The Tribulations of Artists

All three of the stories in this reading are about artists who are obsessed with their art. Both the trapeze artist and the starvation artist are so devoted to their respective arts that they don’t want to encounter the real world. Josefine struggles and is damaged by her interaction with the real world and her audience. None of them want anything to challenge or hinder their art or their artistic process. The first two stories consider the artists, whilst the last focuses more on the audience.
The relationship between the artist and the audience progresses with each story, beginning with the trapeze artist who never wants to come to earth. (The part where Kafka explains how the manager uses the fastest race cars to move the trapeze artist from town to town gave me the weirdest picture in my head because I imagined tall poles bolted to the sides of a convertible with the trapeze artist and his trapeze swinging high up between them. Perhaps the manager should have thought of this. Maybe it would have made the trapeze artist happier. Too bad he existed in the days before air travel!) I see this as an idealized metaphor for the way an artist sees himself; that if the demands of the real world didn’t force him down to earth now and then, he would spend his days and nights doing nothing besides making art. Artists seldom get to experience this, however, because the real world—or gravity—cannot truly be overcome.
My thought in relation to this particular idea is this; if the artist were allowed to exist solely without the interruptions of the real world, would he not get bored? How will he look forward to making art when he has no boredom or tedium to contrast it with? When he has no lack of art, can he be satisfied with round-the-clock art? What happens when there is no black to contrast the white, no evil with which to define good? TA (from now on I will refer to the trapeze artist as TA and the starvation artist as SA, because it takes too long to type their names over and over) gets to the point where he really has no contrast for his art, so he has to make one up. One trapeze is no longer good. Now, only two trapezes can satisfy him and he looks back with horror on his former single-trapeze act. His creativity is flourishing—no one ever thought of doing the act with two trapezes before!—but at the same time he can never be satisfied. He is either going to drive himself mad or worry himself to death, hence the wrinkles. I think this can apply to anything in life. If you could do whatever you wanted all the time and never had to do a single thing you didn’t want to—not even visit the dentist—would you get bored? Would you live longer or die sooner than others who had to balance their time between odious chores and having fun?
What is the price of absolute freedom? When I think of SA, two things come to my mind, the first is the term “failure to thrive,” which is the term biologists and doctors use when babies die. The second is that when Kafka describes SA in his black leotard, I picture Willem Defoe in Shadow of the Vampire. Poor SA, all he wants to do is starve, but when he gets to have all the time he wants to starve, people stop caring. This is just one possible consequence of the complete artistic freedom that TA yearns for. The theme of never being satisfied is echoed in the dying words of SA when he explains that he “never found the food [he] liked,” (94). Isn’t this a metaphor for not ever being satisfied? But if SA had found the food he liked, he wouldn’t have an art. Perhaps he just tells himself that he doesn’t like any food to justify his art? Because it seems like kind of a cop-out, coming at the end of the story and all—is he just rationalizing?
Josephine has some problems with regard to her audience. They are so busy forcing her to perform and conform to the way they think she should be that in the end she and her art are lost. It seems like the narrator of this story is the collective voice of all of the Mouse People, and the way they treat Josephine reminds me not only of the way critics and scholars treat writers and artists, but also how tabloids treat celebrities. They are at the same time proud of her talent and jealous of it. She’s the greatest singer ever, but her voice isn’t any different than anyone else’s—or is it? Why is she the greatest singer? Why is she more special than the rest of them? How can she be better than them at this thing if all Mouse People are created equal (I wonder if Kurt Vonnegut read this before writing Harrison Bergeron)? They want her to be superhuman, (or super-Mouseman?), and at the same time just like all of them—how dare she get old! How dare she refuse to sing! They want to use her and her art to define the identity of their whole people, and they can’t ever be satisfied with her or her art because she isn’t superhuman. They revere her for her talent at the same time they resent her for it. They can’t stop themselves from doing this any more than the starvation artist can help starving. Does the art belong to the artist or to the audience?
I am especially interested in the questions posed at the beginning of this story—how is Josephine’s “squeak” so great when it is just a squeak like all others? Why is it that what one artist says is better or different than another? We all have something to say, but society only considers what some of us have to say as “art.” Who says what’s good and what isn’t? This is an interesting question to contemplate in modern times when the blogosphere makes it possible for any wannabe writer to smear his brains all over the Internet. Most people shouldn’t. What sets people like David Sedaris apart, people who can relate (slightly or not-so-slightly exaggerated) anecdotes about daily life so much better than those bloggers? I have several books by a guy named Al Burian who self-publishes stuff that is also very similar to what bloggers write (personal anecdotes and personal philosophies), but it is better. It is so much better that his self-published zine, “Burn Collector,” is popular across the US and probably in Europe—these crappy little things that he used to make at Kinko’s and still are put together by hand (part of the zine aesthetic)—but why have I read them all a hundred times? Maybe it’s because he writes things like this:
“If any doubt remained as to [former mayor of Providence, R.I., Buddy Cianci] having what my dad would call ‘a mean streak a mile wide,’ consider the name of his daughter: Nancy Ann Cianci. Say that fast. That’s right, it’s ‘Nancy Antsy Antsy,’ What this means, in a nutshell, is that it’s my mission in life to befriend Nancy Ann, get invited to some fancy social engagement, and then when she comes to pick me up dawdle and putter around until she gets exasperated and tells me to get the lead out. At this point I say in the most condescending tone I can muster, ‘Nancy Ann Cianci’s antsy!’ Her bodyguards beat me to a pulp but I die a happy man.”

