Orlando by Virginia Woolf

"At one moment we deplore our birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation. The next, we are overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes sing."

Were I to comment on the novel, in a very general sense, I would say that Virginia Woolf's Orlando was rather uncompelling. Of course, one might rightly call me to task for using the term "uncompelling," due to the fact that it is not a word--it is not a word in the sense that it cannot be found in a major dictionary. However, if you were to suggest that my word was not a word merely because it was not in the dictionary, I would say that this matters little because you get the gist of what I am attempting to communicate. Or, alternatively, in response to your criticism that my word is not a word, I might respond by saying that Woolf's novel is not a novel.

Orlando is in fact a displaced genre. It is written as a biography and intended by the author as a biography. It is shelved under "fiction," and more importantly, it is being reviewed by this writer as a novel....but not quite a novel....but when you read it, you get the gist of what Woolf is trying to say.

The novel is a biography of "Orlando." It is a loose interpretation of the life of one of Virginia Woolf's intimate friend, Vita Sackville-West, also a writer. Yet it is free and easy with the truth, very "unhistorical," if you will, "unfactual." But then again, you'll get the gist of what is going on. Woolf is taking liberty with the biography to better understand the person. It's like painting a tree that doesn't quite look like a tree but at the same time gives us a better sense of the tree than we would have if we had looked at the tree itself. Or said differently, it's like the fact that what we see in the mirror is never quite what is being mirrored.

Orlando, the one being biographied, if that's a word, which I am sure it is not...oh, but we've had that conversation before....Orlando, subject of this biography, is like Woolf's friend in that s/he is a writer. However, unlike Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is ageless and sexless. Well, not quite sexless. We are treated to a discourse on the life of Orlando, and then we find that while Orlando is in the prime of his life, he falls into a deep sleep and wakes up to be a woman. The "he" becomes a "she," but retains her (or his) prior impressions and understanding of what it is like to be a he. So she understand he, as perhaps no she has ever understood a he. And to top it all off, she sometimes acts like a she and sometimes acts like a he.

Orlando also feels out of place in his/her class. S/he is an aristocrat who can't quite give his/her heart to the life of an aristocrat, but who also on the other hand cannot quite escape the life of an aristocrat. Orlando isolates himself from his aristocratic peers, never managing to quite form any intimacy with them. Later, as a woman, Orlando finds herself living with Gypsies, but she longs for the comforts of her aristocratic lifestyle.

"For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another."

Our subject also belongs to no era. As the story progresses, centuries pass and Orlando does not age. S/he is somehow lifted out of time and space, yet s/he seems at the same time to embody each era, be it the Elizabethan Era of the Victorian Age or the modern industrialized city.

In short, this novel is the story of a subject displaced from time, class, and gender. And all of this displacement occurs within a novel that is deliberately displaced as a biography by its author who (despite being a novelist) insists that we approach her novel as though it were a biography.

"How little she had changed over the years....she had remained fundamentally the same."

"I have sought happiness over many ages and have not found it, fame and missed it, love and not known it....I have known many men and many women, none have I understood."

The text is experimental. The prose is beautiful. Yet for me, the novel lacked a truly compelling element. The subject is lifted out of the world such that s/he lacks context. Orlando becomes a sexless character without any true affiliation to any particular era or even alignment with a class. Orlando, the protagonist, remains static, and as such, there is nothing to invest, emotionally or otherwise. The best the reader can do is to sympathize with this character for the extreme displacement that s/he finds his/herself living.

"Morning James," she said. "there's some things in the car. Will you bring them in?" Words of no beauty, interest, or significance in themselves it will be conceded. But now so plumped out with meaning that if they fell like ripe nuts from a tree and proved that when the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly....to see Orlando change her skirt for a pair of whip cord britches and leather jacket, which she did in less than three minutes, was to be ravished with the beauty of movement, as if Madame Lopokova were using her highest art."

The protagonist is distant and inaccessible. S/he seems to live in a sleep-like state, unable to awaken to a strong sense of identity. In the above quote, Orlando is in here eleventh hour, nearing her demise, and she experiences an awakening of sorts. The prose is beautiful, but somehow I remain unconvinced. Orlando still seems distant, as if she is experiencing a moment of fullness, when life is being experienced in all of its richness and the heart is full. Yes, she may be living a few moments of being in tune with the wonder of the world, but the reader still is somehow being kept at bay, closed out. As for myself, my sense is that Orlando is not only closed off to the reader but ultimately she is closed off to herself. And perhaps that is the point of the novel, itself, a character unable to ever quite wake up.

The world seeks to establish and settle identity: gender, era, class and social standing. Orlando is displaced in this world, and somehow his/her displacement paralyzes his/her ability to awaken. She remains trapped in a dream.

"Illusions are to the soul as atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air, and the plant dries, the color fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder...by the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis waking that kills us..."

But how many of us truly wake from this dream?

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

There's something stirring in the soul of Ishmael, the narrator of this "great and enduring volume." When civilization becomes an anchor on the soul, it's time to cut the line, to cast off to sea. It's time to reawaken "that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it." He says "call me Ishmael" in the opening line of the text. He is the bastard of civilization, out of place in his own father's house, but perhaps all the better for it. He is not "the son of the inheritance," and he shrugs off all societal responsibility and obligation, in search of adventure.

As I read Moby Dick I found that I had a certain fellowship and kinship with Ishmael, a fellow pilgrim in search of a life of deeper mystery and awe, a life somehow connected with exploring the wild of the natural world, a life a bit less comfortable but a bit more terrifying. Civilization can make one "grim about the mouth." Civilization values its domestication and the easing of any human exertion. It is, in a word, boring.

I've been chatting with some folks, and I've found that many of us in the States read Moby Dick as required reading in high school. It's unfortunate, I think. (Perhaps it is unfortunate that any text is required reading for students.) It can be a difficult read. Melville's great work was a forerunner to the modern novel. It cuts from plot to poetic and philosophical musings, or it breaks off of the narrative to attempt an encyclopedic-type entry on whale classifications, these sometimes spawning several chapters at a time. This disregard for strict narrative in a novel, however, was ahead of its time. In fact, it took a generation of two to really recognize that Moby Dick is one of the great American novels; indeed, one of the greatest novels of all time.

I think Moby Dick is a novel for a mature soul to savor, and to do so with a certain joy. I found it to be insightful, informative, breath-taking in its scope, and above all quirky and irreverent. Melville's Shakespearean prose does not take itself too seriously, but in the process, I find it to be a sweeping commentary on the entirety of western civilization. My review, then, will follow the epic nature of this great text and tease out how Melville, in his subtle and sly way, re-imagines civilization: with its imperialism, religious dogmatism, philosophical foundationalism, its life of comfort, its mastery of nature, and our conception of free will, necessity, and chance, with chance being the dominant force.

A Grand Epic

The Greek tragedy warns o the passions of a human being. The grasp exceeds the reach. Be wary of overstepping the boundary of morality. Live within your nature and all will be well.

The primary story line of Moby Dick reads like a Greek tragedy, and it is epic in its scope. We see two essential characters throughout the novel: Ishmael, the insightful, if somewhat idiosynchratic, narrator of the tale, and Ahab, the monomaniacal Captain of the Pequod. Ishmael has been taken aboard the Pequod for his first whaling expedition. Not long after setting sail, Captain Ahab reveals his true intentions for the Pequod: "Death to Moby Dick," the famed white whale who kills men and once took Ahab's leg. The two perspectives of Ahab and Ishmael are woven together throughout the tale. Ishmael, the investigative, thoughtful, and poetic novice, alongside Ahab, the seasoned old captain, a "grand, ungodly, godlike man."

"The chick that's in him pecks the shell. 'Twill soon be out." Ahab is intent on his vengeance of Moby Dick. "He piled up on the white whale's hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race, from Adam down." Ahab's was a "supernatural revenge," an anger that pursued the whale with a divine fury!

One of the crew speaks prophetically, even desperately to Ahab as the chase for the whale threatens the whole ship: "Let Ahab beware of Ahab. Beware of thyself, old man." Beware of thyself could not be more Greek, that sense that one's passions mixed with hubris--an arrogance that exceeds its proper limits--might produce a monstrosity of desire. "God help thee, old man. Thy thoughts have created a creature in thee!"

Melville's intent is to create a story that is on a grand scale. As such, even his long detours on the whale, the nature of the whaling equipment, and any other fact that strikes his fancy--all of these are meant to draw the reader into the epic tale. The true-to-life detail creates a greater-than-life narrative, something worthy of the full awfulness of the sea; something to inspire awe and dread.

"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme: No great enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it."

A Critique of Western Civilization

Where does one begin, to distill the spiritual, religious, and metaphysical musings of Moby Dick? Is it an act of hubris and madness, like the quest of the cracked old Ahab? Perhaps. And yet it may also be the case that Melville gives us the modus operandi for interpreting his text. In the interrogative words of Ishmael, "Why then do you try to enlarge your mind? Subtleize it." Melville works in a poetic, subtle, and even silly manner as he pokes at the fabric of the civilized world and the imperialistic worldview of the West.

