Great Books Archives - Page 7 of 26

The Miner Prophets

Emile Zola used to be more widely known than he is today. Indeed, the place he is most likely to be referenced these days is a passing mention of his famous essay “J’accuse” about the Dreyfus Affair, but then again few people remember the Dreyfus Affair anymore.

Indeed, was Zola pro or anti-Dreyfus?

And what century are we even talking about?

Such is the fickle nature of fame. In the late 19^th century, he was one of the most well-known novelists in the world. In addition to multiple other books, he wrote a series of twenty (yes, 20!) loosely connected novels in an attempt to detail every aspect of French life. He was the sort of novelist who treated the form as something on the border of fiction and journalism; the details are real but the story is fictional.

I first learned of Zola decades ago when reading Tom Wolfe. Wolfe loved Zola. It’s not hard to see why: Wolfe fancied himself a modern day incarnation. From an article in The Guardian:

He is “proud,” he says, “that I do not think any political motivation can be detected in my long books. My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of Les Miserables, in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not—and was not interested in—telling a lie. You can call it honesty, or you can call it ego, but there it is. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.”

I spent some time trying to figure out which Wolfe essay it was that I read that prompted me to get a copy of Zola’s Germinal decades ago. I have no idea—he wrote about Zola in lots of places. But, the best description of the book is in “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” a 1989 Harper’s Magazine article.

In 1884 Zola went down into the mines at Anzin to do the documentation for what was to become the novel Germinal. Posing as a secretary for a member of the French Chamber of Deputies, he descended into the pits wearing his city clothes, his frock coat, high stiff collar, and high stiff hat (this appeals to me for reasons I won’t delay you with), and carrying a notebook and pen. One day Zola and the miners who were serving as his guides were 150 feet below the ground when Zola noticed an enormous workhorse, a Percheron, pulling a sled piled with coal through a tunnel. Zola asked, “How do you get that animal in and out of the mine every day?” At first the miners thought he was joking. Then they realized he was serious, and one of them said, “Mr. Zola, don’t you understand? That horse comes down here once, when he’s a colt, barely more than a foal, and still able to fit into the buckets that bring us down here. That horse grows up down here. He grows blind down here after a year or two, from the lack of light. He hauls coal down here until he can’t haul it anymore, and then he dies down here, and his bones are buried down here.” When Zola transfers this revelation from the pages of his documentation notebook to the pages of Germinal, it makes the hair on your arms stand on end. You realize, without the need of amplification, that the horse is the miners themselves, who descend below the face of the earth as children and dig coal down in the pit until they can dig no more and then are buried, often literally, down there.

Wolfe isn’t exaggerating at all. This is a novel about miners, and I think it would be impossible to read the book and not viscerally feel what it would be like to be a miner in the late 19^th century in France. It is not hard to figure out why there are no theme parks replicating the experience.

The story in the novel revolves around whether the miners should organize a strike in an attempt to get better payment. The novel clearly sympathizers with the miners; indeed, it would be hard not to sympathize with the miners. The owners and managers are surprisingly cartoonish when compared to the miners. The novel would have been a lot stronger if the wealthy had as much depth as the poor, but that would have blunted the impact. Maybe the other 19 novels in the larger series have more detailed portrayals of that class; it is fascinating to think of a 20 part story and this is just the part that delves into the lives of the miners.

Now I know that you, Dear Reader, are wondering why you should care about a novel about 19^th century miners. The answer is in the title of the book. When the French Revolutionaries were busy making all the world new, one of the things they did was create a new calendar—obviously a new political order needs a new set of names for the months! Germinal was the first month in Spring, when things, you know, germinate.

Now, ask this: if there is a novel with the title Germinal that is part of a massive project detailing all the assorted parts of French society, which profession is that novel about? Farming, right? Isn’t that obvious? So, now you pick up this novel which is obviously going to be about farmers, and you slowly realize there ae no farmers here. Just miners.

