Part two of a very long discourse

(Link to Part One of a Very Long Discourse and Part Three of a Very Long Discourse)

Occasionally, I become infatuated with fictional characters. Pathetic, I know. The most significant was Holden Caulfield; the result of reading The Catcher in the Rye as an impressionable young seventeen-year-old.

Catcher in the Rye is a novel that should never be read by anyone over the age of 18.

The first time I read it, I embraced Holden Caulfield’s cynicism with relish and tried to convince every living human that it was the greatest book ever written. I wrote research papers about it, I wrote stories in Salinger’s/Holden’s cynical style of narration, and when I got to college I spent time with my friends arguing over which people on campus seemed accurate personifications of Holden (usually based on the presence of a hunting cap with earflaps). I cheered any references to Catcher I read or saw on television or in movies. I wanted to marry Holden Caulfield, to tell the truth, despite the fact that he would probably ultimately find marriage squalid and depressing.

Eventually, I ran out of books I hadn’t read (obviously, this was before I discovered the Russians) and decided to read good old Catcher in the Rye again. Bad idea. The saying goes that you can’t step in the same river twice, and you definitely can’t read the same story twice, especially if it happens to be written by JD Salinger. Upon second reading, I was about 20, past high school and on hiatus from college. I found Salinger’s language still to be poignant and sarcastic and funny: “I don’t much like to see old guys in their pajamas and bathrobes anyway. Their bumpy old chests are always showing,” and “Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head,” are passages that cracked me up when I first read it and they still crack me up now.

But there was something missing the second time I read it. Holden annoyed the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. He just complained too damn much! It had been the basis of his charm before, but not now. It had something to do with the fact that you don’t possess the same innocence and wonder at 20 as you do at 17. Or the fact that all you want at 20 is to be 21 and party. Or that once you encounter real people who are as depressed or complain as much as Holden, it's hard to deal with. There’s also the fact that I read all of JD Salinger’s short stories that I could get my hands on, and I simply didn’t like them as well. Then there’s the fact that Salinger seems to feel, as Steven King put it, that his writing is too good for anyone to read. It just seemed…I don’t know, overrated, somehow.

Yeah, not somehow overrated, but totally overrated. I'm convinced that the enduring popularity of this book is owed solely to the fact that it's a banned book. I'm pretty sure old JD sold his soul to the devil to get noticed. Some words of wisdom: ladies, if you meet a guy who has read this book since turning 19 and considers it one of his faves, run for your fucking life, because you can be sure that guy is a great big mopey bore. The sick thing is that now I have a Lit-major-y urge to look up scholarly articles about Catcher to see what the scholars have to say. I suppose it might mean more to give it another read with an eye to Modernism, now that I know more about it, but blehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

If I want some late-Modernist reading I'll just stick with Camus. His characters don't mope.

the monk again

Ambrosio plays the feminized character during the selection from The Monk. In the section from Chapter 2, he admonishes himself not to give in to “temptation” and “the seduction of luxury and desire” (Norton 596). The idea of not giving in to temptation or not being seduced is one generally associated with the virtuous woman. In the scene from Chapter 8, Ambrosio is described as being “more timid” than a woman, which allows Elvira to get the best of him at first. Elvira in this scene acts the more masculine part, declaring ‘“I will secure [Antonia]” and threatening to expose Ambrosio’s attempt to rape Antonia to all of Madrid (Norton 599). When he kills her it is out of desperation and fear; he is operating from a position of less power, which is typically the female role.

This selection of The Monk supports the claims of Anna Letitia Aikin and John Aikin because it both compels the reader to satisfy her curiosity and stimulates the imagination. Lewis makes it clear in Chapter 2 that though Ambrosio is held in very high esteem as a virtuous monk, he has human flaws, namely vanity and lust. His unconventional lust for the painting of the Madonna coupled with his great pride makes the reader want to read on to see how these qualities will combine to bring about Ambrosio’s fall from grace. These qualities also enlarge the reader’s imagination because monks are often thought of as so virtuous that they are above normal human weakness; Lewis’s Ambrosio refutes those ideas. The Aikin’s two ideas of gothic allure are combined in the Chapter 8 reading because the reader must have her curiosity satisfied as to what happens when Ambrosio tries to rape Antonia, and she is continually having her conceptions of what a monk should be shattered.

The feeling I get from reading this is one of horror more than terror. Terror reading occurs more when the reader is forced to identify with the hero or heroine who is passive and who doesn’t know what is going on. In this scene Antonia is passive, but the reader is forced to identify more with Ambrosio because the story is told from his point of view. He is the monster in this scene, and it gives the reader a sense of horror to identify with the monster and to know what he is doing or what his intentions are.

2 divine images

The first stanza of William Blake’s The Divine Image shows how important are the graces of “Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,” to humanity; not only does man call upon them for aid in times of “distress,” he also attributes prosperity and happiness to them when he is not in need (85). The first stanza of The Human Abstract, on the other hand, points out that man wouldn’t need graces such as pity or mercy if there weren’t inequalities between men such as poverty: “Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody Poor” (95). This is paradoxical to the second stanza of The Divine Image, which sets up “Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love” as ideals that man should strive to practice because God is comprised of these qualities and man is God’s creation (85). The paradox suggested by the first stanza of The Human Abstract is that in order for these graces to exist there must be poverty and suffering, because “Mercy no more could be / If all were as happy as we” (95).

The final three stanzas of The Divine Image call for all humans to love one another because if man is both capable of practicing the four graces mentioned above, and if “every man, of every clime, / That prays in his distress” calls upon those same graces, then all men are really praying to the same God, whether “heathen, Turk, or Jew” (85). He also states that God is in all men: “Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell, / There God is dwelling too” (85). This call to all humans is shown to be idealistic in light of what Blake says about humans in The Human Abstract, which suggests the true nature of man rather than the ideal. Here Blake states that man is only humble when he has “holy fears,” i.e. when he remembers that he doesn’t want to spend eternity in Hell; his humility is based in selfishness rather than genuine respect for God (95). Out of selfishness grows a tree which shades man in “Mystery,” or evil, and which “bears the fruit of deceit” (95). Blake ends the poem with a vivid image of this tree as part of “the human Brain,” which is different from the end of The Divine Image, in which he calls upon man to “love the human form,” with the word “form” meaning either a body or an ideal. By stating that a tree bearing deceit lies in the human brain, The Human Abstract warns that though this “form” represents a divine ideal, though this body may be the image of God on the outside, inside it dwells not only God but also this tree of deceit.

Of Proofreaders and Dogs

One thing I like about this book is the fact that Saramago mentions dogs frequently. Like the scene on pages 140-44 where Raimundo interrupts his errand to see Dr. Maria Sara in order to feed the stray dog who has been hanging around his apartment. One of the things that strikes me about this scene is the fact that Raimundo can’t just give the dog food and go on his way. He has to wait and make sure the dog eats the food, and this makes him late.

It’s almost as though Raimundo’s and the dog’s roles are reversed in this scene. It starts out with the dog wailing piteously to get Raimundo’s attention, then as soon as Raimundo decides to help the dog, he is almost falling all over himself to please the starving dog. First he “decides to return home to find something that a famished dog dare not refuse,” even though he needn’t worry because a starving animal isn’t likely to refuse anything one sets in front of it (141). Once he finds something, the narrator tells us “he was so worried about being late and making a favourable impression when he puts the fruits of his plunder before the dog” (141-2). What I get from this statement is the sense that the “favourable impression” he’s worried about making is with both Dr. Maria Sara and also with the dog. He hovers just “three paces away” from the food, as though he is eager to make sure this food pleases the dog. It is only when he realizes that his proximity keeps the dog from enjoying his scraps that he moves away.

Raimundo is very anxious for the dog not to reject his offering, for how insulting would it be to be rejected by a beggar? He is just like the dog, only what he is starved for and wants from the dog (and other people) is friendship; “[o]n condition that it’s friendship is returned” begins Raimundo before switching to a short meditation on the nature of the Moorish perception and treatment of dogs—he never sufficiently follows up that opening phrase about friendship (140). Raimundo doesn’t speak the actual follow-up to this statement, which if finished would be “[o]n condition that it’s friendship is returned, I will feed this dog.” In the same way the dog is wary of eating for fear of being kicked, Raimundo is wary of reaching out to other creatures—even a dog, who “might well be [man’s] one and only remaining friend”—for fear of being rejected (140). I see this at play in Raimundo’s first meeting with Dr. Maria Sara when he snaps at her about deleaturs.