What better place to start than with religion? Melville's imagination recasts and reinventS our conception of faith and the spiritual. He works with the same clay as the rest of us, for Melville is constantly alluding to Christian scriptures, motifs, and characters. His interest is primarily with the Hebrew scriptures, almost exclusively. Even when mentioning Jesus, Melville refers to him as "the man of sorrows," the prophetic title given in the book of Isaiah. In this way, Melville is writing his own Christian scriptures. Like a modern Apostle Paul, he recontextualizes the Hebrew faith into something new.

The best example of this work is found when Ishmael is caught in a bit of a bind. His new friend Queequeg is a "savage" and a pagan; yet Queequeg beckons Ishmael to join with him in worshiping his little idol, Yojo. Ishmael wants to be polite, friendly, and accommodating, but he is also a Presbyterian and knows that this act would make him an idolater. It is well worth citing the text at length, to see Melville's recontextualization in action.

"I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with the wild idolater in worshiping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth--pagans and all included--can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?--to do the will of God?--that is worship. And what is the will of God?--to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me--that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolater."

Not quite the same conclusion that the Apostle Paul would reach; however, in this wonderful paragraph, Melville recasts all of Christianity in light of goodwill toward one's fellow traveler. It's a sort of practical, organic Christianity that meets its neighbor where its neighbor is, even if smack in the middle of idolatry. And what is more, this interpretation seems to foreshadow the theological issues facing Christianity in the coming era of globalization. Melville's novel, as you know, was first published in 1851.

I also see Melville as developing a new (or perhaps very old) interpretation of God. I think Melville conceives of God as he conceives of the whale--as a being that is most fundamentally beyond our grasp. I suppose I ought to cite the novel again at length, to get the full sense of this idea.

"You must needs conclude that the Great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any considerable degree of exactness so there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like, and the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour is by going a whaling yourself. But by so doing you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him."

This conception of God strikes me as a very Hebrew idea. Again, I see this as Melville's reach back to the Jewish roots of Christianity. The allegorical link between God and the whal is almost made explicit when Melville says of the whale, "He has no face," and we must only see his tail. It is a clear allusion, as I see it, to the passage in Exodus chapter 33 where Moses asks to see God's glory, and God says, "you will see my back; but my face must not be seen," because, "you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live."

As has been alluded to, my read of Moby Dick is that it is not only a reinterpretation of the Christian faith but also the whole of of Western Civilization. Melville seems to take the lessons of the Greeks, with their warnings against hubris and untamed passions, and merge them with the Hebrew wisdom tradition and their conception of God as a God of awe and mystery.

There are two very notable passages where this merger seems most explicit to me. The first is in Father Maple's sermon on Job. God is not to be trifled with. Beware the disobedience of Job, Shipmates! Melville gives us an entire sermon on Job, a sermon that Ishmael listens to before embarking on his voyage. The whale narrative of Job is inverted, when rather than a whale swallowing a sinner-prophet on the run, Ahab is "chasing a Job's whale around the world." This is the switch from Hebrew narrative to Greek tragedy, but they both seem to bring the reader to the point of a healthy fear and trembling. This sense of awe is clearly lost on Western Civilization, in its imperialistic, monomaniacal quests to conquer and master the natural world.

Western Civilization in the modern era borrows its philosophical concepts from Greece and creates a new Christian God who charges her with conquering the nations in the name of Jesus. So, the pursuit of land, wealth, and glory merges with an evangelistic zeal. Melville inverts these. He takes the very human wisdom of Greece and carries over the God who cannot be contained in temples made by men.

This Greek and Hebrew merger also comes together in Ishmael's musings on the book of Ecclesiastes. Ishmael calls this "unChristian Solomon's wisdom," insights that the Christianity of Western Civilization knows nothing of.

"Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with they hand on the helm! Turn not they back to the compass." In other words, the darkness can overwhelm. But on the other hand, "that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or underdeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. 'All is vanity!' All. This willful world hath not yet got hold of unChristian Solomon's wisdom yet."

This "willful world" is the imperialistic force of modern civilizations, which like Ahab would cry out, "I'd strike the sun if it slighted me!" But again, we must keep in mind, that Melville's text is not a sermon. It's philosophical themes and words of instruction are tucked away in a subtle manner, with a sense of humor and a wink of the eye. Melville isn't looking for converts. He isn't even seeking to undo Western Civilization: he's only deconstructing it through is novel, using its words and story to exaggerate it. He only wants to play with it and work it out with a crazy old captain, a massive and mythological whale, and a witty observer to record it all. Ishmael records it all as such:

"Here goes for a cool, collective dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost."

Conclusion: A Desperado Philosophy

If Melville stirs up a sense of awe and fear toward the world, he does so with the advice that we ought to still dive into it. There's something of the best of all practical wisdom in that. The world, with all its grandeur and greatness can swallow you, like the deep sea. God is great and beyond us; but don't let all that stop you. If you have a sturdy back and a noble soul, then take that cool, collective dive. "I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul."

So, Melville's "desperado philosophy" emerges from all of this. "There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange, mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own....That sort of wayward mood....comes in the midst of his earnestness....There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial desperado philosophy."

I do think that it is fairly clear that on some points, Melville may be guilty of a bit of over-romanticizing. He seems to believe, for example, that whales will never be driven to extinction. The whale is "immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality." The estimation that I am familiar with is that in the last 200 years, the whale population has been reduced by 90%. Ecosystems, we are now learning, are fragile things. Wiping out a species can have a devastating effect on the world, to say nothing of being deprived of the beauty of a species. Technology is powerful enough to wipe out even the mighty Leviathan.

We live in fascinating times. Our world now has the technological capability to either create "a new heavens and a new earth" or completely destroy it. This extreme is perhaps unknown in all of human history. The tower started at Babel is finally complete. Still, for all of our mastery, it is our humanness that holds us back. "Sayest all of us are Ahabs."

"Heaven have mercy on us all--Presbyterians and pagans alike--for we are all cracked about the head and sadly need mending."

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

“They’s somepin worse’n the devil got hold a the country, an’ it ain’t gonna let go till it’s chopped loose.”

John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize winning novel The Grapes of Wrath has helped to shape the perspective of an era. It is the story of exploited peoples; as a novel it uses the power of human story to stir something in the soul—an outcry against injustice. History, it is said, is written by the winners. While this may be true in a general sense, it is equally true that it only takes on powerful and passionate voice to humanize and dignify “the tears of the oppressed.” Steinbeck succeeds in this effort. He tells us the fictional story of the Jode family, and in doing so he speaks for hundreds of thousand, perhaps millions, of souls who were displaced by exploitation and the passivity of the U.S. government during and before the Great Depression.

Steinbeck wrote about the Jode family as they are driven off of their land in Oklahoma and seek work in California, only to find themselves homeless and near starvation, exploited by large land owners. California was Steinbeck’s home. Published in 1939, Steinbeck drew a good deal of opposition and backlash from many in his home state. However, Grapes of Wrath spoke for the dispossessed of its time, and the novel still to this day forces its reader to reflect on the state of the nation—both on its moral and ethical direction, but also on the wisdom of the system in its entirety: its economic sustainability, the justice of its laws, the shape of its politics, and its movement into the age of the machine. While it raises all of these issues, it is its story that is most compelling, the humanizing of a family struggling to survive.

The Machine Man

The first part of Steinbeck’s novel centers on the technological and economic shift in the U.S.: the small farm is obsolete. This is the age of the machine. A tractor can do the work of ten or twenty farm families. The Jode family is one such clan. They are working land during a drought. They can’t pay the bank, so they have been displaced. Their house is jus in the way now, and it’s time for the Jode’s to move on.

The novel does not accept this technological shift. The man driving the tractor can’t love the land, says Steinbeck. He’s just a “machine man.” He is cut off from the soil. The land is not a living and breathing entity to the machine man. For him, a crop is a matter of science: chemistry and land management. The land is an object, a job, a profit margin, a thing to be manipulated.

“But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understand only chemistry, and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself.”

This new technological age is now normative and unquestioned in the 21st century. Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the nation was small, local farms spread across the fruited plain. Technology has changed this. Technology combined with an obsession with mass production and wealth building. The Jeffersonian vision of life has been replaced by a nation of machine operators and an army of paper pushers living in offices and cubicles.

Why did technology not develop as a support to local farms and local communities? Was this a conscious choice? Or was it out of the hands of anyone? Perhaps it was a force and power with its own volition and will, operating without the resistance necessary to stop it.

Revolution of the Repressed

The Joes have to pack up as much of their belongings as they can inside of their truck. They are heading west! To California! They know there is work in California, because they have handbills that say so—printed handbills—handbills that say there is a need for workers: fruit pickers and farm hands. Why, a fella’ could work for a while, picking oranges and grapes, then buy himself a nice plot of land. Those handbills wouldn’t have been printed out if there were no jobs. That’d just be a waste of money.

So the Joes follow the handbills to California. It’s a difficult journey. Grandma and Grandpa die, and some desert the family when times get tough.

