Book bucket challenge (a double barrel)

I just heard about this through a Toronto Star piece (sorry if it is behind a paywall).

The basic idea is to list 10 books that deeply influenced you and that you would recommend to others.  As far as I can tell, there are no specific age limits, and while it is true many of our most influential books are ones we read as children, that doesn't have to be the case.  I also don't want to tie it too strongly to books that "changed my life," as that may mean sticking to books that are too overtly philosophical.  This may be something I return to from time to time, and indeed, perhaps I should add a date anytime I update the list (rather than editing it silently).

On a somewhat related topic, someone mentioned that many of the critical darlings of today (particularly of the New Yorker set) will have fallen from fashion at the end of the century, which got me to thinking about literary canons and the fact that today's literary landscape seems particularly fragmented.  I do think a fair number of the 20th Century foreign authors I read have made it into translation and will probably still be remembered (particularly if they were republished by NYRB Press). So that would certainly include von Rezzori, Bulgakov, Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, Mahfouz, I.B. Singer, Narayan, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie (ok, so the last three aren't really being translated into English but they do write primarily about non-Western cultures).  I am not entirely sure about Irène Némirovsky; she's got a compelling and tragic back-story, but will it resonate in another 85 years?

It's so hard to predict if times will be so terrible that escapist fiction is the order of the day, or if those future readers obsessively peruse our dystopian books and books about ecological disasters and wonder why we mostly sat around on our asses and let the world burn up.

Anyway, after I gave it some thought, I decided that of the US or British (or Canadian) authors from the second half of 20th Century or early 21st Century, the ones that would still be discussed at century's end were probably Don DeLillo (esp. White Noise), Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, probably Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro (but only in the context of a few stories that get anthologized), maybe Muriel Spark, possibly Doris Lessing (though her best work is over 50 years old already).  It's possible that Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible will resonate more strongly through the years as conflicts between the developing world and Western nations increase (most likely anyway). I suspect there are some who are still in circulation that maybe shouldn't be (looking at you, Jonathan Franzen). David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Lethem might have some readers but probably not a very significant following compared to today.  It's so tough, because most of the writers before then that I read already rose to the top as it were, so it is extremely likely that Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Willa Cather will still be read (even outside of university courses) whereas much of what I read now hasn't passed any kind of longevity test.  What I do tend to think is that the urban writers will speak more to future readers and that these future readers will generally be fairly alienated from rural life.  On the other hand, some people will read the "country" writers just for a window into that world, but that may be a minority position.  Very hard to say.

I think I have come up with my list of 10 books that I found powerful and influenced my thinking in one way or another.  I believe I would still recommend all 10 (I hope I have it narrowed down to 10 -- let's see).  I'll list them in roughly the order I came across them.

Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Edwin Abbott - Flatland
Isaac Asimov - I, Robot (I read a lot of science fiction as a teenager)
Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Ivan Turgenev - Fathers and Sons
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths (also A Personal Anthology -- or cut to the chase and get Collected Fictions)
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities 
Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot

That's already 10!

I need at least 10 more:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon
Adrienne Rich - The Fact of a Doorframe
Anne Sexton - Complete Poems
Donald Barthelme - City Life (or The Dead Father but really just go get Sixty Stories) 
Raymond Carver - Cathedral (or the Collected Stories from Library of America)
Don DeLillo - White Noise
Timothy Findley - Not Wanted on the Voyage (need at least some CanCon on the list!)
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide (this is the most recent addition to the list, while not as overtly philosophical as Life of Pi, I think it is some ways more meaningful)

I'm sure this will change, and I almost left an empty spot, just to signify the impossibility of the task.  (Just like some rune sets come with a blank rune.)  But they are a pretty solid 20 to start with.  Feel free to add your nominations in the comments.

And a few of these are particularly dear to my heart.  I've actually given away Invisible Cities and The Master and Margarita to some of the junior modellers I've worked with over the years (having picked up a bunch of remaindered copies one year -- I think I am down to one left).  I even ordered a few copies of Borges' Collected Fictions to give away when I left RAND, but that was a special case.

In some cases, I would recommend the more complete version, particularly for short stories or even poetry, but this isn't how I first was introduced to these authors.  It is also the case that something more compact may have more impact, particularly on somebody just starting out on a (life)long journey of appreciating books.  I only put one play on the list, as I generally do think they need to be seen to be fully appreciated, but Waiting for Godot was so radical and it did influence me in several ways (I already told the story of how my Senior Honors English teacher had us do a live reading of this in place of our final exam).  I think in a week or two, I will put together a list of the best plays -- perhaps 10 of the ones I consider the most intelligently constructed on the page and 10 productions that have stayed with me all through the years (some might be quite surprising!).

