By Jonathan Safran Foer (2002) Published by Perennial, 276.
This is the best book I’ve read so far this year. It starts out with some truly funny passages written by Alex, a young Ukranian man who’s paid to give a tour to an equally young Jewish American (named Johnathan Safran Foer) who’s come to Ukraine in search of a woman he believes rescued his father from the Holocaust. Alex’s narrative is filled with hilarious thesaurial blunders: he uses the word “rigid” for “difficult”, “flaccid” for “easy”, “manufacture Z’s” for “get some sleep.”
In between sections told by Alex we have stories of the shtetl of Trachimbrod where once a baby girl appeared in the river among an enigmatic cloud of floating detritus: string, clothes, maps, books. The official story is that a wagon crashed into the river, jettisoning the baby and the odd items, but the wagon is never found, and as we watch the baby mature into the beautiful and ingenious Brod we are left to wonder if perhaps her origins are more magical than we were first led to believe: was her coming somehow an omen of the future destruction of the shtetl at the hand of the Nazis exactly 151 years later.
A huge cast of characters is brought into play, the narrative breaks off and starts again at various stages of history, and the story is told at turns through rabbinical diaries of a communities dreams, through songs and wedding invitations, through encyclopedia entries and stage directions, but all of it is a beautiful accretion of mythic speculations built around the sand kernel of a man searching for the lost origins of his family.
It’s interesting: at the start of the book the sections told from the point of view of Alex are by far the strongest, whereas the sections that take place in Trachimbrod read like shoddy ripoffs of Sholem Aleichem. But the novel starts plunging into new depths as soon as the author begins to focus on the recurrent dreams that plague the residents of Trachimbrod, and it just never stops. By the end of the novel Trachimbrod has become as rich, grotesque and weirdly sad as Garbriel Márquez’s Macondo or the post-war Zone of occupied Germany in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
I get a sense that Foer set out to write a rather silly novel and found himself writing something magnificently more profound. While overall the results are incredible. The only big flub, I think, is that as Foer grows as a writer he begins to take the character of Alex a little too seriously, allowing him to morph from a good natured clown into a troubled existential antihero in a way that doesn’t quite ring true. I really liked the choice to add depth to the character: over the course of the book Alex, like the other characters, is confronted with the horrors of the history of the Nazi invasion, the Holocaust, and the possibilities of a godless and meaningless world—it’s natural that the character should change and grow in response to this, but the fact that his joyous, manic temperament disappears altogether is just about the only graceless touch to this otherwise supremely elegant story.
Fallen
A theatrical production created by the cast and Aerial Angels and directed by Allison Williams and Zay Weaver
This is a show going on for one more weekend at University of Alaska Anchorage, and it really knocked me off my feet. The show draws from several Bible stories, all of them troublesome because of their depiction of women: The Garden of Eden, the stories of Samson and Delilah, Esther, Jezebel and Lot’s Wife. The dialogues and monologues leave something to be desired; clearly this is a play that was written by committee. But the devices used to showcase the stories are often display the sort of brilliance that can come only from a well-tooled ensemble that enjoys working together. The story of Samson and Delilah begins with a gossipy choral telling set in a hair salon, and progresses to an absolutely stunning trapeze routine carried out by Anthony Oliva and Rachael Donaldson at some frightening altitudes. The death-defying (or at least concussion-defying) nature of their work made me feel I was witnessing a primal and carnal liaison of mythic proportions. Later on Kelli Brown and Elizabeth Daniel face each other on either side of a hoop suspended from the catwalks above the stage that serves as a mirror through which Jezebel contemplates the reflection in the moments just prior to her death. The ensuing trapeze routine where the queen and the reflection she worships balance together on their mirror is a subdued and elegant moment, one of the most beautiful in the whole show.
Great kudos have to go out to the whole cast as well as to the Aerial Angels, a touring ensemble of circus-skill performers who have come through Anchorage several times now and who have done a great service to our community by passing on their skills to some of the talented up-and-comers studying at University of Alaska Anchorage.
This is a show going on for one more weekend at University of Alaska Anchorage, and it really knocked me off my feet. The show draws from several Bible stories, all of them troublesome because of their depiction of women: The Garden of Eden, the stories of Samson and Delilah, Esther, Jezebel and Lot’s Wife. The dialogues and monologues leave something to be desired; clearly this is a play that was written by committee. But the devices used to showcase the stories are often display the sort of brilliance that can come only from a well-tooled ensemble that enjoys working together. The story of Samson and Delilah begins with a gossipy choral telling set in a hair salon, and progresses to an absolutely stunning trapeze routine carried out by Anthony Oliva and Rachael Donaldson at some frightening altitudes. The death-defying (or at least concussion-defying) nature of their work made me feel I was witnessing a primal and carnal liaison of mythic proportions. Later on Kelli Brown and Elizabeth Daniel face each other on either side of a hoop suspended from the catwalks above the stage that serves as a mirror through which Jezebel contemplates the reflection in the moments just prior to her death. The ensuing trapeze routine where the queen and the reflection she worships balance together on their mirror is a subdued and elegant moment, one of the most beautiful in the whole show.
Great kudos have to go out to the whole cast as well as to the Aerial Angels, a touring ensemble of circus-skill performers who have come through Anchorage several times now and who have done a great service to our community by passing on their skills to some of the talented up-and-comers studying at University of Alaska Anchorage.
Ruminator III—This Time It's Personal
Review of author Denis Bostock's work in progress
It’s now been about two weeks since I finished my close reading of the manuscript of Ruminator III, and I can honestly say that the delightful and anarchic world created by author (and my friend) Denis Bostock continues to shimmer in my mind for several reasons: Bostock’s amazing ability to riff comically on simple absurdities of life and language; the loveable ensemble of characters; and the freewheeling storyline, which satirizes the conventions of social fiction and epic war, while at the same time profiting from the dramatic tensions vital to these spheres of fiction. All this is quite an achievement, especially considering that this is a novel told entirely from the perspective of a band of revolutionary dairy cows who decide one day to throw off the mantle of oppression and stand up—as it were—on their own four hooves.
Bostock’s comic style is readily apparent in the first section of book, which is probably an unrivaled compendium of bovine jokes and puns in the history of western literature. Bostock’s rare and splendid ability to play with words shows itself in the delightful coining of such phrases as “workcowship” for “workmanship,” “bovinity,” for “divinity,” and the phrase, “I felt as if I had butterflies in my stomachs.” At times, the author seems to be channeling the cartoony and conceptual humor of Eddie Izzard, such as when a cow pauses in her conversation to consider the light bulb that has just appeared above her head as an indication that she’s just had an idea. At other times, Bostock’s comedy is like that of Dave Barry during the prime of his Miami Herald humor column: the jokes are unrelenting and shamelessly silly, and half the fun comes from watching the author continue to outdo himself in search of mischievous nonsense.