When they arrive in California, things go from bad to worse. There are no jobs in California. The land owners printed the handbills in order to flood the state with desperate, hungry workers. With a massive surplus of labor, land owners can hire workers to work for food, or in some cases for less than enough to feed a family. The plan works great for the land owners. The only problem is that there are now hundreds of thousands migrant workers hungry and virtually homeless. Oops. This could cause a public reaction—it will cause a reaction and public protest; and it is for this reason that the land owners must demonize the migrant workers. “Why, Jesus, they’re as dangerous as niggers in the South! If they ever get together there ain’t nothin’ that’ll stop ‘em.” So local cops burn down the migrant camps and harass the workers. The workers have to keep on the move, live in fear and shame.

Steinbeck consistently alludes to the power of repressed groups: “If they ever get together…” There is a power in the collective. This is a revolutionary tone that runs through the novel. It’s like the revolution is right there, waiting for leaders and organization. “The little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”

The novel ends with the young Tom Jode running from the law. He is a fugitive, having struck down a man who killed Casy the preacher, when Casy was trying to organize a worker strike. The suggestion is that Tom could lead the revolution. Meanwhile, the Jode family is without yet another member of their shrinking and starving family. Like a turtle in the wasted, dry land, they move slowly and hopelessly, always on the verge of another tragedy. The novel ends without resolve, like the lives of so many.

"One Big Soul"

Steinbeck’s portrait of free market capitalism is bleak: if each person works for their own immediate gain, everyone works against each other and against the common good. In a truly free market, what is to stop the wealthy from exploiting the poor? And what’s to stop the poor from rising up and overthrowing the rich? It’s like an endless cycle of violence, a form of economic Darwinism: survival of the fittest, might makes right. Grapes of Wrath never suggests that the government should intervene, it’s a bit more radical: the people should rise up and take the land back from their oppressors.

Also at play is the idea that economic individualism fails because it does not take into consideration the interconnectedness and interdependence of all people with each other. The people’s dependence on each other and their mutual dependence on natural resources. A system only works when it is a system that works for all. This is the theological conclusion, voiced by Casy the preacher: “‘Maybe all men got one big sould ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an all of a suddent—I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true.”

The novel also chides the failure of technology: “Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State.” Technology can create bigger fruits and bumper crops, but it all goes to waste without an economic system that distributes the produce. It is something intriguing that before and during the Great Depression, crops would be wasted and destroyed in some parts of the U.S., while in other parts people starved.

Then, As Now

The trajectory of the U.S. has changed little since the writing of Grapes of Wrath. The disconnect is complete. Technology and economical sophistication have helped to fix the system. People do not starve quite so much, and we have some checks and balances in place to prevent the kind of wide-scale worker exploitation (of U.S. citizens, but not all peoples) that occurred in California during the 1930s. But what have we really gained?

We are more cut off than ever from the basic, essential needs of our lives: we do not know who farmed the food we eat (or often who even prepared our food). We do not know the source of our clothing, much of it made by exploited workers overseas. We have a massive entertainment industry, but as such we find ourselves fairly disconnected from our neighbors. Our work is usually not something life-giving or truly meaningful. We are all either Steinbeck’s “machine man” or office paper pushers or fast food workers or cashiers. All that said, our lives, by and large, are good. We have food to eat, houses, cars, and entertainment. There may be a disconnect, but who really cares?

But someone has to pay. This is as true now as it was in Steinbeck’s day. We may not see the exploited laborer in Asia or India, who makes us a sweatshirt with our favorite team’s logo, but they are there. And illegal immigration from Mexico has created a heated national debate. These starving migrant workers are the result of our “success” in at least some very significant ways: our excessive use of the Colorado River has dried up Mexican farm land that depended on it; our government has subsidized corn (the corporate machine man now actually gets paid by the government), and this corn has been sold to Mexico putting more farmers out of work; and our taste for drugs has put big money into the hands of drug cartels, which has created a dangerous, violent nation, funded by our dollars. The Mexican migrant workers risk their lives, like the Joes, for the money to feed their families, and it shames us at a fundamental level. Is this part of the irrational hatred and fear of the Mexican immigrants? Is this why we are so eager to chase them out, to “crack down” on “illegals?

Why do we need drugs in the land of the free? For recreation, for entertainment, for pleasure, for boredom, and to heal the hole that apathy creates. We live in a system of individuals. There is no concept of “one big soul.” Loving our neighbor means writing a check or creating a new government program. We live with this deep disconnect and sense of fragmentation, a wound that we have not been able to heal. Our contemporary priests and Levites can’t be dirtied by the bloody bodies strewn along the Jericho Road. But the consequences of this turning from our neighbors is an inner vacuum that stubbornly refuses to go away, even in a culture that has invented the most sophisticated psychological and religious language to describe it.

Did anyone create this system? Does anyone control it? Does anyone defend it? Or is it ratified and energized by a mass of individuals with no capacity left for true imagination and creativity?

Steinbeck’s solution was to revolt. In Grapes of Wrath he envisions a collective revolution, but it must come from a movement of the poor as a whole. Isolated, they stand no chance, even in small groups they can be chased out of towns by angry town folks and deputies with guns. But if they were to rise up as a collective? If they were to speak as one voice? That would crush the system.

The State of Fiction

Special thanks to my friend Aeyn, for loaning me his copy of The Point, issue two, from which I take this quote, about the state of the novel in today's world:

It is perfectly fair--and what's more, manifestly accurate--to say that social and cultural conditions are presently antithetical in lots of ways to creating literature that resonates with the times....The novelist is caught in a double bind: in order to properly capture the feel of a kinetic, overloaded modern world she must pack more, and more varied, material into her work, but does so for an audience that has less and less inclination to engage with it. Alternatively, the novelist simplifies and straightens her work in order to win readers, but at the expense of representing the world as she truly perceives it to be (i.e. "selling out"). There is a concern that the novel is simply unable, structurally, to harmonize with an era where the written word has been so heavily marginalized by sound and image." (p. 50, "Hard Feelings" by Ben Jeffery)

My friends, why did I embark on the Human Narrative Project? If only I had known that the novel was extinct! Perhaps it is not too late. We can make a subtle change: change the Human Narrative Project from a review of the great novels to an exploration of the world's greatest Youtube videos.

1984 by George Orwell

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake”

George Orwell’s 1984 is a novel exploring power. As literature, I found the writing good but not particularly compelling. The novel was clearly written to discuss political and philosophical points of view. From a purely literary perspective, one might object to such a practice. In the case of 1984, however, I find that Orwell’s imagination and creativity overcomes any objection to writing a novel for the sake of theoretical discussion. In actual practice, I do not think that it is possible to divide the message from the media, the content of writing from its language. The two are inseparable.

The genius of 1984 is Orwell’s ability to create a totalitarian world that explores power, politics, and the human subject. The Orwellian world of Oceania sets its characters in a context of absolute power and domination. The Party differs from the Fascist or Communist powers of the modern world in that they do not pretend to embody any humanistic ideals. Their objective is clear: “power entirely for its own sake.” The undoing of German Fascism or various Communist regimes is their ideological pretense. The Party recognizes that it must root all of its activities in terms of power, stated explicitly.

The symbol of The Party is Big Brother. Big Brother is a giant face that can be seen on posters, walls, and screens throughout Oceania; but Big Brother is also the representation of the power of the state, the symbol of its strength, the divine and eternal metaphor.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. Big Brother is omnipresent. Big Brother is ever-present, keeping watch to be sure that there is no one who will oppose the power of the Party. Through technology, Big Brother is able to monitor the masses and every individual. Everyone at every time knows that they are being watch.

Big Brother is given credit for his benevolence. If the economy grows, manufacturing forecasts are surpassed, or food rations increase (as they always do), this is due to the wisdom and foresight of Big Brother. Big Brother provides all that is needed.

Big Brother is omniscient, all-knowing. Big Brother demands that your speech be controlled by controlling language. The language is continually being reduced so that the fewest words may be used. As language is reduced, the capacity for consciousness, reflection, and critical thought decrease accordingly. Free thought is a vice. Big Brother can do all of the thinking necessary for the world. Big Brother knows all.

Big Brother is the one who is everywhere, monitoring your movements. Big Brother is the all-knowing one, controlling your speech and thought. In addition to these two exercises of power, there is a third method of domination: the power to crush any rebellion. Big Brother is the omnipotent, all-powerful one who can unleash a force that will bend any will. Big Brother can use violence to exterminate any act or expression of freedom. This is not just any independent act that threatens the Party; rather, Big Brother will destroy any act of a free self. Through violence, torture, and pure force, Big Brother will break the mind and will of any rebel. What is most shocking, however, is that Big Brother will even unleash such immense power as to force a person into loving Big Brother.

“Winston, you are no metaphysician”

Within this context of absolute power, there are two individuals who dare to assert themselves as human beings, each in a different way. Winston Smith is the primary character, the main protagonist. Winston is the everyman, and as such he is not a philosopher of surpassing intellectual powers. Nonetheless, he is no slouch, and his self-discovery is a theoretical and ideological one.

Winston works for the Party. His job is to rearrange the “facts” of the past so that Big Brother is always correct and always looks good. Winston changes history. It is through this that he begins to question the Party and desire to defy Big Brother.