I am tempted to include at least one non-fiction book on the list, but most are a bit too specialized.  I also was tempted to include Thoreau's Walden, but the truth is, while I find much that is admirable about it, it never influenced me that much.  I certainly never wanted to stop being a city boy -- or to slow down.

Now there are a few books that are tempting to throw on the list that skew more towards children, such as The Little Prince or The Phantom Tollbooth, but the truth is that I came to both of those pretty late, and I wouldn't say I was that influenced by them.  Still, both are great books.  Now Charlotte's Web is a more serious contender, and perhaps that will sneak into the first list, particularly if I decide that my knowledge of the Three Laws of Robotics never really came in handy.  But by the same token, I never needed to know how to deal with farm animals!  I probably will have to work Orwell's 1984 onto the list, as that has remains a powerful and depressing vision of the society we are creeping towards and have essentially become.

But rather than making any changes, I'd rather take a week and let some of those omitted books start creeping their way back into my consciousness, asking for a place somewhere on the list.  (I suspect in the end I will cheat and I'll pull the poetry off into its own special list and free up a couple of spaces at least.)

Minor progress

I did manage to get through the TRB reviews.  I made some progress on the documentation and bought basically one more day, so I am about to go work on that (otherwise I will probably fall asleep and just feel like I tossed away my lifeline).  There is one other thing I should do for work, and I can probably wrap that up in 30 minutes, so I'll probably look for a break when I am sick of typing.  I'm not thrilled at how much extra time this is taking, but in some sense I did squander some of my time (prior to this week).  I've always found completing documentation difficult.  This is actually not nearly as bad as the GUM documentation which ended up taking something like a year to complete, and all the files are missing.  Well, after my various recovery attempts, pretty much all the files have been recovered, though some still sit on the TransLink servers, meaning I may not have instant access to them.

I just get distracted by other pressing things, and I find that in general I am a better started of projects than a finisher.  This is something I share with Nelson Algren apparently.  It's also somewhat endemic of the consulting life, though you would think there would be some people coming up through the ranks who are better "finishers."  And in fact, my greatest strength is to do the solid, difficult work in the middle of a project (which in itself is a bit of a rare skill) and hand off stuff to the client and have them satisfied.  Is it so much to ask that someone come around and help me polish off the bitter end of a project (when there is still documentation to write and no budget left)?  Apparently so.

One exciting thing is that I did see the new streetcar on Spadina.  It's almost like catching sight of the white whale.  I had actually debated bringing my camera along when I went to lunch, but left without it.  Too bad.  Anyway, over time these will start becoming far more common on Toronto streets.  Now I happen to like riding on the streetcars (at least some of the time), though I am aware of their shortcomings, particularly when they 1) break down, 2) get diverted with little or no notice and 3) get stuck behind a car making a left turn.  Still, I do like them, especially on weekends when I am not as pressed for time.  It will be a difficult period of adjustment, as they are so much longer and it will be harder for them to interact with cars (and then the cars will make life even harder for cyclists, particularly on Queen and Dundas (west of Broadview at any rate).  I'm sure I'll post more on TTC and its policies later down the road.

We met a very promising candidate to babysit the kids.  We'll ultimately want to find two or three possible sitters, but this one seems like a keeper.  Maybe my wife and I will get to make it to the movies for the first time in months.  That in itself is serious progress.  (The sitter even complimented us on how homey our place felt after only two months, and we really are basically done, aside from the boxes in the basement.)

As much as I want to, I can't spend any time on the basement tonight or probably tomorrow, but after that, I think I can get back to it.  Once I see serious progress down here, I'll be in better spirits and can start thinking about setting up an actual writing schedule or a progress meter or something.  But now -- back to work.

Tough decisions

I finally had a breakthrough in the basement.  I was able to clear enough space to put together the final bookcase and then rearranged a few other boxes.  I also got the rug down, which makes it feel like a more appealing space.  The problem is that I can already tell that there is still going to be some overflow.  I lost roughly 15 linear feet of shelves because the ceilings are lower here, though at least the shelves fit downstairs in the first place.  And there are far fewer places to just stuff things here.  For instance, after the boxes are broken down, I can't just toss them in the garage.

On the positive side, this will probably force me to start getting serious about tossing out books that are only marginally of interest after I have read them.  I'll also have to get off the pot on one of these academic projects I have been considering for a long time.  If I am not going to follow through with it, I need to part with the relevant books (ideally donating them to the UT library if they don't happen to have them).  And I really need to start paring down my CD and DVD collection, so I'll have to find out which shops actually buy them and start up a routine of visiting them and dropping off those things I can part with.