He may sense his own similarity to this starving dog, as he is starved for companionship and human relationships, but I don’t think he fully realizes it yet. He muses on the “otherness” dogs represent to different religious groups, here he speaks of how the Moors consider dogs dirty, and a few chapters back he discusses how, historically, Christians and Moors called each other “dogs” and both groups referred to Jews the same way. Raimundo himself is outside normal society; he’s always alone, he doesn’t even talk to his cleaning lady, or if he does he’s not interested in what she has to say. He and the dog are the same in many ways, and the narrator even shows them as mirrors on page 140, the dog’s first mention in this scene: “[n]ow ... [Raimundo] is standing on the Escadinhas de São Crispim, eyeing the dog who is watching him.” The difference is that the dog openly cries out for what it needs, whereas Raimundo does not; he seems bottled up inside himself. I think throwing away his hair dye is the first step towards actively seeking companionship, as is his fantasizing about Dr. Maria Sara, and even accepting a ride from her like he does at the end of today’s section. I hope to see Raimundo’s relationship with the dog develop as well as his relationship with Dr. Maria Sara.

Who is Raimundo Silva?

Raimundo Silva seems to be a man who is hiding from himself. This is what I see in his flight from the phone on page 49 and his subsequent walk around Lisbon. He never lets his thoughts get very self-reflective, instead ruminating on the “childish” way the woman in the café eats the crumbs of her pastry, pondering over the discreetness of waiters or how the Japanese and American tourists feel about the architectural marvels of Lisbon (53-7). (But wait, is it Raimundo or the narrator who occupies his thoughts this way? Both, because they are one and the same—see below!)

The fact that he dyes his hair is another indicator that Senhor Silva is hiding from himself, especially the way he goes about it, “lock[ing] himself in...he did it in secret, which, as he ought to know, was no secret to anyone, and he would certainly have died of shame were he ever to be discovered carrying out what he himself considered a depressing operation” (90). This points to some essential part of his nature, as he seems to be both totally non-self-aware and at the same time in denial about the fact that he’s getting older and that he’s alone, as we see on page 81 when Leonard Cohen reminds him that he’s alone and that he is missing out on life: “[w]hy won’t you listen to me, lonely man...now [Leonard Cohen] could sing, and sing he did, he sang of things only someone who has lived can sing of...someone who has loved” which causes Raimundo to cry in his darkened apartment.

I’ve been thinking that the reason there are no quotation marks around the dialogue in this story are because the dialogue all seems to be occurring within Raimundo’s memory. Obviously I am right, as on page 96 Dr. Maria Sara asks Raimundo to write his own version of The History of the Siege of Lisbon “in which the crusaders do not help the Portuguese.” The book we are now reading is obviously that same book authored by Raimundo. I love metafiction!

It looks as though this eventual romance with Dr. Maria Sara will make Senhor Silva look back on his life with more penetration than he exhibits currently. Though I think some things are starting to dawn on him, as he says on page 100: “could it be that Dr Maria Sara simply wants to see how far he is capable of going down the path of madness...perhaps one of the symptoms is this impression of alienation, as if this were not my home and this place and these things meant nothing to me[.]” Here we have Raimundo already associating Dr. Maria Sara with the idea that this lonely bachelor life is not the only possible life for him. He also brings in the idea of madness, a word which authors and poets have long equated with both romantic love and divine insight. I can’t wait to see where this goes!

Grenouille and Gollum

I think it really speaks for Süskind’s talent that he can make the reader identify with a character who is so solitary, misanthropic, and inhuman. Part of how he does this is, like I said before, is by setting up foils for Grenouille who treat him like garbage, thus evoking the reader’s sympathy; the other orphans, Grimal, Baldini, and now Taillade-Espinasse. It’s funny that people in class were talking about Grenouille as a super hero, because this section in particular has a lot of comic book elements. There’s the obvious fact that Grenouille can smell humans miles away, but there’s also this quest that he goes on which is a journey into himself.

The description of landscape on page 118 sounds like the post-apocalyptic nightmare landscape of a comic book and its relationship to the comic book anti-hero: “[m]oonlight knew no colors and traced the contours of the terrain only very softly. It covered the land with a dirty gray, strangling life all night long. This world molded in lead, where nothing moved but the wind that fell sometimes like a shadow over the gray forests, and where nothing lived but the scent of the naked earth, was the only world that he accepted, for it was much like the world of his soul.” After reading this, it’s not surprising that Grenouille holes himself up in a barren cave on a barren mountain in the middle of a barren wilderness.

The initial description of Grenouille’s existence in the cave is utterly inhuman: “[h]e also found nourishment in the form of small salamanders and ring snakes; he pinched off their heads, then devoured them whole...he discovered a natural tunnel leading back into the mountain...at the end of the tunnel it was pitch-black night even during the day...no living creature had ever entered the place...He was lying...inside the loneliest mountain in France” (121-22). You know who else in literature exists this way? Gollum in Tolkien’s The Hobbit: “Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature...as dark as darkness...Goblin [meat] he thought good...he took care they never found him out. He just throttled them from behind, if they ever came down alone anywhere near the edge of the water...They very seldom did, for they had a feeling that something unpleasant was lurking down...at the very roots of the mountain” (Tolkien 67). The difference between the two is, of course, that Grenouille wants to get away from humans while Gollum “lost all his friends and was driven away, alone, and crept down, down, into the dark under the mountains” (Tolkien 68). Gollum develops strange speech patterns because he has only himself to talk to, whereas Grenouille’s speech is strange when he emerges from his cave because he hasn’t spoken at all for seven years.

I find a lot of interesting parallels between Grenouille and Gollum. Gollum is a character who is a grotesque and serves as antagonist for other characters in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The other characters in the story are constantly reminding each other, (and therefore, the reader), to have pity and compassion for Gollum because he can’t help being what he is; he is enslaved by his obsession for the “precious” ring. Grenouille is also a grotesque. He is the protagonist, but all of his relationships with other characters are antagonistic; he and Baldini hate each other but use each other, he and Taillade-Espinasse use each other. I don’t think any character so far has had any compassion for him, and he certainly doesn’t have any compassion for anyone else. He’s a slave to his sense of smell in that he wants to be where he can’t smell humans, but he seems to be more in control of his obsession than Gollum. They are very similar in their reactions to the things that they find precious. Gollum kills to get the ring, and Grenouille kills to get the scent of young virgins; both become utterly focused on the precious and blind to everything else.

The reason I find myself comparing Grenouille to Gollum is twofold. As I said above, Grenouille’s situation is very similar to Gollum’s in this section where he holes up in his cave; they are both unloved, strange, and slaves to their obsessions. The thing, however, that continues to fascinate me about Perfume is the fact that none of the characters are very likeable, yet I am so enthralled that I can’t put it down. For one thing, the prose is beautiful in places, such as the section I quoted above about “[t]his world molded in lead.” If Gollum had been the main character of The Hobbit and The Rings books, I think they would have been very different and maybe not so popular. It brings me back to Zola yet again; La Bete Humaine is full of ugly, dirty, immoral characters who do disgusting things, but it is so beautifully written and so fascinating that I know I will read more Zola in the future. Perfume is the same way; I can’t wait to read the end, (I already know what happens), but I can’t help thinking how little I would care for these characters in the hands of a less talented writer.

