The Grateful Bourgeoise

To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it's good to be anglo-bourgeoise. Seriously. We had a friend over for dinner last night with whom we were discussing our future plans in a desultory sort of way, and there was a gap between our understanding and his; he was baffled by the idea that we'd leave a situation where we both have stable jobs that we don't specifically hate. He was from a deep South European country with traditionally shy-high unemployment, among other social disasters, and it reminded me of chatting with Jeebus this Christmas in Calabria, and him being endlessly amused by my wishing aloud that I could get made redundant next December. To me, there's be nothing amusing and everything lovely about the prospect. Nice big fat Belgian payoff, pogey at 80% of my final paycheque, maybe some language courses and then bam, we fuck off somewhere with our wheelbarrows full of euros - I mean, it's a fucking wet dream, getting made redundant next December, although I'm trying to be conscious that there will be difficult psychological issues in terms of my pride, if it happens.

Anyways, this guy from the deep South we had over for dinner and Jeebus both, they're bourgeois too, by the standards of their own countries and indeed in terms of the relative standard of their living to ours. But they have a really understandable psychological attachment to job stability, even at the expense of satisfaction, that the F-word and I never had to have inculcated in us, because we grew up in such prosperous countries.

Now I can go back home to Canada and whine and complain about the intensely profligate and unsustainable lifestyle there, and I wouldn't be wrong; it is profligate and unsustainable. And I'm not saying I wasn't given rather more work ethic than I think I need, or even than I think is best calculated for my happiness. But I am really, really grateful that growing up in such a prosperous country in such a prosperous way has left me fairly relaxed about some things many other people can't relax about. That's the real blessing of riches, maybe the only real blessing of riches, and one we can forget about to easily because it's negative, in a sense, rather than positive: there's a whole range of neuroses you just don't have to have. What a pity I seek to replace those neuroses so quickly with new and exotic ones, instead of spending a little more time dwelling on how lucky I am.

Of truth and coincidences

'"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or
made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave,
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name."'

Shit.

So it was excellent, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I've heard Thomas Hardy was one of those who bucked under the strain of magazine serialization a bit - having to have an 'event' every week, in every short chapter - one of those shocks or coincidences that I quite enjoy but which alienates so many people from Victorian literature, because they seem unrealistic . And to a certain extent that strain tells, as events get left trailing. Why did Susan esteem Donald so much as a match for her daughter? What accounts for the intimacy of Donald and Elizabeth-Jane's father at the end? There's an 'event' or coincidence there evidently that got left out . . .

But it doesn't matter at all in terms of the quality of the book, as far as I'm concerned, because of the psychological perfection of the characters. To me this is what makes great literature. Perfect plots are the aim of superhero comics, primetime television series, and Martin Amis literary turds; great literature should be psychologically true. As a society we're so caught up in the idea of artistic realism, straying no farther from it in our blockbuster modern lit than surrealism or magic realism or neorealism but always realism, realism, realism, and that makes us as audiences and authors fall into the description Charlotte Brontë (I think unfairly) applied to Jane Austen - our literature "is more real than true."

We laugh at Dickens, and we want our literature to turn on one or two ridiculous coincidences at most, forgetting that if we take any given starting point, whether it be in real life or in any narrative, and trace its path to an end we've marked out, every event driving the story to its conclusion is a ridiculous coincidence with an incredibly small chance of having occurred in a random universe. And in consequence our literature tends to the unrealistically bland and uneventful, to the wordy, to the self-referential - firmly stuck up the author's own ass (Ian McEwan, isn't it getting crowded up there?) Bring on the coincidences, say I. In real life they've worked out well for me thus far, and in literature they provide the best showcase yet discovered for showing off characters' psychological truths, the best showcase for preventing an author from inadvertently writing a false memoir instead of a true novel.

So The Mayor of Casterbridge is a psychological masterpiece. Henchard is a horrible cunt who engineers his own utter destruction with what seems like a dogged tenacity, but we're made to know him so well that it's as impossible to wholeheartedly hate him as it would a close family member who'd acted in such a way, and when his will comes (copied above) it's excruciatingly pitiable. Donald and Lucetta are perfectly mapped out in their relative amiability, weakness of character, and attractiveness; Susan is painted perfectly as an ignorant, good woman doing what she could with what she got. And Elizabeth-Jane - Hardy meant us to fall in love with Elizabeth-Jane, I suppose . . . a truly good, unsullied girl who's more interesting than porridge. What a feat.

'But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.'

