Between the description of an 'infinitesimal glass of sherry', the litany of cutesy place names ('Crook Manor', 'Ceck's Bottom', 'Pock-on-the-Fling') Between the description of an 'infinitesimal glass of sherry', the litany of cutesy place names ('Crook Manor', 'Ceck's Bottom', 'Pock-on-the-Fling') and actually reminding the reader in as many words that the theme of the book is 'the grotesque', I now know what it's like to read a book with the iconoclastic spirit of Gormenghast as written by an author lacking the wit or idiom to carry it off. It's affected, trite, and tiring. Mostly tiring....more
Another read for my research into early horror as I work on my own supernatural Victorian tale, but in the end I have to agree with Lovecraft's assessAnother read for my research into early horror as I work on my own supernatural Victorian tale, but in the end I have to agree with Lovecraft's assessment in his Supernatural Horror in Literature that Walpole's style is insipid and full of silly melodrama. It's not hard to see why it was so influential, as it introduced a great number of interesting ideas and symbols, but like so many books that inspired a genre, its the fact that original author did so little with those ideas that left room for better writers to improve upon it....more
Kipling's is one of those imaginations which, slipping here and there, seems to plant the seeds for numerous books and genres yet to be devised. He wrKipling's is one of those imaginations which, slipping here and there, seems to plant the seeds for numerous books and genres yet to be devised. He writes to pique, slowly twisting out his stories and drawing the reader along unexpected and unrecognized roads. Each tale might set the mind on a new and unusual tack, and hence, more than anything, Kipling is an author for authors: an author whose imagination is contagious.
His stories always center around the foreign mystery of his native-born India, but more than that, of the intersection of dry, Anglican Protestantism and vibrant, deadly, magical Hindu tradition. The Greeks long ago borrowed from the Indian mystics the ideas of the soul, of atomism, and asceticism, and since then, the West has adopted holy meditation, the scourge of the flesh, and the One God who is Many.
Kipling's cultural crossroads is not a new conflation, but a reintroduction of an old acquaintanceship. Many of his earlier stories present a kind of deniable magic: a magic which is only magical because it is unfamiliar, and which later finds a perfectly reasonable explanation. It is not hard to imagine such overgrown superstitions on the parts of the British, whose magical roots have been long straitlaced and sublimated, excepting ghost stories at Christmas.
In 'My Own True Ghost Story', we find a Britain who is obsessed with finding magic in India, and who comes to find it only because he looks for it everywhere. Kipling's works are full of such reversals of expectation, where it is not the 'alien magic of India' at fault, but the alien India which a foreigner wishes were true.
In his introduction, Neil Gaiman mentions the stigma of Colonialism that follows Kipling to this day. Kipling was representing the point of view of a ruling class descended from a foreign culture, but he is hardly dismissive of Indian culture or its traditions. Indeed, he does not try to make anything absurd out of Indian culture, nor does he try to represent it from the inside.
Though many may be content to declare him a racist and a colonialist because he was of the race of conquerors, that stance forgets that every nation has been conquered and sublimated by a series of various cultures, and that this should not invalidate the conquering culture any more than it invalidates the conquered culture. Even North America's native people wiped out a previous aboriginal population in staking their claim.
Gaiman is also one of the authors who shows a clear line of inspiration back to Kipling. The concept of his novel 'American Gods' is completely laid out in Kipling's 'The Bridge-Builders'. Likewise, one can find the roots of Gaiman and Pratchett's 'Good Omens' in Kipling's 'The Appeal', which also forms a background for C.S. Lewis' 'Screwtape Letters'. All three show the afterlife in terms of a purely British bureaucracy: polite and convoluted. Kipling also provides a scaffold for Gaiman's favorite: 'awkward fellow in an incomprehensible underbelly of horrifying magic'.
Yet these are not the only threads to be traced through Kipling. 'A Matter of Fact' is a proto-lovecraftian horror tale, if there ever was one, from the carefully-paced, skewed tone to the confessional style to the incomprehensible sea creatures and the alienating realization that the truth often has no place in the world of man.
The collection also includes a pair of science fiction tales, which are not Kipling's best work. The first, especially, is difficult to follow. His retro-future is barely comprehensible today, and he has made the most common mistake of the unskilled sci fi author: he explains too much. He spends much more time on describing his unusual, convoluted technologies than on imagining the sort of world they would produce.
The second, 'As Easy as ABC: A Tale of 2150 AD ', spends more time on plot, politics, and character, and if one makes it through the overwrought sections, one can see a prototype of 1984. The political tack of the story tries to tackle fascism versus democracy decades before it became a reality. While he does not have Verne's eye for the social impact of technology, he did succeed in making a remarkably forward-looking tale.
He also dabbles in metaphysical and psychic connections, trying to divine the nature of consciousness. In 'The Finest Story in the World', he presents a case of previous lives as the lively backdrop for a true Author's Story. The narrator obsesses with writing, talent, inspiration, and the eternally looming specter of Lost Perfection in a way which threatens to pull out the heart of any aspiring writer by its strings.
'The Brushwood Boy' deals with another obsession of the writer: the despair that there will never really be an audience who can comprehend you. Eventually, the tale collapses neatly into a paranormal love story, but its implications stretch far beyond its conclusion. 'Wireless' takes a technological tack in the question of whether there might be a universal source of human inspiration.
He also writes many more standard English Ghost stories, usually regarding mental breakdown and obsession, as in the 'The Phantom 'Rickshaw' or 'Sleipner, Late Thurinda'. Perhaps the most powerful of these is the seemingly innocuous 'They', which subtly and slowly builds a mood of thick unease without resorting to any tricks or shocks.