Unreal Cities

Of the multitude of themes and patterns I’m finding in Invisible Cities, one thing I’m reminded of are the kind of observations I make when I go on a road trip. I actually wrote about it in a response for To the Lighthouse for another class, discussing the notion that you can never really know anyone. I’m reminded of this idea in Invisible Cities, but as part of a larger idea of what does it mean to know anything: every time I go on a road trip and pass towns that seem isolated or undesirable, I think, “Who actually lives here?” I look at their homes and think how depressed I’d be if I lived in, say, Durkee, Oregon or Winnemucca, Nevada. The entire corridor of I-34 between Loveland and Estes Park, Colorado is on of the most surreal places on Earth to me, probably just from hearing stories about the flood of ’76. (Which reminds me, you should really eat at the Bohemian Cottage, it’s on I-34 west of Loveland. My parents used to eat there when I was a kid. I just typed it up on Google and it gets rave reviews from many Europeans. That place is neat.) I wonder, “What do the teenagers do to occupy their free time?” I wonder, “Do they have derogatory nicknames for their town or their high school and, if so, what are they?” “I’d call it ‘Winnesucca’ if I lived here. Hell, I’m gonna call it that anyway.” I have a friend who hails from “Poopert,” (Rupert), ID, and I used to have a coworker who came from “Hellhole,” (Declo), ID. I can’t imagine that these places exist, much less that people actually live there. It is utterly unfathomable to me. I can be standing in the middle of one of these places, and it’s less real to me than New York or London, even though I’ve never been to either. There is some of this going on in Invisible Cities, and I imagine Kublai and Marco creating the cities out of their pipe smoke (is it opium, or is it just shisha?), and these smoke cities still seem more real to me than say, Burns, Oregon.
I have a friend who grew up in McDermitt, Nevada, which is one of the tiniest, most dismal places I have ever seen. My friend’s family owns the only hotel/casino in McDermitt, coincidentally the first casino I ever set foot in, where my mom made me play a slot for the first time. Across the street from the casino is the tiny grocery store, which also houses a museum of Dutch ovens, something I’d always heard of but had never seen before visiting McDermitt. I was reminded of this when reading about Calvino’s city of Clarice, where, “[items from the past] were now preserved under glass bells, locked in display cases, set on velvet cushions, and not because they might still be used for anything, but because people wanted to reconstruct through them a city of which no one knew anything now,” I wonder if pioneers would scoff at the idea of their kitchen utensils one day being displayed in a museum? (107). The other notable thing about the grocery store is the wall of liquor between the cash registers and the door, consisting of stuff I thought existed only in legend like Thunderbird wine and Everclear. This is perhaps the saddest indicator that McDermitt skirts the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation.
Places like this have a weird, existential quality, and there is definitely something existential in the way Calvino’s cities all seem to be bound up in some sort of repetitive cycle, like the animatronic puppets of Melania, who do nothing but exchange roles and read scripts, and whose lives are meaningless. A similar city is Eutropia, which reminds me of our board game for The Plague, “[t]hus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open alternate mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same” (65). One of my favorite cities is Eusapia, where there is a city of the dead beneath the actual city. A lot of these stories have funny contradictions in them, like in this one, the fact that the confraternity of hooded brothers tells everyone living about the goings on in the underground city of the dead. It seems to me that a confraternity of hooded brothers would be secretive, but I guess this is not one of those. This story and most of the others remind me of that locked casket riddle in the Dinesen story. Especially the line where Kublai Khan says to Marco Polo, “[p]erhaps this dialogue of ours is taking place between two beggars nicknamed Kublai Khan and Marco Polo” (104). Ouch, that locked casket question makes my head hurt.

Hochhuth, He Makes Me Angry

Helga’s situation and Hochhuth’s description of her will not do. If I could find Rolf Hochhuth right now, I would throw a really big rock at his head. I hope he doesn’t have any daughters. Sure, Helga is young and impressionable, but the fact that the Doctor, (Why won’t Hochhuth just say his last name? We all know who he is.), coerces her into bed is not her fault. It is not because she is “totally malleable, like most young girls,” but because she has spent her formative years being indoctrinated with Nazi b.s. in the League of German Girls and doesn’t know any better (229). She may “come to his bed during the lunch hour” by walking there on her own, but as is the case with any young woman being sexually manipulated by an older man, it’s not a case of “lov[ing] this fear more than her soul’s peace” (229, 234); it’s that he knows how to manipulate her, as is seen before they part on page 239. What a bunch of crap! I find it beyond ironic that Hochhuth describes Helga sardonically as an inhuman, vacant-minded sexual robot—she seems more like a victim to me, naive—given that The Deputy deals with how one group of people managed to dehumanize and subjugate another! I understand the point he’s trying to make about ordinary people working at Auschwitz like it’s a normal job and then later claiming to “not know” that people were being killed there. I think he could have conveyed his point without this venomous indictment of women (it reminds me of the passage in Zorba the Greek where Zorba complains that “women can’t help but get children from every man they’re with” or something similar). It’s a difficult enough subject to deal with, a reader doesn’t need to be slapped in the face with this as well. I find Hochhuth to be very heavy-handed and arrogant and I don’t care what the point is he’s trying to make because I resent his method. I also hate the way he inserts his poisonous little opinions about the characters into the text. He obviously never learned how to “show” rather than “tell” when writing.
There’s a movie that came out recently called Funny Games, also by a German, where the whole point of the movie is to disgust the audience enough that they walk out of the theater. In the movie, a wealthy American family is tortured by two young men who invade their home. The director says that anyone who stays until the end credits of the film has something wrong with them. He also says that he made this movie for Americans, to show them that are too interested in violence. Something about this reminds me of The Deputy...
I’m not surprised that in the end Riccardo gets killed and Gerstein gets arrested (obviously because it says so at the beginning of the play). I had hope for poor Jacobson and Carlotta, but they are characters created by Hochhuth to serve as martyrs for his heavy-handed cause, so of course they are doomed. I find it quite merciful at the end that Hochhuth lets the characters and the audience/reader get off rather easy. I was afraid we were going to have to witness the characters being tortured or gassed. This is an unusual work because it leaves you in the end with no hope whatsoever, other than the voiceover stating that the Russians liberated the Auschwitz prisoners in January 1945, which actually makes you feel worse because all you can think is “Why not sooner?” This is the sort of work that gets its point across by pummeling the audience into feeling worse and worse. Like I said before, I understand the point, but I have to question the method and, really, the purpose as well.

The Debt to Pleasure

(Spoiler alert! The Debt to Pleasure is a wonderfully evil little cookbook. Don't read this essay if you plan on reading the book, because I give away everything here!)

Going back to our class handout on Brillat-Savarin, there is an aphorism reading, “The order of food is from the most solid to the most light” (145). This is a theme I see Tarquin developing in the progression of his narrative in The Debt to Pleasure, both with the foods he talks about and his revelations about himself. He begins by discussing the heavier, heartier foods of winter and finishes by talking about the lighter fare of summer and fall. The discussion of food works as a kind of cloaking device for what is actually going on in the narrative, with Tarquin uncloaking more and more of his true nature as the story moves along and as the recipes get lighter and more loosely defined.

In the beginning the reader doesn’t know what Tarquin Winot is up to, merely that he has undertaken to write this “unconventional cookbook” and that he is ordering it by seasons. He begins by saying that “winter presents the cook with a...combination of threat and chance,” which is a good metaphor for the book as a whole; Tarquin is a threat to society and there is a chance that you might figure out what he’s up to (3). If you’d prefer, you could say that if you are reading this story, there is probably a good chance that Tarquin is going to kill you, thus the “crisis” that he’s implied in the first line. You won’t know, however, until he’s sent you on your way, that you have been murdered, as he reveals in the novel’s last line.

The recipe for Irish Stew especially brings to mind not only hearty eating but also the addle-brained sluggishness one sometimes feels after a heavy meal. The opacity and solidity of this stew is representative of the fact that Tarqin reveals very little of his present situation in this first chapter. Irish stew also works as a metaphor for The Debt to Pleasure as a whole. It’s a densely layered story, with some of the ingredients being more substantial, (plot, characterisation, backstory), and others which dissolve, (recipes, philosophical musings), but which work as “binding agents” to hold the narrative together (18).

The spring recipes are not only lighter, but consist of items such as “peaches in red wine” which give us a better glimpse into Tarquin’s persona. With the peach recipe not only do we get a discourse on the poisonous possibilities of peach pits, we get our first revelation that Tarquin tried to poison Bartholomew. Tarquin also reveals his nature as someone who is perhaps untrustworthy. Tarquin tells us that he “prefers” Sauternes which is, according to Wikipedia, an expensive white—not red—dessert wine that’s tricky to produce because part of the fermentation process relies on chance: the grapes become infected with something called “noble rot” (which could be used to describe Tarquin and much of what he talks about, if one were so inclined). I also find it somewhat grotesque that peaches are Bartholomew’s favorite fruit and dipping blanched, skinned peach slices into red wine resembles dipping flesh into blood. Tarquin follows this up with a menu for “Luncheon on a theme of curry” in which the term “theme” becomes almost literal, with Tarquin pontificating about the role of curry and spices in life and the cuisine of Europe, but neglecting the recipes. He tells the reader to look up all the recipes herself, opting instead to describe breaking in to the honeymooner’s hotel room to install a listening device. He is revealing more of himself and his plans as he goes along.

