Notes on Recent Reading 43 (Bellamy, Roy, Melville)

 

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.  

Notes on Recent Reading 43 (Bellamy, Roy, Melville)

 

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.  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)

     Arundhati 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.  

Notes on Recent Reading [Melville, Greene, Whalen]

Herman Melville Redburn

     Redburn is clearly shallow, all the more when juxtaposed to a huge metaphorical construction like Moby Dick or a subtle metaphysical mystery like The Confidence Man. Figures pregnant with symbolic weight such as the mysterious Harry Bolton and the sinister and fated Jackson never ripen into meaning. The book is in fact filled with such false starts: the wholly fantastic trip to a London pleasure palace, for instance, or the use of the outdated Liverpool guidebook. Melville feels free to include divigations on whatever comes to mind without tying these remarks to the rest of the text. (The discussion of immigration in Chapter 58 and the passage at the end of Chapter 29 questioning whether sailors can ever “be lifted wholly out of the mire” are examples.) His several lapses into common piety (such as the conclusion of the same chapter: “God is the true Father of all”) likewise play purely to received ideas in a way the later Melville avoided. Redburn is part self-portrait, part unconvincing artifice (his ingenuousness is forced when, for example in Chapter 42 he wanders into a private club and expresses surprise at his expulsion).
     The biographers tell us that Melville was writing speedily for money when he produced what he called “a little nursery tale,” “beggarly Redburn,” “calculated merely to please the general reader, & not provoke attack.” In spite of his announced ambition to write “those sort of books which are said to ‘fail,’” economic pressure led him to write Redburn in less than ten weeks. He wrote in his journal “I, the author, know [Redburn] to be trash, & wrote it to buy some tobacco with.”
     Its strengths include the simple inclusion of the details of sea life which he knew so well: rigging, slang, the social order on board. One finds excellent paragraphs throughout such as the one in Chapter 24 describing Redburn’s learning to work aloft, comparing his sense of mastery over the canvas to Richard II’s satisfaction as quashing the Peasant’s Rebellion.


Robert Greene Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

     Robert Greene’s name is most commonly recalled as the author of A Groats-Worth of Wit, itself remembered only because the pamphlet satirizes Shakespeare, but he also wrote a number of romances and plays, including Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Though educated at Oxford, he acquired a reputation as a demimondaine and his leaflets display considerable knowledge of the libertines and confidence men of his era. He is rightly associated with Marlowe, not merely because this play includes devil-conjuring like Faustus but also because the author was reputed to live loosely and cultivate scandalous conduct as well as opinions. Greene’s “celebrity” image, if such a term can be used of a sixteenth century man, was that of a daring immoralist, and his readers and listeners must feel a bit of the savor of safely second-hand license.
     The play is lively and entertaining enough, as it drifts from romantic reverie to slapstick to melodrama, ending in marriages. Bacon’s unregenerate servant Miles is carried off by a devil, scapegoat for all the darker psychic contents churned up by the story. After all, viewers have witnessed Lacy’s abrupt and cruel testing of his beloved, the senseless deaths not only of Serlsby and Lambert but of their sons as well, in addition to a considerable dose of Satanic conjuring, which may have seemed worst of all.
     The verse is agile and imaginative, lit with the ornaments of an age that enjoyed language, but it lacks powerful image systems. Green’s word-play entertains, no mean achievement if not the highest praise.
     There was surely plenty of spectacle (a theatrical quality that seems to dominate Broadway and a good number of today’s movies). Thematically, in the primary plot of the victory of Friar Bacon’s better self, Greene works the basic gambit of warning spectators against immoral conduct by exhibiting it for their edification. Of course, his reformation is caused not by enlightenment but by the most mundane of failures, simple fatigue and his servant’s irresponsibility. The love story of Lacy and the Fair Maid of Fressingfield, complicated by Edward’s lust as well as by Lacy’s strange misleading of his beloved, ends as satisfactorily as it would have in a ‘thirties film. The four deaths are tossed with very little reason other than to keep the pot boiling.


Philip Whalen Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head

     I have often lamented the fact that the hip people of my own generation recorded so little of their experience. In contrast to the passionate authors of the fifties, many of whom were intellectual as well as adventurous, many rank-and-file bohemians of the next wave, ten years later, took their principal art to be rock and roll. In this and in his other novel You Didn’t Even Try, Philip Whalen, the “Warren Coughlin” of Dharma Bums, records life among his Berkeley friends. Written in the sixties while he was living in Kyoto, practicing zazen, and teaching English, the title of the novel derives from Robert Greene’s play and its origin is more than coincidental, for it shines a spotlight of the learning cultivated by Whalen and the people of his circle. Though it may not be a novel of the highest standard, Imaginary Speeches reminds us that the hip scene was never limited to Kerouac and Cassady, and the discourse in the counter-culture of the time was not necessarily dominated by “goofing.” Though they do violate taboos (smoking a bit of dope and hanging out with gay people was much more edgy half a century ago), Whalen’s characters also pursue “elite” high culture: they prepare elaborate European meals and play string quartets with their friends. One of the principal figures in the book is a poet of somewhat irregular habits, but another is a linguistics professor at Berkeley who seems fully to participate in academic hustling. The reader is best advised to first go through Whalen’s poetry, some of which is first-rate, but the novels have for me a casual charm of their own.