Book Review: Ulysses, by James Joyce

Well, that took a while. Ulysses (maybe you've heard of this one) is really a special kind of challenge: the plot isn't terribly complicated, and the characters and their motivations are not indecipherable. It's not the kind of puzzle novel that obscures plot points amid selective omissions. It's got its share of jokes and analogies that probably require the better part of a bachelor's in liberal arts to get behind. I didn't get as many as I'd have liked--I realized, for example, that I was missing a lot of Stephen Dedalus's classical philosophical motif on his long walk on the beach--but I don't think they're unassailable. The real challenge is just the reading, it's the form, the structure, the confounding sense of flow. I've frequently been thinking of it as a long-form experiment with the language, which isn't wrong, but which is a little unfair. Ulysses does what novels generally try to do, even if takes the long way around. It explores and reveals some insight about the human condition using plot, character, setting, and the tools of language. What Joyce is doing is looking closer at the English's relationship to the other things. It's one of those books with a high entry fee--it's a lot to ask to decipher structure, theme and plot all at once--but I think it's actually easy to enjoy, provided you can get used to it and don't mind the length.

I guess the briefest of summaries is in order: 18 sequential chapters of novella length, each varying the frame in one way or another. Sometimes Joyce is getting in his characters' heads in a narrative that reads a little closer to the loopy curlicues of actual thought than the usual exposition-and-dialogue. Other times, he takes on some formal analogies here and there (headlines, a stage play, an oral defense). Some are chapter-long thematic vehicles, and there are a few episodes of unreliable, flawed narration, connected to the story or omniscient. A real hodgepodge of style, but it's connected, and you can get the authorial voice in all of them. I realize (based on reading part of the introduction) that each section is informally titled based on episodes from The Odyssey, but not familiar with the critical convention, I gave them nicknames of my own. (I try to avoid certain background reading before I get going with a review, because I usually find someone who has already did a better job of saying what I'm thinking. This'll probably be the worst case.) Although there are a number of throwaways to Homer's epic, I imagine it's "Ulysses" mostly for the general thematic case, a story that is meant to be some canonical representation of a bunch of stuff that happens in the wandering between a departure and a return. (Although having only read it once, I'm awfully hesitant to tell you what's not in there.) The narrative styles seemed intermittent to me, possibly selected for what might best illustrate a plot or thematic point, but if there was an overarching method to choosing the modes of expository madness, I missed it.

The most painful chapter? I found "Maternity" (ch 14) dreadful to get through, most frustratingly, because it's where the plot really begins to coalesce. It starts as a nearly unintelligible drumbeat of connected words, resolving to more sensible, but still difficult, prose, possibly meant to evoke the confusion of the exit which finally sends Stephen and Leopold Bloom on a parallel journey. For all the female points of view Joyce daringly got into in other chapters, here among Bloom, Stephen, and the medical students, for all of their clever contrasts about procreation, we never did quite hear what the ladies might have thought about it. Buck and the gang are never more annoying than in this chapter, and what actually bothered me most was that I just didn't understand the nature of the place--why did the ward have a bar in it? My favorite chapter ("The Tales of Brave Ulysses," Ch 12) was a more normal bar where a loquacious bigoted drunk recounts Bloom's visit, getting seamlessly interrupted by some other brain which goes off on silly, purple tangents. Bloom isn't represented as a potent soul here and his climactic rejoinder isn't impressive. The chapter balances the sympathy of the presumed listener and the distaste of the reader, and both voices of the narrators are, for their personal or intellectual failings, droll as hell, with even more smiles in the contrast. This is the chapter you most hear the brogue.

