In Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” Jack Burden, the novel’s narrator and de facto protagonist, spends a lot of time driving. He works as consultant and hatchet man for Willie Stark, the governor and political boss of Louisiana; this occupation requires a lot of traveling. During one of these drives, as he heads away from is mother’s house and towards an assignment for Willie, he begins to speculate that he doesn’t exist without relating to others: that mere self reflection does not a whole person make, stands in stark contrast to the philosophical currents of the time. Sartre’s “Hell is Other People” stands in stark contrast to Warren’s novel-length treatise on the inner-connectedness of people and the need for human beings to work and relate to one another in order to do good.
Like “Kings,” Bernard Malamud’s “The Assistant” also feels like a bit Contrary Mary. Unlike Warren, Malamud’s novel feels like a specific attack. Frank Alpine and Morris Bober sit on opposite sides of the moral relativist scale.
Morris’s Judiasim keeps him in a place of moral absolution, even to the point of being cuckolded into failure. He won’t burn down his store. He allows himself to be run over by his business partner. At every possible turn, Morris does the right thing and is punished for it. But the novel still treats Morris as a moral center.
Frank Alpine, on the other hand has no fixed moral center.. But he still needs to feel good about his own life; he’s not amoral by any stretch. First, Frank tries crime, but he feels bad. Then, when he works for Morris, he steals. But he doesn’t commit; he even takes note of all the money he steals from Morris so he can pay him back. Frank’s journey in “The Assistant” is one of compromises; he’ll do something bad, then repent by trying to a “Right thing” to make up for it, or justify his bad by thinking about his good.
I assaulted Morris: But I gave him water.
I steal from Morris: But I am keeping track and I will pay him back.
I raped Helen: But I saved her from Ward.
For ever bad thing Frank does, he tries to justify it with a good thing.
Frank’s fluctuating morality only brings suffering to himself and to others. Morris’s consistent morals bring suffering to himself, but excludes most others. (His wife and daughter, it could be debated.) At novel’s end, Frank relents his journey to create a system of morality: he becomes a Jew instead.
Speaking of the Jewish people and Bernard Malamud… Philip Roth! In “The Ghost Writer” Roth’s first novel written from the perspective of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s literary Alter Ego, Zuckerman says of E.I. Lonoff’s work, a stand in for Malamud:
In fact, my own reading through Lonoff’s cannon as an orthodox college atheist and highbrow-in-training had done more to make me realize how much I was still my family’s Jewish offspring than anything I had carried forward o the University of Chicago from childhood Hebrew lessons, or my mother’s kitchen, or the discussions I used to hear among my parents and our relatives about the perils of intermarriage, the problem of Santa Claus, and the injustice of medical-school quotas.
Malamud’s work showed Roth his Jewish origins. In other novels, Roth details a childhood in Newark that was removed from the sort of experiences that Malamud chronicles in “The Assistant.” There’s no fleeing from the gulags, no major oppressive forces that make being Jewish a statement of defiance the way it is in Russia. The experiences Malamud discusses contextualize Roth’s life in a way that reveals his heritage.
In “Defender of the Faith” Roth illustrates the conflict between American Culture and Jewish culture. Sergeant Nathan Marx, the story’s narrator and protagonist, indulges the requests of Private Sheldon Grossbart. Both are Jews. At first, Grossbart just pushes Marx into addressing the non-kosher food on base. But soon he has managed to get Marx to give him and some other Jewish privates day passes so they can go to a late Passover dinner at one of the private’s aunt’s house. They don’t go; instead they go to a Chinese restaurant. Grossbert then tries to get Marx to move out of the Pacific Theatre, appealing to their common Judiasim. Marx says no, and Grossbert goes behind Marx’s back and manages to get himself reassigned by speaking to a superior (Jewish) officer. After funding this out, he lies and gets Marx reassigned once again.
“Defender” perfectly captures the anxieties of being second generation Jewish in America. Marx doesn’t want to betray his upbringing, but a military doesn’t work without order and sacrifice to the establishment. In the beginning of the story, he bends to Grossbet’s requests as a tribute to his culture. But once he discovers that he’s being manipulated, he becomes less charitable towards Grossbert and sentimental about his upbringing.
One might say that Roth concludes that assimilation is a working solution to operating in a “Foreign Culture.” I’m certain that this isn’t the case completely; other Roth novels (Particularly “The Plot Against America”) strike against assimilative efforts. Possibly he instead wishes to write a story about resisting sentimentality about one’s culture.
Flannery O’Connor shares Roth’s lack of sentimentality and an outsider status; Roth being a Jew in America, O’Connor being a Catholic in the mostly protestant South, but not much else.* Roth is an ace novelist, O’Connor’s great work is in short stories. Roth’s novels concern themselves with sex and dying, O’Connor’s stories are about Religious salvation. Roth frequently casts variations of himself in the role or protagonist, O’Connor’s stories are usually about idiot protestants (The sort she grew up with in the south.) or arrogant atheists (The sort she encountered at college.).