Julia’s path is not ideological. Winston was born before the Party took power; Julia was not. All that she knows is the power of Big Brother. So she plays along with the whole thing as though it were a game, and she looks for opportunities to slip outside of the watchful eye of Big Brother and live her life as fully as she can. Her sensuality and lust for life are her way of rebelling and asserting herself as a self.

Together Winston and Julia seek to defy the Party by meeting in secret. They become lovers, friends, and co-conspirators.

Orwell’s world in 1984 is one in which technology advancement allows the government a level of god-like omniscience, monitoring the movements and speech of each person. Technology is also used to transmit a continuous stream of media propaganda, to keep all citizens aware of the power and glory of the Party. Controlling the language and speech of individuals is important to Big Brother. There is a word, “duckspeak” that is praised by the Party. It is not speech in the true sense; rather it is “noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.”

If Orwell’s world appears to be one in which technology has invaded the freedom of individuals, is the situation all that different in our contemporary, Western world. The Orwellian totalitarian future is one in which there is a centralized intelligence that controls the media stream and monitors the speech and actions of citizens. Our media world is perhaps much more random and chaotic. There is no centralized control of media, but does this mean there is more freedom?

The contemporary discussion usually presumes that because we can choose to shut of the television or log off of the internet that we are free. However, the fact remains, that most of us in the developed tech-savy West we are no less plugged in than the members of Orwell’s dystopian society. It begs the question of whether we are really more free. Are we more free because most of our populace can choose between Fox News or CNN? Or is this choice more a matter of illusion. Perhaps the point is not that we can choose between cable news or the internet, perhaps the greater point is that we are constantly plugging in to media, a media that always seeks to capitalize on ratings by selling advertising.

In a sense, our current climate is sort of a voluntary limiting of freedom, based on a perceived choice between which media we want to be our Big Brother for the day. While we often praise ourselves in the U.S. for being the land of the free, there is a disturbing parallel between Big Brother and the media.

Every society and culture has its mechanisms of control and manipulation. What perhaps is most disturbing about life in the States is that we seem to be under the naïve assumption that our perceived freedom of choice with regard to media means that we are less subject to manipulation. In reality, our nation has become polarized into two ideologies, both of which are often inconsistent and seemingly random. On any particular issue, we can be sure that the same people will line up on either side, and that the discussion will be less rational or fact-based, resembling more the quacking duckspeak of Orwell’s novel.

This all raises a very serious question of what it means to be free in an era of our eternal news-byte media. If the result of media submersion is the same in Orwell’s novel as it is in today’s Western society, a sort of “duckspeak,” then how much “freedom” do we truly have? When public discussion is more about “noise uttered in unconsciousness” than it is about creative and original thought, then what right do we have to say that our freedom (so-called) is really and truly all that superior to Big Brother. That we choose to submit our minds to hours a day of connectivity does not make us any more free. In fact, it is probably more the perception of choice, much as an alcoholic may have a momentary sense of freedom in choosing between spirits for his next drink.

“God is Power”

Reading 1984 is helpful to me because it states that the Party’s explicit aim is to power for its own sake. Our modern Western ideals center on democracy as a control measure for power. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So we assume in the United States that if we have appropriate checks and balances, then we can gain more freedom. Many in the U.S. are disturbed by any perceived expansion of government power. An expansion of governmental power means a loss of freedom. It is an equation that is a given in many circles of thought.

Friedrich Nietzsche believed strongly in the will to power. He criticized democracy. Democracy, Nietzsche believed, will limit the ability of great people to do great things. It will, in essence, make everyone mediocre and prohibit the rise of great creative people. Democracy, says Nietzsche, merely gives rise to a herd mentality.

Looking at the current state of political discourse in the U.S. today, with its tone of “duckspeak,” groupthink, and talking points, it is clear that there is a marked inability for individuals to cultivate their own unique perspectives. For me, this speaks in favor of Nietzsche’s critique of democracy.

While Big Brother pursues power for its own sake, in our democratic society the power plays are more subtle but no less real. The lesson of 1984 in light of our contemporary society is to understand that power is always at work. Power is no less controlling or manipulative in democratic societies as it is in Orwell’s totalitarian state. In democracy, the masses must simply perceive themselves as making their own choices. Because democracy requires the illusion of choice, the manipulation and control mechanisms cannot be overtly manipulative, as they are in 1984.

What seems to me to be the commonality between Big Brother and contemporary society is that both evidence a lack of rationality and love in public discourse. We tend to see the worst in our opponents, the various sides being convinced that other political parties are out to limit their freedoms or otherwise do harm to their fellowman. This intense fear and suspicion, ironically, makes one most vulnerable to manipulation by those who are presumably “on my side.” When one proceeds in public discourse with humility, reasoned arguments, and charity toward those who disagree, one is far less inclined to fall into duckspeak, and far more likely to create a society where members are far less naïve to the workings of power.

Power is always with us. Power is god, in the lower “g” sense.

“You must love Big Brother”

In the end, Winston and Julia are caught by the Party. They undergo torture to cleans their minds. By sheer force, Big Brother forces Winston to believe what they want him to believe.

But belief is not enough.

“To die hating them; that is freedom,” Winston thinks to himself. If he can retain this thought, this private, inner rebellion, then at his death he will have reserved for himself a moment of freedom and independence.

Big Brother knows this, and so it is not enough to merely bend the will and mind, Big Brother will use his power to force Winston to love him. And it works. In works because Big Brother breaks down his body and soul, forcing Winston to deny Julia, his only true love. After months of torture, Winston is completely broken. There is nothing left. He spends most of his days drinking. Everyone pities him. The Party no longer monitors him. There is no need, because Winston’s psyche has no power left in it to assert itself in anyway.

Striped of all power of the mind, will, and heart, Winston is sitting in a café, drinking some filthy gin. He hears a report of a military victory of Big Brother. He is genuinely cheered by the news. And finally, something clicks in Winston. He realizes the folly of his rebellion. He understands now. Everything is clear.

“Oh cruel, needless misunderstanding. Oh stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast…but it was all right…he had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

With this the novel closes. Winston loves Big Brother. Big Brother, of course, does not love Winston; but even if he did, the love was gained by force. Here, at the end of the novel, we find the correlation between love and freedom. We understand, at a fundamental level, that love gained by power, by brute force, is not love. Love without the freedom to choose love is still brutality. Love is only true when the lovers are free to reject or embrace the other.

On their own, these sayings can seem cliché. As such, it is the narrative of 1984 that brings to life phrases that have been overused. The story, the characters, the world that is created through fiction can bring us to really see love and freedom in real life. This brings me back to my first point in this review: that the form of writing and the content are inseparable. The ability for ideals to stir us through story is directly related to the ability of the writer to take us into the narrative and into the minds and hearts of the characters. There are certain things that we have to be shown, not merely told.

I believe 1984 to be an important novel. By carrying power to an extreme, we can reflect on the ways in which power is always working, in ways that are subtle but no less extreme. It would only be a superficial and shallow reading that would presume that the control and manipulation of Big Brother is no less present in all societies. This tends to give support to the idea that power itself is not the issue. Rather, power must be discusses in the context of a society whose modus operandi for public discourse is charity, humility, and rationality.

Chastity and Political Orthodoxy in 1984

Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual Puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship. The way she put it was:

“When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour….”

That was very true, he thought. There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy.

From next month's novel of the month, 1984 by George Orwell

Coming Attractions -- 1984

The novel for next month is George Orwell's 1984. I read Animal Farm in the context of attending a private, Christian (evangelical) high school. The general vibe I was always given is that Animal Farm was a treatise against both Communism and Socialism (the two were often conflated). Interestingly, Orwell was a Democratic Socialist. His critiques were not leveled against socialism or capitalism but against the abuses of totalitarianism found in 20th century forms of Communism and Fascism.

I think that our discussion of 1984 will be particularly timely, in light of many of the debates that take place in the current U.S. political climate. I often see ideological debates about the merits of socialism or capitalism. Discussions of the abuse of government are usually merely an attempt to criticize someone else's ideology. That is, I find it rare that we can put the labels "liberal"/Democratic or "conservative"/Republican aside long enough to have honest discussions about the degree to which government is intruding on freedom and civil liberties.

Jean Francois Lyotard some thirty years ago wrote his classic The Postmodern Condition, which has become a definitive postmodern text. Lyotard says that information will be central in the years to come. He goes so far as to say, "It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor. A new field is opened for industrial and commercial strategies on the one hand, and political and military strategies on the other."

The central character of 1984 is Winston Smith. He works as in the "Ministry of Truth" to revise historical records in order to advance the propaganda of The Party. Knowledge, information, politics, government, and the struggle for freedom are all interconnected. This is as true today as it ever has been.

Happy reading.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Thus far in my novel project, I have not yet encountered a novel that illustrates so tragically the brokenness of a single individual. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert is that individual: a pedophile, a poet, and a depraved predator. In January, I reviewed A Thousand Splendid Suns, a tale of the heroism of women who are victims of abuse and objectification. Nabokov’s novel is the reverse perspective.