A great deal needs to be said about the audible element. It took me to Ch 11 (lamely, "Music") to finally realize that Joyce is doing more than offering a few occasional teasers on music, but he's often structuring his prose that way. It's not lyrical in the sense I'd usually mean it: although you'll find the occasional alliteration, repetition or rhyme, and the words are certainly chosen for aesthetic effect, it's not words to a song (well, usually--a short sample of lyrics are in fact how the chapter opens). Joyce is instead trying to make the language itself do the the things that music does. There are recurring rhythms and patterns that go along with episodes and characters. Right down to the syntax, he's trying to work harmonies, sometimes letting a sequence of thought or words trail up while another drifts down, like a dominant closing in on the tonic, or, you know, declining to close (hi switters). Maybe you'd say it's unrhymed poetry, but I think I'd rather call it prose music. Now, it's got to be hard to make literature do this on so fundamental a level, or at least it was tougher to read than a stage play. Do you really need prose to copy something that sound is already successful at conveying, that is, are there more reasons to read this than some experimental satisfaction? Well, there's more to Ulysses than that obviously, and Joyce eventually gets a payoff or two for his themes, which is probably a lot clearer on a second read.

The word I'm looking for up there by the way, is leitmotif, which, like I said, isn't exactly unfamiliar in other media. Stephen's theme music, the rhythm of his streams of consciousness, is scholarly and complicated, and is most likely to incorporate these language tricks I just described. I have him as played by a string quartet, an adagio on the beach, an allegro in the library (musical terms suit his Italian scholarship), possibly a march-timed interlude in the maternity ward. Bloom, on the other hand, is simpler than Stephen, he's a complex man too, but more linear, something just a hair odd in the gait and the tonality but still speech-like. A little uptight, and a little pervy. I don't doubt for an instant that Joyce had him as klezmer. (Although when I got bored of his section, I found that singing the lines to the melody of Blackbird usually worked.) Molly Bloom needs a Spanish guitar, slowly accelerating and upping the pitch to build to an offscreen climax (yes). These difference sound trite to describe, although I think I'm right about how they're intended, but they are executed very carefully. We get a treat when Joyce finally contrasts a pair of them in chapter 13 ("Voyeur"). On the beach, Gerty MacDowell's inner voice is (disappointingly) immature and most closely resembles the streams of consciousness you'll more commonly find in literature, and halfway in, as always without warning, we're back Bloom's agreeable up-tempo to learn about the other side of the skirt-peeping. What I most appreciated about this technique is that it built a real feeling of the differentness of the various characters, highlighted them as individuals, very separate in their own minds. It's different than the usual tools of character-building, in which the author identifies a few traits as a skeleton, then fleshes them out as needed. You can put traits on Joyce's characters too, but they're more emergent, the result of an accretion of representations by themselves and by others. Which is more realistic?

It's hard to read words as allegorical musical notes, but these various styles tapped other veins too. The visible is the other modality we can't avoid, thanks to Stephen. Chapter 15 ("Hookey") is a lengthy sequence of the shifting perceptions and thought excursions we got used to in the musical chapters, now written as if they are externalized and viewed, with elaborate props, costumes, gimmicks and stage cues inserted by the narrator. Joyce's go-to analogy was theater or vaudeville (or some fusion thereof--Stephen's friends always caper around in a gaggle, but here every bit player is a member of knowing extras, like a multipurpose chorus or a portable peanut gallery), but these absurd stretches of sight gags are very accessible to, um, a student of modern visual media. Imagine the visit to Dublin's night town as a cartoon and it loses its weirdness quickly. I get from chapter 10 ("Tales of Springfield") a similar feeling, this one closely resembling the kaleidoscopic visuals that John Dos Passos made a lot of hay with a few years later. And there's a hell of a cultural difference between 1904 (the setting) and 1920 (published) to account for this sort of perceptual thing, following along the rapid development and meteoric popularity of film. In those intervening years, the roving camera eye became a staple of the Western experience.

As the novel progresses, the frequency of leitmotifs declines and we get a number of formally structured chapters before it goes out on Molly's big solo. Although the narrators could get verbose, these more obviously engineered chapters were easier to digest, a straight story under the avoidable modifiers and cliches appropriate to the style of the mystery lecturers, or the mandates of the framing. Jesus, in a similar context did I write that "there's a fine line between cleverness and excusing yourself for bad writing, between showing your authorial hand and distancing your readers from your characters"? Well, it's the execution, right, and I think one reason that these skits go on so long is that Joyce wants to show beyond doubt who's in control of the language here; he tosses off a profundity now and again to let us know he's in on the ideas as well. We're not going to forget that it's good writing and not a hobble on some literary crutches.

