GRIM TRUTH

I got a feelin I ought to be afraid of you but I aint.
Well. I cant advise you on that neither. Most people'll run from their own mother to get to hug death by the neck. They cant wait to see him.
--Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (2005)

Warning: contains material that will spoil your first viewing of the film and/or first reading of the novel.

After seeing the Coen Brothers' film of McCarthy's novel over break, I resolved to read the novel forthwith. Judging by a short piece a friend sent me today, I'm not alone in wondering why the film's ending seems so unsatisfactory. My immediate reaction was that the Coens had deliberately played the audience for suckers, which is to say: setting up expectations for a film they then refused to provide. And in part I'm still convinced that that's the problem. It's a way of saying that the film plays into certain kinds of assumptions, by virtue of certain "markings" that occur with films, that don't occur in novels. In general, it's coaxing us into expecting a more generic modern Western, then pulling the plug on it. Things like: having Tommy Lee Jones play Sheriff Bell (i.e., strong assumption he'll "get his man"); pacing the movie and its scenes so that one naturally assumes a shoot 'em-up ending, a last man standing sort of thing (i.e., action films tend to up the action as they go); showing "our hero" (Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss) go through two (more like three) narrow escapes, thus creating the expectation that, even if his luck runs out, we'll see it happen, maybe even see it coming.

To frustrate all three of those expectations is more than risky, more than playful, but being risky and playful is the Coens' territory when they're at their best. But I felt that something went wrong -- and even after I was told that the novel doesn't depict a final showdown, I remained convinced that the Coens dropped the ball. Now that I've read the novel, it's clearer to me why the Coens couldn't deliver McCarthy's vision. Not really. I give them great credit for bringing to the screen Javier Bardem as Chigurh, the steely killer, and for giving Jones a role that he was clearly born to play, and for adding their "touches" to the story: the early chase of Moss into a river by a fierce attack dog is all theirs, as is the amazingly tense scene of Moss waiting to be invaded in a motelroom. The novel delivers that scene differently and it's right there that one begins to see that McCarthy is telling a different story, a story that, it seems to me, the Coens don't quite get or at least don't tell.

In part it has to do with the moral center of McCarthy's tale. It's Sheriff Bell all the way: his story continues after the main deaths in a manner that is intrinsic to the character sorting out what his life means, and what part Chigurh's killing spree plays in that life. That's what the novel is all about. The fact of Moss as one of Chigurh's antagonists is necessary because that's what gets Bell involved. But the film puts its focus on the tussle over the money, like many another heist film, as though -- as with the Coens' groundbreakingly brutal, ugly AND funny Blood Simple (1984) -- the point is, again, what money makes people do. McCarthy doesn't really care about that. He's concerned with a kind of fatalism that the Coens can't begin to get across. I won't say that film in general couldn't (though I have my doubts), but certainly not one that is so busy playing out the tensions of the last-man-standing scenario.

And certainly not if you veer too far from McCarthy's lockstep. The Coens make several changes: 1) in McCarthy, Chigurh enters the hotel room, with Moss beneath the bed and ready: in other words, Moss has the drop on him and doesn't kill him (because Moss is not a killer); so when Moss runs and gets shot at, the sense of getting away without killing is at least momentarily acceptable; in the film it's simply unthinkable that Moss wouldn't shoot Chigurh if he could, so already we're dealing with a different situation because (another change) Moss is privy to Chigurh's brutal killing of the other posse out to get the money (not so in the novel). The Coens deliberately ratchet up the rooting interest in Moss as, perhaps, the only one who might kill Chigurh. So they never bring the two together. McCarthy gets away with it because, in the novel, our sense of Moss as any kind of deliverer is mostly nil. At most we hope he'll "get away" somehow (maybe with Bell's help). The movie gives us much more of "a Clint and Lee Van eventually crossing paths in some blaze of glory" expectation. Intentionally.

2) How is Moss killed? In McCarthy: the people who sent the other posse send more -- what's more, they're listening-in on Bell's calls; so when Moss' wife, Carla Jean, finally decides to cooperate, her call to Bell to say where Moss is brings down his death. This is intrinsic, in my view, not only to the plot (how will Moss be betrayed?), but also to what the entire novel is trying to say about one irrevocable step determining what must follow. In the movie: the garrulous old mother of Moss' wife gives away their destination (they're going to meet Moss) to an extremely well-dressed and polite Mexican who is clearly not to be trusted (because we know he must be one of those who are seeking Moss). Next thing we know, Moss, who we saw arrive at a motel, is dead -- the Coens tease us further by withholding any spoken or visual account of how he got killed (McCarthy gives us an eyewitness account, told to a cop, and a perpetrator -- who is not Chigurh), thus the ambiguity the Coens' bring to bear on Moss's death is their own "touch," a way of creating ambiguity for its own sake (and possibly for the sake of their own odd humor), but steering well clear of the degree to which, in McCarthy, both Bell and Carla Jean help each other to undermine the efforts of the man they're trying to save. The grim humor of that -- if you like -- is perhaps present in the Coens' Carla Jean's insistence on bringing her complaining mother who babbles to the wrong person, but it's a different register: irritating stupidity vs. ruinous innocence.