There is much to discuss in this novel, but the one theme that I wish to stress in this review is the role of the reader. What responsibility does a reader have? Lolita forces on us certain ethical concerns; ethical concerns, yes, but there are also certain human concerns, or even spiritual, I might say. More than any novel that I have reviewed thus far, I am impressed with how much interpretation hinges on the reader. I think this is always the case, but Lolita demands something from the reader, not allowing the reader to remain ambiguous or apathetic in interpretation.

In light of my recent readings of Afghan women in A Thousand Splendid Suns, I was delighted that my intellectual partner (and my new fiancé) Tamie recommended to me a book by Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran. This is a memoir of a book club for women in Tehran, who met in secret to discuss the great works of western fiction. I resonate with much of Nafisi’s thinking about Lolita, so I will be citing her throughout the review.

Humbert Humbert fantasizes about young girls. “Nymphets” he calls them.

“My mind rejected my body’s every plea.”

“Taboos strangled me.”

Humbert is an academic with a poetic imagination. In private, he obsesses about his desires; his “excruciating desires and insomnias” torture him. The novel is his private memoir of his encounter with Lolita.

The following quote describes well the way desire shapes Humbert. He describes a “gap” between what he has and what his imagination promises him. With desire, the gap between reality and possibility is ever-present, which makes desire a lustful quest that never ends.

“It may well be that the very attraction that immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised—the great rosegray never-to-be-had.”

Art? Or Pornography?

On this blog, we have discussed the question of how to define pornography. What is the line between art and pornography? Is all erotic film and literature pornographic, by definition?

Nabokov himself addresses this question. For Nabokov, art is beautiful regardless of subject matter. Pornography is cheap and commercialized. There is a formula approach that lacks any sense of the artistic. “…in modern times the term ‘pornography’ connotes mediocrity, commercialism, and certain strict rules of narration. Obscenity must be mated with banality because every kind of aesthetic enjoyment has to be entirely replaced by simple sexual stimulation which demands the traditional word for direct action upon the patient.” (Cited on p. 69-70 of “Lolita Turns Thirty,” in What Do Women Want? by Erica Jong) Pornography is a means to an end: “simple sexual stimulation” resulting in “direct action upon the patient.”

Pornography, according to Nabokov is also formulaic. In this sense, it is not unlike other forms of commercialized entertainment, like the popular detective stories of his day. “Old rigid rules must be followed by the pornographer in order to have his patient feel the same security of satisfaction as, for example, fans of detective stories feel—stories where, if you do not watch out, the real murderer may turn out to be…artistic originality…” Pornography, like all mass produced art, is cheap and cliché. “Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust.”

Erica Jong agrees with Nabokov, but puts it a bit more bluntly: “Those who can’t tell the difference between masturbatory stimulation and imaginative literature deserve, I believe, the garbage they get.” (p. 70 of “Lolita Turns Thirty”)

I think Nabokov is onto something here. Pornography is produced as a means to an end: sexual gratification. In this sense, however, much of what we call “entertainment” fits the bill as porn. In fact, many of the products we purchase that we believe we “need” would become porn. The books we buy and never read, the gadgets for the kitchen and garage that we use once or twice, the DVD’s that we only watch a few times or none at all. So much of our economy turns on impulse buys that gratify our itch to have a cool new something-or-other….but I digress….

There is a sense in which I would add to Nabokov’s definition, because I think there is a bit of a problem with defining good art as non-pornographic; namely, that this definition fails to take the reader into account. In other words, even if a piece of erotica is tasteful, beautiful, and poetic, I think it is still reasonable to suggest that it could be used as porn and not appreciated as art.

What I am suggesting is that the question of porn does not have to do with the text (or film, etc.) itself. It isn’t isolated to the novel in question or the movie in question. I am suggesting that something does not really become pornographic until there is a reader to make it so.

Whether cheap or artful, I suggest that pornography is in the eye of the beholder, which puts responsibility on the reader. How are we reading a work? Pornography is not just a matter of good or bad taste: there is something else going on, a more sinister and lustful intention by those who are reading or viewing the material.

I think good art is more beautiful than cheap, instant-gratification entertainment. The latter can easily be called “pornographic” when compared with the former. This is a good start; but we cannot let the reader off that easily. Readers are a part of the artistic process. We have the power to turn good art into a cheap commodity.

Lolita, The Double Victim

Many readers find that they sympathize with Humbert. A female friend of mine, Nicole, recently read the novel. When we talked about Humbert as a sympathetic character, she was blunt and to the point: No. Humbert was not a sympathetic character. Yet it is also true that many readers find something charming about Humbert.

Humbert is funny and self-deprecating, he is poetic and wistful, and he comes to us as someone who seems mostly harmless, at least at the beginning of the novel. Humbert has desires like anyone else. He lost his love at a young age, and he has been sort of stuck in those pre-adolescent years.

The desire to create a sympathetic character is no doubt the intention of the author, but this creates a serious ethical concern, especially as the novel progresses and Humbert is transformed into a maniacal predator. How can we sympathize with Humbert when he objectifies a person? Lolita, in a unique way, makes the reader reckon with themselves as a reader. What is the appropriate way to read?

The structure of the novel itself seems intent on putting the reader in an awkward situation. Even as the novel progresses and Humbert becomes evil and abusive, the reader might be tempted to sympathize with him, because he does in fact repent. Humbert himself finds to be reprehensible. But as I see it, the problem is that it is not merely Humbert, but the structure of the novel itself, that objectifies Lolita. As such, the reader is put into an ethically compromising situation, for to sympathize with the structure of the novel seems to be an immoral act.

Azar Nafisi comments on this from the perspective of the underground women’s reading circle in Tehran. “The first thing that struck us in reading Lolita—in fact it was on the very first page—was how Lolita was given to us as Humbert’s creature. We only see her in passing glimpses. ‘What I had madly possessed,’ he informs us, ‘was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita…having no will, no consciousness—indeed no real life of her own.” (p. 36 of Reading Lolita in Tehran)

There is a power differential, and this is crucial, between Humbert and Lolita. It is a violation. And yet the novel itself sides with Humbert. It is Humbert’s story in Humbert’s words. Lolita is whatever Humbert will make of her. The reader ratifies this at the very point that s/he sympathizes not only with Humbert the fictional character but also with the structure of the novel.

Nafisi continues: “Like my students, Lolita’s past comes to her not so much as a loss but as a lack, and like my students, she becomes a figment in someone else’s dream….Lolita on her own has no meaning; she can only come to life through her prison bars.” (p. 37)

“She [Lolita] becomes a double victim: not only her life but also her life story is taken from her.” (p. 41)

The philosopher Richard Rorty also sees this in the novel. There is a story in the novel that reveals how disconnected Humbert has become from his surroundings, so consumed by lust and drawn inward with paranoia and fear.

Rorty cites this portion of the novel. Humbert is speaking, revealing how disengaged he has become from the world around him:

“In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a very mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every explodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce new paper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead the last thirty years.”

Rorty turns the table on the reader: "The reader, suddenly revealed to himself as, if not hypocritical, at least cruelly incurious, recognizes his semblable, his brother, in Humbert and Kinbote. Suddenly Lolita does have a 'moral in tow.' But the moral is not to keep one's hands off little girls but to notice what one is doing, and in particular to notice what people are saying. For it might turn out, it very often does turn out, that people are trying to tell you that they are suffering. Just insofar as one is preoccupied with building up to one's private kind of sexual bliss, like Humbert, or one's private aesthetic bliss, like the reader of Lolita who missed that sentence about the barber the first time around, people are likely to suffer still more" (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 163-64, emphasis added).

My suggestion is that the reader must take responsibility as a reader for his or her sympathies. The structure of the novel is no doubt intentional, to put the reader into this bind. It is as if the novel were carefully crafted in order to force the reader into responsibility for the very manner in which the novel is read.

“Obsession has a life of its own”

“Obsession has a life of its own: the object, however irreplaceable and particular it seems, can change, though it is in the nature of obsession to recognize that.” (Erica Jong, p. 73 of “Lolita Turns Thirty”)

Let us take a more careful look at the progression of Humbert’s desire. I think that the progression of lust is an objectification of Lolita and an increasing disconnect from Lolita as a person. Lolita is Humbert’s object, and she becomes increasingly so the more Humbert acts on his lust. The result, however, is that Humbert becomes increasingly disconnected from himself. He changes and morphs into something grotesque and vile.

“Humbert is the hero with the tragic flaw. Humbert is every man who is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made flesh—which is the eternal and universal nature of passion.” (Elizabeth Janeway’s review in the New York Times Book Review, cited on P. 77 of “Lolita Turns Thirty” in What Do Women Want? By Erica Jong)

Throughout the novel, Humbert’s desire for Lolita drives him mad. Increasingly, Humbert disconnects from Lolita, as he increasingly objectifies her. As his objectification increases, he also disconnects from himself. The result is a downward spiral of abuse, terror, and psychosis.

At the beginning of the novel, Humbert thinks of himself in gentile terms. He is not a violent killer, rather “the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely as the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society coming down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mind, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.”

And yet by the end of the novel, Humbert is both a rapist and a murder.

