Figuring Things Out

Morning clouds, October

This could be a short post. We'll see! If I were writing about all the things I have not figured out, it would be long, but I’m taking the easy way out. 

Happy girl!

First (because I know that’s why many of you tune in), Sunny and I are making great strides in our agility sessions with Coach Mike. I’m able to keep more of the course in my head at once, and our race from one station to the next is becoming smoother all the time. If there were an indoor agility course in Leelanau Township, I would be more than willing to continue through the winter. 

Scene of someone's adventure glimpsed on our way to agility --

(Parenthetically, in answer to the often-asked question, “How late in the season will you keep the bookstore open?” the answer is that Dog Ears Books will be open all winter. Come November, weeks will be shorter [Wednesday through Saturday], and days will be shorter, too [11 to 3], but weather and roads permitting, the shop will be open four days a week.)

 

I’m pretty sure I have the answer now to why Albert Murray is not better known as a writer of fiction. By now well into the fourth of his semi-autobiographical novels, more and more I realize that while his characters and settings are vivid, the world large and complex (from Alabama to Hollywood to Paris and back to New York), there is simply no conflict. The narrator makes a single mistake as a boy, is saved from the consequences by one of his boyhood idols (an understanding and sympathetic character with the wonderful name of Luzanna Cholly), and from there on there are no obstacles in Scooter's life path. When he learns a secret about his parentage, he takes in the new knowledge without a moment’s angst, and it never troubles him later, either. He is given a string bass and within months is touring the country and the world with one of America’s top dance bands. All women want him, no men are ever jealous, and the woman he wants to marry waits contentedly for his return. Marked out from the beginning for great things, he is the golden boy from start to finish, with everything falling into place for him. 

 

Just as Murray decried interpretations of the blues as music of suffering, he had little patience for stories of Black victimhood. He heard the blues as celebratory, not moans of misery, and he wrote his hero’s progress through the world as a story of success, and that’s great – except that we don’t see Scooter triumphing over anything, because nothing ever blocks his way. There is no agon to make him a protagonist. 

 

I say all this more as explanation than critique because I am still very much enjoying these books and looking forward to rereading them in years ahead. Any one of so many little vignettes, e.g., a scene in a barbershop, is as delightful as many a short story from a less-skilled writer, and discussions between characters about history, literature, and music are endlessly fascinating. I’m no longer troubled by neglect of Murray as a novelist, though, because I see what’s missing in his books as fiction: there is no tension, conflict, struggle, and so no real drama. 

 

It’s hard to believe that Murray’s own life was as velvet-smooth and free of difficulty as Scooter’s road. Life is never that easy for anyone! But he apparently felt free to leave out the bumps in the road, thoroughly covered as they had been by other Black writers. I’ll be interested to read this author’s nonfiction work and see how it compares to the fiction: Next up on my Murray agenda is The Omni-Americans: Black Experience & American Culture.

An already colorful curve in the road --

We should have peak color here in Leelanau by next weekend, although I almost hate to see it build to a climax, knowing that the gales of November will soon follow. And we still need rain! But who can argue with blue skies and the warm, albeit temporary, palette of our upper Midwest trees in autumn? 

So here it is for today – dog, books, outdoors. Because that’s my life. 

Wait for it...

...to turn blue!

Back When the Stage First Struck Me

So many choices! How to decide!

 

No, I'm not going to be writing about “Tea and Sympathy.” It’s just that this past Sunday was a dreadfully cold, windy, rainy, dark day that cried out for tea, and since I have no photographs to illustrate today’s opening story from my teenage years, you might as well have pictures of tea.

 

My story begins in the fall of my freshman year of high school. Only fourteen years old, never before had I been on a date with a boy old enough to have his driver’s license. We didn’t have to have a parent deliver us to the high school to see the senior class play, and it wasn’t a double date, either! In both ways, then, that date was a first for me -- and you might expect that having my date as the driver would have been the most important aspect of the evening, then and in memory, but no --. 

 

As it turned out -- I had no way of knowing ahead of time that this would be the case -- the play was the thing. A live stage play: another first for me. 

