Song of Solomon, Literary Criticism, Essays, Blog Posts, and the Problem of Continuous Thinking (Part 1)

I haven't updated my blog in a while. It's not that I don't write posts; it's that I never finish or publish them. I've got a couple sitting in my drafts folder that stop halfway through. What killed these poor posts at a young and tender age? Was it lack of time? Did my internet connection suddenly die?

No.

They just went obsolete before they were finished.

Song of Solomon is a rather difficult book to write blog posts about, since everything keeps changing. I come back from class discussion with a great idea to write about, and I start typing, and decide I need a bit more time to think things over, so I read the next chapter and BAM! I find out that all the assumptions I made when writing my blog post were wrong, or possibly wrong.

For example, my post-in-progress about Macon Dead. I started that post early in the book, before the part where Milkman hits his dad. In those first few chapters, I saw Macon Dead as a pretty sympathetic character, and was writing to defend him from the slanderous accusations of him being similar to Mr. Rochester. Sure, they've both got "crazy" wives, but Macon didn't show any signs of outright sadism like Rochester. He was just emotionally drained and too concerned with his business. The way I saw it was that Macon was driven to do the less-than-perfect things he did (ignoring/oppressing his wife, criticizing his son, evicting old ladies, being greedy) because he was convinced that was the only way to survive in society and bring up his children. In my initial interpretation of Macon, he sought to regain the things his father had lost (land, wealth, comfortable life, etc) and ensure that no one could take advantage of him and take those things away (like they did to his father). In order to survive in a white-dominated world, he felt the need to "act white" and distance himself from Pilate and the kind of life she represents (free and loving, but down in the dirt as far as the upper class is concerned). His criticism of Milkman and his forbidding him from visiting Pilate were representative of his attempts to bring up his son to be able to keep the Dead family's precarious social standing among whites. That's what made him a sympathetic character--unlike Rochester, who is acting entirely in his own self-interest, Macon just has a perhaps deranged way of taking care of his family. He's doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons. Maybe I just take the sympathetic view of him because I like bold, determined, somewhat deranged, self-emotionally-repressed characters.

The scene where Macon tells Milkman about the relationship between Ruth and Dr. Foster, however, made me less sympathetic to Macon. Sob story? Sure. But it made him start to seem like Rochester. I liked him better before he blamed everything on having a crazy wife. So much for the "Macon is a sympathetic character while Rochester isn't" argument. Thus died a blog post.

It got worse. Once Ruth's version of the events was thrown into the mix, and once Macon started obsessing over Pilate's "inheritance," I couldn't really sympathize with him. That doesn't mean I like Ruth, either--I was disgusted by the nursing part, more so by the 'in bed with the dead' part. When she finally got to tell her story, my thoughts were:

"Okay. Somebody's lying. Either Macon is imagining things or trying to make his son hate his wife, or Ruth is trying to cover up her past and turn her son against her husband. Gee, ain't this a great family?"

I would prefer if it turned out that Ruth is trying to cover up her past, because then Macon isn't a whiny wife-blaming jerk like Rochester. Unfortunately, with his blatant greediness in regards to the bag of gold, it seems like he'd be likely to slander his wife and make a lackey out of his son. Still, I think Song of Solomon is too complex a book to have a clear-cut villain like that, especially if it's supposed to be about father/son relationships.

Song of Solomon has thus dug itself into that hole where there really aren't any particularly likable characters. Macon might be lying. Ruth might be lying. Milkman has a Meursault attitude with a Samsa lifestyle and not much interesting about him. Pilate is cool, but also weird and off-putting, and since I originally sided with Macon I'm still a bit against her. Hagar is a vengeful, heartbroken nutcase (if I haven't mentioned this in a previous blog post, I'm not a big fan of romantically motivated characters). Magdalene called Lena is unfairly critical of Milkman. First Corinthians can't make up her mind (again, romantically motivated character). Guitar is probably the most likable character even though he's terrorist-ish. Technically he's a murderer and not a terrorist, since he's not trying to enact political change--and strangely, he might be more likable if he were a terrorist. Then he'd seem like a rebel who is trying to change things for the better (albeit through nasty means--once again, wrong things for right reasons) and not someone with wacko (Waco?) theories about racial population balancing.

Okay, fine. Maybe Rev. Cooper is likable. And hopefully Milkman will turn into more of a protagonist and less of a camera as we go deeper into Part II.

But back on the subject of things going obsolete before they're done, look for the next post...

