Leo X. Robertson's Blog, page 16
January 31, 2017
Losing the Plot!
Hello good people, Here you can listen to every episode of the Losing the Plot podcast so far! I’m working on getting it on iTunes and Overcast—let me know how you like to listen to podcasts, and I’ll see what I can do :) I’m looking to release a new interview every Wednesday and new book review every Friday. As always, you can get in contact with me if there’s anything at all you’d like to…
January 24, 2017
I Don’t Know 5: I CAN SPEAK!TM
This George Saunders story takes the form of a letter written by an employee of the company KidLuv to a customer who has returned a product known as the “I CAN SPEAK!TM”, a device which is strapped onto a baby’s face and makes the baby appear that it is talking. The product cannot read the baby’s mind: it simply says a number of stock phrases, or those programmed by the parents, depending on the chosen product’s sophistication.
The letter is filled with creep from the first paragraph: ”I thought I would take some of my personal time (I am on lunch) and try to address the questions you raised in your letter, which is here in front of me on my (cluttered!) desk”, that only gets creepier “We would like to come to your house on Lester Street and make a personalized plaster cast of [your baby’s] real, actual face!”
The KidLuv employee writing the letter goes on to proselytise for the company, detailing the many merits of the I CAN SPEAK!TM range of products, creeping even further as he talks about the use of the device on his own son: “It makes you love him more. Because suddenly he is articulate…we have several times seen a sort of softening in the eyes of our resolute childless friends, as if they, too, would suddenly like to have a baby.” What is wrong with this guy, this corporate fetishising drone loser? It soon becomes apparent: “last weekend my supervisor, Mr Ted Arnes, stopped by (a super guy, he has really given me support, please let him know if you’ve found this letter at all helpful) and boy did we all crack up laughing when [my son] began rubbing his face very rapidly across the carpet in order to make his ICS2100 shout, “FRICTION IS A COMMON AND USEFUL SOURCE OF HEAT!””
“On a personal note, I did not have the greatest of pasts when I came here, having been in a few scrapes and even rehab situations, but now, wow, the commissions roll in, and I have made a nice life for me and [my family]… if you decline my upgrade offer and persist in your desire to return your ICA1900, my commission must be refunded, by me, to Mr Arnes… I don’t quite know what I’m doing wrong.”
It would be fantastically easy to indict the person writing the letter and leave it at that: if he was a good guy, would he work for this creepy corporation? Saunders has the intelligence and empathy to demonstrate that “Corporate America” is a thing once created by humans that now apparently roams around on its own. This is demonstrated in further stories in the collection In Persuasion Nation, in which this story appears, most memorably for me in the title story where a breast filled with Red Bull invades a house and tries to nurse a baby.
Saunders has an essay collection called The Braindead Megaphone, his name for the omnipotent voice of the media, defined as “the composite of the hundreds of voices we hear each day that come to us from people we don’t know via high-tech sources”: it exists as a technically alive separate entity, which is harmful, but has no easily definable consciousness at its helm. Similarly, Corporate America pushes people apart and leaves them dumbfounded as to how exactly it got to this or what to do about it. Behind the corporate mask are a whole bunch of people trying to keep their kids fed: the mask itself is alive and out of control. Quoting from The Braindead Megaphone: “How does such a harmful product emanate from such talented people? I’d imagine it has to do with the will to survive… each deferring his or her “real” work until such time as he or she accumulates his or her nut and can head for the hiills, or get a job that lets them honor their hearts.” Doesn’t that seem to reflect Chekhov’s observations in “Gooseberries”? “A young friend who writes content for the news page of an online media giant, emails me:… If anyone wonders why Americans aren’t informed with real news it’s because of sell-out corporate goons like me who will do anything to never deliver a pizza again.”
Saunders doesn’t claim to know what to do about the situation, and from his non-fiction work, it’s clear he knows that awareness of issues doesn’t automatically lead to the resolution of them: he merely aims to reflect those issues, as apparently dumbfounded as anyone else as to how America arrived where it is today.
I don’t know about you, but I feel positively healed, understood, reassured and yet disturbed by these examples. I have re-entered life’s unknowable flux with just enough human understanding and black humour to get me through. I wonder if with enough time, patience and mind-boggling, you will be the next to join these greats?
January 23, 2017
Episode Four of the Losing the Plot Podcast: Interview with Eddie Generous of Unnerving!
Eddie Generous is editor-in-chief of Unnerving, a dark fiction publisher, and Unnerving Magazine, a quarterly dark fiction publication.