But for all this silliness, the humor also serves the important purpose of giving the reader a welcome into the story of the dairy farm revolution. The message to the reader is, “I know this is ludicrous, and you know it’s ludicrous, so let’s sit down together and have as much fun as we can with it.” Again and again, we’re invited to laugh as the cows—guided by their leader Daisy a.k.a. Moo See Dung—are torn when forced to choose between overthrowing the unjust power structure of the ruling regime or just eating some grass and taking a nap. The wit and playfulness grows as thick and dense as grass in the first section of the book, and as a reader I was having so much fun a part of me wanted to stay forever in the meadow of absurdity and postpone the action of the plot indefinitely.
But the action does commence. Shortly after taking over the dairy farm, the farmhouse catches fire, and Moo See Dung has to rally her troops to action in a section that gives evidence to Bostock is able to weave humor into a fast-paced scene where a lot is going on. The cows are just barely able to avert the fire, but it still proves to be a pretty simple adversary compared to the problem of their mounting social and sexual frustration. You see, there’s only one bull in their pasture, Angus, and he happens to be a self-absorbed, useless oaf who throws all his energy into perfecting his James Bond impersonation and grooming himself as the world’s first bovine gangster rap star. Driven to despair, the cows send out a single scout, the impetuous Doris, into the world to search for more recruits to their band, and especially for bulls of a higher caliber.
This second section of the book centers on the family history of Moo See Dung née Daisy, her mother Florence, and her daughter Doris. As with any family drama, issues of character take center stage. We see all sorts of little subplots developing, romances between the cows and bulls who are brought in to visit, constant bickering between Moo See Dung and her mother, and Doris’ discovery of her long lost grandfather.
This section of the book ends with the great big wedding festival of Florence and her long lost love, who (a little confusingly) is also named Angus—Angus Senior. The story of the wedding festivities are enjoyable because by the time they occur I felt as a reader that I’d been drawn into the community on the dairy farm, that I cared about who they were and what happened to them. I would very much like to see this aspect of the book fleshed out even more: I’d like get a better idea of the differences between the cows, see more subplots, and be treated to more of the sort of idiosyncratic, slice-of-life humor that is at the heart of all romantic comedy from Jane Austen’s Emma to Forgetting Sarah Marshall. There’s already a lot there: we see the cows worrying about whether they look fat; we see the delight of the sexually frustrated cows when they discover that the washing machine can function as a huge vibrator. I think that Bostock has made a good start here, but has not quite realized the incredible comedic blank check he has written himself in the form of the first great bovine wedding comedy.
Still, by the time that the world of the dairy farm is threatened from the outside, we have a sense that there really is something at stake. The threat comes from the expansionist and imperialist despotism of the pig Bonaparte, a sort of update of Orwell’s despotic swine Napoleon from Animal Farm. Like the cows, Bonaparte has led a barnyard revolution, but he has turned his farm into a massive military-agricultural complex. He is surrounded by a tight coterie of animals, all of whom are not-so-subtle caricatures of despotic figures ranging from Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe to George W Bush and Tony Blair. Bonaparte and his gang has cast a covetous colonial eye on the rich (vegetable) oil reserves owned by Moo See Dung’s revolutionary collective. We’re introduced to Bonaparte’s farm by way of the intrepid cow Buttercup, who volunteers to infiltrate the encampment on the eve of Bonaparte’s impending invasion.
The narrative of Buttercup’s reconnaissance mission is probably the best piece of descriptive prose in the book. The innocent Buttercup is initiated into a nasty and brutish barnyard Gitmo where torture and wanton execution is the order of the day. Buttercup’s horror at what she sees helps to raise the stakes in preparation for the climactic battle scene wherein Bonaparte’s pigs bombard Moo See Dung’s dairy farm with rocks, bullets, flaming catapults and the corpses of conservative British politicians. The story of the battle is told at a fast clip that held my attention, and there are quite a few surprises, especially the transformation of Angus Junior from a useless wanker into a sort of bovine Achilles, putting his life on the line at the height of this barnyard Armageddon.
The story of Bonaparte’s invasion is clearly modeled on the 2003 invasion of Iraq and George W Bush’s “War on Terror,” and so it’s unfortunate that Bostock cheats himself of a fair bit of satiric sting by making the figures of George the bush kangaroo and Tony the toad relatively minor characters in Bonaparte’s army.
But the most important thing is that Bostock has presented in this manuscript the main ingredients of a story that, from start to finish, only he could create. The three main elements of conceptual comedy, ensemble family drama and satiric war epic all fit together in a novel and satisfying way. I think Bostock still needs to do some revision, blend the elements together a little more gracefully—for instance, there’s very little foreshadowing of the pigs’ invasion until the final third of the book—but he’s reached the crucial stage where the roadmap to such revision lies mostly in exploring and augmenting the strengths of the manuscript he’s already developed. I wish him luck in this endeavor, and very much look forward to seeing how the novel develops.
It’s now been about two weeks since I finished my close reading of the manuscript of Ruminator III, and I can honestly say that the delightful and anarchic world created by author (and my friend) Denis Bostock continues to shimmer in my mind for several reasons: Bostock’s amazing ability to riff comically on simple absurdities of life and language; the loveable ensemble of characters; and the freewheeling storyline, which satirizes the conventions of social fiction and epic war, while at the same time profiting from the dramatic tensions vital to these spheres of fiction. All this is quite an achievement, especially considering that this is a novel told entirely from the perspective of a band of revolutionary dairy cows who decide one day to throw off the mantle of oppression and stand up—as it were—on their own four hooves.
Bostock’s comic style is readily apparent in the first section of book, which is probably an unrivaled compendium of bovine jokes and puns in the history of western literature. Bostock’s rare and splendid ability to play with words shows itself in the delightful coining of such phrases as “workcowship” for “workmanship,” “bovinity,” for “divinity,” and the phrase, “I felt as if I had butterflies in my stomachs.” At times, the author seems to be channeling the cartoony and conceptual humor of Eddie Izzard, such as when a cow pauses in her conversation to consider the light bulb that has just appeared above her head as an indication that she’s just had an idea. At other times, Bostock’s comedy is like that of Dave Barry during the prime of his Miami Herald humor column: the jokes are unrelenting and shamelessly silly, and half the fun comes from watching the author continue to outdo himself in search of mischievous nonsense.
But for all this silliness, the humor also serves the important purpose of giving the reader a welcome into the story of the dairy farm revolution. The message to the reader is, “I know this is ludicrous, and you know it’s ludicrous, so let’s sit down together and have as much fun as we can with it.” Again and again, we’re invited to laugh as the cows—guided by their leader Daisy a.k.a. Moo See Dung—are torn when forced to choose between overthrowing the unjust power structure of the ruling regime or just eating some grass and taking a nap. The wit and playfulness grows as thick and dense as grass in the first section of the book, and as a reader I was having so much fun a part of me wanted to stay forever in the meadow of absurdity and postpone the action of the plot indefinitely.
