Kino’s bar is a modest success. We learn more about “the man.” “My name is Kamita,” he said. It’s written with the characters for “god” —kami—and “field” —“god’s field,” as you might expect. It’s pronounced “Kamita.” The first two paragraphs of this next section are in imperfect time that collapses four months. Then we have a specific scene. While Mr. Kamita is at the bar, two guys come in to drink expensive wine. Kino thinks they may be yakuza, gangsters. They cause a disturbance and Kino asks them to quiet down. They become belligerent and threaten Kino, but Mr. Kamita suddenly appears and calmly challenges them to “step outside.” Kino is quite anxious that Mr. Kamita will be hurt or even murdered but he comes back into the bar after a period of time and asks for a towel to clean his hands, refusing to say what happened. After he leaves, Kino remembers a situation where he witnessed a yakuza beating the tar out of two guys and imagines that Mr. Kamita’s encounter with the two gangsters was similar. This is an interesting device—Kino doesn’t see Mr. Kamita’s confrontation with the gangsters; instead, the implied author has him remember a possible parallel, a sort of mise en abyme, if you will. We will. There is a theme of creatures coming into Kino’s bar, the cat, Mr. Kamita, the two gangsters—who are evil and threatening and are disposed of “outside” the bar. There will be other visitors to the bar, both good and bad. Mostly bad. Is it too soon to speculate that Mr. Kamita is a sort of guardian spirit sent by someone to protect Kino? No. Mr. Kamita’s name is ambiguous, its pronunciation is ambiguous, which is why he specifies that it should be pronounced a certain way. But the meaning “god’s field,” seems to fit the context above. To expand on this, I think his name refers to a plot of land where a god’s shrine is situated. He is the field that holds the god, “he” is a holy place. Huh. Another layer is Kino himself. As the character narrator, he shows himself experiencing the situation with Mr. Kamita and the gangsters and his subsequent association with the fight he witnessed. But Kino doesn’t show much internal reaction. The two gangsters smoke, and Kino doesn’t like that. When the men argue, Kino decides Mr. Kamita is disgusted by their behavior and that, as the bar owner, he has to do something. “I have to get this situation under control, Kino realized, I need to step forward and take care of this.” Then as the argument escalates, he understands he may be assaulted. “Kino steeled himself for something bad to happen. Sweat began to pour from his armpits.” Then Mr. Kamita intervenes. Kino’s only shown reaction is to remember the incident from the past. What’s missing? If Kino had a normal personality, we could speculate that he would feel anger and fear at the gangsters, and then anxiety and possibly intense relief at Mr. Kamita’s intervention. And maybe shame at not doing more. But what we are shown is that after Mr. Kamita leaves, no more customers come to the bar that night and neither does the cat. Kino has the memory that helps him understand more about “a mystery.” So we don’t see a lot of internal reaction but plenty of external action. In fact, arguably it’s all internal. Kino experiences a threat and is protected against danger by a mysterious, perhaps non-human entity. Emotions are represented and/or allegorized by other characters. The next “visitor” to the bar is a woman. “About a week after the incident, Kino slept with a female customer…He wasn’t sure if she would be classified as beautiful.” This is a significant comment that reveals something about Kino. He isn’t sure if the woman would be classified as beautiful—the implication is that he doesn’t know or trust his own judgement. He relies on what he thinks others would think. Kino lacks an identity. The woman “had been to the bar several times before, always in the company of a man of about the same age who wore tortoise-shell framed glasses and a beatnik-like goatee.” The woman talks to Kino about their mutual enjoyment of jazz. One night, she comes in alone and winds up showing Kino numerous cigarette burns on her body—apparently inflicted by the goateed man. A paragraph break, and then “Kino couldn’t remember now what had led him to sleep with the woman that night. Kino had felt, from the first, that there was something out of the ordinary about her. Something that triggered an instinctual response, warning him not to get involved.” But he does get involved, taking the woman upstairs to his apartment after closing time (again outside of the bar) and having sex most of the night in what’s described as an intense, almost animalistic fashion. Hmmm. Another “creature” coming into Kino’s bar. Apparently, she and the goateed chap have been having S and M sex, but she then takes a liking to Kino and wants to display these signs of pain to him. Well, I suppose we’ve all had some wild days (and nights), but what’s going on here? The woman and her companion are shown as being “out of the ordinary” and repellant. Kino doesn’t know why he sleeps with the woman; he’s aware of an instinctual response not to get involved but does get involved. Our psychologist friends would probably say letting someone burn you with cigarettes during sex has a lot to do with wanting to feel pain intensely, as in wanting to feel authentic because you usually don’t. We don’t know much about the woman, but we do know that Kino himself has a lot of difficulty feeling emotions. His wife was unfaithful to him, and they divorced, but he doesn’t really feel anger or sadness. He doesn’t know what he feels. So he hooks up with a woman who (maybe) doesn’t know what she feels and acts it out instead. The woman returns to the bar several times, accompanied by the goateed man and makes no reference to the sexual encounter with Kino. “Kino sensed something vicious entwining itself about the couple, as if there were a deep secret only the two of them shared.” Kino thinks that sooner or later, the woman would return alone to have sex with him again and show off her new burns. “Kino didn’t know when it would happen but felt sure it would someday. The woman would decide that. The thought made his throat dry, the kind of dryness no amount of water could quench.” So he apparently is both repelled by sex with the woman and also obsessed by it. It’s notable that Mr. Kamita, Mr. Guardian Spirit Kamita, doesn’t interfere in this whole situation with the woman. You’d almost expect him to, expect him to give Kino some advice, or assault the goateed fellow. But there’s no mention of him in this section. Maybe he wants Kino to learn something. Ooh. ‘Kay Till next time, my friends. #Kino #Murakami #AlanBray

This week, a new story, Kino, a long short story written by Haruki Murakami. An English version of Kino first appeared in The New Yorker in February, 2015 and was subsequently included in his collection Men Without Women, published by Knopf in 2017. Kino was first published in Japanese in 2014. Readers may remember a similar process occurred with Jhumpa Lahiri’s story, Casting Shadows—a story written originally in a different language and translated to English, then published in the New Yorker, then published in English as part of a story collection. Nothing wrong with that, just sayin.’ The title has meaning, oh yeah. Dena speaks Japanese; what I’ve learned is that in that language, words in isolation don’t have much meaning. Everything is context but a translation of Kino that makes some sense in the context of the story is “wandering soul.” The story begins in imperfect time: “The man always sat in the same seat, the stool the farthest down the counter.” In other words, this sentence is describing an event which re-occurred over time. On more than one occasion, a particular man always sat in the same seat, a particular stool farthest down the counter. Please compare this with “The man sat at the stool farthest down the counter.” The fact that the man always sat at the same seat adds meaning—over time, the man deliberately picked the same seat on multiple occasions. He must have wanted to sit there, and the sentence—from the narrator’s perspective—indicates the narrator noted this repetition and made meaning of it. (whiny voice—Well, duh. Why are you making such a big deal about this?) We’re looking at technique here, best beloved. Why does Murakami start in imperfect time? I think because he wants to establish “the man” as a presence whom Kino must recognize. Many of Murakami’s stories seem to involve a more or less passive narrator/storyteller who describes someone he (usually a man) encounters and goes on to show the other person’s impact on him. Kino certainly begins like this, and the reader might think, “Huh, I’m reading a story about this guy who always sits in the same place at Kino’s bar.” But Kino takes this structure down different paths, as we shall see. (Are you going to go over every line? What a snooze fest). The narration