Just looking at the shelves of books that I have tentatively marked as read once and discard, I just wonder if I will have time to get through them all and how would I start narrowing that massive bunch down (without reading them...).  It just feels overwhelming right now, but I'll probably get back to some equilibrium down the road, i.e. I'd still be pushing off some tough decisions in the hope that I could get through them all.  I guess what I really need to do is to rip through a bunch of 150-250 page books and clear them out, and I'll feel so much better, but I really do want to stick to my program of Russian novelists and thinkers for the time being.*

The other tough decision is whether to push through and get most of the books on the shelves or to just do a bit each night.  I'd really prefer the first approach, but I just have too much real work that is intervening.  For that matter, I promised to complete a bunch of reviews for TRB and they are all due tomorrow.  So instead of going off to the AGO (and a stop off at work), I think I'll take the kids for a quick trip to the park and then come back and get caught up.  So I will try to do the right thing, which basically means unplugging from the internet for a couple of days.  I'll check back with my progress after the reviews and in and the TransLink document is submitted.  It could be another long night...


* I will admit that following through is a real problem because there are just so many ideas I want to pursue and books I want to read.  And then I get an idea like scanning journals or digitizing cassettes or even VHS tapes, and I get about halfway through and run out of steam.  It's not that this doesn't make an improvement since I can toss stuff out along the way, but in general, it would probably be better to try to see one idea through at a time.  Well, as always, easier said than done.

Iris Murdoch's Under the Net

This current post was meant to be written as a continuation of this post, but with the packing and a lot of other things coming up, I just had to push it off for several months now!  I'm not sure if I will ever get through the whole of Iris Murdoch (or Muriel Spark for that matter), but I was told that her first book, Under the Net, was a particularly strong one to start with.  And it is a fairly fun romp, though every now and again, you want to give the main character Jake Donaghue, a good shake for being so stubborn or short-sighted.  I think in particular his decision to stop translating books by the French author Jean Pierre Breteuil once Jean Pierre actually went and wrote a decent book was petty and small.

While it is hardly a new insight, I did like the way Murdoch expressed the idea that a person really can't know how others see him or her and that these others have internal lives in which the observer may play only a fairly small role.  Given how I have continually uprooted myself from family and potential friends, this is not news to me.  On the flip side, because I identify so closely with academics, they all scattered anyway, and even if I had stayed in Toronto or Chicago (both places where I went to grad school), they would have moved away from me.  Even now that I am moving back to Toronto, I believe I will only be near two or three people that were in my Masters program, and a couple of people in the transportation world that I know reasonably well from conferences. I've actually written before on rootlessness and how Simmel argued that for some people, their ties were not primarily geographic.  That is certainly true of me.

But back to the point at hand, back in January I finally read Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen, and it expressed this same view that Donaghue has, i.e. that we are only fairly minor actors in other people's dramas, though this role can expand and shrink based on how much we interact with others.

Anyway, here are the passages from Under the Net:
We all live in the interstices of each other's lives, and we would all get a surprise if we could see everything. (p. 50)

Donaghue realizes he had been mistaken about Anna's true feelings: "I had no longer any picture of Anna. She faded like a sorcerer's apparition; and yet somehow her presence remained to me, more substantial than ever before.  It seemed as if, for the first time, Anna really existed now as a separate being and not as a part of myself.  To experience this was extremely painful. (p. 268)

I hope or at least think that I am bigger than Donaghue in that Under the Net is reasonably close to the kind of novel I hope to write some day -- some amusing episodes, some tolerably profound sentiments passed back and forth (though hopefully I can at least give different characters  different voices rather than being uniform).  I even was going to have an escape out the window which occurs in Under the Net (fortunately such escapes are common enough that one cannot be accused of plagiarizing any particular one).  So I could choose to mope or at least feign unhappiness about being scooped (which is more or less Donaghue's reaction to Jean Pierre's good fortune in finally writing a well-received book), or I can just get on with the business of writing.

As far as that goes, I clearly need to clean out more of the basement before I can really have a productive space conductive to creative writing.  It is past time to shut down the blog for the day (though I am feeling reasonably satisfied about the last four posts or so) and spend some time unpacking and sorting and reshelving.

Proust redux

So it turns out that when I am not distracted by other books, I can read Proust on a fairly normal schedule.  The first two volumes took 2 months each, but I managed to get through the 3rd in 3-4 weeks.  The bad news, however, is that reading it straight through didn't really make it any more compelling, even when Proust kills off one of the key characters to the Narrator's early development, and while the Narrator does mope about it to some degree, he actually seems to think it is just as well that this person died before their being "on the down low" was discovered.  (I'll actually dwell a bit more on the somewhat bizarre treatment of homosexuality below, since it is inescapable from the second volume on).  The depiction of the writer Bergotte's death is certainly more sensitive, though as I already groused it is spoiled for me by the fact that the Narrator could not have possibly witnessed it or known Bergotte's last thoughts. Basically, I never did get over the issues I had with memory -- false memory and impossible memories, particularly the hundreds of pages that Proust devotes to Swann’s love affair with Odette, when there doesn’t seem to be any opportunity for the Narrator to ever have learned about these details, particularly at such length.

