It is fun to refight the battles in the Civil War or in the Second World War. The dead have all been counted and the battles are so complex that there might have been very different outcomes in many of them. War is more complicated than chess if for no other reason that the values of the elements of force can change over time. So long range artillery are more important in the Russia-Ukraine War than are jet planes. Maybe Italy wouldn’t have been such a long slog that was not decisive if Mark Clark had better handled Salerno. Would Hawaii have been invaded if we lost at Midway? What if Union forces had not taken the heights on the first day of Gettysburg or Grant had not persisted on the second day of Shiloh and turned defeat into victory? So many imponderables that are no longer at anyone’s expense. Unless you worry that Jefferson Davis and Hitler might have won. Now, those would be nightmares.
On the other hand, I don't like to refight the Cold War. I lived through the entire thing, from the late Forties through 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and I had nightmares throughout the period. During the Korean War, friends of mine in junior high school sang “MIG’s are a’comin; their planes are In sight” to parody the then popular tune “Shrimp Boats Are A Comin”. I calculated that I would survive a nuclear attack in my neighborhood, the central Bronx, if the A Bomb hit Lower Manhattan but not if it landed in Midtown. My friends and I were asked to tell our school how we went back and forth to home, probably for the innocuous purpose of redistricting school catchment areas. We took it as meaning that the school authorities could find where our bodies laid, though, of course, no one would bother. I dreamed of whether radiation was like a sunburn that fried me and, in my dreams, avoided windows because the shards of glass would riddle me as sure as a tommy gun. Pamphlets told me a brief coating of soil would keep me from radiation, but that didn’t help inside an apartment building. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when I was a graduate student, a young woman was heard on Telegraph Avenue, in Berkeley, yelling out that she didn’t want to die and my friends and I made plans to go to the Oregon coast because I thought the wind currents were west to east and so likely to have little fallout. The crisis eased when Russian ships carrying missiles turned back from the American blockade of Cuba but I did not know at the time that there was a secret agreement that Kennedy would withdraw the Jupiter IRBM’s from Turkey because they were only offensive missiles in that they took time to get fueled and so could only serve as a first strike, not a response to the enemy's nuclear strike. There were so many loose ends in mutual deterrence that it seems likely that one of them would ignite the nuclear fire. Early on, writers wondered about what a war would be like. Collier’s Magazine, while in the Fifties, before it folded, had a sense that a war might be punctuated with atomic bombs but more conventional warfare might obtain. It believed the Allies would conquer Russia by land although New York City would have been hit by two nuclear attacks. Comic book artists imagined that the Soviets would attack the west coast of South America with an army. Science fiction authors postulated the Soviet occupation of America. Then there was the later version, which estimated, according to Herman Kahn in his “On Thermonuclear War”, that by the mid Sixties, it was now possible to annihilate the civilization of the attacked enemy, and so led to movies like “Fail Safe” and Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”. No way out of a conventional war then, only the apocalypse.
Read MoreJohnson’s “Tour of the Hebrides'' is two things. It is an entertaining account of his travels with Boswell to the Near Abroad that begins in Edinburgh, which Johnson thinks will be a familiar enough city to his readers so that it need not be described, and works its way to the remote islands off the northwest coast of Scotland, and then back again, revealing things about the places and the peoples that might seem a bit strange to his London readers. Second of all, in this mild guise, Johnson presents what is an analysis of the social structural differences between a backward place and a modern, affluent place, as Britain is, and how one can become the other. This is the self same project that was taken on by the Nineteenth Century sociologists who also wanted to explain how the modern world differed from the feudal or other pre-modern worlds, and so I think it would be correct to treat Johnson as one of the founders of sociology even if he is not given credit for being so because he is a literary man and so his most incisive social structural observations are not particularly abstracted as such, even as other contemporary proto-sociologists such as Thomas Malthus, are given their due because he originates of formulas to describe the whole of social life something sociologists never following up on this promise while economists have tried, however fruitless they are at making predictions. Moreover, Johnson makes his comparison between two societies that are very similar to one another. The two share an island, a language, a Protestant religion, even if Johnson says early on that Scotland has abandoned the more rigorous forms of Calvinism which had earlier inflamed it, as well as having been a single nation, at least officially, for some fifty years. His book is, therefore, much like Young’s “Travels in France'' where Young, some fifteen years later, will treat travel to the land across the Channel as something of a voyage of discovery, finding the natives to be somewhat backward by English standards, neither their farms nor roads up to his standards.