We lose the plot talking about favourite writers, what it’s like to start a magazine, and the influence of Stephen King’s literature on the canned ham market.
Enjoy!
If you are a writer, reader, editor or someone who fancies a chat, please get in touch with me at losingtheplotpodcast [at] gmail [dot] com and let’s set something up—looking forward to it!
I’ve done my best to make the below narrative/ observations make sense if you haven’t seen the film,...
I’ve done my best to make the below narrative/ observations make sense if you haven’t seen the film, but I doubt they are all that interesting to read unless you have seen it. It’s not the way I would have liked to receive its awesome messages about life (2h45min runtime, prostitutes and Nicole Kidman? What??) but it is effective nonetheless :D
Eyes Wide Shut is a film about fantasy and reality and actions and consequences and life and death and lust and money. With symbols of games and toys and red and blue- also some Illuminati bullshit.
- Dr. Bill Harford goes to a party where a patient of his named Victor calls him up to a room, where a prostitute has OD’d. Bill brings this girl back to life.
- The inciting incident of the story takes place when Bill’s wife Alice confesses to him a sexual desire of hers that she had for another man, and did not act upon. Thereafter Bill considers her fantasy in blue light, indicating not a shred of lust in it for him. As a result of this confession of inaction, Bill heads off on a sexual Odyssey that evening. To what extent is Alice’s fantasy just a fantasy? It created Bill’s reality, the evening that follows. To what extent is Bill’s reality his reality?
- Bill goes to a prostitute’s flat. He is about to have sex with her, but by chance Alice calls him, and Bill decides not to go through with it. In a later scene, we learn that this prostitute had HIV. Why doesn’t Bill have HIV? Because Alice called him before he could complete the act with the prostitute- though it’s not even a guarantee he would catch it if he had gone through with the act anyway, but that will never be known. It is not Bill’s lack of desire but Alice’s chance interruption that stops him. Bill does not sleep with anyone on his Odyssey in fact: each opportunity is interrupted. In this case, do we applaud him for stopping after the interruption, the prostitute for making him think of his wife when she inquires about the call, his wife for interrupting the act? Does the prostitute deserve HIV more than Bill does? She does what she does for money- is this more or less innocuous than what her clients do?
- Bill meets up with a friend of his. He learns that this guy is to play the piano blindfolded at a classy orgy party, run by some Illuminati-esque society who are pretty hostile to outsiders, ie Bill, who goes to the party later that evening. The society catches Bill and is about to do something obliquely bad to him, when a masked girl says she will sacrifice herself for him, and is taken away.
- After the party, Bill goes to the hotel where the party’s piano player is staying. Alan Cumming’s character, the receptionist, is believable when he says that the piano player has left, and nothing bad happened to him. When pushed by Bill, Alan gives some account of “big guys” being in the hotel room with him the night before, and of a secret envelope. Does he say this because he is flirting with Bill, creating a miniature fantasy to gauge if Bill might go for him? There is a lingering shot where we see Alan considering Bill a little after Bill has left the hotel- it’s all deliberate… we cannot be sure that anything bad did happen to the piano player after all- nor can we be sure that it didn’t. Bill is pushed in the street afterwards and called a “faggot”, likely because of his accidental involvement in Alan’s fantasy, which enters reality.
- Later, Bill meets Victor, the patient of his from earlier who claims to have been at the party (everyone’s in masks, so who knows?) Victor says that when the girl said she would sacrifice herself for Bill, it was just an act to scare him away. But the prostitute that Victor was with, whom Bill met at a previous party, OD’d and died that same night. Victor reassures him that this is merely a coincidence, and also says that nothing bad happened to the piano player. We can’t be assured of either of these things. What does it matter which happened? Are we even sure that the girl that died really was the one from the party?
- What do we think of Victor? Before he appeared a second time, I thought worse of him than Bill. That is to say, Victor was a married man who saw prostitutes, and Bill was a non-judgmental doctor. After Bill and Victor meet again, they are about the same. Victor went through with his affair, the girl nearly died, Bill brought her back to life. Later, this same prostitute (we think) sacrifices herself for Bill and “dies” (we think) even although Bill didn’t go through with any of his fantasy. Then, who is worse? At first we judge Victor, and perhaps the prostitute. In the end we judge Bill, and laud Victor and the prostitute for the sacrifices they make to preserve Bill’s inherent “goodness”- though the fantasy of an affair and the reality of it are treated equally. Victor and the prostitute seem to perceive that Bill should be spared from the games they play, when actually Bill plays the same games. Victor might be lying about the whole thing, or maybe he doesn’t even know what happened. Since everyone wore masks, we don’t know if Victor was at the party. We don’t know if the prostitute was either. One thing is for sure: both men are out of their depth when it comes to sexual fantasies that they want to make a reality.
