tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12678838031905402512024-03-14T03:14:51.889-07:00Field Guide to Forbidden BooksLiterature, with the naughty bitsBagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-3276821596657579902011-03-31T12:23:00.000-07:002011-03-31T12:23:28.096-07:00Au revoirI've decided to stop posting here for a while. I doubt this will come as any great shock, since it's already been quite a while since my last post, but I'm making it official.<br />
<br />
My reasoning:<br />
1. I'm more interested these days in writing fiction than in writing criticism. If I do happen to get an idea for a piece of writing about writing, I'll probably post it here. This has been a useful place to hash out those ideas.<br />
2. As I work to find representation and, I hope, get the next novel published, it seems to me more and more that writing criticism of contemporary writers could be a bit of a conflict of interest. As an actor, I don't write theater reviews because I doubt my ability to be objective about other performers--especially those performers in roles for which I might be considered. I might, similarly, be more prone to denigrating the work of writers with whom I'm jockeying for position in a crowded marketplace. My bias might not be conscious, but that makes guarding against it all the more imperative. <br />
<br />
I will keep the blog online, since I think I did some decent writing here. Many thanks to everyone who read and commented.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-65817488316614349822010-09-08T08:33:00.000-07:002010-09-08T08:33:33.373-07:00Good Advices<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=fieldg-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B001W6RRFW&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align:left;padding-top:5px;width:131px;height:245px;padding-right:10px;"align="left" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>I've just finished Francine Prose's <i>Reading Like a Writer</i>. For good or ill, I've been reading like a writer my entire life, so many of the discussions are less revelations than statements of truths I have already known instinctively. Which does not, of course, make them any less valuable. <br />
<br />
The lessons in humility in the Chekhov chapter are particularly useful, coming nearer the point than I did when I tried to describe <a href="http://fieldguidetoforbiddenbooks.blogspot.com/2010/07/redemption-in-prose.html">the importance of forgiveness in David Foster Wallace's work</a>. Here's Prose quoting Chekhov:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees--this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.</blockquote><br />
I love this. It's so easy to fall into the trap of believing there to be a list of prerequisites for being a writer, of regarding Tolstoy and Joyce and the other greats with such veneration that we forget that they, too, were simply humans who told stories--that their ways with words would be nothing if not for the peculiar honesty of their visions. Their truths are less pronounced than admitted. <br />
<br />
The heart of the matter was expressed more pithily by <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Poems-Howard-Nemerov/dp/0226572595?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Howard Nemerov</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0226572595" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />, who told a self-described aspiring writer, "Okay, so write something."<br />
<br />
It's amusing that the advice doesn't change at the pot-boiler end of the spectrum. <a href="http://www.modestyblaiseltd.com/bestadvicewriter.html">Peter O'Donnell</a>, author of the Modesty Blaise comic strip and the Madeleine Brent novels, recounts a conversation with a pitiless editor: "You're supposed to be an author, aren't you? Well f--- off and auth."Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-23546452389386041912010-08-13T15:09:00.000-07:002010-08-13T15:09:15.214-07:00Huzzah.I <a href="http://fieldguidetoforbiddenbooks.blogspot.com/2008/05/american-psycho.html">suggested</a> an <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/American-Psycho-Bret-Easton-Ellis/dp/0679735771?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">American Psycho</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0679735771" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />/<a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Pride-Prejudice-Jane-Austen/dp/0307278107?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Pride and Prejudice</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0307278107" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" /> mashup, but I'm very happy that Drew Grant has gone one better: <a href="http://crushable.com/other-stuff/baby-sitters-club-by-bret-easton-ellis-chapter-1/">American Psycho meets the Baby-Sitters' Club</a>.<br />
<br />
I hope this means there's a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Less-Than-Zero-Easton-Ellis/dp/0679781498?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Less Than Zero</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0679781498" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />/Nancy Drew hybrid waiting in the wings.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-42573109942543700522010-07-28T07:50:00.000-07:002010-07-28T07:50:31.875-07:00Redemption in Prose<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=fieldg-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=030759243X&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align:left;padding-top:5px;width:131px;height:245px;padding-right:10px;"align="left" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>I'm not even done with this book yet and already it feels vitally important, exactly what I needed to be reading at exactly this moment in my life. (As if to prove that, at my audition last night one of the other actors was wearing a homemade David Foster Wallace T-shirt: across the chest was <i>DFW</i>, then a superscripted 1; across the bottom of the shirt was the footnote <i>David Foster Wallace</i>.) I can tell I will soon be collaring my friends and thrusting the book at their chests with evangelical fervor. Guys: You have to read this. It is so good.<br />
<br />
The opening pages, in reintroducing me to this literary personality I adore, made me cry. They also help me understand his 2008 suicide somewhat--that it was the end of a long and deeply sad battle, that it disappointed him too.<br />
<br />
I am--maybe--beginning to understand why I love his writing so much. (As with any writer, the understanding is a lifelong process.) It's not just that he's brilliant, or that he's the most accessible genius you've ever encountered. It's the expansive sense of forgiveness that pervades his work: forgiveness of himself for being what he was, forgiveness of humans for being what we are, forgiveness of the language for being what <i>it</i> is--this last taking him past all the elementary-school dogma about Garbage Words and all the grad school dogma about literary prose and letting him just use the words he needs to use. If the words were sometimes inelegant, sometimes academic, sometimes earthy, sometimes distracted, sometimes obscene, then far from being less artistic, they did a better job of capturing how it feels to be the mess of contradictions that is a human.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-63090062278996713912010-07-25T10:54:00.000-07:002010-07-25T10:54:47.846-07:00The Missed Opportunities of AvalonThe <a href="http://fieldguidetoforbiddenbooks.blogspot.com/2010/07/book-to-throw-across-room.html">Very Bad Book</a> is done; it had some redeeming qualities, but not enough to make me forgive it for being 900 bloody pages long. I'm drafting a longer post about it, and I suppose for equipoise I'll write one about <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-Terence-Hanbury-White/dp/0441003834?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">The Once and Future King</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0441003834" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" /> as well. <br />
<br />
But first, to cleanse my palate with <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Although-Course-You-Becoming-Yourself/dp/030759243X?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=030759243X" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />, which I've been looking forward to more than any other book this year.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-12849744285323299912010-07-16T08:00:00.000-07:002010-07-16T08:00:24.844-07:00I Write Like E. A. Bagby, Thank You Very MuchBy now, literary folks with time to kill have probably discovered <a href="http://iwl.me/">I Write Like</a>, the website that tells you--based on an automated analysis few cut-and-pasted paragraphs--which famous writer's work your words most resemble. I tried it a couple of times, once with the opening scene of my Victorian YA mystery, once with the last post of this blog. Evidently, the mystery resembles Dickens (hooray! exactly what it needs to do!), and the blog resembles Dan Brown. That last assessment was--well, nauseating.<br />
<br />
I feel better after reading this <a href="http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/getting-the-not-quite-right-stuff-from-i-write-like/">post</a> at the NY Times, in which the tool identifies the opening from <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Moby-Dick-Whale-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0142000086?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Moby-Dick</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0142000086" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" /> as resembling Stephen King. (Well, both writers <i>are</i> New Englanders.) Equally intriguing are the comments on the post, in which it emerges that the tool's database contains a scant 40 writers, of whom only three are female and none are minorities. No <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Song-Solomon-Toni-Morrison/dp/140003342X?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Toni Morrison</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=140003342X" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />, no <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Man-Ralph-Ellison/dp/0679732764?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Ralph Ellison</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0679732764" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />, no <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Black-Boy-P-S-Richard-Wright/dp/0061443085?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Richard Wright</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0061443085" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />, no <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Love-Time-Cholera-Vintage-International/dp/0307387143?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Gabriel Garcia-Marquez</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0307387143" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />, no <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Fictions-Jorge-Luis-Borges/dp/0140286802?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Jorge Luis Borge</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0140286802" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />s, no <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Room-Ones-Own-Annotated/dp/0156030411?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Virginia Woolf</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0156030411" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />, no <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-Artemio-Cruz-Novel-Classics/dp/0374531803?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Carlos Fuentes</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0374531803" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />, no <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Wind-Up-Bird-Chronicle-Novel/dp/0679775439?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Haruki Murakami</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0679775439" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />...so this is really not much of a canon, then. It's a shame: the tool offers yet another instance of a celebrity-dependent culture wasting an opportunity to turn a bunch of readers on to some brilliant writers they might not have heard of.<br />
<br />
But, in a more positive development, yesterday a friend who'd never read any <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Supposedly-Fun-Thing-Never-Again/dp/0316925284?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">David Foster Wallace</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0316925284" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" /> was told her writing resembled his. That led to a spirited online discussion of his work--he's one of my favorites, and his 2008 suicide robbed literature of a brilliant mind. The conversation reminded me of what it's like when a writer permanently changes your way of seeing the world. DFW is one of the writers I find most inspiring; his work impels me to write and write and write, until you have to pry the pen from my cold, dead hands. Anything that reminds me of that isn't all bad.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-45101539553192785082010-07-14T12:56:00.000-07:002010-07-14T12:56:27.835-07:00A book to throw across the roomWhen I read something bad, I feel compelled to write about it. Partly, I suppose, to ensure that my reaction is legitimate, not just some awful moment of bitter-author jealousy; also partly to justify the time I've put into reading.<br />
