Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee has some interesting reflections on Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, a late nineteenth century writer who got a lot of attention from literary scholars, including Henry Louis Gates, because she was identified as African-American, but now turns out to have been white. While there are some academic politics here that are worth exploring, Scott focuses on the more interesting aesthetic question: how it is that an author of very considerable mediocrity may become interesting because of her racial background. When Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins was black, the relentless whiteness of her fictional characters was significant and important, but when she became white again, it turns out to be hundrum and uninformative, a rather banal product of the racial prejudices of its time.1 Scott has some fun with the earnest efforts of literary theorists to read racial complexities into a text which simply doesn’t support them, contrasting Kelley-Hawkins with another, far more interesting-sounding African-American writer from the same period who does actually engage with the ironies and paradoxes of fluid racial identity. But even though the alchemy of race may not be able to produce gold from dross, the body of Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins scholarship may still have some worth. We can consider it as an imaginative exercise, along the lines of the literary critics of Borges’ Tlön, who
often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres…
Re-imagining a dull white religious novelist of the late nineteenth century as a conflicted black woman is less ambitious, certainly, but still not entirely without merit.
1 Which, as Scott points out in his conclusion, are themselves worth studying, but surely not the same thing.
I’ve just finished Günther Grass’s Crabwalk , which which I read partly because it dovetails with some other stuff I’ve been reading (such as Sebald’s Natural History of Destruction ) and partly because I have to give a presentation to my German class about a recent book I’ve read. I figured that if I chose a German book there’s be plenty of on-line material to help me work out the relevant vocabulary.
There’s been much blogospheric concern recently about the resurgence of the German far-right, and that’s very much Grass’s concern. One of the favourite themes of the neo-Nazis is Germans-as-victims and Grass’s underlying thought is that the embarassed silence of the German mainstream about the fate of the refugees from Germany’s lost eastern provinces has gifted the extremists a monopoly of that issue. The novel is centred around the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on 30 January 1945. The ship, a former pleasure cruiser, was carrying as many as 10,000 people when it was sunk by a Soviet submarine. Nearly everyone on board perished and it therefore ranks as one of the worst maritime disasters even. The narrator protagonist Paul Pokriefke is a cynical journalist whose mother, a survivor, gave birth to him on one of the lifeboats. His estranged son, Konrad, is a neo-Nazi obsessive who runs a website devoted both to the ship and to the assasinated Nazi functionary after whom it was named. Paul tells us of the sinking itself, of his difficult relationship with mother (a DDR loyalist who cried when Stalin died) and son, and of the assassination of Gustloff himself in Zurich in 1936 by a Jew, David Frankfurter .
One thing that Grass gets absolutely right is the atmosphere of internet chatrooms. The son, Konrad, is forever engaged in hostile-but-matey banter with a “Jewish” interlocutor “David”. Not only are their identities not quite what they seem but he gets the adolescent faux-enemy-I-hang-out-with thing. I won’t say more about this, because I don’t want to spoil the denoument for anyone.
I’m not sure that Grass ends up telling us all that much about the neo-Nazi phenomenon. What he does get across though is a sense that the commitment of all of his protagonists to anything like a liberal democracy is fragile and contingent. Certainly a book worth reading for both its literary and historical interest, though the translation is occasionally clunky.
Imagine my delight last night when I opened my copy of Wired to find a “From the Blogs” column featuring a charming excerpt from Crooked Timber’s own Kieran Healy. (No, seriously- imagine it.)
As a Freeper hates a Camembert slice
And an OxBlogger hates a dove
As CalPundit hates a rainy day
That’s how much you I love.
Whole poem here, and many congratulations to Kieran. Now, there are some who would wonder how it happened that Wired would come to publish a short blog excerpt that’s two years old. Not me, though; I’m still waiting for my close-up…
David Eisenman informs me in a comment to a previous post that he and his colleagues have just put together a new edition of Guy Davenport’s novel, “Wo es war, soll ich werden,” which is 35% longer than the original published version. It’s handbound, in a signed edition of 100 copies and looks quite beautiful.
Jennifer Howard of the Washington Post has a longish article-cum-book-review in the most recent Boston Review on “the uses of fantasy,” where she gets it very badly wrong, but in an interesting way. She takes a critical hatchet to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (which I and others on this blog and elsewhere liked quite a lot) and to modern fantasy in general, but rather than attacking it for being too ridden with the cliches of genre, she attacks it because it isn’t genre enough. For Howard,
When the news strays so far from the familiar moral contours of the struggle between Good and Evil, it’s tempting to lose ourselves in stories in which this battle is fought in clear terms and on an epic scale.
Good over here, Evil over there—call it the Lord of the Rings model, in which heroes may be flawed but are always recognizably heroes, and their enemies want nothing less than to stamp out (as one of the good guys puts it in Peter Jackson’s recent film adaptation) “all that’s green and good in this world.” Many other fantasy classics work this territory, too; think of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, for instance, with its underpinning of Christian allegory.
Thus, Howard finds that JSAMN is a failure; it’s “a possibly fatal degree of academic remove away from epic sweep and the big moral questions.” More precisely:
aren’t the showier sorts of magic—magic that battles for the soul of the world—exactly what we need, now more than ever? … Clarke’s novel doesn’t parody the genre; it displays in a lifeless cabinet of wonders all its elements—every element, that is, but the epic sense of Good and Evil, of things larger than ourselves, that makes the best fantasy so powerful and so necessary.
I’m not disputing that escapist fantasy can’t be good stuff (when it’s well written, it’s wonderful), but I do think it’s rather unfair to pillory Clarke for not writing the kind of book that she clearly didn’t want to write in the first place. Clarke isn’t especially interested, as far as I can make out, in epic battles between good and evil; instead, she’s rather more concerned with the tensions between the magical and the mundane. She’s not copying Tolkien; if anything, she’s riffing on a very different tradition of fantasy that goes back to Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist. For which purpose, the incongruence between the world of Faerie and the social niceties of Regency England works extremely well - it not only provides Clarke with the makings of good comedy, but allows her to get at the fundamental thinness of the British social order. The key moments in the book are those where you realize that Jonathan Strange and Dr. Norrell’s dispute is at most a sort of shadow play, a prelude to something much stranger and wilder. From Clarke’s novel:
He had meant to say that if what he had seen was true, then everything that Strange and Norrell had ever done was child’s-play and magic was a much stranger and more terrifying thing than any of them had thought of. Strange and Norrell had been merely throwing paper darts about a parlour, while real magic soared and swooped and twisted on great wings in a limitless sky far, far above them.