The mountain bird

Early on in part 2 of Wide Sargasso Sea (p. 64 in the edition I have), Rochester hears a "mountain bird" whistling and asks Antoinette what kind it is. Antoinette gives no answer, and "whistling bird that lives in the mountains in the Caribbean" is not enough information to make a sure identification. On page 152, we finally learn that this bird is a solitaire (a type of thrush). This is enough for us to presume that Rochester is talking about a Rufous-throated Solitaire (Myadestes genibarbis), which is native to the Caribbean and is referred to as the Siffleur Montagne (Mountain Whistler) by the locals. For those of you who want to get a better sense of what noise Rochester is describing in these passages, I found a video on IBC with one of these birds singing:

http://ibc.lynxeds.com/video/rufous-throated-solitaire-myadestes-genibarbis/individual-singing-dawn-0

Brought to you by your local ornithological fanatic.

Passing the antagonist buck

In class we discussed how Rochester told his story to make himself more sympathetic… but no matter what he does I can't feel sympathetic to him (see previous post). Instead, his only way of potentially making me think for a moment that he is the protagonist of the story is by making the rest of the characters even less sympathetic, a method that might be called "assholier than thou."

To start off with, Rochester is paranoid. He thinks everyone else is in on some joke or big secret or he's the victim of a massive conspiracy. He gives us plenty of details to support this: Daniel Cosway's letter and conversation, everyone laughing weirdly, and his wife trying to poison him. Plus, there's the obeah woman on the side and he's been reading too many books about zombies.

This shouldn't make us sympathetic to him, though. Lots of antagonists are victims to torment and torture before they die. Just take a look at Disney villains. Scar could easily make it seem like that little brat Simba was conniving with two natives and a bunch of his closest advisors to overthrow him. Frollo could tell his story in such a way that Esmerelda is actually some sort of demon temptress trying to lead him to hell with the help of her gruesome sidekick and traitorous love interest. Even Maleficent is wronged: everyone else ostracized her and didn't invite her to the party!

What Rochester does to try and elicit our sympathy is to portray the Caribbean as a wild, uncivilized place full of wild, uncivilized people. But most of all, he extends this prescribed barbarianism to his wife. From Rochester's perspective, Antoinette is always acting weird. She throws rocks, kisses subhumans, speaks patois, and goes by the diminutive of her mother's name. When there is dialogue, her sentences seem choppy, almost pidgin, because pieces of the conversation are omitted or narrated. The only positive description of Antoinette we get from Rochester is that she is beautiful and he lusts after her… which seems to be the one type of involvement he's willing to have with the Caribbean and its people (Amelie).

So he's a jerk. But he's managing to prevent me from developing sympathy towards the other characters, a real feat for a narrator who I automatically distrust.

Hating Hating the Narrator

In an earlier post, I wrote about whether or not a character had to be likable, and came to the conclusion that a jerk could still be a good narrator if they were understandable.

Well, maybe I was wrong, because I can't stand Rochester.

Having not read Jane Eyre, my only previous exposure to the character is from Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, in which he's portrayed (perhaps satirically) the way a Bronte fangirl would see him: hunky, heroic, brooding, etc, battling evil alongside the protagonist even as his house burns to the ground. I was expecting him to be a pretty cool guy, though perhaps not completely understanding of the culture of the Caribbean.

Instead of being a funny action-rom-com leading man, Rochester comes across as (to quote Peter Walsh) an intolerable ass. He's in the Caribbean for no apparent reason other than to complain about the food, the people, the language, the names of towns, the colors of the landscape, and his wife's eyes. His disdain for (or at least discomfort with) the natural landscape might be what puts me off the most. If he was paying more attention to the hummingbirds and quail-doves than to his wife, I'd find it perfectly understandable, but he just constantly mentions how everything is wild and uncivilized without showing genuine interest in the wildness.

It's true that I can understand why Rochester acts this way: he's been raised in poo-poo-proper English society and has convinced himself that England has the most beautiful weather in the world, English people are the most civilized in the world, and English cooking is the most refined and properly flavored in the world. Unfortunately, this delusion doesn't do anything interesting to the story. It's not unusual enough to add an interesting twist to the story like Jake's attempts at full internalization of emotion did. He's just one of those guys who goes on YouTube and dislikes every video that doesn't show cats.

I wasn't such a big fan of Antoinette's choppy narration with all of the quotes 'like this' instead of using normal quotation marks, but Rochester makes me wish she had continued to tell the story.

End rant.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Being Transformed into a Monstrous Vermin

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis is on track to be my favorite book we have read this year by far. Though I hesitate to call it "science fiction," the book fits well into the category of speculative fiction and has more in common with "social science fiction" than fantasy. Social science fiction tends to disregard technical and physical practicality of the situations involved and place emphasis on the reaction of modern society to impressive (or simply ubiquitous) new technologies. Examples you may have heard of include Feed, Minority Report, We'll Remember it for you Wholesale (the basis for the movie Total Recall), and Gattaca. Many dystopias could also be classified as social science fiction.

