The Hunger Games

I don’t really think the HG series is worth blogging about, so I’m going to keep it short.  I’m writing because the discussions of the books I’ve read miss what seem to me the most obvious things about them.  This mystifies me.  It might actually be because they are too obvious for people to mention, but I can’t be sure.  So here I go, with some simple stuff.

First, I have heard a number of people speculating that Cinna joins the conspiracy because he is gay and the Capitol is not gay-friendly.  The claim that he’s gay is based on his being artistic, into clothes, and very cool — and that’s okay I guess.  But the other part of the claim can’t be right, as it is just not plausible that the Capitol insists on any kind of sexual normativity.  The Capitol is a portrayal of Roman enormity, and must treat sex the way it treats food:  the more the better, the kinkier the better, throw up and do it again.  Its grotesque morality is premised on excess, not limitation, and if it can be said in any way to represent our society in order to criticize it, it’s not our homophobia that’s being criticized, but our vapid, imperialist capitalism, and commodity fetishism.

Second, there is in the plot of HG a hint of Greek mythology laid over the Roman background insofar as the arena, as well as being a gladiatorial colosseum, should also remind us of the labyrinth.  It is the labyrinth into which, each year, an equal number of young men and young women were sent to be killed, sent as tribute and as a reminder of conquest.  Each of the three books highlights a different aspect of the parallel.  The labyrinth of the myth is escaped, as in the first HG volume, by a young man and a young woman working together.  And the labyrinth of the myth is mastered, as in the second HG volume, by a thread.  And the labyrinth of myth is defeated, as in the third volume of HG, by a joining of forces from the city (in the case of the myth, Ariadne) and from the party representing tribute (in the case of the myth, Theseus).

Actually I don’t think people are commonly aware of the Theseus roots, and especially not of the thread, Ariadne’s and Beetee’s, stretching from the centre of the maze or the heart of darkness out to the extremity, and facilitating its defeat.  But surely this third point is known to everyone:  that HG is not really about the colosseum or Greek mythology.  It is about reality TV, in particular the show that set the tone for the rest:  Survivor.  The kids are dropped off in a desolate place and must fight to survive, rewards are sporadically given to them from outside, each evening a few of them are, albeit rather drastically, voted off the island, there are arbitrary rule changes, and the rest of society, forced to watch the whole damn thing on TV, find themselves presented with more soap than contest.

Presumably this is critique of our society on a different level, but it’s pretty weak critique.  It’s like one of those documentaries condemning porn where the real interest is that you get to watch all that porn.  And this, of course, is the real problem with HG.  The games are fun.

Read Full Post »

Dystopian politics

I’ve spent the past two days reading a book my students have been trying to get me into for years:  Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game.  It holds interest for me mainly because it provides another entry in the short list of novels that follow what I call the Lawrence of Arabia Pattern.

In the Lawrence pattern, a group of rival nations come together to fight off a common threat, an imperial power that is much more powerful and technologically sophisticated.  Beating the threat takes just about the whole text to accomplish:  the war is the pretty much the whole story.  Except that to fit into the pattern there has to be a twist at the end:  a denouement, in which politics resumes its natural course and the rival nations, no longer facing a common enemy, begin to squabble.

The idea is probably simply that humankind naturally tends toward war.  It gains philosophical depth, though, by the fact that the tendency is always presented under an ambiguity.  Either hostility is the necessary human condition or it’s marginally preventable;  war is either inevitable or almost inevitable.  The general idea gives the books a cast of tragic realism; the narrow ambiguity gives them a cast of political profundity.  Together they make readers feel wised-up, and smart.

I first met the pattern in John Christopher’s Tripods series.  More recently, it became the political backbone of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy.  Orson Scott Card does it all in one book, and it feels a little rushed.  The real problem with Ender’s Game, though, is something else.  Both Card and Collins present the pattern in plots that hang on a game — yes, Ender’s game is a game, and yes, the hunger games are games.  But Ender’s game is nothing more or less than a video game.  Seriously:  this whole book is a matter of reading about someone playing video games.  In comparison the Hunger Games’ game, which is gladiatorial, seems like real life.

And there’s more.  Following Christopher, Collins uses her game as a feature of dystopia:  it’s the bad guys who force you (Collins) or encourage you (Christopher) to spend your life playing games.  In other words, for Christopher and Collins, games are a distraction and prevent you from accomplishing anything.  In Card, they are the only thing to do, and they win wars.