is first person and generally past tense, which implies that the events shown have already occurred. And this, dear friends, reveals the presence of the implied author who tells the story. Heh, heh, heh. In the second paragraph, Kino switches to past tense and a particular event. “Kino remembered the first time the man had come to his bar…It was seven-thirty on a chilly mid-April evening, and the bar was empty.” For several paragraphs, the story describes this first meeting between “the man” and Kino. We already know the name or word Kino, as it’s the title. Now we learn that Kino is a human, that he owns the bar where “the man” identified in the first paragraph sat on a stool. And we learn that the story is largely told from Kino’s perspective. After “the man” leaves that first time, Kino “…glanced up occasionally at the seat the man had occupied. It felt like someone was still there…” Again, this is a statement about presence. “The man” remains present when he’s not there. In the next paragraph, the narration returns to imperfect time. “The man”—still unnamed—is observed by Kino becoming a regular at the bar, a regular who always orders the same thing, who says little, sits in the same spot and reads. After a paragraph break, we have a new section that is about Kino—not “the man.” It explains who Kino is and how he came to own the bar. It is not written from Kino’s perspective, more from the impersonal perspective of the storyteller. We learn that Kino wanted to be a runner but had to give up his dreams after an injury. He worked as a product rep for a running shoe company, excelled at it, but came home unexpectedly from a trip and found his wife in bed with one of Kino’s colleagues. After a divorce, Kino no longer wanted to work at the company. So in this section, we get a sympathetic portrait of Kino, a good fellow who has had some misfortune. After another paragraph break, the story explains that Kino has an aunt who wanted to retire from running a coffee shop. Kino offered to lease it, and his aunt agreed, she “…named a figure for the monthly rent, far lower than what Kino had expected.” Another thing we are being shown is that, whoever “the man” is, the story seems to be about Kino. He sets up a bar in what used to be the coffee shop and lives upstairs. He claims he doesn’t feel angry or bitter toward his ex-wife. “The most he could do was create a place where his heart—devoid now of any depth or weight—could be tethered, to keep it from wandering aimlessly. Kino (the name of the bar)…became that place.” A stray cat begins visiting; Kino feeds it and installs a pet door so the animal can go in and out. But the cat prefers to use the front door, just like the customers. We readers get a good deal of information here from the implied author explaining the background in summary fashion. Other writers might present Kino’s “backstory” as part of dialogue in a dramatic scene. A clumsy example might be that a customer at the bar asks Kino, “Hey pal, how long you had this place anyway?” and Kino tells the story. However, I think Murakami’s technique works very well. Much of Kino is dramatic scene, so the contrast provided by these background sections is welcome. As we begin the story, we have questions: Who is Kino? How did he come to run the bar? These are quickly answered. And amidst the background, we learn about his aunt and get the powerful image of his heart needing tethering—the first reference to Kino being someone who is suffering. As we will see, these elements become central. The question as yet unanswered, that the story must address, is: why is “the man” coming to Kino’s bar? ‘Kay. Till next time, my friends. I think I’ll take the whiny voice for a walk. #Kino #Murakami #AlanBray

A friend recently wrote that he would be interested in my thinking about Steppenwolf in light of recent mass and/or school shootings, as exemplified by the horrific Michigan high school killings. I had to do some brooding about this; it really “put me through the changes,” as another old friend used to say. I hadn’t been thinking of Steppenwolf in this way. Regarding violence, Steppenwolf is problematic. It depicts strong suicidal ideation, and then very realistically describes murder, although these are eventually recast as fantasy. There is a sense in which Harry treats real humans as chess pieces or toys, in the same way I believe some mass murderers have thought about their victims, de-humanizing them the same way the Nazis tried to de-humanize Jewish people, or certain Americans de-humanized African Americans to enslave them. If you regard someone as a toy, it’s much easier to abuse them. But does Steppenwolf promote this attitude? I don’t want to say this, but my answer is I’m not sure. Hermann Hesse was a pacifist; the book can be read as a protest against the mass killings of WW1. I think he would strongly condemn efforts to criticize Steppenwolf based on its encouragement of violence. However, I don’t think the book is appropriate for young people to read, frankly. I think it’s only okay to read it as long as you have a good sense of who’s human and that murder (and suicide) is wrong. Many adults don’t have these senses. I believe its (ironic) point is that if it’s okay to kill millions in a war, it’s okay to kill people in peacetime. I don’t think Hesse believed murder was ever a good thing, but without a good sense of irony, the reader may miss his point. In the Magic Theater, Harry enters the door marked: Jolly Hunting Great Hunt in Automobiles “I was swept at once into a world of noise and excitement…I saw at once that it was the long prepared, long-awaited and long-feared war between men and machines…On all sides lay dead and decomposing bodies and on all sides too, smashed and distorted and half-burned cars. Airplanes circled above the frightful confusion and were being fired upon from many roofs…In every eye I saw the unconcealed spark of destruction and murder and in mine too these wild red roses bloomed as rank and high, and sparkled as brightly. I joined the battle joyfully.” ‘Kay. Harry observes a scene of wild destruction and death—so far, he’s not a participant. But then he encounters his old friend Gustav and the two of them embark on a murderous adventure of ambushing and shooting the drivers of cars. “Aim at the chauffeur,” commanded Gustav…I aimed and fired at the chauffeur in his blue cap. The man fell in a heap. The car careened on, charged the cliff face, rebounded, attacked the lower wall furiously with all its unwieldy weight…and…crashed…into the depths below. “Got him!” Gustav laughed. “My turn next.” So far, I’d say this reads a bit like a description of playing a violent video game. It’s cold and the victims are de-humanized. Gustav remarks after the next murder. “…it is all one what our victims are called. They’re poor devils just as we are. Their names don’t matter…we do not kill from duty, but pleasure, or much more, rather, from displeasure and despair of the world. For this reason we find a certain amusement from killing people.” Indeed. And there’s no remorse, no consequences. Murder is shown as being an amusing game. The victims are not real. In what is arguably the climax of the story, Harry enters the last door of the Magic Theater. Inside, he sees a naked Pablo and Hermine, “side by side in a sleep of deep exhaustion after love’s play. Beautiful, beautiful figures, lovely picture, wonderful bodies. Beneath Hermine’s left breast was a fresh, round mark, darkly bruised—a love bite of Pablo’s beautiful, gleaming teeth. There, where the mark was, I plunged in my knife to the hilt. The blood welled out over her white and delicate skin.” Pablo and Mozart chide Harry for this murder, and Harry tries to justify it by saying that Hermine wanted him to kill her. Pablo ultimately transforms the dead Hermine into a small toy figurine and puts it away in his pocket. Nevertheless, Harry must face punishment for his crime; he anticipates execution, but the sentence is to be laughed out of court. It seems clear that the implied author’s intention is to show that all the scenes in the Magic Theater are from within Harry. He does not commit murder; he only fantasizes it. But is this so different from the way real mass murderers operate? A troubling question. Even more troubling is the way Steppenwolf is written, with beauty and lyricism. A pretty package containing poison that the reader must have an antidote for. Yet, I can imagine many fans of the book and critics saying, “You are reading the text in a naïve way. Steppenwolf certainly doesn’t promote murder. You are missing the point. It’s supposed to be all fantasy. Irony, my dear.” ‘Kay. I’m troubled. I can think of other novels that show violent acts. Madame Bovary, as an example, shows a graphic suicide. Does it make the reader fantasize about the romance of suicide? No, it’s horrible. The suicide is presented in a horrible way, and there’s a harrowing lead-up to it of despair. Does reading Steppenwolf make the reader want to shoot the drivers of cars or stab naked women to death? Keep in mind, each act is presented with an absence of consequence—but we all know there are consequences for murder, right? Did the young man who killed four of his fellow students in Michigan know this? Read Steppenwolf, please. It’s a magnificent novel. But be prepared to become uneasy about the questions it raises. Maybe that’s one of the purposes of literature. On a seasonal note, may all your end-of-year celebrations be joyful, best beloved. Till next time. #Steppenwolf #HermannHesse #AlanBray

