Look in the Mirror. Do You Read the Future There?

Marina sunrise, Monday, October 1, 2023

What kind of world do you see around you today, and what future world do you envision? Is it one you want?

 

Years ago here in Northport, when our community was even deeper in the doldrums than the rest of the country, a series of “visioning” meetings was held for local residents, and at one meeting, we were asked to draw a picture of our “vision” for the future. I use scare quotes there because I interpreted the word as meaning something positive – something like a best-case scenario that we might be able to work toward and bring about. (Yeah, yeah, prepositions at the end of the sentence. Move along, move along!) One local woman, however, took “vision” to mean a prediction, and hers (obviously based on the times we were in) was ominous: her drawing showed a street of empty storefronts with big CLOSED signs on all the windows. Very unhappy "vision," I thought. 

View from inside my bookstore to Saturday morning preparations for street fair --

Leelanau UnCaged 2023! Northport was full of life!

My bookstore, like all the village, was full of life, full of people this past Saturday for our annual street fair, Leelanau UnCaged. Music, food, arts and crafts, face painting and art fun for the kids! It is a happy day in Northport, and my guest poets, Fleda Brown and Michael Delp, read to an attentive audience – though I fell down on the job, neglecting to pick up my camera, too overwhelmed by their powerful words. If you weren’t here, I’m sorry you missed them.

But coming back to my sheep (meaning and origin of that French phrase here): Asking the question about the future today, I’m not trying to elicit only positive visions but not exactly asking for predictions, either. I’m asking what you expect, personally, in our country and in the world in the coming years. Is yours an optimistic or a fearful vision? Do you welcome the future you see? Or maybe you don’t look very far ahead, but even if you’re focused more on today than tomorrow, please keep reading, anyway, because today is where we all are now.

 

This post will not be a book review. (For a fuller idea of the contents of the book, please see the publisher’s description I have included in the comment section below.) Everything Naomi Klein has written in Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World is worth reading, and most of it is very, very important, but I want to address a single narrow issue, more or less, one that has been hurting my heart. And I’m not just pointing a finger, either, because the temptation and danger are there for me as much as for anyone else. 

 

Klein notes that as the political divide has widened across the U.S., thinking has become binary on the left as well as on the right, with the left, simply to counter lies and conspiracy theories on the right, often defending the status quo rather than offering nuanced critique.

 

It's as if when something becomes an issue in the Mirror World, it automatically ceases to matter everywhere else. This has happened on so many issues that I sometimes feel we are tethered to each other as reverse marionettes…. 

 

When fear-mongers on the right encourage panic, the left knee-jerk is to dismiss all worry, and vice versa. The problem doesn’t stop there, either. 

 

There are also uncomfortable ways we have begun to imitate each other.

 

I added emphasis to the sentence above and set it apart by itself (though it does not take up three lines on my laptop screen) because that sentence brings into focus my today's concern. 

Potentially murky waters --

 

There were groups of people during the height of COVID concern who refused to wear masks, and when some went so far as to say it was for the good of the country and the human species if the weak and old were to die, mask wearers were indignant and horrified at such heartlessness. And yet, when unvaccinated people began to die, how many mask wearers made jokes about people dying of stupidity? “How,” Klein asks, “did we cede so much territory? Become so heartless [ourselves]?"

 

Klein uses this insight to introduce Steve Bannon’s strategy, that of picking up and using the left has dropped,

 

…identifying issues that are the natural territory of his opponents but that they have left neglected or betrayed…

 

-- but my concern here and now, in this post, is with what we are all becoming. The radio/television network that its followers call “conservative” has long hosted name-calling screamers who ridicule their opposition. (I choose to read their news online occasionally to know what they’re saying without having to hear the mocking voices.) I find it equally disturbing, however, when my fellow liberals stoop to name-calling and bad jokes, though I understand the temptation. “We have to laugh so we don’t cry,” one friend told me. But ridiculing our political opponents and those the opposition holds up as leaders and pundits will not open a single mind or heart, and, beyond that, it certainly does not make us kinder, happier people. A hate-filled future for our country? Is this what we want?

 

*****

 

Okay, let me switch gears. How do we escape from what Klein calls “the mirror world”? When I had almost reached the final chapter of her book, I picked up a paperback from 1962, The Image: A Guide to Pseudoevents in America, by Daniel J. Boorstin. Historian Boorstin’s thesis was that America had replaced originals with images, and now, like Narcissus in the Greek myth...

 

We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves. 

 

When cursed-by-the-gods Narcissus saw his reflection in the water, he fell in love with his image and “died of languor” on the spot, his own image a narcotic that not only put him to sleep but ended his life. And so Boorstin can’t help but wonder,

 

How can we flee from this image of ourselves? How can we immunize ourselves to its bewitching conceitful power? 

 

This becomes ever more difficult. The world of our making becomes ever more mirrorlike.

 

(Are dogs wiser than humans?)

