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Tables of Memory: Fathers, Sons, and Ghosts in Ellis, King, and Shakespeare

REMINDER: you can buy Arcane #1 in print or for your ereader of choice right now, and it has a story by me!

But today I’ve gone through my archives and found this essay on Shakespeare, Stephen King, and Bret Easton Ellis, because certainly those things all belong in an essay together!  Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered how I can reconcile my love of Shakespeare with being a huge horror geek and pop culture nerd, this is probably the best example.  Please note that this essay will discuss the plots of all three texts in depth, so if for some reason you are wary of “spoilers” for old books, beware!

Read, enjoy, comment if you like, and so on.

Tables of Memory:

Fathers, Sons, and Ghosts in Ellis, King, and Shakespeare

–What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy.  One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.  …  Who is the ghost from limbo patrum, returning to the world that has forgotten him?  Who is King Hamlet?

– Joyce, Ulysses

 

Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park is unquestionably connected to Hamlet — one of the novel’s epigraphs is Hamlet’s vow after the ghost of his father tells him to seek revenge in I.v: “From the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past / That youth and observation copied there.”  The bulk of its action also takes place on Elsinore Lane, near Ophelia Boulevard and within spitting distance of Fortinbras Mall and Horatio Park.  Thematically, Ellis seems to concern himself with the relationships between fathers and sons — and how the son remembers the father who has passed on, as with Hamlet’s vow after meeting with Old Hamlet’s ghost.  And yet in addition to Shakespeare, another writer looms large over Ellis’s novel.  Following an incident where Bret-the-Narrator storms into his family’s house, drunk and high, wielding a handgun in order to fend off the serial killer he thinks is hiding out on the second floor, his wife Jayne refuses to let him sleep in her bed.  Bret brings up an earlier conversation they had about starting over, about “new beginnings,” to which Jayne replies, “You screwed that up sometime last night …. You screwed that up with your big Jack Torrance routine” (219).

Jack Torrance is the protagonist of The Shining, a 1977 horror novel by Stephen King, dealing with substance abuse, familial disintegration, and — a concern it shares with Hamlet and by extension Lunar Park — the relationships between fathers and sons.  I suggest, however, that Jayne’s seemingly offhand comment is a single explicit reference to the text from which Ellis draws most of King’s themes, giving them center-stage in a book that simultaneously rewrites Hamlet and The Shining, bringing to light elements of the former that are more obscure in the latter and raising the possibility that The Shining is itself another rewriting of Hamlet.  What this means is that Ellis’s novel, being the most recent text, does not simply include conscious references to Shakespeare and King, but embarks on what might be termed a renovation of both works, a very direct campaign to dismantle, remodel, and improve Shakespeare’s play and King’s novel so that the end result (to carry the house metaphor) has different molding, flashier wallpaper, new windows, more rooms, but still rests on what is essentially the same foundation.

This foundation, the key element that unites all three of these texts, is the way they dramatize the relationships between fathers and sons, and the mechanism of this dramatization is the supernatural — specifically the concepts of haunting and ghosts.  A ghost in fiction, speaking in very broad terms, is simply an indicator of trauma, of the past exerting some sort of malign or at least upsetting influence on the present.  In other words, the ghost in fiction can be a very powerful tool for presenting the way in which a character’s memory influences his actions — the past has an effect on the present because the living are constantly beset by their memories of the dead.  This is most concisely encapsulated in Hamlet’s meeting with Old Hamlet’s ghost: Hamlet’s dead father, or some demon taking that form, is speaking to him, calling him to action.

But Hamlet, no matter what he vows, is placed in a situation where he is uncertain of his father figures; Old Hamlet, a headstrong and commanding warrior, has been replaced on the throne by the physically weak but wordy and cunning Claudius, and while Hamlet admires his namesake more he wonders why his mother should marry his “father’s brother, but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules” (I.ii.157-158).  Hamlet’s concern here is primarily why his mother should have remarried so quickly – “within a month.”  Yet as Hamlet contemplates the situation, he remarks: “O, most wicked speed, to post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! / It is not, nor it cannot come to good. / But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (161-164).

To hold one’s tongue means to stop speaking, which of course makes sense as other characters have just entered the room, but it also suggest Hamlet must not say something in particular.  What could he possible feel so strongly about?  Voicing his dismay the marriage?  Everyone seems to know he’s upset.  Rather, I believe has made a realization, and the reason for his mother’s quick marriage has become very clear: if Gertrude did not in fact love Old Hamlet as she seemed, she may have been having an affair with Claudius for years, thus explaining the speedy marriage; and if this is the case, then there is a strong chance that Claudius is Hamlet’s biological father.  After all, Old Hamlet was a fearsome warrior, like Hercules, and Claudius is a talky intellectual; Hamlet knows he is nothing like Hercules, but in this scene he suddenly understands that he is a young man who likes to read books and hear himself speak — he’s more like Claudius than the man he’s believed to be his father.

Hamlet, perhaps unaware of what he is doing, even acts like Claudius for most of the play: we know that when Old Hamlet wanted something done (eg annexing part of Norway) he simply challenged the rival king to single combat; when Claudius wants something done (eg, the king dead and the throne and queen all to himself) he sets up an elaborate plot involving ear poison and a lie about a serpent in an orchard.  Hamlet seems to take after Claudius, in that when he wants to exact his revenge on his uncle he must first feign madness and put on a play in order to determine Claudius’s guilt.  If Hamlet is Claudius’s son, the implication might be that he naturally acts as his father does.

Yet Hamlet also has a moment of self-realization: while being escorted to England, he is struck by the similarity between Fortinbras’s self-motivation and Old Hamlet’s escapades, and wonders: “Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do,’ / Sith I have cause, and strength, and means, and will / To do ’t” (IV.iv.47-49).  Hamlet’s epiphany here is that — regardless of who his biological father is — he still has the power to act and to choose how he acts; if Fortinbras can be so forceful despite his own father falling to Old Hamlet, then so can young Hamlet, even if he might be Claudius’s son.  And from this point on in the play Hamlet does away with scheming, boldly doing battle with pirates, escaping back to Denmark, and calmly and confidently accepting the invitation to duel to Laertes.

Old Hamlet is distanced from his son by death; Claudius (if the usurper is indeed his father) has been absent for most of Hamlet’s life, and is furthermore estranged from Hamlet by his crime.  One possible point of Hamlet is that the young prince must make the choice of whether to heed the call of not one father, but two possible fathers; to choose not only to heed the call but to also choose which call to heed: will Hamlet do as the ghost of the old king or the nature of the new king bids him?  To choose one father over the other means to choose one way of acting over another; for Hamlet, for the son, it means choosing what sort of life he wants to live.  This is not only the crux of Shakespeare’s play, but the crux of the two rewritings of it I will discuss, and while Hamlet contains only one ghost in a minor role, the supernatural is unleashed with a vengeance in the other texts.

Of the three texts, King’s The Shining comes the closest to embodying the typical modern conception of a ghost or haunted house tale.  It is the story of the Torrance family (Jack, Wendy, and six-year-old son Danny) who are hired as the winter caretakers of the haunted Overlook Hotel, an establishment with a sordid history of illegal gambling, mob connections, suicide, and murder.  When the snow piles high, trapping the family inside the hotel, the Overlook’s past begins to seep out of the woodwork; it becomes apparent that the hotel itself has been bestowed with some sort of sentience by the aggregate emotional trauma experienced within it, and it desires to add Danny, who is a powerful psychic and telepath, to its menagerie of specters.  This is all suitably pulpy, the kind of supernatural melodrama that King is most well known for, and if the hotel simply used its collection of ghostly mobsters and turn-of-the-century business moguls to accomplish its goals the novel wouldn’t be much more than that.  However, it takes on a deceptive complexity in the way the Overlook chooses to attack the Torrance family: from the inside out, using Jack as its agent in the attempted murder of Danny.