For summer Tarqin tells us “[t]his section will not consist of rigidly articulated menus as such,” but rather “suggestions for recipes;” he also starts unwrapping his devious deeds more for the reader (130). “An Apéritif” is something Tarquin describes as a libation drunk to “exchange[...] personae,” from the self’s more controlled daytime incarnation to its less-restrained nighttime form (132). This is the turning point wherein Tarquin begins to get comfortable, loosen his tongue, and tell the reader what he is really up to. It is in this chapter that we hear about the untimely death of Mrs. Willoughby, who so unfortunately “misunderstood” Tarquin’s directions on how to avoid getting shot by Pierre and Jean-Luc. We already know that Tarquin has been spying on the honeymoon couple, but it hasn’t been clear to what extent. At the end of the Apéritif chapter he goes to the trouble of exchanging rental cars in order to follow them; the intricacy of his plan is becoming more apparent. In the following chapter he compares the childhood simplicity of hiding his mother’s earrings under Mary-Teresa’s bed to the more complex adult act of testing his GPS tracking device out on his milkman. At the end of the section he is almost spotted by the honeymooners—it seems the change he effected on himself in the apéritif chapter has made him almost careless, but only almost.

The key chapter in the Autumn section of the novel is the first chapter, titled “An Aïoli.” Here Tarquin states that one of his most-beloved rituals involves eating aïoli because, “one of the pleasures of the dish is its inversion of the relationship between bit part (sauce) and star player” (190). This is Tarquin letting the reader know that from here on that recipes are no longer the “star player” in this book, and that the “sauce” or condiments (the actual story of Tarquin’s interaction with the honeymoon couple plus the details he’s been giving us about his murderous nature) is now taking center stage. Tarquin reveals his parents’ untimely demise in a freak explosion, in the chapter which he cheekily refers to as “A Barbecue,” and goes through a list of dangers to avoid for Laura and Hywl to avoid around his property, including the fatal directions he gave Mrs. Willoughby. By the final chapter, Tarquin is so comfortable that he is gloating; he taunts both the reader and Laura and Hwyl to guess that he is poisoning the honeymooners by relating the story of Bartholomew’s death by poisonous mushrooms and his personal views on the art of absence and destruction whilst he feeds them mushrooms. Just in case you haven’t figured it out, he makes all clear in the novel’s last line.

Why Dr. Rieux is a Better Narrator Than Zorba’s Boss
Albert Camus’s The Plague and Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek are each told by a narrator who is a character in the story. I will argue that the narrator of The Plague does his job more effectively than the narrator of Zorba the Greek because Camus’s narrator has more valid reasons for writing his chronicle and is better at persuading me to read his tale than Kazantzakis’s narrator. I will use as my evidence the fact that the serious manner and historical aim of Camus’s narrator imbues his tale with a universal importance, thus compelling the reader to continue reading, whereas Kazantzakis’s narrator’s personal motivations do little to persuade the reader that his tale is of importance to anyone other than himself. I will also discuss the fact that the professional air of Camus’s narrator garners more respect for him as a storyteller than Kazantzakis’s narrator, who seems to have little respect for himself or his craft.
One of the most important questions one must ask when considering the narrators of The Plague and Zorba the Greek is whether it is easier to sympathize with the third-person distance of Dr. Rieux or the first-person immediacy of Zorba’s boss. The objective detachment of Dr. Rieux is colder and more impersonal than the impassioned storytelling of Kazantzakis’s narrator, but I find I’m more willing to listen to Camus’s narrator due to his clinical approach. Dr. Rieux’s clinical detachment comes from the fact that he wants to portray the “grave events” of his tale accurately and objectively, but also because he’s not seeking any glory for writing them down. On page six he says “[a narrator’s] business is only to say: ‘This is what happened’” and that “the narrator...would have little claim to competence for a task like this, had not chance put him in the way of gathering much information, and had he not been, by the force of things, closely involved in all that he proposes to narrate.” He also feels he needs to give “justification” for writing his story down. He goes about storytelling like a very professional news reporter who hones his work to give an accurate portrayal of events, similar to the way his friend Grand agonizes over writing one phrase. I see Rieux’s wish for accuracy reflected in Grand’s feverish editing, and his precise “just the facts” style of reporting represented in Grand’s statement that he has finally “cut out all the adjectives” (306). By contrast, Kazantzakis’s narrator describes his goals and reasons for writing as personal ones, “I had, without knowing how, engraved on my mind the double task I had to accomplish on this shore: Escape from Buddha, rid myself by words of all my metaphysical cares and free my mind from vain anxiety” (55). Like Rieux, Zorba’s boss sees writing as an important undertaking, but he does not have any “grave events” or ideas of important historical magnitude to convey to the reader. Why should the reader care that he needs to, as he says, “[m]ake direct and firm contact with men?”
At the beginning of The Plague, the as-yet-unrevealed Dr. Rieux gives very compelling reasons for why he wants to tell the story of Oran’s plague, the chief reason being “that it actually did happen, that it closely affected the life of a whole populace,” and that he wants to “play[...] the part of a historian” for these events (6). Describing his story as true and serious convinces me that it’s information I need to know and that I should keep reading. In contrast, the narrator of Zorba the Greek doesn’t give any reason why his story is important other than to say that Zorba helps him to understand “[t]he meaning of the words, art, love, beauty, purity, passion” and that because of this, “Zorba [i]s the man I ha[ve] sought so long in vain” (12). This statement lets the reader know why Zorba is important to the narrator, but it doesn’t make a convincing argument for me to read the narrator’s story about Zorba.
I also respect Dr. Rieux more as a narrator because the seriousness and professionalism discussed above show that he treats himself and his writing with respect, while Kazantzakis’s narrator doesn’t respect himself much and allows his friend to make fun of him for being a writer, or “bookworm.” On page five of Zorba the Greek, the narrator describes his “great friend” Stavridaki with all the tenderness of a lover: “I gazed at him intently for a long time...I wished to make a mental note of his features...his bluish-green, luminous eyes...youthful face...intelligent and disdainful expression...his aristocratic hands with their long, slender fingers.” Immediately thereafter, the beloved Stavridaki mocks the narrator, asking him “how long are you going on chewing paper and covering yourself with ink?...Au revoir, bookworm!” From this point on the narrator internalizes his friend’s mocking attitude, referring to himself as a “barbarian” compared to Stavridaki, “the intelligent, ironical, civilized man.” He goes on to describe his embarrassment at feeling upset over parting with his friend, who attempts to shame the narrator about showing his feelings, “[h]e looked at me, astonished. ‘Are you so moved?’” A short time later, the narrator makes clear the extent to which his friend’s words have affected him: “If only I could live again the moment of that anger which surged up in me when my friend called me a bookworm! I recalled then that all my disgust at the life I had been leading was personified in those words” (8). This man obviously does not have confidence in himself or his convictions if his friend can so easily make him feel bad about the life he’s chosen to lead. It’s also somewhat ironic that he’s just referred to his friend as an “intellectual” but beats up on himself for living the life of an intellectual.
The above-mentioned factors lead me to believe that Kazantzakis’s narrator is a hypocrite who is full of self-loathing, so I don’t see why I should read the story he’s telling if he hates himself for the very act of writing it. Stavridaki as much as calls him a hypocrite for not joining him in the Caucasus: “‘Don’t you preach: “The only way to save yourself is to endeavor to save others?”. . .Well, forward, master. You’re good at preaching.’” The narrator next admits his cowardice, “I was listening, passively, as if pain was a dream and life some absorbing tragedy, in which nobody but a boor or a simpleton would rush onto the stage and take part in the action” (5). He is too conflicted; he’s writing a story but hates himself for writing rather than having the guts to help his countrymen in the Caucasus. What would Rieux say to this? He tells Tarrou on page 126 of The Plague “when you see the misery it brings, you’d need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague.” Rieux compares plague to war on page 37, and when I consider this, I cannot see Kazantzakis’s narrator as anything but a coward in comparison to Rieux, who ends his tale by saying that he “resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure” (308). Perhaps if the narrator of Zorba the Greek were less of a coward, he would join his friend in the Caucasus and write about those events, which would certainly be of more historical significance than his own personal tale.
In conclusion, I feel that The Plague’s Dr. Rieux is a more professional and critical thinker in the way he approaches his writing than Kazantzakis’s narrator. Dr. Rieux makes me believe it’s essential that I read his tale because of its historical importance, while Zorba’s boss tells me he is writing for personal reasons that have meaning only for him. Most importantly, I cannot respect Kazantzakis’s narrator because when I compare him to Camus’s Dr. Rieux, he appears to be a coward with little self-respect.