- During the Bill-Victor scene where they discuss the orgy, Victor mucks about with the balls on the red (no accident) pool table, and Bill says he doesn’t feel like playing. But are we fit to judge anyone in this film at all, based on what they do, what they don’t do, what they fantasise about, what they don’t fantasise about? There’s no way they can predict the consequences of their actions OR fantasies one way or another, regardless of the intent of them, or their perceived badness or goodness. But, maybe we see that the acts of sacrifice, the acts of forgiveness are each and every time more noble. Each time thought turns to action converts to consequence, we have no idea of the outcome of any of it, or what would happen if we stop it at any step.
- At one point in the film Bill wakes up Alice because she is laughing. When Bill sees his mask from the orgy on the pillow beside Alice, he wakes her up because he is crying. Alice confessed to him her fantasy, out of spite, and it started Bill’s weird sexual saga. Bill confesses about the prostitute and the orgy to Alice- out of guilt? Fear? Obligation?- and it ends all the problems. Alice confesses freely and with conviction; Bill confesses only because he sees his mask from the orgy, placed on the bed, perhaps because he is afraid and not because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. Does he think that the confession will cure things? It has no effect on whether or not the bad guys will stop chasing him. Does he confess because he thinks the bad guys placed the mask there, or because she found the mask? We don’t know that it was left at the party or not! Which option was it, and does one of these make his confession better?
Things I did not figure out:
- What role does money play in this film? Bill racks up quite a bit of spent cash in his evening. The costume shop owner wants to send some guys to jail for sleeping with his daughter, but in the morning he has a monetary agreement with them, one he is so satisfied with that he is willing to offer his daughter to Bill in future if he so desires.
- What role does death play in the film? One woman’s dad is dead, and she kisses Bill and proclaims that she loves him. Is this to say that inaction and hoping for tomorrow brings about stasis, but the realisation once again that we are going to die brings about urgency and change? Love is often portrayed as a distraction from death.
- Bill asks Alice to tell him what she dreamed: it seemed to reflect his evening at the party. She was there only in fantasy. What is the significance of her dreaming his evening: is it nothing more than a reflection of their dualities: him, reality; her, fantasy?
This film I believe is of the opinion that people might think they want their fantasies to be a reality, but that’s not what they want at all. What they want is what they have. Alice doesn’t like that she and Bill will be together “forever”, and we can see this film as a complete cycle. We create a fantasy world, we try it out and expect a different outcome in spite of our experience. We then learn again the true nature of life and that it cannot match our fantasies, once again. The cycle in the film begins with a sexual act between Bill and Alice. In the final scene, they make amends in a toy shop, again not deliberate (on their part, not Kubrick’s), because they are children to the true chaos of their acts. He is sure they won’t repeat the cycle and she isn’t. Whether they will or won’t, it has no bearing on what happened. How they even reached the truth to each other was very much out of their hands. And whether or not they will “book-end” the story’s cycle is not revealed before the film ends.
One thing we can say for sure about Eyes Wide Shut (lol the title) is that it deliberately blends reality and fantasy alike: neither is a separate divide. Mere intention can cause consequence and action doesn’t necessarily incur consequence: in what proportions this occurs or doesn’t occur, we don’t know. We are children playing games we don’t know how to play when it comes to the universe’s indifference to us and how it plays dice with our fate, giving us what we deserve and what we don’t deserve, or nothing, at random. Kubrick is not didactic about anything: the film has no moral high- or low-ground, just a plateau. He does not even suggest there is a way out or a way to act- as if we could really control our fate with our actions anyway.
I Don't Know 4: Eyes Wide Shut
I’ve done my best to make the below narrative/ observations make sense if you haven’t seen the film, but I doubt they are all that interesting to read unless you have seen it. It’s not the way I would have liked to receive its awesome messages about life (2h45min runtime, prostitutes and Nicole Kidman? What??) but it is effective nonetheless :D
Eyes Wide Shut is a film about fantasy and reality and actions and consequences and life and death and lust and money. With symbols of games and toys and red and blue- also some Illuminati bullshit.
- Dr. Bill Harford goes to a party where a patient of his named Victor calls him up to a room, where a prostitute has OD’d. Bill brings this girl back to life.