But the action does commence. Shortly after taking over the dairy farm, the farmhouse catches fire, and Moo See Dung has to rally her troops to action in a section that gives evidence to Bostock is able to weave humor into a fast-paced scene where a lot is going on. The cows are just barely able to avert the fire, but it still proves to be a pretty simple adversary compared to the problem of their mounting social and sexual frustration. You see, there’s only one bull in their pasture, Angus, and he happens to be a self-absorbed, useless oaf who throws all his energy into perfecting his James Bond impersonation and grooming himself as the world’s first bovine gangster rap star. Driven to despair, the cows send out a single scout, the impetuous Doris, into the world to search for more recruits to their band, and especially for bulls of a higher caliber.
This second section of the book centers on the family history of Moo See Dung née Daisy, her mother Florence, and her daughter Doris. As with any family drama, issues of character take center stage. We see all sorts of little subplots developing, romances between the cows and bulls who are brought in to visit, constant bickering between Moo See Dung and her mother, and Doris’ discovery of her long lost grandfather.
This section of the book ends with the great big wedding festival of Florence and her long lost love, who (a little confusingly) is also named Angus—Angus Senior. The story of the wedding festivities are enjoyable because by the time they occur I felt as a reader that I’d been drawn into the community on the dairy farm, that I cared about who they were and what happened to them. I would very much like to see this aspect of the book fleshed out even more: I’d like get a better idea of the differences between the cows, see more subplots, and be treated to more of the sort of idiosyncratic, slice-of-life humor that is at the heart of all romantic comedy from Jane Austen’s Emma to Forgetting Sarah Marshall. There’s already a lot there: we see the cows worrying about whether they look fat; we see the delight of the sexually frustrated cows when they discover that the washing machine can function as a huge vibrator. I think that Bostock has made a good start here, but has not quite realized the incredible comedic blank check he has written himself in the form of the first great bovine wedding comedy.
Still, by the time that the world of the dairy farm is threatened from the outside, we have a sense that there really is something at stake. The threat comes from the expansionist and imperialist despotism of the pig Bonaparte, a sort of update of Orwell’s despotic swine Napoleon from Animal Farm. Like the cows, Bonaparte has led a barnyard revolution, but he has turned his farm into a massive military-agricultural complex. He is surrounded by a tight coterie of animals, all of whom are not-so-subtle caricatures of despotic figures ranging from Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe to George W Bush and Tony Blair. Bonaparte and his gang has cast a covetous colonial eye on the rich (vegetable) oil reserves owned by Moo See Dung’s revolutionary collective. We’re introduced to Bonaparte’s farm by way of the intrepid cow Buttercup, who volunteers to infiltrate the encampment on the eve of Bonaparte’s impending invasion.
The narrative of Buttercup’s reconnaissance mission is probably the best piece of descriptive prose in the book. The innocent Buttercup is initiated into a nasty and brutish barnyard Gitmo where torture and wanton execution is the order of the day. Buttercup’s horror at what she sees helps to raise the stakes in preparation for the climactic battle scene wherein Bonaparte’s pigs bombard Moo See Dung’s dairy farm with rocks, bullets, flaming catapults and the corpses of conservative British politicians. The story of the battle is told at a fast clip that held my attention, and there are quite a few surprises, especially the transformation of Angus Junior from a useless wanker into a sort of bovine Achilles, putting his life on the line at the height of this barnyard Armageddon.
The story of Bonaparte’s invasion is clearly modeled on the 2003 invasion of Iraq and George W Bush’s “War on Terror,” and so it’s unfortunate that Bostock cheats himself of a fair bit of satiric sting by making the figures of George the bush kangaroo and Tony the toad relatively minor characters in Bonaparte’s army.
But the most important thing is that Bostock has presented in this manuscript the main ingredients of a story that, from start to finish, only he could create. The three main elements of conceptual comedy, ensemble family drama and satiric war epic all fit together in a novel and satisfying way. I think Bostock still needs to do some revision, blend the elements together a little more gracefully—for instance, there’s very little foreshadowing of the pigs’ invasion until the final third of the book—but he’s reached the crucial stage where the roadmap to such revision lies mostly in exploring and augmenting the strengths of the manuscript he’s already developed. I wish him luck in this endeavor, and very much look forward to seeing how the novel develops.
Grendel
by John Gardner (1971) Published by Vintage. 174 pages.
Reviewed 18 January 2009
John Gardner’s Grendel is a monster who could only live in books. He goes on rampages and midnight raids, he howls at the moon and sneaks up on his enemies, drinks their blood and rapes their wives and does all sorts of other things that could be fodder for movies, but the main thing this Grendel does is to listen. He’s always keeping an eye on the goings on in the little community of Dark Age Danish warrior-folk that he preys upon, and whenever something significant happens he sneaks into the shadows and gets near the action, listens to the secret conferences of those in power, catches onto their petty resentments and feuds, feels glee at their defeats and laughs at their vanity.
John Gardner has taken the character of Grendel from the story of Beowulf, king of the Geats, a heroic figure who slays first Grendel, then Grendel’s mother, and finally kills a dragon. I haven’t read the story of Beowulf yet, but I do know that it’s sort of one of the root stories of English literature, one of the most ancient texts we have in English of any sort, probably one of the oldest poems. And so I understand what it symbolizes for a modern author to go back and revisit this story: by taking his subject from this ancient text, John Gardner is taking a look at the foundation of our culture, trying to track down some of the mysteries of how we came to be who we are. Some of my favorite and least favorite books work along these principles: Derek Walcott’s Omeros uses themes from the Iliad and Odyssey to wonderful effect; Ahab’s Wife, on the other hand, tries to explore the origins of American fiction and just winds up making an ugly mess of the whole thing.
The story of Beowulf is a template for sword-and-sorcery fantasy, and would seem to be a poor source of material for a contemplative book about humankind, but John Gardner makes the matter interesting by exploring the issue of why Grendel has such hatred of the humans that he terrorizes.
Grendel narrates the book in the first person. He’s a creature of monstrous form but with considerable intelligence. His mother is a huge, brutish creature who has nothing to offer him in terms of intellectual stimulation. Although he learns from watching the animals that move about in the wilderness where he lives, he recognizes that they are beneath him. Eventually, Grendel does come into contact with the Dragon, a creature who borders on omniscience. Try as he might, Grendel cannot penetrate the abstract philosophy that occupies the Dragon’s brilliant mind. His intelligence is comparable only to that of the humans who live near him, but because of his form Grendel knows he will never be accepted by them.
