Friday, April 20, 2018

the other - in sex and in daily life

There have been interesting pairings in my reading this week.   Driving from Boston to Washington on Tuesday, I listened to the audio-book Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel.   Meanwhile, in my book clubs I read Albert Camus's The Stranger and  Kamel Daoud's  extraordinary re-imagining of that novel The Meursault Investigation.   All three books are about navigating proximity to the other.

Esther Perel is a sex therapist. In her terms, the other is the lover.  Her book explores the difficult balance between domestic harmony and sexual desire.  In The Stranger Camus gives us an absurdist novel about a man who cannot connect to the other - whose lack of empathy renders connection impossible.  The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud's 2013 retelling of The Stranger - gives us the perspective of the family of the unnamed man who is murdered on the beach.

But who is the other? How separate from us are they? Esther Perel writes that in order to maintain frisson in our romantic relationships it is imperative to see our beloved as other - as a separate person with their own thoughts and erotic imagination, as one who is free to stop loving us, to fantasize about others and even to transform themselves into a different person from the one we fell in love with.    We  cannot expect to own our beloved. And yet, married couples take a vow to become as one.  Good marriages, we tend to believe, rest on a couple's ability to make a comfortable and secure nest - each partner as one half of a whole. Perel's book offers examples of how various couples reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: sexual frisson and domestic felicity.

In a very different way,  the encounter with the other drives the narrative of The Stranger.   The main character, Meursault is an island. He doesn't care to connect - and his existential passage from one physical experience to the next renders him a stranger to us.  His mother's dies and he responds without emotion. A neighbor beats his dog, and he does nothing.  Raymond beats up his girl and instead of taking her side, Meursault goes to the beach with the intention of punishing her brother. Then he kills a nameless "Arab" - firing his gun four times. "like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness" (Joseph Laredo translation).

This unnamed "Arab" is unacknowledged as human in The Stranger even though their encounter drives the narrative.  In a chilling twist, Meursault's conviction rests not on the murder per se, but on the evidence that he showed no feeling at his mother's death.

In  The Meursault Investigation Kamel Daoud  treats The Stranger as if it is Meursault's own story - a manifesto called The Other.  Since the murdered man is unnamed in The Stranger, his humanity has been negated.  There is no encounter between two humans here. The sun is blinding and we aren't even sure Meursault is fully aware of what he's doing.  The murdered man has no humanity, since he is just the Arab.  "Arab," writes Daoud." I never felt Arab, you know.  Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man's eyes.  In our neighborhood, in our world, we were Muslims, we had given names, faces and habits. Period."

Reading this, I was reminded of Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Only when her protagonist comes from Nigeria to America does she understand that she is seen as "black".  Black is an American construct.  I  remembered too Ta Nehisi Coates' in Between the World and Me where he writes about Saul Bellow's embarrassing quip, wondering who the Shakespeare of the Hottentots is.

Well, Coates responds - the Shakespeare of the Hottentots is of course, Shakespeare.

In order to be fully human, we must recognize the humanity of the others we encounter, while also honoring their otherness - be they lovers, neighbors, or strangers.  As Orhan Pamuk observed in his Nobel Lecture "The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is."

But wait! Pamuk's final step is crucial: "We must first travel through other people's stories and books and the writer who writes the stories of other people must not and should not negate them by folding their identities into something about ourselves."

Honor the other and you honor yourself.



Thursday, April 12, 2018

messy emotional journeys in the stories of Alice Munro

The following post originally appeared as one of my 2013 book reviews in Washington Independent Review of Books

Desire can be mysterious. Why do some attractions hold strong while others dissolve for no particular reason?  The nature of romantic impulse and the disorienting shifts in the direction of desire provides the central focus of Dear Life, Alice Munro’s extraordinary collection of stories. Here, accidental encounters alter the characters’ internal landscape, often leaving them stunned.

The stories often feature trains. In “To Reach Japan” a young married poet meets a journalist at a horrible party where she feels ignored and disconnected. Sometime later, this leads her to travel with her small child on a train to Toronto, and what happens on the journey itself transforms her emotional destination.

In another story, a soldier jumps suddenly from a train to find himself in “an immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on the train and just looking out the window… coming to some conclusions about you from vantage points you couldn’t see.” With his reckless jump the character shifts the story’s direction. Then his story shifts again, never heading in a direction the reader anticipates.

All the stories in Dear Life depict characters whose emotional journeys are at odds with their eventual destinations. In the hands of a less skilled writer this would come across as an endless stream of red herrings. Too much story here. Cut out all the detours. But Munro is a master craftsman and she manages her shifts superbly, making them crucial, even though these very shifts make the center of her stories elusive. As you read, you can never quite catch hold. Like quicksilver, the center of each story constantly eludes you.

In “Amundsen,” a young teacher with a new job at a sanatorium gets off a train in a Canadian landscape that feels to her like the Russian steppes. The descriptions are detailed and evocative. But we are already deep into the seventh page when the focus totally changes. “I had not been there more than a day before all the events of the first day seemed unique and unlikely,” Munro writes.
Where is the emotional center of “Amundsen”?  As the reader, you never really know. And the amazing part is you don’t really care, because you are invited into an emotional puzzle. Like the character, you find yourself disconnected, jarred, feeling as she does when she leaves Amundsen on the train, “dazed and full of disbelief.”

