Great Books Archives - Page 4 of 26

The Horror

“The horror! The horror!”

That is Hall of Fame in the category of famous last words in literature. (Famous last words should not be confused with famous last sentences.) Indeed, in the entire history of literature, it is hard to come up with any other candidates for the most famous.

(Yes, I hear you, Dear Reader, exclaim, “What about Sydney Carton?” “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Quite famous, to be sure. But, Carton didn’t actually say it.)

Heart of Darkness is a work of genius on many levels. Mencken summarized it thus:

I give you “Heart of Darkness” as the archetype of his [Conrad’s] whole work and the keystone of his metaphysical system. Here we have all imaginable human hopes and aspirations reduced to one common denominator of folly and failure, and here we have a play of humor that is infinitely mordant and searching.

It’s a short novel, but Mencken is right about its laser-like ability to concentrate the energy of the human experience into a small area. What do we find at the center, at the heart of humanity? Darkness. Now begins the fascinating question: what is in that darkness at the heart of humanity?

Mr. Kurtz knows about that heart of darkness. An ivory trader who ventured upriver and ended up as a godlike ruler engaged in barbaric acts of brutality, he has slipped the bonds of the civilization in which he grew up. Marlow, that narrator, is sent to fetch Kurtz, and on the way back, Kurtz shuffles off this mortal coil, gasping his famous last words on the way out. The horror.

One of the many brilliant aspects of the novel is that it is never quite clear what exactly the horror is. Kurtz knew; he peered into the darkness and saw it. He told us what he saw, and we mere mortals are left to figure out the implications of that revelation.

Marlow is greatly disturbed by the revelation, but not by the content of the revelation. His immediate concern is with something else:

I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it.

There is your challenge. You are on your deathbed; you have time to say one thing. You can give one message to posterity, one thing you have learned in the course of your life that is worth sharing with the rest of the world. Do you have something to say?

He had summed up—he had judged. “The horror!” He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth—the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best—a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things—even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry—much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory! That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.

Presumably most people do not actually decide in advance which words will be uttered with one’s final breath, mostly because it is generally difficult to know when one is drawing one’s final breath. But, it’s still an interesting thought experiment. Based on your life to date, what words would you utter if you knew it was the last thing you would ever say?

Obviously, your final words would be different if you believed that they would be broadcast to the world or if you believed that only whomever is standing nearby will hear them. So, for the sake of the thought experiment imagine that your words will be shared far and wide for generations to come. What would you say?

As I thought about it, it became a very depressing exercise. None of my ideas stand up as something worthy of being memorialized in such a manner. “I love you, Long-Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator”—she would presumably be charmed, but it is hard to imagine anyone else would be. “Christ is Lord” makes a nice message to the world, but it is hard to believe that anyone would find that worthy of thought simply because it was someone’s last words. “Read more Wodehouse” has the advantage of being novel and it is certainly good advice, but it seems to be lacking in gravitas as the summation of one’s life.

As Marlow said: “I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.”

Kurtz had something to say. The horror! The beauty of that exclamation, the reason is resonates so deeply, comes when you ask yourself, “To what is Kurtz referring?”

The sharp divide in possible answers is whether he is referring to something outside or inside of himself. How you answer that question probably says a lot about how you thing about the horror of the world in which you live.

First Kurtz could have been talking about things outside himself, talking about society. Here though there is still yet another divide. To which society is Kurtz referring? Is it the utterly barbaric society he was leading deep in the jungle, full of blood and heads on spikes? Or is it the Western Civilization to which he was returning? Are blood sacrifices by a fire in a jungle at night or balls in drawing rooms in European capitals the horror?

There is yet another related possibility which the very clever Conrad casually tosses on the table. After returning to Europe, Marlow tracks down Kurtz’s fiance to tell her about the death of her beloved. She asks Marlow what were the final words uttered by Kurtz. His reply? “Your name.”

On the other side, the horror may not be external at all. Lying on the boat transporting him from one world to another, did Kurtz look deep into himself and see the horror within? Here he was, the pride of Europe heading off to the jungle where he became a god, this hero of two civilizations, and yet when in that liminal space that is neither here nor there he looked into his heart and all he saw was darkness.