Again with the mirrors! In the mirror world both Klein and Boorstin describe, the kneejerk reach for false villains is matched by an equally desperate reach for false heroes. And here is a problem I have with e-mails that plead on a daily basis for my donations in these “dangerous” times: It isn’t that I don’t see our times as dangerous, because I do, but I see our fear and fixation on opponents as dangerous narcotics, too, not as signposts to peace among neighbors. Because what we are being asked to fear is our neighbors! Each other!

 

I don’t know how much common ground there might be between Boorstin (who died in 2004) and Klein, since the former traveled from Communist Party membership to mid-20^th century conservatism, while the latter makes no bones about being an anticapitalist eco-leftist. Boorstin saw the beginnings of today’s mirror world when advertising invaded American politics, and Klein sees how the mirror world has divided Americans until, gazing at doppelgangers of one another over the abyss, we no longer share a view of reality. But somehow I don’t see them greeting each other as hard-and-fast comrades, because while they see similar dangers, they reach very different conclusions on what we need to do to get beyond the impasse.

 

Boorstin’s map for escaping the mirror world is stronger individualism:

 

Though we may suffer from mass illusions, there is no formula for mass disenchantment. By the law of pseudoevents, all efforts at mass disenchantment themselves only embroider our illusions.

 

“Each of us must disenchant himself,” he counsels. 

 

Klein, on the other hand, sees too much individualism as part of what lures us into the mirror world – the idea that each of us, on our own, is responsible only for ourselves. The first wave of COVID, like the shock of 9/11, initial brought Americans together in common cause. Quickly, however, we retreated not only to our respective “sides” (and in the case of COVID, for those fortunate enough to be able to do so, to the safety of our private homes) but also from connectedness. And now, too many who should be making common cause on important issues have become sidetracked into splinter groups with tiny, often entrepreneurial, self-admiring agendas. Fearing and ridiculing a dangerous, monolithic opposition, we subject one another to scrutiny, too, and who on earth can measure up on all possible counts? Even if we don’t begin from individual isolation, it’s where we may end up if we can’t give each other a little slack!

 

So Klein’s recipe for exchanging mirrors and images for reality is not more individualism, but solidarity and connections.

 

We have kin everywhere. Some of them look like us, lots of them look nothing like us and yet are still connected to us. Some aren’t even human.

 

Our doppelgangers can teach us, she urges, that we are “not as separate from each other as we might think.” And while working on ourselves is a start, changing the larger world requires collaboration and coalition, even in the face of discomfort.

 

I cannot urge too strongly the reading of Doppelganger. Naomi Klein writes as a friend, trusting readers with her own errors and weaknesses and difficulties in her journey through the mirror world. As I said, this is not a book review, and I have left vast numbers of the author’s ideas for you to discover on your own, because I have been wanting for a long time to address what I see as outright meanness in utterances and writings of those with whom I otherwise agree, and it makes me sad, and one of the things I most love about Naomi Klein is that she refuses to stoop to unkindness. 

 

Besides, it’s a fascinating journey! Doubles, twins, identity thieves, avatars, doppelgangers, a house of mirrors – it’s an irresistible story, isn’t it? 

 

But now I need to get back to Iain McGilchrist, because a common underground thread I see connecting all of us in this splintered, divided, many-mirrored world is what McGilchrist identifies as a cultural over-reliance on the left brain, that narrowly logical, super-rational “emissary,” with its intolerance for ambiguity and an inability to make room for facts and ideas that conflict with its orderly catalog of guarded knowledge. 

 

Another strength of Klein’s view and her book: she sees the irresistible temptation to judge characters globally on the basis of single issues. Is so-and-so this? Or that? We are all, she says, both this and that, neither devils nor angels. 

 

And every new day is an opportunity for us to make better choices.

Is This a "Man’s World"?

 

What is it about the book business, anyway, Moon wonders. Sometimes it seems like nobody on any level of it makes any money. Maybe if you’re Random House and you can figure out how to publish nobody but James A. Michener, you can make a little money. Everybody else picks up peanuts.

 

Why do they do it? he wonders. But he knows why.

 

-      John Dunning, The Bookman’s Wake

 

 

Only fitting, I reflected, to find myself reading a mystery starring a rare book dealer in a copy I scored from a ten-cent table of used books. Not a signed copy, not even a first printing, but quite a clean, decent later printing of the hardcover edition, a volume I’m sure Cliff Janeway, fictional former cop-turned-bookman, would have picked up himself for resale. Janeway is also a reader, and the quotes and references to works of literature in the stories' dialogue are part of the fun of this series.

 

I was about halfway through reading The Bookman's Wake when, as I turned a page, a slip of paper fell out. No, it was not a $100 bill. Not even a dollar bill. Twenty-eight years a bookseller come this summer, I have yet to find money in any book that has come my way, which seems ironic, considering how often I used to hide five-dollar bills in my own books back in a previous (pre-graduate school) life. I would move my hidden cash around so often -- in my concern that the book holding the money was far too attractive and obvious, certainly the first item a book-loving burglar (in my vivid imagination) would pull off the shelf to inspect! -- that I would lose track of it, which made a subsequent accidental finding seem like manna from heaven, an unexpected gift. A harmless eccentricity left behind but occasionally fondly recalled when I find random bits of paper other people have left behind in used books I buy. -- Are you curious? Do you wonder? Grocery lists and airline boarding passes are a couple of the most common such items. 