On the whole, there are a few decent insights per chapter and one or two true belly laughs, but there is nothing in here that truly merits this length. I'll go ahead and provide a few of the most interesting bits below. If they strike you as pretty thin gruel, then by all means skip Proust entirely; you don't need to feel like you are missing out.

[Françoise] was one of those servants who in a household seem least satisfactory, at first, to a stranger, doubtless because they take no pains to make a conquest of him and shew him no special attention, knowing very well that they have no real need of him, that he will cease to be invited to the house sooner than they will be dismissed from it; who, on the other hand, cling with most fidelity to those masters and mistresses who have tested and proved their real capacity, and do not look for that superficial responsiveness, that slavish affability, which may impress a stranger favourably, but often conceals an utter barrenness of spirit in which no amount of training can produce the least trace of individuality.

It is paradoxical, as Françoise seemed so uncongenial to the Narrator but then ends up sticking around forever. To some extent this was one of the problems of this particular form of labour relations -- what to do with aged servants who had more or less become part of the family. What does seem particularly unfair is how Proust translated an actual servant who was completely devoted to him (Céleste Albaret)* into this querulous, fairly stupid peasant-type. There is also perhaps a bit of transference of guilt over being so coddled and pampered by others (though this definitely might be a modern day rereading of Proust).  Rushdie's Midnight's Children seems to encapsulate the dilemma of living so closely with servants who know every bit of your business, though he adds a somewhat creepy sexual dimension on top of this by having Saleem sleep with Padma on an occasional basis.

What is somewhat interesting is the Narrator's description of certain kinds of technologies coming into more widespread use (at least among the upper classes), such as telephones and private automobiles.  There is even a bizarre bit where the Narrator is befuddled by a revolving door.  While the coming of the railroad and its impacts on society was even more profound (and well covered by Dickens (see Dombey and Son), Trollope (The Way We Live Now) and Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, obviously)), Proust was writing in a time when technological change was really picking up steam.  He generally was writing about the more positive side of technological change, which makes sense that these inventions were often first marketed to the well-off as conveniences or even expensive toys.  You would have to look to Dickens and even Trollope to get the more rounded picture of how industrialization also changed societies and put many out of work and divorced the factory workers from the land.  (Heck, you could even find this line of thinking expressed by Father Beaubien in MacLennan's Two Solitudes, written 25 years after Remembrance.)

Certainly a Marxian critic could have a field day with Proust, given that he provides so much detail about the upper classes and occasionally furnishes some insight into the relationship of the working class servants to their employers.  I think class-based analysis is essential to understanding Proust, but at the same time there is a certain sameness to what one could say about this, book after book.  I very quickly found the Narrator deeply immersed in a world of boring parasites, who were almost indistinguishable at the many boring parties that Proust describes. Even the Narrator later seems to feel a bit ashamed of how he sometimes spurned more artistic types in favour of attending another party.

I was constantly asking myself why I spent thousands of pages inhabiting the world of people whom I despised, not least of which was the Narrator. He reports at one point that his servant Françoise once said he wasn’t worth the rope it would take to hang him, and it’s hard to say she was wrong. He is a schemer, loose-lipped, very full of himself and generally disinclined to actually do anything other than go to parties. His entire class appears parasitical and unbelievably status-conscious. Since they all seem interchangeable, I have no desire to read at length about a party where they try to snub others outside their circle, and yet that kept coming up over and over. I thought the nobility in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina were pretty intolerable, but this batch is far worse.

It was marginally interesting to see how the Dreyfus affair did divide society, raising its head in different contexts and even causing some breaks between friends.  Typically, Proust describes how one salon would primarily be inhabited by those who were completely convinced about Dreyfus's guilt and then another where most people had doubts.  Obviously, antisemitism was a recurring theme whenever Dreyfus came up.  Proust does show how at least some people in society could either change their minds or, more typically for those that didn't particularly care either way, equivocate so that they could move in both social spheres.  Certainly a number of people decided it was the wisest course to simply hide their true feelings regarding the Dreyfus affair unless it was completely clear what those around them thought about it.  I think if one was going to write a contemporary novel set in New York or particularly D.C., any discussions about Snowden would be somewhat comparable, though no one doubts he really took the NSA documents, but rather whether his actions were justified.  If one is more interested in conversations where guilt is uncertain (and sometimes discussions over the slippery nature of Truth can be worthwhile) then the Amanda Knox case or even the Woody Allen molestation accusations might be more polarizing (than Snowden -- given that people on the two sides hardly talk to each other other than just hurling insults on Internet message boards), though I don't know whether these cases are discussed "in society."