The Overlook’s ghosts are unconnected to the Torrances, but when the hotel goes to work on Jack its methods become deeply personal.  He is a recovering alcoholic when the story begins, a point made clear in the early chapters.  As the novel develops, we learn two important details: first, that Jack has trouble controlling his temper (he broke Danny’s arm a few years before and was recently fired from his teaching job for assaulting a student) and Jack’s father was similarly violent and alcoholic, implying that his present behavior is tied to his father’s abuse.  During one of Jack’s more lengthy flashback sequences, we learn that he idolized his father, completely innocent as to the nature of his dad’s alcoholism.  However,“[l]ove began to curdle at nine, when his father put his mother into the hospital with his cane” during an irrational, drunken dispute at the dinner table:

[Jack’s father was] up out of his chair and around to where she lay dazed on the carpet, … [his] jowls quivering as he spoke to her just as he had always spoken to his children during such outbursts.  “Now.  Now by Christ.  I guess you’ll take your medicine now.  Goddam puppy.  Whelp.  Come and take your medicine.”  The cane had gone up and down on her seven more times before [Jack’s brothers] got hold of him, dragged him away, wrestled the cane out of his hand.  Jack … knew exactly how many blows it had been because each soft whump against his mother’s body had been engraved on his memory like the irrational swipe of a chisel on stone. (224-225)

The hotel, which appears to be psychic in its own right, uses Jack’s memories of his father to manipulate him; it conjures alcohol for him to drink, it speaks in his father’s voice through the Overlook’s emergency radio; his father’s bludgeoning of his mother is reminiscent of Jack’s eventual assault on his wife and son with a roque mallet, and the hotel (speaking to Jack through the person of Delbert Grady, the last caretaker to murder his family in the Overlook) casts the necessity of murder in terms of patriarchal punishment and discipline: “[Your son] needs to be corrected, if you don’t mind me saying so.  He needs a good talking-to, and perhaps a bit more” (352).

Jack has a choice to do as the spirit(s) of the Overlook command him or to protect his family; his wife Wendy understanding the crossroads her husband stands at, and casts it in very telling terms: “[Jack] looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way” (297).  The hotel, like the demon Hamlet initially supposes the apparition of the old king to be, is a monster in the form of Jack’s father, calling him to terrible action, and Jack, unfortunately, answers.  This culminates in him echoing his dad’s drunken cries while he stalks Wendy and Danny through the hotel corridors:  “You’ll take your goddam medicine for this, I promise you!” (383).  In a way, by making this decision, by siding with the Overlook, Jack becomes his father.[1]

This raises an interesting problem for King: if the nature of trauma is somehow recursive, if the sort of abusive father-son relationships The Shining explores are actually a self-replicating phenomenon, then what does the future hold for Danny?  This is remedied by Danny’s own unique nature; the manifestation of his psychic abilities is a ghostly young man he calls Tony, a figure the adults around him believe to be some sort of imaginary friend.  But Tony shows Danny the future, gives him hints as to what will come, and before Danny’s final confrontation with Jack at the end of the novel he sees Tony more closely than ever before:

And now Tony stood directly in front of him, and looking at Tony was like looking into a magic mirror and seeing himself in ten years ….  The hair was light blond like his mother’s, and yet the stamp on his features was that of his father, as if Tony — as if the Daniel Anthony Torrance that would someday be — was a halfling caught between father and son, a ghost of both, a fusion.  (420-421)

Danny is saved by this vision, by the implicit realization that while he may resemble his father he is not and does not have to be a copy of him; Danny cannot fully shed Jack’s influence and legacy of abuse, perhaps, but he still is (and will be) his own person, and is not doomed to imitate his father’s (or his father’s father’s) mistakes.  This sort of generational tension, the eventual self-realization of the son, and the personal nature of haunting are all Hamlet-esque elements of The Shining that Bret Ellis draws to the fore of Lunar Park, which he admitted in a Today Show interview to be his “homage to Stephen King.”

In the first chapter of Lunar Park Bret-the-Narrator gives an extensive overview of his early home life and his rise to fame as a young novelist in the 80s, with special attention paid to his troubled relationship with his father: “[M]y father had always been a problem — careless, abusive, alcoholic, vain, angry, paranoid — and even after my parents divorced … his power and control continued to loom over my family” (6).  He repeatedly mentions that leaving California for college in New England was a type of “escape,” and his unexpected success as a writer granted him a financial independence from his father that allowed the man to be cut from his life almost entirely.  When Bret’s father died, Bret explains, he stored the ashes in a California bank vault rather than scatter them in the ocean, and he let himself forget about them.

Yet despite his attempts to distance himself from his father, Bret falls into many of his dad’s bad habits; though he’s not physically abusive, he’s careless, alcoholic, and vain: “And soon I became very adept at giving the impression I was listening to you when in fact I was dreaming about myself: my career, all the money I had made, the way my life had blossomed and definde me, how recklessly the world allowed me to behave” (12).  The real meat of the novel lies outside the first chapter; Bret settles down with movie star Jayne Dennis and her two children: Sarah, from one of Jayne’s previous relationships, and most importantly Robby, who is actually Bret’s biological son, born after a tryst between Bret and Jayne a dozen years before their marriage (and, notably, conceived in the aftermath of Bret’s father’s death — Robby is named after the deceased).  Bret is “thrust into the role of husband and father” (38) and takes up teaching at a New England college.  However, the situation is fragile; Bret wants to continue the self-centered drug-abusing lifestyle he’s used to, while his new position as part of a family demands some measure of responsibility.

The tension between Bret’s old life and the requirements of his new one would make satisfactory fodder for a normal dramatic novel or perhaps a second-chance romantic comedy but, like The Shining, Lunar Park uses the supernatural as a vocabulary for (self)destructive behavior, the resulting disintegration of the family unit, and the ability of the past to encroach on the present.  Bret-the-Narrator (who is to some degree based on Bret Ellis the writer) wrote a novel called American Psycho about the serial killer Patrick Bateman who was, he confesses, inspired by his father: a rich, successful, vain man with a propensity toward staggering and horrific violence.  Bret is a little ashamed and afraid of the novel; he likens the experience of writing it to having been possessed.  And when Patrick Bateman (who for all intents and purposes is the conglomeration of all of Bret’s negative feelings about his father) shows up at a Halloween party, driving the vintage car Bret’s father drove, he becomes understandably upset.

The idyllic existence Bret has managed to construct for himself becomes more and more uncanny: he receives apparently blank emails from the bank where his father’s ashes are, a series of murders mimicking those perpetrated by Bateman in American Psycho occur in the surrounding area, Sarah’s toy bird takes on a life of its own and begins eviscerating stray animals, and boys Robby’s age are disappearing all over the county.  Throughout the ordeal Bret is the only character who suspects that something supernatural is at the root of what is happening — only he seems to see Bateman, or a college student named Clay who resembles both the narrator of Ellis’s first novel and Bret himself and perhaps even a younger version of his father.  Bret grows intensely paranoid and afraid, confused about what is happening around him but unwilling to explain it to anyone.  This stress only makes his drinking and drug use worse, and when he acts rashly (such as the episode recounted at the beginning of this essay, where Jayne compares him to Jack Torrance) the people around him assume drug use is finally taking its toll.  Much as in The Shining then, the supernatural is a mechanism by which 1) substance abuse is worsened, and 2) the family is forced apart.  Though Bret doesn’t attempt to murder anyone, the supernatural forces at work intensify the weaknesses already present in his relationships with his family, and they are particularly harsh for him because they are in some way related to his dad.

This is especially troubling for Bret because he finds that Robby treats him with much the same distaste that he treated his own father: after ignoring his son for twelve years Robby is a resentful stranger, and Bret’s inability to understand his son leads him to believe that the disappearing boys are actually running away from home, working together in some sort of conspiracy to escape their parents, and that Robby will soon join them.  Bret’s distrust of his son is also one of the key facets of the way in which Ellis works with Hamlet, in this case actually restaging an aspect of Shakespeare’s play while maintaining the notion of recursive or generational trauma found in The Shining.  Bret takes on the role of Claudius, the scheming usurper of the throne who is doing his best to guess the mind and motives of his petulant stepson, Hamlet/Robby.  But Bret hasn’t always been Claudius — he was once, in his own way, Hamlet His father, he tells us, “had no faith in my talent as a writer … [and] demanded that I attend business school at USC,” and despite this, Bret chooses to go to college in New Hampshire: “My father, typically enraged, refused to pay tuition.  However my grandfather — who at the time was being sued by his son over a money matter so circuitous and complicated that I’m still not sure how or why it began — footed the bill” (8).