So, how serious is Ulysses? The thing is full of humor really (a lot more ironic smiles than gut laughs), and a lot of the "important" subject matter gets subsumed under the imperfect characters and faulty narration modes. I don't think the characters are particularly deep, not in the sense of a direct and profound analysis, or of the sterling character traits with which novels usually present people, and Bloom, our main dude, nearly falls under the weight of stereotypes when it comes to the littler descriptions. Stephen is complex in an intellectually facile way, but he comes off as unfocused (understandable: he lost his mother and got sucked back to Dublin; he's broke and too proud or too decent to go home to a family that is also broke; his friends are assholes), and as a wounded idealist. We don't forget that he's young. Mind you, I have gotten this vibe from Shakespeare too (although in his case, he had defining adjectives run through his characters like pillars). 300 years of literature later, and I don't believe Joyce is exactly trying to sell us shallow characters either, more, maybe, on the idea that a lot of human depth in literature is illusory, that our actual nature doesn't map as well to storytelling as we pretend. Joyce is without doubt taking the novel representation very seriously indeed.

I should be in bed, but there's one last thing I want to say here. I think the reason Ulysses is liked because it has a good heart. It's got jokes, jerks, pontification, losers, fuckups and oddballs, life, youth, age, and death, satisfaction, disappointment, marriage, sex, food, drink, beauty, music. It's about the things we care about, and it may take a while, but eventually you find that you care about the people in there too. A lot of the story is a variously one-sided and unflattering portrait of Leopold and Molly's marriage, which is unfaithful in action and constantly disregarding or misrepresented in thought. But the funny thing is that the Blooms are always thinking about one another. They're in mutual orbit, and in their way, they do connect as the primary people in one another's lives. It's strange, but really quite genuine and sweet. After a long journey home, I found myself touched at the end.

[Some edits.]

[Update: I'm a fan of these sorts of synesthetic cross-media explorations in general, which is probably why so much of the review glommed onto that area. I happened to catch Ratatouille last night, and to blabber again what I loved about it, it did a great job expressing on film how food tastes, and in the sequence where the food critic was converted, the expression of the emotional connection we have with food crossed over into brilliance.

It's an activity we do all the time, right? We talking animals are always finding ourselves explaining how things feel or how things went down. It's central to our experience, and in one sense, it's what literature basically is. Joyce really broke some molds in finding and then using different representational modes in writing. A little higher-level (probably) than using jazz and fireworks to show how flavors feel, although I think future art historians will look kindly on the Pixar efforts too. Film, stage, music, and fuck it, even lectures (and maybe cuisine too) are interesting media in that they've always struggled with the reverse of what telling normally does. They take a story, and must then convert it to display and sounds. Always a challenge, and it can obviously be hard to do well, judging by the endless reels of crap out there. All the failures to make a decent movie out of a good book. But even there, we've assimilated some fairly complex things to teh point where we take them for granted. Imagine the work that goes into a good movie score, for example. I think when it hits, it can be a higher level of craft than we usually give it credit for. Much as I like words and all.]

Review: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

[Note: I'm not sure it's possible to spoil this book, but I do talk about events near the end of the story in relation to the rest of it.]

Lolita, of course, doesn't occupy a savory moral place, and might as well get that right out of the way. There's no forgiveness there, not on my part and not on Nabokov's, when it comes to an evaluation of the novel and its characters. If you could distill it from the language (second language? No fair!), it's a story about the serial rape of a minor by her stepfather, and concludes in a jealous murder, and unlike some recent selections of mine in which inhumanity is hidden by humor and shifts of emphasis, Nabokov never lets Humbert Humbert's depravity out of the reader's sight, and not all of the humor is of the sort that can soften the blow. Lolita is a cousin (though the thought must have the curmudgeonly literary Humbert spinning in his grave) of the Hollywood staple of the colorful and emotionally complex hit man, and it's the beloved daddy of novels about amoral time-traveling torturers and the like. Nabokov is not just manipulating assumptions that the reader makes with respect to the language and the form, he's doing it in a variety of very conscious ways, maybe working up an understanding of those relationships.

