Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

I am an invisible man.  No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.  I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind.  I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.  Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.  When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me.

I was thumbing through the recent collection of Muriel Spark's essays, The Informed Air, and was struck by something she said about contemporary literature.  I can't recall it exactly, but her point was that not all good literature is a social good, singling out what she saw as a glut of literature exploring victimization and suffering.  She believed that if we really wanted to see social change through literature, writers must abandon tragedy and turn to comedy and satire; they must make the powerful look ridiculous.

I was reminded of that when reading Invisible Man, because I couldn't help but notice how similar it is to Black Boy.  Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were friends, and had strikingly similar experiences which are recounted in the two books: they are Southerners driven north by racial animus (Wright to Chicago, Ellison to New York) where they flirt with Communism before becoming disillusioned with the way that it suppresses their individuality and intellect.  Ellison's unnamed narrator is invisible because, as a black man, whites don't see him--in the opening chapter he talks about savagely beating a white man who bumped him on the street, literally not noticing that he was there--but also because those who claim to want to help him and help black communities are incapable of seeing him as anything but a political tool.

But where Black Boy is the kind of book that Spark warned against, intensely focused on Wright's individual suffering and victimhood, Invisible Man is something wildly different--not a satire, really, but grimly comic, sometimes bordering on the fantastical.  The opening paragraph establishes the narrator (in a mode cribbed from Notes From the Underground) hiding out in a forgotten basement, stealing electricity to power the thousands of lightbulbs with which he has decorated his sanctuary.  That warped sense of not-quite-realism pervades the book, but in a way it is more appropriate than the hyper-realism of Wright, who wants the reader to know exactly what happened to him, when, why, and who.  It is the mode of someone who is shut out from the conventional structures of power, society, and literature.

The narrator begins as an eager young student at a predominantly black Southern university who, as a consequence of an ill-fated job chauffeuring a major donor around town, is sent to New York under false promises of employment by the university president.  There he becomes involved with an organization called the Brotherhood--I'm not sure, but I don't think the book ever uses the term "Communist"--who need his public speaking abilities to advance their cause.  Summarizing the plot this way makes it seem rather straightforward, but the actual experience of the book is chaotic.  In fact, Ellison writes about chaos with a facility that I've never seen before.  A couple scenes stand out: one in the beginning of the book in which the narrator and a number of other black boys take part in a "battle royal" for the prize of a university scholarship, and the brilliant end piece in which Harlem erupts into race riots.

But the one that amazed me the most is the story of the narrator's chauffeuring job.  He inadvertently drives the donor past the house of a poor black man who is reviled for impregnating his own daughter; the donor insists that they stop and talk to the man, who tells them his story.  This is gruesome and outlandish enough, but when the donor becomes faint from shock at the story he's been told, the narrator has nowhere to take him but to a nearby tavern which has been overrun by a group of black veterans from the local insane asylum.  This series of events is preposterous, hilarious, captivating, tragic--utterly ridiculous, but perfectly done.  In the end, the donor is treated by a half-mad veteran doctor who, as the mad do, sees things better than either the donor or the narrator:

"A little child shall lead them," the vet said with a smile.  "But seriously, because you both fail to understand what is happening to you.  You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see--and you, looking for destiny!  It's classic!  And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and he sees far less than you.  Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other.  To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less--a black amorphous thing.  And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force--"

The novel is full of terrific stuff like that, but the one other terrific thing that seems necessary to mention is the figure of Ras the Exhorter (laster Ras the Destroyer), a Harlem demagogue who urges the black community to complete separation from whites as well as racial violence.  He pops up now and then opposing the Brotherhood's efforts in Harlem, and his influence leads directly to the race riot of the book's climax.  Check out this description of him at that point:

They moved in a tight-knit order, carrying sticks and clubs, shotguns and rifles, led by Ras the Exhorter become Ras the Destroyer upon a great black horse.  The new Ras of a haughty, vulgar dignity, dressed in the costume of an Abyssinian chieftain; a fur cap on his head, his arm bearing a shield, a cape made of the skin of some wild animal around his shoulders.  A figure more out of a dream than out of Harlem, than out of even this Harlem night, yet real, alive, alarming.

Real, alive, alarming--the poisoned racial atmosphere of America, Ellison shows us, has a way of dredging up nightmares and turning them into reality.  I think this is what Spark was talking about.  For all of Wright's honesty, there's nothing as universally frightening in Black Boy as the image of Ras the Destroyer in his warlord's outfit, wreaking havoc on a Harlem night,

Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat

We spent most of yesterday telling stories.  Someone says, Krik?  You answer, Krak!  And they say, I have many stories I could tell you, and then they go on and tell these stories to you, but mostly to themselves.  Sometimes it feels like we have been at sea longer than the many years that I have been on this earth.