Magic, in Susanna Clarke’s novel, is profoundly unsettling, in a way that it isn’t in Howard’s preferred forms of fantasy; it threatens to disrupt the social order. There’s a sort of dynamic tension between it and reality, rather than a simple escape from our complex world. If the usages of Regency England are so fragile, so vulnerable to disruption from without, then what of our own settled ways of doing things? Howard clearly doesn’t like this mode of writing, which is her right, but it seems to me at the least peculiar that she should prosecute the book for not being what it doesn’t want to be in the first place, and then convict it on all counts. There’s more than one mode of fantasy out there, and if JSAMN doesn’t conform to her preferred type, then that’s really not Clarke’s fault, nor does it reflect on the book itself so much as on the lack of sympathy between the book and a particular kind of reader.
I’ve never known any more about Walt Kelly’s comic strip “Pogo,” than that it gave birth to the famous phrase “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Now, after reading John Crowley’s lovely essay on Pogo in the Boston Review, I want to read the lot.
I’d come across Stephen Schwartz as TCS’s resident ranter against “Islamofascism” and producer of ex post facto rationalizations for such wise decisions as the Tariq Ramadan exclusion and the Cat Stevens deportation. Now I see that he’s turned his hand to literary criticism . Apparently, the Swedish Academy “have returned to their habit of awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to an unknown, undistinguished, leftist fanatic.” At one point he interrupts himself, mid-rant, to write
But the Nobel Prize is bestowed for writing, and one must therefore address Jelinek’s publications.
Before going on to make clear that his only knowledge is based on a film adaptation of one of Elfriede Jelinek’s books!
Anyway, that list of unknown, undistinguished leftist fanatics ….
scolding lefty turned Nazi-nostalgic Gunter Grass, in 1999; Jose Saramago, a vulgar enemy of religion and former Communist censor in revolutionary Portugal, in 1998; and the repellent Dario Fo, an Italian playwright specializing in denunciations of capitalism, in 1997…. Other Nobel stars have included Claude Simon (1985), a Stalinist who defamed George Orwell; Castro-lover Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982); Pablo Neruda, Stalinist secret police agent (1971); and Soviet plagiarist and propagandist Mikhail Sholokhov (1965).
Incidentally, is “Nazi-nostalgic” Schwartz’s take on Crabwalk ?
It is National Poetry Day here in the UK, and though it is presumably not National Poetry Day in many of the nations from which CT contributors and readers come, I’m not going to let that stop me. Nick Barlow is assembling a list of participating blogs and among them is “Backword” Dave Weeden who opines that 130 is the greatest of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He may be right, but my favourite — especially in Britten’s setting in his Nocturne — is 43. Here it is:
When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow’s form, form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made,
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.
Atrios linked to this discussion of the rather odd claim that in 164 different TV shows, what we’re seeing is not what is really happening in the fiction, but what happens in the mind of a small character from St. Elsewhere called Tommy Westphall.
The argument for this claim, what I’ll call the Westphall Hypothesis, is based around a rather impressive bit of research about crossovers in TV-land. (The site seems to be based in Victoria, so I have some natural fondness for it.) The reasoning is as follows. The last episode of St. Elsewhere revealed that the entire storyline of that show hadn’t really (i.e. really in the fiction) happened but had all been a dream of Tommy Westphall. So by extension any story involving a character from St. Elsewhere is really (in the fiction) part of Tommy’s dream. And any story involving a character from one of those shows is also part of Tommy’s dream, etc. So all 164 shows that are connected to St. Elsewhere in virtue of character sharing are part of Tommy’s dream.
It’s a nice little idea, but there are half a dozen things wrong with it.
To categorise these, let’s formalise the argument.
P1. All of St. Elsewhere (except the last scene) takes place in Tommy Westphall’s mind.
P2. If all of St. Elsewhere (except the last scene) takes place in Tommy Westphall’s mind, then any show that bears the ancestral of the sharing a character relation with St. Elsewhere takes place in Tommy Westphall’s mind.
C. So all shows on this grid take place in Tommy Westphall’s mind.
As mentioned in the title, I have six objections to this little argument. (Overkill, I know, but there are some moderately interesting questions about truth in fiction that come up.) Two to P1, two to the overall argument, and two to P2.
Objection One - Dreaming Never Works
I’m generally suspicious of the effectiveness of the “It was all a dream” move. I think it was true in the Wizard of Oz movie that the scarecrow didn’t have a brain and the tinman didn’t have a heart. It wasn’t true that the scarecrow didn’t have a heart and the tinman didn’t have a brain. If we take the movie seriously to the end then neither of these are really true, they are only true in Dorothy’s dream. So we should, for purposes of working out what is true in the story, not take the final scenes too seriously.
I don’t want to rest too much weight on this, since it is possible that our inclination to say that the scarecrow didn’t have a brain and the tinman didn’t have a heart is because we couldn’t be bothered always prefixing “According to Dorothy’s dream…”
Objection Two - This Dream Sequence Doesn’t Work
I know the St. Elsewhere characters intended the final scene to make it true in the fiction that the entire storyline took place in Tommy Westphall’s head. But I’m not sure they succeeded. There are way too many alternative interpretations of the final scene to bed down that interpretation. For one thing, we could interpret it as a dream of the real Tommy Westphall, the child of Dr Westphall. Maybe he wishes his father really was a construction worker. As people on numerous comment boards have argued, it would be very implausible a child his age could imagine everything that happened in the show’s run. So these alternative explanations are somewhat to be preferred, especially given the show’s preference for realism.
Objection Three - The One from Moore
I reckon nobody will believe this argument, but I thought it was worth making.
P3. Some of the things that (fictionally) happen in Friends happen in a different city to some of the things that (fictionally) happen in Joey.
P4. If the Westphall hypothesis is true, then all of the things that (fictionally) happen in Friends happen in the same city as all of the things that (fictionally) happen in Joey, namely the city that Tommy lives in.