I like that last explanation the best, but like I said above, that may well be more due to the fact that such a reading fits my theological priors. One of the beauties of the book is that it can just as easily be read as an indictment of European Civilization or of civilizations who have not yet adopted Western norms. (The condemnations of this book as if it can only be read as an expression of the glories of Western Imperialism truly fascinate me. How can anyone read so narrowly?)

“The horror! The horror!” Coppola ending Apocalypse Now with Brando’s voice uttering those words is surely one of the most brilliant directorial decisions ever. It is a haunting refrain, worth a lifetime of contemplation.

(An appendix: as all right-thinking people know, Apocalypse Now is one of the greatest movies ever made. There is a fabulous documentary about the making of the move: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. If you love Apocalypse Now and have never seen the documentary about making it, you really owe it to yourself to hunt it down. The short version: it is truly amazing this movie ever got made—a complete train wreck of a production process.)

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Evil Jeeves

A plot summary:
A young gentleman of dubious intellectual capacity with no discernable means of income has a valet who is extraordinarily brilliant. Said valet is capable of designing ingenious scheme to enable his master to attain seemingly impossible aims. The story is told with great wit. It is incredibly amusing despite the fact (or maybe because of the fact) that it is ridiculously repetitive. Over and over the valet’s clever plans are thwarted because the young master is convinced he knows best and ends up making things even worse.

Question: Who is the author of that story?

The odd thing: within the last week, I have read two stories which are perfectly described by that plot summary. Only one of the stories was written by P.G. Wodehouse. Right Ho, Jeeves, which I read for the third or fourth or fifth (I really have no idea) time has Bertie Wooster deciding he can forgo Jeeves’ talents and solve a wealth of problems which continuously get worse until in desperation Bertie turns to Jeeves to save the day. But you knew all that as soon as you saw that the title contained with word “Jeeves.”

Right Ho, Jeeves was published in 1934. You can imagine my great shock when I read a version of this story from 1655.

Moliere’s The Bungler is the tale of young Lelie who is enamored with a slave, the extremely beautiful Celie, but cannot figure out how to win her. Fortunately, Lelie has a very clever valet, Mascarille. Consider this exchange at the outset of the play:

Lelie:
Yet I’d be foolish to despair or doubt;
With your help, I feel sure of winning out.
You’re full of clever schemes; your canny wit
Finds no predicament too much for it;
You are, I think, a king among valets;
In all the world…

Mascarille
Whoa! No more sugary praise.
When masters need the help of us poor hinds,
They call us paragons with brilliant minds;
But let us make some slip; and in a flash
We’re stupid scoundrels who deserve the lash.

With a few changes, that could have come straight out of any Jeeves and Wooster novel. The changes? First, Wooster and Jeeves don’t speak in verse. Moliere wrote in verse, and the translation here is the great Richard Wilbur translation (if you are going to read Moliere in English, do not even think of reading any other translation).

It is the second difference between the Moliere play and a Wodehouse novel which is the more intriguing. What Mascarille says above is not something that Jeeves would ever say. He might think it, but he would never say it. It is most definitely true—every Jeeves and Wooster story begins with Bertie sporting a new bit of rather loud clothing or facial hair which Jeeves abhors and Bertie in effect declares that Jeeves is a stupid scoundrel lacking taste—but Jeeves would still never say this. Jeeves always maintains a perfect outward demeanor.

What follows is very much in the Jeeves and Wooster line. Mascarille hatches a plan which will cleverly allow Lelie to leave the scene with Celie as his wife, and Lelie shows up and manages to bungle the entire plan. Over and over. A part of the humor in the play is watching how Lelie bungles yet another perfect plan. It makes no difference if Lelie knew the plan in advance or not; he never fails to ruin it.

The plot is not the only source of humor; the wit in the dialogue is extraordinary. Consider this exchange:

Lelie: Help me, I beg of you.
Mascarille: No, I’ll do nothing.
Lelie: If you won’t change your mind, I’ll kill myself.
Mascarille: Do, if you’re so inclined.
Lelie: You won’t relent?
Mascarille: No.
Lelie: You see that my sword is drawn?
Mascarille: Yes.
Lelie: I shall thrust it through my heart.
Mascarille: Go on.
Lelie: Won’t you be sad to have taken my life from me?
Mascarille: No.
Lelie: Then, farewell.
Mascarille: Farewell, Monsieur Lelie.
Lelie: So! . . .
Mascarille: Hurry up, please; less talk, more suicide.
Lelie: Because you’d get my wardrobe if I died,/ You’d have me play the fool and pierce my heart.
Mascarille: I knew that you were faking, from the start./ Men often swear to kill themselves, and yet/ Few of them, nowadays, make good their threat.