What is going on? Zola is a clever one. You find out in the last paragraph of the book:

And beneath his feet, the deep blows, those obstinate blows of the pick, continued. The mates were all there; he heard them following him at every stride. Was not that Maheude beneath the beetroots, with bent back and hoarse respiration accompanying the rumble of the ventilator? To left, to right, farther on, he seemed to recognize others beneath the wheatfields, the hedges, the young trees. Now the April sun, in the open sky, was shining in his glory, and warming the pregnant earth. From its fertile flanks life was leaping out, buds were bursting into green leaves, and the fields were quivering with the growth of the grass. On every side seeds were swelling, stretching out, cracking the plain, filled by the need of heat and light. An overflow of sap was mixed with whispering voices, the sound of the germs expanding in a great kiss. Again and again, more and more distinctly, as though they were approaching the soil, the mates were hammering. In the fiery rays of the sun on this youthful morning the country seemed full of that sound. Men were springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would soon overturn the earth. (Ellis translation)

A rather chilling image. Here are these miners, buried away out of sight and out of mind, but they are there, everywhere beneath your feet, waiting to burst forth one day. Maybe you ought to think about those miners. Maybe you ought to think about the work they are doing. Maybe you ought to think about the fact that without coal, the entire society will shut down.

You don’t have to be a Marxist to realize that Zola is right. These were horrific working conditions. Of course the workers didn’t have to go down into the mines. They could always have just starved to death. But, even still, even the slightest degree of humanity makes you think that the mangers and owners could have done at least a little bit better. (This is where, however, the fact that all the managers and owners are such cartoon figures does not help the novel.)

But, on the other hand, it is well worth noting that the job of mining is a lot different now than it was in the late 19^th century. All too often people act as if nothing has changed in the last 150 years. Economic growth is an amazing thing.

There is the central problem, the problem Zola wants you to realize. You actually don’t think much about the actual working conditions and the actual lives of actual people outside your immediate orbit. You have lots of caricatures in your mind. Zola’s project was to fix that; Zola was there to say, “this is how it actually is.” To do that meant going down into those mines, actually going down into the dark and seeing what was there. You want to know what mining is like today? You want to know what it is like to work in a modern factory? Someone needs to go there, notebook in hand, and find the stories equivalent to the horses who spend their whole lives living underground.

The Unquenchable Spark of Humanity

“I wish the book didn’t make me SO sad — I started reading it knowing nothing about the storyline or the author. There are no happy characters, no tying things in a bow, no joyous moments unmarred by sorrow. Yet, you can’t help but sympathize with each of the main characters.”

That was the summary one of my former students provided in a fledgling online reading group. The book: Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

But, first some background (which will seem to you, Dear Reader, to be utterly without interest. Bear with me for a moment.) I first picked up this book many decades ago before I really knew how to read. I don’t mean before I was literate; I mean before I knew how to read with insight and understanding. I hated the book; I quit around page 75. If you asked me about the book I would have said: It is the story of a woman named Sethe who escaped from slavery, had a baby named Beloved who died, and then years later this mysterious stranger named Beloved shows up who doesn’t act human and has supernatural powers and nobody can put two and two together and why exactly am I reading a ghost story because I don’t even like ghost stories. Like I said, I didn’t know how to read yet.

I decided to start it again after reading Morrison’s brilliant novel The Bluest Eye. Suffice it to say, it is not even remotely the book I read before I knew how to read. Indeed, even the ghost in the story is different. The book is deliberately vague about Beloved (and, as discussed below, other things). Maybe she is the ghost of Sethe’s daughter, maybe the ghost of her mother, maybe a composite of all the dead, but the possibility I like best is raised by Stamp Paid toward the end of the novel: “Huh. Was a girl locked up in the house with a whiteman over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone. Maybe that’s her. Folks say he had her in there since she was a pup.”

Why do I like that interpretation? It adds yet another piece to the question raised by this novel which intrigues me a great deal. Is human dignity something which can be eradicated from a person?

The way that sort of question is normally raised is asking whether it is possible for one person to treat another person as if the second person was something less than human. Obviously that is true; there are so many examples, it is inescapable. The capacity in humans to treat other humans like animals (or worse) is extraordinary and provides the best evidence for Original Sin that I can imagine. It is depressing to start thinking of the creative ways that humans have invented purely to torture other human beings. Human depravity is a real thing. In order to commit atrocities of this sort, it does seem psychologically necessary to dehumanize your victims. To do otherwise would be difficult, to say the least.

That, however, is not the intriguing question raised in Beloved. Yes, the novel has accounts of horrific cruelty, but so do lots of other books. Beloved flips the question around. In the face of such evil, can a person lose their own inherent dignity or their own moral balance?

