Ponderings

Tag: fiction

  • Illumination

    On February 19th, 1917 the American author Carson McCullers was born. She was a shy and diffident child, and by her own admission an outsider. She spent her childhood in a deeply conservative town that, in her mind, valued conformity above everything else. It seemed to her that imagination, creativity and the pursuit of meaning were of little or no concern to the majority of people who lived in this environment.

    However this formative experience was tremendously useful. Her solitary childhood inspired her greatest fiction. It enabled her to write perceptively about the struggles of lonely people living in stifling environments who long to liberate themselves. All her characters yearn to express their own individuality without fear of censure, their difference is never celebrated, it is only feared. They are not embraced by the community, they are exiled to the fringes.

    Her portraits are tremendously powerful and moving. She paints each character in painstaking detail. She illuminates their inner lives, giving them the dignity to tell their own stories. They are allowed some credence denied to them by others. They are not ostracised to the darker recesses, they are brought back into the light. Their importance is crucial to the narrative, there is no pretence or artifice. They are both seen and heard by the reader, instead of being relegated to the shadows and silenced.

    McCullers endured her own struggles. She was frequently ill, and spent protracted periods convalescing at home. Spending so much time away from her peers at school set her apart. Her closest friendships were forged with her family’s household staff, and her extended family. She grew especially close to her aunts and her grandmothers. This was an education in itself, she developed empathy, maturity and wisdom that belied her youth.

    When she was just five years old her father bought her a piano and a typewriter, and for many years she felt conflicted in her ambitions. She was not sure whether she wanted to be a musician or a writer. She remembered her cultural awakening. When she read a biography of Isadora Duncan, her example gave her hope that another life was possible, a life of personal expression and artistic fulfillment.

    She yearned to escape from her small town, and make her mark in the wider world. At seventeen she made her first attempt. She moved to New York with a powerful ambition to acquire a place at the prestigious music college, the Julliard School. When she realised that the fees were too steep, she decided to take part-time work and attend night classes in writing.

    One of her first stories was an early draft of what would eventually become the novel “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter”. This was a profound insight into the inner life of a profoundly deaf man called John Singer. Singer is detached from the community. His closest friend, another profoundly deaf man called Spiros Antonapoulous loses his mind and is sent to an asylum. He later dies at this institution. Isolated and alone, Singer takes his own life. His tragic death leaves a void in the town and the other characters are forced to contemplate their own moral failures.

    It is extraordinary to consider that McCullers was just 23 when this novel was published. Her precocious literary talent was admired and feted by luminaries like Tennessee Williams who encouraged her to adapt her work for the stage. Tragically her health declined in the intervening years. At the age of just 50 she succumbed to a fatal brain haemorrhage. However her legacy as a writer and champion for the marginalised continues to resonate today.

  • Native Wit

    On the 7th January, 1891 the African-American writer, anthropologist, folklorist and filmmaker Zora Neale Hurston was born. She grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first autonomous black principalities in the United States. Her father was the Mayor, and a Baptist minister in the town.

    She was educated at a Baptist boarding school in Jacksonville but was forced to leave after her father failed to pay her tuition fees. She worked as a maid and attended night school, before leaving for University in Washington. While on the course she grew fascinated by anthropology and folklore.

    It opened up her mind to other cultures, which seemed so remote and distinct from the earthy humour and superstition of her hometown. However, as her upbringing was so detached from the experience of white Americans, it gave her a much greater sense of appreciation for the wisdom that she acquired growing up in an all black neighbourhood. She realised that her memories of the stories, traditions and rituals had a profound significance. She decided to continue to pursue anthropology as an academic subject, and she also composed short stories and satirical pieces.

    In 1925 she was granted a scholarship at Columbia University, and three years later she received her B.A in anthropology. Her literary and scholarly talents were recognised by the philanthropist and literary patron Charlotte Osgood Mason. She provided Hurston with a stipend of $200 a month to help further her research into folklore. In 1935 she published her first literary anthology on African-American folklore called “Mules and Men”. This was swiftly followed by the novels “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and “Moses, Man of the Mountain”. Her extensive research work took her to the Southern states of America and also the Caribbean, where she collected stories and testimonies from the African diaspora.

    In 1938, another collection of folklore was published. It was called “Tell My Horse” and it details the syncretic beliefs of the post-colonial world. Hurston’s work was overlooked in her lifetime, as she was overshadowed by literary titans like Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. Both Wright and Hughes were overtly partisan in their political beliefs, and this inevitably gave them more gravitas culturally. Hurston only reflected her experiences, and did not perceive herself as a propagandist for the cause of racial equality. Her objectivity, and obvious affection for the community of Eatonville resonates in her writing.

  • Black Flowers Blossom

    On the 1st January, 1988 the first English language edition of the novel “Love in the Time of Cholera”, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez was published. It was something of a gift to the Anglophone literary world, as it opened up a new and exciting frontier of writing and writers.

    The culture of post-colonial Latin America was once hidden from the rest of the world. It was a region that was considered mysterious and exotic, and Marquez was an expert and a vivid voice describing this colourful and multidimensional corner of the world.