As a work of social science fiction, The Metamorphosis certainly makes no attempt to explain how its situation came to be (Gregor must have... uh... metamophosed during the night) and jumps right into exploring how people would treat a monstrous vermin even if they suspected it was one of their family members. However, it goes about it in a style that reminds me of an author of a less serious form of speculative fiction.

Helpless protagonist, ridiculous situations, deadpan narration. Remind you of anything? Anything involving petunias, towels, mice, horrendous poetry, and pan-galactic gargleblasters?

The fact that Kafka's writing reminds me of Douglas Adams only makes me like it even more. Granted, Kafka is slightly more serious in how he goes about the story, but a number of thematic elements are common between the two authors' writing.

Like Gregor Samsa, Arthur Dent is a guy with an unimpressive job (works at local radio station) who wakes up one day facing a horrible calamity (destruction of the earth) but focuses on a more local issue (his house being bulldozed to make way for a bypass). Dent realizes a bit more than Samsa that the things around him make little sense, but his goals are still largely unreasonable considering his situation (trying to continue a normal human lifestyle when human life is nearly extinct).

Dent's humanity isn't necessarily degraded in HHGTTG, but he is certainly a fish out of water (insect out of proportion?) in the weird galactic setting dominated by dolphins and mice. Instead of not being human making him somehow lesser than those around him, it's the fact that he is a human, a species that merits no more description than "mostly harmless."

The other modern work of speculative fiction The Metamorphosis brings to mind is the movie District 9 directed by Neill Blomkamp, at least in the sense that it includes the premise of "guy gets turned into a giant insect/insectoid alien and is promptly ostracized by society." My guess, though, is that at no point in the book will Gregor Samsa don a mech suit and battle the minions of a xenophobic security firm.

Them Hipsters, part deux...

...in which I take back some of what I said about the characters in The Sun Also Rises. Not all of it, not most of it, but some of it.

 Pedro and Cohn:
After reading the last few chapters of TSAR, I find a few of the characters less repulsive than before. As mentioned in the previous post, Cohn gained back some decency by avoiding Brett and (possibly) reuniting with Frances. His immaturity and naivete were passed on to Pedro Romero, who was pretty sure that Brett was the love of his life and would make a great spouse if she would just become an "honest woman" and grow her hair out. Maybe Pedro took some of Cohn's irrationality.

Brett:
She solves her Pedro problem. She shows signs of considering how her lifestyle affects others (aka deciding "not to be a bitch"). She actually seems kind of caring when she tells Jake not to get drunk. Trouble is, her conversion is too sudden. An about-face at the end of the book can't make me like a character I've spent two hundred pages disliking.

Jake:
The last line of the book makes me hate Jake a lot less than I did when I wrote the previous post. It's entirely possible that this is just my dark interpretation of the wording, but by saying "isn't it pretty to think so?", Jake indicates that he at least realizes he can't be with Brett. This is a big flip from earlier in the book when it seemed like Jake wanted to get back together with Brett and she was the one resisting the idea (granted, she didn't want Jake to come with her to San Sebastian because she intended to be with Cohn)...

...which means that Jake has actually changed over the course of the story.

YES!!!

I like characters who change, even if the change is a transition from insanity (when defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results) to resignation. Jake's transformation is somewhat less abrupt than Brett's, since he starts to realize he has screwed up when Montoya stops smiling at him (there's Montoya again... my favorite character in the book). Still, he was kinda boring for much of the book, so his extant character arc is merely improves my opinion to something warmer than apathy.

And I still don't understand where everyone's money comes from.

Them Hipsters...

...them bullfight-watching, pernod-drinking, expat hipsters.

Think about it. They're writers. They care so much about irony. Brett was androgynous before it was cool. Jake and the rest of his com(ex)patriates are hipsters. Except for Cohn. He's the opposite of a hipster. He's chivalrous and romantic after it was cool.

Actually, the main point of this post is not that the characters in The Sun Also Rises are hipsters. It's about likability. A week or so ago I read a column in the New York Times Book Review (available online here) about whether characters in a novel have to be likable in order to keep readers interested. This got me thinking about the characters in the novels we read in class and the characters I write in my own fiction.

Begin rant.