Read Full Post »

Favourite characters

I talked about favourite books, so now it’s time for favourite characters. What does it mean: a favourite character? More specifically, is your favourite the character you identify with, or is it the character you’re in love with? Obviously J.M. Barrie is sympathetic to Peter Pan. But does that mean he sees himself as Peter Pan? That’s what lots of scholars say. Or is he in love with Peter Pan? That’s what I think.

My guess is that most people reading the Harry Potter books identify with Hermione. Girls, boys, it doesn’t matter: she is the voice of common sense, as well the one who understands the muggle perspective, our perspective. I’d go so far as to say it doesn’t really make sense to read the books without identifying with Hermione. What she thinks is always, in the broadest sense, true; it’s what we’re meant to think, what we’re being drawn to think. But does this make her the universal favourite? I do not think so. Nor, for that matter, does it make Ron the universal favourite. But I’m thinking more and more that “favourite” implies a loosely erotic connection.

One of my students came into my class with a favourite character: Bellatrix Lestrange. I have put gentle effort into questioning this choice, and believe I have successfully steered him in the direction of his next love, who turns out to be Narcissa Malfoy. In turn, he has convinced me that Cissy is one of the great behind-the-scenes manipulators of the books. I look forward to future character studies.

Read Full Post »

Favourite books?

I’ve thought for a long time that people lie when asked their favourite books.  I usually do, and I bet my experience is general.  I lie because I don’t know what the question means.  Does it mean the books that I think are the best?  Or, of the best, those that I particularly enjoy?  Should I try for a list that includes representative examples from various genres and periods?  Should I pick a book typical of an author by whom I’ve read everything?  Now that I think of it, I don’t exactly lie.  It’s just that in one mood my answer might constitute a list of Shakespeare plays, and in another mood, Plato’s dialogues.  Or the collected works of P.G. Wodehouse.

But this morning, responding to a post on Meg’s blog, I realized that a better, more honest answer might come in response to a different question:  to what books do I turn when I am sick, or unhappy?  It wouldn’t produce a list of favourites (no Nabokov!), but, then, there is no list of favourites.  It does, however, produce a revealing list, which is what the original question seeks to elicit.

So what do I read – and read again and again — when I am at my most lowest and most fragile?  It’s a short list, and it is characterized by a cast of naiveté.

1. Marchette Chute’s The Innocent Wayfaring, than which a sweeter, charminger lighter, less angst-ridden book has never been written.

2. E.F. Benson’s Lucia books.  I am a full-blown Luciaphile.  These books delight me, and have no other effects.

3. Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit Will Travel.  I’m not sure what grabs me about this book.  I like all Heinlein’s juveniles (as much as I dislike all his adult sci fi, which is a lot) but this one stands out from the rest.  It is heroic, innocent, and, like the other things on this list, profoundly non-annoying.

4. The Lord of the Rings. I don’t need to say much about this, except that I am always happy to read it even though (a) I know it almost by heart, and (b) I would have to criticize it strenuously if I ever taught it.  I like the books in order of appearance, one better than two, two better than three.  And while the other books on this list I usually read from front to back, these I can pick up at any page.

Read Full Post »

Should you read Why You Should Read Kafka? Oh, go ahead.

I open James Hawes Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life expecting to find an account of how exactly a Kafka-less life would be wasted, to be amused and enlightened by a grand division of lives into Kafka-added (good) and Kafka-free (bad).  From the fly-leaf, however, I gather that what I’m going to get instead is a systematic debunking of prevalent myths about Kafka, a full-scale attack on “the K-myth” that’s been created by a cabal of over-protective scholars.  Then what I get when I start reading is something else entirely.  The book is a tidbit-stuffed rant, going off in a variety of directions pulled together in the culminating argument that Kafka was a pretty regular guy and that pretty regular guys like us should therefore find his writing all the more relevant.  And I agree.  Bravo!

Hawes does organize his book around a series of myths he wants to debunk.  But in order to make himself sound radical he oversells his myths, and the upshot is that half the book reads like a big straw man and the other half reads like the obvious.  Take myth #1:  “Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime.”  Does anyone actually believe this?  Hawes marshals all sorts of interesting evidence of Kafka’s literary success, but presents it in a sneering tone, as if he’s got one on somebody.  Does he?   He makes a lot of the fact that Kafka’s biographers don’t give much mention of his having split the Fontane prize in 1915, but, if they don’t feel that there’s any doubt about Kafka’s moderate literary success, why should they?