There are multiple books showing the triumph of the human spirit in the face of evil. Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, for example, is a massive argument that no matter what tortures and degradations are heaped upon people, human dignity remains, the human spirit prevails. Jean Hatzfeld’s books on Rwanda show the same thing. Books like that are inspiring even though the stories, the true stories, contained in them will tear apart your soul.

So, we know that it is possible to retain human dignity in the face of evil. But, what about the other way? Is it possible to lose human dignity? Is it possible that the inhumanity of one’s oppressors can squash the last vestige of humanity in a soul? Is it possible for a person to turn into an unthinking reactionary beast because the person has been treated that way for so long?

That is the question about the characters in Beloved. The characters suffered horror, true horror, as slaves, legally considered property, not people. Even after they are free, their lives are shattered beyond repair. These are broken people. All of them are broken. They cope with that brokenness in assorted ways. It is hard to feel happy about the lives any of these characters lead, but it is not hard to admire many of them for their persistence in the face of evil. Paul D and Baby Suggs are straight out of Solzhenitsyn.

But what about Sethe? Her story is horrific, easily the most horrific story in the book. It is hard to imagine a heart so made of stone it would not break encountering Sethe’s story. Yet, it is also hard to offer her your unqualified admiration. Living in freedom, she sees her former oppressors riding her way. Afraid of what is to come, she gathers her children, kills her baby daughter, and attempts to kill her sons.

What do we make of this act of desperation? A mother killing her own baby is the sort of story that becomes one of those TV trials these days. People are horrified. People ask how any mother could do such a thing? Do we say the same thing about Sethe? Or do we understand how she could do such a thing? Does her history explain her act of infanticide? Do we pity her? Or judge her?

The question underlying all that is how we, the Readers, look at Sethe. Is she a moral agent making an immoral decision? Can we say that the act was actually moral, that she was right to kill her baby daughter? Can we say we understand why she did it, but still condemn her for doing it? Would you sentence Sethe for the crime of infanticide or excuse her from punishment because of why she did it? And, the most disturbing question of all: are you thinking that what has happened to Sethe has actually removed her from the realm in which questions of guilt or innocence are appropriate?

Beloved raises these question, but I do not think it provides an answer. That is why the question of who or what Beloved is becomes so important. If Beloved is another women who escaped from captivity and then tried to find a way to get through life, then it adds to this story of moral accountability in the face of evil. Is what Beloved did right? And the fact that the nature of the character is ambiguous, the novel raises it to a question not just about the characters in this novel but all people in all time who have suffered under true cruelty. It is possible and inspiring for people to persevere in the face of that cruelty. But, what do we say about the people who were crushed by the cruelty? If they in turn commit cruel acts, how do we judge them?

Destiny and the Coin Flip

“Most people dont believe that there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of.”

No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

Anton Chigurh is what you, Dear Reader, would call a homicidal psychopath. That is not what he would call himself. The difference between your description and his description reveals much about how you see the world.

(Side note: Chigurh is pronounced something like “sugar.” There is no way to really know how to pronounce it. Anybody who ever asked him is probably no longer among the living.)

The plot of the novel follows the actions of four men near the border of Texas. Llewellyn Moss, mid-30s, married, living in a trailer park, driving a pickup truck. Sheriff Bell, a small town sheriff, the old man of the title. Carson Wells, a rather cocky bounty hunter. And Anton Chigurh, a force of nature. It is Chigurh who interests us here.

Chigurh moves through the novel with an unflappable stoicism. You can imagine him delivering all his lines in a cold and patient monotone. You can imagine him shooting a man with zero hesitancy or doubt or even a twinge of guilt. You can imagine him accomplishing the task in front of him with a cold, almost mechanical precision. Who is this guy, you ask? You’ll never know. He shows up with no backstory. He just is.

At three points in the novel he explains his philosophy to a person who simply cannot comprehend what he is saying. It is hard to believe that such a person can really exist. What type of person is he? You are now thinking he is a cold-blooded psychopath. Maybe you are right. Maybe.

Twice, Chigurh takes a coin out of his pocket, flips it, and demands that the person to whom he is talking call it. He doesn’t explain what happens if you call the coin the right way, but neither the person of whom the demand is made, or you the Reader, have any doubt that calling the coin is a matter of life and death.

