Of Books and Bicycles

Thanks, everyone, for your kind comments about Hobgoblin’s father and about my interview; things are beginning to get back to normal or at least are getting closer to it, so it’s time to return to book talk.

I finished two books during the last week, Never Let Me Go and Boswell’s Life of Johnson; I thought I’d write about the former today, as it’s been on my mind ever since I finished it. I loved it so much that I told a work colleague about it who immediately asked if she could borrow my copy, and I told another friend about it who just told me she now has a copy and will read it this weekend. I love it when people listen to me!

One of the things I found so compelling is the way Ishiguro writes about a subject so eerie and frightening and mysterious — human clones — in a manner that’s perfectly normal and straightforward — and beautiful and insightful as well. This could be a regular kind of coming-of-age novel; it’s all about Kathy H.’s relationships with her school friends and teachers and her efforts to understand the world and her role in it. She and her friends fight and make up and try to figure out the lives of their teachers and think about their futures, just as normal children do. And Kathy is a wonderfully appealing protagonist; this is a first-person story, told by a 31-year-old Kathy looking back at her life, and she’s very smart and observant and insightful into relationships and social dynamics and conversations. It’s a pleasure to watch her mind at work, describing the shifting moods and voices of her friends; I love the depth and carefulness with which she describes everything — I love real people and characters both who put that much care into thinking about other people.

But as normal as that all sounds, what Kathy and her friends are trying to come to terms with is the fact that they are clones created so that their organs can be harvested for “regular” people. And I think part of the brilliance of this book is the way Ishiguro slowly reveals the facts about their lives and the way the characters both know the truth about themselves and don’t know it — as children they know some of the facts but they don’t really grasp them and later when they grasp those facts a bit better, they still have ways of talking around them. After leaving school they become “carers,” or caretakers of those in the process of donating organs, and then they become actual “donors” who spend their time recovering from operations until they can no longer recover and they die. Facing the facts about their fates head-on is one of the hardest things the characters ever have to do.

And this brings me to my other reason for loving this book: it strikes me as a book that’s really about having to face death, and while the characters have a particularly cruel death ahead of them, that doesn’t take away from the fact that we are in the same situation. We grow up knowing that we will die, or learning the basic fact of it somewhere so early on that we really don’t know when we learned it, and then spend our lives thinking — or not thinking — about what that basic fact means. This book about clones whose lives have a carefully defined “meaning” to them — they exist to provide healthy organs — makes me think about what meaning my own life has in the face of death — if any. The meaning Ishiguro’s characters find, if there is any at all, is in the moments of companionship as they help each other face their lives. But in this novel moving towards death ultimately means increasing isolation.

It’s a sad book, and a particularly sad one to read while mourning the loss of a family member (I suggested to the Hobgoblin that he read it — but not now), but I found it just the right book for me at the right time. I think I needed something to help me think through just what it was my own life was touching up against.

It always amuses and fascinates me when novelists comment on novels and novel reading in their novels — this happens an awful lot in the 18C when the novel is just becoming an established genre and people were really anxious about what it meant and how it was changing the culture of reading. It happens also in Jane Austen’s unfinished last novel Sanditon (1817).

Charlotte, the novel’s heroine, has decided that Sir Edward, who has spent some time flirting with her, is a complete idiot (my words, not hers), and she knows this partly because of the way he talks about novels. Sir Edward claims he is “no indiscriminate novel-reader,” staying away from “the mere trash of the common circulating library,” but when Charlotte asks him what kind of novels he likes to read, he has a peculiar answer:

You will never hear me advocating those puerile emanations which detail nothing but discordant principles incapable of amalgamation, or those vapid tissues of ordinary occurrences from which no useful deductions can be drawn. — In vain may we put them into a literary alembic; — we distil nothing which can add to science. — You understand me I’m sure?

Charlotte astutely replies, “I am not quite certain that I do” and asks him a follow-up question. His answer is an even longer string of sentences that make little sense, including this extraordinary one:

They hold forth the most splendid portraitures of high conceptions, unbounded views, illimitable ardour, indomptible decision — and even when the event is plainly anti-prosperous to the high-toned machinations of the prime character, the potent, pervading hero of the story, it leaves us full of generous emotions for him…

Sir Edward’s problem is that he is a bad reader. He claims to be a good reader and to read only “quality” novels, but the narrator tells us otherwise:

The truth was that Sir Edward whom circumstances had confined very much to one spot had read more sentimental novels than agreed with him.

It’s not just that he’s read too many sentimental novels (which were extremely popular at the time), but that he’s not smart enough to make proper sense of them. He has a “perversity of judgment” that makes him sympathize with the villain when it’s clear that’s not what the author wanted. And he thinks reading well means pulling out every big word he can find and then throwing it into casual conversation — which results in the kind of atrocious sentence I quoted above.