Marinated Potatoes, How I Love Thee

My parents took me to Acapulco when I was 8. They aren’t the adventurous sort, so we didn’t eat outside of our hotel. It had five or six restaurants that served memorable dishes such as huge fresh shrimp, fried sardines, fresh mango and papaya, real Caesar salad with raw egg rubbed in the bowl (this is when I learned the Caesar salad was invented in Mexico), and house-made sugarcane pancake syrup. I remember being disappointed in the flavor of the sugarcane syrup and afraid the tiny lizards scrambling around the walls and ceiling of the patio café would manage to fall into my food. I remember feeling as though the presence of the tiny lizards was somehow responsible for the unusual taste of the syrup.

Our favorite dish was the make-your-own taco extravaganza served in the hotel’s Mexican restaurant, which served a mix of authentic and Tex Mex dishes. The make-your-own taco dish was served in two or three earthenware platters with molded sections to hold all the taco ingredients. These included avocadoes, skirt steak, chicken, pork, onions, cilantro, and tomatoes. My two favorite things were the pool of melted white cheese, (up to this point I hadn’t met a white cheese I liked), and the marinated baby potatoes. I first thought the baby potatoes were cocktail onions and wouldn’t touch them. I soon discovered they were not cocktail onions and realized instead that they were vinegary and herby and that potato skins could actually be good.

I am reminded of my marinated Mexican potatoes when Hemingway takes himself to lunch at Sylvia Beach’s insistence and orders for himself beer, potato salad, and sausage on page 72 of A Moveable Feast. I wonder how a person can remember so much detail from something that happened almost 40 years prior, then I realize I never would have remembered the lizards at the café in Acapulco if I hadn’t taken time to consider that nasty sugarcane syrup. Right now I’m drinking green tea and I know that later when I read this paper again I will remember not only the taste of the green tea, but also how utterly impossible it is to describe the odd sensation in my mouth after a sip of it.

I think taste can be an even stronger link to memory than smell. Since he has prefaced this work with the words, “this book may be regarded as fiction,” Hemingway may be fabricating some details of his meals, but I think it’s possible to remember exactly what one ate on a certain occasion. While in Paris, eating good food allows him to consume Paris, literally making Paris a part of him that stays with him for the rest of his life. I’ve noticed a lot of people talk about food when they reminisce about travel. Is it because eating is one of the most important parts of experiencing a culture? Is it because when you’re somewhere different from home you naturally encounter outstanding food and drink—or are food and drink more easily committed to memory because you’re more attuned to your senses?

