John Updike, Couples

     I started reading Updike around the time of his death in 2009. I was fascinated to hear on the radio that he considered himself a Christian AND that he was a double-Pulitzer winner. I’ve read a half dozen of his novels in the time since, beginning with Rabbit Run, when I was, like the protagonist and his creator, 26. Naturally I had trouble waiting the logical next ten years for Rabbit Redux.

     Couples reads a lot like the Rabbit books in that it focuses on suburban marriages in crisis. Piet Hanema is similar to Rabbit, one could say similar to a lot of Updike’s protagonists, in that he has a vast array of sexual conquests and just enough of a macho aloofness to keep the consequences from weighing on him too heavily. Updike’s main charm—his rich, poetic narrative voice—captures the readers in a kind of alien logic. Every sentence sounds true, but somehow it leads us down peculiar paths (who would have guessed you could win two Pulitzers writing sympathetically about a Republican?). Updike’s characters seem thick skinned—impervious to the sort of anxiety that might keep the rest of us on good behavior. The Updike-archetype is vaguely religious, center-right, blue collar, and just a little too intellectually and ethically nimble for his own good.

      There’s a lot sex in Couples (not quite more than an average Updike reader has come to anticipate, though). While I don’t think he meant to castigate his characters here (he obviously relished creating these scenes), it’s hard to say that their behavior is meant to be understood as normative. Where Updike’s own ethical compass is within all this is hard to say—it’s probably blowing around, pointing wildly in all different directions like the shining weathercock atop the church caught between fire and rain in the novel’s end. I judge the sexuality here as needless inasmuch as it is meant to be a kind of wouldn't-it-be-cool? wish fulfillment for readers. I see it as an important part of the work inasmuch as Updike simply means to be honest about the nature of human desire and experience.  Infidelity offers for the couples a new and liberating adventure, and for a time it seems Updike means merely to be another free love voice of the sexual revolution (some would say he sparked that revolution) but, alas, in time the adulterous couples find that “constraints aping marriage develop” between them (554). I choose to understand what is depicted here as descriptive rather than prescriptive. Updike describes something going on, something he likely took part in himself, but he stops short of idealization. Piet ends the novel happy, but not necessarily unpunished for all his infidelity—more rewarded than we might have anticipated, but not necessarily celebrated. Rather than present his final relationship as a new and dramatic love, we learn in the end that he and his new lover are merely “another couple,” re-married now, and not unlikely to re-suffer the ordinary barriers (557).

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has something to say about beauty and attraction. The final quarter of the book is much concerned with a debate among Stephen and his peers about classic definitions of what is beautiful. The boys define and reduce things rather coldly—and the dialogue here makes a curious contrast to the chapters that precede it about Stephen battling lust. The intellectualization of beauty, looking at everything with the “the dullness of a thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of god” (175) is, perhaps, the real sin. The boys misguidedly attempt to distill what is primal and beyond language. What rings truer than these scholarly debates is Stephen’s battle with sexual desire as it is played against a terror of the afterlife and the threat of pain and misery therein. “What did it avail to pray when he knew that his soul lusted after its own destruction?” (95). There’s a rich complexity to the psychological conflict here (Stephen becomes terrified at the thought of pleasure) and Stephen’s battle is reminiscent of something every young person brought up to fear hell must at times consider.

At one point in the novel, Stephen’s friend Davin interrupts the richly poetic and deeply intellectual tone of the whole book to declare, “Too deep for me, Stevie…But a man’s country comes first. Ireland’s first, Stevie. You can be a poet or a mystic after” (190). Interesting words in light of the book’s title. Does Joyce consider himself an artist first? Or first an Irishman? The book concludes with a dialogue in which Stephen makes it clear that he (much like his creator) is a religious unbeliever, although still sympathetic of a system “which is logical and coherent,” (Catholicism, that is, compared with the alternative, Protestantism). Even so, Stephen declares that “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself freely in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can…” (232). I suspect that this is the novel’s primary message—to be defined as an individual first (an “artist” first), as a member of a community only secondarily. 