Austen singles out Richardson in particular — Sir Edward is too fond of Richardson and those who have imitated Richardson:

His fancy had been early caught by all the impassioned, and most exceptionable parts of Richardson’s; and such authors as have since appeared to tread in Richardson’s steps, so far as man’s determined pursuit of woman in defiance of every feeling and convenience is concerned, had since occupied the greater part of his literary hours, and formed his character.

All of this amuses me because Austen was a Richardson fan herself, and, of course, she’s a producer of the novels that she’s here pointing out the dangers of. She learned a lot from Richardson, after all.

What it comes down to, I guess, is that novelists were very concerned about what novels were supposed to be, what makes a good novel or a bad novel, what novel-reading would do to people’s minds, and how people would interpret their own novels. Were their readers going to be smart and savvy, or stupid like Sir Edward?

So, many novelists have passages like this one from Sanditon where they seem intent on separating their own good, wholesome novels from those bad ones that have pernicious effects. And in these kinds of passages, they are also asking us to be smart readers — we are supposed to be more like Charlotte than like Sir Edward, to read this passage and condemn Sir Edward and determine not to be foolish like him. What novelist doesn’t want to have smart readers, after all, so why not throw in passages like this one that indicate to us how we should read — or how we shouldn’t?

Posts on Lady Susan aren’t due until tomorrow, but as the Hobgoblin and I are going on a long hike, and I’m not sure I’ll feel like posting when we get back, I’m going to write on it now. I enjoyed this book very much; it was a pleasure to read something by Jane Austen I hadn’t read before. I’m very familiar with her six major novels, but there is still a lot of shorter stuff I haven’t yet gotten to. My edition of Lady Susan includes The Watsons and Sanditon, the first of which I’ve now finished and the last of which I’m going to read next.

I’ve heard many people talk about the limitations of the epistolary form, and it’s probably true that there’s a limited number of things you can do with it, but I do like the form anyway. Perhaps it’s all the reading in the 18C I’ve done, a time when the epistolary novel flourished. What I like about it is the way you can see different versions of a character in the letters written to different audiences, and the way reading an epistolary novel gives one the sense of the importance of words and writing and how people can do battle with language — and other, less violent things, of course. But I think of doing battle with language when I think about Lady Susan, as Susan seems to be at war with much of the world.

Here is what she says in the very first letter of the novel:

I can no longer refuse myself the pleasure of profiting by your kind invitation when we last parted, of spending some weeks with you at Churchill … I impatiently look forward to the hour when I shall be admitted into your delightful retirement.

And this is what she says in the second letter of the novel:

I take town in my way to that insupportable spot, a country village, for I am really going to Churchill. Forgive me, my dear friend, it is my last resource. Were there another place in England open to me, I would prefer it.

Already we know so much about Lady Susan. She presents herself in very different ways in these letters, but even within one letter, her language can be interpreted in multiple ways. She writes the following to her brother-in-law, the owner of Churchill:

I am determined you see, not to be denied admittance at Churchill. It would indeed give me most painful sensations to know that it were not in your power to receive me.

As this is the novel’s first letter, we might interpret this to mean that Lady Susan wants to visit Churchill very much because she is genuinely interested in seeing those who live there, and this is the meaning she expects her brother-in-law to find. Upon knowing something more about Lady Susan, however, we can see that these sentences hint at her real feelings: she must leave her current residence, Langford, home of the Manwarings, because she has gotten herself into trouble there, and if she cannot stay at Churchill, she will experience “painful sensations” because her escape route will be blocked.

It’s this kind of facility with language that makes Lady Susan a very fun heroine — or villain, rather, except that, as Margaret Drabble, author of the introduction to my edition, points out, there really is no satisfactory heroine here, so Lady Susan steals the show. She prides herself on her ability to talk herself into and out of any situation (“If I am vain of anything, it is of my eloquence”); this is how she keeps Reginald, her gullible young admirer, by her side for so long. When Lady Susan can no longer convince people to believe her version of events, the novel ends — there is no more story.

The difference between appearance and reality, and the time and trouble it takes to learn to tell the two apart is a very common plot line in 18C fiction, and Lady Susan has much going for her as she tries to fool nearly everybody. She’s beautiful, and even Mrs. Vernon, her most serious enemy, is susceptible to it:

She is delicately fair, with fine grey eyes and dark eyelashes; and from her appearance one would not suppose her more than five and twenty, though she must in fact be ten years older … Her address to me was so gentle, frank and even affectionate, that if I had not known how much she has always disliked me for marrying Mr Vernon, and that we had never met before, I should have imagined her an attached friend.

Lady Susan is a symptom of a larger problem:

One is apt I believe to connect assurance of manner with coquetry, and to expect that an impudent address will necessarily attend an impudent mind; at least I was myself prepared for an improper degree of confidence in Lady Susan; but her countenance is absolutely sweet, and her voice and manner winningly mild.

We expect people’s insides to match their outsides, in other words — to be beautiful only if their hearts and minds are beautiful, and to act mildly and kindly only if they have mild and kind minds. Someone who combines a beautiful appearance and pleasant manners with lying and deceit is dangerous.

