Moving along from the discussion of Feb 6, “Theme,” I’d like to suggest possible themes of a novel I’ve reread lately. I have no idea whether the author started with a theme in mind, or not, a pronouncement on an idea that was worming its way into his consciousness. Or his society’s. But if you were a white South African of any feeling and intelligence, during apartheid, how could such an idea elude you?
South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (2003), now resides in Australia.
This book is the celebrated novel Disgrace (1999) by the Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. It’s set in the South Africa of the 1990s, just after the end of apartheid. It’s about a literature professor named David Lurie who gets fired from his job for abusing, molesting, having sex with (what are the right words here?) a young student of his. He refuses to apologize in the terms his academic colleagues require and is let go.
He goes out into the South African countryside and lives for a while with his grown daughter, who is farming and taking care of dogs. He helps her with these tasks and is there when three black men break into her house, beat him, rape her.
The daughter refuses to get an abortion when she becomes pregnant.
The father continues ministering to the needs of stray and unwanted dogs at a local veterinary clinic; he assists in their euthanasia and takes the corpses to a crematorium. The last page of the novel is unsentimentally powerful, even shocking:
He opens the cage door. "Come," he says, bends, opens his arms. The dog wags his crippled rear, sniffs his face, licks his cheeks, his lips, his ears. He does nothing to stop it. "Come."
Bearing him in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery. "I thought you would save him for another week," says Bev Shaw. "Are you giving him up?"
"Yes. I am giving him up."
No, Coetzee is not proposing a Christian framework of salvation, of disgrace and redemptive grace. This fallen creature, David Lurie, cannot save the dog, even for another week. The dog must die, and David must continue living like a dog; for that is the human condition.
The dog is a secular lamb, not Jesus, and will not redeem our sins. Still, if we cannot save the dog but enter into empathy with the doomed creature, identify with the miserable animal, then we ourselves, not without sin, may begin to rise above our misery, our degradation, our disgrace. May achieve some kind of secular grace, which if it does not take us to heaven enables us to go forward with a better notion of our duties and our place in the fragile human condition.
Vulnerable, crippled, disgraced, carrying on and doing the dogged best we can.
Now that the holidays are over, it may be time to sort through the holiday news, well wishes, and greetings we received through the mail.
Who sends and who gets Christmas cards anymore?
One of the pages of my holiday calendar for 2020 showing our granddaughter Ruby after her first cross-dressing spectacle.
Not too awfully many, I suppose. I gave up mailing cards maybe 10 years ago and have resorted to email since then, at first composing a rambling letter with many photos and then gradually through the years dwindling down to a Powerpoint calendar format, as you see at left: one or two big pics for each month and a pithy comment to go with.
This year my wife Jennifer and I received about a dozen such season’s greetings in the mail. As I count and sort ’em, they are
Two postcards with photos on one or both sides
One sheet printed one side with family photos and captions
Five typed letters of various length, with or without photos
One hand-written card with photo
Patrick and Candace, two apple-cheeked young friends from Louisville and their woof-woofs.
I can see why I stopped writing long Xmas letters: who has time to write or even read ’em? And unless you’re an experienced writer, the details tend to be rolled out in humdrum fashion. Yes, these are the lives of friends and relatives you haven’t seen in a while, and you miss these people but you want to go deeper, into the interior, even the heart of darkness, and these tend to sweetness, blitheness, blither & light.
We are happy, of course, that your family is doing well:
You survived an attack of the dread Covid
You lost one job and picked up another
You summered in your home state
You visited friends with pets
Yes, you love dogs, dogs, dogs
You went to Paris and the Louvre, where they keep some wowser art
Your kids are surviving, working and marrying
You bought a guitar, flew half across the country to see friends, suffered from MS, MD, AD, ALS, or other acronymical disasters
The twins turned 17, is it possible, and you joined a book club
These titbits are not boring, they’re simply not in the context of a novel or coherent, compelling narrative, a transfixing fiction or poem. The details don’t seem to add up; they miss the point, which is what?
As I know from my calendrical missives, that’s the trouble with trying to sum things up and wrap them in a tidy package with a bow.
Here’s us, sitting on the living room sofa. Here’s our dogs. Bow wow.
Matt and Hongjian and their new baby Aine Mai (Joy Plum Blossom), yes, and let’s not forget the hound.
Perhaps I was most affected by the one hand-written card from a young academic couple. It’s a card with a photo on the front showing the couple, a dog (woof), a Christmas tree, and a new baby in mom’s arms. The greeting is “Happy Holidays” and, verso, “From our family to yours, wishing you a joyful holiday season!”