At this point, Chigurh sounds a bit like the Batman-villain Two-Face, who leaves his decisions up to chance by flipping a coin. But, that is not at all how Chigurh sees the coin flip.

Put yourself in the position of facing Chigurh. Is he there to kill you? Your immediate reaction is that he is deciding whether to kill you or not. So, you appeal to him. You tell him he does not have to do this; he does not have to kill you. His reply: “Everybody says that.” Everybody imagines that Chigurh is making a choice. So he takes out a coin, flips it, and tells you to call it.

You now think that your life is being decided by the random flip of a coin. But as Chigurh will explain, it isn’t. The coin has been flipped. Nothing you can do or say will change the outcome of the flip. You can appeal to the coin all you want, but whether it is heads or tails will be totally unaffected by your pleas. So, call it. (This is the Reader Participation portion of the essay—call the coin. The result will be revealed shortly. The whole message of this essay depends on you calling the coin flip now. So, do it. After all, what do you have to lose by calling this coin flip?)

Was your fate just decided by how you called the coin after reading the last paragraph? If you called it wrong, will bad things happen? You think the coin has absolutely nothing to do with whether your future is good or bad, whether you live or die. Calling the coin wrong will not cause bad outcomes in your life. Chigurh pulling a trigger is what causes the death. But, this is where Chigurh will explain that your view of the world is wrong. “Look at it my way. I got here the same way the coin did.”

As Chigurh explains, the coin flip does not determine what happens to you. The coin flip merely reveals destiny. You were either going to say the same thing as how the coin came up or you were not. If you are destined to live, then obviously your call and the coin flip will be the same. “It doesn’t have to be that way” makes no sense. What is is what is. Nothing you can say or do will change what is. Nothing you can say or do will change whether the coin was heads or tails. And just as what is is what is, what will be is what will be. You call the coin wrong, then you will die. All Chigurh is doing is acting out what will be. You cannot change the coin. You cannot influence Chigurh. Both are impersonal forces, implacable and unchangeable.

Most people don’t believe that there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of.

Why don’t you believe there can be such a person? Why do you call him a homicidal psychopath? You don’t like the idea that whatever will be will be. You don’t like that idea at all. But what if your preference does not affect what will be. What if no matter how much you plead, the coin will still be what it will be. What if there is a person who is just like that coin? What if the whole universe is just like that coin?

You called the coin above. It was Heads. There is nothing you can do about the fact that you either called it correctly or not. And now you have to live with the consequences. You have no say at all over what consequences will come from whether you called Heads or Tails above. You scoff. You insist that nothing will come if it. You say it is just a silly trick in an essay. Maybe you are right. Maybe. But there is nothing you can do about it, is there?

A Jolly Time with Martin Chuzzlewit

If you made a list of the Best of Charles Dickens, you would almost certainly not include Martin Chuzzlewit. You would not be unusual.

A sign of where this book ranks in the popular imagination: Doctor Who once met Charles Dickens and while expressing his general admiration, he did wonder what in the world Dickens was thinking when he wrote this novel.

Is it really that awful? A complicated question, that.

The subtitle of Martin Chuzzlewit could be A Tale of Two Novels. Well, really two novels and a short story.

The whole work is a little over 800 pages long. First, an aside: the sheer length of the typical Dickens book prevents many people from starting one. This is unfortunate. The novels really aren’t as long as they seem when they are sitting on the bookshelf. Remember, the novels were originally published in installments; when the installments were collected into a single volume, the break points were eliminated. Fear not. With the handy aid of Wikipedia, you can find the original installment break points. My advice: read Dickens in those installments. Each section is about 40 pages long. One section at a time is a rather short bit of reading, and the next thing you know, you are done with the book. Moreover, the installment breaks themselves are really interesting to notice, something which is totally lost in plowing through the book all at once.

Returning to Chuzzlewit: the first big break in the book comes around the halfway point. The first half of the novel was an awful slog. Characters are introduced and then meander around doing little to nothing. Then new characters come along and also do nothing. A few of the characters rise to the level of potentially interesting, but, even those characters have nothing to do and get lost in the general malaise of a novel heading nowhere.