- The inciting incident of the story takes place when Bill’s wife Alice confesses to him a sexual desire of hers that she had for another man, and did not act upon. Thereafter Bill considers her fantasy in blue light, indicating not a shred of lust in it for him. As a result of this confession of inaction, Bill heads off on a sexual Odyssey that evening. To what extent is Alice’s fantasy just a fantasy? It created Bill’s reality, the evening that follows. To what extent is Bill’s reality his reality?
- Bill goes to a prostitute’s flat. He is about to have sex with her, but by chance Alice calls him, and Bill decides not to go through with it. In a later scene, we learn that this prostitute had HIV. Why doesn’t Bill have HIV? Because Alice called him before he could complete the act with the prostitute- though it’s not even a guarantee he would catch it if he had gone through with the act anyway, but that will never be known. It is not Bill’s lack of desire but Alice’s chance interruption that stops him. Bill does not sleep with anyone on his Odyssey in fact: each opportunity is interrupted. In this case, do we applaud him for stopping after the interruption, the prostitute for making him think of his wife when she inquires about the call, his wife for interrupting the act? Does the prostitute deserve HIV more than Bill does? She does what she does for money- is this more or less innocuous than what her clients do?
- Bill meets up with a friend of his. He learns that this guy is to play the piano blindfolded at a classy orgy party, run by some Illuminati-esque society who are pretty hostile to outsiders, ie Bill, who goes to the party later that evening. The society catches Bill and is about to do something obliquely bad to him, when a masked girl says she will sacrifice herself for him, and is taken away.
- After the party, Bill goes to the hotel where the party’s piano player is staying. Alan Cumming’s character, the receptionist, is believable when he says that the piano player has left, and nothing bad happened to him. When pushed by Bill, Alan gives some account of “big guys” being in the hotel room with him the night before, and of a secret envelope. Does he say this because he is flirting with Bill, creating a miniature fantasy to gauge if Bill might go for him? There is a lingering shot where we see Alan considering Bill a little after Bill has left the hotel- it’s all deliberate… we cannot be sure that anything bad did happen to the piano player after all- nor can we be sure that it didn’t. Bill is pushed in the street afterwards and called a “faggot”, likely because of his accidental involvement in Alan’s fantasy, which enters reality.
- Later, Bill meets Victor, the patient of his from earlier who claims to have been at the party (everyone’s in masks, so who knows?) Victor says that when the girl said she would sacrifice herself for Bill, it was just an act to scare him away. But the prostitute that Victor was with, whom Bill met at a previous party, OD’d and died that same night. Victor reassures him that this is merely a coincidence, and also says that nothing bad happened to the piano player. We can’t be assured of either of these things. What does it matter which happened? Are we even sure that the girl that died really was the one from the party?
- What do we think of Victor? Before he appeared a second time, I thought worse of him than Bill. That is to say, Victor was a married man who saw prostitutes, and Bill was a non-judgmental doctor. After Bill and Victor meet again, they are about the same. Victor went through with his affair, the girl nearly died, Bill brought her back to life. Later, this same prostitute (we think) sacrifices herself for Bill and “dies” (we think) even although Bill didn’t go through with any of his fantasy. Then, who is worse? At first we judge Victor, and perhaps the prostitute. In the end we judge Bill, and laud Victor and the prostitute for the sacrifices they make to preserve Bill’s inherent “goodness”- though the fantasy of an affair and the reality of it are treated equally. Victor and the prostitute seem to perceive that Bill should be spared from the games they play, when actually Bill plays the same games. Victor might be lying about the whole thing, or maybe he doesn’t even know what happened. Since everyone wore masks, we don’t know if Victor was at the party. We don’t know if the prostitute was either. One thing is for sure: both men are out of their depth when it comes to sexual fantasies that they want to make a reality.
- During the Bill-Victor scene where they discuss the orgy, Victor mucks about with the balls on the red (no accident) pool table, and Bill says he doesn’t feel like playing. But are we fit to judge anyone in this film at all, based on what they do, what they don’t do, what they fantasise about, what they don’t fantasise about? There’s no way they can predict the consequences of their actions OR fantasies one way or another, regardless of the intent of them, or their perceived badness or goodness. But, maybe we see that the acts of sacrifice, the acts of forgiveness are each and every time more noble. Each time thought turns to action converts to consequence, we have no idea of the outcome of any of it, or what would happen if we stop it at any step.
- At one point in the film Bill wakes up Alice because she is laughing. When Bill sees his mask from the orgy on the pillow beside Alice, he wakes her up because he is crying. Alice confessed to him her fantasy, out of spite, and it started Bill’s weird sexual saga. Bill confesses about the prostitute and the orgy to Alice- out of guilt? Fear? Obligation?- and it ends all the problems. Alice confesses freely and with conviction; Bill confesses only because he sees his mask from the orgy, placed on the bed, perhaps because he is afraid and not because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. Does he think that the confession will cure things? It has no effect on whether or not the bad guys will stop chasing him. Does he confess because he thinks the bad guys placed the mask there, or because she found the mask? We don’t know that it was left at the party or not! Which option was it, and does one of these make his confession better?