C2. The Westphall hypothesis is not true.
Obviously anyone who believes the Westphall Hypothesis will not believe P3. But I think most of us have better reason to believe P3 than we have to believe any complicated argument to the contrary. Indeed, I think we know P3 to be true, so we can use it in arguments. (What else could we need in order to use a premise in an argument?)
Objection Four - Charity
Maybe you don’t think the previous argument is conclusive. (I do, but contemporary philosophers are specially trained to let known facts override complicated arguments.) Still, that kind of consideration should be an important part of our overall interpretation. We get an interpretation of TV-land generally that is simpler, more realistic, and more in keeping with the authors’ wishes if we don’t include the Westphall hypothesis than if we do. It would be very odd to override all of those points on the strengths of a few ambiguous minutes at the end of St Elsewhere.
Put another way, even if we accept that the story writers for, say, Cheers wanted their show to be set in the same world as the world of St Elsewhere, it doesn’t follow that they wanted their show to be set in a child’s dream. In fact it is clear they didn’t. Now since St Elsewhere is set in a child’s dream, it follows the writers for Cheers had inconsistent intentions. But from that nothing much follows. It may be (indeed it is) true that the best way to resolve the inconsistency is by denying that Cheers really takes place in the same world as St Elsewhere.
All that is basically skirmishing to clear the ground. The next two objections are the really decisive ones.
Objection Five - De Re Dreams
The argument for P2 seems rather weak to me. It seems to involve the following inference.
P5. Show X included character Y.
P6. Character Y is part of Tommy Westphall’s dream.
C3. So show X is part of Tommy Westphall’s dream.
But this inference is clearly bad. Tommy could be dreaming about people who really (or really in the fiction) exist.
For instance, I could have a dream where I’m spending a lazy Sunday strolling along St Kilda esplanade. That Sunday and St Kilda esplanade are in my dream doesn’t prevent them being real.
Or I could have a dream where I’m catching Pedro Martinez as he strikes out 22 Yankees to clinch the ALCS. Again, that wouldn’t mean Pedro Martinez, or the New York Yankees, or the American League are not real.
The same thing is going on here. Just because Tommy Westphall had a dream in which some character from St Elsewhere appears, it doesn’t mean that character doesn’t really exist in Tommy’s world. Indeed, most of the characters that appear in our dreams are real people. So the inference that gets the argument off the ground fails.
Objection Six - De Re Fictions
This is related to the previous objection. From the fact that a character appears in two different TV shows, it doesn’t follow automatically that those shows take place in the same fictional world.
We can see the logical point here by simply noting that the fact that a city appears in two different fictions doesn’t mean those fictions take place in the same world. For instance, recently I saw two romantic comedies set in London, one with tennis (Wimbledon) and one with zombies (Shaun of the Dead). The presence of London in both movies doesn’t mean they take place in the same fictional world. And if cities can be cross-fictional so, logically, can people.
To make the point more vivid, note that the massive list of crossovers misses one very important crossover. (They do mention crossovers like this one, but don’t note its logical significance) Michael Bloomberg plays the Mayor of New York both in Law and Order and in the real world. So by the logic used here, the real world (taken to be either what we’re in or the MTV show of the same name) is part of the giant St Elsewhere fiction. This is clearly false. (Or at least it was last I checked.) Similarly it is possible that the same character can appear in two different fictional worlds. That doesn’t mean that every time a character appears on two different shows they are different fictional worlds. Cheers and Frasier clearly are part of the same world, as are Friends and Joey. But it doesn’t mean that interpretation is forced on us by the common appearance of a character. So the Westphall Hypothesis is not forced on us by the existence of crossovers. And since it is a crashingly bad interpretative hypothesis as applied to any show except St Elsewhere, we shouldn’t accept it.
Chip Kidd once said, “A good book cover makes you want to pick it up. End of story.” More often then not, however, a gripping first sentence or paragraph prevents you from putting it back down. The opening hook. It’s a simple concept, reading is linear, time is finite. What keeps a reader reading is the opening hook.
I don’t have any particular memories of special opening hooks, but browsing through the site’s data base I came across this one: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” - Yup. I think this one qualifies as a good opening hook. Unfortunately, when I first read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis I attempted to do so in its original. Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt. Perhaps understandably, words such as “Ungeziefer” - or insect - are not part of one’s basic foreign language vocabulary lesson so I’m afraid I had a hard time fully appreciating some of the nuances - huh, some of the basics! - during my first attempt at the novel. Let’s just say I probably spent more time flipping through the dictionary than the book. But reading the sentence in English on that site brought it all back and I do think it qualifies as a good opening hook. I suspect others around here who are much bigger literature buffs than I am will think of candidates for their favorite opening lines without having to go to their book shelves (or browse an online data base).
Hat tip: Matt Read.
1 This post is dedicated to a fellow CT blogger. You know who you are.;-)
I’ve just finished Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love, which I recommend very highly; it’s the best novel she’s ever written. Her earlier work is sometimes extraordinary (if you can find a copy of Winterlong, buy it without hesitating) but it’s never quite under control - one has the impression of an artist struggling with her materials and every once in a while being overwhelmed by them. She’s overcome this in her recent shorter work - in particular “Cleopatra Brimstone,” and The Least Trumps. Both these stories have a technical mastery that was only sporadically present in her early work. They’re acute and sharp.
Mortal Love repeats this success at novel length. It has a wealth of materials - Richard Dadd (lightly disguised), Pre-Raphaelites, Henry Darger style outsider art - but handles them with style, grace and economy.
There are some splendid sketches of Victorian aesthetes and their world - a garrulous and malicious Swinburne, and a formidable, oracular Lady Wilde:
“I refer to your genius. If you do not have one, Mr Comstock, you will fail. If you do find one, it will devour you. It will destroy you, but in that case we will have your paintings to remind us of you in the event we want to be reminded.”
She seemed to consider this extremely unlikely.