There are also the tales of a world which suddenly turns, growing stranger that the protagonist could have imagined, but without resorting to magic or the uncanny. Such stories as 'The City of Dreadful Night', 'Bubbling Well Road', 'The Strange Ride of Morrowby Jukes', and 'The Tomb of his Ancestors' ask us to accept a world which seems eminently possible, if unlikely. It is these stories that most stretch our horizons by asking us to imagine something which requires not a leap of faith, but merely a coincidence of remarkable circumstances or an unusual world view.
Kipling also has chance to show the humorists' pen in the Fish Story 'The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau' and in the uproarious farce "The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat', which rises in ever steeper climaxes of unimagined consequences until it begins to shake the high seat (and low comedy) of Wodehouse himself.
There are many other tales besides, from Fairy Stories to original Mythology (which Kipling fully realized in his lovely 'Just so Stories'), adventures, and even a mystery. Kipling's great wealth of production and imagination is daunting, but we may at least take comfort in the fact that his soaring wit is not the kind that overawes and dumbs us, but the sort which sets our mouths to laugh and call, and our minds to dance and twitter, or to fall suddenly into unknown and unrecognized depths in just the place we thought we knew the best.
He may lack the poetic turn of Conrad, the drive of Verne, or the harrowing of James, but neither could they lay claim to the far-ranging vivacity of that ingenuity that is, and remains, Kipling's.
A nice collection, including some stories I haven't come across anywhere else. Particularly intriguing is a travelogue by H.P. Lovecraft originally ghA nice collection, including some stories I haven't come across anywhere else. Particularly intriguing is a travelogue by H.P. Lovecraft originally ghostwritten for Harry Houdini.
That story, along with Doyle, Haggard, Kipling, Stoker, and archaeologist Howard Carter provide a view of the mysterious Egypt which lured the English of the Victorian age. The Poe, Twain, and Bradbury provide more absurd and amusing views of the mummy myth.
The inclusion of an original Egyptian myth gives another useful insight, as does Elizabeth Peter's well-researched period piece, though it was not as culturally intriguing as the actual myth.
The Rohmer is amusing, though as unpolished as one expects from the pulps. I could have done without this particular Anne Rice piece, which pales in such close quarters with masters of structure, humor, and especially tone.
It's a good introduction to a once-rich setting for stories and myths which has now been mostly boiled down into action movie fodder. Most interesting is how it recalls a time when Egypt and its mummies were filled with a promise of mysteries; a sense that each stone unearthed might rewrite history, yet again.
Today, the myth has become a cliche, the magic has been codified, and the mummy is more likely to invoke Scooby Doo and Brendan Frasier rather than an alien and unknown threat from a time long dead. It was nice to be reintroduced to the myth as it once was....more
Conrad should be known for more than 'Heart of Darkness'. As good a book as it is, it shows only a minute glimpse of what he is capable of. The delicaConrad should be known for more than 'Heart of Darkness'. As good a book as it is, it shows only a minute glimpse of what he is capable of. The delicacy, humor, wit, and sheer beauty he shows in this collection marks him as one of the most talented writers of his time, and with one of the most unique voices.
I at once compared him to Chekhov, for he shares with Chekhov a remarkable psychological insight, and hence is capable of constructing characters by merely hinting at notions and moods, or by what he doesn't show us. It is this deft characterization that allows realism to equal the strange vitality of truth, recalling that 'fiction' need not mean 'falsehood'.
But then it shouldn't surprise that Conrad has something reminiscent of Chekhov, as he was born in the Ukraine, and was familiar with the same tradition of stories, and storytellers, as well as the bittersweet, resigned humor of Eastern Europe. But that is not all there is to Conrad.
Along with the patented despair of the great Russian authors, Conrad possesses a lightness, a bawdy, earthy amusement, something that approaches wit, picking up the story and bearing it along, without crudely driving it, like some French oxen. Like Dumas, pere, Conrad is capable of writing an adventure, a story which ties together the improbable, the unfortunate, the miraculous, and the disastrous into something grand and amusing and ridiculous, but not without a touch of humanity and pain. But then, Conrad left the Ukraine at 18 to join the French merchant marine, so it should hardly surprise us that he picked up something there of wit and joie de vivre, even as he picked up the Gallic tongue.
Yet he wrote his stories in English, and his stories were not without an English touch. After all, he bears comparison to Haggard, Stevenson, and Melville, but more than them, Kipling. There is something often small and precise, undaunted about his characters that is British, and he writes of Horror like a Victorian, of the overawing force of the sublime.
But why should that surprise us? After all, he left France to join the English merchant marine, picked up a new language, and sailed up the Congo river in Africa for them, and by this point, he was a man of forty who hadn't written as much as a short story.
In Africa, he experienced a kind of Hell on Earth, a place of true demons, of suffering, of things unimaginable. Like Dante, he descended, ever on, and saw for the first time the terrible depths of the human heart. And he emerged.
Yet never the same, he had gained some insight, or lost some ideal there, and in all the future, could only see the world as a strange, tinted place, a satire, a place where pains and joys were small, yet refused to be overshadowed.
Perhaps it was here that he found his greatest talent: the ability to feel great beauty and great terror in every thing, every man, every sunset, every gust of wind and gesture. Conrad will surprise you. Not merely with his amusing, fraught characters, eccentric, varied stories, and moments of amusement, but with sudden, poignant, insightful visions of the world, visions both unerring and vast.
In a moment and a turn of phrase, Conrad suddenly opens the soul, and a deep sigh flows from the page like the breath of the Earth, a sigh of love that has seen love die, and a thousand times. There is something in his voice, something that is not merely Russian, or French, or English, but which moves between them, and rises above him, and is his voice, and his alone, and forever.