3) Further proof the Coens' either missed the point or didn't want to accept McCarthy's point? They have Carla Jean refuse to call heads or tails. One might say they want her to stand for something (especially since it wasn't her call to Bell that gave the game away, in the film), that her refusal is a matter of principle, that we need something to set against Chigurh's baleful sense of fate. But it's yet another ellipsis and so we're beginning to feel man-handled by the filmmakers, made to accept the version they want us to have: a version that spares us having to accept -- maybe like Carla Jean, through tears -- what Chigurh says and what he means.

4) A final variation: what becomes of the money? The Coens don't show us (as though it's not really about that -- even though their screenplay has frontloaded that aspect of the "showdown" -- so they can kick it aside like a Hitchcockian MacGuffin): they give us an almost incoherent scene in which Bell returns to the room where Moss was staying when he was killed. We see, but he doesn't, that Chigurh is hiding there somewhere; we see, with him, that the cover is off the airduct (so we know Chigurh has the money). In the novel, Chigurh is shown retrieving the money, and then sits outside in his truck while the Sheriff, who suddenly arrives, goes into the room. In the novel, Bell strongly suspects Chigurh is out there, but his effort to nab him (via re-enforcements) comes too late. In other words, like Moss, Bell might've called Chigurh out, but manages to get away instead. Which brings us to McCarthy's use of a story from Bell's war years, which has a lot to do with what is actually preying upon Bell. As with the long conversation between Moss and a teen-age hitchhiker (conversations which go a long way toward showing us Moss' fatalism), most of McCarthy's efforts to deepen the characters -- to make them more than action figures of the Good (Bell), the Bad (Chigurh), and the Ugly (Moss) -- fall by the wayside in the film.

So that, in the end, while the movie ostensibly "says" the same thing as the novel, it doesn't do it in the same way. The difference may not be that great, but it's much like the difference between hearing a story you believe vs. one you don't, between hearing a sermon that convinces you vs. one that doesn't, between dimly grasping a grim truth vs. uncertainly accepting a vexing entertainment.

"SUCH ARE THE VISIONS"

The solitary traveller is soon beyond the wood; and there, coming to the door with shaded eyes, possibly to look for his return, with hands raised, with white apron blowing, is an elderly woman who seems (so powerful is this infirmity) to seek, over a desert, a lost son; to search for a rider destroyed; to be the figure of the mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world. So, as the solitary traveller advances down the village street where the women stand knitting and the men dig in the garden, the evening seems ominous; the figures still; as if some august fate, known to them, awaited without fear, were about to sweep them into complete annihilation.
--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

Woolf's situation in Mrs. Dalloway seems clear from the outset: to respond to the two greatest provocations of recent memory: the Great War (1914-19), and James Joyce's Ulysses (1917-22). To do so, she employs interior monologue and creates a character, Septimus Warren Smith, who, shell-shocked after his experiences in the war and in delayed mourning for a fallen comrade, goes to pieces in the streets of London and commits suicide from the window of a house in Bloomsbury -- that area where Woolf and her circle practiced their status as the most representative examples of British modernism. Smith, in fact, in his rambling stream-of-consciousness brings to mind not only Ulysses' Stephen in what Woolf calls "that boy's business of the intoxication of language," but also her sometime chum T.S.Eliot, who read to her his draft of "The Waste Land" -- a postwar poem of a young poetic sort going to pieces -- while also in mourning for a friend lost to the war. In other words, Septimus is something of a modernist manqué: he lacks the genius of Stephen or Eliot or Woolf (who also suffered from "voices," tried to jump out a window, and later killed herself), but he has a visionary mind-set, thinks of himself as a prophet (as Stephen thinks of himself as Hamlet and Eliot adopts the pose of Tiresias), broods on Shakespeare, and experiences, fatally, the alienation of the modern artist and the sacrificial role of the "sons killed in the battles of the world."

But the lines quoted above aren't from the mind of Septimus. They are from the mind of Peter Walsh, a middle-aged man who is asleep on a park bench, returned to London after years abroad in India. If anyone in the novel is its Bloom / Odysseus it is Walsh -- dreaming of himself as a "solitary traveller" for whom a maternal Penelopean figure waits. That figure's correspondent should be the novel's eponymous heroine. Much as Stephen's final image in Ulysses is in the mind of Molly (who likens him to a statue of a poet she has seen and considers sucking him off), so Septimus must "go a progress" through the mind of a matron (to alter Hamlet's line), making Clarissa feel "the beauty . . . the fun."