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

I first read A Passage to India in high school, just a bit more than ten years ago. Upon rereading it, I kept discovering charming little words and phrases that fascinated me as a teenager and that have been “echoing” in the cave of my mind ever since without my being quite sure where I first heard them. For example there’s the friendly dialogue between Aziz and Mrs. Moore just before things deteriorate, in which Aziz discusses their first chance encounter in the Marabar Caves in chapter fourteen (“…how rough and rude I was and how good you were.” “And how happy we both were.”).  Rummaging through high school papers recently, I discovered an essay titled “Broken Wings,” which I now recall is a reference to a bit of figurative language used to describe Aziz just after his arrest in chapter sixteen (“…he gasped, his wings broken.”).

The questions the book raises about colonialism (and my own family’s past in apartheid Africa) have stayed with me also. It is easy to resent the sort of old-fashioned British Imperialism that the book illustrates. However, Forster touches on challenges that are still very much with us. Still today, there is no easy answer for how two cultures should interact. The Anglo-Indians in the books throw “Bridge Parties,” intending to “bridge” the gulf between east and west, but, of course, this cannot be so easily done. Mr. Fielding and Dr. Aziz each begin the book with seeming earnestness and open-mindedness, complete willingness to interact civilly with an unfamiliar population, but in time their connection is strained, and the book ends with the two having a moment of friendly rivalry before parting. Here we see another phrase (the very last sentence of the book) that has haunted my memory “…the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House…they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there.’” Except I remembered it wrong until I checked the phrase once in college near graduation. I had in mind “The Sky said, ‘No, not yet.” As if it were God Himself who had forbid friendship between east and west (not “the palace, the birds” as Forster implies), which left me with the question, “Well, God, how about now?”

The book is nuanced in its depiction of westerners, and it becomes difficult to say exactly how Miss Quested, who began so well-intentioned it seemed, went wrong. Forster describes Miss Quested as erring in that she “wanted to see India, not Indians…” (elsewhere “seeing India” is described by the narrator as “a form of ruling India; no sympathy lay behind it.”). She attends “Bridge Parties” in which Anglo-Indians intend to bridge the gulf between East and West. Miss Quested embodies, it seems, the cavalier attitude of westerners who imagine that the two cultures can be blended in such a way as to benefit both parties—the disadvantages of the arrangement upon the native Indians go unnoticed. Instead, she is drawn to an India for capitalists and sight-seers; she imagines an India united in religion, a “Universal Brotherhood,” which Forster scoffs at as something to be “dreamed of,” but which “as soon as it was put into prose… became untrue.”

It becomes difficult to say exactly what interaction between cultures A Passage to India might endorse. The answer, of course, is not an isolation of cultures, certainly not segregation. But Forster firmly rebukes the kind of dramatic overlapping—conquest, under the smiling guise of civility—that the book’s British characters mean to impose. India remains a land “which the West can disturb, but never acquire.”

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

      I first read Mrs. Dalloway as a scrambling-to-finish college sophomore. The books struck me like so much that I read back then, as something that might make a great impression on me if I were able to allow myself to linger in its world a little more. It was for me back then a very different style of writing and one that I’ve come to appreciate more and more in the years since. I remember writing in college that stream of consciousness was difficult because I had my own thoughts that I had to keep pushing aside (“like a windshield wiper” I joked) in order to follow along. Since college, I’ve grown more fascinated with the style. It’s something that you can really only get from a book—something a movie can’t do (although, I’ll admit, I wasn’t completely turned off by the voiceover-heavy Mrs. Dalloway film adaptation I saw that same year in college for extra credit).

      I think the appeal of stream-of-consciousness is that spooky resonance—that realization that other people are conscious and have minds that move and turn much like our own. It is, I daresay, one of the greatest feats of empathy, to write an entire novel in which the thoughts of a variety of characters—men and women, different ages, from different backgrounds—are so vividly imagined. It would be impressive enough if the novel were content to dwell only in the mind of its worldly, titular hostess. Instead, Woolf also delves into the minds of a hallucinating and trembling veteran, an untroubled teenager, and, among even more others, a miserable history tutor who detests our protagonist. The petty clash between Mrs. Dalloway and Miss Kilman is especially rich in that each one’s thorough hatred of the other is so richly illustrated (and, of course, explained in logical terms that make the reader sympathetic, for a moment at least, with whomever the spotlight happens to be on).