Then quite suddenly, the novel shifts into something wonderful. The characters become Dickens characters, alive and full of irrepressible charm. The plot jerks into motion with dastardly villains doing evil things to good people. Through an improbable set of coincidences, the good people win out in the end. The good people live happily ever after; the villains meet their just ends. Best of all, characters who had potential realize their potential. Pecksniff, Jonas Chuzzlewit, Mrs. Gamp, Tom Pinch, Mark Tapley all become those perfect Dickens caricatures who reveal more about humanity than you would think could be possible.

This break in the quality of the novel was quite jarring. Here I was dutifully picking up the book again to read another 40 pages without anticipation that it was going to be a pleasant hour, and suddenly, I found myself immersed in a world of joy. Jonas Chuzzlewit turned from dull mean guy into a villain right up there with Bill Sykes. Pecksniff became fully Pecksniffian, a bombastic smarmy, manipulative conniving man whose every speech is so over-the top you can’t help but laugh at the wonder of it all. It even has one of those marvelous endings which Serious Literary Critics™ hate, but I absolutely adore, when we suddenly find out that one of the characters who seemed so mean was really just pretending all along and is actually a good guy!

Naturally enough I got to puzzling over why the novel suddenly became good, but while my cursory search of the matter did not turn up anyone talking about this (for reasons which will be discussed anon), I did find a remarkable coincidence, which may in fact be explanatory. In the midst of writing Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens also wrote A Christmas Carol. Then I looked at the dates and much to my shock, the story took on its charm at the very time when A Christmas Carol showed up.

The likely reason that nobody else is splitting the novel in two as I have done here is that there is another split which is even more obvious and which takes up all the air in the room in discussions of this novel. Suddenly, for no apparent reason in the middle of the long meandering first part, young Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley head off to America. This journey occupies three (non-sequential) installments. They go to America, meet some Americans, and then come home. There is absolutely nothing in this entire journey that advances the plot of the novel in any way whatsoever. You could rip this whole section out and there would be no break in the story.

Indeed, the American section would be better ripped out and published separately. It is nothing more than a chance for Dickens to vent his spleen a bit. The message: America is a land of slave-owners, swindlers, and saps. Had Dickens simply put this satire into a stand-alone work, it might have been quite good. There is some potential here for something akin to what Twain did on a regular basis. But, crammed into a novel about the Chuzzlewit family in England, the whole thing just leaves the reader trying to figure out where this is going. The fact that it goes nowhere then just compounds the bewilderment. As Doctor Who puts it: “Mind you, for God’s sake, the American bit in Martin Chuzzlewit, what’s that about? Was that just padding? Or what? I mean, it’s rubbish, that bit.” On the other hand, G. K. Chesterton likes that bit…which just shows the sad fact that Chesterton is not always reliable.

Enough about the downsides of the novel. Let us praise Mark Tapley for a bit. As Tapley is always quick to explain, he is a jolly fellow. But, he suffers from an unbearable problem. When you are living in good circumstances, it is easy to be jolly. There is no credit in being jolly when things are going well. For example:

“Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. There an’t much credit in that. If I was very ragged and very jolly, then I should begin to feel I had gained a point.”

“There might be some credit in being jolly with a wife, ‘specially if the children had the measles and that, and was very fractious indeed. But I’m a’most afraid to try it. I don’t see my way clear.”

What is Mark Tapley to do? Everywhere he goes, he finds himself jolly. He desperately wants to find some way out of this problem:

‘I was thinking,’ Mark replied, ‘of something in the grave-digging way.’
‘Good gracious, Mark?’ cried Mr Pinch.
‘It’s a good damp, wormy sort of business, sir,’ said Mark, shaking his head argumentatively, ‘and there might be some credit in being jolly, with one’s mind in that pursuit, unless grave-diggers is usually given that way; which would be a drawback. You don’t happen to know how that is in general, do you, sir?’
‘No,’ said Mr Pinch, ‘I don’t indeed. I never thought upon the subject.’
‘In case of that not turning out as well as one could wish, you know,’ said Mark, musing again, ‘there’s other businesses. Undertaking now. That’s gloomy. There might be credit to be gained there. A broker’s man in a poor neighbourhood wouldn’t be bad perhaps. A jailor sees a deal of misery. A doctor’s man is in the very midst of murder. A bailiff’s an’t a lively office nat’rally. Even a tax-gatherer must find his feelings rather worked upon, at times. There’s lots of trades in which I should have an opportunity, I think.’