Read MoreSamuel Johnson should be best known as the father of modern literary criticism. Before him, there were mostly what we would today call works of literary theory, such as Sir Philip Sidney’s “Art of Poetry”, which explained the nature of literature. That had mostly been the case in literary studies since antiquity. Commentary was reserved for the Bible and the works of theologians. Johnson, on the other hand, made observations about the author and about lines within the texts of Shakespeare and all the other major poets in English in the century before he wrote so as to make the texts more accessible and therefore pleasurable for the reader and so led to the false conclusion that criticism was a parasitic discipline that lived off the literature upon which it commented rather than was the application of the personality, wisdom and wit of the commentator to make these secular texts come alive by providing comments on them.
Read MoreI am rewatching he 1976 miniseries biopic “Eleanor and Franklin'' and I find it very moving, much deeper than the romance and marriage of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, who were ninnies who never accomplished anything other than flirt with Fascism and spend the Fifties, as I remember it, living in the Waldorf Astoria in New York and spending their time with cafe society, one evening after the other going to the famous restaurants, nor the even more dull Charles, who cruelly married Diana even though he knew himself devoted to Camilla, the true love of her life, who he reclaimed and who by now will become the Queen Consort when he finally ascends to the throne. The story of Diana is of a rather limited woman overcome by paparazzi though perhaps more so by a reigning queen who could do little else than to muddle with her family, mostly preventing them from marrying the people they wanted: her sister and then her son and finally having to give in to Megan, the divorced American Black woman who within a few years she and her husband spurned the whole family.
No, “Eleanor and Franklin” are about deep stuff, partly because it was based on the Joseph Lash biography, he having been a good friend of Eleanor’s when she was older, and because of Jane Alexander and Edward Herrmann in the title roles who while mimicking some of their peculiarities, such as her high pitched voice and his overly bon honomie, were beyond that and made the two fully human beings, their lives full of flaws and makeshift events and yet determined by both of themselves to make something of themselves, the truth being that neither of them might seem the metal to achieve high achievement.
Read MoreThere is a great leap between the gods as they are recognized by anthropologists concerning pre-literate peoples, where the gods are like spirits of nature anthropomorphized into being people because the wind or the ocean or the trees have spirits of their own and so act like free will or are places mysterious enough so as to think of them as having special and conscious like qualities, as is the case with mountains or rivers, and those gods or God who come later. What is to be done with man made creatures rather than with the facts and forces of nature once they have evolved that far into cities? What are those gods like? The Greeks are too late so as to assess that transition. Their gods are immortal and they have superpowers but are subject to normal or extreme family relations and their feelings and so are like superhero movies who have frailties and so fit into everyday soap operas. Even “Gilgamesh” portrays the spats between the gods as resulting in the flood and the making of an ark to withstand the flood. It is only Abraham who stands out as a figure, what we might call a modern figure, who conceives of God as different in nature from other gods in that it is invisible rather than of a place or time and that is subject to morality, even if God remains as a largely quiet figure who sometimes lashes out or bothers to say something profound, God not at all an ordinarily to be understood person. A way to understand that period between spirits and God can be revealed in “Gilgamesh” itself by looking at what are the social structures that have already been obtained by that level of civilization and those that have not yet been accomplished. The effort is not to find new things in the epic as it is to see what is obvious about what things are still same and what things have profoundly altered, what are the greater parameters of social life before they became what was already familiar in Greek and Hebraic life.and literature.