Things I did not figure out:
- What role does money play in this film? Bill racks up quite a bit of spent cash in his evening. The costume shop owner wants to send some guys to jail for sleeping with his daughter, but in the morning he has a monetary agreement with them, one he is so satisfied with that he is willing to offer his daughter to Bill in future if he so desires.
- What role does death play in the film? One woman’s dad is dead, and she kisses Bill and proclaims that she loves him. Is this to say that inaction and hoping for tomorrow brings about stasis, but the realisation once again that we are going to die brings about urgency and change? Love is often portrayed as a distraction from death.
- Bill asks Alice to tell him what she dreamed: it seemed to reflect his evening at the party. She was there only in fantasy. What is the significance of her dreaming his evening: is it nothing more than a reflection of their dualities: him, reality; her, fantasy?
This film I believe is of the opinion that people might think they want their fantasies to be a reality, but that’s not what they want at all. What they want is what they have. Alice doesn’t like that she and Bill will be together “forever”, and we can see this film as a complete cycle. We create a fantasy world, we try it out and expect a different outcome in spite of our experience. We then learn again the true nature of life and that it cannot match our fantasies, once again. The cycle in the film begins with a sexual act between Bill and Alice. In the final scene, they make amends in a toy shop, again not deliberate (on their part, not Kubrick’s), because they are children to the true chaos of their acts. He is sure they won’t repeat the cycle and she isn’t. Whether they will or won’t, it has no bearing on what happened. How they even reached the truth to each other was very much out of their hands. And whether or not they will “book-end” the story’s cycle is not revealed before the film ends.
One thing we can say for sure about Eyes Wide Shut (lol the title) is that it deliberately blends reality and fantasy alike: neither is a separate divide. Mere intention can cause consequence and action doesn’t necessarily incur consequence: in what proportions this occurs or doesn’t occur, we don’t know. We are children playing games we don’t know how to play when it comes to the universe’s indifference to us and how it plays dice with our fate, giving us what we deserve and what we don’t deserve, or nothing, at random. Kubrick is not didactic about anything: the film has no moral high- or low-ground, just a plateau. He does not even suggest there is a way out or a way to act- as if we could really control our fate with our actions anyway.
January 20, 2017
I Don’t Know 3: Camus’ The Fall
Having read the fall thrice now (it’s tiny, dense and confusing) I’m pretty confident to say that it is a novel that discusses the silent hypocrisies on which society founds itself. The narrative is delivered in the form of a long monologue from Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a once-revered lawyer, fallen from grace. As a result of “the fall”, Clamence is painfully aware of the hypocrisies of his former existence, and is filled with stories and analogies to deconstruct them: they are wonderfully dark and never without their share of humour, which makes the novel just as daring and illuminating when read today.
On our deceptive appearances
“I once knew a manufacturer who had a perfect wife, admired by all, and yet he deceived her. That man was literally furious to be in the wrong, to be blocked from receiving, or granting himself, a certificate of virtue. The more virtues his wife manifested, the more vexed he became. Eventually, living in the wrong became unbearable to him. What do you think he did then? He gave up deceiving her? Not at all. He killed her. That is how I entered into relations with him.” Jean-Baptiste enters relations with a man because the man killed his own wife out of frustration for his own lack of virtuosity. J-B holds an unwavering admiration for those who decry their own hypocrisies. J-B goes on to say “I had no chance of killing my wife, being a bachelor.” He believes that only not having a wife guarantees you won’t kill your wife, not any kind of self-restraint or good character: as explained later, J-B believes that we live in a constant grey area of morality that we can choose to navigate across whenever, but that we love to deny this. As a result, he shows, on more than one occasion, admiration for even the basest people whose appearance reflects their character. “You think he looks like a killer? Rest assured that his actions conform to his looks.”
“You are in business, no doubt? In a way? Excellent reply! Judicious too: in all things we are merely “in a way.” Now, allow me to play the detective. You are my age in a way, with the sophisticated eye of the man in his forties who has seen everything, in a way; you are well dressed in a way, that is as people are in our country; and your hands are smooth. Hence a bourgeois, in a way!” Everyone is only something “in a way.” Civilisation is preserved with categories. Everyone is in fact a little of everything, undefinable and uncategorisable, forever evolving.
