Waiting for the Barbarians

South African writer J.M. Coetzee (pronounced kuut - see) wrote Waiting for the Barbarians in 1980 at the height of Apartheid. In 1983 he would write The Life and Times of Michael K which would win the Man Booker prize, and in 1999 he'd win that prize again for Disgrace. In 2003 Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Waiting tells the story of the aging Magistrate of an outpost on the edge of an unnamed civilization. Besides description of the landscape (it is an arid, inhospitable land) there is little offered to locate the reader. If you know, as I did, that Coetzee is South African, you assume that the action takes place on that continent. There's nothing wrong with making that assumption, except that it narrows the range of a novel that seems deliberately sparse on names, perhaps in order to widen its scope into a near allegory.   

Those in power at the centre of this Empire are convinced that a barbarian threat is imminent. They send an emissary, Colonel Joll, with some troops, to the Magistrate's outpost to scour the land for barbarians or those sympathetic to them, and interrogate them by any means. A logical and sympathetic man, the Magistrate doesn't see evidence of a barbarian threat. Early on he tells Joll this, which puts him under suspicion. 

When the troops return from an excursion with barbarian prisoners, Joll subjects them to brutal interrogation and torture. To help manage his own complicity in this the Magistrate takes in an adolescent barbarian girl whose feet have been broken during questioning. Though they share a bed and he bathes her intimately while she lives with him, he is reluctant, even unable, to consummate the relationship. Not until he goes on an excursion into barbarian lands to return her to her family is he able and willing to love her completely. Then, he lets her go back to her own people.

This has to mean something. An aging man of the Empire sympathizes with a young barbarian girl but cannot "enter into" her experience until outside of Empire and in her land. This all seems a bit rich. In fact, if it weren't for his horror at the politics of the Empire, we'd have to declare our hero, the Magistrate, a dirty old man who takes advantage of a situation. 

Even though his conscience seems to trouble him, he never regrets the primal, sexual nature of his relationship with this young girl, and to me this muddies the focus of the novel. When he returns to the outpost to resume his duties he finds that Joll has put an ambitious and vicious young officer in charge and the Magistrate is jailed for traitorous activities. 

The scandal of the Magistrate arises from his sympathy for the barbarians, especially his fraternization with the young girl. Although the Magistrates actions work symbolically, on a "real world" level they are problematic. Why use a cliche-ridden, and abhorrent to many, sexualized relationship as the central illustration of how civilization and barbarity must reconcile - or how what is civilized and what is barbarous are only constructs defined by Empire. Sure it all works, but it's just so unseemly and hard to defend. 

Coetzee however, explores this sort of relationship in Disgrace too. Here again the relationship causes the aging male's fall from grace. My question is simply this: though he sounds the right notes in portraying the moral ethical boundaries of sexuality, does the sexual conquest of a young female by an aging male really warrant this much attention? It may be the stuff of the aging male fantasy, but it's hard-going to suggest that this fantasy has merit on its own, much less as the focus for a parable on how relations between human groups fail. 

Further, this male-oriented point of view is already pervasive and problematic. For at least half of the readers out there, it's solidly "eyes roll back in the head and sigh" material. These readers (and you know who you are) will likely struggle with the sexual nature of the story simply because it's been told and told and told and, it's beside the point. Writers should explore large themes like the clash between civilizations, but perhaps not in a novel about an aging man who finds comfort and understanding in the body of a young female member of the underclass. 

Finally, didactic art is, at best, difficult to pull off. At worst it's a sermon disguised as a story. At best it's art with a message. There's craft in it, to be sure, but one always wonders why the writer didn't just publish an essay instead. 

Ride report

in:      -15'C wind 25 ks SW

out:   -10'C wind 25 ks WSW

       

Simplexity

It's one of the new terms of 2010. A term coined to describe how one describes an impossibly complex idea or phenomenon in a paradoxically simple way. For example, the simple fact that I've entitled this entry as "simplexity" means that it will become a part of complex web of blog entries using the term, and thus adding to its  place on the web, and perhaps in the lexicon. A simple act contributes to, even creates, or complicates, a complex situation. Whatever. I heard the word used today, and thought I'd use it too. But I was thinking of reviewing MacEwan's The Cement Garden, which I finished a week or so ago.