Another thing that strikes me about this particular meal is the fact that beer, potato salad, sausage, and bread constitute a meal of comfort food—especially for a man raised in the Midwest. Sylvia Beach’s admonishment to “eat a good hot lunch,” (71), sounds like something a mother might say to her son. I also notice that Hemingway and Beach’s entire conversation surrounding this admonishment is about a German magazine and its German publisher. The meal at Lipp’s manages capture all of these elements in one specifically Parisian-tinged Germanic-Midwestern meal of comfort food on a day when a man is starving and his friend’s motherly advice is to “eat a good hot lunch.” I wonder if it truly happened that neatly in real life or if this is the fictional element Hemingway warned us about at the beginning?

What I do know is that I cannot read the line, “[t]he pommes a l'huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious,” without remembering my own marinated potatoes, and over the weekend I had to make myself some French potato salad and sausage and eat it with bread and beer. It was delicious.

One of the most interesting things about “In the Penal Colony” is the fact that it didn’t end like I expected it to. The whole time I was reading it, I was expecting that the officer would find something wrong with the conduct of the traveler and condemn him to death in the machine. I think such an ending would make it more of a horror story, and if it had been written by someone like Poe the ending would have gone more like this: the officer tells the condemned man that he is “free” and the traveler finds out the whole thing has been an elaborate scheme to get him into the machine. The condemned man, soldier, and officer have all been working together in an elaborately staged ruse, and they seize the traveler and strap him into the machine, whilst the others on the island crowd around to watch. It would be hinted at—but left ambiguous—as to whether the traveler was being put into the machine simply because the officer and the other prisoners in the colony are depraved and enjoy tricking people into the machine, or whether the traveler has done something that caused his home government to condemn him to death and send him here.
I think part of the reason I expected this to happen is because the officer so fervently worships the machine that its existence has become more important to him than the death sentences for which it was created. This is evident on page 46 when the officer complains about the fact that it takes 10 days to get a new strap for the machine and wonders how on earth he’s supposed to use it in the meantime. He doesn’t consider holding off on the death sentences during this time. The fact that the machine exists, for him, means that he must always be condemning men to death in order to put it to use. I wonder if there even were death sentences in the colony before the advent of the machine. I also wonder if the machine were in better condition and didn’t break down or wear out parts so often, if the officer and the former commandant would have gone through all the prisoners on the colony and started finding others, such as the dockworkers, to feed the machine. It makes me think of something a child would do when given a rock polisher, for instance, and has to find every rock within a three-mile radius of his home in order to polish it, because using the rock polisher is so fun. The officer definitely seems to have a childlike personality, which adds to his creepiness.
I am reminded a little bit of La Bete Humaine, because both the officer’s and Jacques’ existences are so bound up in killing. Jacques has an irresistible urge to kill women simply because they, and whatever they represent for him, exist. He can fight the urge as long as he is not near a woman. Kafka’s officer must kill men because the machine exists, and as long as the machine exists, he feels that he must make use of it. As I said earlier, if the machine didn’t exist, the officer would have not reason for death sentences, but he is too weak to resist his nearly religious obsession with it. In the same way, Jacques wouldn’t need to kill anyone as long as he never encountered a woman, but whenever he sees one, he feels that he must kill her simply because she exists, and he has a hard time overcoming this urge due to weakness.
This story is referenced in, of all things, a Harry Potter book. Harry is sentenced to write lines as punishment, and a magical spell causes the words he writes to be scratched into the skin on his hand, leaving a permanent scar reading, “I will not tell lies.”

Sometimes I can’t reconcile myself to Tolstoy’s optimistic view of humanity. At one point, Nekhlyudov comes to the conclusion that most people “have become bad only because of their office,” (449). I don’t know whether Tolstoy actually believes this, whether he wishes it were the truth, whether he’s just portraying Nekhlyudov as an optimist or a naïf, but sometimes it really bothers me! He says that, then shows umpteen examples of people treating others cruelly and inhumanely, and there is always a reason why they can’t feel compassion; they’re annoyed at dumb bureaucratic things like tedious paperwork, or they’re hot, or they had a fight with their wife. As much as I am enjoying this novel and think that Tolstoy is wonderful, I think he’s guilty of some rationalization himself. I’m sure his optimistic view of humanity makes him want to give rational explanations for peoples’ motivations at behaving cruelly, but I don’t think there always is a rational explanation, unfortunately.