The relationship between Brett and his father here mirrors — though not exactly — that between Hamlet and Claudius in I.ii, when Claudius orders his stepson not to leave Elsinore to return to school at Wittenberg.  Ellis switches things up by doing the opposite of what would happen in a Hamlet adaptation with closer analogues: he lets Bret, the Hamlet character in this scenario, go off to college against the wishes of the father.  However, Bret escapes to college only because of his grandfather, who in turn has a soured relationship with his own son.  Bret’s grandfather sends Bret to school just to spite Bret’s father, who in the meanwhile is carrying out a bitter legal battle against him.  This is an important move on Ellis’s part because it shows us that this Hamlet-like estrangement between fathers and sons is not some one-off event, but like King’s conception: a generational phenomenon, something that happens over and over again.  There is not just one scheming Claudius and one avenging Hamlet, but an interlocking history of them, and they move in and out of their roles when appropriate, as they age and father their own children.

Ellis is notable in his handling of the self-realization or self-determination of the son, the attempt to break out of the shadow of the father — because unlike Shakespeare and King, he shows that it may go wrong.  Bret ran away to college and essentially disowned his father, demonizing him in American Psycho, all in an attempt to free himself.  However, as Bret admits early on: “As much as I wanted to escape his influence, I couldn’t.  It had soaked into me, shaped me into the man I was becoming” (7).  So the escape was not entirely successful; we know this because we’ve seen Bret become a sort of lo-fi version of his vain, alcoholic father, though it doesn’t become obvious to Bret himself until he sees that Patrick Bateman (along with all the other monsters he created out of fear of his father) has come back.

“…[S]pirits who show themselves between night and dawn want something,” a paranormal investigator explains to Bret, bringing to mind Old Hamlet’s ghost walking at night and returning to the fires of purgatory at dawn.  He goes on: “It means they want to frighten you …. It means they want you to realize something” (340).  Like the Overlook Hotel masquerading as Jack Torrance’s father, or Old Hamlet appearing before his son, the appearance of Patrick Bateman, the mysterious emails, and every other supernatural facet of the novel is also, in a way, Bret’s father calling him to action — in this case, though, not murder or revenge per se, but to right old wrongs.

What the wrong seems to be, in the end, is that fact that Bret did his best to wipe his father from his memory, to forget him entirely, to leave his ashes locked in a bank vault in California, and only call upon him should he need fodder for a despicable character in a novel.  And Bret’s father probably was vindictive and abusive — though Bret is unreliable we have no real reason to doubt that, he probably doesn’t hate his father without reason.  But it seems that at some point, without Bret realizing it, his father changed.  When he finds an email video attachment showing his father’s death, Bret sees his father as he truly was at the end of his life: the product of a selfish, abusive existence, a weak old man who died alone and unloved and knew that was how he was dying.  And because he has copied the worst traits of his father despite himself, Bret is in danger of meeting the same end, of losing his son and everyone close to him and dying alone, pathetic, and reviled.

At the end of the novel, we discover that Bret had one opportunity to change this course of events.  The last time he met with his father in person was for dinner in LA; the older man was “fat and drunk” and Bret wonders to himself, “What if I had done something that day?” (394).  He elaborates:

The decision was: should you disarm him?  That was the word I remember: disarm.  Should you tell him something that might not be the truth but would get the desired reaction?  And what was I going to convince him of, even though it was a lie?  Did it matter?  Whatever it was, it would constitute a new beginning.  The immediate line: You’re my father and I love you.  I remember staring at the white tablecloth and contemplating this.  Could I actually do it?  I didn’t believe it, and it wasn’t true, but I wanted it to be. … I realized it could actually happen, and that by saying this I would save him.  I suddenly saw a future with my father.  But the check came … and I simply stood up and walked away …[,] thinking I could just let go of the damage that a father can do to a son.  (394-395)

Bret’s attempts to escape, to determine his own life, result only in tragedy.  His father is fractured, both in Bret’s memory and in his manifestations in the outside world: the human part of his father, the part that deserved pity and forgiveness, has been overtaken by Bret’s fear and hate for the man.  Added to that, Bret becomes a copy of his father, a repetition, and when he confirms that Robby is indeed part of a conspiracy of sons attempting to escape their parents, he finds himself in a situation analogous to that of his dad years before, when a young Bret insisted on going to college in New England and, once he achieved independent success, attempted to sever all ties.

Also like his father, Bret is unsuccessful in maintaining a connection with his son; by the end of the novel Robby has left him, just as Bret left his father, heading off “to the land where every boy forced into bravery and quickness retreats: a new life” (397).  Their final meeting in person, many years after the main events of the novel, mirrors that of Bret and his father: they have lunch together, and Bret is depressed and high on heroin.  But Robby doesn’t sit passively by, waiting for the check; he speaks, he tells his father that everything is okay, that he is “not lost anymore,” and when Bret tells his son he is sorry, Robby says he understands (396).  As Bret, after much denial and hardship, heeds the call of his father and forgives him for his wrongs, so does Robby forgive Bret, preemptively ending the father-son cycle of trauma and haunting – should we choose to believe Bret is writing the truth, and not a wish.

Hamlet puts forth that a son has a choice about which of his fathers (or father-figures) to listen to, whether they are estranged from the son by the son’s hate or by the father’s death.  The Shining holds that a son must not be his father, must contain the part of him that resembles his forebear, for not doing so means repeating his father’s mistakes and destroying himself.  Lunar Park also shows that a son must make a decision, must determine what sort of person he will be, and choose his own life; yet in fleeing his father’s influence, in containing that aspect of his being, he runs the risk of not actually escaping, but only continuing a cycle of resentment and fear with his own sons.

Every Hamlet, fearful and suspicious of his father, may grow up to be a Claudius, fearful and suspicious of his sons; every guilty Claudius may end up a wronged Old Hamlet, tortured in the fires of a purgatory real or imagined and begging to be set free.  To really make peace with his father and the past, a son must be forgiving; he must recognize that his father probably faced many of the same decisions he faces (or will face) and perhaps did not choose wisely; every father was a son once.  This is how the cycle is broken; this is how to make peace with the past and one’s memory of it.  This, Ellis seems to say, this is how ghosts are finally laid to rest.

 

Works Cited

Ellis, Bret Easton.  Lunar Park. 2005.  New York: Vintage, 2006.

“Easton Ellis on Lunar Park book.”  The Today Show.  Prod. NBC Studios, 8/15/2005.

< http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/easton-ellis-on-lunar-park-book/6ma6lch>

Accessed 11/26/2009.

King, Stephen.  “Before the Play.”  Whispers Magazine, 1982.

King, Stephen.  The Shining.  New York: Doubleday, 1977.

Shakespeare, William and Barbara A. Mowat, Paul Werstine (eds).  Folger Shakespeare Library: Hamlet.  1992.  New York: Washington Square Press, 2002.

[1] This bit is hammered home quite soundly in an earlier draft of the manuscript, in a prologue King excised.  Eventually released as a standalone story called “Before the Play” and now extremely difficult to find, the prologue gives a lengthy history of the Overlook and includes a short vignette from Jack’s childhood:  “In that long hot summer of 1953, the summer Jacky Torrance turned six, his father came home drunk one night from the hospital and broke Jacky’s arm. He almost killed the boy. He was drunk.”  Not only does this parallel Jack’s breaking of Danny’s arm, the vignette ends with young Jack passing out from the pain, thinking feverishly to himself, “What you see is what you’ll be.”

 

A Serious Game Part 6: The Only Way to Lose Is Not to Play

It’s been a long, crazy journey through A Serious Game, but with this entry the series draws to a close.  Just think back on what we’ve learned about the way fiction and reality mingle and and what this means for us. After that I did my best to make Harlan Ellison into the biggest bogeyman of 20th century speculative fiction.  I allowed myself a digression into ethical action and postmodern disillusionment, and then more or less took back almost everything I said before about Harlan Ellison.  Today the essay draws to a close, and I offer a few reflections and some tentative suggestions about how we can be better — more ethical — readers in the future, and affirm what I think is my purpose in the study of literature.