It's a curious formulation and resounds as the most enigmatic moment in a novel comprised of impressions and memories, of thoughts and phrases rarely uttered and fleetingly considered. When Molly thinks of Stephen, the "fun" is that he might become another extramarital fling more culturally interesting than her recent, somewhat debasing, bout with Hugh "Blazes" Boylan; when Clarissa thinks of Septimus, the "fun" is in the ability to "throw it away" -- but, as Clarissa realizes, his death, in being mentioned at her party, brings in the shadow of the end for them all, adding its undercurrent of gravitas to what might otherwise simply be another so-so social occasion. For a moment, as it were, Clarissa stands in high relief, not as one in mourning for what England has lost in its casualties, but as one frail consciousness against a background of "complete annihilation." She sees his death as a message for her: "a rider destroyed."

That such a state should be for a moment "fun" comes not as Hamlet's "consummation devoutly to be wished," but rather as the heightened sense of precariousness, of how easily we may terminate, how briefly we are here, how ephemeral is our grasp of what we recognize as ourselves. Woolf responds to Joyce not only by dropping sex from the equation of things -- the strongest passions in the novel are woman for woman, as when Clarissa recalls her teen-aged crush on Sally Seton, as when Miss Kilman faces the desperation of her attachment to Clarissa's teen-aged daughter, Elizabeth -- (Woolf found Ulysses "vulgar and low-bred" largely because of its smutty insistence on bodily functions), but also by bringing death into the novel.

No death occurs in Ulysses. Paddy Dignam gets buried, but he's already dead. Rudy died years ago as did Bloom's father. Stephen still wears mourning, but his mother has been dead some time. Both Woolf and Joyce give us events set on a single day in June; in Ulysses, it is the day that Molly "gets well and truly fucked" and the day on which Bloom and Stephen spend a few hours together. In Mrs. Dalloway, it is the day on which Peter Walsh sees Clarissa after years away, on which Clarissa sees Sally Seton after years apart, but most importantly it is the day on which Septimus Smith -- pursued in his mind by "human nature" in the guise of a nosy, questioning, bland and supercilious psychiatrist named Holmes -- kills himself.

That his sacrifice of himself is "fun" for a well-to-do society matron might be considered ironic if not outright satirical. But I don't think that's the main intention. Clarissa Dalloway, like Leopold Bloom, is not, as a person, particularly profound; she is a bit flighty, a bit staid, a bit nostalgic, a bit unimaginative and so on. The point of what Joyce did, and which Woolf pursues as well, is the rendering of an unexceptional intelligence exceptionally well. But Woolf also clearly understood the working dynamic of Ulysses -- that the structure makes significant a vision of what Bloom and Stephen make of each other, and what they are together (a cuckolded Shakespeare) -- and, perhaps, what they are for Molly (the phallic signified). Woolf -- who imagined Shakespeare's sister as herself in Elizabethan drag -- evades the phallic insistence of the search for a sexual partner, and is able to render more feelingly what Molly doesn't quite find in the loss of Rudy and what Joyce doesn't ever render in May Dedalus' loss of Stephen. Woolf herself was childless and Clarissa is no mater dolorosa, but there floats through the book a beneficent sense of maternal concern, of the matronly imagination -- "She felt somehow very like him -- the young man who had killed himself" -- that Woolf's great contemporary never registered so sympathetically.

"STRANGERS ON THIS ROAD WE ARE ON"

I saw for a second time Wes Anderson's latest movie, The Darjeeling Limited. This time I got to see the short, called "Hotel Chevalier" and labeled "Part One of The Darjeeling Limited," that has been attached to the film. And this time I was completely sober. The only detraction is that this time the theater had a faulty speaker which definitely was annoying and distracting, particularly during moments when the music was highlighted.

Watching "Hotel Chevalier" (which features Jason Schwartzman, in his role of Jack Whitman from Darjeeling, with his girlfriend, played by Natalie Portman, in a swanky Parisian hotel) is to be wooed by Anderson's gift for composition in the widescreen image, but also by his fluid, expressive camera movements. And the way he uses slow motion is, well, musical. And the way he uses music is poetic. The song that Schwartzman plays on his iPod, "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)," is light-hearted, but adds melancholy to the scene because it seems so incongruous with Schwartzman's tense romantic pain. (His performance as Jack is Schwartzman's best work to date.)

But where Anderson's use of music really shines is in the three great slow motion moments in Darjeeling: the opening, when a harried businessman played by Bill Murray rushes to and misses the train, overtaken on the way by Peter Whitman (Adrien Brody), who catches the train by leaping aboard, to the tune of The Kinks' "This Time Tomorrow." I don't know why the song is so perfect, but it has something to do with the yearning in Davies' vocals as he imagines leaving the earth behind for good while on a plane flight.

