a pattern, not of meter, but of grammar.  Each separate sentence features its own extension or modification, thus creating grammatical variety, as well as repetition. 

The content of the poem asserts the modern ideas of individualism and democracy and expands those ideas to include the equality of body and “brain” and of male and female.  While individualism and democracy were well established values in 1855, the elevation of the body and of women was highly controversial, even more so when associated with “laws divine.”  Whitman uses a revolutionary poetic form to reinforce revolutionary ideas.  And he reveals his conscious intention in his final line, “The Modern Man I sing.”

If Dickinson challenged conventional views of reality (see blog post Sept. 19, 2009), Whitman challenged conventional values, especially when it came to gender and sexuality.  Not only did he assert the equality of the sexes, he celebrated the human body as much as he did nature and openly expressed both heterosexual and homosexual attraction, attachment, and desire.

While Dickinson could barely get published, Whitman’s published poems were reviled, not only as unpoetic but as obscene.  Both were too far ahead of their time to be fully appreciated in their lifetimes, but, together, they have exerted more influence on modern poetry than any other pair, and they did it by writing poetry as it had never been written before.

"Fiction"

Someone once said that an Alice Munro short story is as complicated as any novel.  This 2009 story is proof positive.  O. Henry could have learned a lot from her (see http://yourbrainonbooks.blogspot.com/2011/12/gift-of-magi.html). 

 “Fiction” can be read  as the tragic story of a woman on a constant quest for ego-enhancement, for whom relationships are a means to the end of her own fulfillment, or it can be read as a comic story of a woman who repeatedly makes herself look ridiculous by her own self-importance.

 It can be read as a realistic representation of human experience as a maze of coincidences and intersections, a tangle of relationships, of memories, of forgetting, of recognition and non-recognition, of curiosity of story-telling, of manipulation, of complex motives, of self-creation and re-creation.

 It can be read as an ironic statement on the complexity of human experience, the mixed messages, the missed messages, the strange combination of false successes and real failures, of the reality of unreality and the unreality of reality.

 It can be read as a social commentary on the modern state of relationship roulette, of marriage, adultery, divorce, blended families, same-sex relationships; of individualism, the serial making, breaking and remaking of social ties; of the fragmentation in our social fabric and the fragility of social bonds; of the strange web of interconnectedness with its brokenness, and its mendedness.

 It can be read as the carefully crafted juxtaposition of a story within a story and the asymmetry of two different memories of the same episode from two different perspectives, in which what is marginal in one memory is central in the other.

 It can be read as the universal story of a failed quest for redemption, in which we humans are doomed to a cycle of continual compensation for our imperfections, like Sisyphus forever rolling a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down once we get it to the top.

 But the story is called “Fiction,” and in the last line the main character imagines turning her disappointing experience into a “funny story.”  Thus the story “Fiction” is framed by references to story-telling, and at the center of the story is another “fictional” story.  Our attention is thus drawn to the relationship between fiction and truth, unreality and reality, to the significance of writing, reading, and the experience of textuality.

 The poet Donald Murray has said that “All writing is autobiography,” and there is a school of literary criticism that seems to say, by turns, that all reading is autobiography and/or that all writing is about writing and/or about reading.  This self-reflexive approach to fiction can begin to feel like a hall of mirrors, which is somewhat how the story “Fiction” feels.

 Alice Munro, who was divorced and remarried, became a writer and book-seller (a somewhat self-reflexive situation in its own right).  Her story “Fiction” is about Joyce, a music teacher, whose husband rejects her for the mother of one of her students.  Later, after Joyce has become the third wife of a college professor and left teaching to become a professional cellist, she crosses paths again with that former student, Christie, who has married the friend of Joyce’s second husband’s son by his first wife.

 As if this tangled maze of relationships were not enough, Christie has just published a book of short stories, one of which, “Kindertotenlieder” (“Songs on the Death of Children”), recounts the story of a child whose mother moves in with her music teacher’s husband.  (The title suggests a coming of age story.)

 To the extent that Christie’s story is based on her own experience, her memory of it is very different from Joyce’s memory of the same episode.  Joyce barely remembers the details of Christie’s account (if they actually happened) and certainly had no knowledge, much less memory, of the events from Christie’s perspective.  She had no idea that Christie had been so lovingly attached to her as her music teacher and she has no awareness of having manipulated Christie in order to gain access to details of the relationship between her husband and Christie’s mother, at least as Christie tells it.  The layers of complexity continue to mount.  The hall of mirrors makes it ever more difficult to distinguish between the flesh and blood of reality and the reflections distorted in the mirrors of memory and of fiction.

 We read Alice Munro’s story about Joyce, who reads Christie’s story about the memory of her relationship with Joyce, which Joyce compares with her own memory of Christie.  If all reading (and writing) is autobiography, then all writing (and reading) is memory, and all memory is a distorted mirror image of the reality that actually took place.  Thus all fiction is memory and all memory is fiction.

 In Joyce’s memory Christie is a minor character, whose name Joyce can barely recall.  In Christie’s memory Joyce is a central character, the adored teacher.  Even when, as an adult, Christie realizes how Joyce had “used” her, she is able to forgive because of the beauty of the music and the “love” of the teacher, however false.  “It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness—however temporary, however flimsy—of one person could come of the great unhappiness of another.”

 Joyce is so moved by the story and its conveniently self-justifying (for Joyce) moral that she takes her copy of Christie’s book back to the bookstore (Alice Munro was a book-seller) to have it signed by the author (Alice Munro was a published author).  Despite Joyce’s attempt to draw attention to herself, Christie is utterly oblivious as to who she is.  Memory, it seems, is one thing; recognition is another.

 In the end Joyce is as unimportant to Christie as Christie once was to Joyce.  Just as Christie salvaged her disappointment through fiction, so Joyce attempts to salvage hers by imagining that “This might even turn into a funny story that she would tell someday.”

 Just as Joyce has used Christie to construct a mental “story” of the life her husband was living with Christie’s mother, so Christie uses the memory of Joyce to create her work of fiction, and perhaps Joyce will again use Christie, this time to create her own “funny story.”

 Not only are we all figments of our own imaginations, but we are figments of others’ imaginations, as they are figments of ours.  Thus does the real become unreal and the unreal become real, the truth become fiction and fiction, the story we tell ourselves and others, become truth.