“We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself. You won’t delight a man by complimenting him on the efforts by which he has become intelligent or generous. On the other hand, he will beam if you admire his natural generosity. Inversely, if you tell a criminal that his crime is not due to his nature or his character but to unfortunate circumstances, he will be extravagantly grateful to you.” J-B believes that we hate to acknowledge the effort that goes into moving us across the moral spectrum: we are too scared to think of its existence, that we may lack virtuosity and have to go about remedying that. If we appear to be good, we must be inherently good; if we appear to be bad, our circumstances must simply be inescapably unfortunate.
On relationships
“I used to put [women] in the refrigerator, so to speak.” [Digression] In the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode “The D.E.N.N.I.S System”, Dennis reveals his system for picking up women that allows him to sleep with them and leave them, yet pick them up again whenever he wants to. The actor has said that Dennis is the embodiment of his own worst behaviour, attitudes and habits. [End digression.] “No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures”, says Jean-Baptiste.
“The moment I was loved and my partner again forgotten, I shone, I was at the top of my form, I became likable. Be it said, moreover, that as soon as I had re-won that affection I became aware of its weight. In my moments of irritation I told myself that the ideal solution would have been the death of the person I was interested in. Her death would, on the one hand, have definitively fixed our relationship and, on the other, removed its compulsion. But one cannot long for the death of everyone or, in the extreme, depopulate the planet in order to enjoy a freedom that cannot be imagined otherwise. My sensibility was opposed to this, and my love of mankind.” Only “the death of the person [we are] interested in” will cement in place the constant flux of our interactions and re-evaluations of each other and what we want- this can indeed become unbearable at times.
“I am well aware that one can’t get along without domineering or being served. Every man needs slaves as he needs fresh air… The lowest man in the social scale still has his wife or his child. If he’s unmarried, a dog. The essential thing, after all, is being able to get angry with someone who has no right to talk back… Somebody has to have the last word. Otherwise, every reason can be answered with another one and there would never be an end to it.” Oppression is a necessary tool to cut short constant discourse and the flux of life’s ambiguity. Eventually we need to decide right and wrong to move forward, even although it has been explained that this is not really possible.
On life’s constant flux
J-B recounts an incident where he hears a woman falling into the water, perhaps to her doom (perhaps mirroring the ambiguity of Ophelia’s death in Hamlet? Did Ophelia try to drown herself, or did she just fall?) “I had already gone some fifty yards when I heard the sound—which, despite the distance, seemed dreadfully loud in the midnight silence—of a body striking the water. I stopped short, but without turning around. Almost at once I heard a cry, repeated several times, which was going downstream; then it suddenly ceased. The silence that followed, as the night suddenly stood still, seemed interminable. I wanted to run and yet didn’t stir. I was trembling, I believe from cold and shock. I told myself that I had to be quick and I felt an irresistible weakness steal over me. I have forgotten what I thought then. “Too late, too far …” or something of the sort. I was still listening as I stood motionless. Then, slowly under the rain, I went away. I informed no one… What? That woman? Oh, I don’t know. Really I don’t know. The next day, and the days following, I didn’t read the papers.”
J-B doesn’t know what happened to the girl. Other incidents mentioned in the novel allude to the notion that the conclusions he tries to draw from his own past rest on incomplete information. And, having informed no one about this incident, this besmirching of his character is not available for others to judge him upon. But what if the woman was okay? Or does it matter either way, given that he didn’t help? Did he really have any obligation? Maybe she wanted to fall in… This one event, a couple of confusing minutes one evening, demonstrates the incomplete informationwe have to go off when it comes to our judgement of others, or ourselves. There’s no possible way to follow up our impact on everyone we’ve met, nor is there any way for anyone to reach a definite conclusion about the impact we’ve had on them either- and even so, that impact evolves as we try to draw conclusions!
“If I had been able to commit suicide and then see [the] reaction [at the funeral], why, then the game would have been worth the candle.” If we were able to “cement in place” our relationships with others, to “finalise” our interactions with others, and see the effect it had, and how they added it all up, it would be worth it. But we cannot live and know the whole of our effect on the world at the same time, ever! The absurdity of existence, the unknowability. “In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that’s all.” Doubt is the order of our lives, flux and greyness, no true black and white, even if this is the artifice that holds us in place. Only death will end the absurd, but it’s not worth it either, because you’ll never hear your own final judgement. People from your life will happily crawl back out the woodwork to come to your funeral and apply labels to you that they came up with that are almost guaranteed not to capture who you really are. While we are alive, and not conceivably able to have the relief of everyone else around us dead (and thus all our relationships set in stone), the jury is constantly out on all of us, and so does our moral status fluctuate in unknowable ways.