    The novel is set in an era where tradition and modernity converge. It is a confusing time for the characters who inhabit a place of instability and uncertainty. The confusion stems from the imbalance between pragmatic duty, loyalty and the affairs of the heart.

    The characters are suspended on a precipice, a precarious line between the old world and the new world. This is illustrated with a dramatic and auspicious scene, the occasion of a hot air balloon ride on the eve of the twentieth century.

    The main protagonists are the fastidious, correct, upright Doctor Urbino, his wife Fermina, and her lost love Florentino. Florentino is a humble shipping clerk who, as the story unfolds, works his way up to become the manager of the company.

    He is revealed to have poetic aspirations and dreams. Their initial courtship is clandestine, and fails when by chance the doctor arrives in Fermina’s life. She is persuaded by her family to marry him.

    The contrasts between enlightenment and superstition, medicine and primitivism could not be more stark. The parallels between the epidemic of cholera and the pathology of love are intensely moving. Urbino seems immune to affection, and perceives marriage as purely pragmatic. He is puzzled by the very idea of romantic love, and how it is possible between two opposing genders.

    Urbino dies, allowing the revival of Fermina and Florentina’s love affair. Even in old age, their love has refused to die. It has left a permanent imprint. Marquez detailed an alluring and magical world that has continued to charm.

  • A Desolate Beauty

    On the 25th November 1970, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima died. He died in a ritual suicide which was broadcast on television. His suicide, and the central role that he played in a failed political coup has been well documented. Mishima’s last public appearance was intended as a forewarning to the world, a graphic method of self-sacrifice to highlight the decadence inherent to the movement of twentieth-century progressivism. It was apt to depart in such a dramatic fashion, as his entire life, and his work explored the bleakest aspects of modernity. He made a deliberate choice to die in the traditional way of the samurai warriors, a stark counterpoint to the futuristic notions of living, working and dying amongst the remnants of post-war Japan.

    However, his life and death have almost overshadowed his work. His artistic brilliance as a writer is rarely spoken of, especially his last work, a tetralogy of novels entitled “The Sea of Fertility”. This was a saga rich in historical detail. It is evident that in his final days he dedicated himself fully to this project, putting his heart and soul, and in the end literally sacrificing his own life to finish it.

    His research was exemplary. And painstaking. His love of the Japanese nation, history, culture and people reverberates throughout the books, but there is a tinge of despair for the loss of the old ways. Many modern commentators decry his supposed “fascism” but ignore the important context. Their criticisms are shallow and ignorant, it is easy to throw around accusations of chauvinism or extremism, but it is much harder to truly examine the work in depth. Diminishing him and reducing him to a political caricature is crass because there are so many elements in his work that transcend political categories, and there is a powerfully emotive message which is omitted. His work explores fundamental philosophical themes, and the meanings are complex and multilayered.

    The main protagonist is Shigekuni Honda. Honda considers the meaning of life and is caught in a desperate bind between the material, rational world and the vague, subjective notion of the individual human “soul”. He examines the concepts of life, death and rebirth. At the beginning of the series, he is a young student and

    searching in vain for something substantial in a state of impermanence, Mishima illuminates his state of mind in vivid and illuminating prose, explaining,

    “The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions-gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose”. Fate in particular hangs heavily in his mind.

    This becomes abundantly clear when he discovers the corpse of a dog in a river. The arbitrary cruelty of life affects him greatly. The death of an innocent and defenceless animal is just one loss of life in a catalogue of deaths that occur throughout the first book. In this unceasing tale of tragedy he questions the purpose of karma, while in the background there is the very real and frightening prospect of international conflict. Honda’s reveries coincide as foreign generals and diplomats contemplate carving up the map of the world once more without any thought of how this will impact upon the people who will be uprooted.

    The second book in the series focuses on the trial of a youth movement of nationalists accused of planning a military takeover of the government. Honda is now working as a judge and is assigned to this case. He is middle-aged and married, but the preoccupations that bedevilled him as a youth remain with him. Justice and mercy, innocence and guilt are perennial themes.

    Karma is deeply embedded within these concepts. Amidst the machinations at court, he ponders the fleeting aspect of mortal life, and contrasts it with the apparent immortality and permanence of the natural world. Poetic illustrations of the sacred mountains of Japan are contrasted with the dry business of the legal system. Eventually the conspirators are found not guilty, but shockwaves from the rebellion continue to resound throughout the nation.

    In the third book, Honda is sent to Bangkok on a business trip, tasked with settling a legal issue with a Japanese company called Itsui Products who trade with Thailand. He is intoxicated by the landscape and culture and experiences a divine epiphany at a temple. The old familiar feelings return to him, the love of beauty and sentiment and the dislike of cold rationalism. However, as soon as he finds a measure of equilibrium Japan is embroiled in the Second World War, with devastating consequences. In the final book of the series, Honda is elderly and widowed. Japan is barren and struggling to reconcile itself with its militaristic past. Honda himself is rueful, but has found a modicum of meaning in his life as a father to his adopted son. Honda is diagnosed with a terminal illness and on his deathbed realises that what he believed was reality was in fact illusion.