Read MoreHenry James, I think, is an acquired taste that I never did acquire even though I was diligent in reading his major works when in graduate school. I didn’t like him because he was artful in the bad sense of the word. He arranged his stories so as to make a moral point after having clinched his case with an O’Henry twist so that James made sure you got the moral. The shorter works were better but had the same failing. “Washington Square” makes sure you know that it would have been kinder and more moral to allow the ugly duckling heiress to marry her male gold digger. In “The Beast in the Jungle” the young woman tells her friend in the end that he never actually committed to do something, which is to show he loved her, and the moral is that actions of omission are just as devastating and significant as acts of commission. The longer James novels, such as “The Golden Bowl”, are insufferable with their ambiguity and ambivalence strewn in every page, these clever people less clever than their inventor. Who cares to parse the characters because all it means is that they can reverse yet another time on the next page? That is different from Jane Austen, whose characters are set even if they are also ambivalent and rendered ambiguous because each one of them also has his or her own central spine, people just being that way. But I have recently come across James’ “The Spoils of Poynton”, another short novel, and it does have its virtues, even if overly contrived in that every outcome is preordained however much people are wills of the wisp.
Read MoreLet us say we call it “an ordinary novel”: not breathtakingly ambitious and with a host of memorable characters and a big deal moral and philosophical meaning, like “War and Peace” but any number of satisfying and entertaining tales that involve a few distinctive characters, a setting with atmosphere and some plot twists that are surprising and illuminating and where the strands are more or less tied together in te ending, even if some are not. Add some set pieces, like falling in love or turning a spy into a double agent and a reader has got his or her money’s worth, a distraction into another world not too far from our own. Even if exotic, and having had an experience which adds to the reader’s sense of life even if not very specifically. Even extraordinary novels are like ordinary ones in providing those pleasures, from the time when Robinson Crusoe was stranded on an island and the reader wondered how he would manage it--very well indeed-- all the way through English and American literature where a reader at the end of Bellow's “Herzog” whether or not he liked the title character. Even “Ulysses” had the hero wander across Dublin for a day doing the qquantidion and spectacular things he did never mind the fancy linguistic theatricfs. I wanto look in this way to John Le Carre’s “Agent Running In The Field”, the last published of his books before he died. (I reviewed favorably a few months ago his posthumous novel, “Silverview”)
Read MoreThe genre of the romantic comedy is long lasting and stable, reaching back to Menander, and currently available in great numbers in contemporary screening services. The basic idea of all of them is that a couple meets cute, which can also mean conflicted or troubled by their natures or their circumstances, the two becoming emotionally involved, amd then the story concerns how they deal with or unravel the conditions of how they met so that they can live happily ever after at least until they die, which in “Romeo and Juliet” not all that long after they met, and so treated as a romantic tragedy rather than a romantic comedy. That love obtains, and often triumphs, over the corpus of literature, suggests that love is a deep thing and that alterations in this perennial story reveal a good deal about how cultural ages themselves alter, love given as the standing parameter, not altered until very late, in Jane Austen’s time, when love becomes a mutual appreciation and involvement of personalities and not just a matter of sexual attraction, as that happens, as best we know, of Paris and Helen and Samson and Delilah.
Read MoreLiterary journalists rely on tired tropes to hold together the points they make as the themes of essays about one or another of the subjects they decide to write about . They need to have points because their high school English teachers said so, even though newspaper type reports or encyclopedia entries or recipe books may not have them, nor do memoirs or diaries or clinical records. But literary journalists do make points and those therefore can be obligatory references to a theory or a touchstone that lets the reader know how the writer is placed among the ideologies and interests and pursuits that define the writer, or else just to provide some apparatus to help hold the thing together. I am reminded of this by my catching up with past issues of the New York review of Books and finding that so many of its ideas are unnecessary or simply canned. There is an article that reminds the author that she is a Feminist, or else that imperialism was a bad thing, or that an author was underrated when all that was meant in the claim was that an author was not properly rated rather than was upped higher on a ruler presumed previously ranked.