Yes, love and joy come to you, with or without the accouterments of religion, or ideology, for it’s that time of year, isn’t it, when we should be able to lay aside our sadness and grief and anger, and recognize in each other our common humanity?
Why not? Don’t we get tired, after all, of shaming and blaming our political enemies and ducking disease and sticking our head in a hole?
Enough already.
And I read in the five paragraphs, in a neat tiny hand, how our Chinese-American friend, a young woman I met here in Fayetteville and hiked with for a year or so, is now happily married; is stressed out by her teaching schedule at Purdue and her publishing a book that one reviewer called “eccentric” (thatta girl!); and had a baby girl just before Thanksgiving named Aine (Gaelic for joy) Mei (Mandarin for plum blossom).
Now if a name like Aine Mei doesn’t presage joy and love and laughter in this daughter, a poetic and blissful life, I don’t know what will!
Yes, love and joy come to you, and to you good wassail too, dear friends and family, through the year. And keep on writing those cards, won’t you, full of feelings and events that may add up to a story after all, a story that may stir the world.
No, I don’t believe the two gents knew each other, though both were masterful story tellers. (They lived 3,000 years apart.)
In my last entry I broached the subject of finding a story, citing Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay about his troubles moving from a narrative of events to a genuine story. I mentioned his teaching of Homer’s Odyssey, and I brought up Henry James, who wrote many novels and critical essays collected under the title The Art of Fiction.
In his essay Mendelsohn mentions good advice from a mentor, which was actually contained in and demonstrated by the Odyssey. Homer does not stick to a straightforward chronology at every point, but darts back into the past (flashback) and anticipates the future (flashforward). This in fact, then, was what Mendelsohn did with his bloated and listless manuscript of some 600 pages: made the class he taught on the Odyssey the central narrative and tucked into it temporal dislocations on caring for his dying father and taking a cruise that retraced Odysseus’s voyage.
The story emerged out of the bushels of facts. It was a kind of metastory, in fact, a story about being lost and finding one’s way. Just as Odysseus voyaged for years to return home from the Trojan War, so Mendelsohn scrambled to find a home in the heart of his materials.
You might find something of the same struggle going on in Henry James’s fiction, though he covers his tracks pretty well. I’m thinking here of the care he lavishes on his female characters, especially the protagonists, in novels like The Portrait of a Lady, where Isabel Archer moves from America to Europe and is seduced into a loveless marriage by a man interested only in her money.
I’ve suggested that James’s interest in female characters is characteristic of his large moral imagination. But it’s also founded, I think, on self-interest.
It’s long been know that James, who never married, had homoerotic proclivities. He was so refined, so domesticated, in fact, that he could have passed, without too much trouble, as a woman. Mark Twain famously, or infamously, called him “Henrietta James.” T. S. Eliot, more accurately and charitably, opined that James “had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it,” no ideology or stereotype disturb it. When he created characters, he went deep, plunged into hearts and minds, and emerged with characters that enlarge our appreciation of life’s moral puzzles and quandaries.
Penguin’s rendition of James’s Isabel Archer of The Portrait of a Lady (1881).
One of the central leitmotifs of James’s fiction is renunciation. The characters only want what they cannot have, though their desires are not the outsize or outrageous stuff of popular fiction. Isabel Archer wants only a happy marriage … and then happiness for her husband’s illegitimate daughter, Pansy. When she discovers the incorrigible evil in her husband, there is no going back. She renounces herself, or her own chance at happiness, in order to serve others, especially the younger, more innocent self, the daughter.
An article by Colm Tóibín details how “Henry James’s Family Tried to Keep Him in the Closet.” Yes, he had written many “ardent” letters to young men, stuff that would scandalize eminent and obscure Victorians alike. James’s heirs squelched these letters, but the same impulses shown in the letters appear also in the fiction, though in disguised form: his admiration for the fine minds and individual moralities of many female characters, the capacities of men like Lambert Strether, the title character of The Ambassadors, to learn and grow. (Strether is sent to fetch home to New England a wayward son, with a French mistress, but he comes to see that it’s puritan New England and the New World which is corrupt, not the Old World.)
James could not express his ardent desires directly, but he found in writing, both private letters and public letters (that is, literature), a way to announce and renounce who he was and who, under different circumstances, he might have been.
For fiction writers, facts are one thing, finally. But the story, the overarching idea and meaning behind all facts and events, is something else entirely, something grander and more enduring.
If you’re telling stories, you have a fund of experience to draw on. Don’t we all? Nearly all of us tell stories, and jokes, in daily life. We regale and assail each other with such stories. We while away the time, which otherwise might bore us out of our minds. We stake an advantage. We perform.