    The tone is characteristically and recognisably Mishima. He was renowned as a master of capturing the desolate beauty of nihilism. The books are replete with lengthy meditations on vitality itself, in sharp contrast to the all pervading sense of decay. These vignettes describe an environment inimical to sustaining life. It is a sterile landscape primed for destruction rather than any promise of regeneration or renewal. This magnum opus is a symbol for the limits of ideologies that seek to negate the past.

  • Call of the Native

    On the 30th July, 1818 the English writer and literary scion Emily Bronte was born. She was the fifth sibling in an illustrious and talented family, her elder sister Charlotte spoke of her as “a native and nursling of the moors”. The Brontes lived amidst the foreboding presence of the Yorkshire moorland, literally inhabiting a landscape that almost had human characteristics of its own.

    This distinctive environment shaped the young Brontes. It was a major influence on their writing. A profound sense of time and place provided the inspiration for their most famous works. They were also the inheritors of a new literary sensibility which elevated the natural world to a semi-mythic status.

    This is evident in Emily Bronte’s poetry, an all pervading feeling of awe and magic imbues her verse, as she expounds,

    “Almighty ever-present Deity!

    Life, that in me has rest

    As I undying Life, have power in Thee!”

    In contrast, another poem is much darker and fatalistic, as she laments,

    “O for the time when I shall sleep

    Without identity,

    And never care how rain may steep

    Or snow may cover me!”

    Bronte was an unmistakable part of the wilderness of Yorkshire, and this native and wild spirit inspired the figure of Catherine Earnshaw, the main protagonist in her stark and Gothic novel “Wuthering Heights”.

    Earnshaw’s short but eventful life is as fateful as the creatures that inhabit the heath. It is as tragic and as bleak as the surroundings suggest, to “wuther” means to “howl” or “eddy”. This landscape is open and bare, with black hollows and crags. Wind and rain are perennial features in this cold and forbidding location. It is a perfect place for ghosts to roam.

    However it is her doomed romance with Heathcliff that ultimately seals her fate. Heathcliff, haunted by Cathy’s ghost, succumbs to death himself. Yet, as the novel concludes, the torment that afflicted these characters soon ends,

    “I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

    The protagonists, cursed by their mortal enemies have finally returned to the land that gave them life, and now preserves their memory for eternity.

    Bronte herself had a short, tragic but eventful life. She died from tuberculosis aged just thirty. However her startling precious literary talents are her greatest legacy. It must be acknowledged that she owed a debt to the stunning Yorkshire landscape that breathed life into her work.

  • The Ghosts of Empire

    On the 18th June, 2010 the exiled Portuguese author Jose Saramago died. He was 87 years old, and had been suffering from leukaemia. He spent his final years on the Spanish island of Lanzarote. This was an important refuge for him, allowing him the space and the freedom to write without the fear of censure.

    Saramago had long been the bugbear of the Portuguese establishment. His work was a great affront to those in power. He wrote from a place of profound conviction, determinedly opposed to authoritarianism in its numerous guises. It did not matter the source, whether it derived from the Catholic Church, the Government or the associated agencies engaged in imperialism or militarism overseas. Enforced conformity had the same effect, whoever enacted it.

    Portugal had an intensely turbulent history, marked by revolution, counter revolution and dictatorship. Saramago’s personal experience of living through this history both informed and inspired him. It provoked an instant and visceral dislike of any regime or institution that attempted to control the population. His approach, however, was characteristically oblique. He preferred to employ allegory and metaphor to draw out uncomfortable truths.

    His novels are part of a tradition of metafiction, an obvious homage to his compatriot Fernando Pessoa who cultivated elaborate literary personas, or heteronyms to reveal alternate realities. These characters are created to provide a mirror of society. It is pertinent to note that every authoritarian regime in history has deliberately manipulated the population to maintain their control. It is psychological gaslighting on a grand scale.

    The 1997 novel, “Blindness” illustrates this, in graphic detail. An entire nation has been cursed with the affliction of blindness, and is left wholly dependent upon the authorities. A helpless population is easy to control, and is easily manipulated. The state of blindness is a metaphor, an allusion to historical regimes which utilised indoctrination to keep people unenlightened to the truth. In the book, people are literally living in darkness.

    However Saramago’s most controversial work was the novel published six years earlier, “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ”. This was regarded as objectionable and offended a deeply pious Portuguese elite. Saramago was reimagining the Gospel in his own inimitable way, and attempting to expose both religious hypocrisy and the abuse of a divine office like the Catholic Church.

    Saramago was a staunch defender of the powerless, and he devoted his life and work to express his distaste of the exploitation and abuse of the powerful. Throughout history, those invested with power and influence have used their might to crush dissent. It is a strange paradox that Saramago is regarded as essentially Portuguese, and still bound up with the culture and the history that shaped him, but also the fiercest critic of Portugal as a political entity. He learned to live with the ghosts of his previous existence, and his legacy remains with a body of work that champions the courage of the individual amidst oppression.