It is not ungainly, or unfamiliar, and yet it is not quite like anything else. It is not merely the English of the unpracticed man, or the knowledgeable foreigner, but of the man who has come to terms with his new language late, and comfortably, and who saw it for the first time with lined eyes.
They meet as two old people meet, already grown, already whole, and become lovers because it is easy, and it is pleasant. The laughs they share, for there is no reason not to, the pains they do not need to share, because they both know them well, already. He does not forget his past loves, nor does he pine for them. He loves now his new love, yet not simply because she is new....more
Almost every author will fall into one of two camps: the active, and the reactive. The active author looks at the world around them and decides to wriAlmost every author will fall into one of two camps: the active, and the reactive. The active author looks at the world around them and decides to write about what they see. They sit down and think: "I'm going to write a story, the subtext of which will provide my analysis of Victorian sexual mores". They then construct the story around this theme, creating characters to show different aspects and constructing a plot which moves from general observations to specific insights.
Then there are the reactive authors. These tend to sit down to write a story without necessarily thinking about what the characters or story mean. Reactive authors will often still touch on the same themes as active authors, but instead of deliberate explorations, we get the author's gut reactions.
In the Late Victorian, one of the ideas that concerned many authors was the 'New Woman', who was a proto-feminist: she was active, controlled her own life, considered marriage a partnership instead of a master/subservient relationship, took pleasure in her own sexuality, and took part in traditionally male activities, like science, writing, and carousing.
Since Stoker is a reactive author, we do not get a deliberate analysis of the New Woman: we don't get a view of how she came about, of what drives her or differentiates her, or of what she might mean for the future of sexual politics. Instead, we get the reactive view: a certain thrill in the sexual freedom she represents, but in the end, she is condemned for being frightening--she is too difficult to control, she does not fit in.
The reactive view is nebulous, switching back and forth, never getting to the heart of the matter. Stoker does not include the New Woman because he understands her, but because she troubles him. This applies equally to his other recurrent themes: foreign vs. British identity, homosexual and other non-familial desire, scientific innovation, and ancient mysticism.
He includes these things not because he has some insight to reveal to the reader, but because they are concepts he cannot cease bringing up. They are a part of his world, and so he depicts them. These depictions shift and change with his reactions: homosexuality is first condemned, then pitied, then hinted at enticingly, then condemned again.
It is one of many things which Stoker desires to speak about, to puzzle through, something which both intrigues and unsettles him, which he cannot help but return to whenever he considers humanity. It is a habit formed by deep emotional connections and powerful memories. He is lost somewhere between the grotesque fall of his former friend Oscar Wilde and his lifelong worship of Wordsworth, whose celebration of homosexuality was an open secret.
Unlike Byron, Shelley, and Polidori, who inspired Stoker's tale of Gothic horror, Stoker is not certain what he thinks about the world he lives in. He does not have a philosophy or a voice, he is just a man trying to make it through a world which he cannot come to terms with.
It is not an ideal situation for his characters, who must shift with the movement of the tides. The only consistent personality is Van Helsing, who is too ridiculous and overblown to get lost in the text. The others all move from one extreme to the other: now subverting Victorian ways, now upholding them. The longer the story goes on, the more they become a collection of names, losing any distinct identity. Though Stoker works in broad strokes, the characters are not unsympathetic or stupid, but they are there to serve the story, wherever the winds may list.
Dracula, himself, is mostly absent: our heroes try to create an identity for him with their fears and assumptions, but none are very certain that their assumptions about Dracula are correct. They point out several times that their own violent hunt for the count is not terribly civilized or sane, and may not be any more justified than Dracula's own need to feed. What carries them along every time is their own self-righteousness--but coming from such scattered, unsure characters, it is hardly a convincing justification.
There is a lot of elbow room in reactive books, because there is no distinct heart to the story, no central philosophy driving it--which appeals to a certain breed of academic: Stoker touches upon most of the controversial topics of his day, but never creates any definitive view of them. Things are truly open for interpretation, and the critical works in this collection take full advantage.
First Dracula is homosexuality, then he represents a gender switch, then he is the capitalist monopoly which destroys fledgling British Utopian Socialism--and certainly, all these are unconscious influences on Stoker, but it is too much to say that Dracula is any one of them. He is a collection of fears, insecurities, desires, and popular topics thrown in by Stoker as they came to him.
Most of the critics seem to recognize that Stoker was no great thinker--just an average, well-off, educated man with some talent for flowing prose. This being the case, it feels silly for them to declare one argument or another fundamentally sums up the text. Many think a declarative style lends strength to a somewhat vague analysis, but as a New Historicist, I prefer the critic give the author only as much credit as seems warranted.
That isn't to say there isn't a great deal to be gleaned about the period from Stoker--indeed, his insecurity often reveals much more than he intends--but we can only learn as much as we might from talking to the average man of the period, as opposed to studying the expert opinion of an 'active' author.
As a story, it is entertaining, and the reader may be surprised at how different the original vampire is from the one we are now familiar with. There are some aspects of the book that I think would be interesting to see in film, but there are many other winding, long-winded passages which are better left out. The book goes rather slowly in the middle, maintaining roughly the same conflict with no new developments, and we are reduced from several different epistolary views to a more-or-less streamlined, neutral voice as the bland heroes grow more uniformly alike.
The conclusion is rather abrupt, and we never do get to a real showdown to match all the buildup of Dracula's many-faced evil, but this makes sense. Since Stoker is unsure precisely what he means to get at with his book, we can hardly expect him to create a viable, satisfying conclusion. The ending is certainly final, but it is not a decisive advance upon the book's themes, but a safe retreat to normalcy.