Still, Proust's introduction of the Dreyfus affair resulted in this short passage, which was just about the only time I laughed out loud in weeks of reading: “My mother, torn between her love for my father and her hope that I might turn out to have brains, preserved an impartiality which she expressed by silence.”

One other insight related to these salons: the more literary the salon, the more likely that it appear to historians to be the most popular when this probably wasn’t the case at all, but simply that it left more records.

That pretty much is the extent of what I found worthy in Proust. The rest was incredibly repetitive. The sexual politics in Remembrance were appalling. Virtually all the men in the book end up falling for courtesans who were two-bit whores earlier in their careers. I haven't felt the whore-madonna complex so widespread in society (or at least one author's representation of society) since Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy (of which my overall review is shamefully delinquent -- it probably shouldn't be hard to guess that I found The Cairo Trilogy far more rewarding, and it can sometimes be harder to write about things you respect more than things you don't care for).

Throughout the book, particularly the first two volumes, the Narrator strikes me as such a whiny, boring and immature brat. He pines endlessly for one woman after another. I found it very hard to get a handle on his age in the second and beginning of the third volume.  While I would guess he was roughly 18 or 19 (as he had visited brothels already) he seems to act closer to 15, particularly when he first meets Albertine and the other girls on vacation. 

I'm turning the corner on this admittedly very long wrap-up of Proust, but now is the time for a SPOILER warning.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

I've gone into some of my major stylistic problems with Proust here and here, but ultimately I was totally turned off by the twist at the end of vol. 2 (Sodom and Gomorrah) where the Narrator learns that Albertine has occasionally indulged in lesbian antics and decides he will marry her to "save" her from these tendencies.  So he installs her in his house with the promise of marriage and turns her into essentially a prisoner (and thus the title of book 5).  But he suffers unbearably from jealousy and obsesses just how much lesbian sex Albertine has actually had.  It is so unpleasant reading this.  Why couldn't he just leave her alone?  Even leaving aside the fact that homosexuality was not acceptable in this era, he could have just stayed out of it.  It makes no sense to me that he ran through all his inheritance in a totally futile attempt to change someone else and force them to conform to his views (and admittedly most of society's) of what was acceptable.  I guess it was telling that Proust often used the term "invert" for male homosexuals, which while marginally more acceptable than "deviant" is pretty judgmental.  Proust also says some frankly silly things about how inversion can be conquered by will-power, which he must have surely known was not the case.  (This blog goes into considerable detail about how Proust transformed a male love-interest into Albertine.)

Even leaving the Narrator's obsession with whether Albertine and Andrée got it on and, if so, how many times aside (and it is the main thrust of The Prisoner (or The Captive) and The Fugitive), the last volume of Remembrance is basically a monument to The Closet.  Almost all the men that interact with Palamède de Guermantes, the Baron de Charlus,** are homosexuals, and there is a bit where he basically finds homosexuals under every overturned stone in Paris.  It is all a bit much.  Obviously there is transference going on on an epic scale, as the Narrator (and his father and Swann and Palamède's brother) ultimately end up just about the only straight men in Paris.  A bit of an exaggeration, but not much.  I found it exhausting and more than a little tragic, thinking of all the lives that were ruined by having to hide their sexuality.  Nonetheless, the Narrator's deliberate attempts to squelch Albertine were just one more thing in a long list of things that turned me against him and Remembrance of Things Past in general.

And with that, I think I have finally had my say on Proust.

* Apparently, she wrote a book, Monsieur Proust, about her experiences living with and working for Proust.  It fleshes out what we think we know about Proust from his descriptions of the Narrator.  Not surprisingly, some biographical details embedded in Remembrance still hold up whereas others were completely transformed or fictionalized in some way.  To be honest, I don't have enough interest in Proust to read this, but I can see the appeal for anyone who was more sympathetic to Proust and what he was up to.  While perhaps it is too much of a stretch, I wonder if the portrait of the secretly intelligent concierge, Renée, in Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog was somewhat inspired by Céleste Albaret.  Perhaps I am just particularly resistant to French literature these days, as I was quite turned off by Hedgehog as well.

** The Baron de Charlus is an unpleasant character to be sure, though I (and certainly the Narrator) may on occasion cut him a bit of slack simply because it was so difficult to be a man with "vices" that would have destroyed him in society were they discovered.  And indeed this basically what transpires in the final book, Time Regained.  (Incidentally, there is a movie of that title directed by Raúl Ruiz where John Malkovitch is cast as the Baron de Charlus.  I haven't seen it but that strikes me as just terrible celebrity-driven casting.  I'm sure I am being unfair, however.)  While he doesn't have quite as far to fall, I find there are some interesting ties between Charlus and Edward II (as represented in Marlowe's play).  I have trouble believing Proust would have been aware of this play (and obviously not the brilliant Derek Jarman film) but stranger things have happened.