The novel has the virtue of presenting these individuals as they conceivably might have appeared to themselves. Pre-Raphaelite art, far from being trite Arthurian kitsch, is dangerous and infused with sex. Just as “The Least Trumps” riffs on John Crowley’s Little, Big, so Mortal Love borrows a central image (the green woman, who contains worlds within herself) from Mike Harrison’s short story, Anima (‘Whatever lives here loves us. I know it does. But it only loves us once’). Yet the book isn’t in any sense derivative; it argues with this material and transforms it. Hand presents us with a muse who has her own, barely comprehensible motivations, who does not properly know herself, but who is endlessly fascinated with the traces that humans leave in the world through their art. Mortal Love ends not only with an apotheosis, but with two more intimate forms of transcendence - a once-mediocre writer who finds his art without losing himself, and an immortal who proves to have once been capable of creating art because of her loss and her fall. It’s an important book.
As I’ve remarked before, the Washington Post’s Michael Dirda is a prince among fiction reviewers. Dirda has wide-ranging tastes and an altogether infectious delight in the books that he loves (see here for a collection of his recent reviews). It’s a pity then that the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” report has provoked him into a fit of the Birkerts.
at least one in six people reads something between bound covers each month, and I suppose we should be grateful for this saving remnant. Yet what the NEA report fails to say is that most of those people have chosen the very same 12 books, starting with “The Da Vinci Code,” followed by a) the latest movie tie-in, and b) whatever Oprah Winfrey has recommended lately …
most of the bestseller list tends to be innately ephemeral — jumped-up magazine articles, journalistic dispatches in disguise, commercial novels that are essentially screenplays-in-waiting, heavy on plot, shock and spectacle. Such works can hardly be called literary reading. They are entertainments, little more than 250-page TV shows and documentaries. …
A true literary work is one that makes us see the world or ourselves in a new way. Most writers accomplish this through an imaginative and original use of language, which is why literature has been defined as writing that needs to be read (at least) twice. Great books tend to feel strange. They leave us uncomfortable.
“Reading at Risk” is right to lament the decline of what I will forthrightly call bookishness. As the report implies, the Internet seems to have delivered a possibly knock-out punch. Our children now can scarcely use a library, instead looking to the Web to learn just about anything. We click away with mouse and remote control, speeding through a blur of links, messages, images, data of all sorts. Is this reading?
Of course, Dirda is at least half right when he talks about the high proportion of trash on the bestseller lists.1 He’s more than half right when he says that great books feel awkward and uncomfortable at first reading; if they’re not unsettling in some sense, they’re not doing their job. But he really misses the mark when he claims that the Internet is the root cause of the decline of bookishness and of interest in good, difficult books. Indeed, one can defend just the contrary argument: thanks to the Internet, there has never been a better time to find good conversation about books. John Holbo has blogged here previously about the explosion of literary blogs, some of which are very good indeed.
These blogs are superior to the old-style review journals like the Partisan Review in a couple of important respects. They’re more idiosyncratic than their printed predecessors, and thus, in a quite important sense, more democratic. Rather than adhering to, or indeed dictating, a universal standard of good taste they allow individuals to speak intelligently to their personal interests.2 As a result, they’re less pompous and more fun. In About Last Night, Terry Teachout and “Our Girl in Chicago” can mix criticism of high art and literature with intelligent discussion of good popular writers like Donald Westlake. This is a hard trick to pull off in conventional media.
Dan Gillmor’s We, the Media, which I’ve just started reading, argues that blogging is making journalism into something like a conversation. This argument can be extended to literary blogging, which not only provides a partial substitute for the fading specialized review journals and ever-thinner Sunday book supplements of the major newspapers, but in many respects improves upon them. While hypertext is itself no substitute for for the written word (at least until display technologies improve), it’s helping people to create communities of taste (or, more precisely, of argument about taste), to find good books, and to talk about them. Not a bad deal at all.
1 Although one should note that Dirda isn’t a book snob - he likes Stephen King and other popular writers, reserving his ire for hacks such as Judith Krantz.
2 Which, I suspect, renders them unattractive to critics like Birkerts who would prefer to be arbiters than readers.
I’m just back from a week in the Bay Area, with limited web access - John H mentions a friendly argument that we had last year over China Mieville and the economics of fantasy. My two posts on the subject are on my old blog, which is a bit difficult to access these days - for those (if any) who are interested in the topic, I’ve posted them below the fold. I note that I’ve mellowed a bit on the topic in the meantime, partly in response to criticisms from PNH and others.
Goblin Markets
I’m re-reading China Mieville’s rather wonderful fantasy novel, ‘The Scar,’ and noticing (as I didn’t the first time around), how much work Mieville has put into the economics of his created world. Now this is hardly surprising; he’s a committed Marxist, who has written a very interesting Ph.D. thesis on the roots and form of international law. Mieville is a historical materialist, and pays a lot of attention to the economic fundamentals underlying his created societies. But he’s very nearly unique among fantasy authors in so doing; most of them prefer to sweep the dirty business of material accumulation underneath the prettily woven carpet of chivalry, noblesse oblige &c.
Much of this can be traced back to Tolkien of course; his Middle Earth is almost entirely innocent of economics. Bits and pieces of exchange go on in the Shire and its environs but they’re more or less completely submerged in a bucolic and idealized rural yeoman society. And anyone who can guess what the aristos of Gondor and horselords of Rohan live off is a better man than me. Indeed, Tolkien is fervently opposed both to trade and industrialization. When Pippin and Merry find that Saruman has been able to import Long Leaf pipeweed to Isengard, it’s presented as a serious disillusionment, while Tolkien’s horror at nasty factories and mechanized mills that pump out steam, smoke and pollution is notorious.
Those who follow Tolkien in writing fat trilogies with Dark Lords and the like, nearly invariably wear the same blinkers. Kings, lords and earls throng the pages, without much in the way of indication as to what they live off. Or else, the author draws tortured distinctions between “good” nobles (tall, aristocratic in bearing, beloved by their forelock-tugging peasants), and “bad” ones (secretly in league with the Dark Lord, hunchbacked, get their kicks from lashing serfs to death). On all of this and more, read Dianna Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland
There’s a second line of fantasy cliche that descends more or less directly from Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar stories. Not that Leiber himself is to blame; his Lankhmar books have a strong line in political satire (the city’s overlords and civil authorities are invariably either inept or corrupt), and the prosperity of Leiber’s imagined city is founded on the rather unromantic business of exporting grain. Yet multitudes of fantasy hacks have taken the more romantic bits of Leiber’s city (Thieves Guilds, gem merchants, exotic bazaars) and transplanted them into a bog-standard feudal-fantasy setting. The result is what might be called a romanticized mercantilism, in which gold, jewels, treasures, and their getting, are fetishized as being somehow magical in and of themselves, rather than material goods which have simple economic value. Merchants feature occasionally, and sometimes even get rich, but are more interested in the wonderful adventure of it all than in capital accumulation.
