Looking Backward (Bellamy)
A peculiarly
American utopian novel in which patriotism and the growth of monopolies are not
so much combated by internationalism and organized labor as they are endorsed
and extended until there is only one great trust and no capitalist class
whatsoever. And this occurs without
violence, by a kind of general consensus.
To Bellamy who concealed his socialism under the name nationalism, the
radicals of his day function as operatives of the bosses, since their extremism
(which their enemies considered foreign) alienates rather than attracts
Americans, retarding the interests of the workers.
The society
Bellamy imagines seems a bit frightening with the total social control of the
Industrial Army exerted by technocrats who somehow he imagines would act with
no self-interest or partiality or even error.
Nonetheless, he is first-rate when he gets to elaborating on the immense
waste in American capitalism and the absurdity of a system in which each person
strives to get the better of his fellow citizens. To me his proposal that every worker, indeed,
every individual, receive the same stipend is only reasonable, though for many
it would make the whole scheme unacceptable.
Resistance to this particular policy is, however, an instructive
illustration of the hold that greed has upon the human ego. Bellamy’s projection of what life may be in
the year 2000 has much to recommend it, even if it is difficult to conceive of
an enthusiasm for collective effort and symbolic reward emerging in this
country, in spite of the example of the military where such values are indeed
strong. Bellamy’s attacks on
“individualism” must have sounded un-American to many, but his ideas were
sufficiently acclaimed to spawn a newspaper and several hundred clubs devoted
to advancing his vision.
Bellamy’s prose
is pedestrian when it is not stilted (I do realizer that polite circumlocutions
luxuriated in the real conversations of his day), and the novel gets by on the
barest excuse for a plot. One or two
images remain with the reader at the end: the stagecoach that figures the old
society near the book’s outset and the rose bush representing the transition to
the new toward the end.
Bellamy does
share with many revolutionaries of his day an optimism very rare in our own, a
sense that the overwhelming majority of producers over exploiters makes the
victory of the masses inevitable once they awaken to their situation. That tone, which lasted until World War I,
smells now like the springtime of the world.
The God of Small Things (Roy)
Roy’s first novel
is filled with dazzling, poetic, playful, expressive language in a splendidly
varied pattern of different characters of various ages. She is a rhetorician of considerable power,
willing to deploy striking metaphors, distortions, repetitions, and
substitutions each with at least a plausible significance. In fact, her chief fault is her exuberance
which sometimes leads her to fruitless divigations, overuse of motifs,
redundant expressions. The book has a
luxurious texture and often a melody arises from the words even when read
silently. Her verbal play and deep sense
of pIace suggest that Roy may be an admirer of James Joyce, though her book,
for all the chronological displacement and rapidly shifting point of view, remains
far more accessible than even Ulysses.
The mysterious
“double-egg twins” Rahel and Estha are the book’s center. Their lives are twisted by their family and
the local circumstances in their village in Kerala, as well as by the colonial
past. Passive and inward-turning,
stigmatized by their parents’ separation, they are vulnerable to mistreatment,
and, when in their innocence they seek to capture joy, they find they have
violated the “Love Laws” that regulate affection.
The sexual scenes
at the end provide the reader no relief.
One before and one after the deaths of Sophie Mol and Velutha, they
offer little solace. The desperation of
Ammu’s affair, her wretched survival, alone, for a few years, and the monstrous
weight of guilt that haunted the sensitive twins, all these overwhelm any
chance for redemptive sexuality. At the
book’s conclusion the concrete specificity of the scenes of love-making
contrasts with the vast unknowns of Rahel and Estha’s lives since the traumas
of their childhood. It is, of course,
the details, the “little things,” that are real, that are dependable, that
anchor the ego in the everyday. Much of
the rest is muddled, obscure, or vicious.
It took twenty
years for Roy’s next novel to appear, but she was hardly idle in the
meantime. She is an active campaigner
for progressive causes in the US, In India, and in the world. I cannot recall having heard her misspeak on
these topics.
Redburn (Melville)
Contrary to some
recent critics, I would agree with Melville himself who considered Redburn
a piece of hackwork. He notoriously
stressed its rapid composition (two and a half months) saying that he wrote it
simply to keep himself in tobacco. His
haste is evident in the padding. Like a
journalist he tosses in diverting anecdotes and the sort of detailed technical
information which one finds as well in Moby Dick but without the
suggestive metaphorical weight that the later book generally includes. The book is unified only broadly as a Bildungsroman. What exactly is the reader to make of Harry
Bolton apart from the undeniable homoerotic element he adds before
vanishing?
Yet Melville’s
grander style is always in the background.
The symbolic system is perhaps not fully operative throughout the story
though echoes of Biblical texts in particular occur regularly. His rhetoric is denied the soaring heights of
which he was capable, tending at times toward colloquialism. The book’s themes, too, eschew the
complexities and ambiguities in which Melville came to specialize. The self-satire by the narrator reflecting
with amusement on his younger self recurs (though, at times, his comic naivete
is unconvincing and the recurring joke of his appearance in his shooting jacket
is soon tiresome).
Redburn is worth
reading for what it implies about Melville’s life and about transatlantic
crossings in the middle of the nineteenth century. (I find it staggering to imagine a sailing
vessel capable of carrying five hundred steerage passengers.) It also has hints of the sublimity of which
the author was capable. In itself it is
a readable narrative of which a perspicuous contemporary reviewer might have noted
that readers might expect greater things to come from this author.
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