Poor Joseph K

At one point in Kafka's The Trial, Joseph K tells the student, Bertold, "I don't really know about your judicial system yet. . ." (63). The more we glimpse of this system through Joseph K's confusing confrontations with officials and bureaucracy, the harder it is to comprehend any of it.  It becomes something like an unsolvable riddle that Joseph K. tries to solve.  In the fourth chapter, when Joseph K. seeks out the offices of the judicial system in a tenement-like apartment complex, several metaphors, several possibilities, emerge at once: The law and its servants have behaved criminally, and Joseph K is the hero, pursuing the law, much the way he tried without success to pursue Bertold, the washerwoman's "little monster" (63). The 'little monster,' Bertold the law student will one day be a big monster, a judge, in much the same way totalitarianism and fascism begins as a little monster and becomes a big one. To use an earlier statement K. recalls in the story, "the court was attracted by guilt" (39), so it's possible that K. is attracted to justice.  This makes him questionable. Is he guilty of something? Why are the authorities interested in him? And why is he so interested in the authorities?  The last metaphor is conveyed in the dizzy spell K. experiences when he takes a tour of the law offices. Does it reflect his uneasiness with himself and with the law? Is his obsession with getting an understanding of this elusive riddle unhealthy for him? So far, we have no reason to believe he is the worst of people, but because of his life-style, we have no reason to believe he is the best. He probably is like the majority of people in the world, (especially men-- I think this dude is a bit of a chauvinist) somewhere in between. I think he is an average and harmless, person, but I have a feeling that the trial that Joseph K. has been forced to undergo in the story will take many of his freedoms away, at the same time that it leaves him in the position to become the best of people, or the worst. It will be an interesting metamorphosis.

Part III

I'm not yet at the end of Part III in Madame Bovary, but it doesn't take a genius to predict she is on the decline. The way that Flaubert portrays Emma's development as a character reminds me of a binge-eater. Eventually she's going to make herself terribly sick-- or unappealing. Sometimes I wonder if her character would have been more or less tragic and unattractive if she ate or drank herself into ruin. Instead she is destroying herself on a diet of questionable love and dubious lies.

As their affair progresses, even Leon begins to feel a little unsettled by Emma's transformation. At one point he wonders: "Where could she have learnt this corruption so deep and well masked as to be almost unseizable?" (219.)  This question has several answers. One of them is Rodolphe. Before Rodolphe, the novels Emma devoured set the stage for the romantic disorder that her affair with Rodolphe cemented. Rodolphe's life reflects the link between consumption and corruption, indulgence and indifference. Flaubert gives us a glimpse of his history in the following passage: ". . for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing was left; whatever entered there, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall." (162).

After Emma recovers from Rodolphe, she emerges in Leon's eyes as "woman of the world" (209). She satiates herself with pleasures during her relationship with Leon, to the point where love no longer even factors into her feelings. Though in many ways she becomes, at the height of her powers, more physically attractive to Leon, her mentality approaches that of an ever-expanding glutton. Flaubert's genius lies in his ability to portray with daring irony and sensuality the point where the path of a distinctive personality crumbles into pathology.

Part II

An Ordinary Existence

What I really enjoy about the selected readings for this class, and great literature in general, is that the texts and the characters we encounter generate endless talking points.  I find this especially the case with Madame Bovary. I've reached the point in the book where the positively diabolical Rodolphe Boulanger succeeds in his seduction and conquest of Emma. Flaubert has been inspiring humorous snorts from us up to this point with every flailing conceit of his self-absorbed heroine and every ridiculous flourish of Roldolphe. I found the scene at the agricultural fair that preceded the consummation of the lovers' affair, biting. The way Flaubert intersperses quick portraits of yawn-worthy pompous town officials and stupid livestock between Monsieur Boulanger's obvious advances, makes for something almost absurd--and virtuosic. Flaubert is a bit of a ventriloquist. Then, far that matter, so is Roldolphe. He talks to Emma using phrases that seem to come directly from her romance novels.