Last week, I said, “Although it masquerades as one, this (Steppenwolf) is not a realist novel that attempts to show “life as it really is.” Steppenwolf is a story of supernatural events.” There was a lot of uproar about this, many audience members wanted to know more about my thinking in making such a dramatic statement. Well. A realist novel is “A type of novel that places a strong emphasis on the truthful representation of the actual in fiction. Generally, the realist is a believer in pragmatism, and the truth he seeks to find and express is a relativistic truth, associated with discernible consequences and verifiable by experience.” It’s a stretch and a disservice to try to jam Steppenwolf into this category. Why? Last week we talked about coincidence, albeit plotted by the implied author, and found a lot of it in Steppenwolf. Harry sees a sign about the Magic Theater, is given a little book that seems to be about him. He goes to a bar and the only empty seat is next to a woman named Hermine who quickly (ahem) warms up to him and says she’s his sister and/or double. After a later night of brooding, he goes into his bedroom and finds another beautiful woman in his bed. Okay, maybe some of these things have happened to me (I had to write the book myself) but in general these are not realistic occurrences, “associated with discernible consequences.” Anybody want to disagree? Huh? Huh? Let’s step outside then. (sorry, please disregard. Wrong blog). So, if Steppenwolf isn’t a realist novel, what is it? With brilliance, Hermann Hesse “played” with several other forms and genres in writing this book. It may be seen as allegory (more on this later), as a mystical/magical tale of an inner journey, and as a bildungsroman, a novel about a character’s development. And indeed, the structure of presenting the content of the book as a journal which is discovered after the departure of its author refers to Werther by Goethe, who as we know, figures prominently in Steppenwolf. This reference gives a legitimacy and a realist cast to an un-realistic tale which would come across quite differently if Harry’s story were written as a first-person novel. Steppenwolf can be seen as allegory. “An allegory…is not just another word for a metaphor. In essence, it’s a form of fiction that represents immaterial things as images.” Harry interacts with three characters, Hermine, Maria, and Pablo, and each one of this triumvirate can be taken as a symbol. Hermine is the younger self, a sister, a twin, Maria, adult female sexuality, and Pablo, the Dionysian artist. The three of them elicit and reflect different aspects of Harry as he undergoes a process of education. Harry himself can be seen as being symbolic of one who is seeking enlightenment, a student. Perhaps it can also be said, best beloved, that Harry symbolizes the generation of men and women who survived WW1 and were profoundly affected by its trauma. He is a broken man who requires healing. And that brings me to the Bildungsroman—a class of novel that depicts and explores the manner in which the protagonist develops morally and psychologically. The German word Bildungsroman means “novel of education” or “novel of formation.” (whiny voice. Why not just call it that then, Mr. Pretentious Bully. Leave out the German). ‘Kay. I think this last type makes the most sense to describe Steppenwolf. The novel has quite a bit to do with Harry Haller’s transformation due to the education he receives from Hermine, Maria, and Pablo. There is a long tradition of the bildungsroman in literature which connects the form and story of Steppenwolf to such works as Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. But Hermann Hesse gives the genre a twist. Steppenwolf is not the story of a young person maturing and changing but rather about an older person who is unhappy and who undergoes considerable personality change as a result of particular and unusual experiences. In his 1961 Author’s Notes in the Bantam edition, Hesse says, “Of course, I neither can nor intend to tell my readers how they ought to understand my tale.” Then he goes on to say how he would like them to understand Steppenwolf—as a story of healing. I think Hesse is being disingenuous when he disavows any intention that his readers understand the book in a certain way. I think it’s clear he intentionally structured the story to “preach” and “teach” a message. Consider this: Steppenwolf is told by two reliable first-person character narrators, the unnamed landlady’s son, and Harry Haller, whose notebooks form the meat of the tale. The landlady’s son, in the preface, tells the reader how to read the notebooks, that they were written by a strange but good man who disappeared, leaving no opportunity to question him. Harry is shown meeting Hermine, Maria, and Pablo, who all teach him certain “truths” which are not questioned. Pablo, in particular, is a kind of magus-type entity, a magician if you will, who spends his time in the book arranging for Harry’s enlightenment. He and the two women are shown as one-dimensional characters who do not question themselves or their motivations. The whole story is structured as a lesson for Harry. (Yes, they are all allegorical figures). He (and the reader) is not asked to decide whether he wishes to continue, not given a choice. On the contrary, Harry is drugged and seduced into “school.” And the lesson that is taught? That bourgeois life is stifling, that technology is dehumanizing, that every person contains a multitude of possibilities that should be embraced. That a meaning of life is available to those who are open to it. Amen. #Steppenwolf #HermannHesse #AlanBray

– Don Juan, in Carlos Castenada’s The Teachings of Don Juan No coincidence, no story - an ancient Chinese saying. Two mutually exclusive statements, best beloved. However, Don Juan was talking about real life, and the ancient Chinese, about story or fiction. Let’s tease this out. Essentially, coincidence is the coming together of two events. ... Coincidence is often what gives fiction its chance to mean something. When two things come together, improbably or not, a spark is struck. Making those things happen simultaneously suggests that meaning is just beyond the surface—meaning and/or causality. However: “Coincidences always seem contrived, and more than one or two in a story will make the whole plot seem contrived. Now, the whole story is contrived – that’s what fiction is – but if your reader becomes aware of that as he or she is reading, you’ve got a “yeah, right” waiting to happen. The Willing Suspension of Disbelief is what we call the aura that’s cast around a story while the reader is immersed in it. It doesn’t merely seem to be true, it seems to be happening, right there, in front of his or her eyes. We break this aura at our peril.” With apologies to Don Juan, here’s a possible real-life coincidence. Let’s say two people are in love, and both talk about how great it would be to someday live in Hartford Connecticut. (?) They lose touch; ten years later they meet each other in…wait for it…Hartford Connecticut, where they’re both living. What a coincidence! they say. Unbelievable! It must be fate that has brought us together. But the truth is they both chose to move there; they have similar tastes in restaurants, entertainment, etc. It was inevitable that they’d meet. A famous fictional example: In Casablanca, Rick and Ilsa meet in Rick’s bar after a separation of several years, and Rick utters the famous line, “Of all the gin joints, etc.” suggesting a coincidence. But it makes sense that they’d both be in Casablanca and at Rick’s. Everybody, after all, goes to Rick’s, and Ilsa is married to a famous Resistance fighter who must escape the Nazis and leave Europe. Casablanca is the way out so it’s no shocker that she turns up there. And there’s those mysterious letters of transit that bring them together. And Rick—actually I don’t know how Rick wound up in Casablanca—but my point is that it’s really not much of a coincidence that they meet, more of an inevitability, just like with our real-life friends in Hartford, Connecticut. ‘Kay. What about in Steppenwolf? you ask. Aren’t ya supposed to be writing about Steppenwolf? Indeed, coincidence abounds in this novel. It’s no coincidence that there’s coincidence. But here it’s a different beastie than in Casablanca—there’s no rationale that can