Anyway, despite his decline in society, Charlus is sort of restored to his former glory (at least in his own mind) when wartime comes and Paris fills with soldiers and is largely emptied of women.  There is a kind of creepy scene where Charlus pursues "rough trade" sex from a soldier and then runs into the Narrator just outside the bawdy house.  Perhaps for the best, he is not aware of what the Narrator knows about him and his proclivities, and they stroll on for a bit in the darkened streets of Paris.  I find this section just slightly Cooveresque (here I am thinking of Pinocchio in Venice).  To be scrupulous, this passage did catch my attention and was, for me, the best part of all of Time Regained:

The aeroplanes which a few hours earlier I had seen, like insects, as brown dots upon the surface of the blue evening, now passed like blazing fire-ships through the darkness of the night, which was made darker still by the partial extinction of the street lamps. And perhaps the greatest impression of beauty that these human shooting stars made us feel came simply from their forcing us to look at the sky, towards which normally we so seldom raise our eyes. In this Paris, whose beauty in 1914 I had seen awaiting almost defenceless the threat of the approaching enemy, there was certainly, as there had been then, the ancient unalterable splendour of a moon cruelly and mysteriously serene, which poured down its useless beauty upon the still untouched buildings of the capital; but as in 1914, and more now than in 1914, there was also something else, there were lights from a different source, intermittent beams which, whether they came from the aeroplanes or from the searchlights of the Eiffel Tower, one knew to be directed by an intelligent will, by a friendly vigilance which gave one the same kind of emotion, inspired the same sort of gratitude and calm that I had felt in Saint-Loup’s room at Doncières, in the cell of that military cloister where so many fervent and disciplined hearts were exercising themselves in readiness for the day when, without hesitation, in the midst of their youth, they would consummate their sacrifice.

More thoughts on theatre (Tartuffe fall-out)

I think I may need to explain this post a bit better and preempt at least a few angry comments.

First, I do want to stress that, for the most part, I thought the production of Tartuffe was well done, but the play itself was execrable.

Second, I don't mean that people that enjoyed themselves were duped.  What I was really getting at is that there is a powerful tendency for people who have spent a fair bit of money (and time!) on something, either a car or a house or an evening out, will generally want to feel that their money was well-spent -- and that their judgement was correct in purchasing that thing in the first place.  It is essentially a form of self-reinforcement. Georg Simmel goes into this at some length in The Philosophy of Money, a profound but relatively unknown book.

Third, I don't consider it an insult to say that, for many theatre-goers, plot is fairly incidental compared to the dialogue (even I find the language in Walsh's Penelope far more interesting than the so-called plot), or the quality of the acting, or some aspect of the director's approach, or even the sets and costumes.  All of these are perfectly valid things to focus on.  It is just in my make-up that I am deeply driven by plot considerations, which is why I very rarely see the same play done more than once, even if it is a different production.  There are exceptions of course, particularly plays that are mostly about ideas which I find stimulating.  As it happens, I'll almost certainly be seeing Arcadia for a third time in November.

The last thing I want to discuss is that I seem to be implying that Molière is violating a contract with the audience when he pulls these rabbits out hats without any warning.  Actually, I do feel this way.  But what could this mean?  It's not that I think any idea is too "out there" to be put on stage, but that a good playwright will construct a play within a particular set of rules.  There is one set for comedy (where all must be set right at the end) and another for classic tragedy (it is almost inevitable that there be a way out of the unfolding mess on stage but the protagonist's fatal flaw closes this off).  There are more realistic dramas where there may not even be a true villain in a piece but the point of the play is that people have legitimate interests that clash and end up hurting others (I'm sort of thinking about The Glass Menagerie or some of O'Neill's later plays).  The whole second paragraph of this post from a couple of years ago goes into this at length.

One thing does bear repeating and that is, I really don't think most playwrights or actors understand that most people that do go to theatre aren't fully immersed in their world.  (And this is particularly true for Broadway productions.)  We are just occasional sight-seers.  There is a clear tendency in essentially all the arts for artists to feel stifled and/or bored by convention and to want to try new things; this almost always ends up being pretty esoteric -- free jazz for example or a lot of conceptual art and nearly all performance art.  But theatre requires an audience, and this audience is very often not "ready" or remotely interested in ditching theatrical conventions.