Or take the final myth, that “Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds.”  If people believed his works didn’t bear on reality, why would they read them?

And Hawes doesn’t only oversell the myths.  Sometimes he oversells the anti-myths.  One of the myths he takes on is that Kafka, as a Jewish German living in Prague, was part of a “minority within a minority.”  He presents numbers to show that most German-speakers in Prague were Jewish, and explains the historical fact that the Germans were the ruling elite.  So far so good:  the myth, if myth it was, is debunked.  But the argument gets weaker when he suggests that because of this, Kafka’s Jewishness couldn’t have been a source of anxiety.  Honey, Jewishness can always be a source of anxiety!  And how much more so in a country where, as Hawes lets slip in a chapter dealing with a different topic, Kafka’s second serious girlfriend was locked up in an insane asylum by her father for nine months for wanting to marry a Jew?  So we lurch from oversold myth (people think all his work can be explained by Jewish insecurity!  but do they?) to oversold demythologizing (he couldn’t possibly have experienced Jewish insecurity!  but couldn’t he?).  It’s a crazy ride.

However, I enjoyed the craziness, and had fun discounting for Hawes’ excitement.  And I learned lots of things – no, not things that corrected my false impressions, just things I didn’t happen to know.  Like that Kafka was fond of porn.  And that he made a good salary as a civil servant.  And that he liked Conan-Doyle.  And that his father wasn’t (from an objective perspective) any more intimidating than most people’s fathers.  Also, that he once wrote that “though the might of his work, Goethe probably holds back the development of the German language.”  Which means he was having thoughts similar to those of his contemporaries, Rosenzweig and Benjamin, about the relationship of literature to the history of a language.

Read Full Post »

Absalom

I taped a TV show last week on Absalom, one of the sons of King David. I’ve never paid much attention to his story before but it’s an awfully juicy one. If it were a play in two acts, the first would treat his fratricide — his eldest brother has raped their sister and Absalom avenges her – and the second his almost-successful campaign to overthrow his father and take the throne. Lots of interesting things happen along the way. An advisor turns traitor, a crop is burned for small political gain, Absalom flees Jerusalem and returns, David flees Jerusalem and returns, a spy is used effectively, a wise woman is manipulated into making a prophetic comment and adds a comment of her own, and there’s a kind of truth and reconciliation affair at the very end. Absalom even has a cool death. While he’s fleeing the battlefield, his mule passes under a tree and he is caught in the branches. David’s commander is led to the spot and, against David’s instructions to deal gently with his son, kills him. David dies not long afterwards, probably from grief.

What I didn’t point out on the show (for several reasons) were the parallels between Absalom and Jesus, parallels that become all the more interesting in light of my interlocutor’s argument to the effect that Absalom’s sin was perfection. There’s a Jewish argument for you, and no surprise coming from an Orthodox rabbi: “be perfect” is just not advice that works for Jews. That argument is his and I cannot duplicate it here. It has to do with Absalom’s much touted physical perfection, his restraint as a life-long Nazirite, his apparent lack of regular human relationships, and his inability to tolerate the injustices endemic to regimes. But I can say in more detail what’s mine.

-Absalom is born to the most illustrious father and a lowly mother (his mother was a captured slave woman).
-we have no childhood stories; after the account of his birth he re-enters the narrative in his prime.
-he is very beautiful.
-he is a defender of women.
-he believes the ruling regime in Jerusalem to be unjust, and makes the idea known.
-he starts a revolution to defeat the Jewish leadership.
-he rides a mule.
-someone refuses to betray him for 10 (or 1000) pieces of silver; he is nevertheless betrayed.
-he ends up hanging from a tree, pierced by spears.
-his body is taken down and placed into a pit, which is then sealed.
-he is much mourned by his father.

What might happen when you tie my argument about the parallels to my interlocutor’s argument that Absalom’s sin was to be too perfect could be very interesting, and might give a whole new spin to the scorn in which Absalom is held by the Jewish tradition.

Read Full Post »

Don’t bother with this unless you’ve read Norrell & Strange. If you haven’t, and happen to want to read Harry Potter crossed with War and Peace, do.

The book is about the restoration of English magic. Why, asks John Segundus in the first chapter, do we only study magic, not perform it? and thenceforth the question governs the action of the book, providing motivation for Norrell (and, as we later learn, for a much more powerful force) and eventually bearing fruit in the book’s climax. But though Clarke is generally careful about her loose ends, the original decline of English magic is never explained. We learn gradually that at a certain point the tradition began to decay, and are given a hint that Uskglass might have been responsible, but the matter is never made clear.  Mr. Segundus’s question is never answered.