be easily seen, and Harry spotting the Magic Theater sign seems more like divine interference—or interference from the implied author. There’s a long tradition of this sort of thing, connecting with ancient Greek drama, where the gods “play” with mortals. Think of Oedipus and his mom. The implied author doesn’t show Harry being particularly surprised when he “happens” upon these meaningful events. Harry “happens” upon the Magic Theater sign, “happens” upon the man who gives him the Steppenwolf Treatise, “happens” again on this man who tells him to go to the Black Eagle Tavern, where Harry “happens” upon a young woman named Hermine who will change his life. There is a long literary tradition of characters meeting seemingly by coincidence who are, in fact, related. Charles Dickens is full of such devices. Why do I mention this? Because as Steppenwolf develops, Harry comes to accept that Hermine is his sister, even—his double. Even—himself! Yet, there is no mention of any divine or otherwise outside provocation. At the Black Eagle, Harry sees one a seat at a table and sits down next to an attractive young woman. (explosive laughter from the audience, a loud voice calls, Yeah, right). No, really. “I soon found myself near the bar, wedged against a table at which sat a pale and pretty girl against the wall…She gave me a friendly and observant look as I came up and with a smile moved to one side to make room for me. “May I?” I asked and sat down beside her.” (Laughter continues). Please, I’m not trying to be funny. Does this seem like too great a coincidence? I can see many of you are nodding. Well, this is actually a stylistic issue—hey, settle down! I’m trying to make an important point here if you’ll all please listen. Steppenwolf is a story of someone in despair who is brought back to life by mysterious and mystical means. By coincidence? Not if we define coincidence as random. If we return to our original definition of coincidence—which does not mention randomness—we can see that in each case, there are two incidences that meet. One: Harry goes for a stroll at night. Two: A sign appears on a wall reading “Magic Theater.” Harry “happens” on this sign—no one tells him to go to it—and this sets off a chain of events that runs throughout the rest of the book, leading him to a mysterious woman who seems to be his younger self. At a later point, the young woman tells Harry: “Think of that evening when you came broken from your despair and loneliness to cross my path and be my comrade. Why was it, do you think, I was able to recognize and understand you?” Why indeed. It's worth considering that coincidence is what makes the plot of Steppenwolf. Without it, Harry might be trapped in his miserable and meaningless existence. With it, his life changes and has meaning. Whether or not anyone else sees the sign is outside of the scope of this book, which is about Harry, who does. Although it masquerades as one, this is not a realist novel that attempts to show “life as it really is.” Steppenwolf is a story of supernatural events. The encounters seem at times to be coincidental, but they are planned by the implied author who desires to tell a story of a character being taught a lesson about life. Instead of the ancient Greek idea of the gods creating apparent coincidences to change characters, we have the implied author doing the manipulation. Maybe Don Juan was right—there are no coincidences. Till next time. #Steppenwolf #HermannHesse #AlanBray

Last week, we talked about how the first section of Steppenwolf—after the preface—describes Harry Haller’s painful existence. He is glum, dysphoric; he believes his personality is divided into two parts, permanently at war with each other. This is classic storytelling in the western canon; a story begins with a showing of the protagonist’s conflicted condition just prior to an inciting incident that sets off a process of change. Aristotle would be proud. In Steppenwolf, this incident is Harry’s discovery of the Magic Theater. “With these familiar thoughts I went along the wet street through one of the quietest and oldest quarters of the town. On the opposite side there stood in the darkness an old stone wall which I always noticed with pleasure…the wall was peaceful and serene and yet something was altered in it. I was amazed to see a small and pretty doorway with a Gothic arch in the middle of the wall, for I could not make up my mind whether this doorway had always been there or whether it had just been made…now that I looked more closely I saw over the portal a bright shield, on which, it seemed to me, there was something written.” Magic Theater Entrance Not For Everybody Then on the path he’s walking on, he sees: For Madmen Only! Harry doesn’t seem to think these messages are unusual. After lingering a few moments to see if there will be more, he continues on his walk. He goes to a local tavern and drinks wine, then goes out again, stops to hear a jazz band playing, and, to his surprise, likes what he hears (he usually doesn’t like jazz). Then: “From the black mouth of an alley a man appeared with startling suddenness at my elbow…He wore a cap and a blue blouse, and above his shoulders he carried a signboard fixed on a pole, and in front of him an open tray suspended by straps such as pedlars carry at fairs…I called out and asked him to let me read his placard. He stopped and held the pole a little steadier. Then I could read the dancing, reeling letters: Anarchist Evening Entertainment Magic Theater Entrance Not For Everyone Harry pursues the man and says he wants to buy something from him. “Without stopping, the man felt mechanically in his box, pulled out a little book and held it out to me.” The man “disappeared.” What is the significance of the word “Anarchist?” During the first decades of the 20th century, the anarchist movement flourished in most parts of the world and had a significant role in workers' struggles for emancipation. For the bourgeoisie, it meant something dangerous. An anarchist entertainment would be a show that challenged the basic order of things in the guise of fun. ‘Kay. This makes me think of the film Field of Dreams where the Voice makes dramatic pronouncements to Ray that change his life. “Go the distance!” “Ease his pain!” The difference is in the protagonists’ reactions. Neither Ray nor Harry react in a realist way; Ray gets mad, but Harry doesn’t seem particularly surprised by these events. However, when he gets home, he looks at the pamphlet. “It was with great astonishment and a sudden sense of impending fate that I read the title…Treatise on the Steppenwolf. Not for Everybody. As we know, Harry thinks of himself as a Steppenwolf. So what’s happened is that he’s out walking at night and sees a sign he’s never seen before, an enigmatic and intriguing sign concerning a Magic Theater. Then he encounters a strange, cartoonish sort of fellow who sells him a book—about himself! Whoa. Another facet of this is the repeated condition: Not for Everybody. The implication is that if you’re allowed entrance, or access to the pamphlet, you are somehow chosen, you are special. A time-honored way to create desire, as in, “I’ve got to have the thing I’m not allowed to have!” So, there are several “hooks” cleverly designed to grab Harry’s attention. (The fisherman is the implied author, heh, heh, heh). He reads on till the end. His first reaction is to remember a poem he’d written about the wolf. “So now I had two portraits of myself before me, one a self-portrait in doggerel verse, as sad and sorry as myself; the other painted with the air of a lofty impartiality by one who stood outside and who knew more and yet less of me than I did myself…Both were right. Both gave the unvarnished truth about my shiftless existence. “Death was decreed for this Steppenwolf. He must with his own hand make an end of his detested existence—unless, molten in the fire of a renewed self-knowledge, he underwent a change and passed over to a self, new and undisguised. Alas! This transition was not unknown to me. I had already experienced it several times…” So, Harry seems to conclude that the Treatise is telling him he must go through a painful transition to a new self. He describes other transitions wherein he lost his profession, his wife and family, becoming alone. “And every occasion when a mask was torn off, an ideal broken, was preceded by this hateful vacancy and stillness, this deathly constriction and loneliness and unrelatedness, this waste and empty hell of loneliness and despair, such as I now had to pass through once more.” Interesting—he says the Treatise was “painted with the air of lofty impartiality by one who stood outside and who knew more and yet less of me than I did myself.” So, it’s only a partially accurate portrait. He disagrees with the Treatise on suicide, thinking that it is an acceptable out, not a weakness as the Treatise advises. “On the other hand, all suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide” In