It’s this set of cliches that Mieville subverts almost as a matter of course, by reinserting them into a more realistic economic and political setting. NB - mild spoilers follow. Mieville’s city of New Crobuzon is semi-industrialized, but resembles one of the city-states of the late Renaissance; a patina of republicanism that barely conceals the real nexus of power; industrial magnates working together in a monopolistic cabal. Trade and imperial domination go hand-in-hand. Mieville has enormous fun creating outlandish societies - New Crobuzon itself, the pirate polyarchy (i.e. mix of modes of government - forget Dahl) of Armada - and strange creatures. But he never forgets the relationship between the economic, social and political. One of the key characters in The Scar, Silas Fennec, is exactly the kind of merchant-adventurer that populates hack fantasy epics in multitudes. However, unlike his literary comperes, Fennec is primarily interested in making money. In other words, he’s the real thing. One of the most important moments in the book occurs when the main protagonist, Bellis Coldwine, realizes she’s been had by Fennec. She’s been taken in by his traveller’s tales, and has failed to penetrate through to the sordid economic relations of colonial domination and exploitation that underly them. What he presents as romantic adventure, is in fact an effort to extend New Crobuzon’s economic grasp to new territories.
You may agree, or disagree with Mieville’s political analysis as you like (in any event, he never lets it get in the way of telling a good story). But one of the reasons why his fantasies are subversive is precisely because they reintroduce the economic and the political into a genre that sometimes tries to run away from them. Fantasy all too frequently harks back to a never-never land in which exploitative economic relations, clashes of interest and the like, never take place, or are airbrushed out of the picture. This isn’t an unmitigatedly awful thing; a bit of escapism here and there is quite harmless. But fiction that takes society - and the forces underlying different kinds of social organization - seriously, is fundamentally more interesting. At least to people like me, who study this stuff for a living.
Update: John Holbo responds at length with some interesting counter-arguments. Will reply when I get a chance …
From Mieville to Melville
John Holbo politely dissents from my earlier piece on Mieville, primitive accumulation, heroic fantasy and the like, and makes some rather good points. Two in particular that are worth highlighting. First, a summation of Tolkien that is worth quoting in full.
of course, Tolkien is sort of at fault for all of this, providing the blueprint for the factory farm. But, then again, he isn’t at fault. He did nothing of the sort. He’s practically an outsider artist (there, I said it) with his obsessive, borderline Asperger linguistic and historical constructions and conceits. His wilful refusal of the 20th century; hell, of the 19th century. I think part of him feels that everything after Beowulf, in English literature, is sort of a misstep. It is hard to make fun of such a man by poking him in the ribs with his inadequacy, compared to Proust and Joyce and so forth. He is too far away from you for you to reach his ribs.
This is a large part of the explanation of Tolkien’s substantial immunity to criticisms of the sort brought against him since Edmund Wilson’s day. He is just too intense and authentic. Tolkien is so true to himself that he simply can’t be untrue to anyone or anything else. So when he seems to lack technique, for example ending chapter after chapter by bonking hobbits on the head - ‘A great blow fell, and Frodo saw no more’; or sort of stipulating that unfunny jokes are funny - ‘And they all laughed heartily’; or pointlessly grammatically inverting - ‘Ever have I wondered,’ ‘Never have I witnessed’ - I forgive him all. Funny as it sounds, when I never ever get to hear about sex, I feel that I am being shown the man’s bared soul. That it is a very odd, in some ways crabbed and cramped and limited soul … well, that’s just how he was. It wouldn’t be better if he airbrushed these features out, merely less honest. And the genre of fantasy is, in a weird way, just a dull formalization of many of Tolkien’s intense limitations as a man and a writer.
This strikes me as being exactly right. And, in the best possible sense of the word, it’s a useful way of talking about Tolkien. It allows you to think about his work without being overwhelmed by the oppressive presence of his epigones and self-appointed heirs - the Jordans, Goodkinds, Brooks and (gawd help us) Eddings of this world. A sort of Henry Darger figure (although far less weird and far more genuinely gifted), puttering away, crafting his idiosyncratic world of Middle Earth without really caring all that much about what anyone else might think of it. Holbo’s analogy makes you realize how personal Tolkien’s work is. Tolkien can still serve as a scratching post for radicals to sharpen their claws upon, and as an inspiration for conservatives of a certain brand (as witness this essay by Gene Wolfe). But he’s something else besides - and the something else is the more important bit.
Still, I’m going to take issue with John’s second point (although again I think it says some rather useful things). John thinks that Mieville isn’t genuinely subversive, because his two books are monster hunts. In other words the structure of the books (humans confronting big scary monsters and eventually winning) makes nuanced description of character virtually impossible - and means that the books descend into genre cliche. For John, the backgrounds of the books are richer and more convincing than the plot. Nor does he think that the books are politically subversive.
I don’t think Miéville holds a mirror up to our own society, culture, politics. The specific lessons he teaches are about how to stop slakemoths, raise giant avancs from the bottom of the ocean, etc.; which is ‘how-to’ of dubious export value. The general and genuinely exportable morals – e.g. people with power are usually calculating, self-centered bastards – are interesting and important; but, I think, too well known and documented to credit Miéville with their significant advertisement.