<br />
So, a confession: I've been reading <i><a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Mists-Avalon-MarionZimmerBradley/dp/B000GGOCIE?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">The Mists of Avalon</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B000GGOCIE" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" /></i> and actually hoping to discover that it has been censored somewhere, so I can write about it here. Because it is so very, <i>very</i> bad. More than once the writing has made me laugh out loud--and not because the author meant it to be funny. There isn't an ounce of deliberate humor here, as the characters all know they're in an epic tragedy and therefore speak exclusively in a language of ponderous platitudes and dramatic assertions (in which exclamation points serve as a handy substitute for emotion). <br />
<br />
Anyway, the book hasn't been on the ALA's list of the hundred most challenged books for either the nineties or the aughts, and the ALA website doesn't have earlier lists than that. It <i>must</i> have raised some hackles in the eighties, though, right? I mean, there's sex--ponderous, epic, tragic sex, even if it is mostly written in soft focus--and there are blatant challenges to Christianity. Plus, feminism, and magic, and witchcraft. It cannot have escaped the Reagan years unscathed.<br />
<br />
Maybe I'll just write about it anyway.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-31225602503444724942010-07-07T14:48:00.000-07:002010-07-07T14:48:01.927-07:00Pig tallow candles and the contract with the reader<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/537.David_Mitchell?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Jul_newsletter&utm_content=mitchell">Here's</a> a nice interview with David Mitchell (whose <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Green-David-Mitchell/dp/0812974018?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Black Swan Green</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0812974018" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" /> was one of my favorite reads last year). I love his discussion of the necessity of humor in literature ("it would be like bread that didn't contain water"), as well as the writer's contract with the reader and how "perhaps the contract defines the book." And this, from the discussion of historical fiction:<br />
<blockquote>To get it right, you need to research and research and research. And then you need to hide all your research, otherwise something else happens. You get sentences like, "Milord, would you like me to light the sperm whale oil lantern or would you prefer the cheaper but smokier pig tallow candle?"</blockquote>Heh heh. I've totally read books like that.<br />
<br />
Mitchell suggests more than once that when the reader feels the contract has been broken, the appropriate response is to hurl the book across the room. John Gardner says the same thing in <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Art-Fiction-Notes-Craft-Writers/dp/0679734031?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">The Art of Fiction</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0679734031" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />. Now I'm trying to recall if any book has ever been so bad that I have actually done this. The only one that comes to mind is <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Angels-Demons-Movie-Tie-Novel/dp/B002PJ4I2A?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Angels and Demons</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B002PJ4I2A" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />. But that's hardly the only bad book I've read. Maybe I need to work on my arm.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-34708070856403502912010-07-07T10:40:00.000-07:002010-07-07T10:40:35.690-07:00Brave New World<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=fieldg-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0060850523&fc1=000000&IS2=1<1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align:left;padding-top:5px;width:131px;height:245px;padding-right:10px;"align="left" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe> <b>First Published:</b> 1932<br />
<br />
Along with George Orwell's <i><a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Eighty-Four-George-Orwell/dp/0452284236?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">1984</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0452284236" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" /></i>, <i>Brave New World</i> is one of the classic, indispensable future-dystopia novels of the early 20th century. In essence, the two books posit opposite outcomes of the Cold War. Orwell's dystopia is a triumph of Soviet-style oppression; Huxley's is a triumph of American corporate power. In the past couple of decades, Huxley's book has gotten a good bit scarier.<br />
<br />
<b>What Happens: </b>In Huxley's world--several centuries ahead of ours--the pressures of population and industrial production have led to the creation of a global caste system, carefully controlled by genetic engineering and behavioral conditioning. Human life has become pleasant and shallow; one is programmed to enjoy one's work, and nonworking hours are spent in ceaseless sensory distractions--most notably, under the influence of the wonder-drug called <i>soma</i>.<br />
<br />
Bernard Marx is an Alpha, at the top of the caste system, but this privileged life is not enough. He feels keenly alone, and he cannot stop questioning the world. He is restless and malcontent, increasingly impatient with the ostensible pleasures that interrupt his contemplation. There is "no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think."<br />
<br />
Bernard takes a vacation to a relic of past times--a "Savage Reservation" in New Mexico, where Native Americans carry on with their traditional ways. Here he encounters Linda, an exile from the caste society who pines to return. He brings her and her son John back to London. Bernard becomes a celebrity, rising so quickly that he must inevitably be taken down. <br />
<br />
John--quickly dubbed John Savage--is in hell. His upbringing has relied on books, spirituality, and friendship; he lacks the conditioning that would reconcile him to contemporary life. Worse still, he falls for a woman who is not programmed to recognize monogamy or love as desirable. The individual clashes with the society, and tragedy results.<br />
<br />
<b>Censorship History:</b> As Huxley later wrote, "The subject of freedom and its enemies is enormous." <i>Brave New World</i> remains one of the most challenged works in the United States, ranking at #36 on the ALA's <a href="http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedbydecade/2000_2009/index.cfm">Banned Books List</a> for the most recent decade.<br />
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<a href="http://www.ncac.org/literature/20090716~GA~Joint_Letter_to_Appling_County_Board_of_Ed_Urging_Return_of_Censored_Classics.cfm">Georgia</a> and <a href="http://home.nvg.org/~aga/bulletin43.html">Missouri</a> schools have removed <i>Brave New World</i> from their classrooms, and the Council for the Literature of the Fantastic <a href="http://www.uri.edu/artsci/english/clf/n1_a2.html">claims</a> that a Philadelphia teacher lost a grant because he taught the book. Some Texas parents, calling it "pornographic literature," <a href="http://atheism.about.com/b/2003/09/28/brave-new-censorship.htm">attempted</a> to remove it from schools during 2003's Banned Book Week. (Whatever will they do for Irony Week?)<br />
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<b>Why It's Censored:</b> To keep its citizens content in their overstructured lives, Huxley's government sponsors regular orgies and promotes recreational drug consumption. These scenes are clearly not meant to titillate; Bernard responds with weary disgust. And, compared with the sex scenes you can find in other books, they're tame. (I first read this in my late teens and had forgotten about the orgy scene by the time I revisited the book as an adult. If you can forget about sex scenes you first read as a teenager, the scenes are mild indeed.)<br />
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Huxley's world is also atheistic; all the crosses have been lopped off into capital Ts. Does this make the book anti-Christian? Hardly--you can't read ten pages without knowing that Huxley is not describing a world he wants. <br />
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As in most of today's totalitarian regimes, the power of Huxley's government rests on strict order, including censorship; most pre-industrial writing has been destroyed, and Shakespeare is unknown. Perhaps what really chafes the would-be censors of this book is the way both Bernard and John burn to escape the rigorous organization of this world--the unignorable implication that questioning rules is natural and desirable, or that some discontent can't be entertained away, or that some readers might <i>want</i> what a character disparages as "Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole."<br />
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<b>Eerily Prescient Bits:</b> By now, the comparison of Prozac to <i>soma</i> is old hat. Are they truly identical? Not really; <i>soma</i> doesn't have side effects. But Huxley is accurate in his prediction that a society might prefer to medicate discontent rather than to address its underlying sources.<br />
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Huxley doesn't predict the Internet, but he's bang on--no pun intended--about the so-called mainstreaming of porn. (Could he have predicted the verbing of <i>mainstream</i>? Probably.) His society is awash in shallow physical pleasures, often at the expense of genuine emotional connection--it's not far from <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/love-bytes/200910/passion-in-hook-culture">hookup culture</a>, made official by government sanctions. ("You <i>ought</i> to be a little more promiscuous," says one female character, who proudly displays her contraceptives.)<br />
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Huxley isn't the only writer to address the stupefying effects of distraction. Kurt Vonnegut's short story "<a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Monkey-House-Kurt-Vonnegut/dp/0385333501?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Harrison Bergeron</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0385333501" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />" suggests a much bleaker future created by similar techniques. What <i>is</i> fairly new, however, is scientific <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?_r=1">confirmation</a> that constant distraction harms our cognitive abilities. (Are you listening, Blogger? Could you stop jumping back to the top of the post every time I insert a bit of code?)<br />
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Contemporary female readers--that is, those of us who are leaving our youth during the era of Botox--will probably find it especially poignant that in Huxley's future, no one ages naturally. Various drugs and supplements keep them pert and firm until about the age of 60, when they typically just collapse and die, quickly and discreetly. The city dwellers react with <a href="http://www.starmagazine.com/best_worst_beach_bodies/photos/gallery/13919?id=13057">horror</a> to the sight of "primitive" Linda, wrinkled and sagging.<br />
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Those who are frightened by the growing power of corporations are not likely to find this a reassuring read. The leaders of the Industrial and Communist Revolutions are treated as near-deities, the namesakes of many of the characters (Benito, Lenina, Henry). Huxley's characters use the name "Ford" the same way we'd use the G in "OMG" and the C in "B.C."<br />
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Through the ceaseless, subliminal repetition of slogans ("Ending is better than mending"), Huxley's characters are conditioned from infancy to participate in a global economy of instant gratification, consumption, and disposability. Remember that scene in <i><a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Super-Size-Me-John-Banzhaf/dp/B0002OXVBO?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Supersize Me</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=B0002OXVBO" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" /></i> when everyone can sing the Big Mac jingle, but no one remembers the national anthem? Yeah.<br />