Humor relies on the unexpected and there is no way that any reader expected Mascarille’s lines in that bit of dialogue. Jeeves is also extremely funny, but one again, Jeeves would never say to Bertie “Less talk; More Suicide.” Never.

Therein lies the big difference between the two valets. Jeeves is good; Mascarille is not. The trailer for The Bungler: “What if Jeeves decided to become morally bankrupt.” This evil Jeeves is every bit as clever as the Jeeves we know, but this Jeeves is perfectly willing to concoct a plan which involves lying to Lelie’s father, Pandolfe, to send him on a wild goose chase out of town and then telling Anselme that Pandolfe has died, staging a funeral, and then asking Anselme for money to help Lelie pay the funeral expenses—all so Lelie can get the money he needs to buy Celie from her owner so he can run off with her. A clever plan to be sure, but of course it fails.

We get a glimpse into the soul of Mascarille in a remarkable soliloquy which seems positively Shakespearean in the midst of a madcap story. He begins with a debate within himself:

Hush, my good nature; you haven’t a grain of sense.
And I’ll no longer hear your arguments.
It’s you, my anger, that I’ll listen to.
Am I obliged forever to undo
The blunders of a clod? I should resign!

He is right; there is no reason he should continue to strive to help his bumbling fool of a master. We never once get the impression that Jeeves is angry with Bertie for being a fool, but that is a level of heroic resolve which seems quite above mortals. Mascarille has no such calm. It is annoying, truly annoying to have a bumbling master.

But why does Mascarille persist in working for Lelie? It isn’t about service at all.

Were I to let my just impatience rule me,
They’d say that I’d been quick to call it quits,
And that I’d lost the vigor of my wits;
And what them would become of my renown
As the most glorious trickster in the town,
A reputation that I’ve earned by never
Failing to think of something wildly clever?

Once again, the contrast with Jeeves is revealing. Jeeves is the most clever person in the Wodehouse pantheon. Indeed, Jeeves may be the most clever person in the literary pantheon. Jeeves vs Hamlet in a battle of wits? I’d bet on Jeeves. Yet, while Jeeves would have every right to utter these lines about his reputation, it is inconceivable he would ever say such a thing, even in an aside to the audience.

Then comes the most fascinating pair of lines in Mascarille’s soliloquy:

O Mascarille, let honor be your guide!
Persist in those great works which are your pride.

Mascarille is a devious trickster engaged in any number of immoral schemes, and yet, in deciding to persist in his ways, he is letting honor be his guide. Honor? It is hard to find an honorable act in the whole play. Right after talking of honor, Mascarille explains:

And though your master irks you, persevere
Not for his sake, but for your own career.

Mascarille may be many things, but honorable is not one of them.

The disturbing note: imagine a person who has the inventive genius of Jeeves and Mascarille. Which moral character is more realistic? I’m afraid it isn’t even close. I can far more easily imagine meeting Mascarille than Jeeves.

Moliere is not listed in the index of Robert McCrum’s biography of P.G. Wodehouse, but if Wodehouse had never read this play before concocting Jeeves and Wooster, that would be amazing. If you like Wodehouse (and you should like Wodehouse), I am happy to heartily recommend the Richard Wilbur translation of The Bungler. In addition to all the other joys contained therein (the play, by the way that Victor Hugo said was Moliere’s best), you’ll get the added enjoyment of watching the evil version of Jeeves in action.

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An Unseen Hook and Invisible Line

“I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God they hated Mummy.”
“What do you mean by that, Cordelia?”
“Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that.”

Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is not just a brilliant novel, it is a brilliant Christian novel written in the mid-20^th century when that Christianity thing was supposed to be passé.

The story is of Charles Ryder’s interactions with the Flyte family, denizens of an ancient English manor dubbed Brideshead. He enters the Flyte orbit via his college chum, Sebastian, for whom he has a vaguely homosexual attraction. Sebastian’s parents (now separated) and his siblings (Brideshead, Julia, and Cordelia) make up quite the menagerie. The defining trait of each character is the relationship to the Roman Catholic Church. Over the first two-thirds of the book, we watch these characters become developed as a Catalogue of Failed Saints.