Krik? Krak! was another suggestion given to me for the ninth grade, and it hits all the right criteria: the author, Edwidge Danticat, is a woman of color, a New Yorker born in Haiti, and the protagonists of the short stories in the collection are mostly, but not always, women of color as well.  And the stories themselves are excellent--I admit this is a book I had been reluctant to read because of its voguishness in high school curricula.  (I have a distrust for contemporary books that are read more in schools than outside of them.)  But they are good.

The first story in the collection, "Children of the Sea," takes the form of letters written back and forth between a Haitian woman and her lover, who is in a raft trying to cross the Caribbean Sea to the United States to seek asylum.  The female writer talks about the political violence happening in Haiti, the male writer about the dwindling food rations and approaching dehydration on the raft.  Of course, the writers have no way to get these letters to their intended recipient--but they write them all the same, knowing that they'll never reach the other.  That kind of elegiac touch is typical of Krik? Krak!, which catalogs the myriad ways that political and economic instability erode the lives and minds of ordinary Haitians.

[Spoiler alert for the following paragraphs.]  The best story, I think, is "Between the Pool and Gardenias," the story of a Haitian woman who finds a baby on on the curb of the road and keeps it as her own.  The narrator herself has had many miscarriages, and the providential child underlines the difference in the family life of the rich and poor, the traditional and urbane:

When I had just come to the city, I saw on Madame's television that al ot of poor city women throw out their babies because they can't afford to feed them.  Back in Ville Rose you cannot even throw out the bloody clumps that shoot out of your body after your body after your child is born.  It is a crime, they say, and your whole family would consider you wicked if you did it.  You have to save every piece of flesh and give it a name and bury it near the roots of a tree so that the world won't fall apart around you.

In the city, I hear they throw out whole entire children.  They throw them out anywhere: on doorsteps, in garbage cans, at gas pumps, sidewalks.  In the time I had been in Port-au-Prince, I had never seen such a child until now.

But as Danticat slowly reveals, the child that the narrator has taken in is herself already dead, and the narrator tragically deluded.  The tragedy is a political one, informed by the narrator's poverty, her isolation, her migration from the Haitian countryside to the city, but more than that it is intimate and psychological.  Danticat manages to strike just the right balance between these.

I don't think I want to teach these stories.  For one, I don't love the idea of teaching a collection of stories in the first place.  Secondly, they are frequently punishing--from the doomed lovers of "Children of the Sea" to the would-be mother of "Between the Pool and Gardenias," they are emotionally difficult material.  In another story, a man jumps out of a hot air balloon to his death.  The darkness eases up only toward the end, with the final trio of stories, which are set in the New York Haitian immigrant community.  These stories, like "Caroline's Wedding," which details the culturally difficult marriage of a Haitian woman and a non-Haitian man, are devoid of the blood-and-terror of the Haitian stories.  More importantly, they fulfill the scuttled promise of the very first story by depicting immigrants who have built successful, hard-won lives in the United States. 

That's part of the question Danticat poses, of course: are the sufferings of the Haitians in the first stories redeemed by the lives of the Haitian-Americans in the final ones?  Does the Haitian mother, even as she struggles to accept her daughter's marriage, recover the dream of the narrator of "Between the Pool and Gardenias" to have a daughter who is safe and loved?

So Far from God by Ana Castillo

The lid had pushed all the way open and the little girl inside sat up, just as sweetly as if she had woken from a nap, rubbing her eyes and yawning.  "Mami?" she called, looking around and squinting her eyes and against the harsh light.  Father Jerome got hold of himself and sprinkled holy water in the direction of the child, but for a moment was too stunned to utter so much as a word of prayer.  Then, as if all this was not amazing enough, as Father Jerome moved toward the child she lifted herself up into the air and landed on the church roof.  "Don't touch me, don't touch me!" she warned.

Here's a partial list of the protagonists of the novels read by my freshman class this past year: Holden Caulfield.  Winston Smith.  John Singer.  Pip.  Huckleberry Finn.  You may notice they have something in common: they're white, and they're male.  With the exception of Mick Kelly, one member of the ensemble cast of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, there are no female protagonists, and no protagonists of color.  These facts aren't lost on the students, either.