The story is told in the first person, and it's hard to sum up narrator Humbert in a paragraph, even if there's a temptation to try (Martin Amis takes a shot or two in the introduction*; the protagonist's fictional executor estate has some words; Humbert himself tries frequently; and Nabokov offers a summary or two of his own in the afterword). He's got a great writing style, a sarcastically lyrical twist, as given to unintentional irony as the intentional sort, full of both self-aggrandization and self-pity. He's the sort of tireless villain that, when easily thwarted, returns to his lab to double down on his calculations (or in Humbert's case, his words) with comic fervor, clamping down on defeat with forced dignity and sarcasm. (Could Peter Sellers have played Humbert? Could Alan Rickman maybe?) His self-regard (with all of its obvious but unspoken doubts) is amusing; his jealousies are comic; his moral double-standards are ridiculous. We spend a lot of time laughing at Humbert, which does help distance us from his predilections, but there's Humbert's power of words for us to contend with too, and so many of his barbs find purchase, and we sometimes laugh with him too. Nabokov pokes at the character in much the same way that Humbert cruelly invests his attention in everything around him.

Humbert's selective attention to detail is essential to the character, as well as the development of the story. He can recall (with a photographic memory, he brags), twenty pages of obsessive journal entries when he first meets twelve-year-old Lolita. He's got an eye for landmarks and names when they can take on a pun or a literary allusion. He remembers episodes of his travels for the poetic or storylike settings. But he's an imbecile when it comes to useful facts, chronologies, or detective-like connections. His pursuit of Clare Quilty, his rival and double, in the last quarter of the book gets a little bizarre, and it's because the intellectual performance it requires is outside of Humbert's skill set. It's remarkably self-centered, this outlook of his, and it also leaves no room for anyone else's humanity. Countervailing points of view are mostly invisible to the man, caricatured and bitingly mocked when Humbert can see them at all. (I really wish I'd encountered Humbert years ago. His spirit occupies a good number of online kooks, even if his writing ability is gifted to so few of them.  In the real world, it's furthermore clear that whatever could make professional monsters like Chuck Buckley or George Will tolerable was a certain Humbertness. What a fine epithet I've missed out on all this time.) It takes a while for the reader to gauge how much Lolita is suffering (or not suffering), because Humbert is incapable of perceiving it. It gradually comes out as he (comically) characterizes her complaints and apathy, or in the briefly-seen opinion of her educators. We can sense a trauma under there, a lost childhood that's eventually spelled out, but there's also a pervasive character that is adjusting to her circumstances regardless, a normal kid, who doesn't know better, dealing with it, sometimes better and sometimes worse. When Humbert is finally overcome with what he has taken from Lolita, he still doesn't get it.

Lolita herself, of course, is the star example of the chasm between Humbert's words and the underlying reality of their relationship. Humbert is furiously writing erotica onto the character. Lolita isn't "innocent" really, maybe a little precocious for a twelve-year-old, and she has heretofore approached sexuality in an age-appropriate fashion. In the moment when her proto-sexuality finally, briefly overlaps with Humbert's over-intellectualized lust, it's uncomfortable, it's a taken advantage and a disturbing rape, but (if Humbert is telling the truth) it's not completely incongruous. Quickly, the relationship returns to its normally skew character paths. Lolita continues as an insolent, indolent tween at every available reveal, and for all the abuse, she doesn't come a jot closer to Humbert's erotic portrait, nor does her stepfather ever approach her child-like level of sexual exploration. Humbert writes a great deal of plot and character onto her, but Lolita never ceases to be a young girl, as revealed by the details that Nabokov cleverly lets slip through Humbert's story. She is never womanly, never complex in a way that Humbert would understand.

The relationship between Lolita and Humbert is ultimately nasty and banal, but really there's a similar pettiness infusing everything that Humbert sees. It's almost embarrassing: the car trips; the shallow, simple people; the cheesy motels; my god, fucking suburbia. Humbert traipses through them like the proverbial Martian examining all the stupid details of existence and mocking them. The symphony of toilet flushes is entertaining, teenagers can be pustulent freaks, and middle age is relentlessly unflattering—it's mordantly funny stuff, but Humbert doesn't rise to assess life on higher terms for most of the novel. In the late scenes, among his imagined revelations surrounding the adult (boring, domestic) Dolores (she's only seventeen, but plenty of cause to grow up fast), she's no less misrepresented by Humbert's bathetic streak. Different subject, but more erotica, Humbert crying the fat hot tears of a poet, gifted with the ability to grant immortality. And the really brilliant part about the ending is that it succeeds in making this sad life beautiful, and fifty years later, Lolita is immortal enough. For all Humbert's evil, it does end up a beautifying sort of evil, which may be what sets him apart (even from the non-criminal but similarly degenerate Quilty).