As all horror authors must, Stoker reaches for his own fears and insecurities to drive his story along, but he is not a self-searching man, so when he comes to the time for an ending, he instinctively rejects all of the vague things which unsettle him, trying to do away with them suddenly and violently, as befits a man who is out of ideas.
And so, the showdown the story deserved is absent--we never face Dracula in his own domain, under his own power. His dark castle remains shut up, and the mystery of who he was and what motivated him is left unconquered. Due to one of the many small errors which permeate Stoker's text, even the conclusion can be called into question.
Though we are assured that life has returned to normal, that things are now safe again for the straitlaced Victorian family--that homosexuality, feminine power, foreign influence, and pagan mysticism have all been destroyed--the assertion rings hollow, because Stoker never deals with any of these fears. He never manages to meet them with the right tools to overcome them.
In the end--and as we always suspected--Dracula is simply too pervasively perverse for the upright Victorian man to kill, because as an average Victorian man, Stoker simply doesn't know where to strike. Like too many conservative thinkers, he has cultivated his own naivete by avoidance until he cannot comprehend how to oppose his enemy.
So Dracula lives on in our world, growing in power, his vast array of subversive powers getting stronger with time. He withstands the full force of Victorian ideals, then outlasts them, watching them crumble. It shouldn't have been surprising: as Byron, Polidori, and Shelley all hinted, it wasn't Dracula who was the myth, but Victorian morality. It isn't heroic to oppose sex and death, it is tragic: strike them as hard and as often as you like, then watch them rise again. And so Dracula does....more
If you have not read the book, then you do not know Frankenstein or his monster. Certainly, there is a creature in our modern mythology which bears thIf you have not read the book, then you do not know Frankenstein or his monster. Certainly, there is a creature in our modern mythology which bears that name, but he bears strikingly little resemblance to the original.
It is the opposite with Dracula, where, if you have seen the films, you know the story. Indeed, there is a striking similarity between nearly all the Dracula films, the same story being told over and over again: Harker, bug-eating Renfield, doting Mina, the seduction of Lucy, Dr. Van Helsing, the sea voyage from Varna, the great decaying estate--it's all there, in both book and cultural myth. Even the lines tend to recur, as almost every retelling has some version of the famed "I never drink--wine."
But think of Frankenstein's story, the moments that define it: the mountain castle, the corpse-thieving, the hunch-backed assistant, the silently shambling monster, the pitchfork-wielding mob, the burning windmill--none of these things appear in the original story. The first puzzlement comes when the story begins on a swift ship in the arctic, told in letters between the captain and his beloved sister.
The structure of the story as it follows is, in many ways, not ideal. It is not streamlined, focused, or particularly believable. It seems that every picturesque cabin in the woods is inhabited by fallen nobility, that every criminal trial is undertaken on false pretenses to destroy some innocent person, that an eight-foot-tall monstrosity can live in your woodshed for a year without being noticed, and that that same monstrosity can learn to be fluent and even eloquent in both speaking and reading an unknown language merely by watching its use.
The style itself is ponderous and florid, as Shelley ever is, which is fine when she has some interesting idea to communicate, but bothersome when she finds herself vacillating--which is often, since our hero, the good doctor, is constantly sitting about, thinking about what he might do next, and usually, avoiding actually doing anything. I understand the deep conflict within him, but it might have been more effective to actually see him act on some of his momentary urges before switching instead of letting it all play out in his head.
But then, it's hard to think of him as the hero, anyways, since his activities tend to be so destructive to everyone around him. Sure, he is aware of this tendency--hyper-aware, really--and constantly blames himself, but he doesn't come across as especially sympathetic.
The monster, on the other hand, is truly naive and hopeless, unable to change his fate though he often tries to do so, while the doctor tends to avoid doing anything that might improve the situation. There is a very Greek sense of tragedy at hand, in that we have a man who, though combined action and inaction, drives himself inevitably to utter ruin.
As Edith Hamilton defines it, tragedy is a terrible event befalling someone who has such deep capacity for emotion that they are able to recognize and feel every awful moment, and Dr. Frankenstein certainly has this capacity. In fact, he seems to have an overabundance of such feeling, to the point that he spends most of his time wallowing and declaring his woe--which is not always endearing.
But the tragedy remains the most interesting and engaging part of the book, overcoming the sometimes repetitive details of the story. It is an entwined tragedy, a double tragedy between the man and his creation, and it's never quite clear who is at fault, who is the villain, and who is the wretch. The roles are often traded from moment to moment, and there is no simple answer to wrap up the conflict.
Of course, the classic reading of this is an exploration of the relationship between man and his universe (often personified by 'god'). As human beings, we see our lives as a narrative, ourselves as the hero, and we look for villains to blame for our short-comings. the way Shelley lets this story play out between these two entangled lives, each justifying himself and blaming the other for every hardship forces the reader to look at how he does the same thing in every day of his own life.
Looking at the tale as it is presented, it is easy to read Dr. Frankenstein as the figure of 'god', the creator and authority, the author of life. We see the monster's pain and suffering and on one hand, it is all the result of his being created in the first place, and of his creator not planning well enough. But beyond that, there are also the actions and choices the monster makes that make him a monster--his own will.
But I began to look at it in the opposite way: the doctor creates a monster for which he can blame all of his problems, a force which dictates every moment of his life, which causes all of his pains, which haunts him, powerful and unseen, at every moment. Frankenstein has created a god. He has made a force which can lord over him, a god which resembles man, only more powerful, indestructible, inescapable, terrible. In the end, who is the real 'modern Prometheus'?