And yet, it's not an easy problem to solve.  House on Mango Street?  Persepolis?  Already read in earlier grades.  Song of Solomon?  Their Eyes Were Watching God?  Woman Warrior?  The later grades.  We tried to solve the problem by adding Kindred, but in my eyes that novel is simply not good enough.  The sad truth is that canonical books with female protagonists of color--the kind that are unquestionably of literary value, as a matter of consensus--are so few that they already occupy places in the curriculum.  I don't mean to say that there aren't hundreds of excellent books that would work well, only that save for a select few, they exist at the margins of literary prestige, needing to be discovered and championed.  So Far From God, which I read at the suggestion of a fellow teacher, is one of a handful of books I read recently in search for a solution.

Unfortunately, I don't think this book is it--at least, not for me.  So Far From God is the story of a Latino family living in New Mexico, Sofi and her four daughters: Esperanza, Fe, Caridad, and La Loca, a mysterious and antisocial child who seems to dwell in a separate, more spiritual world.  The book opens with La Loca dying and then returning to life at her own funeral, then flying up to the roof of the church.

These magical realist touches recur throughout the book, drawing from a Spanish language tradition typified by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  It's not a style I love, honestly--though I ought to admit I've never actually read a book by Marquez.  In Castillo's hands, at least, it seems to me that the magical bits undercut the realism and plausibility of the characters, eating away at the sympathy we might otherwise feel for them.  When Caridad, famous in town for her licentious ways, is found brutally mangled by the side of the road, La Loca's prayer intervention restores her mysteriously to health--but at the expense of the emotional impact of Caridad's injuries.  I don't mean that we feel less for Caridad because she is magically restored, but that she becomes less a human protagonist than a vehicle for a magical experience that the narrative is more interested in, despite its humanist and feminist pretenses.  Similarly, the story ushers Esperanza off to the Middle East as a war correspondent, where she stays conveniently out of sight until her death, at which point she returns as a mystical presence to her family's New Mexico home--a more interesting presence, it seems, than the living Esperanza who has been absent from the story for a hundred pages.

In fact, the part I found most affecting was the death of Fe:

The rest of this story is hard tor elate.

Because after Fe died, she did not resurrect as La Loca did at age three.  She also did not return ectoplasmically like her tenacious earth-bound sister Esperanza.  Very shortly after that first prognosis, Fe just died.  And when someone dies that plain dead, it is hard to talk about.

But "plain dead" is something that Castillo isn't able to talk about, beyond that paragraph above.

The book has a lot of strengths, and I would recommend it to interested students.  It shuffles around a large cast without seeming frenetic or distracted.  Castillo cultivates a unique voice, peppered with Spanish words and slang phrases that harmonize with the narrative.  But I don't think I'll be teaching it in class.

The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne

This was the time, perhaps, when Kenyon first became sensible what a dreary city is Rome, and what a terrible weight there is imposed on human life, when any gloom within the heart corresponds to the spell of ruin, that has been thrown over the site of ancient empire.  He wandered, as it were, and stumbled over the fallen columns, and among the tombs, and groped his way into the sepulchral darkness of the catacombs, and found no path emerging from them.  The happy may well enough continue to be such, beneath the brilliant sky of Rome.  But, if you go thither in melancholy mood--if you go with a ruin in your heart, or with a vacant site there, where once stood the airy fabric of happiness, now vanished--all the ponderous gloom of the Roman Past will pile itself upon that spot, and crush you down as with the heaped-up marble and granite, the earth-mounds, and multitudinous bricks, of its material decay.

The Marble Faun is about three American artists in Rome, a city that would be unrecognizable to anyone who has visited in the sprawling metropolis in the 21st century.  Until the Industrial Revolution, Rome was underpopulated, described by Hawthorne as a city of mostly ruins, freighted with an intense heritage of music and art but also prone to summer outbreaks of debilitating malaria.  The artists--Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon--are joined by a fourth friend, an Italian Count with a carefree personality named Donatello, who is the uncanny likeness of the Greek sculpture the Faun of Praxiteles:

Hey baby.

Donatello's similarity to the titular faun is one of those quasi-mystical touches Hawthorne likes that he never bothers to explain; think of the meteor shaped like the letter "A" in The Scarlet Letter.  The Marble Faun borrows heavily from the Anne Radcliffe school of Gothic Romance, including the Roman setting, but refuses to explain away its ghosts Scooby Doo-style, like Radcliffe does.  On the other hand, there's is nothing as explicitly supernatural as in Dracula or The Monk--rather, Hawthorne employs these mystical flourishes so matter-of-factly that it seems beside the point to ask for any sort of rational explanation at all.