I can run with this a little. We're reminded frequently that the novel is ersatz reality—there's Humbert as discussed, there's a distancing effect of the silly pseudonyms, there's the fact that most of the characters leave the novel to go off and perish offscreen, there's this obvious metafictional bit with the Enchanted Hunters play (a script fit to the events of the novel), there are revisitiations, doubles, and echoing scenes, there's the effort to sink the whole thing into a frame story. I hate to reduce the novel to some modernist experiment because it's too small a box, but let's imagine Humbert as Writer: is the reality of human existence always lesser and apart from the stories we build up to romanticize it? Is a writer's feeling both cheaper and more poetic than the scripts our lives proffer? Is it still beautiful when we inevitably get it wrong? Even though Lolita works plenty well as a novel, it's not about sexuality exactly, it's about language, observation and life.


*Wish I didn't read the intro, at least not until after I wrote this, but for a novel this famous, it's not very easy to act as an untainted jury. Amis makes a point about Nabokov's cruelty to Humbert (a bit beyond the "sarcasm" I was going with) but he's right and I'm going with it; he points out the significance of some of the where-are-they-nows in the introduction, that I indeed might have missed.

Review: Beloved, by Toni Morrison

[Fuck it, I edited the post. Does that bother anyone? I can revert to the clumsier original if it does. I am upset by a comment obviously, but it was a fair one in the sense that an anecdote and a bunch of adjectives on my part are not sufficient to communicate my understanding of the novel. And I'm looking at it this way too: some sophomore is going to find this post sooner or later, and for the purposes of my self-respect, I'd like that turned-in copy to at least look like it was plagiarized.]


It's not like the shitty old cliché needs any more mileage, but the cover of a book really does offer a small basis for pre-judgment, at least in the sense that it tells me what the publisher thinks of this book, or what hints to content the company thinks will entice people to buy it. Books convey all kinds of suggestions like this. For a sufficiently famous or worthy work, you'll find a few pages packed with one-sentence blurbs, which are probably better thought of as recommendations from famous authors you "know" rather than reviews. (I like to write out my mental blather, but I'm not usually comfortable to go and tell people to read stuff--friends' recommendations are probably the biggest shapers of expectations for this sort of thing.) So with Beloved, I picked up the shiny red trade paperback, with the metallized cursive, which looks like it's meant to be somebody's "book of gold," deeply meaningful and touching. And of course, there's the Nobel prize. What Beloved is, however, is a ghost story, a haunting that's used as a vehicle to carry the unspeakable past into the present. Now, I often like a good haunting, especially when it's plotted with sensitivity to the deceased, and Beloved is, on one level, that sort of book, although it took me a few chapters to realize that, and I wasn't clear whether it was the marketing that governed my expectations. Anticipating one of the best novels of the twentieth century, I felt a bit let down to find just a great-in-parts one. Did the publishers affect me more than they usually do? Irritating if true.

I feel like such a Philistine, especially considering it's little things I kept bumping up against. I stumbled over missed metaphors (this annoyed me most--for example, when the hell is a cloudy sky white hot?) and I had a difficult time pinpointing the authorial voice, which drifted from dialect to a sort of generic third-person academic tone, and sporadically included repeated descriptors as you'd find in oral traditions (Baby Suggs, holy...), to streams of consciousness. I don't have any problem with any of the narrative styles on their own, I just wasn't sure they synthesized into a neat voice. As I mentioned, this novel is a ghost story, but even though we're introduced to the spirit on the first page, the tension is not the mystery of its origins, or rather, it's not the raw fact of them. It's not until the Beloved character returns a couple chapters later, fey and needy, that I began to worry what's going to happen to the living as much as what happened to them. Then, the novel got going for me.