MacIntyre points out that the good we receive from ethical practice “can only be achieved by subordinating ourselves within the practice in our relationship to other practitioners” (191).  This is why I study literature: to become more aware of myself as one person in the context of many others, and more conscientious in my ethical evaluations.  This comes about through my reading of diverse texts, but also through my relationships with other practitioners: reading a wide selection of criticism on those texts, and my individual interactions with professors and fellow students.  I have played a game throughout this essay, at varying levels, with texts that I enjoy for myriad reasons, and in writing about it I have invited you to play the game with me.

Wayne Booth offers the metaphor of a book-as-friend, with some books being more worthy of our company than others, but with all of them, generally, deserving of at least minimal attention to determine that.  I think this is workable, but for my part I would like to combine it with a notion implied by my Borges epigraph, the idea of the author-as-chessmaster.  In ethical reading we are playing a friendly game of chess — but we must remain alert whenever we are in danger of being drawn into check, or sometimes cheated.  In a game of chess between friends, or potential friends, victory is not important.  Getting to know one another is: spotting your opponents’ gambits and strategies, their strengths and weaknesses, and learning how they think.  Above all, we must recognize that any bad turn is not indicative of some inherent, all-consuming malevolence on our opponents’ part, but rather due to the fact that texts are the products — us in our act of reading, and the author in his or her act of writing, and the cultures that gives rise to our expectations in either case — and therefore capable of every prejudice and imperfection we are heir to.  Just as chessmasters are not angels, they are by no means demons.

Interacting with stories is a game insofar as doing so is quite selfish: I read the texts because I enjoy them, though my reasons are slightly different in each case.  My approach to stories is not that reading them is at the forefront practical, in the same way washing the car or buying groceries is practical.  But I am also aware of the serious ethical dimension of this game; texts may invite me to think some things that I know to be wrong, or in subtler instances, not think about something that I would recognize as wrong.  I can anticipate and block these moves because my life, both everyday and scholastic, has trained me otherwise.  MacIntyre claims that inherent to the future of virtue is “the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained” (263).

The reliance on a community is what makes ethics problematic; differences between communities will engender different ethical approaches.  But while the hope of an ideal ethical communal space is probably just as much of a pipedream as true ethical universality, some grasp at that community is why I believe the study of literature is important.  Academic study initiates the student into a practice of thinking and acting where both aesthetic and practical considerations of texts matter, a community where concerns about a text’s stance on class, gender, race, or economic policy can be discussed alongside a text’s language, form or genre.  These modes of reading are not exclusive, and this is where the possibility of ethical reading flourishes.  A morally bankrupt work, like The Jew of Malta, may be immensely entertaining, while a formally clumsy and sometimes boring work such as Edward P. Jones’s The Known World may have a vibrant ethical core.  An ethical reader, active in a civil, intellectual and moral community, should have the power to appraise both of these works, enjoy them for the reasons they are enjoyable, and allow that enjoyment to be tempered by the ways in which they falter.

Ethical reading is a serious game, and it is through a wide-ranging and conscientious study of literature and criticism that we learn how to play it.  I did not always read ethically; it was a gradual process, lasting many years and only becoming a conscious issue as my college courses exposed me to the many natures and schools of criticism and interpretation available.  I had to learn understand that literature did something.  I had to learn, first, how stories could shape my world and the life I lived in it.  If literature is a force that contributes to making us who we are, it follows that our assent to stories can make us better or worse people.  In the case of my childhood encounters with Old Hickory, it seemed incredibly easy to assent to a story entirely, to just believe.  As this dawned on me, I began to wonder: how likely was it that I unthinkingly accepted or applied patently untrue or unhealthy narratives?  How many of them, instead of teaching me to tread very softly on hardwood floors, were teaching me to demonize, discount, or oppress?  How many of them were convincing me to harm myself or others?  And how would I deal with stories that did this,  but were still beautiful or elegant or clever in some other way?  Booth makes a poignant analogy of this dilemma: “…[Stories] offer every opportunity to miseducate ourselves, and therein lies the task of ethical criticism: to help us avoid that miseducation.  The trick is always to find ways of doing that without tearing the butterfly apart in our hands” (477).

I think this is the key: the butterfly is in our hands.  We are not powerless, but in fact are given a very important task as readers.  Barthes’s idea of a mediator applies just as well to readers as authors, for as Eco suggests, the reader is a “fundamental ingredient not only of the process of storytelling but also of the tale itself. …[A text] cannot say everything about the world.  It hints at and then asks the reader to fill in a whole series of gaps” (Walks 1, 3).  The text has the power to shape us, yes, but it is not an autocrat; we can resist and to some degree shape the text.  To believe, though, that people and literature should be good — or should be made good — for all times and places is fallacious.  In understanding how narratives do make us who we are, we must also be aware of the ways in which narratives could shape us but do not or should not, because they probably have shaped others in those ways, and we could just as easily have been shaped.

We must play our games cautiously and wisely, we must maintain intellectual and moral civility, for the things at our disposal — our literature, our narratives, the building blocks of ourselves and those around us, the butterflies and the chess-pieces — are fragile.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland.  “The Death of the Author.”  Image — Music — Text.  Trans. Stephen Heath. NY: Hill and Wang, 1977. 142-148.

Booth, Wayne C.  The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”  Labyrinths.  1962. Trans. James E. Irby.  New York: Modern Library, 1983.

Dickens, Charles.  Great Expectations. 1860-61.  Ed. Charlotte Mitchell.  London: Penguin, 2003.

Eco, Umberto.  Five Moral Pieces.  1997.  Trans. Alastair McEwen.  New York: Harcourt, 2001.

—.  Six Walks in the Fictional Woods.  1994.  Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Ellison, Harlan. “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ said the Ticktockman.”  The Essential Ellison.  Ed. Terry Dowling, et al.  1987.  New York: Morpheus International, 2001. 877-886.

Gardner, John. On Moral Fiction. 1978.  New York: Basic Books, 2000.

Gregory, Marshall.  Shaped by Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives.  Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.

Johnson, Samuel.  “Rambler No. 4”.  1750.

MacIntyre, Alasdair.  After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.  1981.  Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe.  “A Defense of Poetry.” 1821

Wilde, Oscar.  “The Decay of Lying.”  1891.

Wallace, David Foster.  “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky.”  Consider the Lobster.  2005.  New York: Black Bay Books, 2007.

A Serious Game Part 4: Ethics, chiptunes, and DFW

Now we pass the midway point in A Serious Game, my senior essay on the study of literature.  If you’re just tuning in, then you should know that we’ve already discussed how stories influence our lives and seen the reality of fiction in action, then I said a lot of really melodramatic things about Harlan Ellison. Today, I’m going to talk out of my ass about ethics!  To make up for it listen to the following song for a while.

Let me take this opportunity to extend the tiniest olive branch to Gardner; I think he is wrong, but I also think he means well.  The greatest schism in his argument is one I don’t think we can heal, but we can work with it.  Ethical reading should take into account the question of imitation versus understanding, especially the fact that people can and will do both, and above all, that these are actions that lie with the reader.  Gardner’s folly is that he places too much emphasis on the individual writer of fiction — for him, it is the writer’s responsibility to pick the correct morals, the correct sympathies, and the appropriate understandings.  To a degree that’s hopefully true; we’d like to believe that every writer is at heart David Foster Wallace’s Dostoevsky, who

wrote fiction about stuff that’s really important.  He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, reason, faith, suicide.  And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts.  His concern was always what it is to be a human being — that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal. (265)

Unfortunately not every writer is Dostoevsky, who may have indeed been a great and rare intellect,[1] but what we have here is Wallace’s reading of Dostoevsky.  It is in the reader, I suggest, that the true responsibility for an ethical literature may reside; this does not immediately solve my problems, though.  For every reader who responds as enthusiastically as Wallace, there is probably another reader who finds Dostoevsky absolutely depraved, or worse, so boring as to not even merit reading.  I can give Dostoevsky a benefit of a doubt, though: surely he wrestled with ethics and the meaning of being a person when writing, and I can commend him for it.  But what do I say about Dostoevsky’s readers, who could have such disparate views?