It isn’t just loneliness, though, that makes Grendel hate his human adversaries. The thing that really hurts him is the dishonesty that seems to lie at the heart of their society. Growing up, Grendel watches the battles for territory that are carried out as the Danes fight one another. Eventually one Danish warlord, Hrothgar, gains supremacy in the region. Shortly after reaching this pinnacle of power, Hrothgar’s meadhall is visited by a blind bard who has come to seek Hrothgar’s favor. The bard, called the Shaper by Grendel, sings a song that glorifies Hrothgar, praising his rise to power not as a story of pillage and victory of brute force, but as a tale of the triumph of civilization and virtue over “barbarianism.” Grendel is outraged to see that the Shaper’s song casts a spell over the people of Hrothgar’s kingdom, that even though they know the story to be false, they now believe themselves to be the heroic and noble warriors that the Shaper sings about.
In a sense, then, all of Grendel’s ravages against Hrothgar’s people can been seen as the rebellion of true human nature against the lies that we tell ourselves about our own special place in the universe. That’s a little bit too simple an interpretation, but it will serve to demonstrate one of the many wonderful possibilities that arise from this brief but fascinating little tale Gardner has written.
Reviewed 18 January 2009
John Gardner’s Grendel is a monster who could only live in books. He goes on rampages and midnight raids, he howls at the moon and sneaks up on his enemies, drinks their blood and rapes their wives and does all sorts of other things that could be fodder for movies, but the main thing this Grendel does is to listen. He’s always keeping an eye on the goings on in the little community of Dark Age Danish warrior-folk that he preys upon, and whenever something significant happens he sneaks into the shadows and gets near the action, listens to the secret conferences of those in power, catches onto their petty resentments and feuds, feels glee at their defeats and laughs at their vanity.
John Gardner has taken the character of Grendel from the story of Beowulf, king of the Geats, a heroic figure who slays first Grendel, then Grendel’s mother, and finally kills a dragon. I haven’t read the story of Beowulf yet, but I do know that it’s sort of one of the root stories of English literature, one of the most ancient texts we have in English of any sort, probably one of the oldest poems. And so I understand what it symbolizes for a modern author to go back and revisit this story: by taking his subject from this ancient text, John Gardner is taking a look at the foundation of our culture, trying to track down some of the mysteries of how we came to be who we are. Some of my favorite and least favorite books work along these principles: Derek Walcott’s Omeros uses themes from the Iliad and Odyssey to wonderful effect; Ahab’s Wife, on the other hand, tries to explore the origins of American fiction and just winds up making an ugly mess of the whole thing.
The story of Beowulf is a template for sword-and-sorcery fantasy, and would seem to be a poor source of material for a contemplative book about humankind, but John Gardner makes the matter interesting by exploring the issue of why Grendel has such hatred of the humans that he terrorizes.
Grendel narrates the book in the first person. He’s a creature of monstrous form but with considerable intelligence. His mother is a huge, brutish creature who has nothing to offer him in terms of intellectual stimulation. Although he learns from watching the animals that move about in the wilderness where he lives, he recognizes that they are beneath him. Eventually, Grendel does come into contact with the Dragon, a creature who borders on omniscience. Try as he might, Grendel cannot penetrate the abstract philosophy that occupies the Dragon’s brilliant mind. His intelligence is comparable only to that of the humans who live near him, but because of his form Grendel knows he will never be accepted by them.
It isn’t just loneliness, though, that makes Grendel hate his human adversaries. The thing that really hurts him is the dishonesty that seems to lie at the heart of their society. Growing up, Grendel watches the battles for territory that are carried out as the Danes fight one another. Eventually one Danish warlord, Hrothgar, gains supremacy in the region. Shortly after reaching this pinnacle of power, Hrothgar’s meadhall is visited by a blind bard who has come to seek Hrothgar’s favor. The bard, called the Shaper by Grendel, sings a song that glorifies Hrothgar, praising his rise to power not as a story of pillage and victory of brute force, but as a tale of the triumph of civilization and virtue over “barbarianism.” Grendel is outraged to see that the Shaper’s song casts a spell over the people of Hrothgar’s kingdom, that even though they know the story to be false, they now believe themselves to be the heroic and noble warriors that the Shaper sings about.
In a sense, then, all of Grendel’s ravages against Hrothgar’s people can been seen as the rebellion of true human nature against the lies that we tell ourselves about our own special place in the universe. That’s a little bit too simple an interpretation, but it will serve to demonstrate one of the many wonderful possibilities that arise from this brief but fascinating little tale Gardner has written.
Freddy’s Book
Freddy’s Book by John Gardner (1980). Published by Ballantine Books. 214 pages.
The story of Freddy’s Book starts in modern times, narrated in the first person by a chummy professor named Winesap, open minded and jolly, a professor of something called “Psycho-history. Winesap is a refreshing character, genuinely optimistic and kindly, free from all the overblown vanity and professional jealousy that characterize academic characters in most modern literature. It’s especially noteworthy that he seems to be a champion of the talents of the young: he is easily inspired by the prospect that one of the students he lectures to may be “some young Gibson or Macaulay not yet conscious of how good he is.” At a party, Winesap meets a crotchety, mean-tempered professor named Agaard, a scholar of Scandanavian history whom Winesap admires academically even though he finds him personally repulsive. After accepting an invitation to Agaard’s house, Winesap then patiently sits by and endures a barrage of criticism hurled at him by Agaard: real history should be confined to fact, not fiction and fancy. In Agaard’s eye, Winesap represents a sign of fatal decadence.
Why, then, does Agaard invite Winesap to his house at all? The answer has to do with his son, Freddy. Described by his own father as a monster, Freddy Agaard stands seven feet tall and has voluntarily locked himself in a room filled with books. He shows signs of being a genius, but the real nature of his intelligence remains a mystery because he refuses to show anyone the book he’s written. Agaard knows that Freddy admires the work of professor Winesap, and hopes that Freddy will show his book to Winesap, which he eventually does, dropping it off for him in the dead of night.
The book is called King Gustav and the Devil. The first 57 pages of Freddy’s Book tells the story of how Winesap gets possession of the book on a cold, snowy Wisconsin night and the rest of the novel consists only of the text of this strange story Freddy has written. We never find out what Winesap’s reaction to the book is, we never find out whether Freddy eventually is able to escape his self-imposed isolation. But the framing story of Freddy, Winesap and Agaard does serve to prime our minds for the fact that we’re embarking on a weird journey into a narrative terrain very remote from anything we’d expect from contemporary American fiction.
The story concerns Gustav Vasa of Sweden, an actual historical figure, and his faithful friend, the knight Lars-Goren. Lars-Goren is a taciturn man, who is “considered to be of great intelligence, for though he thought slowly, he thought clearly and soundly, so that again and again his opinions were found to be more valuable in the end than the opinions of men quicker and more dazzling.” Indeed, throughout the story Lars-Goren’s thinking process is so slow that he seems entirely inactive. He basically acts as a passive, but very reflective witness as he watches his friend Gustav Vasa be tempted by the Devil himself into starting a revolution against Denmark for Swedish independence. While the plot is filled with historical upheavals, with insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, conspiracies and military campaigns, all these events occur at such a remote distance to the plot that we get the sense that these are merely a mask for something that is emerging much more slowly: the birth of a new sort of civilization.