So Lady Susan depends on her pleasing appearance and behavior to keep her out of trouble and to get her whatever she wants. Besides the appearance vs. reality theme, there’s the juxposition in the novel between public reputation and the impression a person makes in private. Lady Susan counts on the power of private impression to overrule reputation; of her enemy Mrs. Vernon she says:

I hope [she is] convinced how little the ungenerous representations of any one to the disadvantage of another will avail, when opposed to the immediate influence of intellect and manner.

The novel shows, however, that reputation does mean something, and that the “ungenerous representations” of Lady Susan are a better source of truth than anything she herself says or does. You are better off trusting public concensus than trusting your own instincts — collective wisdom outweighs the individual’s insights.

Opposed to Lady Susan’s doubleness and deception is her daughter Frederica, whose simplicity Lady Susan cannot stand:

Her feelings are tolerably lively, and she is so charmingly artless in their display, as to afford the most reasonable hope of her being ridiculed and despised by every man who sees her. Artlessness will never do in love matters, and that girl is born a simpleton who has it either by nature or affectation.

Frederica’s artlessness is held up for praise in the novel; her mother’s criticism is a sign that we are to admire her, and yet she is a boring and lifeless character. All the interest in the novel belongs to Lady Susan. So we are left to deplore Lady Susan’s cruelty and deceitfulness, and yet we can’t help but admire her energy and intelligence and, yes, her artfulness and artifice. After all, Lady Susan’s skill with language is a skill she shares with her creator.

If you’d like to join the discussion of Lady Susan, come on over to Metaxu Cafe!

I recently finished Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which turned out to be a fun read — it’s a light, comic novel, but it also plays around with ideas about writing and the writer and stories, which gives the book some depth. Apparently, the book is somewhat autobiographical, based on the relationship leading up to Vargas Llosa’s first marriage, and the real-life Julia wrote her own side of the story in a book called What Little Vargas Didn’t Say. I don’t know anything about Julia’s book, but judging by the title, Vargas probably didn’t like it.

The novel tells the story of Mario, an 18-year-old university student in Lima who works at a local radio station preparing news bulletins. Part of the story is about how he falls in love with “Aunt” Julia — she’s related to Mario only by marriage — but their relationship is still scandalous because she’s 32 and divorced. The other part is about Pedro Camacho, a scriptwriter recently come to write serials for the radio station. He soon becomes hugely popular as radio listeners find themselves enthralled by his stories, but then the stories start to take some very odd turns and nobody knows what to do with Camacho anymore. Camacho is a very odd character, with strange ticks and mannerisms, a unusual physical appearance (he’s almost short enough to be considered a dwarf), a self-centered and imperious manner, and some disturbing prejudices against Argentinians and against women generally.

These two plot lines unfold slowly over the novel’s course; every other chapter, however, gives the story of one of the serials Camacho is writing, appearing in the novel as regular prose, not in script form. These stories are soap operas, dramatic, shocking, and fun. But as Camacho’s serials start to turn strange, so too do these interpolated chapters. Characters get interchanged with one another, plot lines get mixed up, characters from one story begin to appear in another, and eventually the authorial voice has lost control of the stories entirely. By the end of the book we don’t have straightforward stories anymore, but attempts at plot filled with questions about the plot direction and the characters’ fates.

Camacho has become overwhelmed by his own productivity; he had been producing scripts at such a wild rate, that he begins to forget his plot lines and characters, collapsing under the strain of his long hours. It has turned into a battle between the author, trying to give form and shape to life, and chaos, undermining the very possibility of coherence and order.

Meanwhile, Mario himself dreams of becoming a writer. He watches Camacho with interest, trying to figure out the secret of Camacho’s amazing productivity:

Riding back to Miraflores in a jitney, I thought about Pedro Camacho’s life. What social milieu, what concatenation of circumstances, persons, relations, problems, events, happenstances had produced this literary vocation (literary? if not that what should it be called then?) that had somehow come to fruition, found expression in an oeuvre and secured an audience? How could he be, at one and the same time, a parody of the writer and the only person in Peru who, by virtue of the time devoted to his craft and the works he produced, was worthy of that name?

Mario thinks about what it means to be a writer, and whether he’s capable of becoming one himself.  Camacho is very nearly the perfect definition of a hack writer, churning out the melodramatic stories day after day, but, at this point in the story at least, Mario can’t help but admire his energy and his ease with words and stories:

It was becoming clearer and clearer to me each day that the only thing I wanted to be in life was a writer, and I was also becoming more and more convinced each day that the only way to be one was to devote oneself heart and soul to literature. I didn’t want in the least to be a hack writer or a part-time one, but a real one like — who? The only person I met who came closest to being this full-time writer, obsessed and impassioned by his vocation, was the Bolivian author of radio serials: that was why he fascinated me so.

So this is a love story, but also a story about stories and about writing as a vocation. It’s a novel of the writer-in-training, about a character who lives through the excitement of teenage love and rebellion but who also gets a chance to watch a writer at work and to think about what kind of writer he wants to be.