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And where do all those consumable goods come from? The comfort of Huxley's privileged classes rests on the shoulders of a much larger worker class, the Gammas and the Epsilons, specially bred to be dimwitted and unambitious, kept content in their drudgery with steady doses of drugs. Now, the drug- and alcohol-induced twilight of the Brave New workers is less prescient than historical. Alcohol has long been recognized as a near necessity for peasant and slave classes, with those in power attempting to strike a judicious balance between the workers' emotional stability and their ability to work. Roman slaveholders allowed for festival days; many American slaveholders permitted alcohol, but were all too willing to consider drunkenness evidence of Africans' innate inferiority. But the existence of the industrial slave class qualifies as prescient. As of 2010, there are over <a href="http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/02/slavery-in-2010/">12 million slaves worldwide</a>, and millions more people work at desperately low wages. The proportion of privileged classes to impoverished workers is more or less what Huxley imagined; today, the bottom half of the world's population <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth">owns 1%</a> of the world's wealth. (If you're reading this on a computer, it's a safe bet which half of the population you're in.)<br />
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Huxley wrote this long before the first test-tube baby (that, for the record, was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Brown">Louise Joy Brown</a>, born in 1978), but in his world, the test-tube process has entirely replaced viviparous reproduction. Children are "vatted," not born, and the concept of parenting is considered embarrassing and dirty. How close you think we've come to that probably depends on how your childhood shook out in its proportion of parental interaction to TV time.<br />
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<b>Relationships with Other Works of Literature:</b> The title, of course, comes from a line in <i><a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Tempest-William-Shakespeare/dp/1451532512?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">The Tempest</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=1451532512" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" /></i>. John (the only really literate main character) quotes Shakespeare constantly. One of the most delicious allusions is the use of a Caliban line to describe the distractions of modern life--"Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about my ears." In its original context, that line describes the uncivilized island of Prospero's exile and the magical ways Prospero keeps Caliban enslaved. In Huxley's telling, it describes the experience of the "Savage" John within the hypercivilized caste society. The implications about what constitutes true slavery and true savagery are unmistakable. It's a brilliant little reference.<br />
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Julian Barnes's somewhat more optimistic <i><a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Staring-at-Sun-Julian-Barnes/dp/0679748202?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Staring at the Sun</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0679748202" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" /></i> posits a similar future for humans at the end of the 20th century, with "fundrugs" taking the place of <i>soma</i>. The population is ranked by letter grades.<br />
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In 1958, disheartened by overpopulation, totalitarianism, and the rise of nuclear weaponry, Huxley wrote a nonfiction follow-up, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Revisited-P-S/dp/0060898526?ie=UTF8&tag=fieldg-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969">Brave New World Revisited</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fieldg-20&l=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969&o=1&a=0060898526" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important; padding: 0px !important" />. Among other things, he laments the speed with which the nightmarish shift from disorder to rigidity is coming to pass:<br />
<blockquote>In 1931 systematic terrorism was not the obsessive contemporary fact which it had become in 1948, and the future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell.</blockquote>One can only imagine what he would write now.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-6883997120049381052010-07-06T19:25:00.000-07:002010-07-06T19:25:54.414-07:00A Brief Moment of Necessary HousekeepingFCC rules compel me to mention that <i>The Field Guide to Forbidden Books</i> is now part of the Amazon Associates program. I've always linked the books I mention to Amazon, but now if you click my link and buy the book I get a tiny amount of money. <br />
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This is not going to change the way I present my opinions of books, and it's certainly not going to change whether my reviews are positive are not. If you want to buy a book just to see how horrible it is, who am I to stop you? The whole point of this blog is that individual readers--not censors, not mail carriers, not editors, not hand-wringing PTAs, not the Texas school board--should be the ones who decide whether a given work is offensive.<br />
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Honestly, I have about three* readers, and I think most of them have already read most of the books I discuss, so I don't expect to make a dime from this. <i>If</i> by some chance my readership takes off, and <i>if</i> some of those new readers buy books because of my criticism, well...no, I probably still won't even come close to earning fair pay for the writing time. But it's nice to dream.<br />
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*Margin of error: ±3.</i>Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-38211019707012498162010-06-14T05:38:00.000-07:002010-06-14T06:15:48.217-07:00Postscript: Ulysses, Or Another Reason I Won't Be Buying an iPadCensorship of <span style="font-style:italic;">Ulysses</span> has seemed like a non-issue for nearly a century, but the New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/technology/14ulysses.html?src=me&ref=technology">reports</a> that a new graphic-novel treatment of the book has been bowdlerized by Apple for its release on the iPad.<br /><br />Sigh.<br /><br />I am less concerned about <span style="font-style:italic;">Ulysses</span>--an old warhorse of the censorship battles, sturdy enough to weather this assault--than about the broader implications of Apple's policy. Female nudity was evidently one of the offending components. I can think of several excellent graphic novels that have nudity (<span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sandman-Vol-Preludes-Nocturnes/dp/1563890119/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276521068&sr=1-2">Sandman</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hell-Alan-Moore/dp/0958578346/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276521093&sr=1-1">From Hell</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Watchmen-Alan-Moore/dp/1401219268/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276521151&sr=1-1">Watchmen</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Preacher-Vol-1-Gone-Texas/dp/1563892618/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276521121&sr=1-1">Preacher</a>,</span> and the list goes on), and it's beyond dismaying that they--and most of the classics of the form--might be inaccessible to a whole group of readers. <br /><br />Scott McCloud notes, in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Comics-Imagination-Technology-Revolutionizing/dp/0060953500/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276521034&sr=1-1"><span style="font-style:italic;">Reinventing Comics</span></a>, that nudity and obscenity battles have historically been one of the most reliable ways for culture warriors to suppress and devalue graphic storytelling, and that artists will probably have to continue fighting those battles for a while. For an established classic like <span style="font-style:italic;">Ulysses</span>, the battle is more ridiculous than anything else. But I shudder to think of the stories that aren't being written and drawn because the artists can't figure out how to get past these self-proclaimed cultural gatekeepers.<br /><br />At the same time, there's a huge opportunity for the Kindle or the Nook to establish a definitive anti-censorship stance. I'd be rather delighted, I must admit, to see the iPad receive some of the same consumer backlash generated by Blockbuster's and Walmart's stealthy soft-censorship practices. <br /><br />When a technology clearly aspires to become the dominant vehicle of media consumption, we must pay very close attention to what media it allows us to consume. I've quoted Ray Bradbury before about how there's more than one way to burn a book, but damned if he doesn't keep being right.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-4977097085952134222009-11-11T08:00:00.000-08:002009-11-11T08:15:11.364-08:00For me, the publishing industry's potential for waste, particularly when sustainable materials are available, seems more obscene than the objectionable contents of nearly any book. If you feel the same way, behold the Environmental Defense Fund's <a href="http://publishingperspectives.com/?p=7751">Paper Calculator</a>, now appearing inside books that are at least partly made from recycled materials.<br /><br />An aside: ebooks are at best an imperfect solution to the problem of waste, since they rely on electricity, the production of which is one of our largest sources of environmental pollution. They're also distinctly inferior to real books in one or two practical particulars: they don't smell like library paste; a real book's battery never dies; and reading a narrative should be a physical--sometimes geographical--experience. Claiming that the two reading experiences are equal misses the point as badly as the fourth edition of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Elements of Style</span> did when it claimed that a word processor's Cut function was the same as a pair of scissors. It's not, and any writer who has physically hacked through a manuscript knows that there is no substitute for tactile interaction with a book.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-18753752836838528172009-07-21T05:31:00.000-07:002009-07-21T05:41:48.097-07:00An anniversary related to a different sort of moonThis morning, the New York Times published an excellent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/opinion/21kaplan.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th">description</a> of the legal arguments for and against the censorship of <em>Lady Chatterley's Lover</em>. Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court's decision stripped the U.S. Post Office of the right to refuse to mail content it deemed obscene--a practice that had previously resulted in books such as <em>Ulysses</em> being shipped in dust jackets bearing different titles and bylines. Amazon ought to be grateful.<br /><br />Pardon the recent lack of posts. I've been working on a book that, I trust, will meet with strenuous parental opposition, if not outright censorship. But I should be back soon.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-42454631492289163232009-04-18T12:21:00.000-07:002009-04-18T12:28:07.700-07:00The writer, redefinedSpotted today in a classified ad calling for writers:<br />"You don't have to be a professional writer who understands sentence structure."<br /><br />That all separating amateurs the pros from is the? Knew who?Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-66814634197131681522009-02-28T09:28:00.000-08:002009-02-28T09:32:22.917-08:00Quote of the day"Every time I read something masterful, I can feel my life getting better."<br />--Writer Philipp Meyer, in a <a href="http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=4493&utm_source=powellsbooks.news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pbnews_20090226_B&utm_content=Meyer's%20post">guest blog</a> for Powell's BooksBagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-62586028196280473362009-01-28T12:05:00.000-08:002009-01-28T12:30:29.740-08:00R.I.P. John UpdikeWe've lost far too many literary luminaries in the past year. For me--although the end of <em>Rabbit, Run</em> sings through my mind sometimes when I am running and it feels just right, and I don't think anyone has ever described that feeling any better--Updike's death doesn't quite have the artistic and emotional resonance that Harold Pinter's or David Foster Wallace's did.<br /><br />But it does have a personal resonance. Updike I actually met. In college the Assembly Series offered student groups the opportunity to sponsor visiting lecturers, and so the literary magazine for which I was an editor got to sponsor Updike. After his talk, the student editors and a small group of English professors had lunch with him at the alumni house (which represented by far the nicest meal most of the students were going to have all semester).