 

“The Curious Savage,” it was. When that final curtain came down (after the curtain calls, which I loved!), I didn’t want to leave the auditorium, didn’t even want to get up from my seat or speak to my date or have him speak to me (though he was a perfectly nice boy). Given a vision of another world, I was riveted. Spellbound. Indeed, stage-struck.

Crunch to go with sips

Every year our high school also produced what we called an “operetta,” and the production of the spring following my fall evening with “The Curious Savage” was “Show Boat,” but for the operetta my seat was in the orchestra pit, where I was section leader of the second violins, which meant that I attended the show (as it were) over and over, intimately connected to it, part of it, through the course of rehearsals I could only wish would never come to an end. 

 

My music stand partner and I were as close to the stage apron as possible, squeezed in practically under the very edge, so we could see the actors only when the action onstage was directly above us. The first violins, on the outside closer to the audience, had the better view of the stage. All violinists, however, were facing stage left, on the conductor’s left hand, and so when the soloist stood at stage left, at the very edge of the apron, to deliver the haunting, unforgettable “Ol’ Man River,” we missed none of it. That young man could have been on Broadway, I felt sure! 

 

A brief comic moment from the show has always remained in my mind, as well. The owner and captain of the showboat, desperate to fill the unexpectedly vacant position of juvenile lead in time for the next performance, asks Gaylord Ravenal (what a name!) if he is a quick study – that is, can he learn lines quickly. Ravenal, who has just seen the captain’s daughter on the deck and been told that she is the ingenue he would be playing opposite, responds, his eyes on young Magnolia, “Lightning!” Or rather, as I recall it from that high school production, “Lightnin’!”

 

As a member of the pit orchestra, required to be at every rehearsal, eventually I knew every line of the play by heart. Now the spoken lines are gone from my memory, but song lyrics remain, along with melodies. 

Honey first --

“Show Boat” was a ground-breaking event when first staged in 1927, “The first Broadway score ever to have a coherent plot and integrated songs.” (See here for more details.) That is, the show had a story, and the songs amplified the story. Before "Show Boat," a stage musical was a series of unrelated, spectacular, highly choreographed musical numbers featuring young women prancing about to music in scanty, feathered outfits and high heels. But “Show Boat” went beyond just having a story, presenting onstage “two unhappy marriages, alcoholism, the harsh realities of life for Southern Blacks, and the delicate subject of miscegenation.” (See here for more details.) Eventually, musicals with real stories, i.e., plays with music, became the American norm, something we take for granted, but “West Side Story” would not have been possible without the trend “Show Boat” started.

 

Very few people probably care that Edna Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan (on Burdick Street, I believe), but since I learned that fact, I have always remembered it, having lived in Kalamazoo myself for a number of years. Yet somehow, as far as I recall, I had never read any of her novels. Then, there it was, just the other day -- Show Boat, the book that gave birth to the musical stage show I had loved with such a deep passion at age fourteen, the book available to me as a public library-bound discard priced at one dollar. So on a dreadfully cold, windy, rainy, dark Sunday that cried out for tea, having finished another book the night before and looking for one to go with comforting hot tea, how could I hope for a better choice?

 

Edna Ferber’s novel was written in 1926, with a story beginning (in flashbacks) after the Civil War, shortly before railroads usurped the place of riverboats for carrying passengers and goods throughout America. Although a riverboat such as the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre was much more than a “houseboat,” it was home to the owner and his family and the cast of players, and as in our old household favorite, Shantyboat, the Mississippi River lends its strong, unconquerable, fluid character to the story, which made me decide immediately that Show Boat needed to be housed in my Michigan farmhouse with all our other 19^th- and 20^th-century books, fiction and nonfiction, featuring life on American rivers, despite the novel’s cringe-worthy casual racist dialogue and commentary. It is a picture of its time, and like any time in history (including our own), there was both beauty and ugliness in it, and, in my opinion, we need to recognize and acknowledge both for what they were. The musical certainly did that, and I think the book does, too.