I put the question to my mother: “how,” I ask “did England lose its magic?” But as soon as I put it that way, I know that the answer doesn’t matter. Because it’s true: England did lose its magic. Always the political scientist, my mother writes back that “perhaps we’re just intended to think of the history of England. Age of Reason. Scottish Enlightenment. Industrial Revolution. Etc.” And she asks: “So what would we conclude about the age in which magic returns?” What indeed? Before she replied, I had been thinking of literary rather than political history, of Uskglass not so much as Arthur but as someone like the Gawain poet, and of magic as a power in the management of words that waned as the language was modernized. But it’s the same kind of deal. And Janet’s question still stands. What is this revival Clarke describes? Or, as I would put it, how can a novel make us feel the restoration of magic convincingly without a treatment of its decline? I love the book, but I’m wondering if there’s a philosophical hollow here.

Read Full Post »

Lost and found

I just read in the paper (=the TLS) that Kipling burned all his letters before he died, and that after his death his wife bought and burned most of the rest of his correspondence and 45 volumes of her diaries.  I am overcome.  Not that I wanted to read those 45 volumes or that I am ever likely to read a biography of Kipling – I do not read biographies – but I might have read those letters dammit.

But I am so ornery that I can be annoyed by found texts as well as lost ones.  A few weeks ago I discovered (this time by reading Christopher Hitchens’ illuminating review of a biography of Saki in the Atlantic, for I do read reviews of biographies) that my Penguin edition of Saki’s Complete Short Stories is missing six.  Stupid me, I assumed that the complete short stories would contain all of them.  Fortunately the missing six are in the public domain and available on the web.  But don’t get the idea that I was overjoyed to discover them.  The pleasure of reading Saki is rereading:  reading over and over again, immersing myself once again in the world of preposterously clever young men and revenge taken on cruel aunts, a world from which I emerge with sharper, longer, better patterns of speech.  These new stories are strangers to me, and I resent their existence.  In short, I have missed 25 years with what I may now not be able to make old friends.

Read Full Post »

Eila sick, Laura coming

Yes, Eila is sick, and once again I notice that the main difference between Eila sick and Eila well is that while she is sick she is obedient.  She remains smart, funny, and good hearted, only it’s not all mixed with foot stamping, door slamming sulks and demonic screams of “no!!”  Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?  Isn’t health supposed to be conducive to politeness?  Isn’t sickness supposed to make you cranky?

I am so pleased that Dmitri Nabokov has decided to publish The Original of Laura.  It was touch and go for a while there: having sat on the index cards for 30 years, despite his father’s instruction to burn them, he began a few years ago to discuss with fans and critics the question of what to do, and seemed for a time to be leaning toward the fire.

Apparently Vladimir wanted them destroyed because he was afraid that an unfinished manuscript would be subject to even more vulgar criticism than a finished one.  And he was always despairing about the critics: of one of the many Freudians who “twisted” his work, he wrote: “And he will be read, he will be quoted, he will be filed in great libraries, next to my arbors and mists!”  Maybe Dmitri was heartened by the many fans who, with love and wit, agreed that the cards should be burned.  But we are all glad to have them.

Read Full Post »

The Scent of Water

One of the more common patterns in British children’s literature places a group of kids into a wild garden where they meet a mysterious old lady who guides them in an adventure.  (I wrote a brief post a while ago about some of them.)  I’ve just now read a novel by Elizabeth Goudge that tells the story from the perspective of the old lady.  Is that not interesting?  Of course there’s no magic — there wouldn’t be for the old lady, only for the kids.  And she’s much younger than she appears in the other novels — 50 — but that, too, is right, since she would only seem ancient to the children.

I’m not exactly recommending The Scent of Water. Goudge has other better novels, both for children and grown ups.  This one is shot through with inordinate levels of Christian piety, and so sentimental that at one point Goudge comes close to apologizing for it.  (“And if that was a sentimental idea, I didn’t care.  Being ill makes you feel what people call sentimental, but what you feel is nonetheless genuine whatever they call it.”)  But so odd and engaging to have the kids there, in the garden, performing the tasks they need to perform in order to do whatever growing up they are to do, while we watch them and occasionally guide them from a distance.

Read Full Post »