<br /><br />I wish I could offer some reminiscence of the perfect phrases that left Updike's lips. What sticks in my memory, though, is the awestruck silence in which the students ate, while the English faculty tried very hard to say impressive things. It was fairly awkward, all told. Updike was quiet and gracious. It must be difficult to eat your lunch when everyone around you is holding their breath, waiting for you to be brilliant.<br /><br />Don't wait for brilliance. Eat your lunch. <br /><br />That's actually a <em>fantastic</em> lesson for a young writer. Perhaps I learned more from him than I thought.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-80088916365433626832009-01-13T11:06:00.000-08:002009-01-13T11:22:13.597-08:00Further thoughts on lazy writingIn the wake of the <em>Fear of Flying</em> post, I was thinking some more about why exactly I get so cranky about lazy writing. It's not because I'm a snippy grammarian who cares about correctness for the sake of correctness. (I can be, I'm afraid, but that's not the impulse that's operating here.) Rather, it's a much larger issue: why aesthetics matter at all.<br /><br />I think it's because, at heart, all art deals in what we could be--or perhaps, what could be, period, with or without us. Along with religion and science, art is one of the arenas in which we reconcile our imaginations with our senses, the limitless universe we envision with the all-too-finite one we experience. Even the dourest forms of documentary-style realism are, in some measure, expressions of disappointment: they present what is as a contrast with what might be, so they offer a sad commentary on how far we fall short of our possibilities. <br /><br />One way or another, art lets us peer through a spyglass at a different world. And it's sad when the lens is cracked, or dirty, or spotted, or blurry. All we want is to see.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-4584285932919467282009-01-10T10:35:00.000-08:002009-01-12T14:43:35.152-08:00Fear of Flying<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fear-Flying-Erica-Jong/dp/0451185560"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ1w69odq3XhL0j1ulVhZW3oEocXO1jObyaetczKbwqq0x0n2c_RsRXKYsJXOrDhqWcPuXS6FqlcvWT1zF3CsNBz3b1O9gdt-tDMPuFimZ9xXo8XSD9fCFwVV5EMVI80kLCZxJ39xX9ww/s1600-h/Fear+of+Flying.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ1w69odq3XhL0j1ulVhZW3oEocXO1jObyaetczKbwqq0x0n2c_RsRXKYsJXOrDhqWcPuXS6FqlcvWT1zF3CsNBz3b1O9gdt-tDMPuFimZ9xXo8XSD9fCFwVV5EMVI80kLCZxJ39xX9ww/s200/Fear+of+Flying.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5289766704981840994" /></a></a><br /><strong>Author:</strong> Erica Jong<br /><br /><strong>What Happens: </strong><a href="http://www.answers.com/topic/erica-jong">Erica Jong</a>, a neurotic poet married to her psychoanalyst second husband, writes about the marital discontent of Isadora Wing, a neurotic poet married to her psychoanalyst second husband. At a European psychoanalysis conference, Wing meets the subtly named Adrian Goodlove, and with him she takes a hippie-style vacation from her marriage, camping and fornicating all across Europe. In the process Jong--or Wing, the lines blur a bit--introduces the invaluable concept of the Zipless Fuck, the fantasy of the lover so compelling and perfect that all real-world obstacles simply melt away.<br /><br /><strong>Censorship History:</strong> Fear of Flying has been banned far and wide, in Italy, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=jGFje8JWmN8C&pg=PA169&lpg=PA169&dq=Fear+of+Flying+censorship&source=web&ots=mz3v9itxcW&sig=7LxBmGL74a_Px6Lxwf3lEbn6og8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result">South Africa</a>, and <a href="http://www.ncac.org/censorship_news/20080623~cn107~The_Long_And_Short_of_It.cfm">right</a> <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=JbqvVVXncqMC&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=Fear+of+Flying+censorship&source=web&ots=h0zqv-94cN&sig=aW15m6yqMJL9skGwytHOOKqpwA8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result">here</a> <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=29NFXftXwI8C&pg=PA83&lpg=PA83&dq=Fear+of+Flying+censorship&source=web&ots=8EiKB8DSB5&sig=W2_xrhs9qTePhwr8-o6__phDSto&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result">at home</a>.<br /><br />The lasting controversy had to do with public funding of the arts. Jong received a $5,000 from the NEA to write <em>Fear of Flying</em>, and, as required, stated on page 1 that she had received this funding. On the very next page she introduced the world to the Zipless Fuck. This outraged people such as Jesse Helms, that champion of the oppression known as taste, who participated in public debates over <em>Fear of Flying</em> without actually having read the book. The debates grew to encompass the furor surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe's photography and works such as Serrano's <em>Piss Christ</em>, and eventually resulted in the decision that the United States would no longer fund individual artists.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0451185560/ref=cm_cr_dp_synop?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending#R3B5LUTSSOHB2R">One reader </a>notes that Amazon still censors certain words, requiring discussion of this book to include phrases such as "the zipless fudge." But "zipless fuck" is right there in the Key Phrases, so no matter how grateful I am for the image of zipless fudge, I'm not sure what she's talking about.<br /><br /><strong>Value as Erotica:</strong> <em>Fear or Flying</em> has a reputation for being wildly erotic. And sure, it talks <em>about</em> sex (or perhaps around sex) plenty. But if you're looking for an actual sex scene, there's not much in the way of explicit description--there's much more discussion of what doesn't happen. Isadora's husband can go for hours, but draws the line at oral sex; she runs off with her lover, who turns out to be mostly impotent; the three of them have one night together--but if that just made you think FINALLY! then you're still in for disappointment. It's very much the R-rated, cut-to-the-morning-after version of the scene.<br /><br />Maybe Jong's language is what's supposed to be erotic. Maybe 30 years ago it was really hot to encounter a woman talking this way. There's a certain locker-room swagger to the way Isadora throws around words like <em>cunt</em> and <em>fuck</em>, but for contemporary readers whatever shock value the words might have had is long gone.<br /><br />And, finally, apart from the basic idea of leaving your husband to go tooling around Europe with your new lover, there's nothing really erotic about the story, unless you have a fetish for neurotic, overprivileged, self-involved women who are hung up on Freudian analysis. Whininess is not hot. Not in women, not in men, not ever. <br /><br /><strong>Value as Feminism:</strong> This is one of the sacred texts of the 1970s women's movement. It was a big deal, I guess, for Jong to use language that only male authors had used previously. I've seen recent press describe her as "the original bad girl" (somewhere, in whatever afterlife you believe in, Eve is getting tetchy). To be sure, there's merit and honesty in her recognition of the contradictions inherent in modern womanhood.<br /><br />And yet, you know, for me, this book encapsulates everything wrong with second-wave feminism. It's whiny, it's solipsistic, it takes Freud seriously, and it makes the tacit assumption that empowerment begins and ends with the self-actualization of a woman who already has quite a lot of power. The heroine never stops to wonder if perhaps her privilege and her obsession with self are themselves to blame for her lack of fulfillment.<br /><br />Now, don't get me wrong: we needed second-wave feminism, and perhaps need it still, but it has some serious shortcomings. Among them are narcissism and whininess--which I think are directly due to a Steinem-style assumption that women are the perpetual victims of society and of the men in their lives. More pernicious, and ultimately more damaging, is the notion that fulfillment comes from gratifying every personal whim, regardless of its impact on others. How can that count as feminine fulfillment? It doesn't even register as human fulfillment. It's fundamentally childish: the exaltation of appetite, the inability to see beyond the bounds of self.<br /><br />So we might as well get into this:<br /><br /><strong>Value as Literature:</strong> I'm not a huge fan of how all this self-gratification translates into literature. <a href="http://www.glbtq.com/literature/feminist_lit_theory.html">Feminist literary theorists</a> suggested that women could--some said should--write according to their own separate aesthetic, ignoring such supposedly oppressive, phallocentric conceits as clarity and grammar. (These concepts didn't really come to prominence until the 1980s, but they'd been brewing at least since the beginning of the century; some say the Nora chapter of <em>Ulysses</em> is an example of <em>écriture feminine</em>, although I have trouble reconciling the ideas of Joyce and laxness.) Suffice to say that, one way and another, ideas of individual liberation have resulted in quite a lot of lazy writing. <br /><br />Henry Miller--no stranger to <a href="http://osgoode.yorku.ca/media2.nsf/83303ffe5af03ed585256ae6005379c9/fd41e3933ac3318285256e3d0050fc19!OpenDocument">censorship</a> himself--championed <em>Fear of Flying</em>, and said in a <a href="http://www.pacificbook.com/catalogs/curcat160-4.html">letter</a> that the book had a "natural, free flow. Just the contrary of Hemingway's studied prose which so many Americans consider 'good writing.'" Now, certainly Hemingway can get far too mannered. But is it wrong to expect a certain amount of discipline from an artist? Isn't that discipline--which boils down, after all, to exercising aesthetic choice--exactly what separates good art from bad?<br /><br />There is little such discipline here. In fact, if your bookstore had a Lazy Writing section, you'd probably spot <em>Fear of Flying</em> on the shelf (right there next to <em>On the Road</em> and <em>Angels and Demons</em>). It's at least 50 pages too long. It's that dreaded beast, an autobiographical first-person novel. It's contradictory. It ends on the sort of cliffhanger that indicates the author couldn't solve the main conflict and opted to weasel out instead. It's in love with its own cleverness, brimming with parenthetical asides and the sort of feeble puns ("whoreoscopes," "my hysterical history") that give wordplay a bad name.<br /><br />Is it antifeminist of me to get on Jong/Wing's case for whininess? That's an interesting question. You could point at literature's long history of neurotic male characters trying to make up their minds--from Hamlet to the protagonist in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Notes-Underground-Fyodor-Dostoyevsky/dp/1420926896/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231620381&sr=1-2">Notes from Underground</a>--and argue that female characters are due for their turn on the couch. Fair point. <br /><br />But the problem here is that <em>Fear of Flying </em>begins and ends with the couch. There's nothing more at stake. Hamlet's decision will reshape the kingdom, and he knows it; the process of deciding involves consideration not just of what he will do but of what it means to be human, what it means to die, what it means to face a decision like this. Isadora's decision is going to affect what she thinks about when she masturbates for the next few years, and it will affect her petulant analyst husband, and that's pretty much it. It's not a reflection on what it means to be human; it's just a reflection on what it means to be her--to be affluent and educated and still unsatisfied--and after a while it acquires the tedium of listening to a shrink's taped conversations with a hypochondriac. <br /><br />Now, isn't there a case to be made for exploring an individual situation in such a way that it becomes universal? Of course. That's all literature ever is, or needs to be. The question is whether <em>Fear of Flying </em>actually makes the leap to universality. The concept of the Z.F. comes the closest. Are we willing to grant the book universality based on that concept alone? For me, it's not enough. I suspect that, when the book came out, the feelings it described were much like those of many women in the affluent chattering class that, coincidentally, happens to establish critical reaction to books. They saw themselves, and assumed the experience was universal. But it's not--not by a long shot. <br /><br />So the real problem is that this is whininess and indecision without a larger purpose. Women are due for their Hamlet, no question, but should we settle for Isadora Wing? In terms of scale, scope, obsession, and would-be shock value, this is much closer to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Portnoys-Complaint-Philip-Roth/dp/0679756450">Portnoy's Complaint</a>. Jong's real subject is Erica Jong, just as Philip Roth's is Philip Roth. That comparison would probably piss off Erica Jong and Philip Roth equally. But so be it.