Having begun with The Kinks' 1970 album, Lola and Powerman vs. The Money-go-round, Anderson sticks with it -- the next time it surfaces is when the three brothers (the third is Francis, the eldest, played by Owen Wilson, in head and facial bandages after a motorcycle "accident" that was actually a suicide attempt), who were last together at their father's funeral a year before, are asked to stay for the funeral of a boy Peter was unable to save from death in the rapids of a river. The scene when the three brothers emerge, dressed for the Indian funeral, is set to "Strangers," a song that Ray Davies' brother Dave sings: "we are strangers on this road we are on / we are not two we are one." There's a moment when Brody -- who is consistently a focal point in the film -- turns and looks back at the other two that seems to register the full weight of whatever is meant by the word "fraternal."

Finally, at the end of the film, the three run for another train and can only make it by discarding all their luggage, to the tune of "Powerman," a much pop-ier rock number, showing, in its bravura, the new solidarity among the misfit brothers, who have actually, against all likelihood, engaged in the "spiritual journey" that Francis brought them together for.

And those are just the rock songs. The soundtrack is filled with haunting music from a host of soundtracks of films made in India. The odd thing about Anderson films is that each first viewing of one, for me, is always a bit tentative, not fully convinced of the merits of what I'm seeing. And the second viewing (and there's always a felt need for a second viewing) is the "fall in love" viewing. It happened this time too. After that, it's just a matter of continuing to sing the praises of, for my money, the only auteur of the under-40 set.

NO MEAN FEAT

Aziz upheld the proprieties, though he did not invest them with any moral halo, and it was here that he chiefly differed from an Englishman. His conventions were social. There is no harm in deceiving society as long as she does not find you out, because it is only when she finds you out that you have harmed her; she is not like a friend or God, who are injured by the mere existence of unfaithfulness.--E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)

A Passage to India is a slippery novel, and that's probably what makes it great. Forster novels tend to be a bit contrived in terms of plot, with characters who often do what they have to do in order to satisfy the authorial intention. This may be as it should be -- especially for the British. But my sense of the possibilities of the novel was early determined by Dostoevsky and, as M. M. Bakhtin famously theorized, Dostoevsky's characters tend to get away from their author, behaving in surprising ways, saying outrageous things and the like. Passage comes closest to that quality of any twentieth-century novel in English that I can think of.

What this means is that the novel, though it is deliberately plotted and features a few contrived moments, permits its characters more seeming autonomy. In most scenes we have the sense that the dialogue could go quite a different way -- as is quite often the case in real life. What makes us hew to a certain script in our dealings with others, maintaining "a line" or fixing on a subject matter that lets the conversation proceed without falling off the map into uncharted regions? In Passage that je ne sais quoi of successful social interaction is always threatening to fall apart, to disintegrate under the pressures of the embattled sense of identity that its characters possess. But, unlike Dostoevsky, that pressure isn't due to the psychoses of the characters, but to the pressures of the British Raj. No one can ever be quite himself or herself in this setting; the mixed sex events are problematic enough, the mixed race events nearly impossible, and the mixed race and mixed sex outings -- such as Dr. Aziz's ill-fated picnic to the Marabar caves -- potentially disastrous.

Getting that "right" -- the tensions between the stiff upper-lip racial "masters" such as Ronny Healsop; the liberal "I want to see the real India" mannerisms of his fiancée Adela Quested; the aging, moody interest and detachment of Ronny's mother Mrs. Moore; the trying so hard to please but also to be my own man attitudes of Muslim Dr. Aziz; the sympathetic Anglo-Indian viewpoint of schoolmaster Fielding, always willing to see his own people as imperfect and the Indians as better than they are judged to be; the inscrutable outlook of Godbole, a Hindu who suggests that in religious thought he finds the anecdote to all this impossible political friction; as well as the "make 'em squeal" fascist contempt for "the natives" on the part of the Collector General and his wife, and the confusion and confused signals on the part of the leaders of the Indian community -- would be enough to make the novel noteworthy, but Forster brings his own special touch to the show, which makes the novel oh so slippery and more subtle than most.

The special quality of Forster's narration is a kind of knowing satire towards everyone, almost equally. This isn't to say that he plays them for laughs or that we are meant to see them as silly and amusing. Rather we have to see them as us, as the way we are in all such sticky situations where "something big" seems to be on the line simply in the way we speak or comport ourselves. In other words, we see the impossible burden that being "emblems of a culture" places upon people, who will continue to try to live up to its impossibility. Forster achieves this by a technique that is no mean feat, it seems to me: he makes almost every character simultaneously likeable and tedious. We admire some insight they have, we are disappointed by their inability to act in accord with what they think. We find their behavior encouraging, but their thoughts are commonplace foolishness. Mrs. Moore and Godbole emerge as the most provoking, because each is able to attain a detachment that comes to seem sensible if selfish -- or mystic to the point of rendering our own commonplace foolishness sad and silly in its own right.