fact, the Treatise says that the Steppenwolf plans to kill himself on his fiftieth birthday, a plan Harry has not divulged to the reader. After reading the Treatise, he gloomily concludes it’s a long time to wait to his fiftieth birthday! There is no specific mention of Harry in the Treatise, so he decides, although it has merit, it’s too general to take at its word. However, although he denies it, Harry seems to be trying to follow the Treatise’s instructions. He doesn’t kill himself; he becomes more intrigued by the Magic Theater and tries to find it and the odd fellow who sold him the Treatise. He finally does find him in a funeral procession. He accosts the man who tells him gruffly to go to the Black Eagle bar. (More on this next time). Is the Treatise another example of the implied author telling, in this case, how the protagonist should act? Could be, could be. Hesse himself wrote of Steppenwolf that he wished to show a sufferer’s state of mind measured against a positive and cheerful world of beliefs above person and time. Well, that’s essentially what the Treatise is, a device that shows a positive world of beliefs that oppose Harry’s dysphoria. As we will see later, the Magic Theater shows the enactment of those beliefs. On a level of writing, Steppenwolf has layers: the Preface, Harry’s journals, the Treatise. As Ralph Freedman noted in his book The Lyrical Novel, this technique allowed Hesse to present a very inner view of a character in the context of a realist novel. In other words, Hesse could have written Steppenwolf a la James Joyce or Virginia Wolf, using the journals without the device of them being “found” by someone else. The book could just have been a portrait of Harry’s consciousness, but Hesse wrote in a different style. Till next time, all you Steppenwolves. Ow-ooh! #Steppenwolf #HermannHesse

Harry Haller’s purported journal begins with a description of his day—written in past tense, something we must return to later. He is, to put it mildly, rather glum. He describes suffering from physical pain, a headache, gout, all of which he attributes to old age—he is forty-seven. He writes of his anger at mediocrity, his desire to smash order, disrupt complacency. This has a very contemporary feel, and one can see how Tim Leary and later rebels would like this. He lives in a very orderly and bourgeois house, and delights at the contrast of his disordered room. He contemplates suicide. As a narrator, he is unlikable; it’s challenging to feel much compassion for such an old crank. He sees himself as old, diseased, hopeless. But Harry’s unique and perhaps redeeming feature is that he believes part of his nature is a Steppenwolf, a wolf of the steppes. Our trusty electronic dictionary tells us that the Steppe Wolf is a subspecies of grey wolf native to the Caspian steppes, the steppe regions of the Caucasus, the lower Volga region, southern Kazakhstan north to the middle of the Emba, and the steppe regions of the lower European part of the former Soviet Union. They are dangerous; they like to eat seals. They often carry rabies. Where do they find the seals? In consideration that the character of Harry, being a creation of the real author who wrote this in 1926, we could speculate that Hesse, a German who was a non-combatant in WW1, tried to come up with a frightening image for his character to admire. A predatory wolf from the steppes of Russia! Harry believes he has a dual nature, half highly civilized European aesthete, and half slavering beastie boy from the dangerous wild. It should be said though, that Harry never kills anyone (except in the Magic Theater, of course—more on that later). He feels this brutal and uncivilized side in his nature but is never violent. He does not behave like some sort of werewolf in the streets of the unnamed city he lives in. What he describes is that he wants to experience beautiful things, art, music, friendship, but always runs up against his wolf nature which ridicules him for liking beauty. Then when he feels more wolf-like, his human nature ridicules him for being an animal. He is rarely happy. The 1920’s were famous for being inhabited by the “lost generation” of men and women who experienced the technological and human horrors of WW1, and who subsequently found themselves unable to fit into postwar life. Ernest Hemingway comes to mind. "You are all a lost generation," he wrote as an epigraph for his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys, and F. Scott Fitzgerald are other notable figures. And so is the Steppenwolf, a wild creature who must exist always on the fringes of society. However, Harry never makes mention of WW1, in fact, makes no mention of any historical events, a feature of the story I commented on last week. It tends to give the story a curious, timeless feel, making it a tale that could occur anytime. And anyplace, since there’s no anchoring of the story to a particular city or country. After the preface, in which the character narrator explains how the story should be read, we have a classic story beginning. Harry describes and shows his condition at the beginning of the story, before the events of the story change him. We have a good eight pages of description of his miserable existence before he happens (?) upon the Magic Theater, a place that will alter the course of his life. Another philosophical angle on Steppenwolf is existentialism. Yes, you read it right. The beginning of Harry’s story can be seen as a presentation of the existentialist concept of the longing for immediacy. Harry dreams of being a wolf, an animal with an immediate grasp of sensory reality without any mediation of consciousness. The wolf doesn’t think “Huh, I’m pretty hairy,” the wolf just is hairy. It has direct access to “reality.” In contrast, Harry the human (who may be hairy, ha, ha!)— Mindless alliteration. Sorry. (whiny voice—‘scuse me, Mr. Pretentious Bully. “Scuse me. Why do you put apostrophes around certain words?) Is that a “real” question? Heh, heh, heh. I’ve been asked about my usage of parentheses set around certain words. I do this to indicate the subjective nature of these words. For instance, there is not one “reality” that everyone more or less experiences. We all have our own perspective on reality, and this particularity is a key concept in modern fiction. (whiny voice—I think you do it to make fun of me.) Let’s move on. Harry the human, must be conscious of all the beauty he experiences, painfully aware that he can never immediately “be” in a Mozart sonata; he can only have a second-hand awareness of it, as in, “Now I am listening to Mozart.” This is the pain of Harry’s life, that he yearns for immediacy but can never attain it. And if he did attain it, he would be a wolf, not a human. The ancient philosopher Parmenides outlines this problem, writing that where a gap appears between words and things, the philosopher in search of Being tries to differentiate what is stable and instable in language, the permanent and the fluid, the “true” and the “deceptive.” (He liked using parentheses too). He persists in trying to sift Being from what he calls words or names, which he regards as a ceaseless flow of things at the level of language. Harry Haller has a lot of difficulty doing this “sifting,” and that annoys the heck out of him. ‘Kay. Next time, we’ll look at the inciting incident of the story, Harry’s discovery of the Magic Theater and of the Treatise on the Steppenwolf. Till “then.” Happy Thanksgiving! #Steppenwolf #HermannHesse

This week, a new book, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, first published in 1927. I am using a Picador edition published in 1963 which features a revised version of the 1929 translation from German to English. So there. Hermann Hesse enjoyed a renaissance in the late 1960s and early 70s, sparked, I believe, by interest in his novel about the Buddha, Siddhartha. However, Steppenwolf was not just swept along on Siddhartha’s coattails. No. Viewed as a counterculture tale, its depictions of sexuality and of drug use made it a natural hit in the psychedelic era. Timothy Leary advised his disciples: “Before your LSD session, read Siddhartha and Steppenwolf.” The book is, in my opinion, not “pinned” very firmly to any particular time period, an idea I’d like to return to as we proceed. My own history with Steppenwolf goes back to those counterculture days. (whiny voice—I thought you read it in the 1920s). As I was saying, I’ll confess I first read the book because it was “cool” to do so. I was in high school, I believe, and got hold of the edition with the realist painting on the cover of a woman naked from the waist up. (Oh, please. Spare us your adolescent fantasies!) I was entranced by the strange story of Harry Haller and his associations with Hermine, Maria, Pablo, and the Magic Theater. Steppenwolf is a favorite; I’ve read it at least five times and have enjoyed the 1974 movie version starring Max Von Sydow. (It’s not