The book is a simplexity. Begin with a lower middle class English family of six: four children (girl, boy, girl, boy) - the oldest three play doctor in their pre-teens, while the youngest wants to cross dress. Make the father a distant, eccentric loner who dies when the oldest is just finishing high school, and then, as if this is not enough, give the reclusive mother cancer, and have her pass away too, in the house, with the kids fending for themselves. It's an epic tale in that it riffs off of the children's story fantasy nightmare narrative of the dangerous, yet absent father, and negligent, absent mother. Add to this the father's near final act of buying 15 bags of cement in order to cover the gardens in his yard, so that he has less work to do. When he dies before he can use all of the concrete mix, the eldest two children, on the mother's death in the home, encase her in concrete in a trunk in the basement, and then go on with their lives.

It's over-simplifying to attempt to unpack the metaphor. The father's garden, hardened over. The mother's burial, or rather encasement. The children living on in this new "garden". The odor that finally gives away the secret of the seed they've planted. MacEwan takes risks here that I can only admire. The narration is clear and simple, the story deep, complex, and resonant. It is a remarkable novel, that begins, continues, and ends in a way that you know it must. Like the distant recollections of a family vacation, with its beginning, and visitations along the way, the return home is inevitable. The memories of the rancour, the love, and the transgression will shape you forever.

The ride in:        Temp 3'C Wind 6 ks SE
The ride home:  Temp 1'C Wind calm
      

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

I read Carson McCullers' novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, this past year and it's memorable and brilliant for several weighty reasons. It is not a plot-driven thing. Though it mostly follows (and wonderfully draws) the main character, Mick, a young girl just coming into adolescence, it also chronicles the lives of the many others who swirl around her. McCullers writes in the traditions of other great southern writers, like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. Her gift, I think, is in the portrayal of women, particularly young women. Which is not to say that she isn't adept at portraying other characters - in particular she is deft with children, or child-like personalities.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, the feature story (a short novella actually) of a collection of seven stories, is a classic of southern writing, and a solid exemplar of McCullers at her best. In it Miss Amelia, a very strong and independent young woman, eschews the help of men and becomes a well-to-do "force of nature". She collects rent, makes and sells the best moonshine, and doctors the sick in the small town she "dominates" and cares about. In conventional southern style, the pleasant, if not a bit odd, rhythms of this life are immediately challenged by the arrival of a destitute misfit, a hunchback claiming to be a distant relative of Miss Amelia. To the shock of the community, she believes him and takes him. Thus begins both a time of wonder and awakening for Miss Amelia, but also triggers events that will lead to her inevitable decline.

(Continued (on July 26, 2010) after a night cap at Ted and Darlene's ...)

McCullers' stories are all about love and longing - for life, for the weak, for art, for music, for the body, for a lover. In "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud," the closing story of this collection, the male main character speaks to a 12 year old boy, in an attempt, it appears, to save the boy the inevitability of misprised love. His argument turns on the following passage:


'And what do they fall in love with?' ...  'A woman. Is that correct son.' ... 
'They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love? ... 
The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The man leaned closer and whispered: 'A tree. A rock. A cloud.' 


The southern writers have this sense of the immensity of nature, and our self-imposed alienation from it, in common. Faulkner, McCarthy, O'Connor, and McCullers fill their stories with this heady presence of  landscape: rain, heat, trees, flowers, ponds. There are characters that work around it and characters that struggle against it, but those characters who accept that they are merely, and most fully realized when they are, a part of this greater whole, those characters thrive, in the spiritual sense. They understand their place in human society. They appreciate their time in the world. They live naturally in their own skin, loving their own people, and caring for them when that is what's required.

I highly recommend this book of stories, as well as the novel: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Rode 52 ks (to Emerson and back). Wind SW 17 ks. Avg 31.43 kph.

I know it

You've been looking at the list of books I'm reading, and it's not changing, and I'm not reviewing any of them, and you're wondering if I actually do read. Or if I've just listed them (eclectic as they are) for show. Well, I suppose, you're partly right. You always will be. But today I finished reading Dick's Eye in the Sky.