Also early in the novel, Humbert describes his relationship with Annabel Leigh, his young first love: “The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the mater-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today.” Humbert ironically becomes more of a “mater-of-fact, crude” character when his relationship with Lolita descends into a deep disconnect with her mind, heart, and anything spiritual in her soul. He clearly becomes a “mater-of-fact, crude” kind of person that he sneers at.

Even as he progresses in his kidnapping, Humbert still wants to think of himself one way (“I am not a criminal sexual psychopath taking indecent liberties with a child….I am the therapist.”), all the while acting in another way. Humbert’s original intention was to molest Lolita while she was drugged and in a deep sleep, so as to make her as innocent as possible…but he abandons even this smallest of good intentions. The result is an increasing disconnect of himself from himself.

Humberts desires and lusts increase, gradually; and because of this, Lolita increasingly disconnects from him. Eventually he becomes abusive, not just sexually but physically. He enters “a new stage of persecution” while all the while not seeming to recognize what he is doing. Humbert becomes obsessive, paranoid, controlling, and irrational. After he loses Lolita, he has a psychological breakdown. He follows every shred of clue he can find for years…he nearly guns down a professor on only a hunch, then checks himself into a sanatorium…he becomes a maniac.

By the end of the novel, Humbert is both a rapist and a killer, two things that he, as a “poet,” swore he was not. There is a sinister transformation.

I find the Humbert’s act of murder significant, for several reasons. It is the point at which he transgresses his emphatic declaration that he is not a killer. However, it is also an extreme act of clutching at the past.

“I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.”

Humbert could never let go of his desire. Desire, almost by definition, cannot be satisfied. It is the gap (as Humbert says) “between the little given and the great promised—the great rosegray never-to-be-had.” As such, Humbert’s murder of Quilty (the man who managed to free Lolita from Humbert’s talons) becomes his desperate attempt to reach back into the past and once again posses Lolita as his own. The murder is an act of revenge, yes. It is a psychopathic shooting, true. It is complicated. But it is significant that after Humbert is arrested, he seems to find some sense of relief, a brief sense of peace. It is as if there is nothing left for him to cling to.

There is something here, I think, that is significant about desire. The ability to truly appreciate anything is compromised by clinging to it, by clutching it with all of our might. Only by setting the object free can we truly appreciate it on its own terms, and by doing so enter into an engagement with what is most truly precious about the person or thing.

This is what differentiates love from lust. Lust objectifies the other, it possesses it and owns it for its own gratification. This is what is pornographic.

But love is artistic. Love sets the person or thing free to be appreciated for what it is, not as a means to an end. Lust demands that full attention be given to its object of desire. Love, on the contrary, engages the person on their own terms.

Finding Love

Humbert dehumanized Lolita. She disconnected from him, and she disconnects from her own desires and her own sexuality. During intercourse, she would read magazines, while Humbert was in the midst of his ecstasy. Lolita has a promising role in the school play and quits just before the opening night. It is as though she cannot reach the climax of the event, as though she is disconnected from the climax of her own desires.

Most tellingly for Humbert, every night Lolita weeps when she thinks Humbert has fallen to sleep. She has no place to go. She is trapped.

Eventually, Humbert begins to gain some measure of clarity and insight into what he has done to Lolita, or “Dolores Haze,” her real name. He realizes how cruel he was to her. He realized how little he knew of her heart and mind. Humbert consults with a priest to gain some measure of relief. Though he finds some solace, he has a profound realization that haunts him:

"Unless it can be proven to me that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a north American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art."

Humbert realizes, at last, the deep interconnectedness of all things, of all people. When he turned inward, to cultivate desire, he turned away from the human reality of others. The more he did this, the more he went mad, and the results were casualties that could not be reversed. Who Humbert was and what he did mattered significantly, especially to Delores Haze. “Life is a joke” if our actions are isolated from others.

Spiritual enlightenment (or the life of the “Spirit” as it is called in Christianity) seems to be precisely that process whereby we recognize that our spiritual fate is bound up with how we relate to others. Our spiritual and psychological state cannot be cultivated in isolation, apart from others; rather, it is defined as we relate with others.

Concluding Thoughts

“Oh my poor, bruised child. I loved you….I was despicable and brutal….There were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it.”

Even in his repentant state, even in his moments of deepest regret, I still cannot find it ethically acceptable for a reader to sympathize with Humbert. Oddly, though, I do think we can love Humbert. To sympathize with Humbert and with the novel is to lend credence to the notion that we can objectify and dehumanize another; but love is different. Love can respond with a broken heart to the brokenness of others, no matter what their frame of mind.

Nabokov’s novel is written to make the reader reckon with how s/he reads. So I read Humbert’s life as a tragedy. I read Lolita’s life as the voiceless victim. There are lessons to be learned from Humbert, lessons of lust, desire, and true love. Ultimately, true love escapes Humbert, and his desire consumes him. Although I cannot sympathize with Humbert, or with the structure of the novel, I believe that there is some sense in which we can read the novel with love. This may be something of an agape hermeneutic, to use the Christian term. A hermeneutic that can love both the victim and the victimizer, and in doing so understand the tragedy that occurs when we objectify and dehumanize others.

Though a tragedy, this is a deeply human novel, if the reader approaches it in order to humanize its characters. To love is to humanize.

A few thoughts on grace....and Lolita

I just finished my reading of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita. It was better than I had expected, more powerful and even (dare I say it) redemptive, in its own way.....more on that later.....I thought I would post some extended thoughts from Herman (my future brother-in-law), who has a very thoughtful blog. His perspective is Christian, but Eastern Orthodox. The Eastern view of faith is quite different, and for many in the U.S. (particularly from evangelical backgrounds), the Eastern take on faith can be so unfamiliar as to even seem non-Christian.

So, here are a few of Herman's thoughts on sin, atonement, brokenness, and grace that might remind me of my readings of Lolita:

Let's say there's a murder, and we know who committed the murder.

We human beings didn't know it was going to happen before hand. We can't do anything about it afterwards. We can't raise the victim from the dead. We undo their relatives' exerience of sorrow. We don't know if the murderer will ever do it again. We don't know if the murder was overcome by an uncontrollable rage, or if he plotted for months. We are all fragile human beings, who could be murdered ourselves, and we are afraid.

And given those facts, it's actually pretty logical that human beings tend to react by punishing, imprisoning, or even executing the murderer. That is the only thing we can do. We're pretty powerless in the situation otherwise.

But God isn't. God knew it was going to happen. He knows what is going to happen in the future. He was there. He knows what it's like to be murdered. He can raise people from the dead. He knows the person's motives, state of mind etc. He can prevent the murderer from ever doing it again. God cannot be murdered as God, and as a resurrected man, Jesus can no longer be hurt. His approach to wrong-doers, whether murderers or shoplifters is radially different to ours.

We re-act. God is. I can't express strongly enough my horror and dilike for the western idea that God is angry with us, in the same sense as humans get angry. Yes, we have to use metaphores from human life to express truths about God, but the truths cannot be contained in our metaphores. God is, he does not get angry.

Or, as an Orthodox priest once put it (I may have already said this, but it bears repeating): "Orthodoxy is the lack of one-sidedness."

I think that whatever suffering we experience now, or after death (hell), is the product (like a chemical reaction, or a law of nature) of our own opposition to God. All death, sickness and sorrow here on earth are the product of our collective sinning because we sin when we are hurt.

Or, but another way, our turning away from God, on its own, is a sufficient cause for all suffering, whether now or later. God doesn't need to interfere, or subject us to something more than the direct results of our own actions. We're doing that just fine on our own.

We are wounded by the fallen world, and in our woundedness we contribute to the ongoing fallenness. All suffering is suffering at the hands of each other and ourselves, not at the hands of God. God is.

So grace, on this account, is the process where we learn how not to contribute to the fallenness, and where we can become healed from our wounds. Grace is God teaching us how not to be hurt, and how not to hurt.

[From the comment section of Holistic Christian Sexuality and Community]

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

We find Alice tired and bored. Sitting on the bank on a hot day, she wants nothing to do with her sister’s book; it has no pictures or conversations, no images or dialog. The day is static and still, conventional and dull.

Then it’s down the rabbit hole and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland begin. In the next Alice book, Through the Looking Glass, it is the mirror that acts a portal, transporting Alice to another world: a world of imagination, creativity, excitement, and absurdity.

Lewis Carroll wrote his first Alice novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (or Adventures for short) in 1865. The second, Through the Looking Glass (or Looking Glass) followed seven years later. The books were highly popular from the very beginning. Lewis Carroll, of course, was only his pen name. (A writer of nonsense fairy tales ought never to take his real name.) The tales of Alice that he writes are funny, entertaining, and charming.

The novels can be read just for the fun of it, with no strings attached. This is one of few great novels that one can just sit back and enjoy, without feeling the need to explore “the deeper” mysteries and darkness of human existence. And yet on the other hand, these texts are not without substance. After all, Carroll was a professor of mathematics and logic and Oxford. The substance of these texts, and any potential lessons they can teach, emerge through their playfulness. Not merely that play itself is valuable, but that the context of triviality can serve as fertile ground for reflection. Perhaps this itself is one of the most profound lessons of reading these novels, especially in politically polarized societies.