I’m going to warn you right now that this is the point in the semester at which all of my research projects begin to meld together in my head and take over everything that I do, so from now on you will probably be hearing a lot about The Master and Margarita, Sergio Leone films, Frankenstein, and M.G. Lewis’s The Monk. Or not. Just know that if I ever for any reason start quoting Nietzsche, it means I have lost my mind.

One thing that really strikes me as a contrast to American ideology in Zorba the Greek is the scene on page 302 where Zorba reenacts for the narrator how his father quit smoking: “‘he...pulled out his pouch and tore it to shreds with his teeth, then stamped it in the ground and spat on it. “Filth! Filth!” he bellowed. “Dirty slut!”...That’s the way real men behave, boss.’” This is the way “real men” behave? I’ve been reading Lee Clark Mitchell’s Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film, and in it he talks about how to Americans Clint Eastwood embodies a “real man” because he does everything with so much “restraint.” Mitchell even compares him to an automaton or a zombie. I immediately thought of this idea when I read this part of Zorba, because, while I agree that a “real man” might just quit smoking cold turkey like Zorba’s father, I find his method to be absolutely childish. And does he have to call it a “Dirty slut?” Of course he does. The smoking makes Zorba’s father more of a “real man” until he becomes disgusted with it; then, he must feminize it to properly show his disgust and to distance himself from it. (Another thing I remember about Aristotle is that part of the Model of Contagious Intoxication involved inculcating his students with a fear of lust for the female body. This theme is so much a part of Zorba the Greek that I think the full title of the book should be Zorba the Greek: A Story of Platonic Love.)

Anyway, this whole scene underscores the fact that Zorba represents all kinds of grand passions and that he’s larger than life, like a Greek god—his father was even bigger, even more larger-than-life. It makes one take note of the differences between the passionate and the rational. The narrator represents the rational, and I find myself disappointed in him after he gets Zorba’s telegram about the beautiful green rock and reacts by writing a letter to Zorba in “the moderating, cold, human voice of logic” (306). I find it interesting that we don’t get to see the letter. I am curious to see what it says. I also find it interesting that the narrator blames his cold, rational behavior on the German depression. That’s not really what his problem is here; this is just his true nature returning to him. He is kind of like an automaton, or a “pen-pusher” as Zorba calls him. I wonder if Greeks think Americans are all automatons (I wonder if they see Germans as automatons, since the narrator is in Germany when he acts this way. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve heard that)? Do Italians, since an Italian made the films in which Clint Eastwood so famously behaves like an automaton? I don’t really care; it’s just one of those inane questions I contemplate after I’ve had too much coffee. The thing is, in the spring, I have irrational hyperbolic reactions to everything, sort of like Zorba. Books, films, songs are all THE BEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN/HEARD!!!! This is the only time I feel like this, and I always identify more with the restraint model than the Zorba model. This has nothing to do with anything, but I think Russian writers find the best balance between the passionate and rational temperaments.

I find end of Zorba kind of frustrating. Lauren Bailey was talking about this book in my Food and Lit class (the one where I’m writing about Bulgakov), and she was talking about catharsis. This book has so many cathartic moments, like the singing girl on page 293, “All at once he leaped up and caught her by the foot, gripping it fiercely. She burst into tears as if only waiting for this brutal gesture to relieve her feelings.” I felt denied when I read about Zorba dying. I thought it would make me cry, but it didn’t. I don’t know if it is tempered by the cold tone of the schoolmaster’s letter or the ridiculous image of Zorba jumping out of bed and dying while looking out the window. The part about the santuri is sweet, but it didn’t make me cry. I cried at the end of The Master and Margarita when Pilate walked away with Yeshua and Banga, and the Pilate plotline was the least interesting to me. I cried when Jim Burden met the 45-year-old “flat-chested” gray-haired Ántonia in My Ántonia. (And I know I’m supposed to talk about literature in the present tense, but I can’t use past and present tense in the same sentence. It makes me crazy.) I find the end of Zorba the Greek kind of conflicted. I think the rationality of the narrator overrides any sense of catharsis because he doesn’t have Zorba there to help him out by dancing or something.

Zorba's Contagious Intoxication

There are ideas in Zorba the Greek that remind me of my good old History of Literary Criticism class. I looked up the journal I had to turn in to Dr. Simon when I took his class and looked up some of my notes on Aristotle. Aristotle compares being inspired with being inebriated and he talks about how art comes from artifice, which is a copy of something else and is therefore not real. He defines divine inspiration as the “Model of Contagious Intoxication,” in which the Muse possesses the artist with divine inspiration, the artist creates an earthly representation of divine energies called art, and the audience is inspired by interacting with the divine energies represented in the art.

Zorba is the Muse, and his link with the divine can be seen in several ways. For one thing, Zorba is often actually intoxicated, and his intoxication is contagious because he talks the narrator into getting intoxicated with him. Zorba is like the narrator’s other muse, Buddha, because “[l]ike the child, he sees everything for the first time” (151); if I remember Siddhartha correctly, Buddha, Siddhartha and Vasudeva all talk about looking at things and interacting with the world like a child. Because Zorba looks at everything like a child, it means that, in a way, everything intoxicates him, like on page 136 when he says, “Boss, did you see that?...On slopes, stones come to life again.” This, in turn, intoxicates the narrator, who feels “a deep joy;” he is the audience to whom the divine energy has been transformed into inspiration, and he’s inspired to write about his muse Zorba.

Zorba has been so effective at passing down divine inspiration to the narrator that the narrator can’t even read other poetry, because in comparison to what Zorba teaches him, it has become “bloodless, odorless, void of any human substance” (133). Zorba’s position as Muse is highlighted when he tells his story to the narrator about “how God made man” because as Zorba says, “I was [there]!” (152-3). Zorba himself behaves as though he’s possessed by the Muse when he plays his santuri just before he tells this story; first he is divinely inspired and plays the santuri, and then he tells the narrator about God creating man. He is the “Model of Contagious Intoxication.”

Obviously, Zorba is the Muse for the narrator of this story, otherwise the narrator would not have called his book Zorba the Greek, he would have called it Buddha, as he originally intended. Zorba is slowly replacing the narrator’s original muse, Buddha, but I don’t understand if the narrator is fully aware of it yet. At the end of this section, he says that Zorba “has given a warm, beloved, living body to all the abstract ideas which were shivering inside me” (154). Then on the next page, he says, “[t]he exorcism of Buddha was flowing without hindrance onto the paper” (155). I don’t understand why he’s still wrestling with his ideas about Buddha when it’s obvious that Zorba is more inspiring to him than Buddha. I suppose it won’t come until the end of the book that the narrator will have an epiphany wherein he realizes that Zorba does not help him to write about Buddha, he is actually the idea the narrator wants to write about instead of Buddha. Which leads me to ask, was this written as a reaction to Siddhartha?

Of Petulant Heroes and Flatulent Villains

I didn’t know much about Like Water for Chocolate before I started reading, so I was pleasantly surprised to find it belongs to the genre of magical realism. I’d always been under the impression that it was a much more serious book. It reads as a fable, which is why I think some characters don’t get very much development. I find this especially true in the case of Pedro. The most we ever find out about him is that he loves Tita, lusts after Tita, and that he often becomes aroused by her food and by the act of her cooking. When he declares he will “smash [John Brown’s] face in,” he just seems like a stereotypical hot-blooded Latin man (231). This comes in the last chapter, after 22 years have passed, and it just makes me want to tell Pedro to grow up. I know being hot-blooded is part of his character, and he represents a traditional archetype, but we get no background for him though we get the backgrounds of most of the other characters. To me he seems petulant and whiny, like on page 211 when he reproaches Tita: “You don’t want to talk to John because you’re starting to have doubts about whether to stay with me or marry him, right? You aren’t tied to me anymore, a poor sick man.” He’s not very understanding; I don’t think he’s quite good enough for Tita. I don’t really understand why she loves him so much, other than that he has some stereotypical masculine qualities like jealousy and lustfulness, and that he makes her feel “how dough feels when it is plunged into boiling oil” (16).