The slip of paper from the Dunning book made me smile as I read the lines on it made by an old dot matrix printer, words that indicated a purchase made by Mary Ann, of the former Mary Ann’s Mostly Books in Benson, Arizona, the book ordered directly from the publisher when new, its cover price $21. Two Benson bookstores we loved to visit in former years are both gone now. We found retired bookseller Lenore volunteering at the Friends of the Library bookstore, however, and learned from her that Mary Ann had moved her base of operations to Apache Junction, at the urging of (and, I hope, with a lot of help from) her children. In any case, I remember both shops fondly and enjoy my reading all the more, knowing the book came by way of Mary Ann.

- B O O K M A N -

 

The word ‘bookman’ (from the Dunning’s title) is interesting. Merriam-Webster defines it broadly as “a person who has a love of books and especially of reading” or “a person who is involved in the writing, publishing, and selling of books.” Dictionary.com says a bookman is “a studious or learned man; a scholar” or “a person whose occupation is selling or publishing books.” (Parenthetical note: note ‘person,’ no gender specified three times, ‘man’ once.) In the world of John Dunning and Cliff Janeway, an actual, real-life world inhabited by many world-wide, ‘bookman’ is understood more narrowly. It implies a person (man or woman) working in the secondhand book trade, especially one specializing in rare books, a dealer (occasionally a bookstore employee) with an emphasis on and knowledge of contents as well as physical attributes, as well as a deep love of same. 

Anyone can be a bookseller. To be called a bookman, especially by a bookman, is a compliment, an acknowledgement. When a bookman friend – another woman – told me I was a “real bookman,” I glowed!

 

‘Bookwoman’ is heard now and then but somehow seems to imply more what the dictionaries give as the definition rather than what we in the trade understand by ‘bookman.’ A big reader. Why is that? Is it the way 'poet' sounds serious and 'poetess' brings to mind a wannabe? No wonder women in theatre and film want to be called, simply, actors! I usually call myself simply a bookseller and leave questions of expertise and gender to others. Today, though, I’m thinking about those questions.

 

In The Postmistress, a novel that was one focus of my most recent post, the woman in charge of the little post office is actually called the postmaster. The character notes at one point in the novel, and the author reiterates in her afterword, that U.S. postal regulations give the position title always and only as postmaster. This fact points silently to a time in American history when having a woman in the position was unthinkable and perhaps not even recognized as legal. One female postmaster in Dos Cabezas, Arizona, did the work of the job while her husband held the official title, I have read. That’s just how it was. I wonder if the husband, the nominal postmaster, ever made an appearance behind the counter.

No post office here any more

If either my artist husband or my bookstore volunteer is in the shop at the same time I am there, and someone comes in for the first time with a question for the owner, the question is invariably directed to the man. It doesn’t matter who is sitting at the desk. It doesn’t matter what we are wearing. One dear friend of mine who suffered this indignity for years finally began to do a slow burn when her husband, jokingly, would say to the questioner, “Perhaps my assistant can help you,” the assistant being the actually bookseller – and, in her case, definitely a bookman!

 

But I’ve had to learn to let that stuff slide. It will never end, and there’s no point in spending the precious days of my life resenting ignorant, thoughtless assumptions over and over. 

In MY bookstore!

Whether or not ours is objectively a “man’s world” (and who in the world could take an objective position on the question?), I try to live as much as possible in my own world. I was quite entertained one time when a male friend was telling me about how he could “lose himself” in nature, on a river or in the woods, and added for my benefit that he didn’t think women ever had such experiences! "And you know that by comparing your experiences as a man with the experiences you’ve had as a woman?” I prodded gently, whereupon he had the good grace to laugh.

My darlings when they were only yearlings

Here are a few aspects of my world. The actual owners of a pair of two-year-old horses, half-brother and -sister, have no idea that I think of those horses on the edge of Willcox, Arizona, as mine. People driving back and forth on I-10 certainly do not recognize the tree I call my tree as mine. Back in northern Michigan, there are many little rural corners and stretches for which I feel what I must admit is a proprietary kind of love. But this is not a sense of ownership as the law would understand it. These are things that have become parts of my soul. I lose myself in them.

And so yes, when I am lost in a book quest or examination of an exciting book find, just as when I am out exploring the morning world with my dog, I am not doing it as a woman but simply as myself. This is one of the glories of being lost in one’s work or in the natural world: other people’s presumptions, assumptions, expectations, and judgments fall out of consciousness. Self-consciousness evaporates.

Michigan insolite!

