Albert Camus: The Possessed: a play in three parts

Albert Camus
The Possessed: a play in three acts

Camus is not one of my favorite writers, though I have read several of his novels.  They seem much too bleak and dispirited to me.  But, I ran across this one while browsing.  Normally I would have moved on, but the title intrigued me--it reminded me of Dostoyevsky's novel of the same name.  So, I opened it and found that it was a play and that it was based on Dostoyevsky's novel.  I just couldn't pass this one by.


PARTS ONE and TWO

Shortly after beginning the play, I realized what Camus's strategy was to be.  He was going to focus on the Nihilist thread which featured  Nikolai Stavrogin and  Pyotr Verkhovensky.   The satiric aspect, Dostoyevsky's attack on the Westernizers and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, got a brief mention at best.  A number of characters and subplots also were eliminated.  I realized this had to be done to make it possible to put on the play in one evening.


PART THREE

This is where I found the most problems.  First, it seemed rushed to me.  It was if Camus suddenly realized that he had to provide certain events to make the plot line intelligible, so he squeezed them in at the end.  As it was, certain parts were removed from the acting script when it was first produced, presumably to shorten the running time.

A second question arose because some of the incidents didn't seem familiar to me.  Now this didn't happen in the first two parts.  Another problem is the body count.  It seemed high to me.  More people died in the last part than in Hamlet.  In Camus' version, three people were murdered, one was killed by a mob, two committed suicide, and one died from pneumonia.  There may have been an eighth death, another one killed by that mob.  I remember that four died, but I'm not certain about the others.  I guess it's time to pull out the novel for another reread. 


Overall Commentary:
First, one must realize that I was reading an English translation of a play written in French which was adapted from a novel written in Russian.  Yet, in spite of this, I felt throughout most of the play that this was Dostoyevsky.  This speaks much for the strength of Dostoyevsky's writing, for Camus' ability to capture him in French, and for the skill of the English translator.  

The most serious problem is that faced by anyone who attempts to adapt a novel, especially a long, complex novel, to a shorter art form--a play or a film.  Something has to go, and others have to be changed.  It is also possible that I might have had a different reaction if I had watched it performed.  .

It may be an easy way into the novel: fewer characters, fewer incidents, a simplified plot structure, and shorter. 

Favorite Fiction--2016

Some favorite works of fiction I read during 2016,

FIRST READS

Sarah Orne Jewett:
                  The Country of Pointed Firs
                   --my first reading of her masterpiece.  Why did I take so long to get to it?
                   --this is on my must reread list.

                   A Country Doctor
                   --this one is a bit weaker than the first, but still an excellent read. and better     
                      than 90% of the other works I've read this year.


Joseph Conrad:  Suspense
 --an unfinished novel set in the Napoleonic era.
 --a traveler gets involved with a plot of Napoleon's escape from Elba.

Ray Bradbury:         Farewell Summer

--the sequel to Dandelion Wine.  The tone is different in this one.  The boy resists growing up.

Graham Greene:    The Human Factor
--a spy novel.  The unmasking of a mole in the British secret service, told from the mole's point of view.

Nathaniel Hawthorne:: The Celestial Railroad and Other Stories
--a collection of some of Hawthorne's most well-known short works.
--decided to leave this in the First Reads grouping as there were several short stories that I hadn't read before.


Kazuo Ishiguro:   The Remains of the Day

--a great novel of repression and fear of commitment, set against the backdrop of WWII.   

--his master is a Nazi sympathizer and the butler refuses to go against his master for he  is the master.

REREADS:


Jane Austen:
                   Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sanditon
                   Northanger Abbey
                   Mansfield Park
                   Emma
                   Sense and Sensibility
                   Persuasion
                   Pride and Prejudice

--as always, great reading.  This was my fifth? sixth? who knows how many readings I've had of her works over the years.  They are just as good, if not better, the fifth? time around as the first.

A. Solzhenitsyn:   One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
--the title says it all--one day in a Soviet Union era gulag in Siberia, based loosely on his time there.  I like to pair this one with Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead, his experiences in a Siberian prison camp during the reign of the Tsars.  Forced to make a choice, I would choose life there under the Tsars.  The treatment was cruel but  much more humane than under the commissars. 


Dostoyevsky:   "The Gambler"
--Dostoyevsky's great novella depicting the downfall of an gambling addict.
--great character study of numerous Russians traveling abroad. sometimes just for travel and sometimes to avoid debt collectors back home.  Comic figures trapped within a tragic story.


Evelyn Waugh:   Brideshead Revisited
--Flashback:  an English army officer finds his unit stationed  on one of the grand   
   estates and recognizes it as the one that had a great influence on him, beginning with
   his stay at Oxford.

--there's a great BBC TV adaptation of the book.  After watching it, I went out and 

   got the book.


Herman Melville:  “Benito Cereno”

--Melville's great novella regarding the slave trade and a very naive American ship captain.


Nikos Kazantzakis:   Freedom or Death

--his powerful novel set in Greece during the time of the Greek war for independence.
--as usual his characters come off the page at you.