Read MoreThe protagonist of Alan Furst’s most recent novel “Under Occupation”, set in occupied Europe in 1942, is a mystery writer and he offers how to go about constructing a novel and the reader can infer how Furst does the deed himself. The fictional writer says that there should be invented characters who are types or contrary to types so as to make the characters interesting and that there should be added local color, such as the colors of streetcars, so as to provide an authentic atmosphere. First applies his own prescriptions into this novel. Some women are portrayed as experienced, some less so, and he shows how it rains on a November Paris street, doing particularly well how a train filled with Germans and civilians are strafed by the RAF. That makes a novel engaging and moves a story along. But what is important in a novel are not these mechanics which provide some entertainment but also what might be called the themes of the novel which give it some moment, the sense of the meanings that a novel captures as the way life itself, here and everywhere and not just in the Occupation work, and so raise a novel to being more than an entertainment, if the way the world works is distinctive and clear enough, so that the reader gets an Alan Furst novel, or a Joyce novel, or a Morrison novel, it having created world distinctive in its own at the same time as an insight into the overall metaphysical world to which it has entered. These structures or ways in which being exists, are not as easily replicated as the schoolbook rules about how to create a novel. They have to do with the wisdom the writer may or may not know about the metaphysical and actual worlds are structured and can be inherent in the way the writer composes or thinks, Hemingway having always known ever since his early stories that his sentences added up to his pointillism style while Mann accumulated learning and history to add to his fluid style, his best work, in my opinion, during his most mature work, with Joseph and His Brothers rather than in Death in Venice, just as the mature Dickens had a dark complexity from “Great Expectations” on that made minor the comic romps of “David Copperfield” and “Oliver Twist”. So let us see what Furst does and not mind that he may not say what it is that he knows what he is doing.
Read MoreA standard distinction between the English and the American novel from Defoe to E. M. Foster and from James Fennimore Cooper to F. Scott Fitzgerald, before the categories got changed by Modernism, is the subject matter. English novels are about family life while American novels are about social problems: the frontier for Cooper, organizations purposeful and purposeless in Melville, slavery and inequality for Twain, Howells about labor and Wharon is about the status of women and Fitzgerald is concerned with Jazz Age ambitions. Another way to deal with those novelists writing in English is their ideology or point of view. Dickens is a Christian conservative, George Eliot is a Christian liberal, and Wilkie Collins is a liberal secularist, while Twain is also a liberal secularist but Hawthorne was concerned with sin and salvation and Melville was bitter about the failure or death of God. Here is a third way to sort out the English language novelists and it has to do with the characters of people as open or closed. The major strand is that people are open in that people are what they seem to be. The reader is able to get enough cues to figure out what a person is all about and, presumably, can read real people in that way too. Defoe thought everyone was rational and so understandable. Elizabeth Bennet thought she was outspoken and so some people found her difficult while everybody, including himself, thought Darcey to be arrogant. We know who Fagin is and not to trust his scheming and we know Pip is pliable but carries a torch for a very long time. No secrets are unrevealed in that strand of the English-writing novel. Ahab has mysteries the reader can’t penetrate but we know that itself to be the problem, his secrecy a concern for everyone around him. Wharton’s Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth” knows what her problem is, that she is getting old without having secured a position. On the other hand, there is a minor strand of writers who are difficult to phantom. Twain makes mysterious all the people in Hadleyville without using much of a gimmick, which makes that story a very striking work of art, while the idea that people are not visible is so strange a perception in art as well as in life that their authors have to often adopt a deliberate role by which people act to make themselves cloaked. Melville adopts a confidence man so as to see the mysterious and labyrinthian ways through which people can avoid and attract themselves to Christianity, and so do Conrad’s anarchists and those who follow into the world of espionage: Graham Green also to find his way to Christianity, and most recently, and the subject of this present occasion, John Le Carre. Let’s elaborate on how he does that.