Maybe Tolstoy is reacting to more pessimistic writers like Zola, and maybe it was just the trend of the time period he was writing in to try to discover and attribute psychological motives for all kinds of behavior because of the emergence of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. I haven’t read any of his other works, but it seems to me as I read this section that he is either naïve or doesn’t want to address the fact that sometimes people are cruel simply because they can be. The prison guards are always treating prisoners badly because they (the guards) are in a bad mood or don’t want to be bothered, but never because they are power-hungry or simply cruel. I know the point is that this system dehumanizes not only the prisoners, but everyone involved in the system, from guards to magistrates to cabinet members. I know he doesn’t think these are good excuses for treating others badly, but it’s like he’s saying that nobody would be this way if they didn’t work somewhere that dehumanized them and others, and I don’t believe that. I think people often seek those jobs because they already have a disregard for other humans and because they are compelled by self-interest and want to wield power over others.

I think it would be more realistic for me if, just once, a character would show up whose cruelty wasn’t explained in some way, or is explained thus, “he was cruel simply because he could get away with it/it made him feel powerful.” Maybe it sounds crazy, but I need that in order to make it fit better into my worldview. I don’t believe that all people are good at heart but have lost their way because they let self-interest guide them. Perhaps I’m too influenced by postmodern, nihilistic novels and films, but I think that part of the reason people would choose jobs like prison guard to begin with is because they need to feel powerful and they like pushing people around (I’ve met some ex-wives of cops who would agree).

I know many people take or stay at jobs they are not particularly well-suited for because they need the money or it’s convenient, (me included), but I also know that people like jobs where they get to exert power or control over people. For example, I work in a finance office. Our office collections rep loves to talk about how if people don’t shape up, he’ll repossess their cars. Every other male who comes within sniffing distance of our building asks my boss if they can help him repossess something. I’m sure that the excitement and adrenaline rush of the thing is very alluring, but I’m also sure part of that adrenaline rush is the feeling of power one gets from taking someone’s car from them. The whole thing makes me uncomfortable.

I did not address it specifically, but I did read the whole section, from the men dying of sunstroke and Princess Korchagina’s ironic exclamation that the heat is killing her, to the convicts’ march across Russia to Siberia (I didn’t know they had to do this. It is horrible), to the description of the unfair and seemingly arbitrary injustices suffered by the political prisoners (Simonson seems like a real pill), to the end where Nekhlyudov must interrupt the officer’s bawdy story about a Hungarian woman “with Persian eyes” (I.e. a gypsy. Good on Nekhlyudov for condemning “this kind of attitude to women”) in order to visit Maslova and the political prisoners. I am fairly certain that when I get to the end of the novel I am going to cry because I won’t want it to be over.

A Field Trip to Dante’s Inferno

I had an interesting experience the other day that called to my mind the attitudes of certain people portrayed in Resurrection. We went to the landfill for a Geology field trip. We rode to the landfill site from school in a van and the van I was in contained about 9 people. On the way to the landfill, one of the guys in the back was talking about how he had to go to alcohol class for 8 hours because he’d gotten caught consuming alcohol and is a minor. Everyone had an anecdote or story to contribute on this subject, because twentysomethings tend to be familiar with that sort of thing.

When we got to the landfill, we picked up the landfill director and drove to the see the sights of the landfill. On our way around to the new landfill area (which is a large, many tiered hole in the ground very much resembling Dante’s description of the Inferno), we passed a white Ada County truck bringing in trash picked up by the alternative sentencing participants in the Sheriff’s Inmate Labor Detail (SILD). The landfill director, who was in the middle of describing the types of jobs available at the landfill, took this opportunity to say to all of us, “There’s the Inmate Labor truck,” and I asked what kind of work they did—because I thought maybe some people were sentenced to work at the actual landfill rather than just pick up trash on the roadside (like I said, twentysomethings tend to be familiar with the consequences of excess alcohol consumption). “Well, you want to be careful that you don’t have too much fun. The Inmate Labor Program is for those who get punished for their sins and indiscretions and have to do hard labor for the County.”