Off-road Arizona

Why, though, do I not call myself a ‘bookman’? Out of modesty? In part. But also out of honesty. Whatever the field of my various life endeavors – music, philosophy, books – I have never been drawn to specialization. It is the old question of depth vs. breadth, and time and time again I have chosen the latter, content to be one of life’s generalists.

 

As for whose world ours is, each of us is the center of our experience, and our experiences and emotions come to us subjectively, not comparatively. So I make no apology for living and working and feeling and writing out of my own little world. I say, anyone who claims to be doing otherwise is self-deluded or seeking to delude.

 

Outdoors with dog or indoors with books? I could not choose one over the other. Fortunately, the two come together in me. Moreover – and miraculously -- my world and the Artist’s world exist side by side and overlap! Lucky, lucky, lucky both of us!

I Had a Jane Austen Moment

It wasn’t the first time, either. 

Many years ago a man came into my bookstore and somehow got onto the subject of concealed weapons and his right to carry same. Don’t ask me how that subject arose. It was very important to him, so my guess is that he was adept at bringing it into the conversation. But as he was giving his impassioned speech, all I could think was, Are you carrying a weapon? Because I’m not. So we are on very unequal footing. I don’t like unequal footing. And while I occasionally have people wander into my bookstore, hands in pockets or clasped nervously in front of them, exclaiming (much to my annoyance, because it’s not as if I’m running an opium den or a speak-easy), “This is such a dangerous place for me to be!” I can’t imagine any of them would feel the serious need to enter armed. And I thought then, and think now whenever I recall the encounter, of Emma’s protests when she learned from the concern of her friend Mrs. Weston that Frank Churchill, who had flirted with her outrageously, had all the time been secretly engaged to another young woman.

“I have escaped, and that I should escape, may be a matter of grateful wonder to you and myself. But this does not acquit him, Mrs. Weston; and I must say, that I think him greatly to blame. What right had he to come among us with affection and faith engaged, and with manners so very disengaged? What right had he to endeavour to please, as he certainly did – to distinguish any one young woman with persevering attention, as he certainly did – while he really belonged to another? How could he tell what mischief he might be doing? – How could he tell that he might not be making me in love with him? – very wrong, very wrong indeed.”

That Frank Churchill should come into that small country society and behave as a single man, without romantic or marital commitment, when his affection and promise had already been secretly given, meant to Emma that Frank had been treating society, as well as the marriage market of the time, as his personal plaything. “Impropriety!” Emma exclaims.

“Oh! Mrs. Weston – it is too calm a censure. Much, much beyond impropriety! It has sunk him, I cannot say how it has sunk him in my opinion. So unlike what a man should be! None of that upright integrity, that strict adherence to truth and principle, that disdain of trick and littleness, which a man should display in every transaction of his life.”

I am not saying that Jane Austen or the society of her time would have the same attitude toward concealed weapons as they had toward concealed engagements or marriages, only that in my mind there is a parallel. Do we meet openly, as equals, or with our secret selves carefully hidden away until -- ???

Well, that was a lengthy introduction, but get me on the subject of Jane Austen, and I am as likely to be carried away as my one-time visitor with his own pet hobby-horse. My more recent Jane Austen moment came when Mr. X said of Mr. Y that the latter was often considered “arrogant.” Mr. X continued, “When you find out about his life, you see he’s entitled to be arrogant.” Austen fans will not have a moment’s hesitation here but will know instantly that Mr. X’s account of Mr. Y brought Pride and Prejudice to my mind.

Mr. Bingley was good looking and gentlemanlike .... but his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien; and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. ,,,[H]e was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.

Mr. Darcy is quickly detested by almost the entire town of Meryton and all the family at Longbourne except Jane (who never thinks ill of anyone) for his insufferable pride, and it takes nearly the whole novel for Elizabeth to realize that she, too, has been guilty of the same deadly sin, prejudiced against Mr. Darcy because he wounded her own amour-propre. A couple of more moderate voices are heard, however, as early as Chapter 5.

“His pride,” said Miss Lucas, “does not offend me so much as pride often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so very fine a young man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour, should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a right to be proud.”

Elizabeth’s friend, Miss Lucas is in general much less critical of others than Elizabeth, sometimes (as we later learn) carrying nonjudgmentalism to extremes Elizabeth regards with something like horror. Elizabeth’s sister Mary, the family moralist, “who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections,” was the first to make a distinction between pride and vanity.

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

What, though of Mr. X’s opinion of Mr. Y? Can one have a “right” to be arrogant? A man who takes pride in his accomplishments – or, of course, a woman who takes pride in hers – does not necessarily need to parade them before others to satisfy his or her vanity. But arrogance – where does that put us?

Without consulting a dictionary, and only going by my own sense of the word, I can’t help finding arrogance, as one of Austen’s characters would put it, “a grievous fault indeed.” I see the arrogant individual lording it over others, disdaining others, riding roughshod over anyone who gets in his or her way – and can there ever be a question of a “right” to such behavior?