A lot of this is right. When John says “the story-telling – good as it is; and it is good – positively gets in the way of the backgrounds,” he’s getting at something. The little hints that Mieville drops about his world are what fascinate; snippets here and there about the Malarial Queendom, the thanatocracy of High Cromlech; which give you the sense of a richly imagined world stretching beyond the page. (apparently he cut big chunks of background from The Scar to make it less baggy). I’m in full agreement when John says that Mieville has yet to write his Great Book - there’s the potential for something quite extraordinary, but Mieville hasn’t quite gotten there yet.*
Still, I reckon that John misses the ways in which Mieville’s books, and especially The Scar are genuinely subversive. He’s right to say that The Scar is a monster hunt - but wrong to think that monster-hunt books are stunted by necessity. First Witness for the Defence is that barnacle-encrusted Leviathan of the genre, Moby-Dick. Melville’s masterpiece is not strong on the subtleties of characterization or politics - the white whale is Too Big to be reduced easily to a simple metaphor for either. But it excels at capturing certain aspects of the human condition.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that Mieville is another Melville - but he is, I think, doing rich and important things with his monster hunt. He’s trying to use the fantasy novel to interrogate itself. There’s a tension running through The Scar, the tension between the fantastic and the material. This can be seen at the level of the main characters’ motivations - all the main characters are inclined to romanticize, to mistake the motivations of others and themselves for being something other than what they are, to think that they are living in an adventure story. And they find themselves manipulated by others, bruised, scarred, and sometimes broken as a result. But they only have any capacity for action because they’re romantic in this sense - the “realists” in the book (Fennec, Uther Doul) are pathetic characters without any real autonomy; they’re trapped within their own manipulations.
This tension also structures the book at a more fundamental level. Mieville isn’t trying to undercut fantasy, by showing how sordid and unpleasant people and politics really are; instead, he’s trying to interrogate it, shoving it up against the churning wheels of politics to see what sparks are generated. Both sets of elements in The Scar- the exotic backdrop, the exuberant fun of pirate stories, whale hunts and vampire vs. swordsman face-offs on the one hand, and the machinations, grubby transactions and de-mystification of romance on the other - are essential to the workings of the novel. Imo, the hunt (which is never satisfactorily concluded - the avanc is snared, but the Scar itself is never reached) allows Mieville to do this rather well, playing grubby avarice for power against romantic aspirations for the infinite. Hunts, whether they be for whales, avancs, snarks or submarines, allow one to tease out the tangled motivations of the hunters.
I’m probably teetering on the precipice of over-analysis - The Scar is much more entertaining than it likely sounds from this extended exercise in criticism. The bits that John likes are the bits that I enjoyed the most too. But there is something more there to Mieville’s book, even if he doesn’t always achieve precisely what I think he’s setting out to do. The Scar isn’t subversive in its overt political analysis, nor in introducing rich characterization to fantasy. But it interrogates fantasy, pokes and prods it, says interesting things about it, and still manages to be fun. What more could you ask for?
And while you’re checking out John’s site, take a look at the first chapter of Belle’s (his wife’s) unpublished novel. A rather wonderful opening image among other good things.
== * I’d suggest that there are three genuinely great novels in the fantasy genre. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast sequence (including the last one, which most people don’t like), Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series, and John Crowley’s Little, Big. Any of those three deserves to stand with the great novels of the last century. It’s interesting (now that I think of it) that they’re all written by idiosyncratic conservatives.
I’ve just finished another Andrew Crumey novel, his latest, Mobius Dick . I thought I might be reporting that, whilst I’d enjoyed it, I enjoyed it less than his Mr Mee (which I completed the other day ). But the last twenty pages where all the different threads come together with a rush (a bit like a Jonathan Coe novel), gave me such delight that I’d have to rank them equally. Crumey is that unusual thing, a novelist with a PhD in theoretical physics. And here his learning is fully deployed: the Copenhagen interpretation, multiverses, Schrodinger; Schopenhauer, Nietszche and Thomas Mann; mad Nazis, Marxism, and a British Democratic Republic; Robert and Clara Schumann; a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps and a Scottish nuclear power plant; weapons of mass destruction. All there, and he brings off the connections brilliantly (even lacerating literary postmodernists in the process). Fantastic. (Not yet published outside the UK as far as I can see, so my link is to Amazon.co.uk).
I finished Andrew Crumey’s Mr Mee last night, and, to adopt the Chris Brooke evaluative vocabulary , it is truly splendid and I’m going to read his other books as soon as I can. Crumey weaves together three interlocking stories: the unworldly octogenarian Mr Mee, and his discovery of the internet, porn and sex; the reflections of a terminally ill professor of French literature on his life, work on Rousseau, Proust, and (most pressingly) his plan to seduce his favourite student; and the adventures of Ferrand and Minard, two characters from Rousseau’s Confessions. I’ll avoid posting spoilers, but along with the Monty Hall problem , we’re also treated to versions of Searle’s Chinese Room and Ned Block’s entire population of China, and one of the protagonists, seduced by an 18th century anticipation of the functionalist theory of mind, tries to construct a computer from string and paper. Anyone who has ever taught or been taught elementary logic will laugh aloud.
I’m in the middle of reading Andrew Crumey’s rather intruiging novel Mr Mee at the moment. One minor point of interest is that this may be the first work of fiction to contain a description of the Monty Hall problem (see Brian’s post below ) in the form of a letter, supposedly written in 1759 from a Jean-Bernard Rosier to the Encyclopedist d’Alembert:
Sir, you may know that many years ago one of our countrymen was taken prisoner in a remote and barren region of Asia noted only for the savagery of its inhabitants. The man’s captors, uncertain what to do with him, chose to settle the issue by means of a ring hidden beneath one of three wooden cups. If the prisoner could correctly guess which cup hid the gold band, he would be thrown out to face the dubious tenderness of the wolves; otherwise he was to be killed on the spot. By placing bets on the outcome, his cruel hosts could enjoy some brief diversion from the harsh austerity of their nomadic and brutal existence.
The leader of the tribe, having hidden his own ring, commanded that the unfortunate prisoner be brought forward to make his awful choice. After considerable hesitation, and perhaps a silent prayer, the wretch placed his trembling hand upon the middle cup. Bets were placed; then the leader, still wishing to prolong the painful moment of uncertainty which so delighted his audience, lifted the rightmost cup, beneath which no ring was found. The captive gave a gasp of hope, and amidst rising laughter from the crowd, the leader now reached for the left, saying that before turning it over he would allow his prisoner a final opportunity to change his choice. Imagine yourself to be in that poor man’s position, Monsieur D’Alembert, and tell me, what would you now do?
John Holbo has an interesting post in his ‘John and Belle’ incarnation on superhero comics and nostalgia. His argument, as I understand it is that the classical superhero story is dead - that the ‘straight’ efforts to resurrect it (Michael Chabon’s ‘Escapist’) and the revisionist (Daniel Clowe, Chris Ware) are more closely related than they seem at first sight. They’re exercises in nostalgia, driven by how the “pain of unachieved adulthood contend[s] with hope for redeemed childish innocence.” If we look through the images around which we construct our identities when we are growing up, they provide luminous refractions of our adult complexities.