For almost the entire book, the only person who ever sees the monster is the doctor himself, and since the doctor is present for all of the killings, it isn't hard to interpret this story as the self-justification of a madman: the doctor, himself, could be doing all of the killings, causing all of the malice, and then explaining it away as the acts of a horrific creature that only he can see, that only he can speak to.
However, I am not willing to carry this 'unreliable narrator' reading to its bitter end, since the story itself does not quite support it--but the fact that the monster can almost be read this way intensifies to the degree to which it is a story of two intertwined egos, each one blaming the other, like so many toxic relationships between people, or even between one half of a troubled mind and the other.
But for all that the core idea of the story is strong and thought-provoking, it is still long-winded, unfocused, and repetitive. It is certainly impressive for the first novel of a nineteen-year-old, and demonstrates splendid imagination, but it does not benefit from her literary affectations. However, her style is still thoughtful and refined, unlike the halting half-measures of Stoker's small-minded Dracula, there is a great expanse here, a wide vista which well-reflects the Victorian artist's obsession with the horror of 'the sublime'....more
One thing which defines the Gothic movement is a ponderous and measured movement. Scenes and events are allowed to unfold minutely, creating tone not One thing which defines the Gothic movement is a ponderous and measured movement. Scenes and events are allowed to unfold minutely, creating tone not with a word, but with a constant and inexorable movement. This allows the author to subtly ease the reader into a strange and consuming world without relying overmuch on symbols and archetypes.
The world of Wieland is strange, and neurotically consuming, but Brown's wealth of words are more overstimulating than engrossing. To paraphrase Mark Twain's critique of Cooper, the author throws his entire force against every action, treating a momentary aside with the same gravity and complexity as a climactic revelation.
As the seminal American novelist, Brown left behind a literary philosophy evident in both Cooper and Hawthorne: never use five words where twenty will do. Brown's contemporary, Jane Austen, utilized a similar formality of speech, and with it exerted careful control over sprawling tales of minute human conflict.
But Austin was a master of tone and character, and filled her plots with intrigue. Brown's characters are shallow, melodramatic, and as dumb or brilliant as the plot requires. The plot itself meanders around the pretentious, flawed narrator, and the construction and pacing leave much to be desired.
Brown sets up impossible mysteries which build and build until some deus ex machina enters and explains it all in a flurry of exposition. We then find that the mystery was entirely red herrings and the explanation relies on what I'd call 'plot magic'.
In such cases, instead of an actual human solution, we are told it was done by a wizard, or a hypnotist, or some other agency that was both impossible to guess and never foreshadowed. This is also why JK Rowling will never succeed at her wish to write 'adult mysteries'.
This is the chief difference between Austen and Brown's styles: her plots hinge on the same emotional drama that her characters constantly spout, while Brown's is entirely divorced from the constant whirlwind of tears, fainting, and madness that his unlucky characters inhabit.
Looking on his characters from the present, they may seem to have an air of sophistication and intelligence, but they are really just goofy dorks. We must recall that arguing the particulars of Cicero was the 17th century equivalent of discussing different classes in WOW. They are ultimately idle, eccentric, and self-involved, producing nothing of worth.
So we have a lady writing about a handful of dorky homebodies weeping over an unsolvable mystery in a guilelessly complex hand. It is sometimes interesting for its sheer ridiculousness, and for its period, but it is more notable as a gothic influence than as a stand-alone work....more
'Rebecca' is Daphne du Maurier's love letter to her father. In writing this tale of youth and insecurity, she drew upon her own experiences with the u'Rebecca' is Daphne du Maurier's love letter to her father. In writing this tale of youth and insecurity, she drew upon her own experiences with the upper crust at the beautiful estate of Menabilly; like it's namesake Manderly, the house was never truly hers.
Throughout her life, du Maurier found herself at the center of intrigue, gossip, and bare-faced lies. Her official biographer painted her as a philandering lesbian, but never produced the promised 'love letters'.
According to friends, du Maurier possessed a darker secret: that her obsessive love for her controlling, distant father had been consummated. du Maurier was reportedly obsessed with the idea of incest, making it a 'private joke' at parties. Her father had been a notable actor, and Daphne spoke of their relationship mirroring his dalliances with young actresses.
Gerald du Maurier might be seen as a prototype for Mr. de Winter, in that he is cold, distant, and charming, and our unnamed protagonist remains ever doubting of his love. However, Daphne manages to turn him from a cold, masculine ideal to a secretly warm and romantic figure; it is the same transformation Austen achieves with Mr. Darcy.
At first our narrator often imagines him as being more than his wooden (even cruel) exterior, filling her naive head with portraits of him as a man from 'another time'. Daydreams make up much of the book's action, as we spend time inside our narrator's busy and obsessive brain.
Her loves, hatreds, sorrows, and fears pass over her like moods, here one moment, gone the next. She is unsure about nearly everything, and any certainties she does develop are soon dispelled.
du Maurier walks a fine line with this character, and sometimes steps over. The narrator can be unsympathetic in her histrionics or her naivety, and writing an annoying character in an entertaining manner is a very difficult task. Tom Jones can be a lout, but when he is, we are able to laugh at it. Elizabeth Bennet is often a dolt, but she is counterbalanced by the rest of the cast.
In her commitment to emotional realism, du Maurier falls neither on the side of wry savvy or farce; though she easily could with the memoir form. Instead, the nameless narrator's moments of mortification are simply unpleasant, and there are many of them.
The dialogue and character interaction can be similarly sparse, with most of the male characters roughly interchangeable. However, the plot is often ingenious, and its movements and reveals can be delightful, when not entirely obvious to everyone but the narrator.