So one could argue (though I don't really think it was the case) that Molière knowingly violated the rules of comedy by delaying the downfall of the scoundrel Tartuffe for an unnaturally long time, but even more importantly, did not have his downfall brought about by the resourcefulness of the main characters, but rather by a deus ex machina in the form of message from the king that set things right.  How many people would find this a clever ending aimed at theatre "insiders" specifically because it thumbed its nose at convention versus how many would just feel that there was something wrong with the play because it refused to follow the typical rules of comedy?  It really is difficult to walk that line between playing primarily to a very small elite group within the already fairly elite group of theatre-goers and catering to the broader crowd.  Certainly when I have overheard people leaving the theatre, they so rarely catch many nuances of the plays and sometimes have major misunderstandings of what actually happened in the plot.  Personally, I've come to the conclusion that if you want to work in theatre, which requires and indeed demands a public in the way being a novelist does not (though clearly a novelist would like to find a public!), then one should play fair with one's audience.  I suppose this really is quite a conservative view, but it is one that is grounded in wanting the audience to be respected and perhaps even more in the belief that there is a kind of artistic integrity to a play that should be maintained.  (Next thing you know, I'll be resurrecting New Criticism.)

But it is even ok to put together a play within a set of rules that are postmodern, i.e. there are no rules or at least no conventional ones, but this should be established early on, and certainly by the intermission, so that people who wish to leave may do so.  Certainly Jones and others pour much of their scorn on plays that suddenly shift direction and their ground rules after the intermission.

Curiously, I was somewhat involved in a play that does exactly this. David Henry Hwang set out to write a play that starts as a family comedy and devolves into tragedy.  This was Family Devotions.  While I did enjoy it, it does not surprise me that it wasn't viewed as a particularly successful play because it is unsettling.  I might well not have been so forgiving if I hadn't read the play first.  In this case, I may be too willing to interpret some of the unsettling aspects of the first half as being enough of a sign post that the play was not going to fall into a completely comic mode.  But as I said, I was an insider for this production (I was actually just rotating off the board of that particular theatre company and knew all the actors) and was willing to accept the rules being deeply bent in this particular case.

At any rate, I think I have made my position on Tartuffe clear enough.  From my perspective, it violates far too many precepts of the rules of comedy.  Indeed, the amount of information withheld from the audience and revealed later is enormous, and that's probably the biggest cheat.  It isn't even particularly original, as pious hypocrites have been in literature for ages, notably in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and in Boccaccio's The Decameron.

I hate Tartuffe

No, this is not some wry play on Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet.  It turns out that I basically despise the structure and plot of Tartuffe, whereas I think The Misanthrope (a slightly later play) still offers some pretty insightful material.

As far as the overall experience, it was pretty mixed.  I liked the fact that Soulpepper (or truly the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto's Distillery Historic District) has a modern lobby that is almost spacious enough for all the theatre-goers.  This is generally a problem at so many theatres where it is just miserable to be pressed for space while waiting for what seems like forever for the house to open.  And the crowd skewed fairly young, which is a great sign.  What was bad was that the two main transit options had major flaws in them.  I took the 72C bus and walked under the Gardiner as directed, but the sidewalks were all torn up and I had to cross roads twice without any traffic lights and then double back when what was left of the sidewalk had been completely fenced off.  As a pedestrian option, it was shit.  Then on the way back, the King streetcar has been rerouted for another few months, so I had to walk up to Queen, which was a bit annoying.  Maybe it is just another sign that I am to avoid Soulpepper this year and check back next year.  (I am bummed that last season looked absolutely amazing -- Angels in America, Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests and Fugard's The Road to Mecca -- and I definitely would have subscribed.  This year nothing really catches my fancy -- and I was so let down by Tartuffe.)

I should say that the acting wasn't really the problem.  I did think the direction was to play it a little overbroad and even a bit like a cartoon, and that wasn't to my taste.  However, the actor playing Tartuffe did a very good job of putting on the mask of false piety (and even a bit of unctuousness), and then later revealing just how terrible and forceful he was underneath. Orgon's wife Elmire was well-played, and I thought the first attempted seduction scene was well done.  Even at that point, I was starting to tune out because Orgon was thick as a brick, and I really hated the reminder that women were nothing more than chattel at that moment in time, but I was still more or less hanging in there.  It was the turn of events after Tartuffe is unmasked where I basically lost interest in the play, and I'll get to that in a minute.  While the maid Dorine was just a bit too saucy to be believable, I thought she was the other stand-out in the play, though again directed just a bit too broad for me.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