The most striking element of the story is the Devil, who walks freely about, takes on all sorts of forms, and often makes no secret as to who he is. His role is always to entice more turmoil and bloodshed. He appears on all sides of every conflict, counseling not only Gustav Vasa but also the Danish King Kristian and the supremely cynical Bishop Brask.
We get the sense that for the Devil, all the constant struggle and change in government actually represents a sort of stasis: as long as people keep sowing conflict, the human spirit can never grow.
And the Devil seems farthest away during the prolonged and serene reveries of Lars-Goren as he turns his back on the business of helping found a kingdom and visits his estate, taking joy in seeing his children going up and reflecting on the duties a feudal lord bears to his peasantry. He is especially touched when he sees Bernt Notke’s statue depicting St George’s slaying of the Dragon, a statue that comes to symbolize for him the notion that the Devil himself can eventually be overthrown.
Although we never see an actual glimpse of Freddy again, his character traits do keep popping up in the narrative of King Gustav and the Devil. For instance, take a look at some of the things Winesap says to encourage Freddy:
“It’s not easy writing books! You know, that’s the one place where all human beings are equal . . . whatever we may seem to be—humpbacked, tall or short, pale or ruddy, never mind . . . when we pick up that pencil we’re all in the same boat . . . A man may say anything when he’s just talking . . . but when he’s writing he ha time to think it over and re-do it until it’s right.”
This description of slow, deliberative thought complements the description of Lars-Goren’s own process of circumspection. And the recollections of Bishop Brask also recall the bookish nature of Freddy:
“When I was young, I was a great reader of books. They were my chief pleasure—my very life. . . But books are expensive and you’d be surprised how easily they burn, if the fire gets hot enough. And so one involves oneself in money-grubbing and politics, even war. For the luxury of reading the gentle thoughts of Plato or St. Ambrose, or sharing the pastoral meditations of the Emperor who turned his back on Rome to run a chicken farm—for the supreme pleasure of musing at one’s ease on the glorious illustrations of the Arabs or the masters of Byzantium—one turns one’s whole attention to manipulating fools full of bloodthirts and ambition . . . crushing underfoot all that God and the philosophers have stood for.”
In the end, Lars-Goren and Bishop Brask are sent out to the frozen waste of Lappland on what appears to be a fool’s errand—they must kill the Devil. During the journey across the vast expanse of land, there is little for them to do but talk, debating lofty issues. Brask seems to dominate the discussion, bolstered as he is by his extensive knowledge of philosophy, but Lars-Goren, the man of few words, is the one who proposes new and challenging ideas—a model for tolerance and universal human decency that challenges Brask’s cynicism.
Interestingly, the opening, modern, section of Freddy’s Book reads very much like a contrivance, whereas the fictional story of Lars-Goren feels far more genuine for all its fantastical elements. A modern reader may well be put off by the long sections of philosophical discussions at the end of the book. I think we’ve all been somewhat entrained to interpret novels as plot outlines for movies and there’s a waning recognition of the fact that they can also serve as a wonderful nursery for meaningful ideas and ways of looking at life. In this book, John Gardner seeks to remind us that great ideas may linger locked away for generations inside labyrinths of obscurity unless we engage that most enlightened and democratic forms of action: careful, patient, open-minded listening.
The story of Freddy’s Book starts in modern times, narrated in the first person by a chummy professor named Winesap, open minded and jolly, a professor of something called “Psycho-history. Winesap is a refreshing character, genuinely optimistic and kindly, free from all the overblown vanity and professional jealousy that characterize academic characters in most modern literature. It’s especially noteworthy that he seems to be a champion of the talents of the young: he is easily inspired by the prospect that one of the students he lectures to may be “some young Gibson or Macaulay not yet conscious of how good he is.” At a party, Winesap meets a crotchety, mean-tempered professor named Agaard, a scholar of Scandanavian history whom Winesap admires academically even though he finds him personally repulsive. After accepting an invitation to Agaard’s house, Winesap then patiently sits by and endures a barrage of criticism hurled at him by Agaard: real history should be confined to fact, not fiction and fancy. In Agaard’s eye, Winesap represents a sign of fatal decadence.
Why, then, does Agaard invite Winesap to his house at all? The answer has to do with his son, Freddy. Described by his own father as a monster, Freddy Agaard stands seven feet tall and has voluntarily locked himself in a room filled with books. He shows signs of being a genius, but the real nature of his intelligence remains a mystery because he refuses to show anyone the book he’s written. Agaard knows that Freddy admires the work of professor Winesap, and hopes that Freddy will show his book to Winesap, which he eventually does, dropping it off for him in the dead of night.
The book is called King Gustav and the Devil. The first 57 pages of Freddy’s Book tells the story of how Winesap gets possession of the book on a cold, snowy Wisconsin night and the rest of the novel consists only of the text of this strange story Freddy has written. We never find out what Winesap’s reaction to the book is, we never find out whether Freddy eventually is able to escape his self-imposed isolation. But the framing story of Freddy, Winesap and Agaard does serve to prime our minds for the fact that we’re embarking on a weird journey into a narrative terrain very remote from anything we’d expect from contemporary American fiction.
The story concerns Gustav Vasa of Sweden, an actual historical figure, and his faithful friend, the knight Lars-Goren. Lars-Goren is a taciturn man, who is “considered to be of great intelligence, for though he thought slowly, he thought clearly and soundly, so that again and again his opinions were found to be more valuable in the end than the opinions of men quicker and more dazzling.” Indeed, throughout the story Lars-Goren’s thinking process is so slow that he seems entirely inactive. He basically acts as a passive, but very reflective witness as he watches his friend Gustav Vasa be tempted by the Devil himself into starting a revolution against Denmark for Swedish independence. While the plot is filled with historical upheavals, with insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, conspiracies and military campaigns, all these events occur at such a remote distance to the plot that we get the sense that these are merely a mask for something that is emerging much more slowly: the birth of a new sort of civilization.
The most striking element of the story is the Devil, who walks freely about, takes on all sorts of forms, and often makes no secret as to who he is. His role is always to entice more turmoil and bloodshed. He appears on all sides of every conflict, counseling not only Gustav Vasa but also the Danish King Kristian and the supremely cynical Bishop Brask.
We get the sense that for the Devil, all the constant struggle and change in government actually represents a sort of stasis: as long as people keep sowing conflict, the human spirit can never grow.