Everyone kind of stopped talking for a minute. Finally one guy said, “It’s better than sitting in jail,” and the director said, smiling, “They think so, too.” My friend was incredulous at his use of the word “sins”—apparently she didn’t realize that a trip to the landfill would entail a morality lesson! Truly, I have not heard anyone use the word “sin” in a non-church situation, (outside of a novel or movie), in so long that I can’t remember. After he got out, my friend and I spent a long time discussing how judgmental and inappropriate it seemed for the guy to use the word and I commented that he’s probably never read Tolstoy.

I’m guessing that the landfill director has never read Tolstoy because he would probably be in the camp of Nekhlyudov’s brother-in-law and his smug assertion that, “innocent people are never punished—or, at least, with very rare exceptions. But the guilty are punished…every thief knows that stealing is wrong and that he ought not to steal—that stealing is wicked,” (410-11). Now, I’m not arguing that the people sentenced to the SILD are innocent; I know several people who’ve had to do it because they drove drunk when they knew they shouldn’t have. My main objection is the guy’s use of the word “sin,” because it presumes the following: A) that everyone has the same notion of religious morality, and B) that we all feel the same as him in reserving the right to judge and condemn others based on this notion, or C) it’s his place to engage in such pedagogy because he has a carload of students at his facility. I don’t like it when people arbitrarily presume that I share their views, especially when it comes to religion.

In a way it resembles Nekhlyudov’s experience in this section of the novel. Everyone thinks he’s crazy for wanting to help the prisoners and peasants and they don’t want to try to understand either him or the people he’s trying to help. One of them, and I can’t remember who because there were so many of them and they all blend together, (Tolstoy makes a good example of government bureaucracy and red tape and the schmoozing it takes to get things done), is described as someone who doesn’t believe anything religion-wise, but he thinks it’s bad for the peasants to have religious views outside of the state-sponsored religion. Then he helps Nekhlyudov anyway and sets them free. Most of the people Nekhlyudov deals with are the same way; at first they are firmly resolved to refuse his requests because he is going against what they consider normal, then they sign over prisoners’ freedom as soon as he asks. So what happened to their resolve not to break with order and normalcy? Are they more humane than they appear at first, are they just indifferent, or are they spineless?