a footstool, it’s an ottoman!) The version I’m reading now displays a thickly furred animal on the cover, although it’s at such close range, it’s hard at first to make the animal out, as the image looks abstract. A nice image that captures some of the ambiguous nature of the book, although the other image was pretty hot. After the title page and publication information, there is an “Author’s Note—1961” in which Mr. Hesse states that “of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was most often and more violently misunderstood than any other…” He goes on to say he realizes a reader is free to make of a book what she/he will, however, “I would be happy, if many of them were to realize that the story of the Steppenwolf pictures a disease and a crisis—but not one leading to death and destruction, on the contrary: to healing.” As we read this story, I will muse on Mr. Hesse’s wish. The story proper begins with a preface, purportedly written by an unnamed nephew who lives in his aunt’s house, a house with a room she rents to a man named Harry Haller. It begins: “This book contains the records left us by a man whom, according to the expression he often used himself, we called the Steppenwolf. Whether this manuscript needs any introductory remarks may be open to question.” This narrator goes on at some length recording his “recollections” of the Steppenwolf before concluding and presenting what are described as certain notebooks written by Haller and left behind after his departure from the aunt’s house. These notebooks comprise the bulk of the story. An intriguing way to begin. The implied author employs a character narrator—who does not reappear—and raises the issue of whether his contribution is needed. I think it is. It represents the implied author offering a guide or template on how the Steppenwolf’s journals should be read. Imagine what a different reading experience it would be to skip this preface and begin with the journals. Dena gave me this idea from her reading of another book. A smart lady. (whiny voice—Mr. Big Shot, is this another adolescent fantasy? Did you skip the preface?) I have never skipped the preface but I imagine doing so would mean having much less context for reading the bulk of the novel. The narrator describes being very suspicious of Haller at first, to the point where he warns his aunt not to trust him. The narrator “snoops,” entering Haller’s rooms when he is not present and searching for trouble. But he then describes being gradually charmed by Haller, charmed and touched by his suffering and his noble struggles to express it. At the end of the preface, the narrator writes: “And now I have gossiped enough. No more is needed to show that the Steppenwolf lived a suicidal existence. But all the same I do not believe that he took his own life when, after paying all he owed but without a word of warning or farewell, he left our town one day and vanished. We have not heard from him since and we are still keeping some letters that came for him after he left. He left nothing behind but his manuscript. It was written during the time he was here, and he left it with a few lines to say that I might do what I liked with it…I have no doubt that they (the manuscript entries) are fictitious…They are rather the deeply lived spiritual events which he has attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experiences…I have no doubt that even they have some basis in real occurrence.” So the reader is told how to read the book. At first, the character of Haller may seem strange, even dangerous but with time, his exquisite sensibility will emerge, making the reading of the text a valuable experience. The reader is exhorted to stay with something that may seem strange at first. Like sushi. The narrator’s contribution tends to increase the feeling of realism in the story. Even though the whole thing is written as a novel, a made-up story, the reader is told that, on the contrary, the journals are the writings of a “real” person. The reader is thrice removed from the real author, Hermann Hesse: once by the implied author, once by the narrator, who mediates between the journals and the reader, and once by Harry Haller, the journal’s author. ‘Kay. With this in mind, we begin. Next time, dear friends. #Steppenwolf #HermannHesse

An important idea is that reading a story changes the reader, that being with a story—and we should say, the implied author of the story—makes you a different, possibly better person. The implication here is not that there should be a Puritanical and censorious rule: “You are commanded to only read the Holy Scripture or Torah, because you are what you read!” It‘s more an acknowledgement that stories have an effect on us, one that it’s good to be aware of. If reading were not an important activity, then it would be no big deal what you read. If you read stories that show the violent exploitation of children and women, what effect does that have? Not a very good one, in my opinion. Although…it’s a bit more complicated. Lolita is a notorious example of a book that some people call pornography, others literature. I’ll just say that when I’ve read Lolita, I think it made me a better person, but not because I thought Humbert Humbert was a great guy. I thought his behavior was wrong, but was moved by the tragedy of the story, the tarnished humanity, I suppose, of a pedophile. A simpler example would be if an implied author wants to show a character killing someone, the act can be contextualized in different ways. Let’s say a character is a policeman who kills very bad people, people who are shown doing very bad things. Contrast that with a character who kills innocent victims, victims whose innocence is displayed. In the first case, the implied author probably wants the reader to feel satisfaction, in the second, unease. Well, you say, that’s all very fine but what of Casting Shadows? How do we feel spending time with the implied author of this story? What sort of experience does the story’s implied author want us to have? I think the answer is something like, if you read me, spend some time with me, I will move you emotionally. Make you happy, sad, frustrated. I will draw you in with my character’s vulnerability, the way her faults are exposed. You may or may not like her and what she does, but you will profit from the effort. How is this accomplished? Our friend Wayne Booth talks about how the title and first line of a story is an invitation to the reader. The first line of Casting Shadows is: “Now and then on the streets of my neighborhood I bump into a man I might have been involved with, maybe shared a life with.” There’s an immediacy of yearning here; the single sentence captures the way a lonely person is excited by somewhat random encounters. You learn quickly that this man is the husband of the narrator’s friend, but by then you already know that an affair between them doesn’t happen, it “might have” happened, and I believe this forestalls condemnation and dislike. Instead, you are given to understand that this is a story about how the narrator is attracted to the husband of her friend but does not have an affair with him. As we have seen, things become more complicated, and the narrator is perhaps not without some blame, but her errors are always cast in a sympathetic mold. Hey, nobody’s perfect. The implied author has the narrator tell the reader: “In spring I suffer…Every blow in my life took place in spring…of loss, of betrayal, of disappointment.” The reader learns that the narrator is melancholy, has had sad experiences. Some people, reading Casting Shadows, have complained that the story is a portrait of someone with “clinical depression.” This is perhaps legitimate, but I think the overall picture is more of someone with gravitas, someone who has had a range of experience and is alone. Again, this interpretation tends to blunt criticism of the narrator as a “bad” person. Not to excuse her desires, but to make her more likable, less an object, more a ”real” person. The next section elaborates on this theme. The narrator describes an encounter with her “ex, the only significant one.” Now she mostly sees his negative qualities, his fussiness, his pretension. She recalls his unfaithfulness to her, how he maintained a sort of double life, going from life with her to life with another woman. The narrator was badly treated, however…”even as my life shattered into pieces, I felt as if I were finally coming up for air.” A further view of the narrator as a sympathetic survivor. Now that the implied author has established some likable qualities in the narrator it’s time to show her dark side—a dark side now in context. She is a sad, lonely person who yearns for happiness. She follows her friend and the husband, listening in on their arguing. She goes on an outing with the husband when her friend is ill, becoming a sort of surrogate wife, and then waits for his call proposing they have an affair. As I’ve mentioned, she