This confusion mirrors the trouble we may have with moral criticism in and of itself.  As Alasdair MacIntyre says, in our current culture, the problem with ethical debates is that our “rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighting the claims of one as against another” (8).  We believe all moral outlooks are matters of individual choice or persuasion, essentially incomparable, and simultaneously we assert that the only ‘valid’ sort of moral outlook would be one that is demonstrably universal.  The confusion holds true for ethical appraisal of literature; if John Gardner looks at “Harlequin” he wants to see an indication that Harlan Ellison is in some way an individual moral human being, and at the same time confirmation that these personal morals are in fact aspects of a universally applicable ethos.  MacIntyre’s assertion is that our ethical maps have been scrambled because we think of morals in terms of individual judgment; the individualist stance assumes that “the self is detachable from its social and historical roles and stauses” (MacIntyre 221).

Morality, MacIntyre argues, is only intelligible in a context.  Human beings are only moral agents when they are embedded in social and historical networks and traditions, which can and do vary, and so any grasp at a flawless moral universality is a snipe hunt.  MacIntyre ties this notion of tradition with that of narrative:

…man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal.  He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth.  But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’  We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters — roles into which we have been drafted — and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed.  (216)

In focusing on moral actions as matters of only individual agency, we are denying ourselves the scripts that tell us how we should act within context as one human being among many, and at the same time we deny ourselves the very mechanism by which — like Pip, finding himself drafted into many roles by others — we even come to understand ourselves as individuals.  Ethics in this sense is always relational or situational, and cannot be extracted from its contexts.  It takes a different kind of courage to stand up to an unjust friend than it does to stand up to an unjust family member, teacher, or political leader.

To phrase it succinctly: ethical action is cooperative, so how I treat you is dependent on how you treat me, and vice-versa.  If I am grouchy and irritable with you, I have no good reason to expect you to be kind and open with me, but if you are, then I may be inclined to not be so grouchy anymore.  (If I remain grouchy, however, I shouldn’t be surprised when you stop talking to me.)  Eco, who we have also seen speak of the narrative networks we use to constitute identity, takes a similar approach to ethics:  “The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.  Every law, moral or juridical as it may be, regulates interpersonal relationships, including those with an other who imposes the law” (MP 22).  The other is necessary for any thought of ethics, but also for any thought of ourselves: “[I]t is the other, it is his look, that defines and forms us.  Just as we cannot live without eating or sleeping, we cannot understand who we are without the look and the response of the other” (MP 22).

The author — or if you like, the text, or the implied author, what Eco calls the “[narrative] voice that speaks to us affectionately … that wants us beside it” (Walks 15) — serves the function of the other in any act of reading.  In reading, we are not only asked to listen to the fiction, but to listen openly and politely, to give ourselves over; recall Booth’s comments about all narrative being rhetoric.  Readers are invited to change in some way how they think and by that token, to some extent who they are.  This change occurs in relation to the implied author, who “foresees as a collaborator” (Walks 9) a certain type of reader willing to notice the text’s cues and clues, pick up the story’s hints, and follow along with the narrative until the end.  It is human instinct, perhaps, to assent to this narrative voice, as Gregory Marshall supposes:

Our impulse for stories is, in fact, the desire to give up mastery and to let the story direct and shape our attention, feelings, judgments, and ideas, at least for the time that we and the story are interacting.  For the most part we go to story because we desire to assent. (68-69, italics in original)

So it might seem that to some degree we are all like me at age five, and every implied author is my grandfather.  We want to believe what stories tell us is true; we are quite willing to give assent, and when we do, we may end up seeing a leering face in every whorl and knot of a hardwood floor.

In a few ways my governing metaphor is, of course, imperfect; I don’t mean to accuse my grandfather of being an immoral storyteller, and I don’t mean to accuse all readers of being equivalent to five-year-old children.  The sort of ethical reading practice I will describe is something generally beyond the capabilities of children.  To return to the schism I noted in Gardner’s argument, ethical reading consists of both imitation and understanding — but while a child’s reading habit tends toward the former, a mature ethical reading practice must tend toward the latter.  This does not happen naturally, though; we grow older and more aware, we are only more inclined not to believe everything we are told (most of us, anyway), but it is very rare that we come to understand what we are told but reject.

The communitarian view I’ve so far described, particularly in relation to MacIntyre, does indeed have its dangers.  Our reliance on preexisting discourses and narratives to come into our senses of both self and ethical practice have not necessarily been laid out in our interest.  This is when imitation does us harm; if I am a member of a particular ethnicity and the narratives of my culture lead me to believe that it is true and good for me to enslave, murder, or even simply cheat members of another ethnicity, this is not for the best.  In this scenario the “self” offered me is that of a member of a particular group, defined in opposition to another group.  I am allowed to find my sense of identity only in my group; the second group is understood insofar as they are not and cannot be me — with the implication that they are not people like me, for they are not drawn from the same traditions and narratives and webs of meaning that constitute me and those around me.  In this case, it is best not to assent to the narrative handed me — for while I must always come to understand myself through the existence of the other, that process has here gone awry.  In assenting to one narrative of self, I have unequivocally turned down another, and not only that, refused to comprehend that the other is even truly a self at all.

It almost goes without saying that a culture’s literature can serve the racist purpose I’ve just described — I will hearken back to The Jew of Malta, which portrays Jews as outlandish and inhuman.  But if ethical reading and criticism were as simple as seeing this, then it probably wouldn’t be worth writing a paper on it.  And if, for instance, we simply decide we should never read Marlowe’s play again, because it is racist (or sexist, or anti-Catholic), then we’ve again made a mistake.  We do not assent to the text’s invitation to take its worldview as our own, but we’ve also rejected anyone who is constituted in part by that worldview.  We’ve again cast aside the other.[2] Knowing who we can be does not by necessity directly effect who we are.  Though I don’t like to think of myself as an anti-Semite, the play invites me into that position, and even if I do not like it, it reminds me that I, as a human being, am to some degree capable.

When I read the play I do not personally think to myself, “Barabas is selfish and evil because he is a Jew,” but I know that is, in fact, the play’s internal logic, and would have been the logic of most of the play’s audience at the time of its writing.  I know that it would be very easy for me to read the play and deduce from it the moral that all Jews are selfish and evil; what has prevented this is my existence within a historical, cultural, and personal context where anti-Semitism is clearly ethically wrong.  Do I run some sort of risk in exposing myself to texts where this is not a self-evident conclusion?  Perhaps, but as Gregory points out, we risk things all the time just by living, and “if we try to protect ourselves from life’s dangers by withdrawing from life, we give up more than we gain” (70) — we have denied ourselves the recognition of others that ultimately figures into our self-recognition.  The moment of contact between me and the other — the text, the implied author, that strange and mysterious and possibly dangerous voice asking me to think and feel something — is the core of ethical reading.  Ethical reading allows us to see “our real selves in relation to other selves,” not in the sense that we are defined simply by who we are not and should not be, but with the understanding that each other we encounter is one of many “alternate selves” (Gregory 69).  As in interactions with real people, I am not required to follow every suggestion a textual other gives me, but before I know whether or not to follow that suggestion I first must listen to it, do my best to understand it, and if necessary, decline it.

Understanding and declining has the added benefit of allowing us to recognize what parts of a narrative are, though marred by their context or content, still worth thinking about.  In reading Malta we can understand, though we do not assent to, the way its contemporary readers saw the world, notice the unhealthy myths it perpetuated, and perhaps caution ourselves when those thoughts processes recur.  If we are secure in our moral standing in relation to the text, we can also afford to study Marlowe’s work within the genre of revenge tragedy, the qualities of the blank verse, or its narrative structure.  In Great Expectations, we can recognize that Pip’s narrative construction of himself may simplify or oppress the others who have helped make him who he is, but in recognizing that, we can consider how we might do the same thing in the narratives of our own lives.