Of strumpets and wolves among the sheep

A little tired this morning because we went to see an amateur production of Othello an old colleague was in, and then I couldn't stop reading The Mayor of Casterbridge when I got home. The amateur production was okay. Like all amateur productions, once you find three reasonably talented actors it's just a matter of blocking the untalented ones like bits of scenery. And this one - the main problem is that it laboured a bit under the burden that Othello and Desdemona looked like nephew and auntie, with about as much sexual chemistry. I know there's the theory running around that Othello and Desdemona never consummate their marriage, and I understand why it exists though I think it's nonsense and rather too subtle for Shakespeare, but I just don't believe someone's going to smother someone else in a jealous rage over the smotheree's sexual improprieties unless he or she feels a sense of sexual ownership of that person. And whether he actually slipped it to her or not there's enough coo-ey and dirty talk between them to at least have them get in a bit of a cuddle on stage. A touch of tongue while the duke is looking the other way. Something that convinces me he loves her in such a way he can bother to hate her. Not really the actor's fault. The director could have whipped that up easily if she'd chosen to.

But the important thing about Othello is Iago as he's always on the fucking stage, to the degree that I feel, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this, that Iago is the play's real hero, and the Iago in this production was very watchable. He gets some good lines, Iago. Lots of examples of what Robertson Davies laughed at in some book I can't remember - that lots of Shakespearian aphorisms taken as serious moral advice have came from thoroughly unpleasant or evil characters. One of our group was baffled by the character - just couldn't wrap his head around why someone would be such a cunt. I guess I'd always taken it for granted. I'm used to the idea of the nature of tragedy being that the hero has a fatal flaw, and always thought without questioning it much that Iago's fatal flaw is to be a asshole in a world full of fucking morons, a fox among the hens.

Othello - well, it takes ten minutes of loose talk from someone he's just passed over for promotion to turn him from an uxuriously happy man into a foaming-at-the-mouth stereotype. Desdemona throws a fit of pique over the handkerchief she's lost instead of coming clean with the fact that she can't fucking find it even as her wierdo husband, whose job it is to violently murder people, is getting all mouth-foamy, and then she trots out that retarded little line as she expires about how she did it to herself. Amelia enthusiastically rushes into her death at the end to expose the story of the hankerchief, but if she had three brain cells to rub together she would have realized what the game was with it at the midpoint of the play when Othello starts chiding Desdemona. Cassio gets dangerously shitfaced after two drinks whilst on the job depsite his boss warning him not to, and it takes 30 seconds of urging from an underling to make him so. Rodrigo - well. Obviously he's so fucking dumb it's only fair to assume he was written as comic relief, as a really openly stupid embodiment of all the other character's stupidity.

The only character who shows even a modicum of rationality and intelligence is Iago. And as far as I remember, that's quite unique in Shakespeare's tragedies - all the other ones I can think of have at least a few secondary characters who aren't fucking dumbkopfs and who figure out what's going on pretty early in the game. So, you know, think about Iago's circumstances: surrounded by blithering morons, blithering morons who are mostly more materially and sexually successful than you, what's more, with two of them rumoured to have fucked your wife - even if you're only sort of an asshole, surely you're going to start manipulating the situation.

And from there comes moments of sly but undeniable humour in a script written off as tragedy, as everybody loves on Iago while he destroys them. And then, as Brad Pitt showed in Burn After Reading, retards are funny. ". . . One who loved not wisely, but too well" after spending an hour bellowing about what a slimy wop whore someone is and then killing her? Come on, that's fucking comedy gold. I think the play could be done as a black comedy - something the Coen brothers could do.

Poor little good girl

Oh my god, I can't believe how good The Mayor of Casterbridge is. It's like Piers Plowman fucked D. H. Lawrence and their baby was raised by Sir Walter Scott. I chose this book in part because I didn't know what it had to offer - back in my days teaching wops and frogs how to speak English, an intermediate edition of Headway featured excerpts from the wife-auctioning chapter - that's all I knew of the book, though it was enough to pique my interest as it was a pretty great excerpt.

The great prose and the hijinks just don't stop, and there are some stunningly good portraits of really unacceptable people, sort of circling like pre-occupied sharks around Elizabeth Jane . . . I suppose he had a thing about nice girls . . . there's always a nice girl somewhere in his books that I've read, a nice, natural girl like Thomasin or Tess or Elizabeth-Jane who gets buffeted about by the passions and pretensions of everybody else whilst cherishing healthy and strong emotions herself.

"There's husks and dust on you. Perhaps you don't know it?" he said, in tones of extreme delicacy. "And it's very bad to let rain come upon clothes when there's chaff on them. It washes in and spoils them. Let me help you--blowing is the best."