Charles, on the other hand, has no religious background. The discussions about religion among the characters are masterfully done; they capture the nature of that sort of discussion perfectly—ships passing in the night. “You know all this is very puzzling to me” is how Charles summarizes it. And this about Brideshead, “I knew that this disagreement was not a matter of words only, but expressed a deep and impassable division between us; neither had any understanding of the other, nor ever could.”

But, the explicit discussions about religion are not the heart of the book. The story follows Charles in his quest for an object of love, from Sebastian to Celia (whom he marries) and onto Julia. In a moment of shocking self-awareness toward the end of the novel, Charles explains this to Julia.

“It’s frightening,” Julia once said, “to think how completely you have forgotten Sebastian.”
“He was the forerunner.”
“That’s what you said in the storm. I’ve thought since, perhaps I am only a forerunner too.”
“Perhaps,” I thought […], “perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”
I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in in him, in those distant Arcadian days.
“That’s cold comfort for a girl,” she said when I tried to explain. “How do I know I shan’t suddenly turn out to be somebody else? It’s an easy way to chuck.”

Right there the whole structure of the novel is revealed. All these longings after failed people and ideals are all pointing to something greater; Charles loves Sebastian and Julia and maybe at some point even his wife, Celia, but none of them are really the object of his love—he just doesn’t realize yet that he loves something more. Those other loves are a hints and symbols of something more.

Waugh is a master of the small but telling detail. Throughout, there is a detail here or there that feels like it just gave a vision of an entire world. A couple of examples:

1. In the first chapter, Charles is at college, and one of his acquaintances (friends?), Anthony Blanche, stands on a balcony with a megaphone reading The Waste Land to the people below. I don’t know of anything which more perfectly captures the effect of that poem in the 1920s. The scene embodies an era and a type of person in that era…you now know exactly the type of person Anthony is…and simultaneously, you know the type of poem Eliot just published. And the part Waugh chose to have Anthony read is perfect: Tiresias on the wall.

(When I taught a Western Civilization course and we got to Eliot, I always mentioned this scene. The guy in the know reading Eliot from the balcony to the masses below. One year, a half dozen or so students showed up at my office and stood in the hallway, reciting The Waste Land. Sometimes Mount Holyoke students have a real sense of humor.)

Eliot hovers over this novel, from this moment on. Eliot’s Four Quartets came out around the time Waugh was writing this novel. Waste Land to Four Quartets is Charles’ journey.

2. About two-thirds of the way through the novel, Charles returns from a long journey in which he was completely cut off from civilization. His return is when we discover that he was married in the space between the last chapter and this one. Not only that, he has kids, one of which was born while he was away. Charles shows a truly shocking indifference to his children; he shows zero interest in seeing them or even hearing about them. It is easy to conclude that Charles is a cad.

But, then the telling details start getting dropped into the narrative in offhand ways. In a conversation between Charles and Celia, she tells him that things will be like before he left, and he asks if she means right before he left or shortly before that. Celia is silent. It’s never explicitly stated, but when reading that I assumed Charles had an affair. Turns out I was right about the affair, but wrong about the person: it is Celia. We later find out that Celia, has been unfaithful in a casual remark in a conversation between Charles and Julia.

The realization that Celia was unfaithful generates another realization of something which is left totally unstated at any point in the novel. We know that Charles’ daughter, Caroline, is born while Charles is away. The realization: she is not his child. The timeline is perfect—Charles finds out Celia is pregnant, he knows he is not the father, he heads off to South America and cuts himself off from all contact with civilization. That also explains an awkward moment when Celia says that Caroline is named after Charles—that would indeed be rather awkward that Celia is pretending to the outside world that this is Charles’ daughter when Charles knows it is not. Then it hit me; why assume that the older child is Charles’ son? Maybe Charles has no children. No wonder he is totally indifferent to them and has no real desire to even see them.

None of this is actually stated in the novel. That is what I found so fascinating. It’s like all the clues are there, but there is no grand reveal. What we think about Charles is hugely affected by whether or not these are his kids. Only an author who is sure of himself would leave something like this buried in a novel. (It is like a small version of Nabokov’s Pale Fire—now that was artistry—the entire plot can only be pieced together by connecting the endnotes (which are a part of the book, not something added later.))