Eventually these revelations do lead toward what may be the culmination of an obsession: the transformation of the laconic, uncaring father into the partner and lover. Without channeling Freud too much: the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. de Winter is often painted in strokes of the callous old man and the nubile young ingenue. Maxim often defines his desire for her in terms of her innocence, her lack of guile.
This is in contrast to his previous wife: the imperious termagant Rebecca. Our narrator first feels a raging jealousy for her, which quickly turns into an obsessive longing, and finally a transformation whereby she takes on Rebecca's role.
If there were any indication of latent lesbianism in the book, it would strike us here, where the the ultimately submissive (nameless, even) narrator forms an obsession with the strong, ideal woman. It is an obsession which may never be consummated, but haunts her just the same.
There is also a female love triangle between the dead Rebecca, the narrator, and the overbearing Mrs. Danvers, cycling between jealousy, spite, devotion, and hatred.
A more promising reading of the situation is provided by family letters where du Maurier describes herself as having two distinct sides. The first is her role as a wife and mother, as a dutiful lady of stature. This is the role Rebecca pretends to, and the role the narrator wishes she could take up.
The second 'life' in Daphne du Maurier may stem from her desire to be a boy (again, to please her father, who had no male offspring). du Maurier was a tomboy as a child, and described her writerly side as decidedly male, as powerful and sexual and in conflict with her womanly role.
Sometimes cited as a sign of her latent bisexuality (or lesbianism) is the way she takes on the male point-of-view in her novels. Her views of the narrator, Rebecca, and the theme of female obsession with the feminine object hearkens back to du Maurier's childhood, where her father's position in theater enabled her to meet Tallulah Bankhead, who du Maurier reportedly described as 'the most beautiful creature I have ever seen'.
The deliberate separation of these conflicting visions of sexuality and gender roles in du Maurier's novels may have formed under the influence of her father's notorious homophobia.
The book embraces and typifies the gothic tradition, its descriptions are vivid and it lives or dies by its tone. The tone often falters during dialogue, or in the narrator's childish insecurity. This insecurity is certainly realistic, but a realistic series of thoughts and actions does not an engaging novel make.
The romance was slightly less realistic, but also sometimes repetitive or dull. In the end, du Maurier's book was not as remarkable or haunting as the author herself. Certainly entertaining, well plotted, and dark, but not as tonally complex as Austen, nor as unsettling as Shelley....more
Roland Barthes talked about 'writerly' and 'readerly' books. I've struggled for a long time, myself, in trying to come up for terms to talk about the Roland Barthes talked about 'writerly' and 'readerly' books. I've struggled for a long time, myself, in trying to come up for terms to talk about the differences between deliberate works and those which are too bumbling, too one-sided, or too ill-informed to make the reader think.
While The Yellow Wallpaper brings up interesting points, it does not really deal with them. The text has become part of the canon not for the ability of the author, which is on the more stimulating end of middling, but because it works as a representational piece of a historical movement.
As early feminism, this work is an undeniable influence. It points out one of the most apparent symptoms of the double-standard implied by the term 'weaker sex'. However, Gilman tends to suggest more than she asks, thus tending toward propaganda.
It may be easy to say this in retrospect when the question "is isolating women and preventing them from taking action really healthy?" was less obvious back then. However, I have always been reticent to rate a work more highly merely because it comes from a different age. Austen, the Brontes, Christina Rossetti, and Woolf all stand on their own merits, after all.
This symbolism by which this story operates is simplistic and repetitive. The opinions expressed are one-sided, leaving little room for interpretation. This is really the author's crime, as she has not tried to open the debate so much as close it, and in imagining her opinion to mark the final word on the matter, has doomed her work to become less and less relevant.
This is the perfect sort of story to teach those who are beginning literary critique, because it does not suggest questions to the reader, but answers. Instead of fostering thought, the work becomes a puzzle with a solution to be worked out, not unlike a math problem. This is useful for the reader trying to understand how texts can create meaning, but under more rigorous critique, it is not deep or varied enough to support more complex readings.
Unfortunately, this means it is also the sort of story that will be loved by people who would rather be answered than questioned. It may have provided something new and intriguing when it was first written, but as a narrow work based on a simplistic sociological concept, can no longer make that claim.
The story is also marked by early signs of the Gothic movement, and lying on the crux of that and Feminism, is not liable to be forgotten. The symbolism it uses is a combination of classical representations of sickness and metaphors of imprisonment. Sickness, imprisonment, and madness are the quintessential concepts explored by the Gothic writers, but this work is again quite narrow in its view. While the later movement was interested in this in the sense of existential alienation, this story is interested in those things not as a deeper psychological question, but as the allegorical state of woman.
Horror is partially defined by the insanity and utter loneliness lurking in everyone's heart, and is not quite so scary when the person is actually alone and mad. Though it does come from the imposition of another person's will, which is horrific, the husband has no desire to be cruel or to harm the woman, nor is such even hinted subconsciously. Of course, many modern feminists would cling to the notion that independent of a man's desire to aid, he can do only harm, making this work an excellent support to their politicized chauvinism.
I won't question the historical importance or influence of this work, but it is literarily very simple. A single page of paper accurately dating the writing of Shakespeare's Hamlet would also be historically important, but just because it is related to the threads of literary history does not mean it is fine literature....more
At a dinner party, Wilde is supposed to have admired some other guest's bon mot, commenting 'I wish I had said that' to which host and prominant paintAt a dinner party, Wilde is supposed to have admired some other guest's bon mot, commenting 'I wish I had said that' to which host and prominant painter James McNeil Whistler replied: 'You will Oscar, you will.' Though often quoted as a great wit, Wilde was more imitator than innovator, which explains his praise of critics over artists--but Wilde's critic does not take the form of the theorist, but the consumer.