[1] And as the biographers have it, a hopeless gambling addict and constant source of frustration to his wife.  It may do well to paraphrase Samuel Johnson and keep in mind that most people write better than they live.

[2] And depending who we are, an unsavory part of our cultural past we’d best not forget, I think.

Here I Am

2010 was probably the best year of my life.  I say this without exaggeration.

Throughout the last year, for various reasons, I’ve been contemplating the way we devise narratives with our lives.  We read our lives, so to speak, in the same way we read stories: we look for beginnings, middles, and ends; we look for progression and change and development.  These things are not there, in the objective sense — unless you subscribe to the notion of God as a master author/reader — but things we construct in our own contemplation.  We want our lives to be stories; we need stories to give form and order to our existence.  This is all stuff you’ll hear more on in the new year, when I begin serializing my final senior essay on literature.

I’ve often thought that my life, as a story, is not one worth telling.  This is why blogging as an autobiographical platform holds little appeal for me; the narrative of my life is of interest to pretty much me and, perhaps, those closest to me.  Not you, Stranger on the Internet.

But it has become increasingly obvious that if there is, so far, a time in my life worth writing about, it is the year 2010.  It was, as I said, the best year of my life.

I mean this in a qualified sense.  I don’t mean that nothing but good things happened to me this year; in fact quite a few unfortunate things happened.  But it was the best year of my life in that I end it feeling fulfilled, because many things happened, and many of them were exciting or interesting.  Most of all, they have made me more like me, if you follow.  I am more myself now than I have ever been.

Another way of putting it is that 2010 in the Life of Michael actually makes a pretty good story.

I began this year by moving to London for four months — an adventure in and of itself, a wonderful experience that I’m grateful for having.  Then I moved out on my own for the first time, temporarily.  I sold and published my first short story.  I completed an independent research project and I helped teach a summer literature course.  In the fall, I reunited with what I suddenly understood was an extensive and important network of friends.  For the first time, I recognized how much I like the people around me.  I also realized, quite abruptly, that the cold steel barrel of my senior year was pressed against my forehead.  In response, I applied to grad schools.  Yesterday morning, I was woken up by an earthquake.

Other things happened, things great and small, things you wouldn’t care about, but they happened and I am glad they did.  I made it through, somehow, alive.

I am inclined to say that 2010 was a turning point, that I can definitively say in the future that, after this year, things were different.  Things will be different.  I am a different person now than I was 12 months ago.

In the sense of Heraclitus, this is true every year.  But it’s never been so obviously true.

I can’t say with certainty — Heraclitus again, or maybe Hume! — that 2010 was a turning point, or even really as important in the long run as it seems.  But I know that right now, it was one of the most significant years of my life, maybe a defining chapter in the narrative of my life, and here I’d like to take a moment to publicly thank all of you who made it what it was, and made me what I am.  I can’t help but cast myself as the protagonist and you all as the supporting characters — the great but necessary lie of autobiography — but I hope that in your own stories, you’re ending the year as fulfilled as I am.  And if not, then I hope the next chapter’s better.

Here is the last theory quote I stumbled upon in my senior research.  It’s about the intertwining of life and narrative, and of life and fiction I’ve been discussing and will discuss in my senior paper.  It comes from the essay “Fictional Protocols” in the collection Six Walks in the Fictional Woods by one of my great heroes and influences, Umberto Eco. I leave you, and 2010, with it:

At any rate we will not stop reading fictional stories, because it is in them that we seek a formula to give meaning to our existence.  Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived.  Sometimes we look for a cosmic story, the story of the universe, or for our own personal story (which we tell our confessor or our analyst, or which we write in the pages of a diary).  Sometimes our personal story coincides with the story of the universe.

It happened to me, as the following piece of natural narrative will attest.

Several months ago I was invited to the Science Museum of La Coruña, in Galicia.  At the end of my visit the curator announced that he had a surprise for me and led me to the planetarium.  Planetariums are always suggestive places because when the lights are turned off, one has the impression of being in a desert beneath a starlit sky.  But that evening something special awaited me.

Suddenly the room was totally dark and I could hear a beautiful lullaby by de Falla.  Slowly (though slightly faster than in reality, since the presentation lasted fifteen minutes in all) the sky above me began to rotate.  It was the sky that had appeared over my birthplace, Alessandria, Italy, on the night of January 5-6, 1932.  Almost hyperrealistically, I experienced the first night of my life.

I experienced it for the first time, since I had not seen that first night.  Perhaps not even my mother saw it, exhausted as she was by giving birth; but perhaps my father saw it, after quietly stepping out onto the terrace, a little restless because of the (to him at least) wondrous event which he had witnessed and which he had jointly caused.

The planetarium used a mechanical device that can be found in a great many places.  Perhaps others have had a similar experience.  But you will forgive me if during those fifteen minutes I had the impression that I was the only man, since the dawn of time, who had ever had the privilege of being reunited with his own beginning.  I was so happy that I had the feeling — almost the desire — that I could, that I should, die at that very moment, and that any other moment would have been untimely.  I would cheerfully have died then, because I had lived through the most beautiful story I had read in my entire life.  Perhaps I had found the story that we all look for in the pages of books and on the screens of the movie theaters: it was the story in which the stars and I were protagonists.  It was fiction because the story had been reinvented by the curator; it was history because it recounted what had happened in the cosmos at a moment in the past; it was real life because I was real, and not the character of a novel.  I was, for a moment, the model reader of the Book of Books.

That was a fictional wood I wish I had never had to leave.

But since life is cruel, for you and for me, here I am.

This blogging thing

Sometimes it seems like a bad idea to do this blog every Friday, especially on the Fridays when I have nothing important to say — not even literary criticism quotes! — and this Friday is one of them.  The year is winding down, I got a few final papers to write up, some drafts of some stories to do, and three more grad school applications to finish.

However, it is cold, and there is snow, so let’s enjoy the beginning of this wondrous season with a special performance by my new favorite musical artist, OtamaTone.

The Host Family

At the beginning of 2010 I spent a few months studying abroad in London. I lived in North London in the Hampstead area, with a roommate, in the home of a host family. I’ll call my host parents Clarence and Emma. They were both semiretired doctors in their early 70s; their three daughters had long ago moved out, gotten married, and had their own children. Their (Clarence and Emma’s) home was the sort of sandwiched townhouse you see all over London. Of course, C&E being semiretired doctors and this being Hampstead, within spitting distance of the Heath, it was actually a nice place and, as you might imagine, really, really old.

It was a Victorian building, but had been remodeled several times, with electricity and phone lines and everything. Clarence and Emma bought the house in the 60s, just after it had been refurbished — the right side of it was damaged in the Blitz, and in fact the next three or four houses in the row had been entirely demolished and replaced with ugly, utilitarian flats.

Of course nothing strange happened right off the bat. I arrived at the beginning of January, and the weirdest thing at the time was that London was going through its first snowstorm in 30 years. Being from the rural American Midwest, it was endearing to me to see Londoners struggle with like two inches of snowfall, but that’s beside the point.

I’d never been outside of the country up until then, and never been away from home for more than a few weeks at a time (I’m astonishingly sheltered), so I spent a while adjusting to my new surroundings. Clarence and Emma had been hosting college students from the US for a few decades by then, and I found a bunch of papers a past student (a girl from Arizona, I gathered) had left in one of my desk drawers. One of the papers was a sort of strange checklist of reminders. I ended up taping it to the wall where I could always see it, since it seemed like an odd bit of found poetry. I still have it, actually — here’s what it says:

– notify bank of leave
– passport copies, extra pictures
– Friday!!! arrive at 5:35
– Saturday sightseeing
– Sunday sightseeing
– Monday classes begin
– toilets = restrooms
– plaster = bandaid
– servillette = napkin
– do not tip, considered an insult
– stay with friends when going out
– do not forget things — they will be gone

So yeah I am pretty much a melancholy jackass. But after a while I began to come around, I got used to my classes, to taking the tube in the mornings, I got used to the rhythms of the city. It happened that I had a cousin who was studying in Stratford-upon-Avon, and she’d met a guy there and they were heading over to America soon to get married. I was invited up to Stratford for their sort of pre-wedding reception for all their UK friends, as the sole representative of her side of the family.