And the Devil seems farthest away during the prolonged and serene reveries of Lars-Goren as he turns his back on the business of helping found a kingdom and visits his estate, taking joy in seeing his children going up and reflecting on the duties a feudal lord bears to his peasantry. He is especially touched when he sees Bernt Notke’s statue depicting St George’s slaying of the Dragon, a statue that comes to symbolize for him the notion that the Devil himself can eventually be overthrown.
Although we never see an actual glimpse of Freddy again, his character traits do keep popping up in the narrative of King Gustav and the Devil. For instance, take a look at some of the things Winesap says to encourage Freddy:
“It’s not easy writing books! You know, that’s the one place where all human beings are equal . . . whatever we may seem to be—humpbacked, tall or short, pale or ruddy, never mind . . . when we pick up that pencil we’re all in the same boat . . . A man may say anything when he’s just talking . . . but when he’s writing he ha time to think it over and re-do it until it’s right.”
This description of slow, deliberative thought complements the description of Lars-Goren’s own process of circumspection. And the recollections of Bishop Brask also recall the bookish nature of Freddy:
“When I was young, I was a great reader of books. They were my chief pleasure—my very life. . . But books are expensive and you’d be surprised how easily they burn, if the fire gets hot enough. And so one involves oneself in money-grubbing and politics, even war. For the luxury of reading the gentle thoughts of Plato or St. Ambrose, or sharing the pastoral meditations of the Emperor who turned his back on Rome to run a chicken farm—for the supreme pleasure of musing at one’s ease on the glorious illustrations of the Arabs or the masters of Byzantium—one turns one’s whole attention to manipulating fools full of bloodthirts and ambition . . . crushing underfoot all that God and the philosophers have stood for.”
In the end, Lars-Goren and Bishop Brask are sent out to the frozen waste of Lappland on what appears to be a fool’s errand—they must kill the Devil. During the journey across the vast expanse of land, there is little for them to do but talk, debating lofty issues. Brask seems to dominate the discussion, bolstered as he is by his extensive knowledge of philosophy, but Lars-Goren, the man of few words, is the one who proposes new and challenging ideas—a model for tolerance and universal human decency that challenges Brask’s cynicism.
Interestingly, the opening, modern, section of Freddy’s Book reads very much like a contrivance, whereas the fictional story of Lars-Goren feels far more genuine for all its fantastical elements. A modern reader may well be put off by the long sections of philosophical discussions at the end of the book. I think we’ve all been somewhat entrained to interpret novels as plot outlines for movies and there’s a waning recognition of the fact that they can also serve as a wonderful nursery for meaningful ideas and ways of looking at life. In this book, John Gardner seeks to remind us that great ideas may linger locked away for generations inside labyrinths of obscurity unless we engage that most enlightened and democratic forms of action: careful, patient, open-minded listening.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
By John Fowles
First in a series of 3 installments — 26 October 2008
The Magus is a book about a modern man drawn into a scheme that, while fascinating, is really more like an intricate private fantasy than anything we can imagine happening in real life. The Collector takes place buried in the psychological prison of an enclosure behind a secret door at the back of a basement. How disconcerting it was that the third book of Fowles’ I read should open up its doors on the Victorian era.
For readers of the English language, the Victorian era is the closest thing we have to public space in the world of literature. Wuthering Heights, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, The Christmas Carol; even in a modern America that shuns literacy and denies the importance of anything even slightly old or unfamiliar, our schools and our teachers do seem to recognize that there’s something universal in these stories that can engage children. From early childhood it was always Victorian images that were the strongest in my mind when I was asked to imagine the past, the way the world must have been before the invention of cars and lightbulbs. Knights in armor, cowboys and horses, all these had the aura of something that was partly make believe. But the Masterpiece Theater world of Victorian England was the world as it really was.
In this book, Fowles puts his own research at the forefront. He’s constantly breaking into the narration with references to his sources, with data about the working life of Victorian servants, the prejudices of the middle and aristocratic classes, and especially with reminders about how we must not mistake the attitudes of the Victorians with those of today’s world.
Far from breaking the illusion, these references serve to make this novel feel more real and more interesting, not only because you feel like you’re getting a really high quality tour of the world as it once existed, but also because in setting his novel in the Victorian Era, Fowles has found a perfect setting for his own ideas.
This is how I would propose it: In The Collector, Fowles shows us two people separated by a wall that cannot be broken. The wall is composed of class prejudices, of sexual desire and internal repression, of primal fear and of self-absorption. In The Magus, we see the story of a man who, through the extraordinary efforts of an eccentric millionaire, is allowed for just a moment to see his own personal walls shattered. It’s a compelling story, at least to me, but it’s somehow very hard to understand completely what barriers it is that Nicholas Urfe breaks down, because he lives in the same world we all do.
But the world of The French Lieutenant’s Woman is far enough removed from our own that we’re able to distance ourselves from the character of Charles Smithson, a young man who expects to inherit a baronetcy and a substantial fortune, who’s on the verge of affecting a very comfortable marriage with a woman—Ernestina—who seems perfectly satisfactory by all the standards Charles has been trained to apply to the world around him.
And then there’s the outcast woman, Sarah Woodruff, called “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by some and “The French Lieutenant’s Whore” by others, because she is said to have lost her virginity to a handsome foreigner who has since abandoned her.
John Fowles tells us that the phenomenon of Charles falling in love with Sarah is identical to the end of the Victorian era. And because he’s dug up so many wonderful facts and stories about 19th Century England to illustrate his point, this rather abstract metaphor becomes quite visceral and believable. Unlike Nicholas Urfe’s brief period of disorientation at the hands of the scheming Maurice Conchis, Charles’ crisis is drawn out over more than a hundred pages as he resists Sarah, condemns her as mad, sees his hopes for inheritance dashed, runs for consolation to the seamy demimonde of London, and finally succumbs to the temptation to destroy the self that Sarah represents.
It works precisely because Victorian literature is characterized by such a wonderful tradition of coincidence. Whereas Maurice Conchis’s whole consciousness shattering project seemed a labyrinthine contrivance whose complexity often obscured the revelation at its own heart, the downfall of Charles Smithson seems to be driven by the same forces that drove the fates of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens’s characters.
IB Singer said that every writer needs to find stories that no one else can tell. It’s impossible for me to imagine anyone else telling the story of Sarah Woodruff. Fowles intentionally makes her an enigma. The great characters of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes and Emma Woodhouse, Ebenezer Scrooge and David Copperfield all are so vivid that they can live inside our minds. But Sarah Woodruff seems to pass mysteriously just beyond our grasp in a way that eludes the Victorian style and makes this novel seem truly a feat of magic.
Second in series of three installments — 2 November 2008
So what is it that this Sarah Woodruff symbolizes? Like the White Whale in Moby Dick, she stands at the center of a network of symbolism that fills up the whole book, but she never quite passes completely into the realm of pure symbol. In one very interesting chapter Fowles pulls out of the narrative entirely and declares that, although Sarah, like all the characters in the novel, is his creation, he cannot and will not reveal her inner motives, although he had planned to do so. She won’t reveal them up to her author.