Yes, I sound like Mary! Sigh! Mary the earnest bluestocking, not the lively, witty Elizabeth Bennett. And yet, I don’t think Elizabeth would put up with arrogance for one minute. She would puncture it verbally and/or turn and dance away gaily in another direction.

P.S. Next day: Here's an interesting site, not only defining but giving tips for spotting and dealing with arrogant people.

Random Discoveries and Recommendations

This morning’s "Shelf Awareness" newsletter, which I receive by e-mail each business day, included a report from the Codex Group, including survey information showing that most “personal recommendations” gaining books new readers are for backlist titles, not new books. Codex is also concerned that recommendations themselves come from and are a form of “random discovery” and that many new books that will be overlooked, undiscovered, and thus not personally recommended.

Books recommended on this blog are definitely personal recommendations—usually mine, although there may be a guest reviewer from time to time—and “random discovery” pretty much covers the territory for how I stumble upon books I love. Not always. Sometimes a publisher offers a review copy, and if the book sounds like something I might read, I take up the offer, hoping for the best. More often, I must say, a synopsis from the publisher or author tells me it just isn’t my kind of book--and if it’s a book I wouldn’t read myself, how could I recommend it?

As for the books I find by serendipity, let’s face it: “random” in book discovery doesn’t exactly have the impersonality and lack of judgment of atoms colliding. There are clues ahead of time—the aforementioned synopsis, cover blurbs, an introduction or preface, sometimes the author’s established reputation. Books having to do with Michigan, especially northern Michigan, are apt to get my attention, whether fiction or nonfiction. The others? If the Buddha Had Kids was sent to me by the publisher after a rep inquired and I said yes, I was interested. The Tiger’s Wife has been the choice of so many book clubs I’d have had to be brain-dead not to have heard about it.  A customer brought in My Grandfather’s Blessings (see right-hand column) with a stack of other books to add to her trade credit account. High Tide in Tucson came the same way, the author’s name well known to all of us who love books. I can’t remember how The Concise Dictionary of Chinese-English Language fell into my hands, but I’m glad it did. (I think I found it somewhere in the U.P.) That covers a handful of recent Books in Northport recommendations. Typing “book review” in the search bar at the top of the page will take you to others.

A couple of the fiction titles mentioned in my third paragraph above were also part of my post on “Fiction and Judgment.” But now, my latest rave--

High Tide in Tucson, by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins, 1995), is a collection of essays that defies one-word description, unless with a meaningless word like wonderful” or “fabulous.” Some of the essays are hilarious, e.g., “Life Without Go-Go Boots” and “Postcards From an Imaginary Mom.” Others are quietly thoughtful, like the title piece, “High Tide in Tucson.” Still others, such as “Stone Soup,” are justifiably angry over things more people should be angry about. Kingsolver writes of her own life and about writing, and good writing about writing always interests me, but she also writes about the world of nature and the world of artifact and artifice. In the later category are essays on prehistoric Native American sites in the Southwest and a decommissioned missile silo, both with remarkable reflections and insights.

The problem is, which essays to discuss, and what passages to quote, in recommending this book? The trouble is that with this collection, as with My Grandfather’s Blessings, I find myself wanting to quote the entire book!

While not all of Kingsolver’s essays are concerned with fiction, by a long shot, you won’t be surprised that I would read the ones that are with special attention, and so, in the spirit of some kind of continuity, or at least follow-up, I’ll focus on an essay called “Careful What You Let in the Door,” one that takes on that question of violence in fiction, part of our recent discussion.

When I watch a film whose plot capitalizes on the vulnerability of women to torturers, maimers, rapists, and maniacs, I take it personally. I feel preyed upon. I don’t enjoy sitting through another woman’s misery even if I keep telling myself that her big problems there are really all just ketchup. It still hurts to watch. For me, a recreation [read ‘re-creation’] of simple violence has no recreational value. So why would I ever create an act of violence in a novel? My answer has to do with the fact that I don’t consider a novel to be a purely recreational vehicle. ...Art is entertainment but it’s also celebration, condolence, exploration, duty, and communion. The artistic consummation of a novel is created by the author and reader together, in an act of joint imagination, and that’s not to be taken lightly.

A few readers stir restlessly. Isn’t Kingsolver missing an awful lot about of film by taking all movies to be only pure recreation? Suppose we divide movies into two groups and books into two groups, with one group of movies and one of books labeled “pure entertainment,” intending nothing serious. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t help answer the violence question for me. Kingsolver says of what she calls “slice & dice” entertainment (I remember the righteous indignation of a young coworker many years ago over the bloody mayhem of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” a film whose title apparently was insufficient to warn her away), “See enough of this bang-you’re-dead kind of thing and you’ll start to go numb around the edges, I guarantee.” But it was the more serious “Silence of the Lambs” that she felt culturally obligated to see and that made her feel “preyed upon.” (No, I didn’t see it, and I won’t.)

As a serious novelist, Kingsolver takes the question of fictional violence seriously:

I find I’m prepared to commit an act of violence in the written word if, and only if, it meets two criteria: first, the act must be embedded in the story of its consequences. Second, the fictional violence must be connected with the authentic world.