So to keep you from making the same mistake I did, I will work through what I hated about the play.  I don't find simpletons particularly interesting, which is why I have never been remotely interested in Forrest Gump.  Intelligent or semi-intelligent people being duped are somewhat more interesting, though this can still be a one-trick pony of a play or movie.  But there comes a point (say after Tartuffe's seduction is revealed and he even admits he was at fault and should leave) where a normal, halfway sane person would listen to others and not double-down by disinheriting his son and ignoring his wife.  It is the too stupid to be believed threshold, and Orgon crossed it fairly early in the play.  (Actually, I already hated Orgon when it was revealed he cared far more about Tartuffe than his wife; even when Dorine upbraided him about it, she is brushed off.) In this case, he is basically too stupid to live (having at least 4 good advisers whom he ignores), and I didn't have any sympathy for him, though it was a shame about his family.  If I was watching TV I would have turned it off and I probably would have left if this were a movie.  And I seriously thought about leaving at intermission (my ears were actually hot I was so angry), but I did want to see how Tartuffe's downfall came about.

Speaking of movies, it did not help that a few weeks ago I saw Satyajit Ray's The Holy Man, which does brilliantly in one hour what it takes Molière 2.5 hours to do badly.  And The Holy Man has a satisfying ending, which Molière completely failed to provide.  So onward.

Elmire hatches a plot to have Tartuffe try to seduce her again with Orgon in the room.  While Tartuffe suspects some treachery, he eventually falls prey to his lust and comes close to consummating the deed.  One woman in the balcony actually burst out "Fucking shit" when Orgon simply would not come out from under the table.  So I don't think I was the only one that thought the pacing was really problematic.  Moliere has Orgon say that he was paralyzed by learning how wrong he was and his mind was whirling.  Fair enough, but he still should have come out earlier to stop the rape of his wife.  Well, in the end he comes out just in the nick of time.  Much relieved laughter from the audience, but none from me.

For half a second, it looks like the trick has worked, and then Tartuffe changes into a different character and says that no, he isn't leaving, that he will turn them out of house.  And this is where things totally go off the rails.  (Though I can sort of understand Molière wanted to tease the audience since in a normal play this would be the turn, leading to the happy ending.)  But really, what rank moron would hand over the deed to his own house while he was still alive?  I don't believe that for a second and it obviously ruins the plot of the play.  But then Molière raises the stakes by introducing a box of treacherous letters that Orgon held for an acquaintance but that he then gave over to Tartuffe for safe keeping.  Umm exqueeze me?  Introducing some key plot point this late in the game (that not even his wife was aware of) is such a cheat.  But it gets worse.

Orgon's mother comes over and then she won't believe the terrible things that Tartuffe has done.  All this is just to allow Dorine to essentially say "sucks to not be believed, doesn't it?"  But obviously the apple didn't fall far from the tree, and she is also dumb as mud.  I actually sensed the audience turning at this point, getting a bit fed up.  If the director was sensible, he would have completely cut this unnecessary bit from the play.  Okay, she quickly changes her tune when the baliff turns up to kick them out of the house, but it is still deeply unsatisfying.

The letters turn out to be just as dangerous as Orgon suspected, and he is about to flee the country when Tartuffe shows up and points them out to the King's Officer.  How the worm has turned, and there are a couple of good lines between Orgon and Tartuffe at this point (not enough to salvage the play obviously).  So how will this end?  How will the tables be turned?

And then a little golden carriage roles out and the King's Officer reads a message literally covered with gold sparkles.  The message is that Tartuffe is to be arrested and the deeds returned to Orgon.  It so transpires that the king in his infinite wisdom knew that Tartuffe was a trickster and just needed more proof, so he let things all play out as they did until it was nearly too late.  So perhaps a nod or two to The Tempest, which as I already pointed out does have its own shortcomings due to the lack of any real threat to Prospero.  Or one could point out that in some ways this isn't that far off from the Book of Job, which is just one damn thing after another until finally God steps in and makes it all better, which is unsatisfying on so many levels, not least of which is God just stands by and lets Job's children be killed off, whereas Molière has the king intervene before anyone really gets hurt.

I will say that I give props to the director for having at least a couple of actors, including Dorine, look totally stunned at this turn of events, as golden confetti rains down upon them.  The happy resolution does come out of nowhere.  It reinforces Molière's somewhat sycophantic relationship to Louis XIV (who was basically the only one who kept him from being excommunicated over this play!), i.e. even if the Church is full of hypocrites, the monarchy is still just and all-knowing.  And it is a complete cheat on every level, from a dramatic point of view.  It easily takes the crown from Shakespeare's As You Like It as the most deeply unsatisfying ending to a major play I have ever seen.  I was just so disgusted with the play itself, I could barely force myself to clap for the actors.  Most people did enjoy themselves (or at least convinced themselves they had a good time), but I was not one of them.

So you have been warned.  If you largely go to plays for their plot (and in fairness most people do not), then Tartuffe is one to be avoided.