[One issue may be just how much Beloved reminded me of Octavia Butler's novel, Kindred, published in the seventies. It would make a good paired reading. Both use a fantasy trick to bring the modern reader to face the troubling psychological depth of the slave past. I remember Butler's as the better novel, but it's been at least ten years since I read it, so who knows. And it may be that Butler was a science fiction writer, and I was anticipating such a mechanism. There's also a case to be made that it's an easier entry point for cracker douchebags like myself.]

What Morrison has done very well, however, is to get into the heads of her characters and bring the dehumanizing face of slavery to an intimate light. [Quoting myself a little now...] The human cost, physical and emotional, of slavery came through loud and clear in the novel. The way it broke up the most sacred and basic bonds that people cherish was wrenching to read. And it answered the question it set out to answer: how could a mother who loves her children kill them? You leave the book thinking, what choice did she have? I admit that the degrees and depth of the mothering instinct was less intuitive to me than a man's struggle for self-possession (I think Morrison did a hell of a job with the male characters) or a living daughter's inward retreat, but it couldn't be missed.

And to the author's credit, I think it's a very difficult place to transport the contemporary reader, especially one of the aforementioned cracker douchebag variety. The backstory is based on the then-famous trial of Margaret Garner, who, like the protagonist Sethe, allegedly killed her children to prevent them from being dragged back into that life. As the characters look back, Morrison shows us lynching and murder, as well as some abuses that were more probably inventive than the story needed (although clearly written as an attack on Sethe's very motherhood), as well as some masters that were improbably decent. (The author doesn't come as far as forgiveness for a damn one of them.) I thought the everyday mistreatment was more compelling than the elaborately staged events, the cases where people were respected or treated about as well as valued livestock, not hated by whitey, but as people, beneath even his notice.

Part of the evocative success comes, I think, from meeting Sethe, Baby, and Paul D when they are no longer slaves, living what would almost be a happy domestic life, were it not for the angry scars and ghosts (real and figurative) intruding unwillingly from the disturbing past. The characters, up till the time Paul D walks into Sethe's home, have been living numbly, loving guardedly, suffering the expectation that another tragedy is ready to explode around the corner. Even if it was a better life, freedom in postwar Cincinnati meant demeaning jobs, no protection of (or from) the law, and a hobbled human network, which in Sethe's case had further abandoned her. By novel's end, it's clear that the grudgingly restored human connections will take generations for healing.

Review: Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

Several years ago, I spent the better half of a summer reading Lord Jim. Picking my way over the dense, congested prose was a slow business, and the effort became more tiring than rewarding if I kept at it too long. I was advised at one later point that Conrad is better traversed paragraph by paragraph--there is no shame in keeping a copy by your bed and conquering a little bit every night. I find these interesting observations, because I'm hard pressed right now to understand what the hell my problem was. Heart of Darkness, while some of the heaviness of the writing was still there, tore right along. (And in the other novellas in that economical Barnes and Noble canon fodder edition--Amy Foster and The Secret Sharer--were also quick reads.) It might be that Conrad works better at the shorter length. Or I might just be reading differently nowadays. Who knows? I'm mostly shocked that the count is "several years."

You might call all three of them allegorical stories, fictionalized memoirs built up around Conrad's larger ideas of imperialism, the immigrant experience, or the alienation of command. Heart of Darkness, is the ringer of the bunch, taking a deep look at human nature, civilization and savagery, yet again. As everyone who was forced to read it in tenth grade, or who has seen Apocalypse Now knows, the plot is the chronicle of a seaman's journey up the Congo River to relieve the ivory trading station furthest up, and to meet his counterpart in Kurtz, the enigmatic chief of the inner station. This is put into a frame story of an afternoon yarn shared among comrades, the main purpose of which appears to challenge the reader to pay attention to quotation marks, although it does allow Conrad to avoid speaking in an authorial or autobiographical voice.