But Flaubert is in this for more than the laughs (if perhaps the same can't be said of Roldolphe). Moments of stirring beauty are his other forte. As Emma luxuriates in her passion for Boulanger in a country meadow, Flaubert's attention to Emma's perceptions, like everything he writes, gleams with exquisite, flawless, detail: "Here and there around her, in the leaves or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as if humming-birds flying about had scattered their feathers." (130). Later he writes, "A blue space surrounded her and ordinary existence appeared only intermittently between these heights, dark and far away beneath her." (131). By despising her ordinary existence, Emma makes what I fear might be a tragic mistake-- a rejection of a life that for all purposes is a good life, a life that many would consider a blessing.  All of the unassuming, harmless, honest mundanities of life-- of which Charles numbers the sorriest-- strike Emma, in her illness, as things she can not enjoy and can not endure. As she basks for the first time in the fulfillment of her romantic dreams, we feel a small ache for the plain, true gifts that are being overlooked, at the exact moment that a world that is sensationally gorgeous and dazzlingly false is being discovered.

Part I

Now that I'm reading our next selection, Madame Bovary, I feel a little sad that we're leaving ancient literature behind, and rapidly approaching modernity. The Sorrows of Young Werther departed from the older classics and offered a semi-modern voice, but Madame Bovary kind of leaves it in its dust, even as Flaubert takes inspiration from Goethe. Both stories strike me as cautionary tales. I'm seeing a theme that we discussed at the beginning of Dante's Inferno appear again: how literature can be a bad influence on characters.

Werther, before his downward spiral, boasts that he has abandoned his favorite songs from Homer and replaced them with Ossian-- unaware that the rhapsodic literary sensation of the latter was that of a poetic charlatan. Madame Bovary makes the same mistake of worshiping false idols you could say, falling sway to the powerful glamors and attractions of fiction and life. Already full of beautiful worthless nonsense from girlhood, she becomes chronically discontented after she glimpses wealthy Parisian life at a ball.

It is incredible how Flaubert doesn't make a moral judgment on the characters-- a feature, we learned in class-- that got him in trouble. Instead he offers an overwhelming array of data and details in prose that dances with elegant ironies and truths. I'm hooked, though I'm disappointed by Charles Bovary, and care even less for Emma. But I love how Flaubert writes about her, as when he reveals how the early development of her character surrounded a sensitivity to things that a devout person might not find devout. We are told that her temperament was the kind that “loved the church for the sake of the flowers, and music for the words of the songs, and literature for the passions it excites,” and “rebelled against the mysteries of faith ...” (34).

I think a writer has a different kind of disorder, but in a way it's equivalent. Writers love words for the music in them, and grapple at times with 'the mysteries of faith,' as I'm sure Flaubert did. Writing literature is a task that demands a considerable amount of passion, and a considerable amount of faith (even if it's not religious faith)-- as well another thing that Flaubert says Madame Bovary lacks: Discipline. It takes discipline to write this blog, I realize. So that's a start.    

The Silhouette Artist

It's easy to see why this week's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, struck its first readers as real. Goethe created a portrait of a tragic young man through the fictional character of Werther's letters that I feel is one of the most complete portraits of an afflicted, sensitive person I've ever observed. Burton Pike's introduction in The Modern Library's edition of the book suggests that Werther's character may have had an autobiographical element to it. As I read the novel I debated whether the author's hand was rendering a scathing self-portrait of himself at times, or providing a precise, internal study of the emotional world of someone he understood very well. Is this impossible, impractical, unfortunate, dazzlingly true and deluded creature, someone who the writer once knew? Or someone who the writer once was? Either way, the picture he to presents us, strikes our senses as vibrantly--and painfully-- authentic. Like great art, it is has the potential to cut and cure.

I'm fascinated by Goethe's surgical precision when it comes to capturing the intricate hopes and despairs of a classic goner. The way Goethe constructs this slim book by cutting and pasting things out of the fabric of remembered experience, for instance: What Goethe pastes together is just as interesting and important as what he cuts out. As Pike mentions in the intro, we get only Werther's letters, not his friend's responses, not Lotte's journals. Information is limited and truncated when it comes to the world beyond Werther's impractical senses, so that we often only receive the first letters of names of places and people. We are given a complete portrait of Werther, but only belated, conjectured glimpses into the minds of the other characters (at the novel's conclusion by the so-called 'editor'). Of Werther, we are privileged—or burdened-- with a cascade of his inner-most thoughts and perceptions-- through his eyes, we get only people's exteriors. Though this is common in first-person narratives, I feel like it illustrates the very nature of Werther's, and mankind's dilemma. How much do we ever really know each other?