But their lives as outsiders still outfit them with interesting perspectives. Roth looks inward, constantly examining how Jewishness effects himself. O’Connor, on the other hand, looks outward.
Lily and I were discussing O’Connor’s place as a Catholic in out seminar one day. At some point I said that I found it strange that O’Connor was a Catholic because her work attacks the symbolic existence of her characters, and Catholicism is such a deeply symbolic belief system and all. (In retrospect, I sound pretty dumb.)
But as we talked about it, and we decided that O’Connor’s beef isn’t with symbols. It’s with the superficial expression of faith.
O’Connor’s life as a religious minority made her Catholicism an act of cultural defiance. While everyone around her was a protestant simply because the culture at large demands it. O’Connor’s contempt for Protestantism is more like contempt for the entire southern experience; from Racism (Revelation) to the tradition of celebrating Confederate Soldiers of old (A Late Encounter With the Enemy).
*Okay, one more thing. Both are spectacularly funny when they want to be, a quality that doesn’t always find its way into literary fiction.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Friday, November 27, 2009
Just to mention something I've been saying.
ALright, I have ONE nice thing to say about "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit." But this. is. it.
One of Wilson's goals in "Flannel" is to explore the life of the American Suburbanite after he had come home from the most brutal war in the history of human existence. Tom reflects on his multiple selves at the book's beginning, the one who goes to work, the one with a family, the one who killed a bunch of germans in Europe.
The novel, on one level, sets out to push these multiple selves together, to make Tom a whole people out of the parts he can identify. It doesn't really do a splendid job of this. But Wilson's attempt is noble.
As opposed to John Cheever, a whiter who is, in every other regard, Wilson's superior. Cheever's characters occationally have to go to war, but it doesn't really effect them. It's pretty weird to be reading a story, see one sentence that says "Ahh, World War Two!" and then it goes on.
Of course, if Cheever had included a paragraph to explain the toll of the war on all of his male protags, it would be annoying.
One of Wilson's goals in "Flannel" is to explore the life of the American Suburbanite after he had come home from the most brutal war in the history of human existence. Tom reflects on his multiple selves at the book's beginning, the one who goes to work, the one with a family, the one who killed a bunch of germans in Europe.
The novel, on one level, sets out to push these multiple selves together, to make Tom a whole people out of the parts he can identify. It doesn't really do a splendid job of this. But Wilson's attempt is noble.
As opposed to John Cheever, a whiter who is, in every other regard, Wilson's superior. Cheever's characters occationally have to go to war, but it doesn't really effect them. It's pretty weird to be reading a story, see one sentence that says "Ahh, World War Two!" and then it goes on.
Of course, if Cheever had included a paragraph to explain the toll of the war on all of his male protags, it would be annoying.
Monday, November 16, 2009
WIlson and Cheever
If I had to give a compliment to Sloan Wilson’s “The Man In the Grey Flannel Suit” I would say that it isn’t the terrible, hackneyed book I expected it to be; it was, instead, a completely different terrible, hackneyed book.
For the first 200 pages or so, Wilson seems to be sending his created family, Tom and Betty Rath, into doom. Tom quits a secure job at a non-profit for a more competitive but higher paying job at a broadcasting company. They sell their house and moves into his grandmother’s estate, which might not actually belong to them. They want to devolp the estate’s acreage into a new suburb, in spite of the legal challenge and a community who isn’t necessarily into the idea! Tom might have a child in Italy, where he had a passionate affair with a local girl! Also he accidentally killed his best friend in the war! Also his new boss might hate him! Ahh! So much stress! So many opportunities for this suburban house of cards to come crashing to the ground!
For the first hundred pages, I was convinced that I was reading a doom and gloom tome about the tragedy of the suburban man. And I was bored. I had just finished reading Cheever, who does a crack job of exploring the emotional deficits of suburban family life without succumbing to the contemptuous clichés that a lot of the suburb’s critics employ in their work.
But then things start working out. That butler who had a claim on the Rath’s estate? A THEIF. The development? IT ALL WORKS OUT FINE. The job? Hell, Tom gets promoted, finds he isn’t really a fan of his new job, tells his boss, then his boss gives him a cushy job instead of the high-pressure post he’s been given just because he likes him so damn much!
Then, and this one is the kicker: he goes ahead and tells his wife about his lovechild in Italy and about the fact that he blew his friend to pieces and about the people he killed in the war and she runs outside, all full of little woman piss and vinegar she falls down and she forgives him and they all have a good laugh and support the child finically and Tom feels better about himself. The last few lines of the book are so saccharine that they are nearly unsettling.