Like many novels written at the turn of the last century, the bridge between the modern and the pre-industrial is palpable. Certainly Conrad snapshots the technological transition from wind to combustion marine power, and in Africa, the empire has dug deeper into the colonial model, deeper into the continental interior and its other-than-human resources. The unreliable narrator that Conrad uses to subtly balance the moral dimension of the novel seems to me (and I am probably wrong) like a more modern trick, and if Charles Dickens might have written any number of scheming, soulless bureaucrats, he lacked the context of a national corporation to describe the general manager in the unsettling way Conrad that did. The madness that fractures the nobility of Kurtz is an ancient theme too (though maybe his final assessment isn't), and we find Conrad following any number of nineteenth century writers contrasting man's wholesome instincts with his barbarous ones, but here he's looking more directly at whom his fellow Europeans are actually "civilizing."

It would be too simple to say that the Africans represent the savage aspect of man, although it's clearly a concept that Conrad entertains, and it would be easy enough to take that as a superficial reading (as his contemporary audience likely did). He is looking at race here, in colonial Africa, and, through a tangle of dichotomies and contrasts, comes off with suitable ambiguity in his condemnations and approvals. What is missing here, and what really makes the novella so challenging, is that there's very little authorial empathy for the dark-skinned Other. We end up with some complex jigsaw puzzle with the contours of the missing pieces discernable by their absence. There's no major black character--the psychological dynamics are among the whites, between the narrator Marlow and Kurtz primarily, and also Marlow dealing with his own and Kurtz's relatives, and the company managers. Kurtz clearly has as much powerful leadership mojo on the locals as he does on everyone else, but the exotic savages are not the ones interviewed. Of course, it's natural that these are the people Marlow actually talks to, and the author can release any moral judgments through his mouth, or else leave them obviously hanging.

Marlow observes the Africans and toys with the idea that they're like us, and dismisses it without justification. The men he first meets are a sorry bunch, conscripted into forced labor by the Belgian company. He offers a cynically accurate judgment on imperialism in general, but chooses to expiate it with some vague ennobling idea. He judges the British colonial efforts to be a more beneficent sort (and judging against Leopold's efforts in central Africa may have had something of a point), and does not fail to observe, at the beginning of the story, that in antiquity, Albion was a dark continent too (uh, despite the name). Marlow's bond with the black crew, to fellow seamen, even though he judges them inferior sorts, is stronger than with the white passengers. He offers the shipboard cannibals the dignity of self-restraint in difficult circumstances, while the white passengers also on board are ignorant loudmouths with hair triggers. For so little screen time, Kurtz offers the richest contradictions. He's introduced as an emissary of civilization, as a possessive monster, a leader, and while he has beguiled and intimidated the exotics into his service on their own terms, it's not at all clear that his savagery is an adopted native sort. I take him as a stark raving parody of the civilizing influence. The horror.

Conrad paints the African jungle as dark, eternal, mute, indifferent to man. The effect is supposed to include predatory tension, but it reminds me of modern observations of the big empty universe, the infinitesimal significance of humanity in the big void to anyone but ourselves--an observation that resonated a little with a science fiction nerd. I hadn't known that Conrad was friends with H.G. Wells, although it's the wrong generation of the genre: nature was smaller back then, and I think Wells' was more social speculation. I was also impressed with the virulence of the dark continent. According to the notes, fully a third of the International African Society were casualties of malaria and other disease. And yet they kept at it, until it was no longer profitable. That the manager rose by means of his stomach doesn't sound like an exaggeration.

UPDATE: Responding to LentenStuffe's comment below, and since I want to write here what I actually mean: I didn't intend to suggest that Africans as savages was the correct reading, just one that Conrad appeared to be aware of, and which he was contradicting. I was trying to list some aspects of the way he discusses it that may be challenging (supporting the idea of Congolese "savages" with weak arguments, and with ugly proponents, and showing a whole lot of the opposite; selecting a narrator, and characters with whom the narrator most empathizes, that doesn't offer much light to an African point of view). And I don't think the contrasts tend to be cut and dry, but to my reading, one of the important take-homes is that Kurtz didn't go native so much as he went around-the-bend colonial. He brought his savagery with him.

He nails me on another point too, and makes some great observations.

Also, this is one of the banned books selections, and is now labeled appropriately. It was a good excuse to finally read it.