As a reader, I feel like I'm not sure if I really know or understand Lotte, the object of Werther's all-consuming love, and even Werther admits himself that he can't draw an accurate picture of her face. Instead, the only image he can make of her on paper is by cutting “out her silhouette instead.” (p45). The New Oxford American dictionary offers a definition of the word silhouette that corresponds with a theme that I feel encompasses Werther's experience-- “the dark shape and outline of someone or something visible against a lighter background. . .”

Nothing perhaps reflects this definition and illuminates Werther's—and mankind's-- predicament than his own words, “. . we are so made that we compare everything with ourselves and ourselves with everything. . .everything outside ourselves seems more glorious, every other person more perfect” (p.71).

At the end of his life, when Werther plans his suicide and settles his affairs, he requests that the silhouette he created of Lotte be returned to her so she can be pleased with his work. But in the end, the silhouette he has left behind is the one created by his own self-negating actions, his own absence. In this sense, the motif of the silhouette provides an apt metaphor for loss. Werther has chosen to cut himself out of the fabric of life. And no one is pleased with his work.  

Gray Area

The Inferno is sensational. And I mean sensational in an unsavory, skin-crawling way. From the moment we embark on Dante’s journey through hell, our senses are assailed by unpleasant smells, sights, and sounds, brought to us by one incredibly uncanny, unflinching mind, and the Hollanders’ vivid and lyrical translation.

On a purely poetic level, the work is a beauty. But I’m still strongly unsettled by much of the imagery, by the ghastly souls, regions, and assorted torments that clawed at my perceptions and left disturbing impressions. At the present, I’m trying to shake off the almost physical discomfort of a description in the final canto, when Dante and his guide Virgil must endure close contact with Satan. We are confronted with the massive and hairy body of Lucifer, and given a description of how Virgil and Dante are escorted to their final destination:

Climbing aboard the colossal Devil, Virgil “clung to the hair” (xxxiv, 80) of the monster, and instructs Dante to do the same: “Hold on tight, for by such rungs as these. . .must we depart from so much evil.” (xxxiv 82-84).

It’s not the first time the characters of Dante and Virgil have received assistance from a demon or monster during their voyage through Hell. And it’s not the first time that one of Hell’s disgruntled creatures has bent itself to their service. (Their ride on the Devil is preceded by aid from the Centaurs in Canto 12, the monster Geryon in Canto 18, the gang of Malebranche in Canto 21, and the giant Antaeus in Canto 31.)

It’s difficult to accept the idea of Good, even for a moment, joining forces with Evil. Even if you just call it an indirect embrace of cruelty, or an expedient alignment, or alliance, with immorality, I think it’s problematic.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just one of those gray areas, like politics, religion, and social psychology, that I have to accept.

Another Beast

If I thought the classics we have been reading so far were unusual, Dante's Inferno is a whole different animal. I really found writer Thomas Cahill's summation of Robert Fagle's translation of The Aeneid accurate: a "miraculous beast of a text."

I agree the most with the beast part of his assessment, since I'm still wrestling with Virgil's work while I'm getting a feel for Dante's tricky swift-footed creation. This again being my first introduction to the text, it's not without trepidation. What strikes me most is how timid the character of Dante is. He worships Virgil, and is uncertain about his own courage and resolve in the first chapter, though the man who is writing the verses is anything but. I love the images that he threads together-- Hollanders' translation is so immediate to me.

Right now I have my own theories about the significance of the three beasts that Dante encounters in the beginning of the story that block his 'ascent'.  "Your spirit is assailed by cowardice," Virgil tells him, after Dante says, "But why should I go there? Who allows it? I am not Aeneas, nor am I Paul. Neither I nor any think me fit for this."  Self-doubt and a sense of shame have a hold of him, and I feel that the beauty of the leopard, enforces that self-doubt, making him step back, while the lion and the she-wolf, hold him in the grips of fear.