In this section Tolstoy gives us again a scene in which a bunch of upper class socialites are attending a party and behaving falsely. It reminds me of gatherings I’ve attended at art galleries, etc. Sometimes they can be really fun, but other times they are really boring, especially when you see it’s just a bunch of people who already know each other and seem to only be interested in talking about their own inside jokes or reliving their good old high school days or talking about people who have long since moved away. Then it can be pretty pointless and empty seeming.
Even worse, I once attended an annual party with the theme of “Pimps and Ho’s,” [sic]. In case you don’t know what this is, the Pimps & Ho’s theme party was popularized by rap musicians in the late 1990’s or early 2000’s. People attending these parties dress up like either hookers or pimps and drink a lot of whatever they imagine rappers or pimps and hos drink, (in other words, everything). Usually there is a lot of drug-doing going on as well. It ends up with everyone trying to outdo each other in crassness and debauched behavior, but in a very affected and pathetic way, (though I doubt any of them has ever heard the word “debauched” before). What it actually boils down to is a group of acquaintances who are drawn together by the fact that they frequent the same watering hole, parading around in too few clothes in mid-November, each hell-bent on doing something legendarily outrageous, most of whom end up puking on the host’s lawn before shambling away at sunrise.
The Pimps and Ho’s party was hardly the same as the soiree Nekhlyudov wades through to talk to Maslennikov, but there seemed to be a similar pervasive air of artificiality—the least of which were the ridiculous costumes worn by the pimps and hos. I heard several exchanges of phone numbers at that party that sounded like this, “Hey, give me your phone number again? Every time you tell me it I lose it, but this time I’m gonna call you and we’ll get drunk!” I’ve no doubt this was finally the magic occasion where they managed to make good on this promise.
There was a guy who was hugging everyone and who seemed genuinely friendly and interested in what other people had to say. As soon as he left, everyone complained about how much they hated him. Most people would be really friendly to someone when they walked past, then badmouth them as soon as they were out of earshot. This is what reminds me of the Maslennikovs’ party. The way everyone is offended by Nekhlyudov’s abrupt departure and talks about him afterwards reminds me the way everyone at the Pimps & Ho's was offended by the too-friendly guy and badmouthed him when he left. It seems more absurd, though, since Nekhlyudov actually did behave somewhat rudely whereas this guy was just being friendly. I remember Nekhlyudov geting annoyed at jury duty because an overly friendly guy ignored social mores and was too familiar with him until he (Nekhlyudov) found more important things to occupy his mind, namely Maslova.
There is an interesting contrast between the upper class social gatherings Nekhlyudov attends and the scenes at the prison. All of the interactions at the prison are more genuine than the upper class get-togethers, whether they take place in the cells or in the visiting room. I think part of what Tolstoy is saying is that the leisured classes have built up all of this affectation to cover up the fact that they have nothing better to do. At least learning and maintaining all of these social regulations gives them something to occupy their time when they aren’t depriving prisoners of their civil rights and/or having them flogged. I’m hoping to see Nekhlyudov interact with the peasants on his estate to see what that is like.
This is unrelated, but I don’t understand why the political prisoners seem to have it so much easier than the other prisoners, which is what we see when Nekhlyudov goes to visit Vera Oh-God-I-can’t-say-her-name-a. Their visiting room doesn’t have mesh wires between the visitors and the prisoners. I’m guessing it’s because they are probably mostly upper class and respectable middle class people. I think they would be the only ones who could afford the luxury of being radical; both literally because they have access to education and reading materials and free time, also because their status protects them from harsher punishment. If there are any poor “political” prisoners, they probably get thrown in the regular, lice-ridden jail on trumped-up or fabricated charges, like the Menshovs or the 130 men with expired passports.