The whole novel is like that. You only realize it at the end, but Charles spends the whole book looking for an object of love that will bring him satisfaction. Sebastian, Celia, Julia…all of them just keep pointing him onwards. At the end, again in masterful understatement, we find out that Charles has converted. He visits the old chapel at Brideshead and discovers a small lamp burning before the altar. And there he explains to the reader that something none of them thought about at the time, some small red flame, that flame the old knights saw from their tomb, burns again for others. That flickering flame is what this novel is. It is only when some flickering light allows Charles to see through “fierce little human tragedy in which I played,” that he comes to “accept the supernatural as the real.” If the novel had been more overt about the conversion, it would have lost this point, it would have lost that sense of inevitability that hovers over the whole story. The novel is arguing that conversion is not due to some loud event; it comes from a still small voice softly calling.

What makes the novel so brilliant is that high percentage of readers almost certainly will miss the larger narrative of the irresistible pull of grace. The novel reads nicely as a tale of the decline of the English aristocracy too. But Waugh, in another bit of misdirection, explains what he is doing in this novel. Cordelia says to Charles, “I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk—I mean the bad evening. ‘Father Brown’ said something like ‘I caught him’ [the thief] ‘with an unseen hook and invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.’” Waugh is not just explaining the hook that has been planted in Charles; the whole novel is designed to plant a hook in the reader. It’s an unseen hook and an invisible thread.

Wander to the ends of the earth, Waugh says, it doesn’t matter…because the hook is set.

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Leaves of Grass (imaginary edited edition)

“I celebrate myself”

Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. In a rather confusing publication history, the original volume Leaves of Grass had no titles for any of the poems within it. But Whitman kept putting out new editions of the book Leaves of Grass, eventually giving titles to the individual poems. The first and longest poem in the original collection was eventually entitled “Song of Myself.”

All of which creates a real headache for those who want to discuss the first poem in the first volume of Leaves of Grass. Technically that original poem is not entitled “Song of Myself.” Pity the poor person wanting to discuss this poem.

Let’s just embrace our inner Whitman. “What I assume you shall assume.” Let’s call the poem “Leaves of Grass.”

“Leaves of Grass” is a sprawling mess of a poem. If you think that is a harsh statement, you have never read the poem. It is deliberately and cheerfully a sprawling mess. I doubt a single person has ever read through the poem, all 60 pages of it in the Library of America volume, and maintained focus throughout. It’s that type of poem. Endless freely flowing lines with no discernable pattern, flittering all over the place.

Whitman is responsible for a ton of horrible contemporary poetry. Whitman has a lot of good lines, so he is better than the contemporary formless dreck. But he definitely made the idea of writing a formless poem seem possible to people who have no ear for a beautiful line.

Thoreau published Walden in 1854. A fun parlor game would be to pick random bits from Thoreau and random lines in Whitman and see if it is obvious which is which. (OK, it would not really be a fun parlor game.) As far as content and catchy images, they are the same. Thoreau uses complete sentences though. So, one way to think about “Leaves of Grass” is “Walden written with poor grammar.”

Take an example from fairly late in the poem:

I tramp a perpetual journey,
My signs are a rain-proof coat and good shoes and a staff cut from the woods;
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,
I have no chair, nor church nor philosophy;
I lead no man to a dinner-table or library or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooks you round the waist,
My right hand points to landscapes of continents, and a plain public road.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

The bit above has some rather nice lines, memorable and evocative. Tramping a perpetual journey, the signs (and the theological implication of the idea of signs), no settled abode, the knoll, the left hand hooked around a waist and the right hand pointing onward (you can imagine the painting). Then the final charge in the two line stanza. There is something really beautiful here.

As a standalone poem, those 10 lines would be rather good. But, this isn’t a standalone poem. Those lines come after over 55 pages of other unrelated things. That is bad enough. The real crime, however, is the next five lines. Whitman doesn’t leave this image after those ten lines. The poem continues:

It is not far . . . . it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know,
Perhaps it is every where on water and on land.

Shoulder your duds, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth;
Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go.

Ugh. Those five lines completely destroy the beauty of the previous ten lines. Suddenly, immediately after being told you must travel alone, Whitman and you are traveling together with shouldered duds, seeking something which is everywhere, in fact maybe you are on it right now. Instead of the marvel of that hooked left hand and the right hand pointing out to the horizon, we get…what exactly? Just some general mush.