The other mystical touch in The Marble Faun is a doozy: Miriam gets lost on a group outing to the Roman Catacombs, and when the others find her again, she is in the company of a sinister stranger who may or may not be a thousand-year old phantom haunting the catacombs:

"Inquire not what I am, nor wherefore I abide in the darkness," said he, in a hoarse, harsh voice, as if a great  deal of damp were clustering in his throat.  "Henceforth, I am nothing but a shadow behind her footsteps.  She came to me when I sought her not.  She has called me forth, and must abide the consequences of my re-appearance in the world."

[Spoiler alert for the following paragraph.]  From then on, the stranger follows Miriam everywhere, stalking constantly at the edge of every room.  Miriam, in a strange and ill-advised move, bargains with him that she can convert him to Christianity on penalty of her immortal soul.  One night, Donatello, who has fallen deeply in love with Miriam, pushes the stranger over a cliff to his death.  The rest--in fact, the bulk--of the novel deals with the consequences of this action, as the guilt from this deed destroys Donatello's once-cheery personality and chases Miriam out of Rome.

Ultimately The Marble Faun becomes a story like The Scarlet Letter, about a single misdeed that becomes a psychological torment to more than the one or two who actually committed it.  But where the pyrotechnics of guilt in The Scarlet Letter are enhanced by the repressive Puritan society that proscribes adultery, Miriam and Donatello's guilt seems discordant in spooky, malarial Rome.  I didn't find that their anguish--or Hilda's virginal shock--was enough to carry the plot after the intriguing first few chapters.  It doesn't help that the novel is padded with material from the journal Hawthorne kept when in Rome, stopping the plot to opine on architecture, painting, sculpture, and other travelogue-type stuff.  Though The Marble Faun comes to a satisfyingly creepy ending, set in a masquerade-style carnival, I had already lost interest.

Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White

The Jew had been hoisted as high as he was likely to go on the mutilated tree.  The rope pulleys had been knotted to a standstill; one of Blue's accomplices had fumblingly, but finally, fastened the ankles.  There he was, nobody would have said crucified, because from the beginning it had been a joke, and if some blood had run, it had dried quickly.  The hands, the temples, and the side testified to that in dark clots and smears, too poor to attract the flies.  If some of the spectators suffered the wounds to remain open, it was due probably to an unhealthy state of conscience, which could have been waiting since childhood to break out.  For those few, the drops trembled and lived.  How they longed to dip their handkerchiefs, unseen.

Riders in the Chariot is the story of four unrelated people living in suburban Australia: Miss Hare, a half-mad heiress living in a crumbling mansion; Himmelfarb, a Jewish refugee and Holocaust survivor; Alf Dubbo, an Aboriginal painter and drifter; and Mrs Godbold, a washerwoman.  Each is an outsider in their own way, on the fringes of polite society, and each experiences the same divine vision of a mysterious chariot.

Even when Alf puts his vision on canvas, White is cagey about referring directly to the chariot.  What does it look like?  What does it represent?  As Miss Hare's father once said to her before his accidental drowning, "Who are the riders in the chariot?"  (Is it our four protagonists?)  White refuses to answer any of these questions; in fact, he hardly writes about the vision at all.  When one character realizes that another has had a similar experience, they allude to it only in the most roundabout of ways.  It is, perhaps, something beyond verbalization, and the only thing that can be said about it is that it is at odds with the shallow superficiality of modern society.

That tension leads the book's climax, in which Himmelfarb, never easily accepted in his new home, is strung up by his drunken coworkers in a parody of the crucifixion.  White's aloofness and his knotty, even hostile prose, elevate this moment beyond an easy Christ parody, even as Himmelfarb's tormentors actively deny the similarity.  Their cruelty is the product of their inability to appreciate the ineffable, as Himmelfarb's experiences in Europe taught him to, and of a suburban mode of living which is reductive and shallow.

White's writing is difficult, more so even here than in Voss or A Fringe of Leaves.  It's rarely beautiful, but always striking:

The train was easing through the city which knives had sliced open to serve up with all the juices running--red, and green, and purple.  All the syrups of the sundaes oozing into the streets to sweeten.  The neon syrup coloured the pools of vomit and the sailors' piss.  By that light, they eyes of the younger, gaberdine men were a blinding, blinder blue, when not actually burnt out.  The blue-haired grannies had purpled from the roots of their hair down to the angles of their pants, not from shame, but neon, as their breasts chafed to escape, from shammy-leather back to youth, or else roundly asserted themselves, like chamberpots in concrete.  As for the young women, they were necessary.  As they swung along, or hung around a corner, they were the embodiment of thoughts and melons.