     I’m still grappling with what the book seems to say about death and suicide. Dr. Bradshaw, who means to cure Septimus, might rightly be considered the book’s only true villain.  Septimus’s jump out the window is depicted both as something the doctor gave him no alternative but to do, but also as a sort a subversive victory. When Dr. Bradshaw’s patients speak of a right to die (“In short, this living or not living is an affair of our own?”), he counters with what he sees as the cure: the re-balancing of “proportions” (whatever that means). At its core, this is a book that means to illustrate how isolated a person can feel within her mind. Septimus Warren Smith in hurtling himself out the window seems to act upon some impulse lurking just below the waters of Mrs. Dalloway’s mind too, even as she busies herself with superficial details. She feels alarmed (guilty?) at the thought of a stranger’s death (“Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress.”), and she identifies with him (“She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it.”). Chilling words in light of Woolf’s own death. If we see Bradshaw as the book’s true villain, and we recognize as valid the frenzied nature of each character’s mind (not Septimus’s only), perhaps we can understand this to be a book about the impossibility, the futility, of ever attaining, as Dr. Bradshaw would say, a sense “of proportion.” That Mrs. Dalloway, this fastidious and capable and mature woman at the head of the party—that even she should be troubled and should have misgivings, this is our solace.

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

     There is a telling moment in the confrontation between Walter and the Count near the end of the book when the count asks Walter about his motivations for disclosing Fosco and Gylde’s scheme. When Walter declares that he acts in his wife’s interest, the young man notices that he “sank in [the Count’s] estimation as a dangerous man from that moment” (401). We get a sense of Collins’s tastes here, too. The romance between Walter and Laura seems like something he includes out of obligation, a sort of necessary motivation for our hero which the author never really develops as colorfully as he should. Instead, he depicts Laura as a wilting flower, a figure so lifeless that one suspects that even Walter is losing interest in her as he explores the machinations of Collins’s proudly elaborate plot.

     This isn’t to say that Collins is completely disinterested in romance. In fact the book includes a compelling love story—between Fosco and Marian. Fosco gives mouth to the reader’s (and Walter’s and Collins’s) fascination with Marian. After Fosco, she is the most developed character. This is due to the chance she is given to narrate and the amount of agency she has in the story. Laura says little and does even less. Walter regards her as a little sister or a child, and the fond remarks he makes of Marian (each more unsettling than the last) give evidence to his latent attraction.   

     Fosco, though, is the most developed character. The way that Collins relishes every paint stroke of his characterization gives evidence to the author’s deep identification with the Count. He is the only character with any nuance—and Collins takes time to depict his cruelty towards humans and his tenderness with animals in such a way that they somehow each make sense and lend themselves overall to a more elaborate portrait of a man. I suspect that Collins imagines himself like Fosco. As with Collins, the Count takes pride in his writing skills, and he even suggests that his caper might be fodder for a compelling English romance. But Fosco, like Collins, is disinterested in traditional love stories that end in marriage (his apathy towards blank-canvas Madame Fosco is evidence of this). His written account, much like Collins’s entire book, swerves again and again to fawning discussion of Marian. His attraction to the more “masculine” sister (much like his cruel aristocratic worldview or his unapologetic love of himself) might be a latent aspect of Collins’s own mind. The Woman in White ends with Collins bored and confused with the Walter-Laura pairing and, as a consequence, not doing much with it at all. He leaves Laura upstairs with a headache for too much of the novel and chooses instead to end the novel with an acknowledgement of Walter’s real love, Mariane, “the good angel of our lives” (426).  

     It seems that the masculine aspects of Marian keep her from being depicted as “desirable” in the traditional sense. Is this merely a consequence of Collins’s period? Jayne Eyre is desirable and autonomous, so I suspect that Collins’s depiction of Marian has to do with his gender as much as his time period. At what point did male romance writers realize that a woman could be both desirable and self-assured—that a woman like this need not be divided into two sisters, and that, if she wasn’t, it would make for a more compelling read? 

