Todd Gernes' Text Museum

Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One

Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (New York & Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1948).  This comic satire, apparently based on Waugh’s experience as a British writer in Hollywood in the 1940s, takes aim at the value and mores of American culture refracted through the lens of the film industry in all its shallow splendor.  Dennis Barlow, a young British poet and member of a small circle of British gentry, “the Cricket Club,” all of whom are more or less involved in the film industry, supports himself by working at the Happier Hunting Ground, a pets’ crematorium and cemetery modeled after the illustrious Whispering Glades, a cross between Disney Land and Mt. Auburn.  Whispering Glades was founded by visionary entrepreneur Wilbur Kenworthy, The Dreamer, who “dreamed a dream and . . . saw a New Earth sacred to HAPPINESS” (39) and created a grandiose theme park of death, which seems like Waugh's resting place for cultural and literary cliches.   When the suicide of an aging compatriot (after he had been summarily dismissed from Megalopolitan Pictures) leads Dennis to Whispering Glades, he falls for the pale and lovely mortuary cosmetician, Aimée Thanatogenos, a personification of death, who becomes his tragicomic muse.  But Dennis has a rival for the affections of Aimée, the revered Mr. Joyboy, mortician extraordinaire and professional standard bearer at Whispering Glades, who expresses himself by manipulating the expressions of corpses--deathly smiles for Miss Thanatogenos--like clay in a sculptor’s expert hands.  Waugh has good fun with the funerary double-speak of Whispering Glades, where the dead are “Loved Ones,” the bereaved are “Waiting Ones,” and corpses are laid out in the “The Slumber Room.” Dennis, an incorrigible cynic and blocked writer, woos Aimée with plagiarized anthology poetry and lies about his association with the Happier Hunting Ground, which is perceived by Whispering Glade employees as a kind of blaspheme against The Dreamer and his designs. The conclusion of this romance-turned-tragedy may be the funniest part of The Loved One, so let me stop before I reveal too much.  Evelyn Waugh is such a skilled writer that I felt compelled to go along with this sometimes mean-spirited joke of a novel, but I think I would have preferred a staged production (there is also a film version available), which would have accentuated Waugh's wit and wordplay. This Hollywood satire (and playful allegory of art and commerce) must have been hilarious at the time, and fifty years hence it still holds up pretty well, intellectually if not always viscerally.

Alessandro Baricco, Silk

Allessandro Baricco, Silk, translated from the Italian by Guido Waldman (New York: Vintage International, 1997.  “The year was 1861. Flaubert was writing Salammbô, electric light remained hypothetical, and Abraham Lincoln, beyond the Ocean, was fighting a war of which he was not see the finish” (3).  Hervé Joncour, a thirty-two-year-old provincial merchant of precious silkworm eggs, establishes illicit trade between the town of Lavilledieu, France, which has prospered from the expansion of silkworm hatcheries and silk manufacturing, and Japan, still veiled in isolationist mystery but on the verge of devastating change brought on by European contact. His Japanese contact is Hara Kei, lord of a village at Shirakawa, who keeps a beautiful mistress of European descent.  In delicate, translucent prose and with the compression of a fairytale, Baricco sketches an affair of the heart expressed in glances and cryptic, resonant signs: a dropped glove, ideograms on a folded slip of paper, or the release and mysterious return of exotic birds from Hara Kei’s aviary. Baricco’s Silk has rhythmic, repeating linguistic patterns (four or five-line riffs), tracing Joncour’s itinerary, there and back, over the measure of years: Metz, Württenberg, Bavaria, Austria, Kiev, the Urals, Siberia, Lake Baikal, China, Cape Teraya, and so on.  Her face haunts him: “Her eyes did not have an oriental slant, and her face was that of a young girl” (44).  The plot turns, in the end, on a love letter, written in neat Japanese ideograms, which Joncour has translated by the worldly Madame Blanche, a Japanese immigrant and refugee from a past she wishes to forget. Barricco evokes an historical context for his tale with sparse but well selected details: Matthew C. Perry’s steam-powered foray into Japan (1853), the publication of Flaubert’s novel (1861), the emergence of Louis Pasteur (1860s), the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), and Chardonnet’s patent for artificial silk (1884).  Some readers may, in fact, hunger for a fleshier historicism, as I did. Baricco’s understated irony, quiet eroticism and minimalist word painting, like the folds of silk that become its metaphoric, weightless center, can seem inconsequential, like a vivid but quickly evaporating dream. Yet dreams can haunt us, awaken our senses, and lead us into contemplation or reverie. Does Silk have the transformative power of dreamwork? Do we have empathy for its characters? Is this novella something more than an exquisite miniature?  I’m uncertain, to be honest, but for an hour’s investment, it is a risk worth taking.    