Read MoreWhen dealing with politics or whatever is large enough as a social matter to be considered history, those of us who are viewers or observers or whatever is the audience to politics and history always await what will happen next, knowing that, except for people who are alarmists or very certain about how well off they may be when the world ends, there is no end of new things, just like in a soap opera, where characters emerge and reemerge if the audience likes them or pass from the scene to new figures and their problems. In politics, there is always a new campaign, a new Young Turk, a superannuated figure who lingers on to become President, and new configurations whereby Jews and Blacks and women and Gays can become part of the political elites as well as the political masses. There are new issues, like climate change, and older issues, like abortion or voting rights, that get revived with a slightly different spin. Politics is like going to a carnival where you pick out which game you wish to take part in. The only cost to the game is the willingness of time and attention to deal with it, everyone is a master strategist or a tout who predicts which horse will win. Consequently, the viewers or observers are always trying to construct the succession of events as comprising a story so as to make sense of those events. What candidate will peak too early (like Kamala Harris) or just hold on, like Joe Biden, when, in fact, Biden was always ahead in the popularity contest even if he did not make headway in the delegate votes until after the South Carolina Primary. Nixon thought a candidate should peak just right while Nixon thought you go full out all the time. So, at the moment, a viewer like me thinks politics is at a lull, the dust up over Afghanistan over, waiting for whether Biden can pull off his reconciliation and infrastructure bills, neither voting rights or police violence going to amount to much, Biden a hero if both of the major bills pass and a good chance for him to retain congressional control after the midterms, while losing both will make him regarded as a failed President, and the press uncertain what to make of it if Biden gets infrastructure but has to be very scaled down to get reconciliation of what has now been called social infrastructure, which means the extension of entitlements, which is always the goal of Liberal politics. My theory is that there are lulls and moments of high drama, as when John McCain sustained the Affordable Care Act over President Trump’s objection, partly out of policy and partly out of pique. Isn’t that usually the case?
Read MoreIt is simple enough to understand the difference between the foreground and the background in a novel or a film. “Pride and Prejudice” has a background of small villages and manor houses and smaller homes who at least have a few servants, as well as roads to London and comfortable places there in which people can live, while the foreground, the action of the story, concerns how young people of various stations of life pursue courtship and marriage. That is the adventure or story of the novel, even though by the time Jane Austen does his last and best novel, “Persuasion”, the foreground of the story is about love lost and then regained has also changed its background in that a class situation dominated by property and station is transmuted into social position dominated by wealth. Sometimes, there is a novel or film preoccupied with the background rather than the foreground. Tolstoy shows the social life of upper class Russia in both “War and Peace” and in “Anna Karenina”, the characters appealing enough but not highly distinctive. Pierre, in “War and Peace”, is the type of someone who doesn’t belong, useful as a companion to go with and elucidate battlefields, while Levin, in “Anna Karenina”, is a type of person trying to be progressive by becoming reactionary, he becoming a bit more human when he notices that he is old enough so that his teeth are beginning to rot. (I guess there were few dentists.) The same focus on background also applies to “Gone With the Wind”, a way of life overturned and ended after what was its brief flourish, the author making believe, as it was for historical consciousness, a way of life that had lasted for only a few generations from the time when the plantations were established and the destruction of the South brought about by the war. Enough figures populate the present so that the background is explored. The same is true with much greater effect in James Gould Cozzens’ much underappreciated “Guard of Honor” where a dashing World War II Air Force officer is tested as a leader, the foreground, when the real drama is how his air base, as an organization, measures up to adapt to changing circumstances. The background, not the foreground, is the issue.
Read More“Sense and Sensibility”, which is the first of Jane Austen’s novels, is a fully developed work. It has the brittle and humorous dialogue, the vivid characterizations, the plot twists, and the deep penetration into the social life of the time, that mark all of Austen’s completed novels, even if there are later novels that include even deeper and more complex people than is the case in “Sense and Sensibility”, such as Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park'', or themes very different from supposedly sunny Jane Austen, such as when death and despair provide the tone for “Persuasion”, the last of her novels. In “Sense and Sensibility”, Jane Austen had already established herself as the best author since Shakespeare. Moreover, “Sense and Sensibility” is clearly grounded in and expressed in its moral lesson and so the novel has the weight that other of her novels have about the meaning a reader is to infer and to contemplate, even if this meaning is one that current readers might find uncomfortable or even repugnant.