Oscar Wilde:   The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray
--This is the first and censored version of Gray's novel.  To be honest, I can not see anything that
   would be more offensive than anything in the published version.  A classic example of changing
    tastes, I will includ this among the rereads for I have read this several times.


There were a number of enjoyable works that I read during the past year, but these are the ones that stand out.  While there  appears to be a large number of first reads, equal to the rereads, one should note that Bradbury, Greene, Hawthorne, and Conrad are all favorites of mine from way back when.  These are works by them that I've never read before.

Only two of the authors in the First Reads Section are new to me:  Kazuo Ishiguro and Sarah Orne Jewett and are now on my reread list.  Coincidentally, I read two books by both.  The other book by by Ishiguro will appear on my Favorite SF novels of 2016 list.


P.S.
Forgot to mention, but if you have questions about any of the authors or books, please ask.  I may not know the answer, but it's worth trying anyway.

Dostoyevsky: Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Notes from Underground

I found that I had posted several entries about The Notes from Underground in association with other works, but I had never given this work its own posting.  So, I decided (being lazy) to gather together the various comments I had made to see if I could make something coherent about this very complex work.

The first part consists of an extended passage in which the underground man (UM) reveals himself. He is a civil servant who has come into a small inheritance and has retired. He is an outsider with no friends or relatives. He lives in isolation. He sneers at society, but at the same time longs to join them, to be one of them.  It is also a philosophical rant against those who think that human behavior will eventually be completely explainable and predictable by the immutable laws of science.  In addition the narrator contends that there are two types of people:  the doers and the thinkers or the intellectuals.   Everything that is accomplished is done by the doers, because the thinkers are paralyzed when they attempt to handle all the ramifications of acting.


The second part shows our reclusive narrator in action and supports both of the arguments put forth in the first part.  In the second part, the UM forces himself upon some former student acquaintances who are giving a going-away party for one of the students. The UM insists on attending the party, while mocking himself and eventually the others. He desires to be one with them, but actively works to make this impossible.

 The UM also meets a prostitute in the second part; the UM persuades Liza to escape from the life of a prostitute. However, when Liza appears at his apartment several days later, telling him that she wants to escape, he rejects her and sends her away.

This is one of Dostoyevsky's most unusual works.  It was while I was reading it, for the third or fourth time actually, that I began to see some similarities between Dostoyevsky's short novel and Poe's short story, "The Imp of the Perverse." "The Imp of the Perverse" is another of Poe's first person confessions--the individual attempts to explain why he committed his act from a jail cell, with a gallows outside awaiting him.

One of the similarities is the format: both begin with lectures on one or more topics which are of considerable length in comparison to the work which is then followed by an incident that exemplifies the topic(s) discussed in the first part. Poe's lecture is solely on the nature of perverseness in human behavior while Dostoyevsky's contains several themes, only one of which is perverseness.

One of Dostoyevsky's first examples of perverseness is that at times he is sick but doesn't go to the doctor out of spite. Who is he injuring--himself. He knows he should go because he is "only injuring [himself]...My liver is bad, well--- let it get worse." He is knowingly acting against his own best interests. Later he speaks of a "friend" of his:

"When he prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with the laws of reason and truth. What is more, he will talk to you with excitement and passion of the true normal interests of man; with irony he will upbraid the shortsighted fools who do not understand their own interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and within a quarter of of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through something inside him which is stronger than all his interests, he will go off on quite a different tack--that is, act in direct opposition to what he has just been saying about himself, in opposition to the laws of reason, in opposition to his own advantage, in fact in opposition to everything..."


Poe advances a similar argument about perversity: "Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say through its promptings we act, for the reason we should not."  In other words, we act  because we know we shouldn't.

Dostoyevsky here, like Poe, argues that humans will act at times in direct conflict with what they know to be their best interests.

Dostoyevsky postulates an advance in science which might provide accurate prediction of human behavior while Poe points out a combination of phrenology and metaphysics that attempts do the same. Both then attack the possibility of a completely accurate science of predicting human behavior.

Dostoyevsky says, "science itself will teach man that he never really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano key or the stop of an organ, and that there are , besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will not longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms..."

And then, when complete rational harmony and prosperity is established, someone will stand up and say that we should "'kick over the whole show here and scatter rationalism to the winds' ... [and] he would be sure to find followers--such is the nature of man. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning; that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated."

Again, we do things simply for the sake of  being perverse or because we know we shouldn't.



A Side Note:


There are some subtle comic comments buried within the text. The UM seems such a humorless person in much of the work, I wonder if he understands what he says here.   

". . . I began to feel an irresistible urge to plunge into society.  To me plunging into society meant paying a visit to my office chief, Anton Antonych Setochkin.  He's the only lasting acquaintance I've made during my lifetime;  I too now marvel at this circumstance.  But even then I would visit him only when my dreams had reached such a degree of happiness that it was absolutely essential for me to embrace people and all humanity at once; for that reason I needed to have at least one person on hand who actually existed.  However, one could only call upon Anton Antonych on Tuesday (his receiving day); consequently, I always had to adjust the urge to embrace all humanity so that it occurred on Tuesday. . . .The host usually sat in his study on a leather couch in front of a table together with some gray-haired guest, a civil servant either from our office or another one.  I never saw more than two or three guests there, and they were always the same ones.  They talked about excise taxes, debates in the Senate, salaries, promotions, His Excellency and how to please him,  and so on and so forth. I had the patience to sit here like a fool next to these people for four hours or so; I listened without daring to say a word to them or even knowing what to talk about.   I sat there in a stupor; several times I broke into a sweat; I felt numbed by paralysis; but it was good and useful.  Upon returning home I would postpone for some time my desire to embrace all humanity."