First published in 1957, this novel does what Dick's stories always do - unsettle us, show us ourselves in a new way, comment on who we are, and what we might become because of it. The premise here begins with an accident involving the "proton beam deflector of the Belmont Bevatron". The story involves eight people who were touring the facility during the accident, and are injured because of it. Scientist Jack Hamilton, and his wife Marsha, are at the centre of it. Hamilton is the centre of the narration. Although this accident opens the novel, Dick steps away from it - kind of steps over it - and, without announcement the reader is ushered into a world that, at first, looks and sounds like a slightly scientifically-advanced version of the late 50s. Marsha is accused of being a communist sympathizer, and this puts Hamilton's work at the security sensitive lab in jeopardy. As Jack and Marsha try to deal with the uncertainty this accusation brings, we realize, as Hamilton starts to realize it that things in the "world" are just not right. Things are off-kilter. Over time Hamilton along with the others, come to realize that the "world" they are in has been adjusted by the bevatron accident. In fact it appears that they are, all eight of them living within the skewed reality of one of their own consciousnesses - and so they must confront the wonder, paranoias, biases, and foibles of that personality. Once they understand this, their task becomes to determine whose world they are in, and then to find a way to snap out of it - either by having that unique consciousness self-destruct, or by destroying it themselves.

Through this vehicle Dick explores not only the flaws of various personality-types, but also the possibility that we create the world in our own image. That if we think that people are out to get us, we will experience that they actually are preying on us. If we abhor disorder and chaos, we will create order to eliminate it. And so on.

That would, it seems to me, be enough of a project for a sci-fi novel, but Dick adds a topical, political layer - McCarthyism, or, what Orwell coined as thought-crime. The story begins with the accusation against Marsha, and Jack's questioning of his own loyalties. Who deserves my trust? Who should I stand beside? Why? He is tempted to leave his wife to keep his job, and to show his patriotism. He is tempted to disregard her protests at the thin evidence presented to him to build the case against her. Although during the middle passages of the novel this theme appears to be dropped, it is picked up again by the end. And then you can see it's presence throughout.

Again Dick suggests that no matter what technological advancements we devise, we will be subject to the flaws and limits of the human situation. We are, each of us, petty and uniquely cruel. Any one of us, if we could, would lord it over others and impose our own whims over those, even those we love. And in this he suggests what should be obvious: we are best when we allow variety to thrive, both in our gardens, and in our communities. Homogeneity in thought, taste, and politics is a nightmare, not a utopia. The "eye" of conformity must be confronted. The dangers of a dis-integrated world of individuals is a dream compared to the nightmare of the "borg".

Rode 56 ks (the Rosetown loop): Wind WNW 30+ ks, Avg 30.02 kph.


July 17, 2010
Yesterday I rode 27 ks: East to the Marais, and then back home. Wind ESE 30+ ks. Avg 31.54 kph.

I kept the ride short because we headed into the city for dinner with Ron & Sandi, Terry and Rhona, and Roland and Aniko. There we celebrated the success of the Himmelbleiw furniture exhibition and catalogue. We also discussed how Hungarians are unrepressed (and perhaps insane), while Mennonites are repressed (and perhaps insane), why Winnipeg is greatest in its smallness, why CBC Radio failing utterly - losing its most loyal, core audience (and who's going to save it, because we know that Stephen would rather like to see its demise), and how to pronounce kilometre (KILLoh  MEter ... not KILLawe MUHter), and why (you'll have to ask Ron about this, but it has to do with being consistent with the way we say "millimetre" and "centimetre").

And thanks to Rhona for her honest ramblings on the ride home.

A good time all told

Lavinia

I want to believe that the angst of originality and creativity are on the wane. At least for a season. With sampling, and open talk of influence, and David Shields' book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (an entire "novel" (although Shields won't call it a novel, and insists that the novel is in need of a rebirth, or of a kind of death) of quotes and footnotes), I expect that the decline of the original is on, in full. Of course any reader who takes his work seriously knows that "original" is one of the those wondrously impossible expressions of the English language (probably of any language). Whatever I read, I'm always thinking, "Hmmm this is a lot like ..." And if I can't think of what it's like, I'm still thinking about what it is like. I'm always trying to place it. Everything we read, we place. We sort it into one category or another. We may read by flavour, but we know what the source of it is - what it holds in common with others like it. The ones we call "originals" are those that take something we've always known and redress it in such a way that we recognize it (and if we recognize it, didn't it exist somewhere in our memory as a kind of possibility, at least) as something other. Perhaps this was what happened when people first read The Catcher in The Rye. Or when they watched The Tempest. Or The Inferno. And so on. But each of these things remains a member of something, a child of some style or movement - an end and a beginning of some imagined world.