Sarah stands out as being the only character in the book that acts even slightly an adult. This is another theme that seems to run through Fowles’s books—although the characters are all adults with adult responsibilities, they seem to be ruled by a set of childish vanities. Charles and Ernestina go through life as though they’re living in a fairy tale, partly because that’s precisely what they are doing. They’re both slated to earn huge inheritances, and while they each have their little cavils and pouting fits with one another, they’re both bolstered deep down by the thought that the ultimate struggle that lies in store for them is the choice of what kind of prosperity exactly they want to choose. Will they move into the large manor house or the small manor house? Will Charles carry on with his amateur paleontology, or will he find some other hobby to occupy his time but not fulfill his longing to ambition.
At first, Sarah seems to be childish as well. She spends her life moping about, staring at the sea, presumably in hopes that the French Lieutenant who once seduced her will come back. But as the novel progresses and she continues to meet with Charles in the primeval groves of the wild region known as the Undercliff, it begins to become clear that she’s not as much a victim of childish passion as we first thought. Does she really have any illusion that her French Lieutenant will ever come back? Did she even love him in the first place? And if not, why does she willingly allow herself to remain in a community where she’ll always be shunned as a fallen woman? Confused by these questions, Charles confides in his fellow Darwinist Dr Grogan, the only man he can trust to respond rationally.
As a Darwinist and atheist, Dr Grogan seems to stand outside the prison of stereotypes and that defines the Victorian era of this book, and yet his response hardly seems that of a reasonable man. He feels certain that Sarah is dangerously ill and must be institutionalized immediately. She is, after all, the inferior of Charles, who must seem to her like a god.
As it turns out, Dr Grogan is correct in thinking that Sarah represents a great danger to Charles’s future as a happy Victorian gentleman, but his notion that Sarah is mad seems diametrically opposed to the sort of rational humanism that Grogan wishes to represent.
The Undercliff, where Charles and Sarah meet, is home to a series of fossils that inspire Charles to realize the fact that Darwin’s natural not only carries the potential for evolutionary progress but also for mass extinction. Sarah Woodruff represents all the forces that will eventually extinguish the Victorian era, but what are those forces? I think that the answer lies in the other name that she’s given by the people of Lyme Regis, the name that’s used least frequently in the book: Tragedy. The true blindness of the Victorian era is not just a denial of sexual desires or the baser nature of even the most refined gentleman, but rather the denial of the tragic nature of life, in the sense of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy where a system destroys itself by its own striving toward nobility. The name “Tragedy” is appropriate for Sarah, but not so much because she’s a victim of tragedy but an agent of tragic catharsis. Although I doubt I can get to the bottom of it, I will try to expand on that idea in my next installment of this review.
Third installment • 23 November 2008
I remember one time I had an acting teacher who suggested that we almost always see the people around us as representations of something rather than as actual human beings. We see people as representations of our ambitions, as challenges to our status, as political opponents or as collaborators at work, as role-models and as supervisors, as parents or children, but it’s exceedingly rare that we simply view them as people who have been set as unwillingly and unwittingly into the great en medias res of life as we ourselves have been.
That memory came to me today as I was thinking about what more there was for me to say about French Lieutenant’s Woman. It seems to me that in all of Fowles’s works I’ve read so far, his central theme is precisely this blindness we carry around with us, this blindness which keeps us from ever quite recognizing the people around us for what they really are. Victorian society especially seems to depend on such blindness. Charles and his fiancée Ernestina enter into the book with a pat answer to every question of human nature that might come their way.
What makes this argument worth listening to is that Fowles doesn’t write off the blindness of the age as a mere handicap. He’s explicit about the fact that he has a great admiration for the achievements of Victorian society, for the incredible productivity and creativity that arose during that time, but he does seem to suggest that these benefits were achieved at the price of creating a society that was incredibly rigid and unyielding in its notions of human value.
I think that one of the weaknesses of Fowles is that his focus on satori-like moment when the scales fall away from a person’s eyes requires him to make his plots pivot on these moments of personal revelation that are very difficult to communicate to the reader and that must seem contrived and alienating to anyone who hasn’t experienced such moments themselves. One of the ways that Fowles manages to get around this problem is by repeatedly bringing up excerpts of poetry by Tennyson and Clough that are always closely attuned to the inner entrapments and awakenings of Fowles’s characters. Another way that he manages this is by admitting that the character of Sarah Woodruff resists even the omnipotence of the novelist. He cannot see fully into her mind, cannot even guess at her true motivations, and in the end this puts her not only beyond the Victorian stereotypes that Charles uses to navigate his way through life, but also puts her outside of the Freudian and Marxist analyses with which Fowles tries to explain his other characters.
First in a series of 3 installments — 26 October 2008
The Magus is a book about a modern man drawn into a scheme that, while fascinating, is really more like an intricate private fantasy than anything we can imagine happening in real life. The Collector takes place buried in the psychological prison of an enclosure behind a secret door at the back of a basement. How disconcerting it was that the third book of Fowles’ I read should open up its doors on the Victorian era.
For readers of the English language, the Victorian era is the closest thing we have to public space in the world of literature. Wuthering Heights, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, The Christmas Carol; even in a modern America that shuns literacy and denies the importance of anything even slightly old or unfamiliar, our schools and our teachers do seem to recognize that there’s something universal in these stories that can engage children. From early childhood it was always Victorian images that were the strongest in my mind when I was asked to imagine the past, the way the world must have been before the invention of cars and lightbulbs. Knights in armor, cowboys and horses, all these had the aura of something that was partly make believe. But the Masterpiece Theater world of Victorian England was the world as it really was.
In this book, Fowles puts his own research at the forefront. He’s constantly breaking into the narration with references to his sources, with data about the working life of Victorian servants, the prejudices of the middle and aristocratic classes, and especially with reminders about how we must not mistake the attitudes of the Victorians with those of today’s world.
Far from breaking the illusion, these references serve to make this novel feel more real and more interesting, not only because you feel like you’re getting a really high quality tour of the world as it once existed, but also because in setting his novel in the Victorian Era, Fowles has found a perfect setting for his own ideas.
This is how I would propose it: In The Collector, Fowles shows us two people separated by a wall that cannot be broken. The wall is composed of class prejudices, of sexual desire and internal repression, of primal fear and of self-absorption. In The Magus, we see the story of a man who, through the extraordinary efforts of an eccentric millionaire, is allowed for just a moment to see his own personal walls shattered. It’s a compelling story, at least to me, but it’s somehow very hard to understand completely what barriers it is that Nicholas Urfe breaks down, because he lives in the same world we all do.