 Is he being ironic?

Some novels, stories, and poems that I revisit regularly, Pt. 2

These are stories and authors who popped up after I began the first post on works I regularly reread.  And, as I think about what I'm going to write about them, the urge to jump up, hustle over to the bookcase, and dust them off for another reread is ever present.  Oh well, it's that old "too few hours or years and too many books" problem as usual.


Herman Melville
Mardi
I have a theory that every writer has a wild book tucked down deep inside somewhere.  Some manage to get it out, while others either repress it or aren't aware of it.  If it does get out, then readers and critics are confused and generally don't like it, for it's not what they want or expect from the writer.  I think Melville's wild book is Mardi.  And, in my usual contrary way, I consider it a favorite.  Mardi is satire, rather like Gulliver's Travels which was published in 1726 and revised in 1735,  whereas Melville's work was published in 1849.  Melville may have been influenced by Jonathan Swift, but I haven't read any scholarly commentary that suggests that.

In Mardi,  Taji, the narrator, is in pursuit of his lost love, Yillah,  a Polynesian woman whom he had  rescued from native priests who were going to sacrifice her to their gods.  She was once again kidnapped, and Taji, in a small boat, went off in search of her once again.  He is accompanied on his mission byKing Media, who was bored with his duties and looked for adventure; Babbalanja,  a philosopher;  Mohi, an historian; and Yoomy, a poet.   As you can imagine, with such a crew representing the political, the philosophical, the historical, and the poetic viewpoints, there are long and sometimes confusing discussions about the universe and everything else as they traverse the  South Seas in search of Yillah.  During their journey they visit various islands, each of which exhibits some facet of human cruelty or weakness or folly.  One of the islands is obviously Europe and another is the US in the late 1840s.

Some contemporary critics have called it an allegory and others "a mess."  Some have called it both an allegory and a mess.  It's one of those books that the reader has to go along with Melville (or Taji) and enjoy the ride and not insist on a tightly woven consistent narrative with no loose ends at the end.
Read it for fun, and whatever else you can get out of it. 


Herman Melville
The Confidence Man:  This is a short allegorical novel set on a Mississippi riverboat, the Fidele, Fidelity or Faith in English, if I'm not mistaken. It consists of a series of encounters that passengers have with various confidence men (or perhaps really only one in disguise), all "representing" various charitable organizations.  Perhaps what fascinates me the most is that I'm never quite sure what underlies the various encounters.    

Herman Melville
Moby Dick is probably considered his greatest work, if not one of the greatest novels written in the US during the nineteenth century, if not also the twentieth century.  It's too early to say anything definite about the twenty-first century, but so far I haven't seen anything to compare to it.  It's a comedy, a tragedy, a revenge play, a travelogue, a history of whaling, and a scientific treatise on cetology.  Enough said.




Greg Benford:
The Galactic Center Series
Six novels.  The first is In the Ocean of Night which was published in 1977.  It is set in the late 1990s on Earth and near-Earth space and features the adventures of Nigel Walmsley, a Brit who somehow got himself a position as an astronaut in the NASA Space Program.  He wanted to go into space and England didn't have a space program.  The sixth novel is Sailing Bright Eternity, published in 1996 and is set some 30,000+ years in the future in the vicinity of the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

In between are some of the most spectacular science fiction adventures I've ever read and that covers 60+ years of reading SF.   In volume three, Great Sky River, published in 1987, we jump ahead some 30,000 years and meet Kileen Bishop and his group of friends and relatives on the run from the mech civilization, AIs and robots who are determined to wipe out all organic life.  Bishop and the other humans are closer to being cybernetic hybrids than 100% human with their metal and plastic reinforced exoskeletons and electronically enhanced senses.  Volumes Four, Five, and Six are mostly concerned with the activities of the Bishop clan and their struggle to avoid destruction by the mechs. However, there a few surprises in store for the reader.



Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon

It's one of the great mystery novels, at least to my way of thinking.  Part of its attraction may be that when I read the novel, I always see the actors from the film playing their respective roles.  I must also admit that I've seen the film more often than I've read the novel.  Actually I saw the film first, actually long before I read the novel.  It features a tough, cynical detective, a femme fatale, sleezy villains, and, of course, the Falcon!  Great stuff.


Nikos Kazantzakis
Zorba the Greek
This is another example of having seen the film first and then reading the novel, primarily because of the film.  A young bookish intellectual attempts to escape his cloistered life by reopening a lignite mine on Crete which he has inherited.  He is aided and abetted and confused by Zorba, an adventurer, miner, soldier, and survivor.  Zorba is the exact opposite of the intellectual--earthy, practical, exuberant, almost a life force in himself.   The book is ironic in that it encourages the reader to put down the book and go out and do something in the real world.  After reading Zorba, I got so entranced by Kazantzakis' works, that I went out and read everything of his that I could find.  I think that by now I've read almost everything he's written that's been translated. 