Ursula K. LeGuin's Lavinia is a rewriting of Virgil's Aeneid no less. But she rewrites the story in novel form, with Virgil (known as the "poet") as Lavinia's muse and prophet. Lavinia, who is a silent outline of a character in the Aeneid - she becomes Aeneus's wife - tells us the story from her point of view. She tells us that Virgil tells her the story, so that she knows it, and how it will end, before it happens. She becomes the first reader of Virgil's epic, and his telling of the story becomes the template for her life. To put it in Star Trekkian terms, Virgil indirectly violates the "prime directive" for he can see what will (or should) happen and, via Lavinia, he makes it so.

The plot of the novel follows Virgil's telling, which is a modified version of the founding moments of the Roman Empire. Psychologically however, Lavinia is a force who uses her influence judiciously and effectively. Though the men make the decisions, her approval means everything. In this she is a political force for she defies the commands of her deceased husband's son, Ascanius, to save her own (by Aeneus) son, and becomes a symbol of heroism for her people because of it.

Rather than replicate the large-scale myth of her model, LeGuin scales things down, empowers the silent and everyday voice of a woman who loves the land and her people, and in doing so the story becomes inhabitable. Whereas the men too often hear the call of "Mars" who always lurks around them, Lavinia brings to the fore the necessities of living, of sowing and reaping, of making daily sacrifice to the gods, of caring for a father and mother, of raising a son, and of mourning all inevitable passings. Virgil recounts the reality of the world according to Mars. The world of men and ego and violence. LeGuin reminds us that our blood flows daily because we care for one another, because repeated ritual tending to the material world keeps us fed and watered, loved and living.

As in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness LeGuin sees and accepts both sides. Our necessity is to understand the two faces, the Janus, and to seek harmony with them. To choose one and reject the other leaves you with only half of the story.

Ride in:                   Temp 7'C    Wind NNE 15 ks
Ride home:             Temp 19'C  Wind NW 4 ks
        

And now, at the end.

I finished reading Muriel Barbery's novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, last night. As of Wednesday of last week, when I had read to page 170, approximately half of the novel, I found it quite inspiring, both as a reader and as a writer. As I moved into the second half of it, these last few days, I read quickly, though by the last third I admit that I scanned and jumped over paragraphs.

There seemed to me to be a significant shift in the tone and interest of the narrator, Renee Michel, the dowdy concierge. Until her inadvertent revelation to Kakuro Ozu, her "hedgehog-ness" was what had drawn me to her. This prickliness was what made her and her fellow confessee, Paloma Josse, the 12 year old genius, so intriguing and, for me at least, attractive.

As the novel drew on though, and the two of them revealed themselves to one another, and to others around them, that tension ebbed. Paloma's trenchant questions about life and meaning nearly evaporate into quaint observations as she sits in the easy-chair in Renee's apartment. In this context, escorted there by her mother, she is reduced to her 12-year-oldness. She looks and sounds young again as we watch her dangle her legs and fidget.

Similarly, Renee's former discussions of things of beauty and reason in the world around her, are replaced by concerns about hairstyles, dresses, and pastries. Strangely, a woman who has, to this point taken great pains to free herself of the classist concerns of appearances, becomes the focus - initially unwilling, to be fair - of a kind of makeover. The story shifts from a focus on the beauty of order and simplicity - in grammar, music, ideas - to an awakening love of self, as she is seen, and comes to see herself, through the eyes of the other, Kakuro Ozu. Indeed Renee learns to love herself, because Ozu comes to love her. It becomes the ideal transformational love story.