Resurrection
It’s interesting that Tolstoy actually sees fit to point out just how fake are the interactions of Sophia Vassilyevna and Kolossov: "Nekhlyudov saw, first, that neither of them cared anything about the play or each other, and that if they talked it was only to satisfy the physical need to exercise the muscles of the throat and tongue after eating," (132). It seems to me that most people don’t want to admit or break the illusion that sometimes conversation is just as Tolstoy describes it above. Every day at work I interact with people whose common greeting is "How are you?" and everyone knows you don't actually give any answer other than, "good" or "great!" or some sort of cliché such as, “living for the weekend.” You never say how you’re actually feeling or if you're having a bad day, because most people don’t want to hear that.
I’ve experimentally answered people a couple of times with things like, “Actually, I’ve been having a terrible week,” just to see what happened. On each occasion, the other person got visibly uncomfortable and was surprised that I gave an earnest answer. One time the other person just changed the subject entirely, and once an acquaintance actually said something like, “Oh, I don’t want to hear about anything bad!” which I found rather rude, because why ask if you don’t really care? I mean, why don’t we just ask some other meaningless question in greeting, such as, “Do you have a third nipple?” or something? It would be the same thing. Why not something totally nonsensical like, “Do bread lights have lice?” and the codified expected answer could be, “Mathematics!” To me it seems as pointless.
It always makes me feel like these exchanges are sort of empty, and like there isn’t any real exchange or communication occurring. It’s kind of the way the whole scene plays out between Sophia Vassilyevna, Kolossov, and Nekhlyudov. Nekhlyudov isn’t in the mood to play along with this ruse of talking for the sake of talking and going along with all of the Princess’s artificial nonsense, so she gets annoyed when he gives her short, dry, honest answers and doesn’t keep up his end of the conversation. She’s receiving all these men in her room because part of her youthful façade is that they are her admirers, and the rumor about her affair with her doctor is probably a false one started by Sophia Vassilyevna herself. Her power struggle with Philip the handsome footman on pages 133-4 is hilarious, and it further underscores her vanity and ridiculousness that she brings in her attractive servant and orders him around in front of her “admirers.” What a totally boring, pathetic life!
I am reminded of this artificiality in the scene where the prisoners attend a service in the ornate, glittering church. The priest is wearing a gold garment that he can’t move in; he leads the prisoners in prayers for the Emperor, which seems sort of blasphemous. The part, though, where Tolstoy describes the preparation of the communion bread and wine/Body and Blood of Christ on p. 181-2 is the best. Such dry sarcasm! He reduces the act of transubstantiation (or whatever they call it in the Russian Orthodox church) to the most ridiculous, comical sounding ritual, and the priest comes off sounding like a hypocrite and a bit of a buffoon: “hampered though he was by the gold cloth sack he had on…sinking to his knees and kissing the table and the objects on it…the most important operation was when the priest picked up a napkin in both hands and rhythmically and smoothly waved it over the saucer and the golden cup.” It reads like a weird ritual carried out by a superstitious child or a mentally challenged or a crazy person. Then Tolstoy tells the reader, “This was supposed to be the moment when the bread and wine turned into flesh and blood, and therefore this part of the service was performed with the utmost solemnity.”
How can anyone believe this silliness would effect a miracle? Indeed, Tolstoy tells us later that the priest himself doesn’t believe the bread and wine actually undergo a transformation—and that nobody can—but that the priest believes, “one ought to believe it,” (185). The part where the priest gives some of the blood and body to the children is a scene I can’t read without howling with laughter: “the priest carefully took a bit…and thrust it far into the mouth of each child in turn, while the subdeacon, wiping the children’s mouths, in a gay voice sang a song about the children eating God’s flesh and drinking His blood,” (p. 182). How utterly grotesque and morbid this sounds! But wait, it gets better: “the priest carried the cup back…and drinking up all the blood left in the cup and eating all the remaining bits of God’s body, and painstakingly licking round his moustaches and wiping his mouth and the cup, briskly marched out from behind the partition, in the most cheerful frame of mind…” There is so much wrong here. I’m not religious, but it is disgusting to imagine the priest licking the blood of Christ off his “moustaches,” as though it’s a tasty morsel. And if it’s supposed to be a solemn occasion, then maybe the priest shouldn’t be quite so cheerful. It’s not surprising, therefore, when Tolstoy breaks into the admonishment on the following pages about how blasphemous these practices are. It’s pretty obvious how disgusting he finds all of it by his description of this transubstantiation ritual.

I knew an Effi when I was a child, and though she was as different from Effi Briest as anyone could possibly be, she too suffered from lonliness and boredom. She was a solid, ruddy Austrian divorcee with a deep voice and a deeper tan. If her son Hans Eric wasn’t home by dinnertime, she’d set the neighborhood dogs barking by standing on her driveway and bellowing, "Haaaannnnn Zzzzaaaaahhhhhhrrrrrrrick!" with that special Bavarian r-roll. For a long time I thought his name was spelled Han Zehrick, or something. Her perpetual summer wardrobe consisted of a faded lavender tube top or faded blue bikini top, white terrycloth short-shorts three sizes too small, and some rather menacing-looking gardening gloves. I remember this disco hit man uniform well.

Effi’s house lay at the corner of a major neighborhood intersection, and the yard contained a mound with a rock garden of sorts, strategically placed to be visible to as many motorists as possible. Effi spent Saturdays and Sundays weeding and planting in this garden, her butt rising ostentatiously into the air whenever she sensed the presence of a male, like a cat in heat. I’m pretty sure it operated of its own accord, like it was equipped with testosterone-sensing radar. You could be in the middle of a conversation with her, and she’d suddenly bend down, forcing you to crouch to continue your tete a tete. Thirty seconds later, the guy across the street would come out of his house to get his mail. It was amazing. The ass never went up if it was a woman or a kid heading for the mailbox. It was the same with cars; the butt could sense a male driving a vehicle from several blocks away. The intersection she lived on was so busy, however, that on Saturdays, Sundays, and holiday Mondays she basically had to spend the whole day bent over. I don’t know if this ploy ever lured any men or not.