About two weeks after arriving in London, the weekend of this reception comes and I head off from Marylebone, have a high time with Stratford, make new friends, be a Shakespeare geek, and so on. It was a cold, rainy day — and remember, it’s snowed in London for the first time in 30 years. Ice all over the damn place is the obvious result. My train out of Stratford was supposed to leave at 9:30, but it ended up delaying until 10:30. Then, while on the train, the rain turned into full-on sleet, and we halted for good at, I believe, Banbury.

The railway people apologized profusely but said we didn’t have a choice for safety reasons. So here I was, stuck at an unfamiliar station in an unfamiliar country in freezing cold rain with about half a dozen drunk metalheads from Birmingham whose train had been stopped going in the other direction. However, the railway actually came through and scheduled cabs to take us to our destinations — but I got paired with the drunk Brummeys, so I ended up going quite a bit in the wrong direction before spending a very long, awkward ride with just me and the driver, all the way back to London. (Not that I don’t appreciate the ride or anything, since it was damn awesome for the railway to do this for me.) The cab dropped me off at Marylebone, since that was my original return destination, and I had to figure out a bus route back to Hampstead.

But remember I just came from a wedding reception, where I had a lot of wine. And also it’s like 2:00 am and I had a really stressful moment where I was stranded in the West Midlands. And also I still hadn’t figured out the damn London bus system.

So I don’t get home until four in the morning, extremely tired and cranky. The house, when I unlock the doors and step in, is completely silent, of course. Now, to give you an idea of the set-up, directly in front of the door and to the left was the stairway leading up to the room my roommate and I shared, which was just off the landing there, along with our bath and loo. The sitting room was another floor up, and Clarence and Emma’s room was above that. On the ground floor, to the right, were doorways to Clarence and Emma’s in-home offices. Meanwhile, in between the stairs and the office doors, heading to the very back of the house, was another doorway: to the kitchen.

The kitchen, of course, was dark and empty.

Wanting very much to go to bed, I kicked off my shoes on the mat by the door and went to the kitchen to drop the sandwiches (now quite smashed and gross) I’d taken from the reception in the fridge. Then I went back and trudged upstairs, intent on going to goddamn bed.

And someone followed me out of the kitchen.

Recall, the stairs are running parallel to the little hall into the kitchen, I could see over the railing out of the corner of my eye, and for one surreal fatigued moment I was absolutely sure that someone had walked out of the kitchen and was looking up at me.

I froze on the landing, soaked and miserable in my heavy black overcoat, trying to get over the sudden adrenaline spike, and looked down at the empty hallway. I chalked it up to being completely exhausted, shrugged it off, and went to bed.

I didn’t think about what had happened over the next few weeks because I managed to successfully rationalize it. When the next thing happened, at the end of February, the events were so distinct and the former incident so distant in my mind that I didn’t really make a connection between them until after the fact.

My roommate talked in his sleep sometimes, you see. Not unusual, and most of the time it was pretty funny. He’s musically inclined, my roommate, and he actually beat-boxed in his sleep at least twice. But near the end of February, after a weekend trip to Edinburgh with some friends, we both got outrageously sick. I got over it before he did, so he ended up spending a few days extra in a medicated haze, sniveling on his bed and popping cough drops. One night he went to bed earlier than I did, and as I was just about nodding off he began to talk in his sleep.

“Where are you going?” he said from the other side of the room.

Imagine an American dude with a head full of mucus speaking. Now imagine that he’s not just talking, but trying to mimic an English accent, and he’s one of those Americans who literally just cannot do an English accent to save his life, but he’s trying anyway and it’s terrible. That’s how my roommate was speaking.

“Where are you going?” he said. “Wait, wait, no. Please, don’t.”

My reaction goes something like surprised to amused to annoyed, since I’m hoping he’ll shut up soon so I can sleep.

“Don’t go,” my roommate says, practically pleading now. “No, please don’t leave.” Then, suddenly, without warning he sits up in bed and turns to me: “It’s really bright,” he says, in his normal if congested voice. “Don’t you think, Michael,” he asks, “it’s really bright?”

It’s almost like midnight so of course it’s not bright, but I go ahead and agree with him since it’s just sleeptalk. “You should close the curtains,” he says to me.

The window in the room is closer to him, so I don’t know why I should be the one to do anything about it, but again, I agree. “Are you closing the curtains?” he asks.

Yes, I tell him, I’m doing it right now. (There were, by the way, no curtains in the room, only blinds.) “Good,” my roommate says, satisfied. “That’s good. Now we can sleep. They won’t find us now.” He giggled as he lay down, as if this were somehow amusing in and of itself.

We went to sleep. Again, I didn’t connect any of this with the overall arc of events until much later. I’ll explain in the end, and even then I might be wrong. This might have just been crazy flu sleep talk.

Anyway, time passed, I had classes, adventures in a new contry and so on. The housing situation was pretty good, and I didn’t have much to complain about. There was one thing that sometimes got on my nerves, though: I’m a light sleeper naturally, and sometimes my host-mom Emma would stay up late watching TV in the sitting room just one floor up.

Normally this wasn’t a problem, but sometimes the sound would get kind of inexplicably intense and it would sound like the TV was right outside of our room, just outside the door. I’d roll over in bed and wake up for a second because like late-night reruns of The Simpsons were suddenly audible, and on at least one occasion I heard Irish folk music, clear as day. More than once, however, I heard the sound of children. You know how kids sound when they’re trying not to be heard — whispering to each other, laughing, walking very low to the ground, almost crawling. I could hear them, almost as if they were right out there on the landing.

This happened often enough that I wondered what sort of crazy late night TV show in the UK would always sound like children playing, but unless there’s something I missed while there, I don’t actually think such a program exists.

I started an internship at a certain arts organization in Covent Garden at the beginning of March. My classload was halved so I had time to work three days out of five, and I had to dress business casual and carry around paperwork, and I was part of the morning commute into work and the evening commute back home, and it was all quite exhilarating and professional. I was miserable, of course, because it was work and work sucks, but really I had a very chill environment. A lot of the time I was just transcribing poems for digital archival, and sometimes if I finished a bit early my supervisor would tell me to head on home.

One day I got out early, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. “So you’re finally home?” Emma called from the kitchen.

Normally she just said hello, so I was understandably a bit confused. “Hello,” I called back. “Did you need me for something?”

Emma didn’t say anything in response.

I walked to the kitchen and found it empty. I checked the offices — also empty. The sitting room, the upper floors, all empty. My roommate wasn’t in, since I was off early. I was alone in the house, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought that the voice I had heard — though undoubtedly a woman’s — hadn’t sounded like Emma at all.

Thinking about this, I remembered the incident upon my return from Stratford when something had seemed to follow me out of the kitchen. I began to wonder if the events were somehow related. I’ve maintained, time and time again, that I am not a superstitious man, but when things happen, or seem to happen in certain ways, I am inclined to entertain possibilities. I decided, at the risk of sounding like a doofus, to ask my roommate if he’d noticed anything strange.

I did this by asking him what he thought about the kitchen, which he interpreted as me asking what I thought about the facilities Clarence and Emma provided us. I clarified: no, I mean, what did he think about the kitchen in a more abstract way, like, was he comfortable there?

Well actually, my roommate admitted with some hesitation, he was kind of weirded out by the closet.

Honestly, I had never paid attention to the closet in the kitchen before. It was just beyond the stove, a little alcove beneath the stairs, all Harry Potter-style. What was it about the closet, I asked him.

He asked me if I was serious and said he couldn’t believe that Clarence hadn’t shown me.

Shown me what?

So my roommate showed me.

And now I’ll show you.

This is the closet in the kitchen. The doorway to the left leads to the little entry hallway, the stairs up to our room, and so on.