<br /><br /><strong>What Else:</strong> There is nothing as simultaneously flattering and dismaying as the light of hope that leaps into a man's eyes when he finds out where you're from. I doubt the reputation American women enjoy in Italy is entirely due to the heroic philandering of Isadora Wing (or Erica Jong, acting as Isadora Wing). Based on my recent months in Tuscany, I'm guessing that the reputation has been well fortified by the hordes of sorority girls who file into the Florence airport wearing velour sweatpants with PINK emblazoned across the butts, chattering about Italy's lack of a drinking age. <br /><br />Perhaps whole armies of American women, inspired by <em>Fear of Flying</em>, have been descending on Italy, demanding sexual awakenings? If American tourists demand sex the same way they demand other things ("HI! I'M LOOKING! FOR THE GIGOLOS! EXCUSE ME! HI! THE GIGOLOS?"), then oh, a brilliant comedy is waiting to be written.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-46319188049810777722008-08-07T17:03:00.000-07:002008-08-07T17:44:21.447-07:00On judging books, and authors, by their coversI have a whole new reason to write as E.A., rather than Elizabeth: what the Guardian is calling <a href="http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/07/the_great_chick_lit_coverup.html">The Great Chick-Lit Cover-Up</a>. <br /><br />Chick lit is a wildly successful genre, of course, so publishers are evidently attempting to make every book by a female author look like chick lit. Now, this is insulting in several ways. <br /><br />One, it's incredibly condescending to the female readers who want to read chick lit: do publishers actually think these readers won't notice the difference? And won't the readers be disappointed? If you're hoping for chick lit, you don't want a book full of subtle lyricism and intricate symbolism, no matter how much you might enjoy that book on another day. And you're bound to resent an author whose book isn't what you expected. So the publishers are actually doing a disservice to these authors, in the name of a quick sell.<br /><br />Two, think about the typical covers of Big Important Literary Books. They do not look like chick lit (which typically proclaims its status with candy-bright colors). They look like they've been designed by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Chip-Kidd-Book-Work-1986-2006/dp/0847827852/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218155069&sr=1-2">Chip Kidd</a>, or one of his imitators. Or, if enough time has passed, they have the little orange band that designates a Penguin Classic, or the logo that says the book has passed into public domain and Barnes & Noble is going to put out its own damn edition. But if all female authors are denied these designations, then hey, guess what, it doesn't matter how profitable our books are, or how well we've written them: we're all being kept out of the canon. It doesn't matter how meaty the book is, if bookstores everywhere are proclaiming it's candy. Far more people will walk past the shop windows than will ever crack the book. <br /><br />And once an author has a reputation for candy, she's going to have a hard time convincing people she can write anything that <em>isn't</em> candy. (Just ask Stephen King.) What if you're Toni Morrison, and your books are entitled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Oprahs-Book-Club-Morrison/dp/0452280397/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218155911&sr=1-1">Paradise</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Song-Solomon-Toni-Morrison/dp/140003342X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218155940&sr=1-1">Song of Solomon</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beloved-Toni-Morrison/dp/1400033411/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218155972&sr=1-1">Beloved</a>, and they get rebranded with big swishy shiny letters, and suddenly everyone expects them to be bodice-rippers? How long do you think you'd have to wait for the Nobel committee to call?<br /><br />I will admit, however, that I'm a teeny bit curious about how the chick-lit covers would look for, say, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Corrections-Novel-Jonathan-Franzen/dp/0312421273/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218154368&sr=1-1">The Corrections</a> or <a href="http://www.amazon.com/White-Noise-Penguin-Great-Century/dp/0140283307/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218154330&sr=8-1">White Noise</a>. For the former, I envision a close-up of a flat chest in a Wonderbra, and a lipstick scrawl of a title; for the latter...oh, it could be the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Know-How-She-Does/dp/0375713751/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218154461&sr=1-1">typical cartoon</a> of the skinny, harried young mother, with a shopping cart overflowing with name-brand products and a comical black cloud in the distance. <br /><br />That suggests a bit of a guerrilla art project, doesn't it? A little fun for a feminist with a color printer. Just fold on the new dust jackets, move the Big Important Men's Literary Books to the chick lit table, and see who notices.<br /><br />Wow, if anyone actually does that, I hope they'll send me the designs.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-67081746981831338912008-08-04T07:55:00.000-07:002008-08-04T08:03:29.106-07:00R.I.P. Alexander SozhenitsynIn case you have any doubt of the power of a single voice raised against oppression, take a look at an <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080803/ap_on_re_eu/obit_solzhenistyn">obituary</a> for Alexander Solzhenitsyn. (For those who prefer biography to hagiography, the New York Times offers a much more detailed <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/books/04solzhenitsyn.html?hp#">life history</a>, including descriptions of a seriously cantankerous Solzhenitsyn in exile.)<br /><br />In any case, let's raise a glass to the memory of a man who believed that "it is within the power of writers...to defeat the lie."Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-47471530381644586812008-07-27T18:47:00.000-07:002009-01-13T07:19:21.256-08:00The Handmaid's Tale<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Handmaids-Tale-Novel-Margaret-Atwood/dp/038549081X/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217217193&sr=1-2"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG6W5npZu2W4Q7WMyRAj9t2ED-vyWEAt_SZJsngPk56Y6_f0SLqnn1D_GCCTGUkyiPibXYnUHNlFj7WES15UQrtSvYMvlO18Lvq_03vO4mhCFMta4Uua99HDsR8CWvPbwQWsJhbpBFmWo/s1600-h/handmaid.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG6W5npZu2W4Q7WMyRAj9t2ED-vyWEAt_SZJsngPk56Y6_f0SLqnn1D_GCCTGUkyiPibXYnUHNlFj7WES15UQrtSvYMvlO18Lvq_03vO4mhCFMta4Uua99HDsR8CWvPbwQWsJhbpBFmWo/s200/handmaid.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5227908371511056658" /></a></a><br /><strong>Author: </strong>Margaret Atwood<br /><br /><strong>First Published:</strong> 1986<br /><br /><strong>In a Nutshell: </strong>Atwood creates a future dystopia in which the United States has just become an oppressive fundamentalist dictatorship, the Republic of Gilead. Women are no longer allowed to read, work, or hold property; rather, they <em>are</em> property, assigned to men, and their sole purpose is to reproduce. Our guide through this world is Offred, the handmaid to a high-ranking Commander in the regime. (Offred is not her real name; the handmaids' names depend on their Commanders' names. Atwood never reveals Offred's real name--which, of course, makes it that much easier for the reader to substitute her own.) Despite extensive reeducation she remembers her life before, and pines for escape.<br /><br /><strong>Censorhip History:</strong> It's always ironic when people try to censor a book that is, ultimately, about the futility of such efforts. Almost every character here finds a tiny or not-so-tiny way to defy the oppressive system, just as almost every interested 10-year-old finds a way to read what's on the school library's age-restricted shelf.<br /><br />What's here to raise hackles? Well, the sexual content, of course. It's hardly the sort of sex you encounter in <a href="http://fieldguidetoforbiddenbooks.blogspot.com/2008/05/earths-children-series.html">Valley of the Horses</a>, but it is sex, and it takes place in a world defined by sex. Or, rather, defined by the renunciation of sex for purposes other than procreation. So it doesn't paint the most attractive picture of the Abstinence-Only movement, or of the loudmouth extremists who like to wave their Bibles around while they denounce other people's choices. (Not that Abstinence-Only <em>deserves</em> a flattering portrait.) A major character is a lesbian, and not in any way that might lead kids to think lesbianism is a sinful choice--she's a total badass, the one you want to be. (Not that lesbianism <em>is </em>a sinful choice.)There's also some incidental use of the f-word. (Not that there's anything wrong with <em>that</em>.)<br /><br />In Atwood's future, Texas is an independent republic again. You'd think that might have won some points with Texans. Not so: The San Antonio public schools considered banning <em>The Handmaid's Tale</em> on the grounds that it contained graphic sexual content and was offensive to Christians. One would-be censor, in what could be a verbatim line from the reeducation center's Aunt Lydia, claimed, "I have a responsibility to the country and our community to speak up for the values that will strengthen our society." (In an <a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1613902/posts">open letter</a>, Atwood responded wryly, "It's encouraging to know the written word is still taken so seriously.") Texas isn't the only case--Handmaid is high on the ALA's list of most censored books--but it's one of the most recent.<br /><br />Is it just the sex? There's far more graphic sexual content out there, and some of it is in classrooms too. I think the real problem is closer to what Atwood describes: women's liberation makes certain people very, very uncomfortable. <br /><br />Fundamentally, this is a book about power--the forms it takes, how we wield it, who suffers under it. It explores the essentially benevolent motivations of the people who have created the new regime. If you care about government or civil rights, this is a great read; it's a glimpse inside what <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Times-Revised-Twenties-Perennial/dp/0060935502/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217217144&sr=1-1">Paul Johnson</a> calls a utopian dictatorship. And if you care about women's rights, you must read this, no question. (Atwood's status in the historically male-dominated genre of literary sci-fi has to count as another victory for feminism.)<br /><br />That said, it's not really a book for kids. No one below high school is likely to grasp the real horror of the government's imposition into women's lives and bodies (though <a href="http://fugney.livejournal.com/210342.html">here's</a> a blogger who read <em>Handmaid</em> at 12 and thereby gained her first real feminist awareness). It may take a serious relationship or two before you understand how awful it is for Offred to be torn from her husband and daughter or for the Commander's Wife to watch the Commander's forced procreation with Offred. It may take several years of earning your own living before you feel in your gut the utter betrayal of having the rules changed to take all that away from you. I first read <em>Handmaid</em> in high school, read it next as the Taliban was <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/1326063/After-1,700-years,-Buddhas-fall-to-Taliban-dynamite.html">blowing up statues</a>, and just read it again; different parts have hit home each time. As <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_Fadiman">Clifton Fadiman</a> points out, "When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before, you see more in you than there was before." But none of that is an excuse for censorship.<br /><br /><strong>Real-World Correspondences: </strong>Of course, any story about the future is really a story about the present. In <em>The Handmaid's Tale</em>, Atwood takes numerous social trends of the 1980s and extends them to their logical and chilling conclusions. But she also works within the known world so well that it's not hard to glimpse the borders of Gilead as you walk down your street.<br /><br />The Reagan era was not a happy time for reproductive rights. Nor was it a particularly promising time for women, period. There were rumblings about the dropping U.S. birth rate (though in fact it remained at replacement level. As Susan Faludi documents in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Backlash-Undeclared-Against-American-Women/dp/0307345424/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217216396&sr=1-1">Backlash</a>, many religious and political ideologues, unhappy about the recent gains of the women's movement, exhorted women to remember their sacred duty of motherhood. (The embittered Commander's Wife, a former televangelist, is a clear nod to figures such as <a href="http://www.beverlylahayeinstitute.org/bli/">Beverly LaHaye</a> and <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/21/tammy.faye/index.html">Tammy Faye Bakker</a>; she seems to have realized too late that achieving her goals would require her to stop working.) Women's newfound sexual freedom and abortion rights were particular sticking points. By the decade's end, "fetal rights" activism was responsible for several forced cesarians and at least one pregnant woman's being <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=_I3OsiScQFwC&pg=PA133&lpg=PA133&dq=Chicago+pregnant+triplets+wrist+cuffs&source=web&ots=7tr-wJCHxm&sig=-74d8lrkuRB27Z2rnHXqZ6bMGnk&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result">shackled to her hospital bed</a>.