My standards for "likability" revolve more on understanding how a character thinks than whether or not they are a nice person. I don't mind characters who are selfish, violent, or crude if I think they aren't deranged. I liked reading about Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart even if he beats his wife, cuts people's heads off, and kills his adoptive son, because I could see how much his thought process was motivated by a paranoia towards "weakness". Victor Frankenstein might ignore the possible consequences of his work and cause the death of a sizable number of his friends and family, but it's because he feels the only point of his life is to make some scientific breakthrough (and later on, to exact revenge). I like characters who are rationally irrational.

I tend to like to read about the characters I write... otherwise I wouldn't write about them. I've created my fair share of understandable jerks. Murderous paranoid philosopher? That was fun to write. Guy who makes a living off of misleading people (and isn't a politician)? I churned out 50,000 words with him as the protagonist. One of my favorite characters in a long-running, constantly changing project I intend to finish eventually (oh, sometime in the next twenty years...) is a military commander so disillusioned with the world that he equates diplomacy with murder. I don't have to agree with his might-makes-right views to enjoy writing about him and respect/pity him for the way he sees the world.

When characters continually act irrationally irrational, though, I start to lose interest in their problems. I start wondering why they don't change their behavior. They get whiny. This was my issue with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, a book I will refrain from criticizing any further because that would take up several paragraphs of ranting. Let's just say that Sherman Alexie is grouped with Nathaniel Hawthorne and, to an extent, Virginia Woolf in the category of authors whose shorter works I enjoy and longer works I do not.

Protagonists seem irrationally irrational when their motivations are things I just don't consider serious enough. If the character is actually deluded, in the case of Okonkwo and Frankenstein, something minor like masculinity or scientific glory can work as a motivating force. If the character is presented as a semi-reasonable person, though, weak motivation makes them seem shallow.

So what's a weak motivation? Love.

Characters motivated primarily by romantic or sexual impulses typically seem shallow to me. Never Let Me Go was a major letdown because it ignored the topic of cloning ethics and went after human relationships instead. Katniss was getting a bit whiny by the time Mockingjay rolled around... yeah, whatever with the whole revolution thing and ending widespread government oppression, just get me my boyfriend alive and non-brainwashed. For those of you about to jump on me for dissing The Hunger Games, I will say that Suzanne Collins managed to pull the end of the series together in a way that was satisfyingly dark to keep me interested.

On a similar note, I think it is possible for an author to pull off an enjoyable book without having any particularly deep or "likeable" characters. I think Jurassic Park is a good example. If the plot itself is engaging enough, the author can be a bit more lax with developing your interest in the characters.
(I'll have to write a post sometime about exactly why I like Jurassic Park so much...)

The problem with The Sun Also Rises, then, is that I don't like most of the characters and I'm not terribly engaged by the plot. Mike is an annoying drunkard. Cohn acts like a middleschooler. Brett messes with other people's lives and then complains about how hard it is on her. Jake just sits there and occasionally tries to get reacquainted with the woman who already turned him down. Pedro Romero is okay, but he's minor enough that my appreciation of him being not a jerk is less powerful than my hope that he gets gored in the bull-fighting ring so that something exciting can happen with the plot. Bill Gorton provides comic relief, but like the rest of them he leads a pointless life and somehow buys copious amounts of alcohol despite being bankrupt.

What makes these characters tick? Why do they lead this ridiculous lifestyle? Are they really so disillusioned after World War I that they can't do something useful with their lives? Cohn, Brett, and Jake fall into the unfortunate category of motivated by love. Pedro would be more interesting if he was some sort of vehement bullfighting purist (wait... that's Montoya... hey, a character I like!). He's also motivate by love, to an extent. Love of bullfighting, love of Brett. Mike is motivated by drinking. Bill is motivated by... irony?

What annoys me most is that the characters don't show any signs of changing the way they live. Okay, Jake, so your life is a mixture of great (bullfights, and Brett) and sucky (that injury, and Brett). Seems like the root of your problems is Brett and her corresponding drama. It's been established that you can't be with Brett. So... can't you flee? Leave Brett far behind? Go do something more exciting than cruising the bars in Paris or watching a dude with a cape kill domesticated animals? Join a monastery or something. Cohn left. He finally realized the solution to the unsolvable problem was to get away from the problem. That made me respect Cohn to an extent, but he still acted immature before that. Brett could leave, too. Avoid Jake and Pedro and Cohn and possibly Mike. But no, they just keep on drinking and going to cafes (and drinking) and staying in hotels (and drinking) and going to festivals (and drinking) and getting into arguments and fights (caused in part by drinking).

Yes, Jake has his sympathetic moments. But the combination of pointless lifestyle and hopeless behavior prevent me from feeling like his story matters to me.

End rant.