Graffiti inside the closet, written perhaps in charcoal. The date to the upper right says “30 Aug 40.” The poem, though cramped, runs thus:

Here we sit in comparative comfort
Waiting for Jerry to do his worst
We pray each night for our lads over Frankfurt
And hope our bombs do damage wherever they burst

“Heil Hitler — the rotter.”

The Führer has been thoroughly humiliated — he has a black eye, bandages, and “R.A.F.” tattooed on his forehead. Winston Churchill looks smugly on, puffing his cigar.

Obviously this is a neat little bit of history, something Clarence and Emma had discovered after purchasing the house and immediately lacquered over to preserve it. They’d shown it to my roommate one day while I was out.

Notably, the graffiti is dated a little over a week before the London Blitz actually began — so I guess it was made during the drills in the lead-up, which would have happened probably every night and lasted for a while. You’d need to keep yourself entertained if you spent the whole time in a cramped closet underneath the stairs. So maybe you’d bring along a charcoal pencil.

The handwriting on the poem seems to indicate an adult woman — the second bit of writing, over the cartoons, seems to be a different hand, though not as feminine. It might belong to a younger man, perhaps a teenager, a little angry that he couldn’t be the one to give Hitler those bruises.

I don’t think there was an adult man in this closet when these drawings were made — and this makes sense, to a degree, at a time when most able men were enlisting. However, something that I think is particularly notable are the bits that aren’t poems or doodles, the random lines and scribbles in between the drawings. The kinds of things children make.

There are no further doodles in the closet. When the Blitz properly began a week after the poem was written and the danger the Luftwaffe presented was fully understood, the children, both young and teenaged, were probably evacuated for safety, staying in rural abbeys or the country homes of the gentry. The adult woman — their mother, I imagine — went with them.

But later on, I remembered that one whole side of the townhouse had been wrecked by German bombs. I remembered that all the neighboring houses were long gone, and the ugly building of flats next door had, like sediment, settled into the cracks of history.

Clarence did not mention to me that their house was haunted until a few weeks before I left. I’d seen two ghost-centered plays (The Woman in Black, an old standard, and Ghost Stories, a new play that I saw in Hammersmith, but it’s recently got a West End transfer). Clarence, being a bit of a theatre aficionado, wanted to know how I’d like them. At some point during the conversation he said to me “You know, we had our own ghost here when we moved in.”

I certainly had not expected him to say this — he and Emma were, I thought, fervent atheists and were constantly railing about the government paying for the Pope to visit — but I was also further confused by his remark — had a ghost. I asked him what sort of ghost this was.

“A man,” he said. “A man in a black overcoat. He would stand on the stairs, actually, just on the landing outside of your room.” Clarence had seen this man several times, and so had their daughters, when they were young girls. Emma, for her part, had never glimpsed it, but Clarence swore he’d always caught this man just out of the corner of his eye, or just as he walked into the house. A tall, lonesome figure in a black coat, standing on the stairs and, as Clarence described it, seeming incredibly sad.

I asked what had happened with this ghost. Nothing much, Clarence told me. He (the man) had just stood there. Personally Clarence had never had a problem with him, but it bothered the girls terribly — they didn’t like how sad he seemed.

So, again, what happened?

“Well,” Clarence said rather matter-of-factly, “we had him exorcised.”

Again, Clarence had told me time and again he was an atheist, but in retrospect I knew he was also really into that James Lovelock Gaia thing, so maybe this shouldn’t have surprised me so much.

The exorcism had apparently broken down like this: Clarence knew some people who knew some people. A psychic investigator had been hired and confirmed the presence of an entity on the stairs, a man in black whose primary aura seemed to be one of sadness. As Clarence explained it, the man in black felt like he had left something behind. The investigator had then walked up the stairs and began to speak to the thin air. “It’s okay,” he said. “You can leave. It’s not here anymore, whatever you left. There’s nothing here for you now.” There were, apparently, a few minutes of stuff like that.

And I guess, somehow, it worked.

“We never saw him again,” Clarence said.

And I never saw him at all.

I never told anyone expressly about what I thought I had seen, and especially the things I thought I’d heard. The things I sometimes still heard, or thought I heard, when I woke up in the middle of the night; the sensation I always had when, alone in the kitchen, I felt as if someone were standing very, very close to me.

It wasn’t until the end of my stay in London that I started to put things together.

I thought about the man in black, and his loss. The things Clarence told me the investigator had said. There was nothing here anymore.

I thought of all the able men, all the men of age, enlisting to fight the encroaching might of Germany, leaving behind their children and families, not knowing that soon the Axis would be at their very door.

Surely some of the soldiers lived, but returned home to find their houses and their neighborhoods decimated, family members missing. How sad they must have been, how alone.

And I thought of the families left alone, hiding in closets, waiting for the inevitable, passing their time in the dark. England had, after all, been under a blackout to make the cities harder to spot from the air. I remembered what my roommate had said in his sleep, about it being too bright, that we should close the curtains. I had assumed he meant bright outside, but what if he meant the opposite? And I remembered his pitiful pleas for someone to come back — not to leave.

It occurred to me, in time, what I had looked like on that January night, seemingly forever ago, when I’d stumbled into the house at four in the morning, rooted through the kitchen, and started up to my room.

I had stood there on the stairs, and I was sad and scared but I was also glad to be someplace that felt like home. And someone or something, seeing me in my black overcoat I got on sale at Kohl’s three years ago, had mistaken me for someone else, and come out to welcome me back.

Rolling Along with the Tumbling Tumblr Weed

You know what there are a lot of these days?  Tumblrs.  There are so many Tumblrs, guys!

So in order to deal with the three billion (ie, 9) Tumblrs that I want to follow I have broken down and made my own.  It will not overtake this blog, though, because I’ll still use this place to post longer updates (as they come) and probably still do my lit crit quotes.  Tumblr will be a place mostly for dumb pictures.  Have fun!

PS Next weekend is Halloween?  Do you like Halloween? i bet you do SO you should probably keep an eye on this space next week when I will post a special HALLOWEEN STORY (woooo spooky!)

This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine

I’ve written an autobiographical poem:

It is okay
to take a shot of whiskey
at 3 am
when you are awakened
by a false fire alarm.

So that’s me, channeling my inner Bukowski.  I’m sorry to say that I don’t have any choice historical literary criticism to dish this week, although I’ve been reading some Stephen Greenblatt and some Frank Kermode and there are bits in there I like.  They may find their way here for my future reference and your momentary enjoyment.

I’ve also got the Patrick Stewart Macbeth in my backlog — it aired on PBS’s Great Performances this week but I couldn’t catch it at the time.  Anyway, it ought to make a good addition to what seems to be Macbeth-a-Thon 2010 — and I have a friend haranguing me to watch Throne of Blood, so that may end up falling under the same banner.  Anyway, if this latest Macbeth raises any points for me, I’ll address them here, as is my wont.

In the meantime, though, let’s take a look at this:

Hey guys I go to college

And sometimes, my college has problems.  Like, let’s say my college is a dry campus, but people drink alcohol all the time anyway.  And they get in trouble.  And then they write two dozen op-ed pieces in the campus paper talking about how they should be able to drink if they want and not get in trouble even if campus policy clearly states otherwise.

And then I write an op-ed piece where I solve the problem once and for all.

give your life for rock’n’roll

As I sit here listening to the new Lordi album, it occurs to me that I had at one point planned to do a blog on grad school.  Not necessarily grad school as an institution, but what it means to me to go to graduate school, being the first person in my family to complete college, and the sort of crazy-ass anxieties I’m subject to when it comes to anything regarding higher education.  I’m normally not vocal about this, mostly because it doesn’t matter in a lot of situations.  It’s also really boring.

But I still feel the weird urge to write about grad school, or at least the application process, sometime — probably in the near future.  Until then I’m scrambling to get application materials together, take my GREs, etc.  This is by no means simple, since I have a pretty full schedule — lots of reading, mostly, like the theory stuff I mentioned last time, but also things for the class I TA, and my normal class reading, and also writing essays and things that are not essays for the creative writing workshop class I’m in.

You, being the bright little star-child you are, probably have figured out that this means shorter and/or infrequent blogs.  Good job!  Just keep an eye here and we’ll see what happens.