So, I want to proceed in a playful manner. These novels open us to imagination and absurdity in a way that can prove quite enlightening.

“Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking!”

The adventures of Alice play with absurdity. The novels seek to loosen the edges, allowing us to be surprised and delighted. The text continually surprises us, constantly playing off of our expectations for things to be a certain way. All dialog and interaction that Alice encounters in Wonderland inverts our conventional sense of how things should be; but it does so in a way that allows us to imagine a new possibility, if only for a brief moment. Only for a brief moment, because the text wants to shake us up in a playful way, without taking itself too seriously.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know that I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

When dialoging with the Cheshire Cat, Alice asks for a reason, for some rationality to explain why the Cat believes that Alice is insane. The Cat provides a reason, but it isn’t quite convincing: “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Many of the characters in Wonderland abide by their own rules, by their own set of standards. The Duchess states that, “Every thing’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” But each of the dogmas of the characters is so bizarre and so unlike any other standard that the result often becomes chaotic, exasperating, and certainly quite hilarious!

Taken as a collective whole, Alice’s experiences with the creatures calls into question the point of conventionality, of fixed and rigid systems of thinking and language. At every turn, a bizarre comment or inquiry upsets another axiom.

“Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!” (Looking Glass)

Does language master us? Or is it the means of mastering our world? A means of mastering others?

Alice always tries. She often follows out the reasoning of the characters she meets, seeking to match wits with them. In this way, Alice can come to represent conventionality. Humpty Dumpty says as much to Alice: “You’re so exactly like other people.” (Looking Glass)

Alice presses. Language, it seems, stretches us. It stretches the creatures to the full extent of their absurdity. It stretches Alice out of her conventionality. Wonderland is not the place of books with no pictures or conversations. In Wonderland, words come alive. They do something that creates excitement and new ways of seeing the world.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Alice asks the question of morality: who has the right to change words and make them mean such different things. Humpty Dumpty changes the question. It isn’t about what we can do, it isn’t about who has the right to change words. This misses the point. Using language is a creative process. It is about asserting one’s self.

Wonderland upsets the dogmatic world of books without pictures or conversations, and to do so it stretches language in all sorts of bizarre directions. “All events in the Alice books thus feel like non sequiturs.” (“Introduction” by Tan Lin in 2003 edition) As absurd as they are, these non sequiturs are the linguistic agents that help Alice to break out of the dullness of normality.

The non sequitur is “that which does not follow.” A non sequitur works in a way that is opposite the cliché. Clichés are trite and boring, they operate only to advance the narrative to the next sequence. Clichés are dull and lifeless. Non sequiturs, on the other hand, make us think differently. They shake things up.

Clichés are easy, and they are familiar. Because of their familiarity, they are not questioned. The reader goes through them and onto something else. The non sequitur is unfamiliar and strange. It is absurd. And as such, we have to stop. In the Alice books, they are devices to make us laugh and to question our assumptions. Clichés lock us into convention, while a non sequitur can help us break out of routine and think in imaginative and creative ways.

In the first Alice novel, the Queen inverts the typical order of the courtroom and makes the absurd assertion, “sentence first—verdict afterwards.” A similar circumstance occurs in Looking Glass, where the criminal is to be punished prior to the crime. “The crime comes last of all.”

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.
“What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.
“Oh, things that happen the week after next,” the queen replied in a careless tone. “For instance, now,” she went on, sticking a large piece of plaster on her finger as she spoke, “there’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”
“Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice.
“That would be all the better wouldn’t it?” the Queen said…
Alice felt there was no denying that. “Of course it would be all the better,” she said: “but it wouldn’t be all the better his being punished.”

Language becomes a tool for the imagination. It refuses to settle the matter; rather, it suggests strange possibilities….even impossibilities, which paradoxically can become possible if we only try hard enough. Imagination and creative language can make the impossible seem possible.

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Chasing after the wind

It is the white rabbit that stirs Alice out of her boredom on that hot day by the bank. So, Alice chases after the white rabbit. But the white rabbit is chasing after someone else: “The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers! She’ll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets!” When Alice meets the Duchess, we find that the Duchess must hurry off to play croquet with the Queen. The Queen, for her part, cannot execute her subjects fast enough: “Off with his head!” And her subjects, of course, are always anxious to avoid being the object of a beheading.

The constant motion is a circle of pursuit. We find deep meaning in the motion, in the chasing, but it all has a certain futility to it. Ah, but not futility in the sense of a brooding existentialist. This is a futility with a sense of humor. The Alice novels illustrate that the futility of our motion may be worthwhile, even in the midst of its triviality and absurdity; indeed, they are important because they are silly.

“Alice’s conversations, when they don’t end unsatisfactorily in silence, tend to go in a circle.” (Tan Lin)

In the West, we tend to live in a linear world. This is particularly true in our modern world, especially in the U.S. If our economy is not growing, then we are panicked. We must always be making progress, moving forward, ad infinitum. To truly appreciate and appropriate the circularity of the Alice novels, we must change the paradigm and realize that circularity, however absurd, allows us to center and enjoy.

The circularity means that we are circling around something in order to appreciate it. This circularity of the novel gives the text a certain lightness, a lightness that is also a spiritual and psychological virtue that is rare in a linear world obsessed with progress.

Our desire to go somewhere is parodied in Alice’s dialog with the Cheshire Cat in Adventures:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

In Looking Glass, Alice suddenly finds herself in a shop. An old sheep is keeping shop. There are many wonderful items to purchase, but Alice cannot actually find any of them. As soon as she tries to fix her eyes on an item, she finds that it shifts or fades away, and when she is able to fully focus her eyes on the shelf, the shelf is empty. But she can see that there are items on the shelves above and below, so she tries to fix her gaze on another shelf to see these items, but she finds that they also vanish.

The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things—but the oddest part of it all was, that whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty: though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.

The Sheep’s shop illustrates that economic desires are always shifting and changing, like the shop that the Sheep is tending. As we read in Ecclesiastes, “The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.” And again, “Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire: this is also vanity...” Desire is that which we see, not with our eyes but with our desire. As such, the object of desire can never fully be brought into focus, and whatever shelf we fix our desire turns up empty.

“Quests for mastery are continually frustrated in the Alice books.” (Tan Lin) Mastery bows to absurdity. The true mastery comes from giving up mastery, from being able to laugh at ourselves and cultivate a lightness of spirit and a sense of humor.

Alice sighed and gave it up. “It’s exactly like a riddle with no answer!” she thought.

A change of pace--the Human Narrative Project update

My review of A Thousand Splendid Suns is available for your reading pleasure. We have had good discussion ensue, with insightful commentary on understanding Rasheed, the women protagonists, and the psychology underlying it all. So, feel free to join in the dialog.

So she took courage and went on again, "I didn't know that Cheshire cats always grinned. In fact, I didn't know that cats could grin."
"They all can," said the Dutchess, "and most of them do."
"I don't know of any that do," Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased to have gotten into a conversation.
"You don't know much," said the Dutchess. "And that's a fact."

The next novel is a change of pace. Novels tend, as a general rule, to explore the darker elements of our lives and of humanity in general. This is certainly the case for A Thousand Splendid Suns, although it ends with a narrative of hope. Our next novel, Lewis Carroll's (his pseudonym) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, is a curious, playful text. It is literature that children can enjoy, full of fantasy and creative dialog between Alice and the idiosyncratic animals and characters that she meets along the way; yet the novel also plays with ideas and philosophies. It is above all a work of art, and as such it gives us food for thought (playful as well as serious) in a subtle and nuanced manner.

Reading the novel will also prepare us for Tim Burton's new Disney film, Alice in Wonderland, starring Johnny Depp. I'm always interested in how filmmakers interpret novels, and Burton is one of those, uh, creative types.....creative in that weird, creepy sort of way. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (and I will also be reading Through the Looking Glass) is our February novel, and the film is set to release on March 5.

You may read this novel/s as you like: it/they can be read as a child's book, as a trivial bit of fun, but it can also be read for the many possibilities for symbolism, metaphor, and philosophical speculation. For a taste of this, I leave you with a few quotes by Tan Lin:

"The Alice books manage to show both these quests--that of the child to look forward, and of the adult to look back--simultaneously, as mirror logics of each other....

"The quandry of a logically grounded knowledge constituted out of an illogical universe pervades both books. The questions that Alice asks are not answered by the animals in Wonderland nor by anyone after she wakens. It is likely that her questions don't have answers or that there are no right questions to ask....

"Nearly all the players in Wonderland, with the exception of the Duchess and the Queen, are male, older than Alice, and contentious, imperious, or condescending in their adherence to strict rules. Even in play, logic reigns rigidly in Wonderland in a kind of spoof of the analytical philosophical logic popular at Oxford in Carroll's day....

"Lewis Carroll was a teacher of symbolic logic at Oxford, and he love to make mathematical knots for his pupils to wriggle out of...."
(Quotes from Tan Lin's Introduction, 2003 Barnes & Noble Classics edition, pp. xi-xxxiii)

A Thousand Slendid Suns

“every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief”

A Thousand Splendid Suns is a novel that is at once both brutal and beautiful. Khaled Hosseini presents us with two ordinary Afghan women whose lives are extraordinary through their response to suffering.