Ultimately it's that perspective -- the unlikely Moore / Godbole confluence -- that lifts the novel out of what it might otherwise be: Austenian comedy of manners about those stuffy, snobbish or well-meaning Brits abroad, signaled in the novel by the oft-recurring word "muddle." But it's the '20s and the novel reminds me at times of another European who tried to take the "passage to India": Hermann Hesse. If the latter's Siddhartha (1922) seems a Buddhism rife with German romanticism, it's still an effort to reconfigure the familiar on unfamiliar terrain. Forster is similarly straining after some vision of what "difference" India makes. I won't say that the novel is fulling satisfying in that regard, but I will say it does significantly question all the British pieties while remaining unflappably British. Kinda like a sitar in a Beatles tune, it "brings it all back home."

No mean feat -- Empire. My word, yes.

"THE REST IS SILENCE"

Norman Mailer died Saturday, joining, with his death, that other grand old man of the American novel who lived into the 21st century: Saul Bellow. Different as those two are, they are two for whom "the Great American Novel" would have to be as great as a great Russian novel of the nineteenth century. For almost everyone else you care to name, the great novel of the twentieth century would have to be developed in the shadow of Joyce. Mailer, of course, floundered in the shadow of Papa Hemingway, but that's a bit different. In other words, it's only because he toed a line that ran from Tolstoy to Dreiser and Farrell and veered into modernism via Dos Passos and Hemingway, that Mailer could still see himself in the running for the Great American Novel. He still believed it could be done by some kind of muscular act of will, that some gargantuan talent, such as himself, would have the wherewithal to include, Whitmanlike, the multitudinous ethnic diversity of America and subsume it via themes of sex, violence, money, family/race, spectacle, and, maybe, art.

It's a grand hope, a great passion. But it's odd that Mailer has so little to do with the one American writer who came closest to doing that, for one region of our sprawling states at least, Faulkner. But that's the wily Jew in Mailer, if you don't mind my saying so, or, put another way, Faulkner didn't do it in New York, so it really doesn't count. In any case, Mailer sensed that being Jewish gave him the outsider status necessary to see America for what it is -- a strength also found in Bellow and in Philip Roth. But only Mailer was also hamstrung by a hubris that both made him and marred him fatally: the need to be hip. If you want to see what I mean, take a look at The Naked and the Dead (1948), then take a look at Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). In the first the creaky Dos Passos-meets-Farrell stuff is all over the place, but it's ok, it's the '40s, that stuff isn't yet completely shot, or, it's an approach that is "new" enough to seem "dazzling" to people who haven't been keeping up (like, um, Americans) and it's grounded enough to do the things the novel is supposed to do (kill time on long flights). And it's a war story, an attempt to portray "honestly" (which is to say with a gritty sentimentalism rather than a polite sentimentalism) the experience of the war for the enlisted man. That was enough to make it a best-seller, the worst possible thing that could've happened to Mailer the writer. Suddenly proclaimed as the possessor of a talent (that hadn't yet become original or even viable), Mailer became the great ego of American letters. And this is because he was forced into the position of, to borrow Lou Reed's line, "growing up in public."

But if Mailer had only intended to be a celebrity, that wouldn't have been so bad. In fact it's almost a "consummation devoutly to be wished" for many a spotlight junkie. But Mailer actually, truly, almost at times humbly, wanted to write a great novel. And not without reason. The Naked and the Dead, for all its malarky is never bad writing. Its ideas, its conception of character, its devices -- all are thin and made to bear much more than they can take. But that's youth, an imagination still in thrall to films and a sensibility willing to take shortcuts. As sentences, Mailer's prose is gifted, can lay claim to Hemingway territory. So -- of course he should've been working at finding the subject, the perspective, the means to make his ability thrive. But what got in the way was in large part the times themselves. Mailer quickly became a "throwback" in a way that didn't bother Bellow. Bellow was willing to be the sane humanist as our cultural values went to pot (ha ha) in the mad revel of the '60s. Mailer wanted to join the party. He wanted to be the life of the party. Why Are We in Vietnam? is the result of steady pot-smoking, of affecting the hipster guise of "cool cat" jazz, black and rock slang, and more than anything it's the anxiety of finding an older nemesis who had somehow caught the ear and the manner of the young: William Burroughs. Naked Lunch (1959), which Mailer defended at one of its trials, was a challenge that was almost Joycean to Mailer. But this wasn't a dead master, this was a guy from Kansas who went to Harvard . . . On just about any page of Why you can experience Mailer reeling from the blow.