George R. Stewart
Earth Abides
This is another of my favorite SF post-holocaust novels.  It's what I call a quiet novel in that it depicts the quiet day-by-day struggles of the survivors of a war that killed most of the humans on Earth.  There are no mutant, slavering monsters, semi-human or otherwise.  The threats are the typical ones of providing food and shelter, and dealing accidents and disease in a world without ERs and vaccines.  And, of course, there are some who figure taking food, etc. is easier than working.  It's also the story of how myths about the survivors or first families begin in a society that is largely illiterate and how those survivors might be viewed in the future.  One other element is that of the making of a sacred symbol purely by accident.  


Lawrence Durrell
The Alexandria Quartet
I was hooked from the first pages of Justine, the first novel in the series.  It was on the reading list of a class I took, and I immediately went out and got the next three.  I've read it at least 3 or 4 times now and had to search for the hardbound copies as the paperback ones were disintegrating.

Justine:  LGD's accounting of events of past year spent in Alexandria just before outbreak of WWII--primarily of his relationship with several women, one of whom is the enigmatic Justine. 

Balthazar: LGD sent his manuscript to Balthazar, one of his friends in Alexandria who also appears in the manuscript.  Balthzar then returns the novel with his version of those same events as seen from his perspective.  We now have two versions of what happened.

Mountolive:  a third version of that same period by Mountolive (who is mentioned in the first two books) of the same events, giving a third and  completely different version of LGD's relationship with Justine.

Clea:  this is an accounting of the events that take place when LGD returns to Alexandria in the midst of WWII, about a year or so after the events told in the first three novels.

The series really asks us if we really ever know the full story of our own history. 


 Durrell's second series, The Avignon Quintet--he sometimes referred to it as The Quincunx and consists of the following five novels: Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian, and Quinx.

 This is a strange series of novels in which Durrell creates an Author who creates a character who writes a novel in which the Author includes a number of his friends and acquaintances, but takes "poetic" license in his creation. This is the first novel in the series--Monsieur.  

The remaining four novels are about the Author and his experiences in Egypt and France during WWII.  What is bizarre is that "fictional" characters from the first novel appear in other later four novels and interact with the Author and his friends.  In addition, several characters from "The Alexandria Quartet" also briefly appear. It's all rather confusing at times, and I had to create a diagram to keep the characters separate as many of the characters from the first novel are actually created from different friends and acquaintances of the Author. 

One of these days I will go back and reread both series for a third? fourth? time. 




Ursula Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness

This novel is one of my top ten SF novels.  If anyone ever asks me to recommend an SF novel for someone who has never read SF, I always mention this one.  It is well-written and has  an engaging main character, action, and an idea to explore.  The idea is simple.  Humans do not have sexually active periods like so many of our fellow residents here on earth. Humans are sexually active all the time.   Moreover, humans like most of our neighbors here have two genders, male and female.  Le Guin in this novel asks the question:  What if humans had specific periods in which they were sexually active and in between those periods, they were sexually neuter?

Winter or Gethen, as the inhabitants call it,   is a planet in which someone has apparently modified humans.  Humans on this planet become sexually active every three weeks and remain so for several days.  At this point they develop sexual characteristics, typically at random, so that humans on this planet can become either male or female. If a Gethen is paired with someone It (they are genderless during this period--what pronoun would you use?) likes, then the first one to go into kemmer (their term for the sexually active period) becomes by chance either male or female.  The other one then becomes the other sex.  If the one who becomes a female at that point gets pregnant, then that person will remain female and nurse the child until it is weaned.  At which point, that person then reverts to the sexually neutral state.  So, in a family pair with two children, each of the two adults could have been the mother of one of the two children.  As you can see,  this upsets all of our ideas about what males and females are like.  In fact, that's the issue Le Guin explores in this work: what are the real characteristics that belong exclusively to males and females.  If you haven't read this one yet, I strongly recommend you do so.

   

Kim Stanley Robinson
Three Californias:  Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge
When first published, they were known as the Orange County Trilogy, but the series title was changed when the trade paperback edition was issued.  My own name for these three is The California Troika.  A troika is a Russian horse-drawn vehicle in which the three horses are side-by-side, so there is no lead horse.  The three novels in this series all take place in the Orange County area at approximately the same time, some years in the future. But, this is an alternate universe series like no other I have read.  I have made several posts on these works, and clicking on the label Three Californias or The California Trioka will take you to them.  If you decide to read them, it makes no difference with which one you start.

The Wild Shore is set some half century or so after the US was destroyed by a sneak nuclear attack.  It is the story of a young male, late teens, and his experiences during one year in a small village that has grown up after the bombing.  In that respect, it is somewhat similar to another of my favorite post-holocaust novels, Earth Abides by George Stewart. 

The Gold Coast is set some years in the future and is an extrapolation of what life would be like if there were no dramatic changes.  The main character, again, is a young male, whose father is an engineer in the military-industrial complex--he works for a company that strives to get contracts to build hardware for the US military.  Like most of his friends, our hero is mildly opposed to what his father does for a living, and he is mostly concerned about the latest designer drugs, sex, and the contemporary music scene.  The novel is the story of events in this person's life that change him.