The whole of “Leaves of Grass” is like that. Nice images surrounded by lumpy porridge. It is hard to even notice the good bits because you must be lucky to have your mind alert at the moment when they show up.

All of this leads to a couple of thought experiments which would be fantastic real experiments for anyone who wanted to spend a lot of time conducting them.

1. Imagine taking “Leaves of Grass” and chopping it down to 10 percent of its current length. You can pick which parts to keep. The result is a six page poem, presented not as an excerpt from “Leaves of Grass” but as an original poem. There are then two questions to ask about that new shorter poem:

a) Is it good? Is it better than the full version? Does it convey the same impression but in a fashion that makes you more likely to want to reread it? Would a poem that is 20% of the original be better or worse than the poem that is 10% of the original?

b) If you got a bunch of people to do this experiment at the same time, how similar are the shorter poems? Which parts are in all of them? (The opening stanza for sure. The barbaric yawp for sure.) What percentage of the lines of this poem are in the essential 10% for everyone who does this experiment?

2. Imagine scouring all the places where people mark their favorite passages. Then add in all the evaluative reviews of the poem. What percentage of “Leaves of Grass” has ever been chosen to be highlighted? Or putting it the other way, how much of “Leaves of Grass” has never been pulled out as something admirable?

Is “Leaves of Grass” a Great Poem? I think the answer has to be “Yes” because parts of it are Great Poetry. But, the fact that this is actually a debatable question again points to the massive problem with this poem. I have read it several times in my life. I am not eager to read it again. But, I know, once the memory of the tortuous slog has faded, I will once again think, “It can’t be all that bad, can it?”

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Travels with Don Quixote

“And if this is done in a pleasing style and with ingenious invention, and is drawn as close as possible to the truth, it no doubt will weave a cloth composed of many different and beautiful threads, and when it is finished, it will display such perfection and beauty that it will achieve the greatest goal of any writing, which, as I have said, is to teach and delight at the same time. Because the free writing style of these books allows the author to show his skills as an epic, lyric, tragic, and comic writer, with all the characteristics contained in the sweet and pleasing sciences of poetry and rhetoric; for the epic can be written in prose as well as in verse.”

That is one of the characters in Don Quixote. Cervantes must have had a merry time writing that description of his own book and embedding it in the book as a description of a perfect book.

If you have never read Don Quixote, this is likely how you would summarize it: Crazy guy (Don Quixote) thinks he is a knight and goes and fights windmills thinking they are giants; he has a sidekick (Sancho Panza) who is not crazy. The book is 940 pages long. And that is why you never read it. Who wants to read a 940 page book about a guy fighting windmills?

The windmill episode, by the way, takes place on pages 58-60 (in the excellent Edith Grossman translation (the one in the picture (and Amazon link) above). That leaves another 937 pages.

Written in the early 17th century, Don Quixote is a contender for the first novel ever written. The debate is not about an earlier book, but whether this is actually a “novel.” It has so many interweaving stories within stories, it was published in two parts written ten years apart, and it, to put it mildly, wanders all over the place—the debate is whether it retains enough cohesion to be called a novel. The problem with the debate is that if it is not a novel, it is not clear what it is. (Well, other than a masterpiece; it is definitely a masterpiece.)

Have you ever had the pleasure of starting a jaunt on a mountain road and wandering aimlessly wherever the path takes you, picking branches of the trail at random, not really heading anywhere in particular, but admiring the scenery? That is how you should read Don Quixote. Forget what little you know or think you know about the book, and just set off. Embrace every lengthy short story within the larger story. Be thrilled when you keep arriving back at the same Inn, which for no obvious reasons turns out of be a cosmic magnet for curious characters. Simultaneously laugh at Don Quixote and be indignant when the characters in the novel mock him. Be delighted. It is easy to be delighted with this book one you lose the expectation of a linear narrative.

But, as Cervantes notes in the quotation reprinted above, delight is only one of Cervantes’ aims. He also wants to teach. What is the lesson?

We begin see the shape of the lesson by looking at Don Quixote. After a lifetime of being obsessed with stories of knights errant, Don Quixote decides that he will become one, dons his armor, picks a fair maiden he has never seen to be the lady for whom he is doing valiant deeds, hires Sancho Panza to be his page, and then sets off to do Great Things. He meets people on the road who are villains and he defeats them in battles, rescues people from cruel captors, joins massive battels between warring armies, fights giants, and visits castles. Well, at least that is how Don Quixote would describe his story. The narrator tells tales of Don Quixote attacking random travelers, fighting windmills, and visiting inns. Don Quixote’s world is a lot more exciting than the narrator’s (and your) world.