As Elizabeth neither assented nor dissented Donald Farfrae began blowing her back hair, and her side hair, and her neck, and the crown of her bonnet, and the fur of her victorine, Elizabeth saying, "O, thank you," at every puff. At last she was fairly clean, though Farfrae, having got over his first concern at the situation, seemed in no manner of hurry to be gone.

"Ah--now I'll go and get ye an umbrella," he said.

She declined the offer, stepped out and was gone. Farfrae walked slowly after, looking thoughtfully at her diminishing figure, and whistling in undertones, "As I came down through
Cannobie."

And now she's looking for a furze-cutting man, that's what I am

Once more - bam - the weekend is over. I really, really hate this about the passing of a chemically depressive state. At least a slow burn of mild braindead makes time crawl. Feeling very bitchy this morning. Not just because we got a new bookshelf this weekend and our library has morphed from piles on the floor to nicely arranged tomes on a shelf (I've even grouped the authors, something I haven't had the mental organization to do since 1996) so I know exactly what I'm not reading as I walk out the door to work.

Not just because I listened to an interesting broadcast this weekend whilst sewing which managed to incidentally spell out for me that part of what makes me hate my profession is its ecological parasitism - a fact I was aware of, but which I'm usually able to bury under five or six layers of rationalizations. My relationship with Buddhism is limited to watching 27 episodes of Monkey! but when people get going about it, it reminds me that there are some good and bad choices to make for oneself as a moral creature that I'm not making right now - all I'm making is money. Ouch. I can say to myself endlessly 'it's okay, I'll stop in a year and a half, in a year and a half everything will change,' and maybe it will, but it's not a year and a half from now yet and in the meantime I don't like the ethics of what I do.

No, on top of all that, I've had motherfucking 'Uptown Girl' stuck in my head since I woke up. I know it was a huge success as a single and probably made Billy Joel millions of dollars, but seriously, as an aesthetically aware creature what possesses you to unleash four minutes of such shit on your fellow humans? Ugh.

Possibly what got it stuck in my head was reading the first ten chapters of The Mayor of Casterbridge last night, since Thomas Hardy's novels are all about uptown girls and downtown guys, or vice versa, in the framework of rural England. At least I think they are, I'm just getting my feet wet with Hardy, having only read The Return of the Native and Tess of the D'Urbervilles before. I didn't enjoy Tess of the D'Urbervilles - it was a very good book but it was too heavy for me at the time at which I was reading it. The Return of the Native I liked better, though it was also quite heavy - I think because in The Return of the Native, I felt less sympathy for the main characters, though Eustacia really struck a nerve, she seemed so real, than I did for poor Tess. The Mayor of Casterbridge also promises to be heavy. It opens with a wife-auctioning scene, in which the protagonist Henchard gets loaded and sells off his woman and child at a country fair. And hijinks ensue.

Sometimes I wonder if I like sort of depressing authors like Thomas Hardy and Somerset Maugham as a sort of hangover teenage Curehead thing - if I've just replaced whiny Robert Smith vocals with whiny British authors dealing with the deterioration of their country's social and economic edifices. But then I get over it. I like Thomas Hardy, at least, because of his incredible powers of description - not just of people, but of place and ambience. Read this, from the beginning of chapter 11:

The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of the finest Roman Amphitheatres, if not the very finest, remaining in Britain (. . .) The dusk of evening was the proper hour at which a true impression of this suggestive place could be received. Standing in the middle of the arena at that time there by degrees became apparent its real vastness, which a cursory view from the summit at noon-day was apt to obscure. Melancholy, impressive, lonely, yet accessible from every part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent spot for appointments of a furtive kind. Intrigues were arranged there; tentative meetings were there experimented after divisions and feuds. But one kind of appointment--in itself the most common of any--seldom had place in the Amphitheatre: that of happy lovers (. . .)

Apart from the sanguinary nature of the games originally played therein, such incidents attached to its past as these: that for scores of years the town-gallows had stood at one corner; that in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning her heart burst and leapt out of her body, to the terror of them all, and that not one of those ten thousand people ever cared particularly for hot roast after that. In addition to these old tragedies, pugilistic encounters almost to the death had come off down to recent dates in that secluded arena, entirely invisible to the outside world save by climbing to the top of the enclosure, which few towns-people in the daily round of their lives ever took the trouble to do. So that, though close to the turnpike-road, crimes might be perpetrated there unseen at mid-day.

So nice.