It isn’t only lovers who are undone by desire. Children get caught in the crossfire too. In “Gravel” an older sister struggles with her parents’ separation. Her efforts to create drama around the family dog end tragically. The younger sister, and narrator of this story, is haunted by a moment of disconnection, when she could have influenced the outcome of events. Instead she “sat down and waited for the next thing to happen.”

Similarly, in “To Reach Japan” a different child is caught in an equally chilling moment between railway carriages, her “eyes wide open and mouth slightly open, amazed and alone.”

Desire can be messy and unreasonable. It springs up like a weed and often chokes a more flourishing relationship. For Munro, desire overcomes people even when they don’t particularly care about what their lovers say or do. In “To Reach Japan” Greta isn’t interested in what the journalist at the party writes about; she can barely remember his name. In “Leaving Maverley” Isabel suddenly leaves her husband for a man who “had been a mid-upper gunner – a position that Isabel could never get straight in her head.” In “Corrie” we aren’t told why the characters are drawn to each other romantically, but it doesn’t matter because we believe their relationship. We feel the connection. As in “Train” one character’s eyes meet another’s, “and a certain piece of knowledge passed between them.”

This might suggest that desire and romantic love are terribly superficial. In “Haven” the narrator comes to understand that “devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous.” Except that Alice Munro clearly believes otherwise. Her beautifully crafted stories take hold of the whole messy confusion of desire and handle it with reverence and delicacy. As one of her characters puts it, “Nothing changes really about love.” As you read you long for desire to win out in the end. When you finish reading these stories, you find yourself reeling, hanging on, as it were, for dear life.


Saturday, April 7, 2018

on the legacy of my mother, who read to me

With a mother like mine,  I could hardly have become anything but a reader and a lover of books.  It was her love for literature that enlightened my path. Although she slipped through the cracks of her very British education, she went on to become an actress, performing several plays a week in repertory theatre-  and she always remembered one particular teacher who had recognized that spark in her.  It was Naomi Lewis, who went on to become a well regarded book critic.  What Naomi Lewis did for my mother Judy, she then passed on to me, along with her passion for words, and particularly her love of Shakespeare.

Some of the things she taught me, I will jot down here as they occur to me. First, if you find a writer whose work you admire, you should read everything you can by them, and in that way, become an expert.

If there is a poem that you love, commit it to memory. You will then have a little poetry library in your head, and you can draw upon it whenever you want. Judy encouraged me to learn Shakespearean sonnets by heart - and as a result I have them forever. If I'm sitting in traffic, or the dentist's office or wherever I may be - I can pull one up, and savor it.  I have tried to encourage my own children and my students to do the same.

Judy had me read Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress - when I was about twelve or thirteen. I could hardly have been expected to understand the art of seduction! But she had me work out what it was he was trying to do in that poem, and to appreciate how funny it was - and how clever.

She also read to us in the evenings before we went to bed - The Hobbit was one of my favorites and The Secret Garden was another.

When we moved to the United States, and I wasn't challenged as much as she thought I should be in my English classes, Judy encouraged me to keep a little notebook with the books I had read - and to write something about them, as a kind of record.   Maybe this was the beginning of my book reviewing life.  Armed with the critical skills she had taught me, as well as a hyper sensitive "bullshit" detector, I went on to evaluate scripts for NBC, to write book reviews and yes, also a few books of my own.

It was because of her that I realized the things I was missing in my high school education.  I made it a point to read such things as Dante's Divine Comedy and Machiavelli's The Prince - in my spare time because I felt I couldn't consider myself educated unless I'd read these classics.

Getting an A on a book report wasn't what impressed my mother.  Sometimes she read my A papers and said I could do better.  Just because you know this will get you an A, doesn't mean it's good enough, she admonished. I know you can write with more depth.

Then there was the Elizabethan Companie she directed in Hingham Massachusetts - a huge part of my young adult life - straight into my twenties.  My father had been a professional actor in London, and he was a big part of these productions - as was my future mother in law Alice, herself a professional actress - and my dearest friend Walter Van Dyk - and his brother Felix, and Bronwen Crothers, and Sarah DeLima - all of these people went on to professional careers. And all those productions  we mounted -there were so many - from She Stoops to Conquer to Blythe Spirit, to Twelfth Night, Cherry Orchard and everything else in between.  My mother Judy is the one who made these happen.  She was a cultural force - and what better way of internalizing literature than performing it for an audience?

And of course there was also her love of the Bible - King James version, of course - which both my parents  read weekly - as did I.  The beauty of the prose in that translation - the economy and poetry of it, has for me embodied the spirit of the Word, and sustained me all my life.

"How did you get interested in reading Brideshead Revisited?" she asked me in a recent phone conversation. She was remembering how I had done a huge project on it in high school well before it became popularized in the TV series.   "You suggested it to me, of course!" I reminded her.

So it was only natural when I had children of my own, that I read to them every night as well - the whole Narnia Chronicles of C S Lewis, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman - and with my daughter Rosalind (named, I might add, for Shakespeare's heroine) Charlotte Bronte's  Jane Eyre and The Professor.

I still have this card she send for Rosalind's first birthday.

This is what she wrote inside.  "I had to get this... it's my idea of heaven I think! It also suggests the shape of things to come perhaps with you and Rosalind."

And has it ever!  My daughter Rosalind, Judy's grand daughter recently completed her D Phil at Merton College in Oxford - on French Enlightenment Literature.   A more avid reader or expressive writer you could hardly hope find.