But at the same time, to anyone paying attention, it should be clear that novels like Naked Lunch and Catch-22 (1961) were happening on a different playing field entirely. The idea of that big novel Mailer yearned to write was passé, in fact it was politically retrograde: paternalistic, imperialist, macho, etc. Mailer tried to school himself in this new manner, but he was even more of an outsider, and actually quite the buffoon, almost a square. Still, he was too much of a writer to be stopped. And that leads us to journalism, where Mailer's strengths as a writer naturally belong -- and fortunately, those very same forces of hipness and chaos that were making the Great Novel impossible were making journalism "arty." Enter Wolfe, Thompson, Didion and the rest. Mailer found his pulpit/podium on the pages of the Village Voice where he was able to be, in print, exactly what he was: Norman Mailer (and who the hell are you?). And then came Armies of the Night, and Mailer got to be himself at an event that those other worthies missed out on, and all the posturing and maundering and playing at being Mailer delivering Mailer also became the occasion for the kind of pithy essays on being American that we don't expect from our great novelists, but which we do accept from our great journalists. Mailer found his vehicle and made the most of it.

I have to say I never read him, not in my day. There was every reason to avoid reading him. In the late '70s when I read some of Wolfe and Thompson, Mailer seemed even more of a "Mr. Jones" than Wolfe ('something is happening here, but you don't know what it is'), and in the '80s Mailer brought out Ancient Evenings (1983) which seemed so decidedly what we didn't want the novel to be, ever, that there just seemed no point. In between he came out with The Executioner's Song (1979) which looked to me to be a potboiler -- the novel as movie-of-the-week (trying to do the Capote number at twice the length). When I finally got around to Armies and then the novels I've discussed and then large segments of Advertisements for Myself and In The Time of Our Time, I found Mailer to be embarrassing at times in his insistence on his powers -- he simply doesn't have enough original talent to be a great artist, and he doesn't care deeply enough about other people to be a great novelist, and he doesn't think deeply enough to be a philosopher, but he does care deeply enough about writing to be, if not a great writer (a GREAT writer has to combine all those other three), a great copyist. But I also found him to be likeable in his insistence on finding himself exasperating and puzzling and ambitious and lazy, and in being able to deliver, via prose, a readable and always recognizable self.

Oswald, the CIA, Jesus, Hitler, maybe sometime I'll get around to the masks of the later Mailer, but, with the exception of Christ, I doubt that what I'll find will be as illuminating as a good non-fiction study of those subjects would be. And that's part of the problem: for Mailer's method to work we have to be deeply concerned with what the novelist makes of historical fact, because we trust him to find in our cultural past material that histories can't bring to light -- because some things must be tempered by fiction. But I don't trust Mailer to find that material, and I expect his fictions to be always subservient to the primary fiction: Mailer as the Great Novelist. Only in the case of Jesus is it possible that Mailer -- a myth to himself -- might manage to remake a myth in his own image that, if not what the world needs, is at least something it wouldn't otherwise have.

In any case, so long, Norman. Good luck.

"IRELAND IS MY NATION"

"The colonnade above him made him think vaguely of an ancient temple and the ashplant on which he leaned wearily of the curved stick of an augur. A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osierwoven wings, of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon.

He smiled as he thought of the god's image for it made him think of a bottlenosed judge in a wig, putting commas into a document which he held at arm's length and he knew that he would not have remembered the god's name but that it was like an Irish oath. It was folly. But was it for this folly that he was about to leave for ever the house of prayer and prudence into which he had been born and the order of life out of which he had come?"
--James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

Re-reading Joyce's first novel -- perhaps, in a manner of speaking, his only novel -- I'm struck again by how beautifully written it is, but also how oppressive it is. It's not a book I've ever warmed to, largely because the sense of mordant wit that I associate with Dedalus, in Ulysses, is largely lacking in Stephen. And for some reason the depiction of Stephen's youth doesn't do a lot to enlarge my sympathy for him. In some ways, of course, that may be because Stephen is "too close to home": an arrogant exactitude about words coupled with a shy uncertainty about how to deal with people animates some stages of this portrait to a degree I can't help but regard as personally applicable. And I too recall well enough the last throes of that wanting-to-believe in the mumbo jumbo of Catholicism, that feeling of surrendering to its mystery in all due humility (and not a little awe and fear) that Joyce captures so well for many a Catholic schoolboy. Beyond that, the bookishness of Stephen, the humorless donnishness of so much of his attitude, is maybe tiresome because it's precisely the thing one tries to overcome as one might.

Those problems are certainly there for me, but another problem has also been its relentless Irishness. Ulysses and the Wake certainly can't exist without Ireland, but it's an Ireland that has already become lore, become grist for the Joycean mill to an extent that makes of it something wholly different. It's like saying that, when all's done, Picasso and Braque were still doing still-lifes. Yeah, but... But Portrait's situation is intrinsic to what it is to a degree that, try as my early reading might to appropriate this tale to the myth of "the Artist," makes it always "a portrait of the artist as a young Irishman." And so that remark I made at the end of yesterday's blog, about an artist always beginning in a certain time and place, is true here with a vengeance.