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, translated by Michael Henry Heim (New York; Harper Collins, 2004 [1912]). Gustav von Aschenbach, a German writer at the height of his powers but facing midlife, is awakened—spiritually, erotically—by a mysterious stranger with whom he has exchanged fleeting glances: “It may have been the stranger’s perambulatory appearance that had acted upon his imagination or some other physical or psychological influence coming into play, but much to his surprise he grew aware of a strange expansion of his inner being, a kind of restive anxiety, a fervent youthful craving for faraway places, a feeling so vivid, so new or else so long outgrown and forgotten that he came to a standstill and—hands behind his back, eyes on the ground, rooted to the spot—examined the nature and purport of the feeling” (5).  Of course it was not, as the narrator would lead us to believe, “wanderlust, pure and simple.” It was homoerotic desire “grown into a passion—no, more, an hallucination.” “He saw a landscape, a tropical quagmire beneath a steamy sky—sultry luxuriant, and monstrous—a kind of primordial wilderness of islands, marshes, and alluvial channels; saw hairy palm shafts thrusting upward, near and far, from rank clusters of bracken, from beds of thick swollen, and bizarrely burgeoning flora . . .” (6).  Aschenbach, author of the tale, “A Wretched Figure,” and the essay, “Art and the Intellect,” is well equipped to chase hallucinations, to follow his passions, and so he sets off to rejuvenate his soul, traveling first to the Adriatic resort city of Pula in Istria and then, dissatisfied, to Venice, where he settles at the Hotel des Baines on the Lido.  There, Aschenbach is enraptured by a beautiful Polish child, “a long-haired boy of about fourteen,” who astonishes the older man with his consummate beauty: “his face—pale and charmingly reticent, ringed by honey-colored hair, with straight nose, lovely mouth, and an expression of gravity sweet and divine—recalled Greek statuary of the noblest period, yet its purest formal perfection notwithstanding it conveyed a unique personal charm such that whoever might gaze upon it would believe he had never beheld anything so accomplished, be it in nature or  in art” (45). In seascape and cityscape, Aschenbach stalks the boy, as his obsessive longing and restiveness grow out of proportion and beyond his control.  In an attempt to channel Eros into intellect, Aschenbach draws on Plato’s Phaedrus, casting himself as Socrates and Tadzio as Phaedrus: “On the grass, its mild slope propping up their heads, two men lay sheltering from the day’s torrid heat: one elderly, one young; one ugly, one beautiful; the wise beside the desirable.  And with compliments and witty, wheedling pleasantries Socrates instructed Phaedrus in the nature of longing and virtue” (83). This Socratic coolness, this imagined, rationalizing pederasty, soon gives way to bacchic imagery, as Aschenbach’s mental landscape becomes infused with the decadence of the city, which is experiencing a cholera outbreak, hushed panic, and the flight of the tourist population.  His soul enflamed with what he acknowledges to be love, Aschenbach grows self-conscious of his aging body and acquiesces when the hotel barber suggests some rejuvenating touches to bring back his natural hair color, accentuate the eyes, and freshen the cheeks.  Adding color to his wardrobe and sparkle to his fingers, he becomes something like the decrepit, effeminate dandy who had disgusted him on his journey to Venice.  In the final scene, the dandified writer watches intently as the sultry Tadzio wades in the shallow water, then, standing controposto on a sandbar lifts his hand from his hip and seems to beckon. “But to him it seemed as if the pale and charming psychagogue out there were smiling at him, beckoning to him, as if, releasing his hand from his hip, he were pointing outward, floating into the promising immensity of it all” (141-142). Pale Tadzio beckons Aschenbach to a world beyond the horizon.  He slumped sideways in his chair, and was carried to his room. “And that day a respectfully stunned world received word of his death” (142).  Is Aschenbach a tragic figure or an example of the deadly consequences of self-delusion?  Is there a heroic aspect to his unyielding pursuit of ideal beauty or is he, in the end, a bedaubed fool? Uttering the words, “I love you,” if only to himself, Aschenbach acknowledges the “love that dare not speak its name.” And, in his essay fragment on Socrates and Phaedrus, he attempts to express his passion and perhaps to overcome his self-loathing. Has Aschenbach attempted to shatter, with his pen, the cultural silence, challenge the taboo against homoerotic desire? Or was this essay fragment an attempt to tame his unruly muse with artistic discipline and mature intellect? And is Mann’s own act of writing, his novel, humanizing and affirming, with regard to culturally forbidden desire, or a cautionary tale?  That we can read the text both ways is a testament to its complexity and depth.  That we are willing to read Death in Venice both ways is a tribute to its metaphoric richness and poetic ambiguity, a quality that is enhanced by this excellent translation by Michael Henry Heim.

Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye

Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye, trans. by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author (New York: Vintage International, 1990).  The Eye is an experimental, modernist “little novel,” as Nabokov called it, originally published in Russian in Paris in 1929-1930 (it was serialized in Sovremennye zapiski), and then collected in book form with other stories in 1938.  An English translation was published in Playboy in 1965. It was apparently Nabokov’s first wholly critical success. A novella of the Russian émigré community in 1920s Berlin with strong echoes of Dostoyevski and Gogol, The Eye turns conventions of realism inside out, violating reader expectations about narrative and point of view. (For bibliographic information, I’m indebted to the excellent New York Public Library exhibit and website, Nabokov Under Glass.)  There are also hints of Poe (and a direct reference) in this ghostly, mediumistic, playful puzzler about humiliation, suicide, and the spectral quality of human identity. Smurov, a pathetic, adulterous and disagreeable Russian émigré--a pale, effete, seedy little man in bowler hat—is living in prewar Berlin, and apparently commits suicide after being caned and humiliated by a jealous husband in front of his own young pupils. Excruciatingly self-conscious and fatally self-absorbed, Smurov is condemned in the afterlife to voyeuristically sniff-out the disillusioning remnants of his repellant identify among a comically grotesque cast of characters that tolerated his presence but disliked him.  Nabokov engages readers in a kind of guessing game with an unreliable narrator (who is and is not Smurov; they are merged and then distinct) and evidence (scraps of conversation, photographs, letters, dreams) that undermines his narrative truth claims. Smurov’s final humiliation is the discovery of his own homosexuality through a diary-letter purloined from Bogdanovich, a rival (the victor, actually) for the affections of Vanya, Smurov’s cow-eyed love interest. “I have the impression, dear friend, that I have already written you of the fact that Smurov belongs to that curious class of people I once called ‘sexual lefties.’ Smurov’s entire appearance, his frailness, his decadence, his mincing gestures, his fondness for Eau de Cologne, and, in particular, those furtive, passionate glances that he constantly directs at your humble servant—all this has long since confirmed this conjecture of mine” (83-84). This revelation launches an anxiety-charged dream sequence. The Eye is an interesting modernist experiment with a Russian accent, a narrative puzzle or trick that dissolves into ether, like interlocking smoke rings.  It is undoubtedly valuable as an early success by the great prose stylist, but I found The Eye difficult to connect to, aesthetically or emotionally, perhaps because of its distancing trickery and formalistic play.

Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack

Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack (Counterpoint: Washington, DC & New York, NY, 1999 [1974]).  This is, when all is said and done, a moving account of a modest country life. “Old Jack” Beechum, at the end of his days in rural Port William, KY in 1952, slips in an out of the waters of memory, somehow fated to retrace his past: an abreviated youth, pastoral joys, heartache, and the web of kinship and friendship that constitutes an intergenerational community of the dead and the living.  Berry depicts this living memory, which extends backward to the Civil War, boldly and precisely. His characters are nothing less than “giants in the earth,” standing tall and angular like figures in a WPA woodblock print.  The soundtrack for the novel might resonate with requiem tones and then a fiddle and guitar punctuated by the rhythmic stomping of a leather boot on a country dance floor. Old Jack loved to dance on Saturday nights, though it was a guilty pleasure interrupting the physical labor that he cherished, which was, for him, elevated to the realm of the sacred.  This is a man’s book, a story of fathers and sons and their deep connection to the land.  These relationships are sometimes inherited and sometimes chosen, and, in Berry’s mystical Jeffersonianism, intimately bound to a sense of place.  The community ideal that Jack Beechum represents--in Berry's hands mythic though not especially nostalgic--has always been threatened by mercantilism, the migration of young folk to urban centers, the mechanization of farming, and the depreciation of manual labor.  To Berry, human values and human wisdom are closely bound to nature and to the husbandry of the soil. The inevitable loss of roots and of mindfulness in a culture of consumption and reckless waste is Berry’s psalmistic lament.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa (Vintage International, 1982).  “On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.  He’d dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered in bird shit” (3).  These are the opening words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s earthy, luminous novella.  Sentence by sentence, we are drawn into this poetic postmortem by the sincerity and lyricism of Marquez’s prose, which twists and turns like an ancient winding sheet.  The narrator has returned to his home village somewhere in Columbia to unravel the motives of a brutal murder that occurred 27 years earlier. In this dreamworld archeology, a beautiful bride, Angela Vicario, is returned to her family when her lack of virginity is discovered by her husband on their wedding night.  The Vicario brothers attempt to reclaim their sister’s honor by killing her alleged seducer, Santiago Nasar.  In tracing the webwork of relationships, Marquez evokes a timeless yet deeply historical moment, baked in Caribbean salt by the August sun.  Arab, Spanish, white, mulatto—it is a traditional yet multicultural community with many accents and customs. Because we know what has happened from the opening lines, the mystery of the narrative has to do with motive, morality, fate, and the complicity of the community, which had ample opportunity to intervene in Nasar’s murder but seemed strangely indifferent to his fate. Of course, the frightening thing is that the community’s reaction is not so unusual, after all. Marquez effectively balances a painterly, dreamlike surrealism with surgically precise description and a folklorist’s ear for language. One might say that he sets these two representational modes into tension, the hallmark of magic realism. Marquez certainly satisfies a hunger for well-crafted, resonant prose, startling turns of phrase, and lyrical flights of fancy that, we come to realize, are securely tethered to historical memory, to a lived and living past.

Perception & History

I am presently teaching a first-year seminar in US history and literature entitled, “Representing the Real: Documenting US History,” a challenging course combining historical theory, archival methods, museum studies, textual studies, and multimedia composition. After assembling a theoretical tool kit (drawn from historiography, philosophy of history, psychology, and cultural studies), I asked my students to read Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Johns Hopkins UP, 1992) and chapters from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (Vintage, 1990).  My students also viewed a documentary film based on Ulrich’s book, which was very faithful to the text. Going against the grain of my own institution (which values immediacy, accessibility, and experiential learning), I intentionally begin the semester by asking students to engage texts (and worlds) that are remote from their experience, to navigate the uneven territory between the poles of the familiar and the strange, to echo educational psychologist Sam Wineburg.  In a word, I want my students to venture outside of themselves into a world of infinite shades of gray between the customary black and white of their own perceptions.  Shades of gray, perceptual indeterminacy, the enigmatic cultural otherness of the past, the realization that our own ignorance is vast, the challenge of expressing thoughts and new concepts without a fully developed vocabulary for inquiry—these things, I know, can make students uncomfortable.  Pursuing this mode of inquiry with rigor, commitment, and accountability can actually be a liability in our society’s market-driven educational milieu, in an academic culture obsessed with test scores, consumer satisfaction surveys, and assessment models inspired by quality assurance frameworks developed for commerce and industry. We want our students to like us, and institutions of higher education want our students to like us, with numbers to prove it.  I would argue that good liberal arts teaching resists the paint-by-numbers approach to higher education, encouraging students to apply color, or shades of gray, as the case may be, outside of the conventional lines of inquiry. Crossing cultural, perceptual, or cognitive boundaries requires imagination and sometimes a leap of faith, and this can make some students uneasy.  However, if we don’t venture into this uneven, rocky terrain, the consequence is that we, liberal arts educators, can become merely academic service providers.  But will our students be well served?   