What does it mean?  Is it really well written or terribly written?  Flaubert famously sought ought le mot juste, the right word, it seems to me sometimes that White searches out the exact wrong word, or, at least, the word you would least expect.  (Why are the young women "necessary?"  What are we supposed to get out of the image of a chamberpot in concrete?  How is a shade of blue "blinder" than another?)  But somehow, that seems appropriate for a novel about the sublime beauty of that which hovers just outside the edge of what is plain and recognizable.

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways.  If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler.  After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a  glass of water.  "I'm fainting, please get me a little water."  You were lucky even then to make yourself understood.  And this happened over and over with everyone you met.  You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well.  The fathers were no fathers and the sons no son.  You had to talk to yourself in daytime and reason with yourself at night.  Who else was there to talk to in a city like New York?

There's something telling about the lengths of books.  Beyond every other stylistic difference, there's something about, say, Muriel Spark's tendency to write short novels that differentiates her from someone like Tolstoy.  Augie March is a Tolstoyesque book, immense, meandering, insatiably devouring different scenes and locales.  What is the writer of Augie March trying to do in writing a book of only 100 pages, as in Seize the Day?  What accounts for the difference?

For one, Augie March was a story of several years; Seize the Day, as its name suggests, is the story of a single day in the life of New Yorker Tommy Wilhelm.  Tommy is a failed actor who has recently moved into the same building as his aging father, who is coldly dismissive of Tommy's many problems: his poverty, his strained relationship with his wife, who refuses to grant him a divorce.  Spurned for money and compassion by his father, Tommy comes under the influence of the suspicious Dr. Tamkin, who convinces him to make an ill-advised investment in the commodities market.

Tamkin is full of cryptic, new-agey advice about how Tommy should reinvigorate his unhappy, broken life.  But even the notion of success eludes Tommy:

But at the same time, since there were depths in Wilhelm not unsuspected by himself, he received a suggestion from some remote element in his thoughts that the business of life, the real business--to carry his peculiar burden, to feel shame and impotence, to taste these quelled tears--the only important business, the highest business was being done.  Maybe the making of mistakes expressed the very purpose of his life and the essence of his being here.  Maybe he was supposed to make them and suffer from them on this earth.

Perhaps, Tommy thinks, the "essence of his being here" is to suffer, but if that is so, why does his father fail to give him sympathy?  His father, of course, is old and preoccupied with his own death, which he accuses Tommy--rightly--of not sufficiently caring about.  Like his son, the father suffers acutely, but neither is able to work up the kind of regard for the other that would bring any kind of relief.

This particular day offers an intense crisis for Tommy, but nothing really happens to him over the course of it: the day is not seized; he exits the novel as feckless, confused, and frustrating as he enters it.  One aspect of the novel's brevity is that it precludes any kind of change in Tommy or his father.  It's difficult to imagine Tommy ever changing in any significant way, but over 300 pages that kind of stasis might have been maddening.  Instead, Bellow offers us a glimpse at a man who is lost and will remain lost, and lets us briefly experience or recognize that mode of suffering.

Seize the Day is one of those novels where I feel as if something got past me--I feel, uncomfortably, as uncertain as Tommy at the novel's end.  Is that by design, or is there really something in it that I'm missing?  I cannot say I really enjoyed reading it, as I did Augie March or Henderson the Rain King.  Tommy Wilhelm is a profoundly difficult protagonist, impossible to like and unpleasant to consider.  Bellow's prose is, as always, something to behold, but it wasn't enough for me this time.

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

“The Days were a clan that mighta lived long
But Ben Day’s head got screwed on wrong
That boy craved dark Satan’s power
So he killed his family in one nasty hour
Little Michelle he strangled in the night
Then chopped up Debby: a bloody sight
Mother Patty he saved for last
Blew off her head with a shotgun blast
Baby Libby somehow survived
But to live through that ain’t much a life
—SCHOOLYARD RHYME, CIRCA 1985”






Thus begins Gillian Flynn's second novel (the first being Sharp Objects and the third being Gone Girl).

Of the three, Sharp Objects was my least favorite. It was okay, but for a non-genre reader (I don't generally choose psychological thrillers or murder mysteries), it didn't stand out. Gone Girl I love and found incredibly compelling - a book that I would and have recommend(ed) to basically everyone. Dark Places I loved more than Gone Girl. It is obvious to see how Sharp Objects leads to Dark Places leads to Gone Girl - she explores MANY of the same ideas throughout like the role of media related to crime and perception and how to have a female character that is really unlikeable. In spite of Gone Girl's INCREDIBLE success, Dark Places is the standout novel of the three.