You know how Tom fixes all these problems? Honesty. HONESTY! He tells his boss what he really thinks of his speech. He tells his lawyer and the Judge about his grandmother’s promises. He tells his neighbors that he wants to build a devolpment instead of trying to be sneaky about it. He tells his wife about his other life. Then it all works out fine. This book started out as a doom tract and then it became a pamphlet preaching the value of good honest hard work. What a boring, shallow, snooze.
The fact that everything works out in the end completely diffuses the anxiety of the early chapters. It looks at the outset like there is a system working against the Raths. Then it turns out that the system works fine as long as you’re honest.
Now, I need to clarify. I am not a ruthless cynic who reads books so that I can see nice young couples get burned alive. The first book I thought I was reading was just as distasteful as the one I ended up with, and less interesting. “Suit” was really successful and even literarily important there for a while. In spite of this, it fell out of print. The message of the novel is completely of its time. So much that the title is synonymous with the type of suburban workingman that Rath illustrates. But its reputation fell apart in forty years and left the book out of print.
John Cheever on the other hand, couldn’t “Diffuse the tension of his early chapters” if his life depended on it. Take his short story “The Summer Farmer.” Paul Hollis, the protagonist, manages a farm with his family over the summer so he can get out of the city. This summer, he has bought rabbits for his children to take care of.
One of his field hands is a soviet ex-patriot named Kasik. He tells Paul that owning pets is sentimental, and gives Paul communist pamphlets that promote the destruction of his way of life. Paul takes a sort of “Agree to disagree” attitude towards Kasik’s politics, and even jokingly asks “When are you going to have your revolution, Kasik?”
Until someone poisons Paul’s rabbits. Paul then confronts Kasik and accuses him and says that if Kasik touches his children he’ll “Split his head open.” After this, Tom’s wife says that she thinks she may have left the Rat poison in the Chicken shed where they kept the rabbits. This is, of course, enough to keep the ending ambiguous; were the rabbits killed by Virginia’s absent mindedness, or Kasik’s hard heartedness? We leave Paul on the train, “So visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle.”
Cheever stories take care to avoid viewing his protagonists with either too much admiration or too much distain. Paul’s “Summer Farming” is an enacted fantasy. It has little to do with Kasik’s experiences in Russia as an actual farmer where he was wiped and forced into work at the age of twelve. Once Labor day comes around, Paul doesn’t need to perform actual labors to make money to feed himself. But what’s the big deal? Paul’s family enjoy themselves and aren’t really hurting anyone. Hell, they’re paying Kasik. All he wants is for his children and wife to be happy.
The conflicts in the end of the piece, between Kasik’s brutality and Paul’s sentimentality, and the open question of how the rabbits actually died, promote a real sense of anxiety at the story’s end.
For the first 200 pages or so, Wilson seems to be sending his created family, Tom and Betty Rath, into doom. Tom quits a secure job at a non-profit for a more competitive but higher paying job at a broadcasting company. They sell their house and moves into his grandmother’s estate, which might not actually belong to them. They want to devolp the estate’s acreage into a new suburb, in spite of the legal challenge and a community who isn’t necessarily into the idea! Tom might have a child in Italy, where he had a passionate affair with a local girl! Also he accidentally killed his best friend in the war! Also his new boss might hate him! Ahh! So much stress! So many opportunities for this suburban house of cards to come crashing to the ground!
For the first hundred pages, I was convinced that I was reading a doom and gloom tome about the tragedy of the suburban man. And I was bored. I had just finished reading Cheever, who does a crack job of exploring the emotional deficits of suburban family life without succumbing to the contemptuous clichés that a lot of the suburb’s critics employ in their work.
But then things start working out. That butler who had a claim on the Rath’s estate? A THEIF. The development? IT ALL WORKS OUT FINE. The job? Hell, Tom gets promoted, finds he isn’t really a fan of his new job, tells his boss, then his boss gives him a cushy job instead of the high-pressure post he’s been given just because he likes him so damn much!
Then, and this one is the kicker: he goes ahead and tells his wife about his lovechild in Italy and about the fact that he blew his friend to pieces and about the people he killed in the war and she runs outside, all full of little woman piss and vinegar she falls down and she forgives him and they all have a good laugh and support the child finically and Tom feels better about himself. The last few lines of the book are so saccharine that they are nearly unsettling.
You know how Tom fixes all these problems? Honesty. HONESTY! He tells his boss what he really thinks of his speech. He tells his lawyer and the Judge about his grandmother’s promises. He tells his neighbors that he wants to build a devolpment instead of trying to be sneaky about it. He tells his wife about his other life. Then it all works out fine. This book started out as a doom tract and then it became a pamphlet preaching the value of good honest hard work. What a boring, shallow, snooze.
