Man was made for joy and woe

Thinking more about goodness, I probably need to qualify my earlier thoughts. A careful distinction needs to be drawn between true comedy, which involves restoration of good and a happy ending after sorrow, and narratives which are merely saccharine, in which no restoration is needed. Unmitigated goodness in fiction feels false.  Unshaded sunshine has no contours.  Even in children's books, there is something eery about stories with no shadow, no threat to happiness, nothing to be overcome; Pollyanna, that avatar of the bright side, exercised her trademark optimism in the face of unusual misfortune and distress.  I'm thus brought back to Hopkins' glory in dappled things, and (to change the metaphor) to William Blake's famous song of “Innocence”:

It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

A character in All's well that ends well has the line: “The web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together.” According to Blake, not only truth but safe passage rests in this knowledge. Not only a better reflection of the way life is, but the secret of a way to live. In this sense, comedy is more instructive than tragedy, less spectacle than physic. The silver-lined cloud has become a tawdry image of wishful thinking, but the silken twine that runs under every grief is a lifeline, a saving grace. The title of Shakespeare's comedy might seem a toothless truism in the face of real sorrow, but it is in fact a great truth. All's well that ends well. The happy ending works backwards, not to erase suffering, but (to change the metaphor back) to illuminate it. Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, all's well.

The good and the great

A couple of posts back I linked to an article at The Millions which compares the reception of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom with that of Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector, both out last year. The writer argues that while the books treat comparable themes and characters, Franzen's was hailed as a formidable and (probably) abiding contribution to American letters, whereas Goodman's received scant and condescending praise of the ‘not bad for a girl' sort. The writer sees this disparity as a function of institutionalised sexism in the literary industry. (It might be, but having just read The Cookbook Collector and the first hundred pages or so of Freedom, I think they really are in different leagues. Goodman's writing is exuberant, but has nothing like the complexity and craft of Franzen's.) A good deal depends on how gendered genre is. There's an assumption that women write about home and family in warm and affirming ways, and that grand alienations and cold ironies are the province of men.

Perhaps there are gender biases at play, but there's a deeper divide, and a more ancient one: that between comedy and tragedy. Possibly tragedy has always had a grandeur that comedy, domestic by nature, could never have, but it seems to be a peculiar bent of the twentieth century that the ‘great’ books, the powerful books, are inevitably the sad books, the difficult, devastating, awakened books that affirm only fragility, inconsistency, and pain. Books that celebrate life and perhaps even end, like traditional comedies, in happy marriages are seen as somehow less powerful, less brave, less grand.  Rom coms never win best picture. Something happened in the twentieth-century - perhaps a great Russian winter - that made comedy with its happy ending the province of fools. Virginia Woolf's comment on Jane Austen shows the shift: “Of all great writers, she is the one most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.” What, after all, is great about ordered and ordinary life in a small community? What is great about goodness?

Another great is most often caught in the act in his big tragedies: Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth. (Some lists include Othello, but others won't on the grounds that it's too domestic.)  Shakespeare's tragic vision has influenced a half millenium of thought, but what about his comic vision? What about a view of the world that sees the catastrophe of life as food for laughter, laughter as medicine for life's various ills? It's the fools in Shakespeare that know this, and that speak truth. It's the comedies that know life not as a trajectory, a tragic fall, but as a circle. Life follows death, spring follows winter. All life comes to an end, but this is no reason not to be happy.

Freedom begins with what appears a happy marriage. Adultery follows, and finally, estrangement. The Cookbook Collector ends with a wedding, and closes with an apt image of mortal happiness: “The hammock swayed under them, and George and Jess floated together, although nothing lasted. They held each other, although nothing stayed.”  Like the original pair: “Happy, but for so happy ill secured.”  But happy.