And it's the vengeance that interests me: Joyce "gets even" not only with Ireland but with himself as Stephen. He's able, from the vantage of his "exile" in Europe, to look quizzically at the slender reed upon which this fantasy of escape hangs. We're never told in the novel where Stephen is going or why. We just assume it's the story of Joyce's own flight to Paris, to study medicine, ostensibly. Joyce, like Stephen, might have felt he was leaving not to return, but of course both did return -- and there's no real reason to assume that Stephen ever gets away again. In other words, the degree to which Stephen is not Joyce is what impresses itself upon me more each time I read Portrait. And I think it's necessarily so -- if only because Ellmann and others have based so much of Joyce's biography on how his life events correspond to their presentation in Stephen Hero and in Portrait. But that fact has nothing to do with fiction. The use to which Joyce chose to put things that happened to him is all that matters. And the novel seems to me much more important as the story of a young (Irish)man with an artist's self-conception, then as a recasting of the past so it becomes the prolegomena to the mature work. Stephen, both Joyce and Stephen realize in Ulysses, will not mature until something definitive happens to him. His mother's death is perhaps the first major event, the next must be finding a different kind of personal meaning in his relation to a woman. But we have no evidence that such ever happens to Stephen, and there he remains.

In the passages I quoted above, what strikes me as significant is the degree to which the mature Joyce is giving us the working method, but without showing us that Stephen really recognizes it for what it is. The tendency to see the visible world as signs is there -- Stephen is swift to recognize how a group of symbols easily come together once he imagines himself as an augur: he is meant to read signs, to call upon mythic figures such as Daedalus and Thoth in his self-conception of what it means to be a writer. This is that mythic subtext that Eliot was so quick to pick up on and which he and Pound as well as Joyce exploited in a modern register that made them a group of true innovators. But it's the second paragraph that gives us the means — the slender reed, the "folly" -- upon which it all hangs. For Stephen realizes that the name Thoth, sounding like "troth" (something you pledge), registers a definite Irish meaning, even as his "absurd name, an ancient Greek" is meant to be accepted as a possible name in Ireland. A judge putting commas in a document is perhaps much more homely than that indifferent god refined out of existence, paring his fingernails, but for that very reason has more imaginative resonance. The task of proofing a document would be definitive for those endlessly proliferating texts of Joyce's maturity. Which is to say that the homely image is what makes the mythic image possible, keeps it from being some antiquated fantasy of a richer world of imaginings. The "god's image" makes Stephen smile because it's a cartoon, not an enduring image of hieratic significance.

And so the question: is he about to give up everything for the sake of this folly? It's not even Rimbaud's folly of seeing a lake where a livingroom should be. It's a folly of claiming kin because of a name, because of a walking stick, because Thoth and troth sound remarkably alike. But Joyce is aware of something that the novel shows and that Stephen doesn't yet grasp -- that the "house of prayer and prudence" is founded upon a willful reading even more audacious than Stephen's. And it is because of the meanings that the Church reads into things secular, and the meanings that Ireland reads into events historical -- in which names and terms loom large, taking on their own life -- that Stephen can in no way "leave for ever" its terms. His master, Mr. Joyce, sees this and knows it -- it is indeed the defining characteristic of his fiction. It could be that this is simply a way of talking about the "transubstantiation" of base Irish matter that Stephen wants to bring about for the sake of his art, but that conception is still too fraught with the fin de siècle aestheticism -- its medievalism -- that dominates Stephen, though it doesn't Joyce. Rather I'd like to see how "the order of life out of which he had come" is what exercises Joyce's mind until the last.

Is this the case for the rehabilitation of Joyce as pre-eminently an Irish author, despite what the industries in the U.S., France, and elsewhere in Europe have made of him? Perhaps it's inevitably so. The "transubstantiation" into the stuff of world literature only happens because the "folly" of his claim is ultimately an insight about the modern world, in its incarnations everywhere, not only in Ireland. The local is, willy nilly, a part of the global, a glimpse of particularity that is only altered -- like the bread and the wine -- because of a system of meanings. Stephen's spirit is still aligned with "the priest of imagination" who would ascribe, Dante-like, to a set of meanings that could make historical reality achieve its hieratic realization -- in the name of the god he himself would become. Joyce remains at the level where the bread and wine, as body and blood, and as wheat and grapes, are only substitutions, a way of ordering the world by means of names we give things, beginning "once upon a time" and continuing "now and ever."

Stephen Dedalus is my name,
Ireland is my nation.
Clongowes is my dwellingplace
And heaven my expectation.