What's wrong with this? Good question. Nothing really, except for the ending. You see, as soon as Renee comes to accept and love her new self (and apparently let go of her alter-ego, a deceased sister who's foray into the city results in rape and death in childbirth has haunted her - "You are not your sister," says Ozu), she comes to suffer the same fate. She is killed by her own naivete, in the city. Certainly running into traffic, and being struck by a dry cleaning van as one attempts to rescue a vagrant from traffic, is a reasonably noble way to die, but it is also mock-heroic and non-sensical, in a novel that has, up till now, taken great pains to make sense of things.

Of course life is like that. Shit happens, as they say. But this novel has been approaching the altar of high art - a religion of order and structure. It has invoked classics of music, philosophy, and literature. In fact, it is almost certain that Barbery intends Renee's death to parallel, or at least conjure, the death of Anna Karenina in Tolstoy's novel, which is often referenced in this story. The haphazard nature of Renee's demise leaves me cold. If it is to be tragic, I don't see the lesson in it. Rather Renee deserves better, not worse. Her death does not stand as a warning for the higher classes who disdain common folk, or, as in Tolstoy, those who would disdain a woman's right to choose. And even as we struggle to see Renee's death as something other than accident, she ascribes it to "the paths of God" that are "all to explicit for those who pride themselves in the ability to decipher them." Really? That is God? So we are just to accept this as "fate" we lie dying; that God makes shit happen. Amen?

From a novelist who has, for much of her story, found exquisite beauty and meaning in the mundane, I find suggesting that this fatalistic conclusion is the result of the hand of God a bit of a cheat. What purpose does it serve except to bring the most abrupt closure to a plot that wasn't the point of the novel anyway? At its core this novel seeks to play the notes of psychological (who am I) and political (class-ism) tension and harmony. The ending fails to illuminate those further. In fact Paloma's bourgeois mother hardly flinches at the news. This non-reaction jars as much as Renee's invocation of god. The classed, atheist universe will trundle along, unmarked by this baser matter.

So it goes.

The ride in:       Temp 4'C Wind 20 ks ESE
The ride home: Temp 8'C Wind 35 ks ESE

It will be rain tonight.

To page 170.

In Barbery's novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Renee, the concierge of a Paris apartment block, tells us how she prefers to play this role rather than herself. French society, according to her, expects a concierge to be doltish, unsophisticated, uneducated, and certainly not well-read, so she gives the people who live in her block what they expect. She is, however, very well-read, both in literature and philosophy - an autodidact of the highest order.

For the people who live in the block, she prefers to be seen as the typical, slow-minded concierge. In this way she can live a quiet life that pleases her, and allows her to carry on reading and learning. Her cover is blown when she says, in a conversation with the new tenant, a wealthy Japanese man named Karuko Ozu by quoting the first line from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike." To which he replies with the next line from the novel: "Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." She know that this will, in some way, be her undoing, at least to some extent.

To this point in the novel, the "plot" if you will, has been driven by the novel's other main character, Paloma, who, with Renee, shares the narration about equally. Paloma is a 12 year old inquisitive genius who reveals very early on that she intends to commit suicide on June 16th, the day she turns 13. She is a happy cynic, who feels there's not much point in going on with her life.

Both characters feel it is better not to be known. They do not even seek to be seen as mysterious, or eccentric. They would simply rather not be known, despite both having exceptional intelligences, and what we would call, "great potential." In our celebrity-intoxicated times, where reality tv makes famous anyone prepared to expose their potential, or lack of it, these characters stand in stark contrast.

One question: If Renee is party to the telling of the story, in the very public form of the novel, what am I to make of her intentions? Am I being too clever as a reader? Should I ignore the apparent fact that a character who does not want to be known is telling me and anyone who will read her words that "reality?" How does the form and structure of the novel work in this kind of story-telling. This revelation, that the character is a paradox, works as high irony on me, the reader, if I don't wake up to how I am getting this "inside" information. That is, that she who does not want to be known is in the process of telling me, and anyone who will read it, who she really is. I feel like I've just opened up a Russian (or Chinese?) nesting doll. Where does it all end?

More later. I have reading to do. In the mean time, have fun with this "rick-rolling".

Ride in:        Temp 3'C Wind 5-8 ks NNE
Ride home:   Ted H. Klassen's Ford