 

But best of all Magnolia loved the bright, gay, glass-enclosed pilot house high above the rest of the boat and reached by the ultimate flight of steep narrow stairs. From this vantage point you saw the turbulent flood of the Mississippi, a vast yellow expanse, spread before you and all around you; for ever rushing ahead of you, no matter how fast you travelled; sometimes whirling about in its own tracks to turn and taunt you with your unwieldy ponderosity; then leaping on again. Sometimes the waters widened like a sea so that one could not discern the dim shadow of the farther shore; again they narrowed, snake-like, crawling so craftily that the side-wheeler boomed through the chutes with the willows brushing the decks. You never knew what lay ahead of you – that is, Magnolia never knew. That was part of the fascination of it. … But her father knew. And Mr. Pepper, the chief pilot, always knew. You wouldn’t believe that it was possible….

 

What Does a Story Need?

Critics and fans alike have struggled for decades over what to call The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett, and so I suggested to the Fearless Leader of our Ulysses Reading Circle that when we discussed Pointed Firs we should address the question, “Is it a novel?” He was somewhat shocked, but I raised the question, anyway. We were only seven that evening, and I abstained from answering right away. Only one person immediately answered with a resounding “No!”

“Why not?” others asked.

“Nothing happens!”

Voices were raised around the table, five people eagerly and simultaneously enumerating various events from Jewett’s pages. “They go out to the island!” “She visits the old man!” “They go to the reunion!”

Yes, there are these quietly related events, but what is lacking is conflict, or, to put it more generally, tension.

“I loved it!” “I did, too!” Pointed Firs defenders were staunch and vocal around the table, although one of them admitted the story had “no dramatic arc.”

I said I meant nothing derogatory by saying it wasn’t a novel. Neither was I was saying it should have been different. I loved the book, too. I think the place itself is the main character, and it’s a charming place -- although I couldn’t help thinking the narrator’s impressions of the place might be different if she were a fulltime, year-round resident. It’s easy for annual visitors to see a place through rose-colored glasses. I admitted that Grand Marais is my Dunnet Landing. Perhaps Willcox, Arizona, even if I never return, is another, but I recognize that my feelings for those places don’t take into account the struggles people making Grand Marais or Willcox their homes and needing to make a living there. Vacation, after all, is a very different kettle of fish. But I digress....

Jewett herself, according to Willa Cather, never referred to this work as a novel or even as stories. Her term was sketches. (See “Miss Jewett,” in Cather’s Not Under Forty, published in 1946 by Alfred A. Knopf.) That intrigues me, as it suggests that there might be a form of fiction besides novels and stories.

Perhaps no tension is required of a sketch? In visual art, we do not expect of something is called a sketch all the qualities of a finished oil painting. And yet sketches have their own charm. Done well, literary sketches, too, can be delightful. And who is to say that a sketch lacks anything if it is everything its author intended?

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, by Stephen Leacock, is in a very different vein from Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. Whereas Jewett shows the beauty and dignity of ordinary lives in a remote place, Leacock’s intent is humor. He holds up and exposes his main characters to our ridicule and laughter – and yet, he does so gently, even lovingly. Truly, we must laugh at ourselves when we laugh at the people in Leacock’s little Canadian village, for inflated self-worth and self-importance can be found in towns of all sizes. Doesn’t each one of us imagine ourselves the center of our world? And how silly is that, in all the enormity of the universe?

In Leacock’s book, as in Jewett’s, there is chronology, and there is one major event (the sinking of the picnic boat) to which smaller events lead, as in Pointed Firs (the reunion), but at no time in either book do we fear disaster. Whatever there is of pain in Jewett lies in the past and has been smoothed and mellowed by the passage of time. In Leacock, conflicts arise in the story as it develops, but the reader cannot be terribly concerned, since the author’s tone is saying all along, “Tempest in a teapot, isn’t it silly?”

On Saturday, looking for something else on my store shelf of writers’ helps, my eye stopped on The Essence of Fiction, by Malcolm McConnell. I have a friend who wants to turn a piece of memoir writing into fiction and isn’t sure how to proceed. Maybe she wonders where to start. Anyway, I brought the book home with the thought that it might shed light on my friend’s problem, as well as on my own meditations on what constitutes a story.

