Notes on Recent Reading 49 (Balzac, Hauptmann, Updike)

 

Eugénie Grandet (Balzac)

     Rereading Eugénie Grandet, one of Balzac’s finest novels, I was struck by the role of commercial transactions in characterization.  The entire narrative is built around the disposition of Grandet’s fortune and his clever transactions express his nature.  Similarly the machinations of the de Grassines and the Cruchots, Charles’ alienation from Eugénie, the town’s interest in the winegrower’s affairs, all have a financial base.  The rise of the capitalist cash nexus as the lens through which things make most sense is explicit.  Each of the succeeding regimes of France offered the miser opportunities he was shrewd enough to seize.

     Yet, stripped of the political, economic, and social elements that so engaged Balzac, the story might have been written centuries earlier.  Eugénie is after all a saintly type, too good for this world, while her father is a model of the sin of greed, Charles a selfish liar (enriched by the wicked practice of slavery), and the townspeople idle gossips.  Poor Eugénie is that perennial favorite, a lovely and long-suffering woman.  For all the nineteenth century socio-economic analysis, most of the plot would not be out of place in medieval hagiography. 

     Like other portions of his Comédie humaine this story preserves a provincial tranche de vie in the author’s straightforward, often uninspired, style, sometimes including superfluous data in the interest of history.  Yet he also punctuates the illusion of the plot as an objectively recorded “reality show” with asides and addresses to the reader that highlight the artifice of the text, generating a satisfying dialectic.

 

.   

Der Biberpelz  (Hauptmann)

     Moe dramatically viable than most of Gerhart Hauptmann’s naturalistic dramas, Der Biberpelz  (The Beaver Coat) in its farcical elements reminds me of the Second Shepherd’s Play with its comic thievery.  Only whereas the Miracle Play ends with the dazzling radiance of Christ’s birth, here we never depart from the social theme. An obtuse official, von Wehrhahn, is too interested in sniffing out liberal subversives such Dr. Fleischer to attend to actual crimes.  Hauptmann’s satire in  a way anticipates works like Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk (1923) and Zuckmayer’s Captain of Kōpinick (1931).  Krȗger is an amusing example of an aggrieved bourgeois, exasperated at his loss of property while Frau Wolff is a cool and clever miscreant. Brecht was fond of this play and it was filmed in Germany three times (1928, 1937, and 1949), but it has been infrequently produced on English stages.  Some of the same characters appear in a sequel Der Rote Hahn  (1901, called in English The Conflagration) which concludes in a far graver tone.

 

 

In the Beauty of the Lilies (Updike)

     With perhaps a bit of the magisterial ambition that might naturally arise in an acclaimed writer, Updike has spread an epic canvas, stretching over nearly a century, with generations of characters urban and semi-rural, with odd variations like Hollywood types and apocalyptic cultists to punch up the plot.  Basically working the vein still of nineteenth century realism, Updike includes, as is his custom, references to the news and the pop culture of several generations.  The research shows a bit too clearly sometimes, but an amusing aspect of Lilies is the consistent references to films, giving the sense of a sort of history of the United States in all of its collective fantasies.  The grim conclusion is foreseeable from a considerable distance, but Updike’s readers will appreciate the solidity of the plot-line, and the emotional weight he lends his characters, whose peregrinations, though they may feel lost and wandering seem, when seen as here in the long view, to hang together and make a sort of sense.  Too weak to be fully tragic actors, Updike’s people’s lives may strike the reader as reassuringly less competent than their own, at least until they think twice.

Notes on Recent Reading 14 [Algren, Hauptmann, Rolle]

The Last Carousel (Algren)

     I mention this late volume reprinting magazine pieces mainly as an excuse to talk a bit about my enthusiasm for its author without rereading a stack of his books. I’m likely to try to do him justice at some point, but for now, I will just note that Algren wrote a number of moving and artful novels: the more-or-less proletarian Somebody in Boots, then Never Come Morning, based in Chicago’s Polish Near-North side, and the stories made into popular movies, Walk on the Wild Side (which used some material from his first novel) and Man with the Golden Arm. The Neon Wilderness contains some of the best short stories of the mid-twentieth century. His Chicago: City on the Make contains a marvelous populist history of the city and an eloquent, if unconvincing, plea for a vulgar Marxist approach to literature.
     This volume, though largely late hackwork, contains some good pieces. First of all, it reminds us of how a writer was still able to make a few dollars with his talent not so long ago. A good share of the contents of The Last Carousel appeared in Playboy, but there are also articles from mainstream popular magazines such as Holiday and the Saturday Evening Post as well as from more intellectual journals. I particularly enjoyed “The Passion of Upside-Down-Emil, A Story from Life’s Other Side” and a nonfiction essay on “The Cortez Gang.”


The Weavers (Hauptmann)

     Hauptmann’s play is a rare example of first-rate agitprop, vividly depicting the weavers’ oppression and the inhumanity of the capitalist. It is truly historic both in its subject matter and in its effect on theater. Most striking is the author’s pioneering portrayal of poor people on stage as other than buffoons or spearholders. Following Antoine’s Theatre Libre and anticipating Artaud and the Living Theatre, Hauptmann developed a “mass drama” with choreographed “spectacle” in which the protagonist is collective and the viewer’s attention is sustained not through plot line but by a kind of almost musical progression in mise-en-scene. The plays’ shifting characters and settings, as anti-Classical as can be, must have been deeply disorienting to the early Freie Bühne audience.
     The apparently sentimental extremes he depicts are nothing more than the simple truth: the careless rich, the abjectly suffering poor exist yet today, if not in Silesia, then in India, Guatemala, the rural backroads of China, or even our U. S. of A. Hauptmann does not idealize the weavers; indeed, though the wrongs done them are powerfully portrayed, they are also shown to strike out in senseless violence.


The Fire of Love (Rolle)

     Mystics have always been viewed with suspicion by the hierarchy of the church, since their approach to the divine is based in their own experience rather than obedience to authority. Rolle studied at Oxford (and later at the Sorbonne), but remained steadfast in his devotion to contemplation rather than theology, becoming a free-lance hermit (a vocation that calls to few in today’s Christianity) while still a teenager. His difficult and uncompromising nature led him to move often for a time, but h eventually attracted admiration and support.
     Rereading this work by one of the most prominent among the 14th and 15th century English mystics, I was struck by his concrete presentation of mystical experience in heat, sweetness, and music, and his resulting impatient, even cantankerous, opposition to the church’s hierarchy. His fierce denunciations of Scholastics and Franciscans display little Christian charity, but who would not be stubborn if he feels he communes with God?