Read MoreJane Austen published “Persuasion” posthumously in 1817, which meant that the novel was composed by her in her late thirties, far beyond when she was likely to marry, but she seems still in her later years to have pined about having never managed to marry. She was, in fact, a maiden aunt, tending the children of relatives, which is just what Anne Eliot, the fictional heroine of “Persuasion” believes has begun to happen to her, nursing children and putting up with her whiny and self indulgent sister as best she can. Anne’s is a rather grim future, even if Jane seems to have gotten along with her real life sister. So Austen, so committed to the notion of bourgeois matrimony, as it includes both romance and children, crafted “Persuasion” as a fantasy about what might have been: how a lover she jilted comes back on the scene and after a while she and he reawaken their mutual sense that they were meant to be together, that they both had persistence in their mutual devotion despite the fact that people will persuade them to be otherwise and so lose several of their years before finding one another again. Anne gets everything: a suitor arises before she gets the man she wants, and even gets the childhood estate she wanted as the place where she and her new husband will live. What makes the story other than a silly girlie romance is the perspicacity whereby Austen looks into family dynamics and the context of the times that make what is happening to the characters’ individual lives. First off, however, is how harsh Austen is to the people in this last of her novels, much more so than was the case with other Austen figures who are also undeserving. Mr. Collins is a clown and so is so patently insufferable that he is amusing. Even Mr. Wickham, who is a cad, is discovered to be just what he is and so to be avoided or sent away, his main purpose is to let Darcy to be seen as how noble he is. But the people who surround Anne are dangerous and insufferable and deplorable and it is a wonder that Anne can follow through the crowds of ingrates and social climbers so as to find her own true love. The main setting for the romance of Anne and Frederick Wentworth is set in Bath, the fashion spa developed only recently in the 1770’s,where the wealthy live in what we would call a planned community of mostly grand apartments, as accompanied with musicals and shops. The poor are there only so as to provide service., as is the case with a modern ski resort. As in all of Austen’s novels, the pace races ever more quickly towards its ending, and Anne does so, going to see Frederick before he will leave and admit to him that she loves him even as he is trying to send him a letter admitting that he loves her, and so both of themselves proposing to one another, which is just a perfect thing. The anxiety comes from all those other people interfering, and most of them malicious, including a distant relative, a Mr. Eliot, who is told by another that he was a cad who wanted her title and would have had a mistress if he had married Anne. It would not seem that it was much too fit that Anne learned he was right to distrust Elliot, but Austen tends to do that, making who was good and bad all too certain rather than left murky, as happens when Mr. Wickham is not just an opportunist but a seducer and the good people overcome the bad rather than just do what they do while the particularly good people find one another. In “Persuasion”, there are so many bad people, and we have to sort out their kinds of badness. Jane is getting bitter.
Read MoreI read a recently released future history novel about a naval conflict between the United States and China. “2034” was written by Eliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavrides. The novel was entertaining even though it had very elementary skills at fiction writing and so provides a good sense of how elemental are the properties of fiction, that fiction is an enterprise that is pleasing in its basic idea, and so to be examined to find out just what that is. I think of it as “painting by the boxes” which was a pastime of some decades ago when people would use the paints provided by dabbing each of the thousand square boxes with the number designated in each square. The painter, not really an artist, found some satisfaction from completing the project. It was less demanding than doing a crossword puzzle. And what resulted was a picture that had the elements of painting, however rudimentary and mechanical was the process. The painting had color, texture, composition and emotional tone, which is what emerges from any painting even if there is little art that makes it deeply feeling or thinking. The same is true of this novel which alludes to the elements of the novelistic style rather than freshly or vividly engaging it as that of a distinctive accomplishment, but satisfying nonetheless. Moreover, it also has a moral theme and a sense of war that at least reminds the reader of more significant fictional and real events and are worth noting because even people, including writers, also have takes on the military life and the history of nations that are worth observing because they render cliches rather than insights.
Read MoreHere is a difficult and deep literary question. What is the difference between apparent meaning and actual meaning and how do texts make use of that distinction? The actual meaning of a text is what critics will say is the accurate meaning even if people are misled to think the text is otherwise, as when readers have a sense of what they are getting at, what the text is communicating, even if the text has not been sufficiently analyzed so as to find what it actually means by looking at its words, phrases, images, and all the other apparatus through which critics or just careful readers interrogate a text. An ordinary communication exemplifies the difference of the two meanings. You get a sense that a beloved loves you even if the spouse sends you unclear or stunted signals. A person won’t rely on the words rather than appreciate the meanings of the words, consulting the intentions rather than the words themselves. The same thing happens if people swear an oath to God. It doesn’t mean that God will punish the person for having broken the oath, but a person has just indicated that they will speak truthfully by whatever one holds dear, such as a mother’s grave. The intention is more important than the formula of words even as in literature a reader can get a sense that people seem polite in Jane Austen because they use what seem to us today to be cordial words, when in fact, critics would say, Austen characters are very cutting with one another, some readers preferring politeness to incisiveness, and so separating “Janites”, as they were and are called, from the darker Austen considered by some critics. While, then, there is evidence in the text that leads people to misinterpret the text, and so the text gives off an apparent meaning, there is also and better evidence which justifies the actual text, which is the accurate or, at the least, the more accurate text as constituting the actual text.