Malcolm takes a clear stand: fiction is drama. What the playwright creates for the stage, the novelist or short story writer must bring alive for readers on the printed page, but the very essence of fiction is always a dramatic core. Take Malcolm seriously on this point, and you’ll hardly be surprised to have him tell you next that the scene is the basic building block of all fiction.

Here is the list of scenic elements from Malcolm’s assignment sheet to his students:

o    Believable and Relevant Physical Setting
o    Point of View
o    Problem or Conflict Situation
o    Dialogue (or Monologue or Thought)
o    Relevant Physical Action
o    Relevant, Original Descriptive Metaphor
 From The Essence of Fiction: A Practical handbook for Successful Writing, by Malcolm McConnell (NY: Norton, 1986), p 37

(I have highlighted “problem or conflict situation” in red, since it is my major concern.)

In his discussion of the “problem or conflict situation,” McConnell does not even bother to argue that conflict is necessary. There is no drama without conflict; therefore, if fiction is drama, conflict must be present in all fiction, if it is to be worthy of the name. That’s a given, not something that needs stating except as it must be part of each scene:

Somewhere in any scene there must be dramatically revealed some aspect of the overall conflict of the story.

Malcolm quotes a friend and fellow writing teacher, Will Knott, who wrote in The Craft of Fiction that fiction is always about people in trouble.

...I take this one step further. Fiction is never about people with no problem or conflict in their lives. At first examination, this may seem perverse, that literature, one of the most respected art forms of Western civilization, is entirely devoted to the negative aspects of life. Be that as it may, the fact remains, that all effective drama, on the stage or in the pages of a fictional work, involves characters faced with one kind of problem or another.

Lest his reader turn away from all this gloom, he adds,

This central core of conflict, of course, does not necessarily mean that the writer must accentuate the negative side of life.

Perhaps the central character will rise to a challenging occasion, triumph over adversity, learn valuable lessons for the future. Whether or not there is a happy ending, however, drama and fiction, unlike the chronicle of factual events most of us recognize as history, allow us a special way to share emotionally in the experience of characters onstage and in books. Like us, the writing teachers say, fictional characters face problems, and that is what captures our interest. Without a problem, without a conflict -- no reason for the reader to keep turning pages.

What, then, accounts for the love so many readers feel for The Country of the Pointed Firs?

Nature is never static, and no one season of the year and no single day, not even the solstices, give us time in which “nothing happens.” If we are very fortunate, however, there may be moments or days or even seasons in our lives that seem uneventful, stretches that flow so gently we have the illusion of time standing still. Those peaceful moments will be lost, and time will resume its headlong rush. But recollection of an illusory season of stillness – perhaps that is inspiration for the literary sketch.

What do you think? Can a sketch be called fiction if it has no conflict? Can something that lacks tension be called a story? Or is it dealing in contradictions to say so? 

And finally, in your limited reading time (because reading time is always limited for all of us), are such slight productions, whatever we call them, worth reading?

Books That Shaped Our Nation

The intrepid group of reader-friends first formed to read James Joyce’s Ulysses together, the bunch that last year tackled Dante’s entire Divine Comedy, is taking a winter break this year. We are not weary of reading, simply reluctant to take on a new challenge while one of our members is away for four months. Book groups can be like that: each member is integral to discussion, no one expendable. And we are only seven, forged into historical unity through the fire of some difficult books over the three years of our existence.

Four months is a long time, however, so rather than do without each other altogether for the winter, our fearless leader suggested we gather to discuss a list put together by some folks at the Library of Congress. Unlike Modern Library’s top 100 books of the 20^th century, books on this list were not necessarily chosen for literary quality but for the impact they had on Americans in their time. Some of the great works read by our Ulysses group (and another group some of us had formed for another, temporary purpose) are on it, such as Moby-Dick and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. There are also nonfiction works widely read and influential in their time—McGuffey’s Reader, The Kinsey Report on Male Sexuality, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, etc. I was very happy that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is listed. To Kill a Mockingbird is there, as well. You can click here to read more about the exhibit and/or simply scroll through my bare bones presentation of authors and titles below to the rest of my rambling thoughts (following list).