No book better represents Wilde's social and economic reasons for this position than 'Dorian Gray'. Though he is writing a novel, Wilde maintains a disconnect between himself and the Artist and Thinker, adopting their form only, and leaving the content to those unclean laboring masses.
His style is polished, practiced, and endlessly indulgent, which tends to obscure his lack of depth. Like Bouguereau, his touch is impressive, but as magnificently realized as the gauze and tits are, they do not aspire to be anything more than gauze and tits.
It is the cleverness of Carlyle: idiomatic, intriguing, but ultimately faltering in ideas. It is clever despite the content. But while Carlyle's is wild, bizarre, and flawed, Wilde is merely undecided. He is not simply a product of an elite class which epitomizes form over function, he is a rarefied parody of it.
His aphorisms, quoted endlessly, are rampant in his style, providing punchlines in comedies like 'Earnest' and here, sarcastic indictments. Yet unraveling them is rarely fruitful, since their meaning is less interesting than their construction. He plays with the form and structure of language--the tacit agreements and expectations of conversants--producing wry surprise, but not insight.
When he is inappropriate, is is not to build a case for impropriety, but to shock for its own sake. Statements which might be profound or intriguing if taken to their conclusion are instead twisted, altered, undermined, and ridiculed until all direction is lost. Instead of a discussion of ideas, Wilde recreates the quotidian society talk which is couched in the language of ideas that have already come and gone.
It is mere conversation, stylized to the point of incomprehensibility. Like business jargon or rap slang, it is all posturing: the conveyance of simple ideas by culturally specific vernacular. Anyone conversant in the form understands the underlying meaning, while anyone unfamiliar with the style is quickly outed as inadequate.
While 'paradigm' and 'synergy' are real terms with specific meanings, these are only used properly by academic experts in theory; by the time they trickle down to Project Managers and HR Heads, they have ceased to represent economic and social thought, and have merely become markers. Wilde's language is similarly derived from a small, specialized class--his are painters, philosophers, and authors--but by the time it reaches the idle, it has traded its function for pretense.
The idle consumers of the arts adopt the language of the arts and then refine it. Since they are not artists themselves, they do not have firsthand knowledge of the skills and qualities involved ('The Turpentine Effect'). Instead, they become critics. They become generalized 'aesthetes', and create their own meaning for art. Artists value art in their own way, based in experience, skill, meaning, and place in tradition. Consumers create meaning based upon novelty, quantity, connections, and money.
This pattern is still evident today in Modern Art, where blank canvasses may sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars and the most technically skilled artists work for a pittance in advertising, which has taken over for the church (in more ways than one). Likewise, literary prizes go to popular bestsellers while writers respected within the writing community rarely get enough to pay living expenses and remain unlauded.
This power dynamic is clear enough in the book--creators are constantly undermined and belittled by consumers. Since the consumers control the financial and social survival of the artists, they feel justified in the belief that they are the real soul of art.
Lord Henry is able to talk circles around painter Basil, in what appears to be Basil's own language, but in fact is not. Basil is a painter, and as such must spend the majority of his time and energy honing his skill. Henry is under no such duress, and so is free to spend all of his time mastering a complex linguistic system based not around art, but power structures.
Like high school, 'nerds' rarely have social power, but this is not just a social deficiency on their part, it's because they spend their time in fundamentally different ways. Keeping up with appearances is a full-time act for popular children, and so those who care more about reading books or doing homework will simply be unable to keep up.
Additionally, even if an artist has a deep understanding of art itself, he will have difficulty in overcoming the social and monetary barriers the wealthy have erected. Basil concedes to Henry's points because they seem tightly-constructed and are built from a framework of artistic and intellectual terms. However, this does not make them cogent or meaningful.
Henry often contradicts himself when addressing (and brow-beating) Basil, but even when Basil brings up these contradictions, he is unable to paint Henry into a corner, because Henry feels no need to stick to anything he says. He has no ideas, no philosophy, merely a customary way of life and a complex series of interlocking self-justifications.
Basil is actually hindered by the fact that he has concrete, informed ideas about art (and the world), because this makes him predictable and centered in a discussion which, while superficially about art, is actually a continued reinforcement of social inequality. It mirrors the endless discourse between atheists and believers, where neither side can come to any agreement because one is discussing differences in ideas, and the other differences in terms.
In such occasions, neither side can win, unless of course, one side has the social and economic power on which the other is reliant. Dorian himself is another curious case, as he is valued for being, in himself, a representation of artistic ideals: he is a beautiful man, and so he needs not dirty his hands with paint and clay to be pertinent to art, he can be the aesthetic focus.
He has monetary means, so he need not pursue Basil's skill-based value, and since he is beautiful, he does not need to constantly reassert his superiority, like Lord Henry. While he could simply subsist on his own beauty, he eventually spends his time becoming an elite collector: learning the market and finding the most rare items, tacitly maintaining his superiority over other consumers. They must support the value of consumption, as it is their own sole value, and hence must respect someone who has mastered the art of consumption itself.
Wilde's own knowledge of consumerism is evident in a divergent chapter on the history of excess, which outshines the rest of the book. While it has no conclusion, it indicates what Oscar might have become as an academic: a man who, like Rabelais, would have been capable of studying, collecting, and conceptualizing a part of history left mostly unrecorded by mere academia.