If the others can be classified as SF, then Pacific Edge is clearly a fantasy.  It is set some years in the future, again in Orange County,  in a world that has gone green.  Large corporations and nation states have been broken up all over the world.  Small is beautiful.  Recycling has become an important activity.  Cars are a rarity and most people get around a bicycles.  The main character is a young man, possibly in his early20s who has become the local expert in remodeling and fixing up abandoned houses. Local politics features strongly in the novel. 



Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"Notes from the Underground"
This is almost impossible for me to describe.  The first part is a philosophical rant against those who think that human behavior will eventually be completely predictable and explainable by the immutable laws of science.  In addition the narrator contends that there are two types of people:  the doers and the thinkers or the intellectuals.   Everything that is accomplished is done only by the doers, because the thinkers are paralyzed when they attempt to handle all the ramifications of acting.


The second part shows our reclusive narrator in action and supports both of the arguments put forth in the first part.  In one sense, the work is an essay and an example of many of Dostoyevsky's themes that he depicts in his novels.



There are others, of course, but I have resolutely refused to think about them for fear that what was supposed to be one post will expand to a trilogy, or even worse.  Some may find it hard to believe that I actually do so much rereading, but I do and this explains why I really am decades behind in my knowledge of contemporary literature.  But, that's a decision I made long ago.  I'm sure you made your own and very likely it's not the one I made.  Be that as it may, there's room for both of us, isn't there?

I just realized that the title of the posts includes poems, and I haven't mentioned any at all.  Oh well, maybe some time in the not too distant future. . .


I hope you consider reading some of these. 

Some novels, stories, and poems that I revisit regularly

 The following is a short list of some novels, poems, and short stories that I reread irregularly for the most part.  There's no particular order or schedule to this.  One day I will get the urge to read something once again, and so I dig it out, settle down in my recliner, surrender to the cat's demand for some lap time, and leave this world for a while.   There are others whose names I can't come up with right now, but sometime tomorrow or the next day, week, month, year, I will see one in my bookcase or read a comment by somebody about it and that's it--time for a another visit. 


J. R. R. Tolkien
The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings   
These three books are the ones that I have read more than any other work on my reread list, which is strange because I prefer SF to fantasy.   Right now, I am slowly reading The Silmarillion and expect to get to the others this year.    


Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain
This may be the second most reread book on my list.  I first read it while an undergraduate sometime during the years 1958-1961.  It was for a lit course, and I had to choose a novel from a list provided by the professor to write the outside paper on.  I choose this one, probably because of the title, and I haven't stopped reading it since.  I am now on my second hardbound copy as the first one is falling apart.

Life in a TB sanitarium doesn't sound that enthralling, but once begun, I found it impossible to put down.  It's partially based on a true experience.  Mann's wife went to a sanitarium for several months because of a lung complaint.  While visiting her, Mann underwent some testing and, like his hero Hans Castorp, was told that it would be a good idea if he signed himself in.  Unlike Castorp, he refused and, instead, wrote a novel about the experience.


Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment
I've reread this a number of times, perhaps as often as The Magic Mountain, or close to it anyway.  I consider this book a very significant work because it first introduced me to Dostoyevsky (I think I've read everything of his that's been translated into English), secondly it introduced me to Russian literature, and thirdly it was my introduction to foreign literature.  Moreover, I may not have selected Mann's The Magic Mountain a year or so later. and instead.  I might have gone with an English language work instead.

Raskolnikov believes himself to be a superior person who is not bound by the laws of human society.  The average person is someone who, if he kills someone, is caught and punished.  On the other hand, superior people, such as Napoleon, can be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and are seen as one of the Great Ones.  He kills a pawnbroker, someone useless and odious, to prove that he belongs among the elite.

 

Jack Finney
Time and Again
Simply the best time travel novel ever written.   Time is a mental construct, and the mind can be fooled into traveling into the past if the environment is appropriate and if the individual can be convinced that he or she is actually living at that particular time.  It's a mystery and a romance, and Finney provides sufficient information, along with appropriate photos, to make this a special work, and one that leaves me wishing this was real.
  

Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose
A marvelous amalgam of mystery and history and religious conflict is all that this is.  Brother William of Baskerville, a monk, has been called to the monastery to act as a mediator and a witness between two conflicting religious ideas of importance.  While there, he is persuaded to investigate a series of murders in the monastery, and his name should provide a vital clue as to his methods.  If he is unable to solve the murders, the Inquisition will be called in, and nobody wants that.  Adso or Adson of Melk is his amanuensis.  The novel is supposedly an edited copy of Adso's recounting of their stay at the monastery.


 
PD James
Anything
 I've read all of her mysteries a number of times, even though I have figured out the villain shortly after getting into the story.  The plots and characters are complex, carefully drawn out.  There seldom is the expected denouement at the end where Commander Adam Dalgliesh gathers all the suspects in the drawing room and slowly works his way around the room, pointing his finger at each in turn.  Instead, the process is a slow one, developing throughout the novel as each suspect is considered and then dismissed until it's a matter of uncovering the final bit of evidence rather than uncovering the identity of the guilty party. 