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

     I've taught this book for three years now to ninth graders. The opportunity to re-read the book (each year, and even in multiple periods throughout the school day) has given me the chance to appreciate the sheer density of humor that Dickens packs in his prose. Somehow, every time I open the book, my appreciation of Dickens humor grows stronger. The only others I’ve read by Dickens are Hard Times and Oliver Twist. These led me to disparage the author for his sentimentalist streak. But here, maybe because Dickens wrote this when he was older and more jaded, the sentimentalism and wit seem even-handed. I’ve come to the point where I feel like the humor might even be the book’s most dominant quality—although I wasn’t as struck by it on my first read through, in which it was all I could do keep straight all the characters and plot twists. I’ve tried my hand at analyzing specifically how and why the book achieves such a comical effect. I sense that a lot of it comes from the blending of the absurd with the proper, as when Herbert tells Pip all about Miss Havisham through a dinner conversation in which Pip commits a number of absent-minded social blunders, including stuffing his napkin into his empty cup (189) His other mistakes are more understandable—this one comes out of left field. A second element to the humor is that Dickens is comfortable completely belittling the characters. Joe meets Miss Havisham and stands with “his mouth open as if he wanted a worm” (105). It helps that the characters are so cartoonishly exaggerated to begin with. They are fascinating to read about, but essentially walking caricature completely defined by a single quality. A third element to the humor is Pip’s narration itself. He has a way of undercutting a moment of sincerity or needless propriety. Take for example Joe’s admission that Mrs. Joe can be a “buster,” which Pip claims Joe pronounces as though it begins with “at least twelve capital Bs” (50).

     Even after re-readings, I have questions about the book's message. Is it really so wrong of Pip to crave social mobility? I like to think that Dickens means to share something about finding happiness in what might appear like mundane circumstances. However, I understand that some have analyzed this to be a corrupt element of Dickens writing. For example, Herbert tells Pip, describing Miss Havisham’s fiancé, that, “…he was a showy man…but that he was not to be, without ignorance or prejudice, mistaken for a gentleman…no man that is not a gentleman at heart ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner…no varnish can hide the grain of the wood, and the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself” (189). These are interesting words in the context of a novel about a poor person who wishes to be rich. By saying that only some people can ever be a true gentleman—does he mean gentleman in terms of someone who exhibits appropriate social behavior, or someone who was born to be “upper class.” Pip’s awkwardness at the dinner here complicates the picture. By mixing up the social cues, is Dickens saying that Pip isn’t fit to be among the wealthy by virtue of the fact that he was born poor?

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

     Questions about which characters are “likable” are sometimes difficult to answer because I sense that the characters we like in a book we wouldn’t like in real life. I think, though, that likability issues have some relevancy here because the book seems so often to lack a figure with whom the reader can identify. Jane Eyre, by contrast, made the reader-stand-in its narrator. Here, though, there are a few narrators, and none have quite the charisma of Jane. I think the book’s central accomplishment, especially in the early chapters is in getting readers invested in such a troubled romance as Healthcliff’s and Catherine’s. Nelly states that “the two, to a cool spectator, made a strange and fearful picture” (189), but I think, on the contrary, that there are many who will identify with the frenzied passion of these characters, even if these moments of recognition are not ones to be proud of.

     Heathcliff makes an engaging centerpiece for the novel. There's something intriguing about his ambiguous background and how that might affect how the others respond to him, including Bronte. Is he a gypsy? If so, I am specifically interested in the question of whether or not Bronte meant to depict racism in her characters’ reactions against Heathcliff, or if his ethnicity were only a small part of his role as an outsider as she imagined it—an element she added subconsciously. Early in the book, Healthcliff laments his status when he cries, “I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!” (66) Nelly counsels him against understanding himself purely as a victim, but she later remarks that, in his moments of jealousy and guardedness, he seems almost monstrous. “I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species” (191). Does Nelly recognize that prejudiced perceptions like these have made Heathcliff such a subversive figure? Does Bronte? ­