She does not create fantasies of violence to titillate and excite but conceives fictional worlds to help us—and herself--understand and find our way through the world in which we live. The caveat with which she ends her essay echoes the title of the piece:

I will not argue for censorship except from the grassroots up: my argument is for making choices about what we consume. The artist is blessed and cursed with a kind of power, but so are the reader and viewer. The story no longer belongs to the author once it’s come to live in your head. By then, it’s part of your life. So be careful what you let in the door, is my advice. It should not make you feel numb, or bored, or demented, or less than human. But I think it’s all right if it makes you cry some, or feel understood, or long to eat sand for want of more, or even change your life a little. It’s a story. That’s what happens. 

Fiction and Judgment

Lately I’ve read some very compelling novels, no one of them like the others. The Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, by Guo Xiaolu , was a glimpse into a world of experience completely different from my own, the narrator a young Chinese woman come to London to study English for a year. Quickly, impulsively, and through an initial misunderstanding (she thought his suggestion of a visit to his flat was an invitation to move in), she falls into a highly sexual relationship with a much older Englishman. They share passion and curiosity but cannot really understand one another, either culturally or as individuals. One of the most unusual and fascinating aspects of the novel is the focus on language, both English and Chinese--different parts of speech, tenses, large concepts and idiomatic expressions, as well as the difference between an alphabetic writing system and one based on characters that evolved from pictographic representations. At my suggestion, David has been reading the novel and, as I was, particularly enjoyed the young narrator’s assessment of how verbs live within the two languages:

Chinese, we not having grammar. We saying things simple way. No verb-change usage, no tense differences, no gender changes. We bosses of our language. But English language is boss of English user.

To see ourselves as others see us!

A friend loaned me an Icelandic novel, Under the Glacier, saying he couldn’t make head nor tails of it, and, frankly, neither could I. Tempting as it was to throw it aside halfway through, I finished it—and then wondered why I’d bothered. What on earth had possessed Haldor, Laxness, whose Independent People, written in 1946, won the Nobel Prize for Literature? Susan Sontag wrote a generous and thoughtful introduction to the Vintage paperback edition of Under the Glacier, tracing its myriad antecedents and influences in the following genres (I kid you not): science fiction; tale, fable, allegory; philosophical novel; dream novel; visionary novel; literature of fantasy; wisdom literature; spoof, sexual turn-on. She also called the work “wildly original, morose, uproarious,” but doesn’t the list rather suggest a jumbled hodge-podge?

Then came The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht. And yes, yes, I admit it: I am one of those snobbish readers skeptical of best-sellers. That’s probably why I took the path through the forest of used books, to begin with—for the sweet, secret pleasure of discovery. But fortunately another member of one of the reading groups I’m part of (the smallest one, the one hardest to schedule, the one of which we always wonder, Will it ever meet again?) chose The Tiger’s Wife for our fall discussion, because I’m so glad I didn’t miss this story! It begins with two young women, doctors, crossing an armed border to take medical supplies to what was recently part of their own country. The story probably takes place in “the former Yugoslavia,” although the country is never named, and that nonspecificity adds to the book’s power. The narrator has had a phone call from her grandmother, saying that her grandfather has died, and thinking of him brings forth all kinds of memories from her earlier life, as well as memories of the stories he told her from his own life, as far back as childhood. Some of the stories merge into primeval rural legends. Fact and fantasy entwine, along with dream and reality. Reality itself often makes little sense. Usually, I would be put off by fiction with these elements and impatient, during the tall tales sections, to return to realism, but not with this novel. It carried me along seamlessly, compellingly.

What, then, is the difference between Under the Glacier and The Tiger’s Wife? Why is one (in my opinion) a mess and the other a success? I don’t know if Obreht plotted her entire novel in advance or let the story lead her where it wanted to go, but my sense was of a writer who knew what she was doing, an author who could be trusted. With Under the Glacier I never had that sense at all. I felt like the butt of a long, pointless bad joke.

And this, finally, brings me to my main topic of the day: judgment. In what ways is it appropriate to judge fiction? Writers of fiction? And should an author judge his or her characters? To put it all together, should a novel and its characters and its author be judged on moral grounds?

The other day I had a conversation with a friend who was very upset about a novel she had just read. My friend did not like the choices that the main character made in her life. She, my friend, thought the writer was advocating the character’s way of life, since, after all, “she was the one in control of the character.” My friend took a Kantian view of the protagonist and felt that society could not function if everyone made the choices that character had made. I couldn’t help asking, “So you’re saying the author should have written a different book?” Mostly, though, I tried to listen without arguing. After all, my friend felt strongly, and there is no arguing with feelings. (This is a lesson I’m trying hard to learn.)

There was so much going on in her judgment. Is an author “in control” of fictional characters? Are they like marionettes, with the writer pulling the strings? My own limited experience with writing fiction suggests otherwise, but really, this question detours away from the main road I want to travel and explore today....