Jane Austen
Everything including her juvenilia.
I tried reading Pride and Prejudice several times, but I always stopped reading.  Then at age 42 I returned to graduate school in the English Department.  In the first course I took, the reading list included Sense and Sensibility.  I groaned a bit and then settled down to read it.  I loved it and then went out to read everything else by her.  I guess I had to mature a bit before I was ready for her.  If I was forced to list my favorites among her works,  I would say Persuasion would be No. 1 and Mansfield Park would be next.  The others follow closely behind.  It's been a while since I read them all, so I shall probably dust them off and settle down once again.




Russell Hoban
Riddley Walker
This is one of my favorite post-holocaust novels, thanks to a Chaucer course I took a year or two prior to reading the novel.  In the Chaucer course, we had to read The Canterbury Tales in Middle English (the language it was written in).  I struggled mightily because I had always hated reading something that wasn't written in Standard English.  I really didn't want to pay attention to the language; that was too much work.  However, at the end of the course, leaving the classroom for the last time, I felt as if I had lost a world somehow that I would never return to.

A year or so later, I had to take my qualifying exams and The Tales was on the list.  I decided to  play it smart and bought a modern translation and settled down to read.  However, something important was missing, and so I got out the Middle English  text and happily reread it in Middle English.

What has this to do with Riddley Walker?  The answer is simple: Russell Hoban has written the novel in what he speculates English would be like maybe 500 years from now after a nuclear war and  during that period most people have been illiterate.  Those few who could read and write learned from their predecessors and not from teachers or texts which would have kept the language unchanged.  If I had not learned to accept non-standard English texts from the Chaucer course, I never would have finished the novel.  The following is the opening paragraph.  If you read it out loud, as you should do with poetry, you will find it much easier to read.

 "On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he weren't all that big plus he lookit poorily. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and make his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later. . ."

 I've made some other posts about Riddley Walker and some other works by Russell Hoban.  You may want to check them out.  Russell Hoban is a unique writer, with a wild imagination.  Reading anything by him is well worth the time spent.


Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
This is another of my favorite post-holocaust novels.  It too is set hundreds of years after a nuclear war. The locale seems to be somewhere in New Mexico, where monks at a monastery manage to survive as monks did during the so-called Dark Ages perhaps almost 2000 years earlier.  And, along with their farm duties (they have to be completely self-sustaining) they also are dedicated to keeping records of the achievements of the past, even if they don't know what it is that they are painstakingly copying.   They have faith that some day human knowledge will increase to the point that these arcane books and schematics and diagrams will be not only intelligible but also help to spark a resurgence of human learning.

Their task is much like that of the Encyclopediasts in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation series."  However, the monks of the Order of Blessed Leibowitz do not have high tech aides and spaceships to travel about, but only sandals, and if they are lucky, a mule.  The novel is really three novellas, set roughly centuries apart, with only monastery and the monks' task of preserving knowledge to link them.  Well, there's always Benjamin, but he really can't be the Wandering Jew, several thousand years old, could he?

Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
I'm never certain about whether this is a short novel or a long novella, so I will guess this time and call it a novel.  It's the work by Conrad that I've read most often for I find it fascinates me, both in its description of the countryside, the inhabitants, and the Europeans who plague the inhabitants.  It's a biting indictment of the treatment of the black Africans by the white Europeans who have come there supposedly to civilize and bring the benefits of European civilization  and in reality end up brutalizing them in search of profit.

The POV character is Marlow, but the center of the novel is Kurtz   Marlow has taken a job as the captain of a steamer on the Congo River.  Far up the river is a trading outpost run by Kurtz, who has been amazingly successful in obtaining ivory for the company.  Suddenly all shipments stop, and after a few months of silence, Marlow is ordered to take the steamer up the river to Kurtz's trading post.  He is accompanied by the district manager and a group of ivory hunters and treasure seekers, along with a crew consisting of a few cannibals.  Marlow becomes obsessed with the idea of Kurtz and only slowly does he realize that Kurtz is not only at the heart of darkness, but also he is the heart of darkness.

The film, Apocalypse Now, is loosely, very loosely, based on the novel--more of an adaptation than a recounting.  The film is set in Vietnam during the war.  Captain Willard, of the US Army, is sent up the Nung River into Cambodia to find Col. Kurtz and assassinate  who has set himself up as a god among the local tribes people and is conducting his own brand of guerrilla warfare against the Viet Cong.  While much of the novel has been changed for the film, I still found the film to be very close in capturing the tone or atmosphere of the novel--the absurdity and arrogance of the white invaders.


Something happened that I did not account for.  I initially said that this would be a short list, something around ten, maybe even fifteen, but the list keep growing.  I'm now at ten and I still have the same amount left.  I guess I will end this here and continue with the rest on Part Two.  I hope this doesn't turn out to be similar to those fantasy trilogies that reach double digits.  