William Wright, Harvard’s Secret Court

William Wright, Harvard’s Secret Court:  The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals (New York: St. Martin’s, 2005).  William Wright’s account of Harvard’s ruthless purge of homosexuals in the 1920s layers sensationalism, voyeurism, docudrama, objective reporting, and history, with objective reporting and history constituting the thinnest layers.  Wright’s discussion fleshes out, largely through speculation and imaginative invention, the original investigative report published in three parts in The Harvard Crimson in 2002.  Wright creates colorful biographical portraits of the Secret Court’s victims and character sketches of the men who stood in judgment in a darkened room, probing and recording: Do you masturbate? How often? Have you read Freud? Havelock Ellis? Have you been to a restaurant called the Green Shutters? The Lighted Lamp? The Golden Rooster? And so on. (97)  To keep the story moving and to heighten the drama, Wright, extrapolating from archival fragments, invents dialogue, homoerotic interludes, and moments of conflict. 

Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe

Kenneth A. Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (London: Weidenfeld, 1993).  The value of Kenneth Silverman's extended study in human misery cannot be denied, in the the same way we acknowledge the thoroughness and dedication of the railroad man who cleans up after a train wreck.  This is a grim and unflattering account of the dark genius who pushed the envelope of nineteenth-century American literary criticism and invented the genre of detective fiction: Poe comes across as an orphaned, insecure, mean-spirited, destitute, paranoid, alcoholic, itinerant magazinist with a spotty education who, in the course of a chiefly miserable life, had brief bouts of intense literary prodigiousness--that is, when he was not plagiarizing obscure encyclopedias, reference works, fellow authors, or himself. If Silverman's goal is to demystify (or demythify) Poe, then he succeeds admirably here.  The crux of Silverman's analysis is that Poe's obsession with death is intimately connected to his own experience of loss, dislocation, abandonment, and absence.  Silverman's synopsis of "The Raven; or, The Power of Conscience" is central: "Indeed the hated-welcomed bird of 'Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance' is Poe himself, beak in the reader's heart, evermore repeating that those we have loved who become lost to us can never return, that we can never clasp them in Aidenn, that they can never be forgotten, and that however painful it may be to remember them, it is still more painful to give them up" (241).  The most striking feature of this hefty volume (564 pages, including index) is the delineation of the women (mother, mother figures, wife, romantic interests) who nurtured and inspired Poe, particularly the figures of Virginia (his child bride) and Muddy (his dedicated mother-in-law) who suffered with him in his desperation, dissipation, and poverty.  The most valuable aspect of this study is Silverman's workmanlike synopses of Poe's writing which he deftly connects to main currents nineteenth-century literary history and popular culture (no real ground-breaking here) and to Poe's gritty and tragic life story. Much of Silverman's literary interpretation consists of decoding Poe's wordplay and half-conscious textual references in poetry and fiction with frequent but sometimes disappointing forays into psychological criticism.  Without a doubt, Silverman's Edgar A. Poe is a worthwhile and important contribution to Poe scholarship but in an encylopedic sense.  It most certainly falls short of Scott Bradfield's back-cover blurb--"one of the best literary biographies ever written."

Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding

It is a privilege to enter Frankie’s world, if only for a brief moment in time: a sleepy southern town in the 1940s; kitchen conversation, the walls closing in; young Frankie, in transition and crisis, her head shaved like a convict’s, needing desperately to escape the isolation and limitations of her existence. Carson McCullers’ heat-shimmering novella, The Member of the Wedding (1946), takes us on a bitter-sweet journey into the world of early adolescence. McCullers uses naming (the old Frankie, F. Jasmine Addams, Frances), to mark subtle gradations in the transformation of her protagonist, a moody, scrappy, knife-throwing 12-year-old girl, prone to flights of fancy and introspection--when she is not distracted by John Henry West, her six-year-old cousin with gold rimmed spectacles, or brought back to earth by Berenice Sadie Brown, the family’s black (“colored”) cook and mother surrogate with a mismatched glass eye and a flat, quiet face.  Frankie’s mother died on the day she was born, and she lives with her “widow-man” father, a local jeweler and man of few words, though not unkind.  Frankie becomes obsessed with her brother’s wedding and projects onto the event her desperate yearning to step outside of her childhood self and merge with the wide world spinning beneath her feet.  It is a dark and moving journey, shot through with rays of summer light and punctuated by airless interludes, gut wrenching emotion, and folksy humor. A beautifully proportioned work by a gifted storyteller.