Foolish Hearts in Literature
Plus: Yes, you've finally made a monkey (and a snake, a newt, a loach, a... tree thing) out of me!
Creatures, the night is full of transformations! In this edition, two short book notes and a couple links.
I re-read Their Eyes Were Watching God. This was a third reading for me. I read this book, and I enjoy being in it, and then it washes off—I forget everything. I read it first in high school, when I think what I enjoyed (and then forgot) were the images of lush youth in bloom: the sex, and the defense of sexual desire as a way of making your decisions. I don’t think I got much from what was my favorite thing this time around, the episode of the free mule. This time I liked wallowing in the way people talk. And I did savor the portrayal of stupid youth in stupid bloom.
I’ve yowled and hissed before about how I don’t get or like Jane Austen. I won’t expand on that here—in general people who dislike a great author understand that author’s work less well than people who like it, and I assume you Austen-lovers have reasons for your incomprehensible emotions. But I found myself thinking about a syllabus, Foolish Hearts in Literature. Austen, sure, where foolish hearts must learn prudence. Kristin Lavransdatter (my partner is on Book III! And has passed the obsession on to her mom, who is in Book II… literally know no Catholic woman who can resist this book), where foolish hearts must learn suffering. The Princesse de Clèves, where foolish hearts are captivated as much by virtue as by romance!
And Their Eyes, where Janie strikes out, against all practical advice, to follow her heart: a little strident, as the imprudent always are, a little bit of a propaganda minister for her own desire. She learns the usual lesson, that your heart is dumb and will hurt you. But she also gets to learn that sometimes your dumb heart comes through for you. Folly’s results are unpredictable: sometimes you throw the bright ball of your life in the air and it smacks down into the palm of someone you love.
Also read Hiromi Kawakami’s collection of three longish short stories, Record of a Night Too Brief. These surreal stories are full of animals that interact with people in unexpected ways: berating us, becoming us. Fish, snakes, catlike creatures that are also a part of your house, Japanese macaques, elephants, newts.
I made my way back along an endless windswept path, and there the girl was. She was seated on a single chair, which she had placed on a totally bare stretch of land. To my surprise, she was smoking a cigarette.
“Why are you smoking, for goodness’ sake?” I asked.
“My body’s changed,” was her reply.
It’s also a collection full of body horror, transformations driven by desire and disgust. I found myself fitting them into a tradition of representing queer desire—this book, especially the title story, resonated with Notes of a Crocodile, published two years earlier. The nameless narrator in that story pursues a girl, consumes her and is filled with “granules of girl,” has a conversation with a mole-laden man that feels like all those conversations girls have with men who don’t want us to make fun of their moles (moles the rodent, not moles the beauty mark)… there are a lot of reasons I was surprised to see that Kawakami is married to a man! Well, it’s a big world. Desire does weird things to everybody. Girls do weird things to everybody!
“Darling,” I spoke to the girl.
“What?” answered the girl.
“Were you always that kind of thing?”
“Yes, I think I probably was.”
Anyway, I definitely found myself feeling that I was missing cultural cues, allusions, lore. The final story has one of those paragraphs where the narrator tells you that surreal tales don’t always have some meaning or moral—they aren’t rebuses. She recounts the tale of a great-grandfather who was seduced by a woman who turned out to be a bird, and then says, “I’d heard this story from my mother when I was a student in middle school, and I remember thinking it was a very odd fable. It didn’t seem to have any point to it. Even now I can’t really see any moral to be drawn.” So maybe my dissatisfaction with this collection is the result of my trying too hard to wring meaning from it, or fit it into a “tradition of representing” something or other, instead of letting it be its rambling, imagistic self.
Webcrawling
Readers of my America article about Awake may be interested to see its new website, which expands its mission beyond its starting point in Milwaukee to address sexual abuse throughout the Catholic Church.
On a very different note… last summer I saw a fairground hypnotist perform. It was creepy! I disliked it! This essay offers some interesting notes on whether hypnotism works, or what people mean when they say it worked on them, which square with what I saw.
Photo of a Japanese macaque looking like a teddy bear in a ritual mask by Angelica Kaufmann, via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.
I am an Austen Liker, so if you decide you want to take a crack some other time, I'd recommend reading one of her works aloud (possibly back and forth with your partner). I liked The Great Gatsby much more when I saw it as the whole-text-of-the-book-play Gatz and was much more struck by the writing hearing it aloud than reading it slightly too fast due to my own bad habits.