Even more on covers

While curiosity is natural, and reverence is healthy, there are times when an author’s familiarity with the literary universe obstructs and clutters her creativity. We like a narrator to be literate, cognisant, and even referential, but we don’t like a story that’s simply a tissue of references, or one that gets stuck in the cobwebs of the literary attic. It feels too second-hand, and too clever by half. Iris Murdoch says somewhere (I can’t find it now), the most obstructive thing for a new writer is literary tradition. This can mean that the greatness of the tradition stops a new writer before he’s begun, or it can mean that the great tradition so entangles and tongue-ties his story that he ends by adding nothing to the tradition he so admires. An overly referential story falls short because it’s written in a kind of shorthand, full of gestures to points already made, images already bodied forth, full of obeisance rather than bold strides. And it cuts to that old dichotomy between artist and critic: both know how a novel is written, but only one can write it.

More on covers

This article's discussion of Colm Toibin's book about Henry James, The Master, led me to further pondering of the copyright issue. There are subtleties here, and beyond the question of whether literary borrowing is good or bad is the question of why we do it. What's the compulsion to go back instead of on? In revisiting scenes of literary greatness, what do we expect to find? Or, more probably, to leave? It's a compulsion I feel too, though I've never acted on it. (And in James' case, reverence would humble my ambition.)

I think it starts with simple curiosity. What became of the younger sister? Who might have lived in the house next door? What happened to him in those three years at sea? That curiosity is strongest where the novel's world is strongest, where the author's creation is real and robust, and carries a resonance of its own. We want to explore the empty rooms that exist by implication, the darknesses left by the limits of an author's fiat lux.

 I think such curiosity and the creativity it inspires show a healthy respect for the power of good writing. “Imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown,” and “gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” Theseus, the king in Midsummer Night's Dream, knows well the power of poets to call things convincingly into being, to name and locate them so thoroughly that they have an existence outside the work which first embodied them.

At a deeper level, I think it proves my theory that art is singular: all art is part of humanity's collected works. I'm not talking about T.S. Eliot's “tradition,” or about a canon of great works, but about the inescapable connection between all works of art, whether they acknowledge it or not.

Friday’s poetry seminar

Last Friday was my final encounter with Richard Strier - a three-hour seminar on a single Herbert poem, “Love,” which I've posted before.  I thought three hours seemed like a lot for one short poem, but the Professor said he could easily have spent a week on it.

We spent the first hour on the poem's form - the rhyme scheme (ABABCC), line lengths (10,6,10,6,10,6 x 3), metre (mostly alternating iambic pentameter, trimeter), and syntax (a move from longer to shorter phrases, from softer to harder punctuation). I confess this left me a bit cold - or perhaps I should say it found me cold; I'm never one to dive into group discussion before it's properly warmed up, and I felt terribly rusty on the technical stuff; my grasp of all those Greek terms (trochees, iambs, dactyls) has always been tenuous. I think form is tremendously important, but to plunge into it before any work on the meaning or tone of the poem felt premature, putting the cart before the horse.  How can we know what's significant about the form, I thought, until we know what the poem's about? Perhaps it showed a lack of intellectual courage on my part.

Then we moved on to meaning. Word by word and line by line, we went deeply into the poem's emotional, social, theological, and intellectual world. We felt the courtesy and hospitality of the poem's atmosphere. We found it odd in the beginning that the speaker would “draw back,” from Love's welcome. We noted an increasing urgency and assertion in his resistance to Love's lovely invitations, his insistence on his unworthiness to the point, in the final stanza, of demanding to be sent to hell, rather than be Loved. A sort of paraphrase of what Milton's Satan says: better to reign in hell than be served in heaven. In the end, Love insists: you must sit down and taste my meat. And in the end, the speaker sits, submits, allows himself to be served, to eat, to be satisfied, to no longer be “ungrateful” but to be the willing object of grace.

In some ways a complex and prolonged analysis sits uneasily with a poem of such breathtaking simplicity. But the beauty of such poetry is that however much you break it open, it is never broken. Relentless interrogation will not weary or stale it, and there is no limit to the number of times or ways to encounter it. Like grace, it is new every morning. Like love, it always bids us welcome.