Eventually Don Quixote starts meeting a cast of characters all of whom have lengthy back stories or tell tales of themselves, some true, some invented. Before long, the reader is lost in this maze of stories. You can pause, if you would like, and untangle the web to try to recall which stories are true and which are fictions told by the characters to deceive Don Quixote even further, or you can just enjoy the journey.

Throughout the story, the question of Don Quixote’s madness keeps arising. On the one hand, dressing up in armor and roaming the countryside looking for villains and magical beasts to vanquish is a rather odd thing to do in the year 1600. Knight errantry died out long ago. On the other hand, when Don Quixote speaks, a remarkable thing slowly dawns on the people he meets (and the Reader):

Those who listened to him were overwhelmed again with pity at seeing that a man who apparently was intelligent and rational in all other matters could lose these faculties completely when it was a question of his accursed and bedeviled chivalry….But, as has been said so often in the course of this great history, he spoke nonsense only with regard to chivalry, and in other conversations he demonstrated a clear and confident understanding…

Is Don Quixote mad? Here we have someone who can speak calmly and rationally about every subject you bring up, but is convinced he is a knight errant. Does his delusion about that one thing render him insane?

Before you answer: what do you call someone who dresses up in armor and roams the countryside looking for wrongs to be righted? Isn’t that the very definition of a knight errant? When Don Quixote sets off on his journeys, doesn’t he, in fact, become a knight errant? Is he wrong about himself? Or is he simply wrong in thinking that windmills are giants?

Before you answer that: Suppose an educated person decides that there are great evils in the world and quits a steady, well-paying job in order to go out and right those wrongs. Is that mad? Are missionaries and social works and teachers all afflicted with madness when they believe they are making the world a better place?

Before you answer that: when I put on shoes and go into a classroom and tell 18-22 year olds about supply and demand curves thinking that by doing so I will help rid the world of those Demons called Ignorance and Sloppy Thinking, am I merely dressing up in a professional garb and tilting at windmills?

Don Quixote, c’est moi.

Am I excused because I know my own delusions? So, does Don Quixote:

“It seems to me,” said Sancho, “that knights who did these things were provoked and had a reason to do senseless things and penances; but what reason does you grace have for going crazy?” […]
“Therein lies the virtue,” responded Don Quixote, “and the excellence of my enterprise, for a knight errant deserves neither glory nor thanks if he goes mad for a reason. The great achievement is to lose one’s reason for no reason, and to let my lady know that if I can do this without cause, what should I not do if there were cause?”

One of the things that most fascinated me in reading the book was the constant undercurrent suggesting that Don Quixote was not deluded at all. What if he was choosing to embrace his delusion because it made for a better life than the one he was leading? If so, then how is he any different than everyone who has ever taken up an impossible task simply because the effort to do the Herculean is far better than rotting away in a cubicle or a back room somewhere?

Maybe, just maybe, there are more Don Quixotes in our midst than we care to admit. Maybe, just maybe, you are a Don Quixote too. Maybe the Don Quixotes of the world are indeed the real heroes because at least they are not standing off to the side mocking or ignoring those who are out to slay giants.

Is it better to spend our life slaying giants even if the giants are windmills or to simply trudge along the path of life occasionally briefly noticing the windmills by the side of the road? When the real giants show up, which type of person is going to be more ready for the challenge of facing them?

That is why you should read Don Quixote.

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Villette (and Jane Eyre)

“Bronte’s finest novel.”
Virginia Woolfe

“It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.”
George Eliot

The book? Villette by Charlotte Bronte.

As longtime readers of this here space know, I have long had a deep loathing of Jane Eyre. (More about that anon.) And so saying that Villette is a superior novel is potentially damning with faint praise. So, let us start with a declarative: Villette is good, really good, well worth reading.

Our heroine (and narrator), Lucy Stowe, is a young English woman who finds herself working in a boarding school in the French town of Villette. Love interests? Of course there are (this is a Bronte novel). A strapping young doctor and a jaded French instructor. Ah, but there is also the beautiful young rival, a vain lass lacking any hint of seriousness, and another beautiful rival, lacking any depth of any sort. Toss in an unscrupulous suitor for the first rival, the father of the latter rival, an oddly terrifying matron of the school, and an enigmatic priest. You can now write a story very much like Villette.