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The House of the Dead

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was arrested in 1849 for  being a member of the Petrashevky Circle and sentenced to death.  Granted a last second reprieve (he was about to be executed when the order arrived at the place of execution) he was sentenced to serve time at the prison camp in Omsk, Siberia.  He was released in 1854 and was fortunate to be given permission to return to St. Petersburg.  Without this permission, he would have spent the rest of his life in a town in Siberia, the fate of his "narrator" in the novel.

Perhaps to distance himself as far as possible from the story, Dostoyevsky has adopted the convention of an "editor" who is given a manuscript written by Goryanchikov, a former inmate of a convict prison in Siberia.  This manuscript, of course, is a first person narrative, which gives  the reader the sense of immediacy and the feel of actually being present in the prison.  The only other prison story that I have read so far that made me feel I was there was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  I recommend reading them together for an fascinating comparison of the Siberian prison camp under the tzars and  under the commissars.  Frankly I prefer the tzars' prison, for as beastly as life was then, it was still far more humane than under the commissars.

The narrator,  Goryanchikov,  was not a political prisoner as was Dostoyevsky, but like Dostoyevsky he was a nobleman.  He was in prison for killing his wife out of jealousy.   We never learn much about the details for Goryanchikov seems to want to put his former life behind him and seldom thinks about it.  His narrative is about his life in prison, including his reactions to this new and horrifying way of living and the people he meets there.  While there is some parts that focus on the prison staff--guards, administrators, doctors-- most of the narrative concentrates on his fellow prisoners.

Goryanchikov discovered shortly after arriving that he was hated by the majority of the convicts for he was a nobleman.  It wasn't personal; it was class hatred that set him apart.  And, it lasted, he reports, for his entire stay in prison, although it did ease off somewhat near the end of his sentence.  Some of the convicts even wished him well as he finished his sentence and was released.

The structure of the work is mostly chronological and follows a very logical plan.  The first days are treated in considerable detail, with the first weeks, then months, and the first year are dealt with in some detail, while the following years are given in less detail.  Significant events are covered in the latter parts of the narrative, such as his stay in the hospital.  The narrator also spends more time reflecting on issues brought up by his  experiences in prison:  the ideal prison administrator, the different types of guards, the psychological effects of whippings and beatings, the various personalities of his fellow convicts.

This is psychologically well-grounded as we all are far more observant when we are put into a new situation, and details are far more noticeable for their novelty.  As we become familiar with the situation, the novelty dissipates, which now gives us the freedom to step back and gain a larger perspective about our environment.  Moreover, prison life tends to be monotonous with most variety being provided by the convicts themselves and their interactions with each other.  After awhile this furnishes the only novelty in prison as prisoners leave, are transferred, or die and new ones arrive. Occasionally, a new administrator appears or a new guard or staff member arrives, which results in some minor changes, but for the most part, it will be the convicts themselves who provide whatever variety there is.

I found it a fascinating account of a horrifying situation and can only marvel at the adaptability of humans who can survive here.

Highly recommended--and as I mentioned above, this should be read along with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Hermann Hesse: Steppenwolf

Warning: I will discuss significant plot elements and the endings of various works.

It’s been several decades since I last read Hesse’s Steppenwolf, so I was curious as to how well it would hold up and how I would understand it now, a half century later. At the end, I thought it still a very interesting and intriguing work, but my understanding of it now is quite different from what I understood the first time I read it. When I first read it, I saw it as a novel in isolation, something unique. Now, I see that Steppenwolf has its relatives; it does not exist in isolation.

Steppenwolf has essentially a two-part structure. Part One consists of defining Harry Haller’s personality, his conflicts, and his relationship to post-war society in Germany. Haller reveals himself and learns even more from a remarkable “free pamphlet” he is given —Treatise on the Steppenwolf: Not for Everybody.

In the second part, Harry meets the classic prostitute with a heart of gold who makes it her goal to teach Harry how to live and enjoy himself. Her lessons involve sex, drugs, and the fox trot. At the end, in the Magic Theater, Harry embarks on a trip of self-discovery with a rather unique goal—he is to learn to laugh.

Harry Haller can be seen in several different ways. One is that of the respected academic who is torn by conflicting feelings about himself and his relationship to society--a sense of isolation or alienation. Another would be that of a seeker who is searching for enlightenment. Yet, another would be that of a man undergoing a severe depression. One more might be what is called a “mid-life crisis” in pop psychology. The work would support any of these views, but the ending seems to support the second theory—that of the seeker searching for enlightenment, in a Buddhist sense, that is. This would give it ties to another work of his, Siddhartha, about which I posted a short commentary a short time ago.

Harry, though, sees himself as two conflicted beings: the respected academic and the Steppenwolf, the outsider, the free creature who is outside civilization. Frankly, however, Haller comes across, to me anyway, more like an wolf/dog who has run away, but who also clings to the outskirts of human society, fearing to enter, but unable to leave.

While reading it the second time, I was reminded throughout of several works which seemed, to me at least, to share common themes: Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1863), Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy ( 1872), and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1911). Steppenwolf was the latest of the four, first published in 1927.

I think Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy serves as a unifier of all three works. Nietzsche’s definition of the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in human culture is exemplified by the three main characters: the German Gustave Aschenbach, the respected professor in Mann’s Death in Venice, the Russian underground man in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, and Harry Haller..