It is hard to fully recommend Mark Tapley as a role model, but there is something quite admirable about a guy whose biggest complaint is that things around him never seem bleak to him. He goes to America with Martin because maybe America will allow him to feel credit for being jolly. You will be happy to hear that things are indeed so awful in America that Mark fully deserves all the credit he can get for being jolly even in America!

All of which raises an interesting question: do you get credit for being jolly while reading Martin Chuzzlewit? For the first half, most certainly, but then the book becomes wonderful and I am afraid you will just have to be content with getting no credit for being jolly as you finish the novel.

Your Mind is an Arrant Thief

How does your mind work? Has there ever been anyone who didn’t spend time musing on that question? What we can dub “Mind Studies” is a rather popular genre of literature. Not only are there the books written by psychologists and neuropsychologists and biologists and economists, but every self-help book ever written fits into the same category. Discover how your mind works and you can unlock the key to making it work better. So, if I told you I recently read one of the most fascinating books on how your mind works, you are interested.

What does a Great Novel do? It creates a world that starts with some important aspect of humanity, isolates it, and creates a story which brings that aspect into sharp relief, allowing the Reader to see more clearly than would otherwise be possible. If you want to think deeply about X, you read novel Y. One of the many beautiful things about a Great Novel is you are never quite sure what it is you will learn. Truly Great Novels have the potential to show more than one thing, and the Greatest of the Great show new things on each rereading. So, if I told you I recently read a novel that illuminated things I never imagined could be illuminated in a novel, you are interested.

The books described in the last two paragraphs are obviously the same book. But the descriptions in the last two paragraphs are not the normal descriptions of Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

If you picked up and flipped through a copy of Pale Fire, you would not recognize it as a novel. It begins with a Foreword, which is not that uncommon. Then comes the poem. A 999 line poem divided into four cantos. The first and fourth cantos are 166 lines; Cantos 3 and 4 are 334 lines. (Is that fact important?) There then follows 173 pages (in the Library of America edition) of Commentary on the poem arranged by the line numbers. The book ends with an index, allowing you to easily find where a given reference is found.

Pale Fire looks identical to a critical commentary on a long poem entitled, you guessed it, “Pale Fire.” The only sign on first glance that things are not what they seem is Nabokov’s name on the cover of the book. A bold publisher would have left off Nabokov’s name. Pale Fire, by John Shade, edited with critical commentary by Charles Kinbote. Since the book was published in 1962, pre-internet, it would have been fascinating to see if the ruse would have worked.

But, we know it is fiction because we looked at the cover. How is it a novel? The editor, Kinbote, tells the story in the foreword. He is an academic who lives next door to the great poet John Shade. Kinbote tells Shade the story of how the king of Kinbote’s native Zembla (one of those tiny European countries that barely show up on a map) had to flee the country in the midst of a revolution. Shade sets out to write an epic poem about this story, and the result is “Pale Fire” (the poem). Sadly, Shade is murdered right after finishing the poem, but fortunately Kinbote rescued the Great Poem and was able to publish it with all the critical annotations necessary to fully understand this most magnificent poem. Between the poem and the commentary, we get a complete novel of Kinbote’s relationship with Shade as well as the whole history of the events in Zembla. So far, so good. Kinbote is a pleasant prose stylist; the commentary flows right along.

If you read the book and your brain stopped there, you have just read a nice little story and probably enjoyed it. There is nothing on the surface of this story that disturbs that nice little narrative. There is no grand revelation at the end that there is more to this book than meets the eye. But your mind, working away in the background, notices something before too long. Kinbote is the exiled king. The story of the exile is his story. And now you think this is a slightly more intriguing story of an exiled king who is trying to keep his identity hidden. Why does he need to hide his identity? Because those Zemblan revolutionaries have sent an assassin out to kill him. And, alas, you realize as the story moves along, Shade was accidentally killed by the assassin who was trying to kill Kinbote. Again, if your mind stopped there, you have a nice little story.

But, your mind doesn’t stop there either. The poem comes before the commentary. When you read the poem, you had no idea at all that it was about the fate of the King of Zembla. It is only when Kinbote tells you that certain lines are hidden references to Zembla that you would have any idea at all that Zembla is in any way relevant to this poem. The poem itself actually seems incredibly autobiographical; the poet is talking about his own life throughout. This makes you wonder as you read the commentary whether Kinbote is right that this poem was really about Zembla at all. Indeed, as Kinbote stretches the attempts to connect this poem you just read to the history of Zembla, it goes far beyond the breaking point.