doesn’t express guilt or remorse, but does feel considerable anxiety over falling into “an abyss.” I think the story would have a much different feel if we did not have the earlier scenes of the narrator expressing sadness, loneliness, telling the unfortunate story of her failed marriage. Without the proper context, she could come off as an unlikable psychopath—but that is not the implied author’s intent. (Unlikable psychopath—are there likable psychopaths?) At the end, responding to a crisis, the narrator goes to walk her friend’s dog. Over several days, she walks the dog; she likes the dog: “…though he pulls me, I’m the one holding the leash. Every step puts distance between me and my infatuation until it’s no longer dangerous, until our romance, which never took hold to begin with, loses its hold over me.” So, reading Casting Shadows lets us spend time with a lonely and alienated person who yearns for connection, almost achieves it through illicit romance, but catches herself and accepts that it isn’t meant to be. I am touched by this story, by its style and by what it shows about people. I like the narrator even though I’m unhappy with her at points mid-story. She shows her vulnerabilities, and this helps me like her. Even though I don’t always find her honest, the implied author lets me know the truth. I think we’ll wrap up Chasing Shadows this week although there’s more to say about this beautiful story. One thing that comes to mind is its curious genesis: taken in discontinuous sections from a novel written in the Italian language, translated, and published in a major American literary magazine just before the publication of the Italian novel in English. A marketing ploy, some have said. I say this is a fantastic story on its own, a successful venture, but I wonder if this sort of thing will be repeated—crafting a short story from parts of a novel. Till next time. #CastingShadows #JhumpaLahiri

Last time, we were musing about what connects the sections in Casting Shadows, that there seems to be a pattern of the narrator describing a situation she’s in and then in the next section she writes of an emotional reaction that may be related to it. Often what seems significant is the reaction left out, and I dare say this gets us into the delicious topic of first-person narrator unreliability. For example, the narrator has been invited to go on an outing with her friend, the friend’s husband, and children but the friend falls ill and cannot go, so the narrator goes along on a trip dripping with romantic overtones. She wonders if the husband says she is “stunning” (he may say it, it’s ambiguous). She has a moment of panic at the thought that she and the husband may fall into an abyss together. Then in the next section, as I outlined last time, she recalls being clumsy and having difficulty balancing as a child. What seems left out is the range of her feelings. It would seem she might question herself at desiring her friend’s husband, feel guilt, that she might be angry at him for being so confusing, leading her on in a sense. In fact, the character of the husband is a curious one. Why is he leading the narrator on? Surely, he must realize they are attracted to one another, the scamp. The narrator is, shall we say, very available. Yet, as does the narrator, we only have his limited response to puzzle over. The narrator leaves a lot out of her narrative indeed. It seems at times to be a carefully manicured presentation that shows her unhappy and lonely, as well as simply desiring her friend’s husband without guilt or regret. In the next section, she admits to feeling “off-kilter” since seeing the guy. She wonders what it would be like “to take things further,” imagining the sound of his voice, the hair on the back of his hands. Not much guilt, my friend. She finally thinks of him phoning her and proposing they have an affair. Without any sense expressed of how acceptance would betray her friend, she waits actively for this call. However, when the call finally comes, it poses a much different request, the friend’s father is mortally ill, the couple has left to be with him; can the narrator walk their dog? Perhaps this is simply a good showing of the denial people experience when they’re considering an infidelity. But it doesn’t make the narrator likable. And, best beloved, she is unreliable in that she only describes one side of her innerness. Unless she’s a psychopath who doesn’t experience conflict, but I don’t think so. In Phelan’s sense, she is “underreporting” herself. She may be selfish; however, ultimately, in this story, there’s no affair. Instead, we have the delightful image of the narrator gluing a plate together, getting glue all over her hands, and laughing at herself. Yes, she’s glued her fingers together, but her predicament becomes funny. When that happens, I like her. Of course, what the narrator tells we the readers is determined by the implied author who structures the story. The implied author could show all possible facets of a character but in this case, chooses a limited range in order to create a particular, nuanced story. I think we should pause here, as our “blogship” is headed toward the sea of ethics—not in the traditional sense of a pronouncement of judgement on the “moral lessons” of a story, but in the sense of whether a story is a “good friend” in Wayne Booth’s formulation. Reading a story is compared to meeting someone: what is it like to meet and be with the implied author of Casting Shadows? Till then. Full speed ahead! #CastingShadows #JhumpaLariri

This week, a new story, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Casting Shadows, a short story or novel excerpt, published in the February 15th 2021 issue of The New Yorker. It was subsequently published as part of a full-length novel entitled Whereabouts. However, the text of Whereabouts, containing the short story, was first published in Italian in 2018, and then translated to English by Ms. Lahiri. Casting Shadows is not a continuous selection from Whereabouts but interestingly, comprised of various chapters put together. In a strict sense, then, it’s not a novel excerpt, but a short story put together from elements of a longer work. Isn’t a short story a different form than a novel, a form with particular and necessary features that can differentiate one from the other? P’rraps so. Ms. Lahiri appeared on New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman’s blog, reading and discussing “Casting Shadows.” Some have been critical of Ms. Lahiri and The New Yorker for this presentation of “Casting Shadows,” calling it a sort of promotional gimmick for her book. I shake my head sadly. Dena says that it’s very common for writers to have a short story and/or novel excerpt published in The New Yorker prior to publishing a book. It’s how the publishing/public relations business operates, and writers are entitled to be compensated for their work as much as anyone. I’m no fan of consumerism but I know that I’m very taken with “Crossing Shadows.” I think it’s wonderful. I like “Whereabouts” as well but wanted to write about “Crossing Shadows.” So there. The gauntlet is thrown. Readers of Crossing Shadows who are familiar with this blog will immediately note the presence of a first-person narrator who seems very close to the “real” author, Jhumpa Lahiri. Both are women living in Italy, divorced and middle-aged, so it’s easy to think that Ms. Lahiri is writing about herself in a sort of memoir. But what of the implied author, my dear? That entity created by the real author whom the reader believes wrote the story. That entity who expresses style and values? Do not blunder into this story without an awareness of the implied author. Oh, no. Casting Shadows is presented as fiction. If you look at the index for that issue of The New Yorker, it says: Jhumpa Lahiri Casting Shadows. Fiction. We are asked to believe that it’s fiction. Our time of the cult of personality, when authors are asked to create marketable personas to sell their work, can make it that much harder to separate the “real” author from the implied author and the narrator. I suppose a “marketable persona” is another entity mediating between the flesh and blood author and the market. Huh. We’ll need to consider the implied author’s presence, but first, something else. In Living To Tell About It, James Whelan makes an interesting distinction between traditional and what he calls lyric narrative: “In traditional narrative, in the logic of connected events: one thing happens which leads to another thing and so on until the author finds some way to resolve the sequence. In lyric narrative…the logic of event gives way to the logic of revelation and exploration of a character’s emotions and attitudes in a particular situation. The movement from beginning to end typically follows the movement of the speaker’s thoughts, but these thoughts are not typically a review of his or her identity and situation. Instead, as the