<br /><br />Of course, the fetal rights folks--who sometimes referred to women as "incubators"--knew the value of nomenclature. That preoccupation carries into <em>Handmaid's Tale</em>. Like much U.S. culture in the 1980s, the Republic of Gilead is a triumph of marketing. Extensive market research has gone into the definition of roles, the design of uniforms, the naming of events. <br /><br />Atwood also explores the Reagan-era nuclear nightmare: part of the reason the birth rate is so low is that the rate of birth defects has skyrocketed. Toxic waste from industrial pollution and a series of nuclear accidents has contaminated nearly everyone. Other people have fallen prey to that other Reagan-era nightmare, AIDS, or a drug-resistant strain of syphilis. Atwood understands the decade's neuroses so thoroughly it's a wonder she doesn't also create some surprisingly lethal side effect of wearing shoulder pads.<br /><br />If the women's uniforms--voluminous, shapeless, all-concealing, with mandatory hats and veils--remind you of chador, that's no accident. Atwood drew a great deal of inspiration from a <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07EFD81F3EF93BA15753C1A9679C8B63">1978 trip to Afghanistan</a>. Some details also, clearly, come from the Holocaust: the new regime is purged of blacks and Jews, and the handmaids all receive identifying tattoos. In fact, when people argued that the book should be censored because of the horrible inhumanity it depicts, Atwood pointed out that it doesn't show anything that hasn't actually happened. <br /><br />Just think about that for a second.<br /><br /><strong>Eerily Prescient Bits: </strong>The coup that leads to the creation of the Republic of Gilead is initially blamed on "Islamic fascists" so the new government has a scapegoat as well as an excuse for suspending the Constitution. And the new government creates some "National Homeland" something-or-others, which hits a bit too close for comfort.<br /><br />Atwood also accurately foresaw the dominance of paying by electronic debit rather than cash; in Gilead, this allows the government to freeze all women's assets. I still occasionally get a what-if chill when I reach for my debit card.<br /><br /><strong>What Else:</strong> I can't believe I just posted a link to Beverly LaHaye's site. From an anti-censorship blog, at that. I feel filthy.<br /><br /><strong>And Perhaps You'd Like to Pair That With:</strong> <em>Backlash</em>, for a sobering look at the real-life trends behind the made-up world; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Kite-Runner-Riverhead-Essential-Editions/dp/1594481776/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217216657&sr=1-1">The Kite Runner</a>, for an example of life under the Taliban; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0586044345/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217216580&sr=1-4">Brave New World</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/1984-Signet-Classics-George-Orwell/dp/0451524934/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217216620&sr=1-2">1984,</a> for other classic fictional dystopias.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-46176740483414948592008-06-29T08:53:00.000-07:002009-01-13T07:21:15.479-08:00Carrie<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3sL2gZo1xlPpkCcbig4zoMy91bNE5NFVNd6NvMEMk8bxXPSpusnTqAFIQs4SC8cJQdyv0nPDGXFcblSUDG6EKI3aS9rDw_K15LD38Iecv0FnnUD2c5nTBBApiZZPcGnY_1TJEGKqw5tU/s1600-h/carrie.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3sL2gZo1xlPpkCcbig4zoMy91bNE5NFVNd6NvMEMk8bxXPSpusnTqAFIQs4SC8cJQdyv0nPDGXFcblSUDG6EKI3aS9rDw_K15LD38Iecv0FnnUD2c5nTBBApiZZPcGnY_1TJEGKqw5tU/s200/carrie.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5217487365807392674" /></a><br /><strong>First Published:</strong> 1974<br /><br /><strong>Author:</strong> Stephen King<br /><br /><strong>Censorship History:</strong> If you Google "Carrie censorship," most of the hits are for <a href="http://fieldguidetoforbiddenbooks.blogspot.com/2008/06/sister-carrie.html">Sister Carrie</a>. Which is ironic, given that <em>Carrie</em> was in the <a href="http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/challengedbanned/challengedbanned.cfm">top 100 challenged books</a> for 1990-2000, and <em>Sister Carrie</em> didn't even crack the list. The censors, evidently, have bigger, dirtier fish to fry these days.<br /><br />What's more curious, to me, is that most of the links for this <em>Carrie</em> lead to the same piece of text:<br /><br /><blockquote>Considered "trash" that is especially harmful for "younger girls." <br />Challenged by Clark High School library, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1975. Placed on special closed shelf in Union High School library, Vergennes, Vermont, 1978. </blockquote><br />That's it? You do get the odd note about parents requesting a blanket ban on all Stephen King books (he has three or four in the top 100, quite a respectable showing), and <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/life/columnist/popcandy/2004-09-28-pop-candy_x.htm">one columnist</a> describes his books as being on an age-restricted shelf at her school's library (which actually seems like a great strategy for getting younger kids to read). If you search for "Ban Stephen King" you get lots of hits about his public stance against <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080409/010247797.shtml">banning video games</a>. But there's very little about any actual censorship of <em>Carrie</em>. One must conclude that either the would-be censors are keeping their efforts very, very quiet--which might not be a bad strategy if you're up against a fiction behemoth like Stephen King--or that the reports of <em>Carrie</em>'s censorship are greatly exaggerated.<br /><br />One can, at least, find an <a href="http://www.salon.com/media/media961015.html">article</a> in which King discusses censorship: "Run, don't walk, to the first library or bookstore you can find and read what they are trying to keep out of your eyes because that is <em>exactly</em> what you need to know." Amen.<br /><br />In any case, <em>Carrie </em>is the sort of thing every high school student should read; if they did, high school might be a kinder place. The book's real power comes not so much from King's gift for horror as from his utter empathy for his title character. No one who reads this should ever again be able to dismiss a misfit with an easy conscience. King is relentless in finding not just the overt cruelty of Chris, the Queen Bee, but also the more passive cruelty of the good girls who go along with the group--the ones who are, in essence, just following orders.<br /><br /><strong>What Happens:</strong> At 16, Carrie White, the class misfit, starts her first period in the shower in front of her entire gym class. The other girls mock her cruelly. She has no idea what is happening. It emerges that her mother is a religious fanatic who believes menarche is God's punishment to girls who harbor sinful thoughts. Mrs. White also beats Carrie regularly and locks her in a closet. Carrie, however, is not quite defenseless. She is discovering a mysterious ability to move things with her mind, and she begins to train this ability to protect herself from her mother.<br /><br />Sue Snell, one of the girls from the gym class, regrets her role in teasing Carrie, and persuades her boyfriend to take Carrie to the senior prom as a way of helping Carrie come out of her shell. For a few blissful hours Carrie transcends her misery. The other students accept her. She is beautiful.<br /><br />Then--in what is one of the best-known episodes in <a href="http://www.stephenking.com/pages/works/bibliography.php">Stephen King's vast canon</a>--Chris, the gym class ringleader, douses Carrie in pig blood. Carrie's vengeance is swift and only half voluntary. She dies, but not before taking out several hundred others.<br /><br /><strong>And How About That Death Scene:</strong> Plenty of writers attempt to take you inside a character's head at the moment of death. Few do it in a way you suspect you will remember at your own death: Tolstoy in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0143039997/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214788571&sr=1-2">War and Peace</a>; Toni Morrison in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sula-Toni-Morrison/dp/1400033438/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214788435&sr=1-1">Sula</a>; A.S. Byatt in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Still-Life-S-Byatt/dp/0684835037/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214788782&sr=1-2">Still Life</a>; a handful of others. I'm going to have to add Carrie White's death to that short list.<br /><br /><strong>A Confession:</strong> I was something of a Sue Snell in high school, only without the boyfriend and the sex and the good looks. I was a very good student and by most standards a good kid; I didn't sneak out or drink or even try one of Kris Nielsen's cigarettes; I didn't trust my body enough to wear anything close to revealing (although there were some really regrettable tie-dyed leggings around 1990); I had a mind, but I was just beginning to discover that it was my own. <br /><br />I was the butt of a few jokes. But I was also privy to a few jokes on students even lower in the pecking order. To my eternal shame, I did nothing to stop them; sometimes I went along with them. There are a few regrets I don't suppose you ever get over. That's one for me. Reading <em>Carrie</em> opened that old wound as if it had never healed. There's a twenty-some year gap between Carrie's prom and mine, but that whole kill-or-be-killed world is apparently a constant, and oh, boy, does King nail it. If he nails the reader in the process, well, that's the point, isn't it?<br /><br /><strong>What Else:</strong> If you want to get a look of carefully restrained pity from your librarian, check out <em>Carrie</em> and <em>Sister Carrie</em> on the same day, as though you think they're related, along the lines of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wind-Done-Gone-Novel/dp/0618219064/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214788152&sr=8-2">Gone with the Wind</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wind-Done-Gone-Novel/dp/0618219064/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214788152&sr=8-2">The Wind Done Gone</a>.<br /><br /><em>Carrie </em>was King's breakthrough. He was inspired by a couple of girls who went to his high school, miserable outcasts of an instantly recognizable type. He describes the whole process quite movingly in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Stephen-King/dp/0743455967/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214789615&sr=1-1">On Writing</a> (another one that should be required reading for high school students). Anyone who thinks of King as a sort of pulpy genre author is in for a fantastic surprise, because his style here is quite inventive, and not in the self-conscious, faintly desperate way you associate with first novels. This is flat-out good.<br /><br /><strong>Trivia:</strong> <em>Carrie</em> was made into a notoriously <a href="http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=940DE7DA133FF930A25756C0A96E948260">bad musical</a>, some say the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Not-Since-Carrie-Broadway-Musical/dp/0312082738">worst flop of all time</a>, in 1988. (Gee, I can't tell <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_lKcT1It5k">why it flopped</a>.) <br /><br />There's also a film version by Brian DePalma I hear is pretty good, and another film called <em>The Rage: Carrie 2</em> that sounds pretty pointless and awful, what with Carrie dying in the first one. <br /><blockquote>FIRE CHIEF: Remember? Remember the horror? <br />SUE (trembling): Yes! Yes, I remember! Oh, the memory is so horrible!</blockquote><br />Etc. There are times when the best compliment you can pay to a story is to let it end where it's supposed to end.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-23050880953557664952008-06-24T09:35:00.000-07:002008-06-24T09:44:35.535-07:00R.I.P. George CarlinNo blog on censorship would be complete without noting the passing of George Carlin, one of the shrewdest and funniest voices for free speech. Everyone remembers the "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," but for my money this was his most inspiring line:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Brain-Droppings-George-Carlin/dp/0786891122/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214325702&sr=8-1"><blockquote>Why is everything like this? Why isn't it different?