The fact that everything works out in the end completely diffuses the anxiety of the early chapters. It looks at the outset like there is a system working against the Raths. Then it turns out that the system works fine as long as you’re honest.
Now, I need to clarify. I am not a ruthless cynic who reads books so that I can see nice young couples get burned alive. The first book I thought I was reading was just as distasteful as the one I ended up with, and less interesting. “Suit” was really successful and even literarily important there for a while. In spite of this, it fell out of print. The message of the novel is completely of its time. So much that the title is synonymous with the type of suburban workingman that Rath illustrates. But its reputation fell apart in forty years and left the book out of print.
John Cheever on the other hand, couldn’t “Diffuse the tension of his early chapters” if his life depended on it. Take his short story “The Summer Farmer.” Paul Hollis, the protagonist, manages a farm with his family over the summer so he can get out of the city. This summer, he has bought rabbits for his children to take care of.
One of his field hands is a soviet ex-patriot named Kasik. He tells Paul that owning pets is sentimental, and gives Paul communist pamphlets that promote the destruction of his way of life. Paul takes a sort of “Agree to disagree” attitude towards Kasik’s politics, and even jokingly asks “When are you going to have your revolution, Kasik?”
Until someone poisons Paul’s rabbits. Paul then confronts Kasik and accuses him and says that if Kasik touches his children he’ll “Split his head open.” After this, Tom’s wife says that she thinks she may have left the Rat poison in the Chicken shed where they kept the rabbits. This is, of course, enough to keep the ending ambiguous; were the rabbits killed by Virginia’s absent mindedness, or Kasik’s hard heartedness? We leave Paul on the train, “So visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle.”
Cheever stories take care to avoid viewing his protagonists with either too much admiration or too much distain. Paul’s “Summer Farming” is an enacted fantasy. It has little to do with Kasik’s experiences in Russia as an actual farmer where he was wiped and forced into work at the age of twelve. Once Labor day comes around, Paul doesn’t need to perform actual labors to make money to feed himself. But what’s the big deal? Paul’s family enjoy themselves and aren’t really hurting anyone. Hell, they’re paying Kasik. All he wants is for his children and wife to be happy.
The conflicts in the end of the piece, between Kasik’s brutality and Paul’s sentimentality, and the open question of how the rabbits actually died, promote a real sense of anxiety at the story’s end.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Off to Oakland
Not sure what internet access will be like, but Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Revolutionary Road posts are on their way.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Oh yeah, reading.
I've spent the last two days writing what amounts to a quarter's worth of seminar responses. Thus far I've written up Malamud, Roth and a little bit on Warren (It mostly just relates to Malamud) and have started on O'Connor. So expect all that soon.
Yeah. Reading. That sounds fun. I'm also starting to think about the paper. I've more or less settled on writing about "King's" but sometimes I think about how emblematic Cheever is or how much Roth I've read in total and I think that those might be good avenues to explore as well.
Also I am going to submit my contract soon! Hooray!
Yeah. Reading. That sounds fun. I'm also starting to think about the paper. I've more or less settled on writing about "King's" but sometimes I think about how emblematic Cheever is or how much Roth I've read in total and I think that those might be good avenues to explore as well.
Also I am going to submit my contract soon! Hooray!
Yikes
Wow, it's been way too quiet around here since October 28th. I was studying like mad for my GRE subject test but that's no excuse of course: part of contracts is that you have to discipline yourself. And speaking of both posting and themes of self-discipline...I have a draft on The Assistant and the short stories from Goodbye, Columbus, which I will complete today. I have finished Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Revolutionary Road and just need to post on them. (As well as confessional poetry, although I want to add Robert Lowell to the group.) That leaves Another Country (but just the end of it) and Rabbit, Run (okay, and tons of criticism) for me to read. But otherwise it's paper writing time! No more of these nice lit blog posts where I can joke and be sarcastic or meandering or confused if I want. This is Serious Business. I'll want to keep up seminars, though. Partly because I'll probably be reading criticism throughout the writing process and partly because discussion will help me clarify my ideas in a paper and partly because I might want to read parts of my paper aloud to somebody. I know that could be boring for you, Corbin, but it's one of the best revising/editing/proofreading tricks. (Even more reasons: because I'm interested in what you're reading/writing/working on, because I would miss yooooou, and, also because I promised to "kick" you out of procrastination.)
I need to go through all of my interlibrary-loaned criticism though, because some of it isn't renewable, and prioritize accordingly. For instance The Novel of Manners in America is due this Thursday!
*This picture is the first edition cover, which is the version I have. My book has library stamps in it from May 24 1963 and so on. This is a source of endless delight and fascination for me. I'm not sure why.
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