FRIDAY NIGHT FILMS

I recently saw two films at WHC that complimented each other well, though they weren't shown together: Killer of Sheep (1977) by Charles Burnett and Pather Panchali (1955) by Satyajit Ray. Both are debut films that have an unrelenting sense of reality to them, a documentary quality that sets them immediately at odds with everything that is contrived and manipulative in cinema. Not that I'm saying that realism in film isn't manipulative -- both of these films aim for emotional effects that can't be achieved without deliberate dramatic rendering, of course. No one just sets up a camera and films what happens (except Warhol). But the way these films create their sense of reality is what is most absorbing about them. It begins with the fact that the characters don't strike us as actors; they seem to be the actual people whose stories we are watching. This is an effect that is impossible to achieve with name actors and familiar faces, so only personal, out-of-the-way films like these can establish an aura of authenticity in place of the aura of celebrity that drives the films that dominate our theaters.

Killer of Sheep is a striking portrait of a man who works in a slaughterhouse and spends his time insomniac, depressed, and trying to cope with a low-income lifestyle in a Black neighborhood in CA that Burnett presents not only with gritty realism, but with genuine humor and affection. All the little intimate details of life leap into relief against the backdrop of minimal existence. The adult actors are amateurs, the kids are children of friends and relatives, and everyone seems real and believably vivid in ways that only, perhaps, non-professionals can be. One of my favorite episodes in this collection of vignettes is when the main character and a friend go to buy a car engine that some acquaintance has stored in his livingroom. They carry it out down some rickety old stairs, load it onto the back of an open pickup, during which the friend hurts his finger and so, when asked to help shove the engine further onto the truck bed, replies, "it'll be ok." The truck starts up, backs up, the engines rolls off and cracks on the road. The friend looks at it and says, "it's no good now." So the engine gets left there, looking like some great fragment of meteor dropped from space, held in longshot as the camera moves away with the truck. There are many wonderful cinematic touches in the film; Burnett, who made the film as a student at UCLA, showing a flair for set-ups that seems almost unpremeditated yet very deliberate.

Pather Panchali is the story of a struggling family in rural India; it's the first installment of the Apu trilogy which follows the fortunes of a boy named Apu -- a stand-in for the director, I believe. I have seen all three on video and only watched the first film at WHC, though all three were screened. What the first one has that the others lack, I seem to recall, is the strength of authenticity -- an authenticity I'm linking to the use of what we might call, to invoke a painting metaphor, a restricted palette. What Pather Panchali offers is a glimpse of a lifestyle that is so minimal it's refreshing. I can't think of another film that so tenderly, but deliberately, evokes a sense of family and place. It may be that this film is the standard to which other films of families facing poverty's restrictions (The Rat Catcher and La Mouchette from last year's film series come to mind) must aspire.

Ray's camera is always evocative, but never maudlin, never didactic. Each shot seems to gleam with a sense of the scene's reality -- the most vivid sense of sub specie aeternitatis I've ever seen on film. The main events -- the birth of Apu; the theft of a neighbor girl's necklace by Apu's older sister, Durga; the death of the nearly toothless and stooped Auntie (who has to be one of the most memorable visages ever placed on screen); the visit to "see the train"; Durga's illness; the storm; Durga's death -- occur with a rhythm that rarely distinguishes an important moment from a random one. It's more "like life" we can say, since all the dramatic crescendoes and climaxes of a standard film have nothing to do with how one actually lives, never knowing that this moment "leads" to something else or will become fatal. A good example is the accusation of theft: it seems false, another example of persecution by the uppity neighbors; only at the end do we see that it was true, gaining a retrospective reading on the deceased Durga that is the more effective for being implicit, left as an internal adjustment for each viewer.

Seeing Pather Panchali after Killer of Sheep retrospectively illuminated Burnett's film. In the discussion with Burnett after the screening of his film, a few questions posed his relation to neo-realism, which made me think of the Italian version, such as The Bicycle Thief (another film I need to see on the screen sometime), but I think Burnett's film is much closer to the feel of Ray's film, a film that doesn't strive for any didactic point except that life goes on, even for people who live "like this." Ray ends with a death and the family's departure for the city (my problem with the subsequent films is that I like Apu best as a boy and I prefer Durga to Apu in any case); Burnett ends with a neighbor's announced pregnancy (after the main couple in his story have finally gone to bed together again), as a suggestion of resilience despite circumstances. Both films, as corny ad-talk hyberbole would say, "celebrate the human condition"; their strength as films is that they allow the audience to celebrate what film brings to the evocation of conditions of existence we might otherwise never know or see.

Every artist begins somewhere in space and time. Perhaps the best thing he or she can do is show us what that was like. (If I really believe that, then it would mark a significant change from my earliest aesthetic).

I've heard you say many times
That you're better than no one
And no one is better than you,
If you really believe that
You know you have nothing to win
And nothing to lose.
--Dylan, "To Ramona" (1964)