In other words, there is nothing about this plot that makes the story in any way significantly different than every other romantic bildungsroman. You’ve read this story a zillion times already. The only questions the reader has throughout the book are a) which love interest will win out in the end? and b) will they live happily ever after?

It is the nature of our heroine that makes the story compelling. Early on, she describes herself:

I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains. Fate would not so be pacified; nor would Providence sanction this shrinking sloth and cowardly indolence.

Lucy Snowe does not see herself, nor does she want to be, the protagonist in this story. Note the title of the book; Villette is the town in which the story takes place; it would be hard to think of a title for the novel which would signify less attachment to the narrator. Eliot (T.S., not George) could have been writing a character description of Lucy when he wrote:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous

Secondary characters like that abound in literature. When secondary characters are the narrator, they are usually detached observers of the actions of others. But, in Villette, Lucy tries to fade into the background while narrating the story of her life in which she is the central character of every interesting episode. It is a curiously effective narrative style.

An observer at heart, Lucy notices much of what is going on around her, but only whenever it does not touch on her personally. Perpetually oblivious to how others see her, we have a heroine who is trying to avoid grand gestures or scenes while patiently seeking out and enduring a myriad of small privations and pains, caught up is a grand romantic novel with romantic intrigues all around, occasionally touching herself. It is the narration, not the plot, which makes this novel so compelling. It has the aura of a detective story without a crime; the reader is constantly trying to be one step ahead of the seemingly clueless narrator in figuring out what is really going on.

There are frequent payoffs in brilliantly crafted descriptions. Here, for example, is how the woman who runs the school is described:

Never was the distinction between charity and mercy better exemplified than in her. While devoid of sympathy, she had a sufficiency of rational benevolence: she would give in the readiest manner to people she had never seen—rather, however, to classes than to individuals. “Pour les pauvres,” she opened her purse freely—against the poor man, as a rule, she kept it closed. In philanthropic schemes for the benefit of society at large she took a cheerful part; no private sorrow touched her: no force or mass of suffering concentrated in one heart had power to pierce hers. Not the agony in Gethsemane, not the death on Calvary, could have wrung from her eyes one tear.

Brilliant. I know a lot of people just like that. (This is, in fact, also a great summary of the thesis in Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals. In crisp biographies of intellectual titans in the past couple hundred years, Johnson mercilessly shows how an intellectual having a very public deep concern for mankind does not correspond with treating real people in their lives with even a modicum of decency. Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Russell, Sartre, and on and on. “Biography as Character Assassination” could be the subtitle of Intellectuals. It is a brilliant book, and wonderfully fun reading.)

While the novel is well worth reading, Villette is not a perfect story. I enjoyed the first two-thirds much more than the last third, which seemed like a jarring shift in tone. In retrospect, the nature of the last third could be interpreted as a change in Lucy herself—she is the narrator after all, so maybe the change in tone is due to the maturation of the narrator. But as it is, it struck me as quite inelegant.

There is also a truly annoying subplot about a ghost haunting the school (mostly in the attic!), which plays no real role in the story and the grand reveal is simply lame. If you are going to have a mysterious ghost in a novel like this, at least have it do something interesting and have the explanation be a lot less painful.

But, none of the above was the most stunning part of reading Villette. The biggest shock for me personally while reading this novel: I realized I have been wrong all along about Jane Eyre.

Somewhere in the middle of reading Villette, the scales fell from my eyes and I suddenly understood Jane Eyre. Mind, the shock of this realization was huge—I have read Jane Eyre at least three times, and here, reading a completely different novel, I finally understood Jane.

Jane Eyre is simply a slightly more adventurous version of Lucy Stowe. It explains so much about Jane and suddenly the constant descriptions of and obsession with the minor privations and pains which she endures, the weird fascination with Rochester, sticking with Rochester even after she discovers he is keeping his wife locked in an attic, the unwillingness to actually just move on with her life, and on and on—all of that is simply a slight variation on Lucy Stowe.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not eagerly anticipating rereading Jane Eyre. But, for the first time since I first read it, I can understand why everyone else seems to adore the book so very much. Jane is the wallflower who is trying to move to center stage.

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