The premise of the book is exactly what the school rhyme says: on January 3, 1984, Michelle Day was strangled, Debby Day was hacked with a bowing knife and ax, Patty Day was shot with a shotgun - all of this presumably done by Ben Day, an outcast teenager who dabbles with Satanic rock music and had no alibi for the night of the crime. Libby Day at age 7 is the lone survivor who testifies as an eye witness at her brother's trial which puts him away for life.

The novel is written in a really interesting way that works wonderfully.
Libby Day Chapter - present time (Libby is in her 30s at this point)
Patty Day Chapter - January 2 1984
Ben Day Chapter - January 2 1984

In the present day, Libby is flat broke and has hooked up with a group of people who think Ben may be innocent and are willing to pay her to investigate. As her investigation continues in real time, taking her back to interview different people who might know something about The Night, the Ben/Patty chapters get closer to the events of The Night, and the reader gets closer to knowing the truth with all the characters.

The mystery is solid, the psychological is thrilling, the writing is good enough, and it is incredibly well researched. I watched Randy reading a picture book for satanic ritual abuse survivors, Satanic Panic: the creation of a contemporary legend, and Satan's Silence: Ritual abuse and the making of a modern American witch hunt, and we had quite a few discussions that piqued my interest. This book was an incredibly satisfying way to end our little Satanic Panic kick.

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

Every time I have taught a play by Shakespeare, some enterprising student will offer the observation--sometimes phrased as a question, sometimes a matter-of-fact dismissal of the entire enterprise--that Shakespeare didn't really write the plays attributed to him.  High school students are by nature, I think, conspiratorially minded.  I've known many who are happy to attribute most world events to the machinations of the Illuminati, as if an all-powerful super-secret international cabal would be transparent enough to make itself known to a sixteen-year old in Queens.  But some are also just happy to take Shakespeare down a peg, since he's been terrorizing them from the grave since middle school.  This phenomenon reached a fever pitch about three years ago, when the Roland Emmerich film Anonymous came out, which depicts Edward de Vere as the "real Shakspeare."

But high schoolers aren't the only ones susceptible to Shakespeare conspiracies.  As Shapiro notes in his prologue, "I can think of little else that unites Henry James and Malcolm X, Sigmund Freud and Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller and Orson Welles, or Mark Twain and Sir Derek Jacobi."  Contested Will is a history of Shakespeare conspiracy theories, focusing on the two most popular historical candidates: Sir Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.  These are not the only candidates, of course, and if you go see the new Jim Jarmusch film Only Lovers Left Alive you'll find a centuries-old vampire Christopher Marlowe who claims to have written Shakespeare's plays.  But most of the critical energy of anti-Stratfordians, as they're known, has focused on these candidates, with de Vere only surpassing Bacon as the preferred candidate in the middle of the 20th century.

An anti-Stratfordian might disagree, but for the most part, Shapiro's book is incredibly even-handed.  He treats his subjects with deference and respect (for the most part), detailing the personal and critical histories that spurred these movements.  One of the things he points out is that Shakespeare did not live in an "age of memoir," as we do; this is one reason that an author like Mark Twain, who claimed that everything he wrote was autobiographical in one way or another, found it difficult to believe that the plays could have been written by a relatively impoverished glover's son from the English backwaters.  But the book is best when it can't resist taking a swipe at the anti-Stratfordians, as when Shapiro discusses the attempts of Orville Ward Owen and Elizabeth Wells Gallup's attempt to uncover a hidden code attributing the plays to Bacon:

Prescott's account of Gallup piecing together names from a string of letters recalls nothing so much as the scene in Twelfth Night in which Malvolio is spied on as he decodes an unsigned letter with its cryptic message "M.O.A.I. doth sway my heart."  Malvolio gets off to a promising start--"'M.' Malvolio. 'M'--why that begins my name."  But he runs into trouble when he sees that "there is no consonancy in the sequel," since "'A' should follow, but 'O' does."  Malvolio, the patron siant of hopeful decipherers, resolves the matter in his ow nfavor by fiddlign with the anagram: "yet to crush this a little, it would bow to me," for "every one of these letters are in my name."  The first decoder of Shakespeare's words, Malvolio would not be the last to crush an anagram to fit the name he so badly wanted to find.

Shapiro saves a final chapter for outlining the case for Shakespeare's authorship of the plays.  The clearest evidence, he notes, is "first what early printed texts reveal; the second, what writers who knew Shakespeare said about him."  In other words, Shakespeare's plays were attributed to Shakespeare when they came out, and no one thought to claim otherwise until the 19th century.  He also makes an argument I hadn't thought of before, describing the progression of his writing career, which was radically different in its final years, challenging the kind of creative dating required to make the events of the plays fit into the schematics of Baconians and Oxfordians.  (de Vere, for one, died twelve years before Shakespeare, so that one takes some work.)