Benjamin Franklin, Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751)

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard Improved (1732) and The Way to Wealth (1785)

Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)

Noah Webster, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1783)

The Federalist (1787)

A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (1788)

Christopher Colles, A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America (1789)

Benjamin Franklin, The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D. (1793)

Amelia Simmons, American Cookery (1796)

New England Primer (1802)

Meriwether Lewis, History of the Expedition Under the Command of the Captains Lewis and Clark (1814)

Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820)

William Holmes McGuffey, McGuffey’s Newly Revised Eclectic Primer (1836)

Samuel Goodrich, Peter Parley’s Universal History (1837)

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851)

Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853)

Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)

Louisa May Alcott, The Mysterious Key (1867)

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy (1868)

Horatio Alger Jr., Mark, the Match Boy (1869)

Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (1869)

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Emily Dickinson, Poems (1890)

Emily Dickinson, Slant of Light=Sesgo de Luz (1890)

Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890)

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Sarah H. Bradford, Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1901)

Jack London, The Call of the Wild (1903)

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Ida Tarbell, The History of Standard Oil (1904)

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

William James, Pragmatism (1907)

Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1914)

Margaret Sanger, Family Limitation (1914)

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (1923)

Robert Frost, New Hampshire (1923)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (1925)

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1929)

Irma Rombauer, Joy of Cooking (1931)

Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1936)

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Federal Writers’ Project, Idaho: A Guide in Word and Pictures (1937)

Thornton Wilder, Our Town: A Play (1938)

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Alcoholics Anonymous (1939)

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)

Benjamin A. Botkin, A Treasury of American Folklore (1944)

Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville (1945)

Benjamin Spock, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946)

Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh (1946)

Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon (1947)

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Alfred C. Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)

J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web (1952)

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1956)

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957)

Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat (1957)

Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

Robert E. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowy Day (1962)

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (1963)

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)

Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed (1965)

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966)

James D. Watson, The Double Helix (1968)

Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970)

Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971)

Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On (1987)

Cesar Chavez, The Words of Cesar Chavez (2002)

With a list like this two questions naturally spring to mind: (1) Is there anything on the list that you would not have included? (2) What do you think should be here that isn’t?

(Did you find yourself nodding as your eye moved down the screen? Harrumphing as you looked back to confirm, indignantly, the absence of one of your favorites?)

An odd note on the (even) number of works: 88. Why 88? Why not 75 or 99 or 100? It turns out that the books were chosen for a specific exhibit space, so when the space was filled, the list was deemed complete—therefore, is not presented as definitive. Oh! And there’s only one book on it from the new century, which seems fair, as who would want to debate newly published work that may or may not, at some future time, be judged to have shaped the time in which we are now living? But did the Sixties get a fair shake? The Forties? The last years of the 20^th century?

Each of us felt the neglect of a different, particular area, depending on our individual interests, and so one member wanted social gospel authors (“Where’s Dorothy Day?”), another more on education (“Where’s John Dewey?”) and politics (The Pentagon Papers). Only one philosophy title had made the list, and while I was happy to see William James there, I’d have thought his Varieties of Religious Experience more widely read and influential than his Pragmatism. (And I definitely agree that the omission of anything by Dewey is shocking and indefensible!)

Here are a few titles and authors we would have added:

Fun With Dick and Jane.

Tom Swift series.

Wilder. Little House on the Prairie.

Updike. Rabbit, Run.

Schumacher. Small is Beautiful.

The Last Whole Earth Catalog.

The Joy of Sex.

Edgar Allan Poe; J. I. Rodale; John Dewey; Dorothy Day; Saul Bellow; Norman Mailer. (We did not choose specific titles for these writers.)

Keller. The Story of My Life.

Halberstam. The Best and the Brightest.

Howard Zinn (various work proposed; my choice was People’s History of the United States).

In the drama category were proposed: “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Raisin in the Sun,” and “Death of a Salesman.”

What about you? How many on the list have you read? Do you have a candidate from the 19^th century that should be on the list? A book to represent the Vietnam era? Like Modern Library’s list for the millenium, this Library of Congress gathering is a good conversation starter. It can also be an inspiration for further reading, which is always good. Other ideas or suggestions?

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?