The poem itself is a lot like something T.S. Eliot would have written in his “Waste Land” years. You read it and every now and then a bit of a story pops up and you can make sense of it for a few lines, but mostly it is the sort of poem you realize you’ll have to live with for years in order to start piecing together the images. Just in case you miss the Eliot comparison, there is a truly funny part about a third of the way through the poem. The poet’s daughter is in another room and starts calling out to her parents to ask them the meaning of some words in a book she is reading. The words she asks about: Grimpen, Chtonic, Sempiternal. If you laughed when you saw those three words, you have spent a lot of time puzzling out Eliot. (Kinbote’s commentary on this scene: “I believe I can guess (in my bookless mountain cave) what poem is meant; but without looking it up I would not wish to name its author. Anyway, I deplore my friend’s vicious thrusts at the most distinguished poet of his day.”)

And now your mind starts working a bit harder in thinking about this novel. If Kinbote is not being completely truthful about the connection between this poem and Zemblan history, about what else is he not being completely truthful? What if Kinbote is an unreliable narrator? As soon as the thought hits, you realize he is indeed an unreliable narrator.

But how unreliable? And now you can watch your own mind work. You just read this nice little book which if your mind would have left it alone would have seemed like a good story told in an unconventional format. But, your mind can’t leave it alone. Why not? Why do you feel compelled to solve the mystery of the book? The solution is just right there around the next corner, so you start recalling little oddities here and there, and you start putting together a picture of what really happened in this book. Step back and watch your mind make these connections, screaming “Aha!,” quickly followed a moment later with, “Oh, but what about this?”

Your mind starts racing through hypotheses about the book, each seemingly more outlandish than the last until you realize that the outlandish thesis actually seems to work even better that then less outlandish one. When you get really hooked you realize you probably should read the Index. Are there clues in there? If you start reading the index and looking up the passages referenced in the Index, are there even more clues there. (Yes, there are.)

Suddenly you realize this is even more intricate than Eliot. With the Waste Land or the Four Quartets, you just have a poem to puzzle over for the rest of your life. Don’t mistake how long you will ponder Eliot; as Kinbote notes in his commentary, “toilest” is an anagram of T.S. Eliot. Here in Pale Fire you have not just a poem, but a whole commentary and index as well. What fresh insights will you get with just 15 more minutes of thinking about it?

And sooner or later you realize you can’t help yourself. Your mind is wired to find ever more complicated answers to simple questions. You see clues everywhere. In fact, you start staring at passages which you originally read as straight narrative, looking for the hidden clues. The only question is how long you will keep at this game.

And when you are done playing, then you can step back and ask yourself why you played this game in the first place. Why did you make the connections you did? Where did you look for the clues? How does your mind work? Pale Fire does an incredible job at taking that one aspect of humanity—how does the mind form patterns?—isolating it and then crafting a story around it so that you can see it more clearly that you would have ever thought possible.

You want to understand how people craft grand narratives of their lives or the world which seem so different than the narratives you have crafted? Read Pale Fire.

Opium and Reptiles

Confessions of an English Opium Eater is one of those oddly compelling titles. “Confessions” has that hint of allure, and the phrase “English Opium Eater” is quaint with a touch of scandal.

I picked up my copy many decades ago at a library book sale. But alas, the title was compelling enough to part with a quarter to purchase it, but not tantalizing enough to actually read the book. Until now.

Hearing the tale, you will be forgiven for thinking this is a penny dreadful, but while having that style (and indeed, the original publication was a magazine serial), it is an autobiography. The timing of his life matters, so bear with me for a minute. Thomas de Quincey was the smart kid from a rich family, who was bored in boarding school and so ran away. A third of the book relates his early life in school and wandering homeless for a couple of years, all with nary a bit of opium in sight. Eventually, he goes off to Oxford, and then (finally) in 1804 discovers the substance which led to the title which was the only reason anyone ever cared enough to read his autobiography. Until 1812, it was a once a week habit. Then came the breaking point, and from 1813 through 1819, he was a full-scale addict, taking high doses daily. In 1821, Confessions was serialized in three parts, relating his fall into addiction and his rise out of it. It was a hit.