</blockquote></a>Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-65316612903013302552008-06-21T13:54:00.001-07:002008-06-22T09:23:35.105-07:00Sister Carrie<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sister-Carrie-Theodore-Dreiser/dp/1420929798/ref=pd_bbs_sr_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214086723&sr=8-4"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Vltlor3AEfGpDvQVFznlQ3mgabPL3y8h83n4XAQiumaa8bKJZYOj1qPo5VhLyLYlziSO2F1GfnNS7XoKdhbko6yy9cxCCaQji_7TOIfrZIIGGhFdm70KeYZtO4JJXaGzAGA0KESbSTE/s1600-h/sister_carrie.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Vltlor3AEfGpDvQVFznlQ3mgabPL3y8h83n4XAQiumaa8bKJZYOj1qPo5VhLyLYlziSO2F1GfnNS7XoKdhbko6yy9cxCCaQji_7TOIfrZIIGGhFdm70KeYZtO4JJXaGzAGA0KESbSTE/s200/sister_carrie.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5214464400496835490" /></a></a><br /><strong>Author:</strong> Theodore Dreiser<br /><br /><strong>First Published:</strong> 1900<br /><br /><strong>What Happens (Here Be Spoilers): </strong>Carrie Meeber, in her late teens, forsakes her small-town life to come to Chicago, hoping for work. She stays with her sister and her sister's husband in their humble apartment, and immediately realizes she wants a life less shoddy than theirs. She hopes for a comfortable position as a shop girl in one of the new <a href="http://www.fieldsischicago.org/">department stores</a>, but can't afford the stylish clothes that would secure such a job, and finds grueling, underpaid work in a shoe factory instead. Eventually she loses even that. <br /><br />However, she catches the eye of Charles Drouet, an up-and-coming salesman. Drouet showers her with gifts and whisks her away from her sister. Soon they are living together. Carrie no longer needs to work at all; she spends her days reading. Drouet promises to marry her as soon as he makes a big enough sale to cover the expenses. He introduces her to friends as his wife.<br /><br />He makes the mistake of introducing her to Hurstwood, who resolves to win Carrie away from Drouet. Carrie--who now has the luxury of time to think--has begun to recognize Drouet's shortcomings, particularly the hollowness of his promises of marriage. She admires Hurstwood's intelligence, extravagance, social connections and superior taste. She refuses to leave Drouet unless Hurstwood marries her. Hurstwood agrees, neglecting to inform her that he is already married. <br /><br />Hurstwood's wife susses out her husband's duplicity and threatens divorce, a move that would leave him without property. It's safe to say Hurstwood does not respond well: He steals $10,000 from work, lies to Carrie, and flees with her to Canada, where he marries her in a ceremony that he only later reveals is a sham.<br /><br />White-collar crime has apparently not changed much over the years. Hurstwood's employers fire him but agree not to press charges if he returns the money. But he is in too much disgrace to return to Chicago, or to work in the elevated social circles to which he is accustomed. He and Carrie move to New York. There, he struggles to find work. For the first time in his life, he must pay attention to a budget. Carrie, for her part, discovers the essential poverty of spirit that underlay all his previous generosity. When he does work, he neglects her in much the same way he neglected his first wife. Their resources dwindle. <br /><br />Finally Carrie is fed up. She gets work as a chorus girl. In the past she has shown some talent as an actor, and the theater begins to recognize it. As her income grows, she leaves Hurstwood. Gradually she becomes a recognized star; the shows are trifling comedies, but she earns a handsome income. She also earns legions of male admirers but--to the bewilderment of her castmates--remains indifferent to their offers of wealth and wedded bliss. Drouet, now quite affluent, seeks her out; they reconcile civilly but she is no more interested in him than in the other suitors. She has discovered independence.<br /><br />Hurstwood, on the other hand, continues his decline into poverty. The book ends with him, a ruined man, in the waning twilight of his life.<br /><br /><strong>Censorship History:</strong> <em>Sister Carrie</em> was <a href="http://www.thefileroom.org/documents/dyn/DisplayCase.cfm/id/1122">condemned</a> early and often; like <a href="http://fieldguidetoforbiddenbooks.blogspot.com/2008/05/ulysses.html">Ulysses</a> it was censored and <a href="http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Censorship.pdf">bowdlerized</a> enough that we no longer have a single authoritative edition. (Bowdlerizing--named for the Reverend <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler">Thomas Bowdler</a>--originally meant removing content "unfit to be read by a gentleman in the company of ladies." It has come to imply "withholding certain details and thereby weakening the whole," in much the same way that future generations will speak of <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/rumsfeld-bio.html">Rumsfelding</a> an invasion.) <br /><br />Most censorship, of course, is less a comment on the work than on its times. Many early descriptions of <em>Sister Carrie</em> refer to Carrie as "a woman of loose morals." Given that she is the dupe of both Drouet and Hurstwood, neither of whom thinks anything of a little casual philandering on the side (and one of whom steals a great deal of money), it's pretty appalling that Carrie gets the blame. But I'm afraid it presents an accurate picture of just how circumscribed women's lives were in the 1890s. Poverty, not baseness, drives Carrie to accept Drouet's gifts and attentions. Her insistence on marriage reveals her awareness of social code; unfortunately, she is also more or less powerless to enforce her wishes, and at first she's too ignorant to to recognize the men's deceit. It's plain that she is not unique in her ignorance. Drouet and Hurstwood both expect her to believe their lies; women in their world do not ask questions. Carrie's society--the same society that sought to ban this book--kept women ignorant in the name of preserving their innocence.<br /><br />Carrie's moral slips occur when she becomes aware of the differences between her material wealth and the wealth of others. This is a tragedy of capitalism more than anything else. The plot shows the natural consequences of income disparity. When Drouet first offers Carrie gifts, she is too poor to afford a winter coat (and that's a serious problem in Chicago). It's hard to blame her for choosing the comfort and surface respectability of life with him. Plenty of women make the same decision today. If the arbitrary lack of a ring is all that makes Carrie immoral, that proves Dreiser's point rather better than it proves the point of his censors. Of course, I'm making these observations from the perspective of a century, but Dreiser is always quite clear about Carrie's circumstances and motivations, and I imagine many women of Carrie's time read this and wondered what, exactly, was so terrible about her efforts to survive.<br /><br />In any case, no amount of Bowdlerization can remove the implications of the plot, which remain quite radical: that capitalism is amoral; that wealth is neither always deserved nor always a reflection of moral character; that poverty is not noble; that we cannot always pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps; that pay does not always accurately reflect the difficulty of the job; that women are not innately moral and innocent but rather gain judgment from their experiences in the world. <br /><br />It says plenty about the character of the times that Dreiser could be censored for implying extramarital sex but that the casual sexism of some of his commentary--the broad observations about women's consciousness of fashion--could go unremarked. (As for the accuracy of these generalizations, all I can say is, Go to a literacy conference, Theodore, and discover the depths of frumpiness to which women can sink when they give most of their effort to meaningful work.) And as far as I can tell no one has found much issue with Drouet's description of a client as "a regular hook-nosed sheeny." These biases are allowable, I think, because the occasional sexism of the commentary pales next to the near-revolutionary independence of the female character, and because the "sheeny" comment serves to illustrate Drouet's small-mindedness. (Or, sadly, perhaps it was the sort of thing people said all the time then, and no one noticed anything amiss.)<br /><br />Off-the-cuff anti-Semitism notwithstanding, the Nazis banned <em>Sister Carrie </em>in 1933. It's a safe assumption that if your work is banned by a fanatical dictatorship, you're doing something right.<br /><br /><strong>What Else:</strong> Dreiser has taken a lot of lumps over the years for his writing style. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Portable-Dorothy-Parker-Penguin-Classics/dp/0143039539/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214087202&sr=1-1">Dorothy Parker</a> notably opined,<br /><br /><blockquote>Theodore Dreiser<br />Should ought to write nicer.</blockquote><br />But it's not as though Dreiser is unlettered, or his sentences are artless in the same way that, say, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Angels-Demons-Dan-Brown/dp/1416524797/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214087253&sr=1-3">Dan Brown</a>'s are artless. One gets the sense that Dreiser is wrestling constantly with the language to make it do his bidding. He has examined all the available words and found them lacking; none is quite precise enough. Where some writers would go for the word that comes nearest the point, and others would try for a metaphor that would transcend the words, Dreiser just keeps cramming words into the sentence, hoping that in combination they will refine his meaning as singly they cannot. <br /><br />That said, his syntax is far more complicated than most American writers would even attempt today. And it's not just that long, complicated sentences have gone out of vogue; it's that must of us don't know how to string together clauses and phrases the way even second-rate hacks did in the 19th century. (Take a good hard look at some of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Edgar-Allan-Poe-Complete-Tales/dp/0785814531/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214087295&sr=1-1">Poe</a>'s sentences, for example, and remember that he was considered inferior in his day. Then imagine a roomful of MFA students being asked to parse a sentence, and blanching in unison.) <br /><br />Anyway, I think what's really happening here, stylistically, is that Dreiser is ushering in the era of American modernism. (This is not itself a modernist book--it's naturalism--but it's a giant departure from what had come before.) He wrote at a turning point in American literature, a turning point he <a href="http://www.lib.niu.edu/2001/ihy010446.html">helped to cause</a>, and <em>Sister Carrie</em>--his first novel--sometimes justaposes the flowery 19th-century high style he must have grown up reading with the cleaner, harder modern lines and ideas he was starting to choose for himself. The last sentence--which will haunt you--leaves no doubt that Dreiser ultimately comes down on the side of the modern.<br /><br />For all the jabs at Dreiser's language, there is real craft in the images he chooses--for example, the bum Hurstwood ignores early in the action, who foreshadows Hurstwood's own fall. And when Dreiser gets it, he <em>nails</em> it. Describing Hurstwood on the social scene: "It was greatness in a way, small as it was." Describing a community theater production: "The applause and good nature of the audience...in its surprise at not being tortured, went to the extreme of hilarious commendation."<br /><br /><strong>May I Suggest a Nice White to Accompany That:</strong> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Devil-White-City-Madness-Changed/dp/0375725601/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214087597&sr=1-1">Devil in the White City</a> takes place in the same Chicago. Larsen's architectural history will give you a thorough idea of the backdrop of Carrie's life. Dreiser's description of Carrie's relative poverty and artlessness will help you understand how the killer in <em>White City</em> was able to prey on so many similar young women. <br /><br />And perhaps you could follow with <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Jungle-Uncensored-Original-Upton-Sinclair/dp/1884365302/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214087633&sr=1-1">The Jungle</a> as a nice digestif, for further meditations on income disparity, or <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Room-Ones-Own-Virginia-Woolf/dp/0156787334/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214087553&sr=1-1">A Room of One's Own</a>, for thoughts on women's independence. Carrie's trajectory is essentially that of Woolf's hypothetical Judith Shakespeare. <br /><br /><strong>And on a Personal Note:</strong> As the Field Guide grows, my life seems to mirror the books to a degree that is sometimes alarming. I had to borrow a hacksaw for a home improvement project the week I was reading <em>American Psycho</em>, and found myself walking into a crowded bar with the saw concealed in a shopping bag. But with this book it was less creepy. Dreiser knows Chicago very well. Carrie sees Joseph Jefferson on stage, for example; and here I was, a woman who came to Chicago to act, reading this novel the week of the <a href="http://www.jeffawards.org/">Jeff Awards</a>. The utter realness of Carrie's world lingers with me.