The tension that John identifies is very useful in understanding another sub-sub-genre - books that are about (but are not contained in) children’s literature, and use childrens’ books to explore the jarring juxtaposition between the world as we see it as a child, full of possibilities, and the disappointments and difficulties of adulthood. The leviathan of this genre has to be John Crowley’s Little, Big, which uses childrens’ stories (Lewis Carroll) and indeed comics (“Little Nemo”) to capture the sense of wonder that we remember (or more precisely reconstruct) having as children. Crowley does such a good job of this that one can read Little, Big as a simple bucolic pastoral without any awareness of its underlying themes of melancholy and loss.
Stories last longer: but only by becoming stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there ever was a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.
Crowley’s Engine Summer and his recent short story in Conjunctions, “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,” speak more openly to this disjuncture. The latter is simply extraordinary - the best thing he’s written in years - but quite savage in its treatment of how teenage dreams are soured in adulthood. William Browning Spencer’s Zod Wallop, is cheerier, indeed wildly funny, despite its unpromising subject matter of lunacy, depression, psychoactive drugs, and a successful author of children’s books whose child has drowned. Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs and Bones of the Moon too are centered on the tension between children’s stories and adulthood, although the former is also about how unheimlich and downright creepy childrens’ stories can be when you look at them too closely.
I’d like to say something more about the relationship between children’s literature, fantasy literature and nostalgia, but my thoughts are too half-formed to be worth committing to pixels. All that I can say is that it seems to me that there’s something important in the way that all of these books provide a kind of anatomy of nostalgia, neither treating the material in an entirely un-self-conscious way, nor using it as kitsch, for ironic effect, but instead using it to get at something important and interesting about our condition.
In comments at John and Belle’s other blog, Fafnir from Fafblog speaks to the perplexity caused by reading Gene Wolfe.
Gene Wolfe is a punk. He also greedily ate my fudgcicle once while signin my copy of “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.” I said “hey gene wolfe that is my fudgcicle” an he said “maybe you only THINK it is your fudgcicle because you are plaaaaauged by the ghooosts of meeeeemory. wooooooo!” all the while makin wiggly fingers. And I went home thinkin that maybe I really was plagued by the ghosts of memory and maybe I wasn’t who I thought I was, was I Fafnir or was I Gene Wolfe, or was I a butterfly dreaming I was Gene Wolfe dreaming I was Fafnir? And the next day I woke up an realized that punk had just eaten my fudgcicle.
Exactly right. When you’ve finished a piece of prime Wolfe, whether novel or short story, you feel as if you’ve been hit on the back of the head. There’s something going on there that’s really, really important, but that you’re just not quite smart enough to figure out. Even when he introduces someone else’s short story, he creates mystery - I’ve been trying for years to understand his hints as to the true meaning of Avram Davidson’s “Polly Charms, the Sleeping Woman,” a tale that’s oblique enough in itself.1
Davidson was never one to explain everything. No more am I. But to his multitude of clues I will add two additional hints. The first is that the Ancients knew that it was possible to torture the dead by burning the hair of the corpse. The second is that the worst crime is not murder. And the third (did you really expect me to tell you everything when I numbered them?) is that you may wish to consider the fifty daughters of Endymion and the Moon.
Wolfe has a new collection out, Innocents Aboard - there are some wonderful stories in it. But if you do buy it, remember that Wolfe’s not to be trusted. Keep a weather eye on your fudgsicle.
1 Both story and introduction are to be found in the Avram Davidson Treasury, which also contains Davidson’s justly famous “Or All the Seas with Oysters,” a story which proposes that safety-pins are the pupae of coat hangers, which themselves are the larval form of racing-bicycles.
A recent post on our blog about whether any of the situations in the Alanis Morrisette Song “Ironic” were, in fact, ironic, has garnered unexpected interest. I looked at the lyrics more carefully, and I think perhaps half could be said to qualify in an extended sense, that is, they seem like dramatic irony. So: “rain on your wedding day” is unquestionably not ironic, it’s just somewhat unfortunate. But I’ll give her “death-row pardon two minutes late”, I guess, if we accept a certain notion of irony I outline below.
Adam Kotsko contends, in comments, that there are no ironic situations. Bryan counters with dramatic irony. I remember learning about dramatic irony as a young lass, and the paradigmatic example is, as Bryan noted, Oedipus’ railing at Tiresias in the opening of Oedipus Rex about how he’s going to get the regicide who is responsible for the terrible miasma afflicting Thebes, when in fact he himself is responsible.
But now that I think about it, the concept seems a little underspecified. Is it that Oedipus’ words are (dramatically) ironic, because they mean something different that what he intends by them? He places a terrible curse on person x, and turns out to be person x. Or is it rather that the whole situation is ironic, such that if it were performed as a ballet, but the same facts were stipulated to be true in the ballet, it would be dramatic irony? If we accept the latter formulation, then we can think that there are dramatically ironic situations in real life, just when something happens which, if it happened in a play, would be ironic.
But even on this account it’s not clear what the criteria are. It’s obviously ironic that Darth Vader is Luke’s father (because this is just the Oedipus situation in sci-fi drag). Is it ironic when Romeo kills himself because Juliet is dead, even though she is actually alive? Not really, I don’t think. But maybe it’s some sort of tragic irony? It seems sufficiently parallel to the Oedipus case that by rights it ought to be ironic. Obviously inversion or reversal plays a role in this account, some sort of precise upending of expectations. Or perhaps a kind of negative lottery, in which a bad thing happens against huge odds. So, although it’s not ironic if it rains on your wedding day in Oregon, perhaps it could be ironic if it rained on a wedding which took place at a Berber encampment in the Sahara, or at Ayers Rock (where I was once rained on while I camped.)