Shapiro is committed to making a rational case, and so avoids from too much invective, but I'll add what I see beneath his history: the case for noble authorship rests on a kind of half-subtle classism that rejects the idea that a man from humble beginnings could be a literary genius.  The subtext of Baconianism and Oxfordianism is that the breadth and imagination of Shakespeare's plays could only be achieved by someone with status and money.  As such, I think those who doubt Shakespeare's authenticity often say more about themselves than they do about Shakespeare.

There are a couple final points that Contested Will makes that I had never considered: First, that Shakespeare scholars, with their recent obsession over the playwright's life and how it affected his work plays into the hands of the conspiratorially minded: "[R]efusing to acknowledge that they have been doing similar things in their own books--even if their topical readings are far less fanciful and the author whose life they read out of the works is the one named on the title pages--rightly infuriates those who don't believe that Shakespeare of Stratford had the life experiences to write the plays.  I was left wondering whether Shakespare scholars ignore their adversaries (when not vilifying them) because they share with them more unspoken assumptions about the intersection of life and literature than they care to admit--and, indeed, were the first to profess."  Et tu, Stephen Greenblatt.

The second I'll leave quoted by itself, since I think it's the most persuasive and prudent reaction to the conspiracy theorists:

What I find most disheartening about the claim that Shakespeare of Stratford lacked the life experience to have written the plays is that it diminishes the very thing that makes hims so exceptional: his imagination.  As an aspiring actor, Shakespeare must have displayed a talent for imagining himself as any number of characters onstage.  When he turned to writing, he demonstrated an even more powerful imaginative capacity, one that allowed him to create roles of such depth and complexity--Rosalind, Hamlet, Lear, Juliet, Timon, Brutus, Leontes, and Cleopatra, along with hundreds of others, great and small--that even the least of them, four centuries later, seem fully human and distinctive.

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

Miro found himself at the door of the cathedral.  In the cool morning air it stood open.  Inside, they had not yet come to the eucharist.  He shuffled in, took his place near the back.  He had no desire to commune with Christ today.  He simply needed the sight of other people.  He needed to be surrounded by human beings.  He knelt, crossed himself, then stayed there, clinging to the back of the pew in front of him, his head bowed.  He would have prayed, but there was nothing in the Pai Nosso to deal with his fear.  Give us this day our daily bread?  Forgive us our trespasses?  Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven?  That would be good.  God's kingdom, in which the lion could dwell with the lamb.

Then there came to his mind an image of St. Stephen's vision: Christ sitting at the right hand of God.  But on the left hand was someone else.  The Queen of Heaven.  Not the Holy Virgin but the hive queen, with whitish slime quivering on the tip of her abdomen.  Miro clenched his hands on the wood of the pew before him.  God take this vision from me.  Get thee behind me, Enemy.

The third book of the Ender series picks up where Speaker for the Dead left off: Starways Congress, the organization which controls the known universe, has sent a fleet to destroy the world of Lusitania, home of the descolada, a crippling virus which has the power to destroy all human life.  But not only are Ender and his family on Lusitania, but the only two sentient non-human life forms ever discovered: the formics, who were carried there by Ender in the second novel, and the pequeninos, who depend on the descolada for the operation of their life cycle.

Xenocide deals with the efforts of Ender, his sister Valentine, his adopted children, and the artificial intelligence program known as Jane to stop the Lusitania fleet.  Whether they do or don't, I can't tell you--the novel ends before the fleet arrives (which takes years and years, considering the distance required for space travel).  In the process, though, they manage to invent faster-than-light space travel and unravel the mystery of philotes, the elemental rays which connect all life in the universe--so there's that.

In many ways, Xenocide reproduces the themes of the first two novels.  It argues passionately for a world view that recognizes all forms of life as valuable and encourages its reader to imagine what it is like to be the Other, whether it's an alien entity or a human rival.  What it adds to these is a sense of how complicated that recognition can be.  The pequeninos and formics are hatching a plan to build their own spacecraft and save their species, but that would mean spreading the descolada throughout the universe.  How does one properly recognize life when the continued existence of one means the elimination of the other, and vice versa?  And what counts as life, anyway?  Jane is alive, in a sense, and one possible solution--shutting off the communication networks in which she exists--may mean her death.  One of Ender's stepchildren theorizes that the descolada itself could be a form of sentient life, deserving of its own right to exist.  Would destroying it be xenocide, the destruction of an entire intelligent species?