From a certain point of view, we can read this novel as though we were perched high in the sky observing the intersection of several crossfires. One crossfire is that of Afghanistan itself, war torn and demolished by conflict. These are the real, literal bullets that rip holes in homes and leave children fatherless and mothers childless. Yet these bullets are often provided by nations that are many miles away, safe from the destruction, safe to play political games with a faceless people group.

This larger crossfire stretches from the former Soviet Union to the United States of America. Within this larger crossfire is a smaller, more dangerous crossfire. In this restricted space, the women of Afghanistan are the targets of spiritual, psychological, physical, and religious abuse by men whose pain, frustration, and warped religious fervor find release against the most vulnerable.

But out of the suffering, true character emerges, real love.

Afghanistan

“‘And that, my young friends, is the story of our country, one invader after another,’ the driver said, flicking cigarette ash out the window. ‘Macedonians. Sassanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we’re like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing. Isn’t that the truth, badar?’”

Kabul is the main backdrop for the novel. The reader walks along the streets of Kabul, visits an orphanage, a women’s prison, and even barters with the vendors in “Titanic City,” a market place that sprang up during the Afghanistan craze over the U.S. film Titanic.

The historical backdrop begins with the communist takeover in 1978, follows the mujahideen rebellion against the communist, the eventual withdrawal of Soviet Troops in 1989 and subsequent warlord rule and in-fighting of the mujahideen, traces the rise and fall of the Taliban and the United States’s post 9/11/01 war and military presence.

This background, however, comes to life. The power of the novel is to give human faces and voices to those who get lost in the political, military, and religious interests. These interests reduce human beings to a means to an end. When people become means to ends, conflict and violence resolutions come more naturally. Internationally, we in the U.S. can play chess for world domination by arming rebellions; domestically, behind the walls of Afghan homes, men can gain the upper hand over their wife with a fist to the face. The approach is the same: dehumanize the other.

Yet the recourse to violence can never deliver what we hope for. Violence begets violence. Jesus said that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Ghandi said that an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth makes the whole world blind and toothless. Under the Reagan administration, the U.S. armed the mujahideen, which eventually resulted in the rule of the Taliban and deep-seated resentment of U.S. interference in the Middle East. The rise in militant Islam and terrorism came back to haunt the U.S., most obviously in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But more than simply a notion of retribution, the objective of violence (if there is any) fails in that violence dehumanizes the aggressor even more than the victim. We see this clearly in Rasheed. While only a teenager, Mariam is forced to marry the much older Rasheed. At first, Rasheed is hospitable, though certainly coarse and controlling. He takes Mariam around the city and even buys her “a pure gift,” a dark maroon silk shawl with beaded fringes and edges embroidered with gold thread. At first, Mariam balks at this gift. She is reminded of her father, who purchased gifts for her only as a matter of penance, a way to absolve him of the guilt of fathering Mariam, an illegitimate child. But Mariam looks at Rasheed’s face and discerns that he has given her this gift in a moment of vulnerability. He has put something of himself on the line, opened himself with this present. However, this vulnerability and easy manner of Rasheed with devolve into cruel rage and abuse.

When Rasheed realizes that Mariam cannot have children, he sinks into hatred and contempt. He resents Mariam and beats her. His violence turns him inward, away from the possibilities of love. Love could have made him whole. Acceptance could have turned their house into a home.

Pinocchio

“Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”

I was intrigued by the author’s explicit reference to the Disney Pinocchio film. When Mariam is a young girl, her father Jalil enchants her with stories of the movie Pinocchio. Jalil owns a theater and the film is showing. Mariam wants to go see the movie. She wants it so badly that she walks all the way to her father’s village and waits on his doorstep for him. But he will not see her. She sleeps on his doorstep, and he will not receive her.

Through a series of events, Mariam’s trip to see her father results in her being pressured/forced to marry Rasheed. Many years later, in an attempt to reconcile with Mariam, Jalil tries to give her a Pinocchio video.

The Pinocchio motif lends itself well to many elements of the novel. In the Disney film, Pinocchio can become real only if he is brave, truthful, and unselfish. Pinocchio must navigate through temptations in a society where he is still a puppet, not yet human. Mariam, representing the women and mothers of Afghanistan, is viewed by the male-dominated society as sub-human, like a wooden puppet who is not yet a real boy. The country of Afghanistan, as well, could be said to be in pursuit of becoming real; however, having pursued this course by violent means, it has become entrenched and trapped in its own hostility.

“Seasons had come and gone. Presidents in Kabul had been inaugurated and murdered. An empire had been defeated. Old wars had ended, and new ones had broken out. But Mariam had hardly noticed, hardly cared. She had passed these years in a distant corner in her mind, a dry, barren field, beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There the future did not matter, and the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake and its accomplise, hope, a treacherous illusion….”

Mariam’s existence becomes wooden. Over time, she becomes Rasheed’s puppet. He pulls the strings. She stays home. She cooks. She cleans. She becomes Rasheed’s scapegoat, and he beats her when his aggression boils over.

It is love that begins Mariam’s transformation. Laila, the other protagonist in the novel, becomes Rasheed’s second wife. At first, Mariam is jealous and resents her; but eventually Mariam is able to open to Laila and Laila’s little girl, Aziza. Holding Aziza in her arms, she realizes the wonder of the love of a child. In that moment, Mariam becomes a mother.

“Mariam had never before been wanted like this. Love had never been declared to her so guilelessly, so unreservedly….And she marveled at how after all these years of rattling loose, she had found in this little creature the first true connection in her life of false, failed connections.”

Eventually Mariam is fully transformed, and she realizes the full beauty, her true radiance. At the time of her death, she reflects, and she experiences abundant peace.

“Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it…..She would have liked that very much, to be old and to play with Aziza’s children.
Mariam wished for so much in those final moments, yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world…a pitiable, regrettable accident, a weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, as a companion, a guardian, a mother. A person of consequence….This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.
Mariam’s final thoughts were a few words from the Koran that she muttered under her breath.
He has created the heavens and the earth with the truth
He makes the night cover the day and makes the day overtake the night
And he has made the sun and the moon subservient
Each one moves on to an assigned term
Now surely he is the mighty, great forgiver”

For me, this was the most profound moment in the novel. I hesitate to include it in a review; the words feel so sacred, and taking them from their context almost feels inappropriate. Perhaps it is. But these words lead us to something deeply touching about humanity.

Love, Violence, and Hope

“Let me tell you something. A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing Mariam. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed, it won’t stretch to make room for you.”

In our search for something more real, we human beings seem to find it in the face of love. And yet it is love that we so often cannot find. Some consciously seek love, some only seek love in very indirect ways. Some, like Rasheed, become so lost in their own despair and illusions that they wander far from love, and far from even any sense of the healing power of love.

I am struck that despite the fact that love is so often that which we seek, it is also that which so easily escapes us. We often try to control love, but love is beyond control. We try to manipulate others to gain love. We make ourselves loveable, or we give to others, hoping to earn love; but pure love will always elude manipulation. In frustration, we may try to force love, but love can never be won with violence. In resignation, we may withdraw and close ourselves to love, believing we are not worthy, believing love cannot be found.

Love is a surprise. We must open our hearts to love, but never try to grasp it.

For me, the most startling element of the story of Christ is that God would incarnate, emptying God of Deity. God chooses to demonstrate the nature of love by giving up control of love. Rather, Christ dies. This act of sacrifice asks nothing in return. Religion tries to capture this love in salvation formulas, creeds, or other forms of institutional control. But the act of love asks nothing, demands nothing, expects nothing. Christ’s love even defies Christianity’s attempt to contain it in its own religion. Christ’s love is only the openness of vulnerability. Love gives up its own love. Love opens its hands, neither clinging to others nor rejecting them. “Love always hopes.”

“It hurt to talk. Her jaw was still sore. Her back and neck ached. Her lip was swollen and her tongue kept poking the empty pocket of the lower incisor that Rasheed had knocked loose two days before. Before Mamee and Babee had died and her life turned upside down, Laila would never that a human body could withstand this much beating, this viciously, this regularly, and keep functioning.” (Laila)

Through all of the brutality of the novel, there is beauty. Mariam is “like a rock in a river enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulance that washes over her.” There is “something deep in her core” that Rasheed and the Taliban cannot see—something hard like a block of limestone…“something that will be her undoing and Laila’s salvation.”

Despite the graphic violence, the novel ends with a sense of hope. But this hope is seasoned and wise. If Afghanistan (or any country) continues on a violent course, if the nations of the world see it as a political playground, then more violence will probably occur, more pain, more destruction and devastation. The situation is fragile. The hope, however, is living. It shines, like a thousand splendid suns in the radiance of the women who have endured the most suffering.

The novel closes with a sense from Laila about the fragile hope she has for the future and a poem by Hafiz:

Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not
Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not
If a flood should arrive to drown all that’s alive
Noah is your guide in the typhoon’s eye, grieve not