Obviously, the next step was to put it into book form in 1822, where De Quincey added an appendix that noted many readers had the impression he had kicked the opium addition because, well, he wrote the narrative in a manner that pretty much said he had done so. However, he reveals that he still takes opium, just not as much. He spent the rest of his life as a low grade addict. So, the feel good ending turns out not to be so feel good after all.

The autobiographical details aren’t really enough to turn this into a classic; there are no horrifying stories of the dastardly deeds done by the English Opium Eater prowling the dark back alleys of London. So what keeps this book on the fringes of “Books worth Reading”? The prose is good, so that helps. But the heart of the book is De Quincey’s lengthy descriptions of the Pleasures and the Pains of opium.

One way to read this book, then, is as a cost-benefit analysis of picking up an opium addiction. I know that makes me sound like an economist, but, honest, it is De Quincey who is writing like an economist. The timing of what follows is, let’s say, curious. Recall that his daily opium use was from 1813 to 1819. Shortly before that, De Quincey discovered an amazing subject: “I had been led in 1811 to look into loads of books and pamphlets on many branches of economy.” Huzzah! (“Huzzah” is the kind of word thy used in 1811.) Ah, but we rejoiced too soon: “I saw that these were generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of sound head, and practised in wielding logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole academy of modern economists, and throttle them between heaven and earth with his finger and thumb, or bray their fungus heads to powder with a lady’s fan.” Ouch. A year later, De Quincey is an opium addict. Let us hope this was not causal.

But wait, there’s more. In 1819, De Quincey breaks his habit. What else happened in 1819?

At length, in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr. Ricardo’s book: and recurring to my own prophetic anticipation of the advent of some legislator for this science, I said, before I had finished the first chapter, “Thou art the man!” Wonder and curiosity were emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I wondered once more: I wondered at myself that I could once again be stimulated to the effort of reading: and much more I wondered at the book. Had this profound work been really written in England during the nineteenth century? Was it possible? I supposed thinking had been extinct in England. Could it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares, had accomplished what all the universities of Europe, and a century of thought, had failed even to advance by one hair’s breadth? All other writers had been crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents; Mr. Ricardo had deduced, à priori, from the understanding itself, laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions into a science of regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.

Who knew David Ricardo was such a magnificent writer? I always thought he was tedious.

But, despite this fascinating foray into economic analysis, the real subject matter of the book is opium. De Quincey clearly thinks his book will convince you of the horrors of opium, that the cost-benefit analysis is heavily weighted on the cost side. He was wrong about his own book; I think it is fair to say that the benefits seem larger than the costs.

De Quincey waxes quite poetic about the benefits:

Oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for “the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,” bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from blood; and to the proud man a brief oblivion for
Wrongs undress’d and insults unavenged;
that summonest to the chancery of dreams, for the triumphs of suffering innocence, false witnesses; and confoundest perjury, and dost reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges;—thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles—beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatómpylos, and “from the anarchy of dreaming sleep” callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties and the blessed household countenances cleansed from the “dishonours of the grave.” Thou only givest these gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!

Contrast that to the pains of opium: it gives you bad dreams and hallucinations. He found himself surrounded by a menagerie of ugly birds and reptiles:

The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him, and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated.

Now that doesn’t sound too good. But, compare it to the encomium to the “just, subtle, and mighty opium” above, and it isn’t hard to see that the book might induce many a soul to decide that the good outweighs the bad. After, all, you get the good with the small doses, right? The bad only becomes a problem when you take a lot, right? So, just don’t take a lot, see, and everything will be OK. All of which leads me to wonder how many other attempts to dissuade a person from taking a hallucinogenic substance led to an increase in the use of the substance.

Part of the problem with De Quincey’s book is that if you really want a literary experience of drug addiction, Confessions of an English Opium Eater doesn’t even compare to Hunter S, Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (To be fair: the strongest mind altering substance I have ever used is coffee, so I am not an expert on whether De Quincey or Thompson is more accurate, just which is more literarily interesting.) An example? How about this:

Terrible things were happening all around us. Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman’s neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge – impossible to walk on it, no footing at all. “Order some golf shoes,” I whispered. “Otherwise, we’ll never get out of this place alive. You notice these lizards don’t have any trouble moving around in this muck – that’s because they have claws on their feet.”

Are reptiles a constant occurrence in hallucinogenic episodes?