Sunday, April 13, 2014

The real ogres know how to live


Claude Chabrol is the French Hitchcock. Of course, that's an Anglo-centric way of putting it. He may be better than Hitchcock. At the end of his film Masques the soundtrack even plays Gounod's 'Marche funèbre d'une marionnette' ... the piece used as the theme music for the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

In this film the sinister character at one point explains: "The love for children, you know, it's terrible ... it eats you alive! They're the real ogres."

Raymond Carver, in an essay on "Influence" in his book Fires wrote: "The biggest single influence on my writing, directly and indirectly, has been my two children. They were born before I was twenty and from beginning to end – some nineteen years in all – there wasn’t any area of my life where their heavy and often baleful influence didn’t reach."

I remember the first time I read this —back before I had any children of my own — this shocked me, maybe because — for like Tonio Kröger I am no doubt ein verirrter Burger — it was not the sort of thing one should say, it was not (in the young Tolstoy's terms) comme il faut, but I think also because — despite the admiration I felt for both the man and his writing — I sensed that here there was something wrong, something that revealed more of some ancient wound of the speaker than it did some universal experience.

Children are — almost by definition — a positive. They know how to live! In a scene at the very end of Mikio Naruse's Late Chrysanthemums one friend advises another whose adult son has just left on a train for a new job in a different city, "Don't worry, young people know how to live".

There are theories about creole languages — new langauges with sophisticated grammars arising out of the many-rooted pidgin languages in communities of immigrant workers of diverse origins — which explain that their creation is due to the children of the community playing together and inventing the new language. But surely the standard languages are similarly invented, or reinvented, children inventing a language based on the inherited dialect, but full of mistakes and radical reuse ... small wonder that reading Chaucer in the original is not so easy.

Friday, April 11, 2014

Problems of the will

"The real problems are the problems of the will" - the quote is from Giuseppe Mazzotta, in his book Reading Dante, but if like me you've watched his Yale lecture course on 'Dante in Translation' more than once, then you'll remember the idea. The full context of the quotation is this: "The body stands for one’s own reality, the passions. It stands for one’s own will. This is the difference between what the Greeks understand as the great intellectual adventure, which is one of knowledge, and Dante’s idea that the real problems are problems of the will. We may not know where we are, and we may understand that we are not happy with the situation in which we find ourselves, but we cannot quite solve these problems with knowledge alone because the problems here are problems of willing."

Dante himself was well aware of the centrality of the question of will in his Comedy. In his Epistle to Cangrande he writes: "Si vero accipiatur opus allegorice, subiectum est homo prout merendo et demerendo per arbitorii liberatem iustitie premiandi et puniendi obnoxius est" (If the work is taken allegorically, the subject is man according as by his merits or demerits in the exercise of his free will  he is deserving of reward or punishment by justice."[bold face mine])

And of all the great writers, who better to understand this than the "problem-gambler" Dostoevsky? But of course it may well not have been until his second marriage that Dostoevsky would actually have felt any 'remorse' at succumbing to the 'weakness' of being addicted to gambling. If the character Alexei in The Gambler is anything to go by, then the young Dostoevsky possibly had his own theories about success and the positive power of human will, although Alexei - like Raskolnikov with his similarly cerebral theories about crime - seems quite incapable of actually attaining the rational control he extols.

Novels are like symphonies: they unfold in a linear sequence, but their parts stand in architectural relation to each other; main themes are announced and explored through their developments.  Crime and Punishment, for example, after a brief introduction which introduces us to Raskolnikov's fevered stream of consciousness, announces a grand theme of the failure of the will as presented in the recounted history of Marmeladov, who has drunk up everything, lost all opportunity, and sinks further and further into wretched hopelessness. He has been reduced to living off the earnings of his daughter who has been driven to prostitution.  We, in a sense, overhear this as he recounts his pathetic story to Raskolnikov, much as Raskolnikov overhears a student and a young officer theorizing over the merits of murdering the old pawnbroker. Of course, it is not many pages after Marmeladov's story that we learn that Raskolnikov himself has been the financial beneficiary of his elderly mother who subsists on a meagre pension, and his sister who had had to take up a very unpleasant serving position; all this bears a striking resemblance to Marmeladov's own circumstances. So we are now left having to revise our suppositions about how Raskolnikov felt about Marmeladov's story; a new light is cast backward over the narrative.  This uncertainty can start to infest the text; when, for instance, Raskolnikov sleeps suddenly in the bushes, and then on the way home, before falling into a deep slumber from which he cannot be woken, he chances to overhear a conversation in the Haymarket with Lizaveta, the unfortunate sister of the pawn-broker, revealing the exact hour at which she will be absent from the apartment, could this perhaps be a delusion? It is paired with the story of Raskolnikov chancing to overhear the student and the young officer, who just happen to be talking of the pawn-broker whom Raskolnikov himself has just visited, and furthermore, they are discussing the very thoughts of murder that he was already apparently thinking himself. How reliable really is this narrator? It starts to feel like the delusional otherness of Fight Club.

Failure of the will is Raskolnikov's own analysis of why most crimes are so readily solved: he believes that almost any criminal, at the moment of the crime, "подвергается какому-то упадку воли и рассудка" - undergoes some failure of the will and reason.