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1267883803190540251.post-57094793040788381712008-06-07T08:46:00.000-07:002008-06-07T10:50:20.257-07:00The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Huckleberry-Modern-Library-Classics/dp/0375757376/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212860265&sr=1-2"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRkbTT-PJTh7Igir-BaXV5zxSmq32_8CIW5pu4V3XnI6M8RLeGnCSFwe5_qrW58jiQBd7bVSxZBhLW0oM1m4BO8d-8WbkopPr94RKSbYqoioIBChzTfZsklJuaf5xm3aoamTyKPiQIZco/s1600-h/huck+finn.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRkbTT-PJTh7Igir-BaXV5zxSmq32_8CIW5pu4V3XnI6M8RLeGnCSFwe5_qrW58jiQBd7bVSxZBhLW0oM1m4BO8d-8WbkopPr94RKSbYqoioIBChzTfZsklJuaf5xm3aoamTyKPiQIZco/s200/huck+finn.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5209195521139915874" /></a></a><br /><strong>Author: </strong>Mark Twain<br /><br /><strong>First Published:</strong> 1885<br /><br /><strong>What Happens: </strong>Twain warns in his preface that "persons attempting to find a plot...will be shot." So the, ahem, sequence of events takes place after the end of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Tom-Sawyer-Penguin-Classics/dp/0143039563/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212860178&sr=1-1">Tom Sawyer</a>. That novel ends with Tom and Huck each in possession of $6,000. In the sequel Huck has been taken in by a kindly widow, but his violent, alcoholic father soon gets wind of Huck's fortune and comes to town to claim it. Pap kidnaps Huck, who eventually flees. Huck meets up with Jim, a slave who has run away from the widow's farm. The town assumes Pap has killed Huck. Huck and Jim escape on a raft down the Mississippi. They hope to get to the town of Cairo, where Jim can pass himself off as a freeman, but they overshoot and wind up in slave territory, where Jim is in constant danger. A picaresque series of escapades ensues; Twain is at his best describing the townspeople along the river and the contradictions of human behavior. A pair of shysters, the King and the Duke, tag along, bilking the townspeople as they travel. <br /><br />The King and the Duke print up false billets to collect rewards on Jim as a runaway slave; the last of these has resulted in his imprisonment. Huck sets out to free him. Then, in the much-discussed (and much-maligned) last section of the book, Huck encounters Tom, who has come to visit his Aunt Sally. Tom, under the influence of countless <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mannering-Penguin-Classics-Walter-Scott/dp/014043657X/ref=pd_bbs_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212860940&sr=8-5">gothic adventure novels</a>, insists on complicating the rescue to a degree that places Jim in physical torment and prolongs his confinement for a month--even though, as it turns out, Tom knows all along that Jim is actually free, because the old widow has died.<br /><br /><strong>The Obligatory Discussion of the Problem Ending:</strong> Twain has indeed created a bit of a Problem Ending, in much the same way that Shakespeare (or <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Francis-Bacon-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0192840819/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212860125&sr=1-1">Bacon</a>, as Twain would have it) wrote a few Problem Plays. I think the real problem comes at the beginning of the end, when Twain gives Tom precedence in Huck's story. Huck has matured on his journey; Tom is still a boy. For the ending to feel more related to the rest of the story, pragmatic Huck would need to triumph over romantic Tom. The two would free Jim using Huck's practical means and thereby get into really serious trouble. (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Braindead-Megaphone-George-Saunders/dp/159448256X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212860040&sr=1-1">George Saunders</a>, in his excellent introduction, suggests that Twain may have avoided this route because he sensed that the trouble might be so serious as to turn the novel into a tragedy.)<br /><br />Once Twain has chosen to give Tom the reins, I don't see any better way for the story to proceed than the way Twain has written it. The great human comedy has become something closer to parody or farce, and a farce has to progress to a crowning punchline. Having established the meaninglessness of the events from the moment Tom insists on his complicated plan, Twain has to progress to the crowning meaninglessness: Tom has known all along that Jim was already free. (And yes, that was two <em>meaninglessness</em>es in one sentence, and I don't see any way around that either.) Tom's machinations result in his getting shot; that's fitting too, since under narrative logic he should be most punished for the stupidity of his actions. It all works as narrative and as comedy.<br /><br />The problem is, we've already seen much better comedy: the life along the Mississippi, through Huck's singularly frank and sometimes naïve vision. Huck and Jim have emerged as people we care about, and they must go back to being pawns who are battered by the blows of farce. The ending feels odd not because it's inferior writing--it is still Twain, after all--but because it's not quite part of the same book. It would have been fine as a short story, and Tom's revelation would have worked the same way an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Henry-Modern-Library/dp/0679601228/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212859865&sr=1-1">O. Henry</a> ending does. However, I have already devoted enough attention to it that I fully expect to be shot.<br /><br /><strong>Trivia: </strong>Jane Austen spoofed gothic novels in essentially the same way in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Northanger-Watsons-Sanditon-Oxford-Classics/dp/0192840827/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212859800&sr=1-2">Northanger Abbey</a>: A too-susceptible character imagines drama in innocuous situations and thereby gets herself into trouble. The device is a bit more successful there, because it's the central gimmick of the plot, and the heroine's snooping eventually does create enough real complications for the climax to be satisfying. Perhaps that has something to do with Twain's well-documented distaste for Austen: "Jane Austen's books," he said, "are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it."<br /><br /><strong>Censorship History:</strong> We tend to think of <em>Huck Finn</em>'s censorship as being one of those <a href="http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/09.28/huckfinn.html">tragic cases</a> of the smothering of all non-PC thought, but the book <a href="http://www.humanities-interactive.org/literature/bonfire/censor.html">raised hackles</a> from the beginning. Though <a href="http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=3637">today's readers</a> may see racism in Twain's writing, his <a href="http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Class/pol325/Huck.htm">views on race</a> were shockingly progressive to many of his contemporaries. Even more shocking was the book's true emotional climax, in which Huck realizes that saving Jim from captivity will mean going to hell--and he chooses to go to hell. A horrified <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Little-Signet-Classics-Louisa-Alcott/dp/0451529308/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212859682&sr=8-2">Louisa May Alcott</a> opined, "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them."<br /><br /><em>Huck Finn</em> is still in the top ten of the American Library Association's list of most challenged books, and that's no mean feat when you consider that <a href="http://fieldguidetoforbiddenbooks.blogspot.com/2008/05/american-psycho.html">American Psycho</a> is #60. <em>Huck</em>'s challenges nearly all have to do with the word <em>nigger</em> and the sometimes <a href="http://itech.fgcu.edu/&/issues/vol1/issue1/huckfinn.htm">minstrel-ish</a> potrayal of Jim. (Interestingly enough, African American writers <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Playing-Dark-Whiteness-Literary-Imagination/dp/0679745424/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212859726&sr=1-1">Toni Morrison</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Roots-Alex-Haley/dp/0385037872/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212859756&sr=1-1">Alex Haley</a> have spoken in defense of the book.)<br /><br /><em>Huck Finn</em> has quite a few things in common with another book that gets challenged on similar grounds, <a href="http://fieldguidetoforbiddenbooks.blogspot.com/2008/05/to-kill-mockingbird.html">To Kill a Mockingbird</a>. Both authors grew up in the South, and certain assumptions color their writing despite their best efforts. Both of them show racism through the perception of a child--and a white child at that, a child just beginning to be aware of his or her own prejudice. If it's clear from the discussion of race that <em>Huck</em> predates <em>Mockingbird </em>by almost a century, it's also clear that the device endures as a way to present honest portrayals of the adult world. <br /><br />However, where <em>Mockingbird</em>'s Scout is naïve because she is priviliged and quite young, Huck is naïve because he is ignorant and largely unschooled. He has unthinkingly absorbed many of Pap's worst traits. Pap is the anti-Atticus; he thinks Huck is putting on airs by attempting to read and write, and he rails against perceived slights from every corner of society, blaming the government, the rich, and eventually even "free niggers" for his drunkenness and poverty. Pap's drunken monologue is instantly recognizable. Twain is unsparing and pretty much letter-perfect in depicting the weaknesses that underlie human cruelty, and what was not yet called addiction. (In many ways, today's clinical vocabulary weakens our ability to describe characters, reducing them to collections of symptoms rather than true people who bear some responsibility for their actions. We fiction writers will have to find some ways around that.)<br /><br /><strong>Huck, Twain, Racism, and Bus Rides: </strong>Twain's father owned slaves, and Twain's perception of race and racism evolved considerably between childhood and adulthood. I have to imagine that, consciously or not, part of his impetus for writing <em>Huck Finn </em>was to convey his awakening to the injustice of racial prejudice. (The book was published twenty years after the end of the Civil War, so he's not lobbying for abolition here; he's talking about basic human interaction.)<br /><br />To me, it's pretty clear that Twain wanted to contrast Jim--who protects Huck, sacrifices for him, listens to him, conspires with him, and ultimately loves him--with Pap, who drinks, extorts, picks fights, abandons and then kidnaps his son, turns instantly and savagely violent, refuses to work, and sees Huck as a meal ticket. Later, when Huck and Jim are joined by the King and the Duke, it's quite obvious that Jim is the kindest and most honest person on the raft. It's unfortunate that Twain sometimes pushes Jim's guilelessness to the point of idiocy. But let's think for a moment about how many other Southern writers of the time were willing to see nobility and humor in the hearts and minds of slaves. Likewise, though many characters--including Huck--discuss the innate inferiority of the people they always call niggers, it's clear that the beliefs belong to the characters, not to Twain.<br /><br />That said, a few days ago I was reading the book on the bus, fairly early in the story, when Huck is revealing some of his more unfortunate beliefs. A black man sat down next to me. We met each other's eyes and smiled, and I surreptitiously marked my page with my finder and shut the book. After a moment he glanced at the cover and said "<em>Huck Finn</em>, huh?"<br /><br />I gabbled about how long it had been since I'd read it, how it was funnier than I remembered. I asked if he had read it, and he shook his head no, still smiling. The word <em>nigger</em> hovered unspoken between us. Was he supposed to accuse me of reading something offensive? Was I supposed to mention the topic we're not supposed to notice any more, the thing you don't talk about with strangers? We rode on in silence. After a few more stops I got off the bus.<br /><br />I suppose it's something that we could ride on a bus side by side: that he could take the seat next to me without fear of reprisal, that I could look at him and see a person capable of legitimate offense. When strangers can honestly talk about race, though, we'll really be getting somewhere. Whatever the book's limitations, I think it's obvious that's what Twain really wanted, and I have a feeling it's more or less what his censors want too. That day might come sooner if we could start the conversation with a point of commonality--such as, say, all reading the same book.Bagbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17208805767033673269noreply@blogger.com0