speaker’s thoughts follow their apparently autonomous direction, the author finds a way to convey to the reader a rounded awareness of the speaker’s character and situation.” I believe Casting Shadows has characteristics of both traditional and lyric narrative but weighs in more heavily on the lyric side. The events or scenes of the story do not always seem connected except by the narrator’s presence, but there is movement and a kind of resolution of the narrator’s unrest. An example, please. The story begins: “Now and then on the streets of my neighborhood I bump into a man I might have been involved with, maybe shared a life with.” A nice beginning—it immediately raises a question: why might the narrator have been involved with this fellow? Why is she not? And the story provides an answer. The story does not begin: “I see this guy in my neighborhood, maybe we’ll get involved, maybe not.” That would raise a different question: will they, or won’t they? The first section continues with a fine image of the chaste couple observing and trying to photograph the shadows of pedestrians walking along a riverbank. “Then we, too, become two shadows projected onto the wall…” The title, Casting Shadows, of course, refers to this. The next section or scene is marked off with a paragraph break. It continues: “In spring I suffer. The season doesn’t invigorate me, I find it depleting.” This section is about the narrator’s seasonal dysphoria and allergies—perhaps it relates to the first scene, perhaps not. There’s no mention of the man, no sense of how much time has passed. In any case, it tells we readers more about the narrator. In the logic of reading and storytelling, we readers want to believe it does connect somehow. What does the narrator not get that the implied author communicates to we the readers? One thing is the episodic nature of the story, the discrete scenes, some almost like journal entries, that are delineated by paragraph breaks. The narrator gives no sense of awareness of these breaks, these sporadic glimpses. It is the implied author who structures them for us to understand. What is communicated? That the narrator is telling someone and/or herself about particular events and personal reactions in a poetic prose style. That these events and reactions are discrete phenomena that the narrator relates in small sections that begin and end. That there must be a process of selection, so that a great many potential things are simply not related by the narrator. This is not a continuous narrative; it stops and starts by some logic that we may be able to infer. As I said, we want to believe the sections connect and will struggle to make them connect, to perceive their over-arching order. In regard to this, it seems to me that there is a pattern of an event reported, say of the narrator acting as a sort of wife-surrogate to the fellow mentioned above, and then the next section describing the narrator’s memories of being unsuccessful at childhood games of balance, games where she was “…terrified that I would fall, even though I never did.” In the previous scene, she was terrified that she and the man would fall together into an abyss. Well, best beloved, the clock on the clubhouse wall says it’s time to go, so let’s pick up on this next time. Till then. #CastingShadows #JhumpaLahiri

This week, as we wrap up our reading of Three Horses, a little background on the concept of the implied author. (Whiny voice: Are you kidding me?) Wayne Booth was the first to coin this term in The Rhetoric of Fiction, where he defines it as a second self that a writer creates in the construction of a text. He quotes Jessamyn West: “Writing is a way of playing parts, of trying on masks, of assuming roles, not for fun but out of desperate need, not for the self’s sake but for the writing’s sake.” Booth goes on: “However impersonal he (the author) may try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner—and of course that official scribe will never be neutral toward all values. Our reactions to his various commitments, secret or overt, will help determine our response to the work.” James Phelan says: “In Booth’s view, an author will necessarily construct a version of himself or herself…as someone with certain attitudes, beliefs, and values, and these matters necessarily inform the narrative text. Implied authors cannot choose whether to be neutral or positive, they can choose only the ways in which they will express their partisanship.” Booth—cited by Phelan—"makes three main points: The implied author is the source for the assumptions, beliefs, norms, meanings, and purposes of the text. Every feature of that text can be understood as a stroke in the service of the implied author’s portrait. The reader’s task is to reconstruct both the implied author and his or her assumptions, beliefs, norms, meanings, and purposes.” I have previously thought of the implied author as a book’s style, but the above definitions expand this to produce a richer palette that includes ethics. I believe there is a question from the audience. Yes. (whiny voice: Mr. Pretentious Bully, ‘scuse me. Are you the first person narrator of this blog?) I suppose so. Yes. Don’t call me that. (Then aren’t you unreliable the way you’ve been saying? The answer has to be yes, so why should we pay any attention to what you’re saying? It’s all made up, anyway. Mr. Big Shot) Beloved whiny voice, yes, first-person narrators of fiction are often unreliable, but this blog is not fiction, and in any case, much of what first-person narrators say is reliable. (Cold, objective voice: Are you an implied author?) There is an implied author of this blog, let’s call it Mr. Bray, but I am the narrator. Could we move on? (Whiny voice: It is all fiction. You make it all up.) ‘Kay, let’s search for traces of the implied author in Three Horses, its values, assumptions, beliefs, norms, and style. A distinct style is evident. An unnamed narrator tells the story in first person voice and relentlessly present tense—even when writing about the past. “At twenty, I have no knowledge of embraces and I decide to wait.” The language is poetic and at times, elliptical, although some of this may be due to Michael Moore’s fine translation to English. Not all of it, though. “Beneath the weathered cardboard of my face, I feel the face I used to have…I tell her that what she has to do is bring to the boy from the old days the embrace she conceals inside…What I tell her, in other words, is: I’m not me. “If you’re not you,” she says. “you never were you.” We learn from Michael Moore that De Luca is very interested in translating the Hebrew Old Testament to Italian. Alas, I’m no expert on the language of the Old Testament, but my guess is that its style influences Three Horses. Many paragraphs begin with the subject pronoun, “I,” which serves to heighten the sense of first-person narration, as in, “I am doing something.” There is a smooth transition from an imperfect to perfect or specific mood. The story begins in imperfect. “I only read used books” This is not a specific scene, a particular point in time. It refers to an on-going activity. The passage continues: “I turn docile pages, slow morsels, then I tear my head away from the white of the paper and the tablecloth…passing behind the two black pupils of a woman…They’re staring straight at me.” This is a beautiful example of moving from a non-specific time into a specific scene, and Three Horses has many of these. How does the implied author ask us to judge the narrator and the others? What values are expressed? Three Horses has to do very much with issues of right and wrong. The epigram at the beginning comes to mind: “Woe to those who do not practice their purity ferociously.” The narrator’s story is a lot about the woe he experiences because he failed Dvora in Argentina, and now has a chance at a ferocious redemption with Laila. But his chance is ironically “stolen” by Selim, who acts out of a need to reciprocate generosity. These three characters are potentially morally compromised people—the narrator and Selim are murderers, and Laila is an escort who must sell herself to earn money. However, the implied author indicates that all three are to be seen as righteous, that certain killings are justified, and that Laila is more a victim than anything else. The man Selim kills is shown as being relentlessly evil in a one-dimensional way. How different the story would be if he were shown as having a kind side—his killing, and the characters’ actions, would be very much morally compromised. There is a value conveyed of reciprocating generosity, of the need to “square things up” with others in an ethical way. If I help you, I must allow you to help me in return. And there is a strong value concerning the dignity of manual work and of workers, of growing things. All of us involved in writing this blog are grateful to Signore De Luca for Three Horses. Next week, a new adventure. Till then. #ThreeHorses #ErriDeLuca