The plain truth is that my friend and I are both very judgmental individuals. For instance, when I drive into Northport and the driver in front of me fails to signal turns, you can bet I’m passing judgment!a minor example to show how leaping to judgment is second nature to me, as it is with my friend.

One very popular view in American culture today holds that it’s wrong to be judgmental, and young people who hold this view (I got strong doses of the view in the community college philosophy classes I taught) take it as inseparable from freedom. But the opposite view was held historically: Because we are free, we must judge ourselves and others. Any time I choose, whenever I take action, I have judged—whether after considered reflection or spontaneously (i.e., from my character as it has been formed through life). To judge another to have acted wrongly is to say, in effect, “I would not think it right to do that” or “I would be wrong were I to do that” or (more generously) “I hope I would not behave in such a way in that situation.” To judge that a person made a morally correct decision is (or should be) to think, "That's what I would do" or "I hope I would be able to act in such a way myself." In Kantian ethics, the standard I apply to others I also apply to myself. 

Kantian or utilitarian, or whatever religion or no religion, altruistic or totally ego-driven, because we are creatures who must make choices, we are also creatures who must judge. It is a necessary aspect of our nature.

Still, do we overdo it? Do we leap to judgment unnecessarily, after the fact, when nothing hangs any longer in the balance and when condemnation adds nothing of value? These are rhetorical questions, not real questions, because I believe the answer is Yes, and I hope my explorations into Buddhism will help me accept and understand more often than I condemn.

But my question of the day has to do with fiction, so let’s come back to our sheep, as the old French proverb has it.

Should an author judge her characters and present only characters making "moral" choices, and should we as readers judge an author by his or her characters’ choices and actions? Do we apply the Kantian moral imperative to fictional characters and, by extension, to their author? I told my friend that the main character in one of my short stories is a bigamist, but that hardly means I am advocating bigamy! It’s fiction, not a political platform. In each of my ten Burger Shack stories, there is a character either at an important moral crossroads or one who has gone through a crossroads without seeing it. Another way I think of characters in fiction is that there are people who might sit next to you on a long bus trip, and you’d find their company a nightmare, but if you read about that person as a character in a novel, given the author’s insights into how that character came to be the way he is now, your understanding might lead you to feel at least some sympathy, if not liking. That is part of the power of fiction.

In The Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, for example, the narrator is well aware that most people she meets don’t like her. She is one of the least popular students in her English class, known for what others see as her insufferable rudeness. When we read her story in the novel, we see her differently, from the inside. We see her in her complexity, her depth. In that way, fiction can teach us—if we let it—how to be more understanding of people in our everyday lives.

Many writers and critics insist that writers should not judge their own characters--that doing so turns fiction to melodrama and/or propaganda. Realism, science fiction, murder mysteries, fantasy—all are richer if the characters are more like us, multifaceted, flawed, struggling. Sometimes I do judge a writer because of characters presented, though, because a novel with nothing but thoroughly reprehensible characters engaged in criminal, violent, or otherwise heinous activities is not a novel I want to read. I have to feel some sympathy and understanding. I have to care about at least one character, or I won’t go far with the story. So yes, to that extent I do judge an author’s choices.

The subject came up because my friend was so troubled by violence in a novel she had just read, one that I loved but knew would be a problem for her. I asked her what she thought about what I call “supermarket” novels—those popular, best-selling paperback action stories people consume like potato chips. Does she not find their popularity appalling? And if not, why is it all right for those books to wallow in violence? "Oh, that’s different," my friend said. “That’s not the real world.” But any novel we find compelling is “real” during the time we’re reading it, and although one of my friend’s objections was that the novel she was troubled by did not depict “the real world” (it isn’t the world of Northport), clearly she accepted the character as “real” when she objected to the her choices. So is it okay for male writers to write about male characters being violent but different if a woman writes about a woman? Why? How can we apply a double standard to literature? Are fictional women allowed only interior adventures, nothing that involves action in their fictional worlds? That bothers me a lot. If women cannot be fully human in fiction, how on earth can they be fully human in life?

But I go back and forth on this myself, and viewing fiction moralistically is a difficult call. I remember reading the Greek tragedy “Antigone” in high school and having no trouble whatsoever judging Antigone as completely in the right and Creon as completely in the wrong. When I learned that the play was about the dilemmas of conflicting rights, I was aghast. Creon’s responsibility for the state and Antigone’s refusal to consider the political repercussions of her actions had flown right under my adolescent radar. I’d judged the characters simplistically, not seeing that both were right and both were wrong, and therein lay the tragedy. Seeing the complexity in that story was an important part of my growing up.

Tonight is the first discussion session of our group reading Moby-Dick together. What will we all make of Ahab? And what will we think of Melville for having created Ahab?