I suppose part of what brings Tita and Pedro together is the fact that he understands how important cooking is to her. In contrast, Esquivel sets her antagonists apart from Tita by the negative ways they interact with food and cooking. Mama Elena can “crack sack after sack of nuts in a short time; she seem[s] to take great pleasure in doing it. Applying pressure, smashing to bits, skinning, those [a]re among her favorite activities” (230). This is a perfect metaphor for Mama Elena’s personality. After she is crippled, Tita’s carefully prepared food tastes bitter to Mama Elena because she herself is bitter, she doesn’t appreciate Tita’s efforts to comfort her, and because she has turned off her ability to love. She sees Tita’s making food for her as an act of pity, and pity is a bitter pill for her to swallow. Rosaura’s fear of the kitchen and fear of adventurous foods is representative of her fear of life. She is boring. She cares so much about what other people think of her that she has no real personality, only bitterness. This is why she has no milk and her son later dies from eating “something that [does]n’t agree with him” (99); she can’t provide nourishment to others because she only cares about herself and her image. This is what I think leads to her unfortunate and amusing demise. Rosaura is full of herself and her image-conscious ways, which is mainly hot air, and it expresses itself as flatulence. Rosaura is also quite rotten, and rotting things give off gas. As for her actual death, I think Nacha may have something to do with it, but we will never know. I think Rosaura may be the only character in Literature who farts herself to death.

I think this idea of food as a sort of sponge that soaks up personality and emotion is an interesting one. I know from personal experience that the food won’t taste good if you aren’t very into it when you’re cooking. I always used to approach cooking as something that I “couldn’t do” and therefore nothing I ever made tasted good. It didn’t even look good. It always had a shabby quality; the texture would be all wrong, and it would leave a weird aftertaste in my mouth even if I followed the recipe exactly. I eventually realized that cooking is not difficult, that it is fun, and I don’t have that problem any more.

The Plague Response #2

I am interested to know why Camus has Cottard shoot a dog. Is it simply to show how bitter Cottard is at the plague's being over? Is it to make the reader feel less sympathy for him, since we may have had some sympathy held over from Cottard's suicide attempt? Does Camus want the reader to agree with Tarrou that Cottard would be forgivable, except for the fact that he has been "for" that indescriminate killer, the plague, all along? Cottard has been on a slide throughout the novel. At first he is pitiful and he seems so lonely and sad that you find it hard not to sympathize with him. Grand treats him coldly, the police treat him coldly, and you feel sorrier for him. Then you find out that he's a criminal and that the reason he tried to kill himself is not lonliness, but fear of arrest. Then maybe you feel less sorry for him, depending on how you sympathize with the fear of being humiliated by arrest and locked away in prison. Then he becomes a smuggler, making money hand over fist. You might either think, "good for him, he's been through a lot," or "what an exploitative bastard," depending on how you feel about such things. Then he almost gets arrested, and you think that either he's getting what's coming to him, or you feel disappointed that he should get caught now, when he's been able to avoid it for so long. When we next see him, he has gone crazy.

Cottard is a coward. Though it’s been since high school that I read The Stranger, I think Cottard has many qualities that are the opposite of its protagonist, Meursault. Meursault faces his crime, his arrest, and his impending execution. Cottard runs and hides from his crime and his potential arrest. Rieux says on page 131 “men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point...the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind, and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.” This describes Cottard; he is blind to the needs and suffering of others. He never assists anyone, never joins the sanitation crew or helps at the camps or hospitals. You could even say that he is blind to humanity in general, so focused is he on himself. I find this somewhat ironic, given that he seems so desperate for attention and companionship when we first meet him. It seems he has learned nothing from his experiences.

Obviously, Cottard represents this “banality of evil” aspect talked about by Arendt and Judt. He’s for the plague, not because he’s evil and wants people to suffer and die, but because the plague helps his cause. Up until this last scene with him, the reader has been thinking, “Oh, he’s not so bad; he’s had a hard time of it, give him a break.” I think Camus wants the final scene with Cottard to be a wake-up call to the reader to show that he’s not such a good guy. He may have been pathetic before, but he is choosing to behave in this undignified, misanthropic way (was he the character who said “don’t call me a misanthrope?” I think he is one). He shoots the cops who are trying to arrest him, and there are those who would say that he is doing what he can to stay free. When he shoots the innocent dog—who hasn’t done anything to Cottard other than remind him that the plague is over—it underscores how selfish he is and that he really has no respect for his fellow creatures. He also represents one of the themes of all Camus’s writing: choice. Years ago, I took professor Harbison’s class on Existentialism and Phenomenology. Much of it was over my head, but one thing I remember is that existentialists feel suicide is the coward’s way of coping with the absurd. One must choose to face the absurd despite everything. This is what he’s telling us in the last lines of the book when he says that the plague may lay dormant but it never goes away. The absurd never goes away, but life goes on.

The Plague

At the end of this section, is Camus saying that Father Paneloux lost his faith and died because of it? His sermon didn’t really seem to go anywhere. In the passage on 225, he speaks of times in history when there was no purgatory; it seems to me that he should say that this plague is the purgatory, but before this, on 224, he says that he can’t assure anyone that M. Othon’s little boy faces a life of eternal bliss because “he [knows] nothing about it.” His words say to me that he knows he should feel that the boy’s suffering is equivalent to the fiery spiritual cleansing usually experienced by the soul in purgatory, and that maybe if he hadn’t witnessed the event himself he would have preached that the boy’s soul had been purified and he is now in Heaven. Camus definitely wants to evoke divine purgation since he describes the boy’s suffering as being comparable to fiery torment.

Father Paneloux has been stripped of his convictions, which I think is why we get most of his sermon as a second-hand relation told by the narrator rather than as first-hand dialogue, except for the important passages; he seems to be just going through the motions. When he dies, it’s like he chokes on his own blood. After reading this, I looked up the four temperaments that evolved from the belief in the four humors. The humors theory holds that blood represents both springtime and arrogance, which fits Father Paneloux because his first sermon took place in the spring and it was very arrogant. The temperament used to name the state of having too much blood is “sanguine,” which Wikipedia defines as being “full of hope” but which I have always associated with a certain amount of self-satisfied smugness. These characteristics also describe Paneloux’s first sermon and his attitude at that time. When he dies, it’s as though the humor of blood has been taken over by the humor of phlegm, which is said to represent coldness and an absence of emotion. Father Paneloux definitely seems cold and unemotional during his second sermon, and afterwards in his interaction with his elderly hostess. In the end, his symptoms match the symptoms said to plague those who suffer from too much phlegm: fever, lungs full of phlegm, lassitude, and resignation. In the end, disgusting as it is, he coughs up what seems to be blood mixed with phlegm.

Why is Camus alluding to these ancient beliefs? I think there are several reasons. For one thing, they’re ancient, just like the plague; in medieval times, the plague would have been studied and dealt with in terms of the four humors. Additionally—in this novel at least—modern medicine seems to have as little effect on curing the plague as did the methods used by doctors who subscribed to the four humors theory. The methods used to combat the disease haven’t advanced very much from medieval times: lancing buboes (which is now known to be harmful), quarantining people, closing the gates to the city, praying.

I think Camus includes descriptions of medieval plague outbreaks on purpose, not just to show that the plague is an ancient affliction or an ancient evil, but also to imply three ideas. The most obvious is to compare how humanity coped with the plague in ancient times to how the people of Oran cope in the modern age (e.g. giving in to hedonistic impulses, trying to avoid contact with people, trying to run away instead of helping people). In connection with this is the notion that society, (or humankind, or whatever you want to call it), is just as ill-equipped today to fight the plague as it ever has been and that it will probably always be so ill-equipped to face such a monstrous affliction. Last is the idea that maybe civilization hasn’t really advanced as far as we’d like to think, if we still can’t fight such and archaic enemy.