But what to do with these stories if we would tell them in print?
I should say rather than stories, it’s narratives we all have, sequences of events that happen to us and around us and sometimes way out there in the family of man. And we may have sequelae, also: outcomes whether healthy or not that are moral, physical, psychological. They may be punch-lines in a joke or a sad or hilarious coda to a story. But how do we get these narratives to add up and make sense and march on in print?
There’s a very good hint provided in a recent essay by Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review of Books. He talks about the long research journey he undertook to write about how the Holocaust wiped out the Jews in a town once in Poland, now Ukraine, in which his ancestors lived. And how, once he published that book, he was depressed and paralyzed and floundered for another project.
Mendelsohn is a writer of factual accounts and analyses. After a hiatus of several years he was able to reach out past the Holocaust back into ancient Greek history and find a subject in Homer’s Odyssey. He wrote hundreds of pages of narrative in three parts, based on a classroom (in which he had taught the Odyssey), a ship which recreated Odysseus’s route home, and a hospital in which his father, who’d taken Mendelsohn’s course in the Odyssey, lay dying.
He gave the script to an old friend and mentor, and got this reaction:
The first part, the account of the seminar, was interesting, he observed—after a small silence during which I absorbed his criticism—but, in his opinion, the problem was that once you reach the end of that part, once you come to the end of the Odyssey course, you didn’t want to keep reading. You don’t want to get through the whole semester and then have to go on a cruise, he said, at which I weakly protested, But that’s how it happened. I don’t care how it happened, he returned; this isn’t about fact, this is about a story. You need to find a way to plant the cruise and the hospital within the narrative of the seminar. Use flashbacks, use flash-forwards, don’t worry about chronology. Make it up, if you have to! You just have to find a way.
When he said the word way, I couldn’t repress an embarrassed start of recognition. The phrase “find a way” allowed me, first of all, to understand retroactively the nature of the creative and spiritual crisis I had undergone after finishing my previous book. I was suffering from what the Greeks called aporia: a helpless, immobilized confusion, a lack of resources to find one’s way out of a problem. The literal meaning of aporia is “a lack of a path,” or “no-way.” I hadn’t been able to leave my apartment; I couldn’t think of a new project. I was, in the Greek way of thinking, pathless—the adjective, as it happens, that in the Odyssey is used to describe the sea, the terrifying blank nothingness from which Odysseus must extricate himself, literally and figuratively, in order to reclaim his identity and find his way home.
Now you or I may not be writing a book. But whether we’re rendering a narrative orally or writing it out, we have to concern ourselves at some point with the central, essential story: where are we going with all these details? what do we want our audience to feel and understand?
If we don’t know these matters well at some level, we may well mess up a joke — or a written essay, article, or book. You know how that works? You go through the details of a joke, and then realize you’re leaving something out or putting something in that shouldn’t be there — you’re messing it up (again), aren’t you?
Henry James, The Master, as painted by John Singer Sargent in 1913, three years before James’s death.
Some people, of course, are inveterate and practiced jokers. They know how to tell a joke or perhaps play a trick, and everyone is convinced. Most of us, however, have to work on our capers and find out, however we can, what is the essential story. There’s a struggle between our conscious and unconscious faculties. We want to control the narrative, but must let the chthonic powers play.
This sort of struggle may have underlain Henry James’s idea of the story “germ.” He writes in his notebooks about how he would overhear a story told at dinner and take its essence, the germ, home with him, only the germ, the central point, as he saw it, and then work it up on his own into his own story.
Once he had his suggestion … he hastened to close his ears to the rest of the story lest clumsy Life should take his seminal idea away. When the artist is too close to the reality he wants to describe, his imagination is no longer stimulated and therefore ceases to work. — “James on Art and the Novel”
James’s MO may or may not work for you, but the gist of this story of the Master is that he let his imagination play, have free rein, roam beyond the confines of the tale he had heard. Of course, James like his brother, the philosopher William James, had a great moral imagination. He was able to create characters and tell their stories with a profound human empathy. Many of the stories, like The Portrait of a Lady and Washington Square and The Aspern Papers, have to do with cold-hearted, amoral men who cheat women out of love, or money, or full personal development. After a while, I would think, such a concern, or motif, a central part of his own character, would be part of the germ, naturally, of many of his tales.
So how do you find a story, telling the facts, such as they are, and developing the meaning of the facts — the solid, essential story which experience, the gift horse, has presented you? Surely, you can’t spend too long looking it in the mouth? Giddyup, you gotta ride experience’s suggestions.