Life is all middle, all confusion, with too much information in the air for us to make reasonable sense out of it: “a dead sea, or almost. With its flat shores, lost in the fog, there’s no saying where it begins or ends. So we are steaming along without any landmark; we can’t gauge our speed. We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It’s not navigation but dreaming.”
Conclusion
In The Fall, Camus identifies and addresses a number of false truths that we assume to be true, and skilfully negates them using some wonderfully dark and daring stories and analogies. The consistent dark humour doesn’t “soften the blow” of these truths so much as affirm life in spite of them. Camus rallies for us to live honestly- right? Is that possible? Or do we live in a world so rife with hypocrisy and does civilisation need lies to survive? Uh…
January 19, 2017
Episode Two of the Losing the Plot podcast!
In this episode, I tell you about a book that became very important to me. The question came from Ms Michelle Ruedin—many thanks :)
I Don’t Know 2: Chekhov’s Gooseberries
This is but one example of Chekhov’s immense storytelling power, the one I thought best suited to “IDK.” In “Gooseberries”, an old man named Ivan speaks of his brother Nikolai’s desire to flee the city and buy a farm: “To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life – it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit.”
Nikolai is given some dashes of telling characterisation during his pursuit of the farm, such as that “he liked reading newspapers, but only the advertisements of land to be sold…” We learn how Nikolai eventually obtained his own farm with the gooseberry bush that was so essential to him: “[He] married an elderly, ugly widow, not out of any feeling for her, but because she had money.” Although Nikolai obtains his blissful little farm-world, his hands are not clean.
Ivan pays Nikolai a visit, and finds that his brother is still enraptured by gooseberries. Ivan tries one: “It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.”
All this rumination culminates in Chekhov’s philosophical payload: “In my idea of human life there is always some alloy of sadness, but now at the sight of a happy man I was filled with something like despair… I thought: ‘After all, what a lot of contented, happy people there must be! What an overwhelming power that means! I look at this life and see the arrogance and the idleness of the strong, the ignorance and bestiality of the weak, the horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, drunkenness, hypocrisy, falsehood… . Meanwhile in all the houses, all the streets, there is peace; out of fifty thousand people who live in our town there is not one to kick against it all. Think of the people who go to the market for food: during the day they eat; at night they sleep, talk nonsense, marry, grow old, piously follow their dead to the cemetery; one never sees or hears those who suffer, and all the horror of life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and against it all there is only the silent protest of statistics; so many go mad, so many gallons are drunk, so many children die of starvation… . And such a state of things is obviously what we want; apparently a happy man only feels so because the unhappy bear their burden in silence, but for which happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Every happy man should have some one with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him – illness, poverty, loss, and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer, and the happy go on living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day, like an aspen-tree in the wind – and everything is all right.‘”
Realising his own blissful folly, Ivan compels his young listeners to take action: “"Pavel Koustantinich,” he said in a voice of entreaty, “don’t be satisfied, don’t let yourself be lulled to sleep! While you are young, strong, wealthy, do not cease to do good! Happiness does not exist, nor should it, and if there is any meaning or purpose in life, they are not in our peddling little happiness, but in something reasonable and grand. Do good!“”
But will they take his advice?
“Ivan Ivanich’s story had satisfied neither Bourkin nor Aliokhin… it was tedious to hear the story of a miserable official who ate gooseberries… . Somehow they had a longing to hear and to speak of charming people, and of women. And the mere fact of sitting in the drawing-room where everything – the lamp with its coloured shade, the chairs, and the carpet under their feet – told how the very people who now looked down at them from their frames once walked, and sat and had tea there, and the fact that pretty Pelagueya was near – was much better than any story.”
Much like Nikolai and his gooseberries, Ivan’s young listeners are exalted by their own illusion. They perhaps feel indignant: older generations will always lecture the young to do not as they did. They carry the suspicion that this hypocritical message is delivered with the intent of denying them their birth-right of peaceful happiness. It seems as if each generation needs to learn the same lesson about the hollowness of bliss by repeating the same mistakes. But Ivan does plant a seed: “A smell of burning tobacco came from his pipe which lay on the table, and Bourkin could not sleep for a long time and was worried because he could not make out where the unpleasant smell came from.”