But Wilde chose to concentrate on criticism, championing its superiority to the art on which it is based. Like Lord Henry, we can see that Wilde's empty aphorisms are not meaningless, but their meaning is social power, not thought. If he had recognized the economic dynamic which tied his characters into their roles, he might have created an insightful satire on the society in which he lived, instead of merely serving as an example of it.
He makes light of dowagers and artists and the poor, but this is all what we might expect, if Lord Henry is as much Wilde as we imagine. To make fun of those who are below you is simply a justification of the status quo and the silver spoon. Lord Henry also makes light of himself, but not in the same biting, constructed way. While his debates with Basil are meant to demonstrate who is most important in art, and his discussions with Dorian to point out his social naivete, Henry's self deprecation has no such ulterior dynamic.
He feels his position is tenuous enough that he bolsters it with clever speech and condescension, but not enough to comment on it or grow beyond it. In the end, Wilde is as uncomprehending as Henry, praising the critic because if the critic is not superior to the artist, then Wilde must keep his quipping mouth shut. Like Carlyle, he creates a clever structure to justify the luck of his birth, and like Carlyle, his technique is as overwhelming as his philosophy is brittle.
There is always give and take in art, philosophy, or science. No man is an island and inspiration and influence are not anathema. The Modernists have worshiped originality for a long time, but this is like Wilde's hollow rebellion: an attempt to disparage what has come before in order to hide the deficiencies of the present. The past casts a great shadow, but closing your eyes to it will not let you escape it. It is only by the light you cast that you may be set apart from the darkness.
That Wilde repeated is not his crime. Whistler's comment is not biting simply because Oscar cannot help reusing every clever thing he hears. What might have drawn Whistler's umbrage (as a painter) was that Wilde placed the idle, wealthy critic above the artist. He placed repetition above innovation. Wilde stood on the shoulders of giants in muddy boots, he used their own words to declare them inferior, and represented the value of paintings by their purchase price and the jealousy they drew from other consumers.
But the critic can be as great as the artist, because the critic can be an artist. Every book is both a refutation and an acknowledgment of what came before. Virgil is a critic of Homer, Milton is a critic of Virgil, and Eliot a critic of Milton. They each took what came before, reiterating some, abandoning else, and subverting the rest.
It is often the problem with critics that their works do not synthesize a new vision. For Wilde and the idle rich, it was often enough to tear down. The only flaw is that you cannot tear something down unless you have some fundamental philosophy to speak from. Wilde has little to offer in return but refinement and wit, which will serve well enough at dinner parties or farces, but are not sufficient for much else.
Wilde himself has said that he intended artist Basil to be how he sees himself, Lord Henry as how he is perceived by others, and Dorian as who he wishes he could be. And here, he is the artist, writing as Basil painted, out of a need to create, to prove himself, a need that never quite overcomes the artist's self-loathing and perfectionism. All throughout, he is beleaguered and harangued by his own domineering critic, whose supercilious, biting wit is the timid artist's mask, and whom the artist cannot defeat, even in the fantasy of his own work. The artist would like to play the lover, but the critic is determined to prove a villain.
Then there is Dorian, who is not the unconfident creator, dependent on an audience, nor the bitter cynic who masters art by paying for it (or refusing to). Dorian aspires to be the keeper of art, the academic who records its history and for whom value is the result of knowledge and research, of the sort Wilde demonstrates in his one-off chapter on the history of aesthetics.
But Wilde, or little Basil, will not aspire so high. Yet we can hardly sympathize, for Wilde at once recognizes his shortcomings (he is, perhaps, too aware of them), yet cannot prevent them from manifesting into the overbearing form of Lord Henry, the part Wilde played in life. He cannot stand to create, unselfconsciously, nor manage to elevate his criticism to an objective record of art.
It's hard to be sympathetic for the man who is just insightful enough to be humorously bitter, but denies himself a whit more....more
Not many people outside of literary study or detective fiction fandom realize that the character of Sherlock Holmes was inspired by Poe's Dupin. DupinNot many people outside of literary study or detective fiction fandom realize that the character of Sherlock Holmes was inspired by Poe's Dupin. Dupin was the brilliant and insightful idle noble who occasionally aided the authorities in particularly difficult cases. However, unlike Holmes, Dupin took it up merely as a hobby, mimicking Holmes' brother Mycroft.
I'm not fond of Poe's poetry. Emerson's leveling of 'Jingle Man' is appropriate. Poe puts sounds together, but usually says very little with them. It is unusual that his prose was so varied while his poetry tended to obsessive repetition. Poe presents an example of the turning point when poetry ceased to represent the most complex and dense literary form (as in Milton and Eliot) and became the most frivolous and unrefined (the beat poets), while prose moved contrarily from the light-hearted to the serious.
When divorced from his single-minded prosody, Poe's mastery of the language elegantly serves the needs of mood, characterization, and action. This is not always the case: his Ligeia retains his poetic narrowness, but his detective stories have a gentleness and wit found nowhere else in his oeuvre.
The three Dupin stories helped to inspire detective fiction, using suspense and convoluted mystery to tantalize and challenge the reader. He may not have been as influential or innovative as Wilkie Collins, but his contribution still stands.
Any book of Poe's is worth purchasing simply for these three stories. They are studies in the careful use of language to develop mood, character, and drive--even in a sparse plot. They are not quite the equals of Ambrose Bierce's short fiction, but they are solid enough....more
Hawthorne is the equivalent of nudging someone and winking without actually thinking of anything interesting, risque, beautiful, or even useful. It isHawthorne is the equivalent of nudging someone and winking without actually thinking of anything interesting, risque, beautiful, or even useful. It is sad that a man with such a voluminous writing ability was seemingly devoid of any notion of what to do with it....more
J.G. Keely
>
Books:
gothic
(21)