But lots of things which confound expectations aren’t remotely ironic; say I am invited to a wedding between Jack and Jill, and I expect that they are a heterosexual couple, but it turns out they are lesbians, and “Jack” is short for “Jaqueline”. This is not ironic, it’s just mildly surprising. And the song “Ironic” contains something which fulfills the negative lottery criterion, but doesn’t really seem very ironic to me, just dumb: “It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.” What are the odds that one of those 10,000 spoons wouldn’t be a knife! (John thinks this is ironic, however. I can see it if I squint a little.)
How’s this one: you are (you believe) alone in the desert, without another soul around for 100 miles, and you fire a gun in the air. The bullet traces a fatal parabola and lands in the head of someone who was sitting behind a rock, killing her. Ironic, or not? Is it ironic to be hoist on your own petard, to set a trap for someone else which you then fall into, as in every action movie ever, when the bad guy looks in terror at the ticking clock of his own bomb, moments before he is blown to bits? Would it be ironic if it turned out that a given action taken to fight terrorism ended up causing more people to become terrorists than it killed or imprisoned as terrorists, so that the situation were a net loss? Was it ironic that I had used the blog post title “Isn’t It Ironic” just a day or so before to blog about extreme ironing, or just coincidental? Have at it, you ironical types.
From the Guardian review of a new book by Regis Debray:
Jeffrey Mehlman has managed to translate from French into an entirely new language, one born dead. It is constructed using English words but the effect is of something almost entirely unlike English. This raises profound questions. What is one to make of a chapter heading like “The Milieu/Medium Deflagration”? How is one to translate the last sentence of that chapter: “That nomadic psycho-object, the unknown masterpiece of a nation’s furniture, would mark the improbable encounter, to the benefit of a God more snobbish than His predecessors, of the custom-made and the ready-to-bear”? The last word is clearly wrong. But should it be “wear” or “bore”?
Via Liliputian Lilith (who realized this via many others among them weez) I noticed that today is Poem In Your Pocket Day, which bloggers are converting into a Poem On Your Blog Day. Although my high school literature teacher did everything in her power to make me hate poetry, I’m happy to say she didn’t succeed. So I share with you here one of my favorite poems, “I Cannot Know” by the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti.
I will first post the original Hungarian version. However, recognizing that few CT readers will know what to make of that after the original version I copy one English translation. There have been several, but this is the only one I can find online. This particular translation gives it a different title: “How Others See”.. which yet again reminds us that translating poetry is not an easy or straight-forward task.
Radnóti Miklós: Nem Tudhatom…
Nem tudhatom, hogy másnak e tájék mit jelent,
nekem szülõhazám itt e lángoktól ölelt
kis ország, messzeringó gyerekkorom világa.
Belõle nõttem én, mint fatörzsbõl gyönge ága
s remélem, testem is majd e földbe süpped el.
Itthon vagyok. S ha néha lábamhoz térdepel
egy-egy bokor, nevét is, virágát is tudom,
tudom, hogy merre mennek, kik mennek az úton,
s tudom, hogy mit jelenthet egy nyári alkonyon
a házfalakról csorgó, vöröslõ fájdalom.
Ki gépen száll fölebe, annak térkép e táj,
s nem tudja, hol lakott itt Vörösmarty Mihály;
annak mit rejt e térkép? gyárat s vad laktanyát,
de nekem szöcskét, ökröt, tornyot, szelíd tanyát;
az gyárat lát a látcson és szántóföldeket,
míg én a dolgozót is, ki dolgáért remeg,
erdõt, füttyös gyümölcsöst, szöllõt és sírokat,
a sírok közt anyókát, ki halkan sírogat,
s mi föntrõl pusztítandó vasút, vagy gyárüzem,
az bakterház s a bakter elõ;tte áll s üzen,
piros zászlo kezében, körötte sok gyerek,
s a gyárak udvarában komondor hempereg;
és ott a park, a régi szerelmek lábnyoma,
a csókok íze számban hol méz, hol áfonya,
s az iskolába menvén, a járda peremén,
hogy ne feleljek aznap, egy kõre léptem én,
ím itt e kõ, de föntrõl e kõ se látható,
nincs mùszer, mellyel mindez jól megmutatható.
Hisz bùnösök vagyunk mi, akár a többi nép,
s tudjuk miben vétkeztünk, mikor, hol és mikép,
de élnek dolgozók itt, költõk is büntelen,
és csecsszopók, akikben megnõ az értelem,
világít bennük, õrzik, sötét pincékbe bújva,
míg jelt nem ír hazánkra újbol a béke ujja,
s fojtott szavunkra majdan friss szóval õk felelnek.
Nagy szárnyadat borítsd ránk virrasztó éji felleg.
1944. január 17.
====>> ENGLISH version from here:
Miklos Radnoti: How Others See
How others see this region, I cannot understand:
to me, this little country is menaced motherland
with flames around, the world of my childhood swaying far,
and I am grown from this land as tender branches are
from trees. And may my body sink into this soil in the end.
When plants reach out towards me, I greet them as a friend
and know their names and flowers. I am at home here, knowing
the people on the road and why and where they are going-
and how I know the meaning when by a summer lane
the sunset paints the walls with a liquid flame of pain!
The pilot can’t help seeing a war map from the sky,
can’t tell below the home of Vörösmarty Mihály;
what can he identify there? grim barracks and factories,
but I see steeples,oxen, farms, grasshoppers and bees;
his lens spies out the vital production plants, the fields,
but I can see the worker, afraid below, who shields
his labour, a singing orchard, a vinyard and a wood,
among the graves a granny mourning her widowhood,
and what may seem a plant or rail line that must be wrecked
is just a signalhouse with the keeper standing erect
and waving his red flag, lots of children around the guard,
a shepherd dog might roll in the dust in a factory yard,
and there’s the park with the footprints of past loves
and the flavour
of childhood kisses- the honey, the cranberry I still savour;
and on my way to school, by the kerbside to postpone
a spot-test one certain morning, I stepped upon a stone:
look! there’s the stone whose magic the pilot cannot see,
no instrument would merge it in his topography.
True, guilty are we all here, our people as the rest,
we know our faults, we know how and when we have
transgressed,
but there are blameless lives here of toil and poetry and passion,
and infants also, with growing capacity for compassion-
they will protect its glow while in gloomy shelters till
once more our land is marked by the finger of peace:
then they will
respond to our muffled words with new voices fresh and bright.
Spread your great wings above us, protective cloud of night.
January 17 , 1944
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