Tony Judt: Much More Than Just “Amazing”

I don’t think I quite grasped it at the time, but “understanding” was becoming for me an increasingly central objective: harder, deeper and more enduring than merely “being right.” – Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century, with Timothy Snyder (NY, Penguin, 2012)

How to begin to describe the mind of Tony Judt? That is the question that came into my mind yesterday. In current parlance, one would automatically say “Amazing!” But then, everything is “amazing” these days, isn’t it? A new jacket, a movie, a hairdo? So to use the word in a serious (let alone a casual) context is to say nothing at all.

First of all, his mind was “well stocked.” The phrase is his own, as he referred to the memories he used to construct the essays in The Memory Chalet. That writing was reflective and impressive, along with being personal, even deeply intimate, but in Thinking the Twentieth Century we see more clearly yet the extent to which Judt’s mind was stocked not only with personal experience but with a lifetime of reading and intense engagement with both experience and ideas.

His mind was engaged. It is clear from reading this book that his mind was always engaged and that the engagement ended only with his death. He didn’t just “talk his way” through this book. He and Snyder talked it, and then Judt edited each chapter, continuing to clarify his ideas about our world in the twentieth century, because it mattered to him. Thinking was not an idle game for him but an activity of crucial importance. He cared about his world and felt a responsibility to the present and to the future.

He thought critically. He did not easily give his assent.His was not a mind to acquiesce easily, either in the pronouncements of others or to his own initial responses, and he continued to question others, the world, and himself as long as he drew breath. But neither was he one to dissent merely to be different, to gain attention, or to play devil’s advocate lightly, as a diversion. Again, he analyzed and reflected endlessly but never as a game—always because he saw thinking as important work.

His thinking and expression had a style all their own. Analytical by temperament and by training, Judt retained a poet’s love for the sensuous details and the great romance of the world about him. Anyone who has read The Memory Chalet knows this. Whoever has not read it, should.

For the remainder of this post, I want to highlight a few passages from Thinking the Twentieth Century, beginning with the somewhat unromantic (most would say) of economics. Judt identifies the Reagan-Thatcher view, “that the right to make any amount of money unhindered by the state is part of an unbroken continuum with the right to free speech,” and he goes on as follows:

It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that this is not what Adam Smith thought. And it was certainly not the view of most neoclassical economists either. It would simply never have occurred to them to suppose a necessary and permanent relationship between the forms of economic life and all other aspects of human existence. They treated economics as benefitting from internal laws as well as the logic of human interest; but the motion that economics alone could supply the purposes of human existence on earth would have struck them as peculiarly thin gruel.

On the role of the historian, a topic of great importance to him, he is particularly eloquent.

The task of the historian, if you wish to think of it this way, is to supply the dimension of knowledge and narrative without which we cannot be a civic whole.

Has anyone ever described the job better? A couple of pages later he is more precise:

I would break that thought into two parts. The first is simply this: the job of the historian is to make clear that a certain event happened. We do this as effectively as we can, for the purpose of conveying what it was like for something to have happened to those people when it did, where it did and with what consequences. This rather obvious job description is quite crucial. The cultural and political current flows in the other direction: to efface past events—or to exploit them for unrelated purposes. It’s our job to get it right—again and again and again. The task is Sisyphean: the distortions keep changing and so the emphasis in the corrective is constantly in flux. But many historians do not see it this way, and feel no responsibility of this kind. In my view, they are not real historians. A scholar of the past who is not interested in the first instance in getting the story right may be many virtuous things, but a historian is not among them. However, we have a second responsibility. We are not merely historians but also and always citizens, with a responsibility to bring our skills to bear upon the common interest. ... We are never free of that.
 Accordingly, we must operate in two registers simultaneously....

Critical as he was of all national political agendas, Judt was very clear in his mind that before students can criticize history, they must learn it. Facts first. Without facts, “criticism” becomes a hash of opinions slung about willy-nilly. And, in thus making history irrelevant, in making it chaotic, “we [historians] lose any claim upon the civic conversation.”

He thought a lot, also, on the distinction between history and collective memory:

...I profoundly believe in the difference between history and memory; to allow memory to replace history is dangerous. Whereas history of necessity takes the form of a record, endlessly rewritten and re-tested against old and new evidence, memory is keyed to public, non-scholarly purposes: a theme park, a memorial, a museum, a building, a television program, an event, a day, a flag. Such mnemonic manifestations of the past are of necessity partial, brief, selective: those who arrange them are constrained sooner or later to tell partial truths or even outright lies—sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes not. In either event, they cannot substitute for history.

I could quote endlessly from this book but give these samples only in the hope of inducing hunger for more, so the last passage I have chosen for today is one from my previous post, and it has to do with faith and judgment:

...It is one thing to say that I am willing to suffer now for an unknowable but possibly better future. It is quite another to authorize the suffering of others in the name of that same unverifiable hypothesis. This, in my view, is the intellectual sin of the century: passing judgment on the fate of others in the name of their future as you see it, a future in which you may have no investment, but concerning which you claim exclusive and perfect information.

Tony, his wife tells us, believed in two things: love and serious public debate. That is, love and informed conversation. Both require that human beings care.