Read MoreMelodrama is usually thought of as an inferior genre. It pits bad people against good ones, as if it were not a simplification to separate people in that way. Melodrama also has exaggerated emotions which people dwell on for much too long and present themselves as victims rather than as active participants in their own lives, and so lose or lessen their dignity. Moreover, melodramatic plots are resolved by arbitrary intrusions of coincidence or derring do, when what ordinarily happens is that people work their way through circumstances and character. “The Count of Monte Cristo” is melodrama because his escape allows his hero to engage in a passion for revenge so as to exquisitely appreciate the suffering inflicted to make up for the suffering that has been caused, everyone drowning in their bad feelings, everyone, including the protagonist, a victim and also malevolent. This is the set of feelings that settle into the Nineteenth Century, supposedly because a more popular audience was not well enough educated to consider finer feelings, though one wonders whether the audiences for Greek tragedy were as elevated as the spectacles to which they attended.
Read MoreEarly blurbs about Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun” sounded as if they would be disappointing. They promised the book to be about a clone who becomes like a human being or about the dire consequences of technology. Neither of these themes were to be the case even if Ishiguro’s earlier masterpiece, “Never Let Me Go” does show how a clone is recognized by the reader as having become human because one pair of them does find a family and one of the pair finds art by doing doodles. Rather than these themes becoming inevitable for the sci-fi universe, as when in “Blade Runner”, the robots, however short their life spans, have seen great experiences and so are the equivalent of humans, Ishiguro works to an opposite tack, which is to show how the clones, in this case the mechanical artificial intelligences, are of a very different kind of species, subject to their own initiatives and feelings, and the reader only gradually learns what is universal to all sentient species, including both humans and those not biologically based. This is a much deeper inspection into this particular sci-fi genre, in that it goes beyond showing creatures to be human like by showing what is natural to a species, any species, and so does the work that was done to Rousseau and others to find out what is the nature of human beings if they are shed of social conventions and left only with their most primitive or elementary sensations. Rousseau was the end of a century or so long experiment to find a bare bones psychology in Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke and Hume, the collection of them usually understood as contract theorists when what they were more importantly dealing with was philosophical anthropology, which meant the elementary origins of human emotions, that sequence overturned by Kant, who took up a critical stance, whereby he demonstrated what had to be there in actual rather than original life and society, because without these assumptions the world as it is wouldn’t make sense.
Read MoreI am afraid that I am going to stick to my guns, however much my view of romance is contrary to the long history of romance in world literature, I thinking that, Ovid and Chaucer to the contrary, love is understood until Jane Austen as it was with Dante’s Francesca and Paolo, who resided in the second circle of Hell because they were people separated by a mad passion from social life rather than integrated with one another and into society. Romance is not part of human nature and so there as long as there have been people. To the contrary, it was invented much more recently, even after the American and French revolutions. What Jane Austen invented in the second decade of the Nineteenth Century was that real romance meant that the couple would find their mutual devotion by coming to deeply understand their characters and would also find a way for the lovers to find the social situation that suited them and that the couple could emotionally prosper by being part of social life rather than isolated from it, which is also the idea that marriage counselors will say. This revolution was so powerful that the previous dispensation was suffused in its light even if Twentieth Century critics reinvent the Dante idea of love as the real meaning of love, but such are the avenues and lanes whereby cultural adaptations evolve, ever tracking back on themselves as they claim to be doing something new, as happens when politicians think they are inventing new ways to be free when they are repeating cliches of previous generations.
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