The questions the story raises aren’t answered: they are articulated through the story and delivered to the reader for him or her to consider. And yet they are so monumental in size that we don’t expect the reader to answer the question themselves. This story is the “someone” with the little hammer at the door to knock and remind us that there are unhappy people. How much happiness we should have versus how much social injustice we should find it within our power/responsibility to tackle is forever unclear. Nowadays we have never been more aware of the world’s social injustices. The internet is the man with the hammer at the door, but he doesn’t have Chekhov’s humanity. “FW: FW: Leo: Tell Cameron Ice Caps Can’t Melt Bees!” Those of us pluged in have no farms on which to hide, and the effect can be debilitating: surely there is a balance? Everyone requires their dose of happiness as much as their face-rubbed-into-it-ness, but when, how, where, which, and to what degree is something I will never know, something Chekhov can’t know, nor does he expect the reader to know. Is it really true that while social injustice prevails, happiness doesn’t exist?
Chekhov has successfully reflected life and the human condition without claiming to know what to do about it, which is the most intelligent and truthful thing a storyteller can do.
January 18, 2017
I Don’t Know 1: Hamlet
I posted a set of five blog pieces on the theme of “I Don’t Know” a while back, and as I recall they seemed to outline my favourite type of fiction, which is explained in detail below. Well, I have a larger audience now and thought new folk might appreciate these if they hadn’t yet seen them :) And thanks to those who read them first time around! Hope they were useful :)
I want to discuss the power of not knowing. Not like Barthelme’s Not Knowing, about the power of writing fiction without knowing where you’re going, but the power of delivering the message of uncertainty. This is something that only storytelling of the highest quality can deliver.
You can spot young-writer-nervousness in our work’s occasional accidental didacticism or its desperation to reveal the entirety of something or to right some wrong. In fact, it turns out the most courageous and the truest and most human thing you can do as a writer is only reveal what you don’t know and admit that you don’t know it: you reveal the problem without solving it.
What is IDK? It’s giving a fair and balanced account of all characters, discursive rather than persuasive fiction, refusing to point the finger by instead showing how characters point fingers at each other, empathising as far as is possible with all of them, refusing to provide a victor or a loser and creating a world full of problems so complex that they defy resolution. (Likely this has some literary term I’ve never heard of.)
I have several examples of “IDK” and will serialise them across “I Don’t Know Month” which starts with this post on Hamlet today and continues for as long as an I Don’t Know Month does, because it’s my thing. Any work mentioned contains spoilers. I hope you enjoy these reflections and please feel free to submit your own, because “IDK” is my favourite brand of storytelling :)
I Don’t Know 1: Hamlet
I did begin my own analysis on this but found the basic effect of Hamlet better summarised by Kurt Vonnegut, so much so that it’s more or less all that remains! Ah, why say it twice though? :D
“[Hamlet’s] father has just died. He’s despondent. And right away his mother went and married his uncle, who’s a bastard.… So Hamlet goes up and talks to this fairly substantial apparition there. And this thing says, ‘I’m your father, I was murdered, you gotta avenge me, it was your uncle did it, here’s how.’ Madame Blavatsky, who knew more about the spirit world than anybody else, said you are a fool to take any apparition seriously, because they are often malicious and they are frequently the souls of people who were murdered, were suicides, or were terribly cheated in life in one way or another, and they are out for revenge. So we don’t know whether this thing was really Hamlet’s father or if it was good news or bad news. And neither does Hamlet. But he says okay, I got a way to check this out. I’ll hire actors to act out the way the ghost said my father was murdered by my uncle, and I’ll put on this show and see what my uncle makes of it. So he puts on this show… His uncle doesn’t go crazy and say, ‘I-I-you got me, you got me, I did it, I did it.’ It flops. Neither good news nor bad news. After this flop Hamlet ends up talking with his mother when the drapes move, so he thinks his uncle is back there and he says, ‘All right, I am so sick of being so damn indecisive,’ and he sticks his rapier through the drapery. Well, who falls out? This windbag, Polonius.”
In attempting to kill his father’s murderer, Hamlet murders Ophelia’s father: he becomes the thing he wishes to avenge.
“Neither good news nor bad news. Hamlet didn’t get arrested. He’s prince. He can kill anybody he wants. So he goes along, and finally he gets in a duel, and he’s killed. Well, did he go to heaven or did he go to hell?… I don’t think Shakespeare believed in a heaven or hell any more than I do. And so we don’t know whether it’s good news or bad news… There’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth…The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”
This dense mixture of action, inaction, reality, fantasy and whether or not we can with our reasoning divine the correct action to take and whether or not this action will lead to the desired beneficent consequences is the stuff of life!
For more info on the shapes of stories from Kurt Vonnegut, check
this out.