Review: Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

Catch-22 is the first book in a new project, consisting of a compilation of the sorta-banned books of the twentieth century that I innocently posted a month or two ago. I'll put up the final negotiated checklist sooner or later--I'm slowly working the titles in to the current pile. If I read all the banned books in a year, then hipparchia has to email me a beer or something. Catch-22 has also been the subject of heated debate between my other two readers, so it found itself right near the top.

I finished the novel a few weeks ago, but it feels like it's one I've had in my head for years. It feels canonical, yes, and I'm sorry that it devolved into a crappy catch (so to speak) phrase, but then a "catch 22" as an unofficial, iron-clad, and contradictory rule, suits the spirit of the novel well enough. As for the feeling of having been here before, I've read or watched enough of its intellectual heirs that it feels like familiar ground. Is Catch-22 really that seminal? We had absurdist and modernist literature already by 1961, even in America, and I'd hesitate to say that the most obvious followers in the form (Slaughterhouse-Five and M*A*S*H, which are also unread and likewise familiar, and the film, Doctor Strangelove) were copying Heller. Heller might have been the first to really capture the idea that modern warfare, with its faceless but horrifically effective violence, with its nightmarishly incompetent bureaucracy, is the pinnacle example of the sorts of deadpan philosophical puzzles that Kafka and Camus had portrayed a few decades previous. Or maybe he was just one of the first handful to finally get that existential haymaker to land squarely on the American jaw.

The absurdist style has only grown on me. It puts the fear and the humor of life in a fair perspective, and my own times seem to foster an appreciation of the dispassionate monstrosity, but they probably all do. I identify absurdist humor with the ruthless comedy of a good heckler, interjecting moments of truth or context to the massive powers that are grinding indifferently against us all. It's hard not to feel like Yossarian these days, once you begin to fancy you have a slight predilection for noticing those myriad things that the political and social world violently denies, once you start to feel persecuted about all the ways the world is actually (if impersonally) trying to kill you. Of course, few of us are astute enough to observe the obvious very well, given our own paradoxical investment in the events around us, and Heller is better at it than many. He finds the right language and the right context from which to take some impressive potshots.

The novel has a lot of great lines, most of which stand alone from whatever point in the book they appear, and I'm surprised I don't see more of them gracing the internets, given how nerds like to obsessively quote things. (Maybe the movie version cut out all the good quips. It's got to be hard to read while you're baked, after all.) Heller gets a lot of mileage out of narrative trick where he presents either a negative declaration, or else follows up an assertion with it's own contradiction. [From a random page: "'I can just picture his liver,' Doc Daneeka grumbled. 'Picture my liver,' Yossarian advised him. 'There's nothing wrong with your liver' 'That shows how much you don't know...'"] It doesn't constitute a wide variety of jokes, really, but what the hell, it's not like they stop being funny, and the characters go off on an extended repartee sometimes, or Heller keeps a coherent sketch going for a chapter or two, which is great. Occasionally the bits steer far off into too much silliness, and sometimes they're nearly played straight. The overall tone of the the story does cover something of an arc: Yossarian's conscience evolves from a purely self-preserving force to something more empathetic, as the deaths around him become more violent, and the dead more innocent, and when, for me, a connection between him and the other characters finally begins to gel. I wasn't quite prepared for the impact of the final sequence. As Yossarian slinks through increasingly brutal shadows of bombed-out Rome, and as his last friends survive the war or fail to, the emotion really hit me.

(A violent set of cliches in today's review. Well, it's a war novel.)

The random dips into serious commentary or total farce jarred the tone in a way that didn't always help the story. The character sketches of the large supporting cast are entertaining, and yet it took a long time to establish the point of many of them, which affected the development of the story. Not that there's anything wrong with shipping in personnel for a quick joke, it's just poorly telegraphed which of these soldiers is worth investing a feeling or two in. Similarly, the plot is a slice'em dice'em affair of flash-backs and -forwards and the jumbled narrative didn't served a whole lot of purpose, except maybe to accentuate the dark humor, but it's harder to pay attention to it when you're busy keeping track of the story details (you can follow the timeline by the number of missions they're complaining about). Catch-22 would almost certainly improve with a reread or two, starting with a good understanding of the plot and characters already in hand.