I also think what Camus is getting at is the fact that Christianity is about as effective at fighting, curing, or understanding the plague—or the absurd—as is the old belief in the four humors. Christianity has been around for a long time, just like the plague. I also see a parallel between the fact that the four humors theory has been disproved, and maybe Camus is saying that Christianity is just as archaic and ridiculous as the four humors theory. Camus gives several examples of monasteries almost wiped out by the plague, so obviously just being a Christian doesn’t spare one from dying of the plague. Interestingly enough, the people who live in most of his examples are the ones who do their duty and help others, like Camus’s characters. Characters like Rieux and Tarrou embody Camus’s belief that one should simply continue doing what one can even though it may seem pointless in the face of the overwhelming enormity of the absurd. Trying to find an answer for the absurd, like Father Paneloux does, is only going to lead to anguish because one cannot understand the absurd.

I love the scene with Gwendolen and Cecily and the tea, sugar, bread and butter, and cake. In David’s response, he mentioned that Gwendolen uses the bread and butter to try to establish herself as more refined than Cecily. I see this too. I also see the phrase, “sugar is not in fashion anymore” as having a double meaning referring to her immediate relationship with Cecily. Upon meeting Cecily, Gwendolen remarks, “Cecily Cardew? What a sweet name!” Now that their declarations of eternal friendship have been reversed and they find themselves enemies, Gwendolyn’s statement that sugar is not fashionable now means both that she no longer finds Cecily to be “sweet;” and it also describes the state between her and Cecily, as their relationship has soured. I may be extrapolating too much here, but when Gwendolyn asks Cecily for bread and butter and Cecily instead hands her a giant slice of cake, it reminded me of the quote so famously and erroneously attributed to Marie Antoinette. Why I think Wilde may have done this is simply to suggest how extremely nasty the state of affairs are between the two ladies, as though the flaring tempers may soon lead to violence.

I also see the way Algernon eats everything he comes into contact with as a reflection of his extreme selfishness. When he arrives at Jack’s country estate, the first thing he tells the butler is that he’s hungry. Obviously, he’s eager to feast his eyes on Cecily, but it also shows that he is always thinking of himself. This is further emphasized when Jack says it’s “heartless” of Algernon to eat muffins in light of their disappointed romantic circumstances, since Algernon doesn’t seem very distraught over losing Cecily. (Why should he be, since he’s only known her five minutes?) It seems that the only time Algernon is actually being “earnest” is when he is hungry.

An extension Algernon’s selfishness is the way he uses food as an immature way to slight others. He makes Jack watch him eat the cucumber sandwiches but won’t let him have any, which is sort of the same thing he does with Lady Bracknell, luring her to his home upon the promise of cucumber sandwiches, then disappointing her when she gets there. When he tells Jack to eat the bread and butter because Gwendolen is “devoted” to it, he’s ridiculing Jack’s wish to settle down and marry Gwendolen. The remark comes at the same time he’s giving his unfavorable views on marriage and annoying relatives. This is in itself cruel, since Jack doesn’t know what it is like to have relatives.

I really wanted to see this when the Idaho Shakespeare Festival put it on some year recently, but like many good intentions, that scheme never came to fruition. I like the overriding ironic tone of The Importance of Being Earnest, though I find that the clever wordplay begins to grate on my nerves by the end. You expect this sort of shtick when Algernon is talking to Lane: “Algernon: I hope to-morrow will be a fine day, Lane. Lane: It never is, sir. Algernon: Lane, you’re a perfect pessimist. Lane: I do my best to give satisfaction, sir.” This is the classic sarcastic servant/master exchange you see in all of British comedy. But having everyone speak this sarcastically from beginning to end just makes me imagine Wilde writing it with a huge smirk on his face, sincerely believing that he is the Brit who invented irony. Perhaps he is.

Walpurgisnacht und Andere Shenanigans

My, my, my, but a lot of things happened in this part of the novel! I think every time I’m annoyed by some sort of nagging doubt or repetitive, unproductive thoughts I'm going to imagine I'm Margarita, free and soaring over the world on a broom, laughing. I read something on the internet about how Bulgakov’s apartment, which is supposed to be apartment 50 in the book, became a favorite haunt of Satan worshippers. I’m not sure if it still is, because it is apparently a museum, but the Satan worshippers thing I thought was a little bit stupid. I don’t understand why anyone would think this book is Satanic. Just because the devil is a character in it, that doesn’t make it Satanic. I’m betting none of those so-called Satan worshippers ever read the book.

Satan is merely a device for pointing out the wrongdoings of humanity. I’ve noticed that all the characters in this book who get attacked, beaten, vampirized, etc., by Woland and his cronies are people who are shown to be cruel people with cruel and selfish motives and/or intentions. Such as Berlioz’s uncle, who cares more about Berlioz’s apartment than Berlioz’s death. The Variety barman, who at first seems to be treated cruelly by Woland, Inc., is shown to be a cheapskate and a hoarder. The doctor the barman visits is judgmental, arrogant, and mentally calls the barman a “madman.” Bulgakov makes sure to show each character’s judgmental, self-righteous, or selfish thoughts before Woland does something bad to them. It seems like the ones who are more innocent, like Ivan and the Master, just end up in the madhouse. And I love the verbal exchanges between Woland and the barman and Woland and Behemoth, such as when the barman says, “I beg your pardon,” and Woland says, “I cannot pardon you!” I love it when clever people call attention to trite phrases by turning them on their heads. It reminds me of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Catch-22—I suppose it is a signifier of Menippean satire.

I think the Walpurgisnacht Ball is a theme that blends well with the excesses of the Jazz Age. I think I see some condemnation of American excess here. The scene where the rotting corpses enter the apartment through the fireplace is really funny, and I am now sure that JK Rowling has read this book, because several of Woland’s magical devices are very similar to things in Harry Potter books. (Of course she would have read it, because this book is a riot! I eon’t know why I always notice things that are found in Harry Potter. I can’t help it; they are very memorable and creative. I think JK Rowling herself may have sold her soul to Woland...) I’ve just been reading Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” for my Lit of the American West class. My favorite line out of the whole thing is the following: “...the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.” I think of this scene in The Master and Margarita, rather than anything in Cooper, every time I think of this line.

I find it interesting that there’s no mention in the footnotes as to why the ladies are all naked. I’m sure this is simply a Walpurgisnacht tradition, but I am too lazy look it up right now—that’s what footnotes are for! I think Mr. Pevear is a bit remiss in not saying anything about it at all, especially after all the great detail he goes into about the claw-footed candelabrum, Satan’s dirty shirt (that would be a good name for a rock band!), and all the famous Italian poisoners of history. I will forgive him, however. Nothing can get in the way of my enjoying this book!