I remember one winter day Hans Eric and I decided to sled down the little hill in the front yard. I toppled off the sled and onto a snow-covered clutch of cactus, and the needles went through my mittens and stuck in my palms and in between my fingers. Effi had little sympathy and mostly scolded me for potentially damaging her cactus garden.

The other night I read La Bete Humaine right before I went to bed. I stopped at the point when Jacques was lying in bed debating killing Roubaud and could not sleep a wink. Interestingly enough, I didn’t sleep well that night. I had several dreams where I thought I was awake and that there was someone in my room. I tried to turn on my bedside light, but the light bulb was burned out and wouldn’t turn on. I had a similar one where I woke up and I knew I needed to go to work, but the lamp was burned out again and my clock was broken. I couldn’t tell if it was time to get up or not, and for whatever reason, I was unable to get out of bed without the lamp being on. I have dreams like this all the time, but I thought of it just as I was reading scene on pages 319-20 where Jacques goes to strangle Severine but then she puts out the lamp and he is okay (for the time being, at least). Zola has made an interesting inversion of the typical cliché of the monster who comes out in the dark.

It’s interesting how Zola is able to make you dread the inevitable when Jacques kills Severine—and yet he must drag it out so that you both dread it but at the same time you just want him to get it the hell over with! And why does Severine have to get so clingy and annoying and murderous right before he kills her? I am very upset that Jacques kills her even though I knew all along he was going to do it. She loves him so much! She’s so childlike! Yet at the same time, she’s going kind of crazy. The scene is set up so that there is nothing Jacques can do but kill her—even if he hadn’t had the dark urge to kill a woman since childhood, I think he may have been driven over the edge anyway. And yet I wonder if that scene is set up on purpose to test the reader: which thing do you see? That Severine is a sweet devoted (though somewhat misguided) lover, she loves Jacques madly, and her desire to kill Roubaud is completely natural and justified; or that she has become a beast herself, desperate and cloying, and she drives Jacques over the edge? (All of the above, of course).

What drives me crazy is that if Severine wants Roubaud dead so badly, why doesn’t she just kill him herself? It’s interesting how many times you are told how docile and submissive she is, but she really stops being so much so after she has her sexual awakening with Jacques. So why does the narrator keep saying that she is? Clearly she is pushing her own agenda when she’s trying to “help” Jacques to kill Roubaud by using her “affectionate docile innocence,” (328), but she is so obsessed with this idea of she and Jacques being one that she believes they are completely of the same mind.

Severine and Jacques are a good example of the notion that love makes you crazy; and that passion and madness are so closely related that sometimes they are the same thing, and that passion often causes destruction. In the end, passion destroys everyone because it is the beast! Misard kills Phasie because his only passion is for her money, and her only passion is keeping it from him; Flore kills a bunch of people and herself because of her passion for Jacques; Cabuche gets dragged into everything due to his misguided idolizing of Severine and because the cops are so passionate to prove their own convoluted theories (and clearly aren’t familiar with the principle of Occam’s Razor), Pecqueux kills himself and Jacques and, everyone on earth (it seems like everyone metaphorically, anyway) in a jealous rage. I am that at least Roubaud gets what he deserves. And as for Jacques, I would be more upset if killing Severine had completely sated his lust for murder. It seems wrong, but it’s better that it’s entirely his problem and has nothing to do with her. Her life has been so sad, and the moment she finds love, it is her undoing. This novel forces you to think things that are unspeakable. Earlier, when Jacques cast about in the streets looking for a victim to murder, I thought, “No, don’t murder the poor sad woman,” and was relieved when he instead chose the happy woman to murder. Good God!

Can I just say that as I have been writing this paper, I have been listening to a CD I made myself at least 5 years ago and just found today. I couldn’t remember the songs on it, so I popped it into my CD player, and here are some of the eerily appropriate song titles that have been playing as I’ve been writing: “Where Is My Mind?” “Killer Queen,” “The Metro” (about a train), “Psycho Killer,” “Everything She Wants,” “She’s Come Undone,” and “Love is the Drug.” Kinda freaky.