But the world of The French Lieutenant’s Woman is far enough removed from our own that we’re able to distance ourselves from the character of Charles Smithson, a young man who expects to inherit a baronetcy and a substantial fortune, who’s on the verge of affecting a very comfortable marriage with a woman—Ernestina—who seems perfectly satisfactory by all the standards Charles has been trained to apply to the world around him.
And then there’s the outcast woman, Sarah Woodruff, called “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by some and “The French Lieutenant’s Whore” by others, because she is said to have lost her virginity to a handsome foreigner who has since abandoned her.
John Fowles tells us that the phenomenon of Charles falling in love with Sarah is identical to the end of the Victorian era. And because he’s dug up so many wonderful facts and stories about 19th Century England to illustrate his point, this rather abstract metaphor becomes quite visceral and believable. Unlike Nicholas Urfe’s brief period of disorientation at the hands of the scheming Maurice Conchis, Charles’ crisis is drawn out over more than a hundred pages as he resists Sarah, condemns her as mad, sees his hopes for inheritance dashed, runs for consolation to the seamy demimonde of London, and finally succumbs to the temptation to destroy the self that Sarah represents.
It works precisely because Victorian literature is characterized by such a wonderful tradition of coincidence. Whereas Maurice Conchis’s whole consciousness shattering project seemed a labyrinthine contrivance whose complexity often obscured the revelation at its own heart, the downfall of Charles Smithson seems to be driven by the same forces that drove the fates of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens’s characters.
IB Singer said that every writer needs to find stories that no one else can tell. It’s impossible for me to imagine anyone else telling the story of Sarah Woodruff. Fowles intentionally makes her an enigma. The great characters of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes and Emma Woodhouse, Ebenezer Scrooge and David Copperfield all are so vivid that they can live inside our minds. But Sarah Woodruff seems to pass mysteriously just beyond our grasp in a way that eludes the Victorian style and makes this novel seem truly a feat of magic.
Second in series of three installments — 2 November 2008
So what is it that this Sarah Woodruff symbolizes? Like the White Whale in Moby Dick, she stands at the center of a network of symbolism that fills up the whole book, but she never quite passes completely into the realm of pure symbol. In one very interesting chapter Fowles pulls out of the narrative entirely and declares that, although Sarah, like all the characters in the novel, is his creation, he cannot and will not reveal her inner motives, although he had planned to do so. She won’t reveal them up to her author.
Sarah stands out as being the only character in the book that acts even slightly an adult. This is another theme that seems to run through Fowles’s books—although the characters are all adults with adult responsibilities, they seem to be ruled by a set of childish vanities. Charles and Ernestina go through life as though they’re living in a fairy tale, partly because that’s precisely what they are doing. They’re both slated to earn huge inheritances, and while they each have their little cavils and pouting fits with one another, they’re both bolstered deep down by the thought that the ultimate struggle that lies in store for them is the choice of what kind of prosperity exactly they want to choose. Will they move into the large manor house or the small manor house? Will Charles carry on with his amateur paleontology, or will he find some other hobby to occupy his time but not fulfill his longing to ambition.
At first, Sarah seems to be childish as well. She spends her life moping about, staring at the sea, presumably in hopes that the French Lieutenant who once seduced her will come back. But as the novel progresses and she continues to meet with Charles in the primeval groves of the wild region known as the Undercliff, it begins to become clear that she’s not as much a victim of childish passion as we first thought. Does she really have any illusion that her French Lieutenant will ever come back? Did she even love him in the first place? And if not, why does she willingly allow herself to remain in a community where she’ll always be shunned as a fallen woman? Confused by these questions, Charles confides in his fellow Darwinist Dr Grogan, the only man he can trust to respond rationally.
As a Darwinist and atheist, Dr Grogan seems to stand outside the prison of stereotypes and that defines the Victorian era of this book, and yet his response hardly seems that of a reasonable man. He feels certain that Sarah is dangerously ill and must be institutionalized immediately. She is, after all, the inferior of Charles, who must seem to her like a god.
As it turns out, Dr Grogan is correct in thinking that Sarah represents a great danger to Charles’s future as a happy Victorian gentleman, but his notion that Sarah is mad seems diametrically opposed to the sort of rational humanism that Grogan wishes to represent.
The Undercliff, where Charles and Sarah meet, is home to a series of fossils that inspire Charles to realize the fact that Darwin’s natural not only carries the potential for evolutionary progress but also for mass extinction. Sarah Woodruff represents all the forces that will eventually extinguish the Victorian era, but what are those forces? I think that the answer lies in the other name that she’s given by the people of Lyme Regis, the name that’s used least frequently in the book: Tragedy. The true blindness of the Victorian era is not just a denial of sexual desires or the baser nature of even the most refined gentleman, but rather the denial of the tragic nature of life, in the sense of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy where a system destroys itself by its own striving toward nobility. The name “Tragedy” is appropriate for Sarah, but not so much because she’s a victim of tragedy but an agent of tragic catharsis. Although I doubt I can get to the bottom of it, I will try to expand on that idea in my next installment of this review.
Third installment • 23 November 2008
I remember one time I had an acting teacher who suggested that we almost always see the people around us as representations of something rather than as actual human beings. We see people as representations of our ambitions, as challenges to our status, as political opponents or as collaborators at work, as role-models and as supervisors, as parents or children, but it’s exceedingly rare that we simply view them as people who have been set as unwillingly and unwittingly into the great en medias res of life as we ourselves have been.
That memory came to me today as I was thinking about what more there was for me to say about French Lieutenant’s Woman. It seems to me that in all of Fowles’s works I’ve read so far, his central theme is precisely this blindness we carry around with us, this blindness which keeps us from ever quite recognizing the people around us for what they really are. Victorian society especially seems to depend on such blindness. Charles and his fiancée Ernestina enter into the book with a pat answer to every question of human nature that might come their way.
What makes this argument worth listening to is that Fowles doesn’t write off the blindness of the age as a mere handicap. He’s explicit about the fact that he has a great admiration for the achievements of Victorian society, for the incredible productivity and creativity that arose during that time, but he does seem to suggest that these benefits were achieved at the price of creating a society that was incredibly rigid and unyielding in its notions of human value.
I think that one of the weaknesses of Fowles is that his focus on satori-like moment when the scales fall away from a person’s eyes requires him to make his plots pivot on these moments of personal revelation that are very difficult to communicate to the reader and that must seem contrived and alienating to anyone who hasn’t experienced such moments themselves. One of the ways that Fowles manages to get around this problem is by repeatedly bringing up excerpts of poetry by Tennyson and Clough that are always closely attuned to the inner entrapments and awakenings of Fowles’s characters. Another way that he manages this is by admitting that the character of Sarah Woodruff resists even the omnipotence of the novelist. He cannot see fully into her mind, cannot even guess at her true motivations, and in the end this puts her not only beyond the Victorian stereotypes that Charles uses to navigate his way through life, but also puts her outside of the Freudian and Marxist analyses with which Fowles tries to explain his other characters.
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