Dreams are important in relation to reality because they allow a person to escape from aspects of his life that are unpleasant or unsatisfactory. By dreaming of a better life, humans aspire to make their lives and the lives of their children better. This is how mankind progresses. Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreaming Child” is a better signifier of dreams in the world of reality than Franz Kafka’s “A Dream” or Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha because Dinesen’s Jens symbolizes the longing of mankind. Without longing, mankind would never progress and would eventually die as Jens dies when his dreams come true and his longing is rendered obsolete.
The situation Jens is raised in is one that would naturally give rise to dreaming. The dreaming symbolized by Jens in “The Dreaming Child” is an act of imagination that a person engages in to escape a reality that is harsh, dull, or otherwise unsatisfactory. Jens’s existence is more than just unsatisfactory; it is utterly bleak. His home in “the slums of old Copenhagen” is “a labyrinth of filth, decay and foul smell.” He is parentless, and Madame Mahler considers him to be a “weak”-minded burden. Such an existence would crush the spirit of many, but Jens knows that he belongs “somewhere else.” This belief of a right to a better existence allows Jens to have vivid dreams at night when he is unconscious. The memory of these dreams is enough to sustain Jens when he is awake, engaged in his dismal reality (156).
The belief that he belongs to a better world is the essential component of mankind’s longing manifesting itself in little Jens. This initial belief is what allows Jens to grab onto Mamzell Ane’s tales of grand houses full of light and warmth. In Jens’s fantasy world, he gets to control all of the components of his life. He gets to create what his parents are like and what his house is like. This is the opposite of his real life, in which he is basically powerless and at Madame Mahler’s mercy. His dream of a better life includes not only material trappings like a nice house and many toys, but also the love of a family; of a mother and a father. It allows Jens to feel that he deserves to be loved, thus he imagines what it feels like to be loved, which in turn makes his harsh life bearable. Jens longs for love before he meets Jakob and Emilie.
Emilie also longs for a love that is not part of her reality, and for a different reality than the one in which she exists. The life she leads doesn’t seem like it would make a person dissatisfied; she is wealthy, beautiful, and married with the promise of a financially successful future. She has little in common with Jens as far as her situation in life, but as Emilie tells herself, “This child is as lonely in life as I,” (170). She longs for the love of Charlie, the man she once rejected.
Jens dies because his dreams become reality, rendering his need for longing obsolete. Dinesen describes Jens as a being for whom, “the essence of his nature [i]s longing,” (176). He has no reason to live once all of his dreams are made true. After Jens dies, Emilie takes up this dream, incorporating Jens into her wish that she hadn’t rejected Charlie that night so long ago. Emilie alters the dream a little bit to suit her own wishes and desires, but it is still essentially the same dream begun by Jens; the dream of a family composed of a mother, a father, and a son. This dream appeals to Emilie because it keeps a part of Jens alive. It also allows her to feel in her heart as though she did not reject her true love and in fact got to keep a part of him. Emilie’s adaptation of Jen’s dreaming is going to be more successful than Jens’s because it can never come true and thus never quell her need for longing, as happened to Jens. The fact that this dream is adaptable to different dreamers is symbolic of the relation of dreams to the human condition.
In Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Siddhartha is not interested in dreams. Siddhartha wants to achieve enlightenment, and this want is also a manifestation of human longing. Siddhartha is different from Jens or Emilie because he actively seeks the thing he longs for; he is not a dreamer. Siddhartha leaves the Brahmin lifestyle to become a Samana because he believes it will lead to enlightenment. When he wants to leave the Samanas, he does so. If he were to go about things like Jens and Emilie, he would just spend his time imagining what it would be like to achieve enlightenment, but he would never actually achieve it. Enlightenment is something that can only be achieved when “every longing and every drive in his heart ha[s] fallen silent,” (13). The very thing that Siddhartha longs for is to be free from all longing. That Siddhartha wishes to be free from longing places him in opposition to my thesis that longing is needed for mankind to progress.
Franz Kafka’s “A Dream” takes place within a dream. This dream is not the same as the dreams of Jens and Emilie, however, because Josef is not engaging his imagination as an act of will to create a different reality like they do. He is unconscious. He does not have control of this dream. This dream renders Josef a passive agent, and the only actions he takes are reactions. He must “quickly jump...onto the grass” because the path he walks on is moving away from him (75). Josef expresses longing in this dream, but his longing only attends to the immediate circumstance, such as the beginning when he “want[s] to go for a walk,” (75). When Josef watches the artist inscribe the tombstone, he wants to know what the artist is writing, but he cannot make the artist move faster and can only wait for him to continue. Josef spends a long time waiting for the artist and becomes frustrated. He is relieved of his frustration when he understands that he must get into the grave. This dream is about understanding; it is not about mankind’s longing for something better.
Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreaming Child” gives a better understanding of the significance of dreams and fantasies in the world of reality than Franz Kafka’s “A Dream” or Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. The reason Dinesen does this better than Kafka or Hesse is because her character Jens is an allegory, symbolic of man’s yearning for progress. He dies when he can no longer dream, because he lives to dream. Jens’s death is symbolic of the fate that mankind would suffer if humans had no need to dream or long for something better; progress would stop and mankind would die out. Hesse’s Siddhartha wants to be free from longing therefore his situation is opposite that of Jens. Kafka’s Josef K. is a man who experiences frustration until he understands the meaning of the dream he has while unconscious.

Michel de Montaigne’s “On Cannibals” and Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” call several things to my mind. I think it would be generally agreed that cannibalism is the number one of what are referred to as “food taboos,” however I don’t think “food taboo” quite covers it, because it’s a more fundamental concept than that. Though I know that food taboos operate on deep cultural, psychological, and philosophical levels, to me the title “food taboo” sounds too casual. The thing that fascinates me the most about cannibalism is just how fascinated much of Western society is with it. The public is certain to remember true stories involving cannibalism, such as pertain to the Donner Party or Jeffrey Dahmer. Most Americans associate the Donner Party with cannibalism, even if they don’t know many other facts about it. Several movies and a musical have been made about Alferd Packer, Colorado miner and cannibal, who also has a cafeteria named after him at the University of Colorado. The cafeteria’s slogan is “Have a friend for lunch!”

I typed the word “cannibal” in a search on the Internet Movie Database and pulled up a long list of movies about cannibals and with characters named “Cannibal.” This list includes the movie “Cannibal Holocaust”—soon to be released on a 25^th anniversary DVD—which my horror-film-obsessed friend says is the type of movie you watch, “when you just want to be disgusted with everything and feel like the world is NOT OK.” Consider the success of The Silence of The Lambs’ Hannibal Lecter, who has appeared in five books and the same number of films, and was voted in 2001 to be the “most memorable villain in film history” by the American Film Institute. I doubt there are many Americans of my generation or older who fail to associate fava beans with the line, “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.” The horror genres of vampire and zombie fiction are based on ideas linked to cannibalism. Both are extremely popular forms of entertainment, as well.

I remember reading Piers Paul Read’s Alive in high school. It’s the story of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972 and the surviving members of the team turned to cannibalism to remain alive. I remember that most of my classmates were pretty uncomfortable with the subject of cannibalism, which lead to many bad jokes. One of our assignments for Alive was a creative project that we had to present to the class. I wanted to stay as far away from the cannibalism aspect as possible and wrote a diary as though I was the girlfriend of one of the rugby players. My friend Julie wrote a diary as one of the survivors that detailed the mental preparation he had to go through in order to take the first bite of his departed comrade’s flesh. I was so uncomfortable while she was reading this that I burst out laughing a few times when it was extremely inappropriate to do so. Though everyone was pretty uncomfortable with that book, everyone in my class read every page of it, (which is more than I can say for some other novels), because it was so fascinating.

I am interested in what Aeneas Snell represents, for he seems to be present whenever bad things happen. I’m not sure I want to call him a scapegoat, because the princes whom he befriends don’t have the omniscient viewpoint of the tale’s narrator, and probably aren’t aware that his presence has anything to do with the “catastrophes and dramas” that occur when he’s around. He is more like an embodiment of the darkness within man, the final push a man needs in order to plunge his sword into another. Considering what was going on in Europe when Dinesen was writing this, Snell could represent the mysterious force that blinds or numbs or invites complicity from ordinary citizens to atrocities such as the Holocaust and lets them retain their belief that they are good people. He is that other, the being who acts on our parts or who we blame when we do something bad. He is as old as man, hence the ancient spelling of his name. He is the darkness inside all of us.

I watched many ridiculously bad horror TV shows as a child. I remember one episode whose plot probably dates back to some ancient folk tale, but was made pretty ridiculous by the show’s poor production values. In the episode, a little girl gets a teddy bear for her birthday and it starts telling her to do things. The little girl starts misbehaving, and her excuse is, “Teddy made me do it.” Eventually she kills or tries to kill her parents and ends up in a mental hospital because she always maintains “Teddy made me do it.” In the end, the bear is given to charity or something, so you know he will strike again. The show actually portrayed the bear as evil and coercing the girl to do things. A more psychologically subtle portrayal would have left it up to the viewer to decide whether the bear actually told her to do things or not.

It is such a fundamental part of the human psyche that when we don’t like something we’ve done, we need to separate out a force or a being to blame it on, because we want to maintain the fact that we are good people and the notion that both good and bad exist within man is a hard thing for many people to swallow. This is part of why I think Snell’s tale is “consolatory” in nature—he is illustrating to Charlie through the tale of the “true” prince who perceives that all is good and the “false” prince who perceives that all is suffering, that both things can exist within the same “state,” whether that state be a principality or a human psyche. The tale is supposed to be consoling to Charlie’s own bruised ego and psyche, which are in a constant state of both joy and suffering due to Charlie’s artistic pursuits. They have also been injured by Charlie’s recent divorce, and though the narrator doesn’t say it, the reader can infer that Charlie is wrestling with questions of blame and identity as a result of the divorce. I also think that part of the “consolatory” nature of the tale is that it is a consolation prize for Charlie upon his wife leaving him.