Xenocide also offers an interesting take on religion.  One of the few new characters introduced is Li Qing-jao, a girl on the planet of Path who is tasked in aiding Starways Congress and the Lusitania fleet.  She is "godspoken," blessed by the gods of Path with superior intelligence, but also forced to undergo humiliating rituals of penance to rid her of uncleanliness.  Spoiler alert--it turns out that this condition is a form of genetic OCD inflicted on the super-intelligent citizens of Path to keep them under control.  When this is revealed to her, Li Qing-jao dismisses it as an evil lie meant to keep her from true obedience.  She is, in a way, the very picture of the unskeptical fundamentalist that Orson Scott Card has been portrayed as--perhaps rightly so.  I thought Ender's thoughts on Qing-jao were especially interesting:

Qing-jao, I know you well, thought Ender.  You are such a bright one, but the light you see by comes entirely from the stories of your gods.  You are like the pequenino brothers who sat and watched my stepson die, able at any time to save him by walking a few dozen steps to fetch his food with its anti-descolada agents; they weren't guilty of murder.  Rather they were guilty of too much belief in a story they were told.  Most people are able to hold most stories they're told in abeyance, to keep a little distance between the story and their inmost heart.  But for these brothers--and for you, Qing-jao--the terrible lie has become the self-story, the tale that you must believe if you are to remain yourself.  How can I blame you for wanting us all to die?  You are so filled with the largeness of the gods, how can you have compassion for such small concerns as the lives of three species of raman?  I know you, Qing-jao, and I expect you to behave no differently from the way you do.  Perhaps someday, confronted by the consequences of your own actions, you might change, but I doubt it.  Few who are captured by such a powerful story are ever able to win free of it.

What to make of that in light of Card's own trenchant Mormonism?  Or Miro's compulsive re-imagining of the story of the Holy Viring to include the hive queen, above?  What does it mean to be "free" of the stories we tell?

Despite these fascinating aspects, Xenocide shows signs of diminishing returns.  The characters simply aren't complex or interesting enough to support what is at this point maybe 1,500 pages of fiction, and start to wear a little thin.  The technological efforts of Ender and the Lusitanians starts to verge on absurd: the "philotic connections" are awfully New-Agey, and the time it takes them to invent faster-than-light travel (which involves momentarily leaving the fabric of spacetime) beggars belief.  But the plot remains compelling, and deferring the one thing the third book seemed to promise--the arrival of the fleet--is a canny move that pretty much ensures I'll have to read the next one.

Walking Through Fire by Nawal El Saadawi

"The gist of the report was that Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, the medical doctor in charge of the health unit of Kafr Tahla, had exhibited a signal disrespect for the moral values and customs of our society and had incited women to rebel against the divine laws of Islam."

"'Inciting women to rebel against the divine laws of Islam.' This became the accusation that was levelled against me whenever I wrote or did anything to defend the rights of women against the injustices widespread in society. It followed me wherever I went, step by step...irrespective of who came to power..."






I read and loved A Daughter of Isis - Nawal El Saadawi's first memoir - as a graduate student. It covers her female ancestry, her childhood, her adolescence, and young adulthood. The insight it gives into Egypt, female genital mutilation, feminism, sexism, etc as she grows up and becomes a medical doctor, an activist, and a novelist; it is wonderful for an ignorant American reader like myself. 

I ordered The Later Years but pushed it to the bottom of my stack. After reading The Handmaid's Tale, I had a craving for this book. I wanted to hear about a culture that attempts to control women's bodies from the perspective of an insider of that culture. 

Unfortunately, I would not recommend this book as an introduction to El Saadawi or even for people who loved A Daughter of Isis. While it has many interesting insights and anecdotes of her life in Egypt after she became a doctor/activist/novelist and her life in exile in America after too many death threats, overall it doesn't stand up. The book has a spiral organization rather than a chronological or topical one. It starts with American exile, circles around to early medical career, circles back to exile, circles to first marriage, circles to medical school, circles to third marriage, circles back to first marriage, circles to exile, circles to second marriage, circles to third marriage, circles to first marriage, etc. 

It is sometimes hard to figure out where we are in time because of the three different husbands and the constant revolutions and wars. Perhaps that is the point - it's hard to tease out whether the scene is the revolution of the 50s or that of the 70s or the imperialism of the British or the Americans or whoever.

Finally, throughout the book El Saadawi expresses the frustration of not being able to write...repeatedly...in very similar language...with very similar metaphors. 

This book just didn't have the staying power of her previous memoir. I do, however, want to read one of her novels and see that side of El Saadawi.