Nietzsche describes the Apollonian mind as possessing “that measured restraint, that freedom from the wilder emotions, that calm . . .” It is characterized by an intellectual, reasonable, temperate, and controlled life. The Dionysian is characterized as “chaos,” “a terror,” “blissful ecstasy,” or “intoxication,” “complete self-forgetfulness,” or ”union with nature.” It is the unpredictable, the irrational, the “uncivilized.” In other words, it is the two sides of human nature, antithetical but both necessary to art, to society and to culture—control and restraint civilization versus excess and extravagance and nature—the yin and yang of the Taoists.

The Notes from Underground has a structure that is similar to Steppenwolf. The first part consists of an extended passage in which the underground man (UM) reveals himself. He is a civil servant who has come into a small inheritance and has retired. He is an outsider with no friends or relatives. He lives in isolation. He sneers at society, but at the same time longs to join them, to be one of them, just as Harry mocks the bourgeoisie, but always lives among them and gains honor and respect as an academic.

In the second part, the UM forces himself upon some former student acquaintances who are giving a going-away party for one of the students. It is here we see, just as in Steppenwolf, the protagonist in action. The UM insists on attending the party, while mocking himself and eventually the others. He desires to be one with them, but actively works to make this impossible.

In the second part of Steppenwolf, Harry Haller meets Hermine who introduces him to a life of pleasure and sensuality drugs, music—especially dance music, alcohol, and sex—most of which Harry has sneered at in the past. Like the UM, Harry is immersed in society, but can’t really join them. Hermine is necessary to help him break out of his straitjacket, before he can move on.

The UM also meets a prostitute in the second part, but his encounter is quite the opposite of Harry’s. Where Harry is induced to join the pleasure seekers, the UM persuades Liza to escape from the life of a prostitute. However, when Liza appears at his apartment the next day, telling him that she wants to escape, he rejects her and sends her away.

Like Harry Haller, Thomas Mann’s Gustave Aschenbach is a respected academic. Unlike Haller, Aschenbach has dedicated his life to research and writing, with no contrary thoughts. Being a Steppenwolf is something Aschenbach has never considered throughout his life. However, at the beginning of Death in Venice, Aschenbach is tired, overworked, and sleeping badly. He decides to go for a walk, in hopes of reviving himself for another evening of productive work.

During the walk, he sees a traveler bearing a rucksack on his back, and this produces a most surprising emotional response: “the most surprising consciousness of a widening of inward barriers, a kind of vaulting unrest, a youthfully ardent thirst for distant scenes—a feeling so lively and so new, or at least so long ago outgrown and forgotten that he stood there rooted to the spot . . . a longing to travel. . . such suddenness and passion as to resemble a seizure . . .”

He ”imaged the marvels and terrors of the manifold earth. He saw. He beheld a landscape, a tropical marshland, beneath a reeking sky, steaming, monstrous, rank—a kind of primeval wilderness-world of islands, morasses, and alluvial channels. Hairy palm trunks rose near and far out of lush brakes of fern, out of bottoms of crass vegetation, fat, swollen, thick with incredible bloom. There were trees , misshapen as a dream . . .”

Nietzsche would recognize this as a Dionysian seizure, emerging from decades of a controlled life of mental activity. Unlike Haller though, Aschenbach has not led a tormented life of struggle between the two tendencies but had successfully suppressed that aspect of his personality. Now the desire to travel, actually more of an escape from his life of dedication to the intellect, has taken over and he flees to Venice. It is in Venice that he sees the Polish youth Tadzio and forgetting all restraint, becomes obsessed with him. Like Haller, he puts aside his Apollonian measured and controlled existence for the chaos and excesses of the Dionysian.

The three works conclude quite differently and, in fact, cover the possible spectrum of endings. The UM apparently is trapped in his self-induced isolation, with no exit seemingly possible. Aschenbach’s obsession ends in death. Haller really comes to no end in the work for he is now trapped in the Magic Theater.

“I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often the hell of my inner being.

One day I would be a better hand at this game. One day I would learn how to laugh.”

This has the flavor of the Buddhist belief that all are trapped within the endless cycle of birth and death until one becomes enlightened and now free to achieve the ultimate goal of existence—Nirvana. For Harry, the goal is to laugh the laugh of the immortals.

Is it coincidence that Harry Haller’s initials are HH, as are those of the author?

Overall Reaction: a remarkable book, which I now find richer and more thought-provoking than I found it the first time around, when it did not bring to mind the works of Nietzsche, Mann, and Dostoyevsky. No doubt there are other works that other readers can bring to mind while reading Steppenwolf.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Nov 11. 1821--Feb. 9, 1881

It was about an handful of decades ago that I sat down, took up a book, and began to read--

"Towards the end of a sultry afternoon early in July a young man came out of his little room in Stolyarny Lane and turned slowly and somewhat irresolutely in the direction of Kamenny Bridge."

A friend had cleaned out his locker on the last day of final exam week and offered to sell me a copy of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. It was the Modern Library edition, translated by Constance Garnett, and he wanted fifty cents for it. I had heard of Dostoevsky but had never read anything by him. I took the book. I finished it in a day or so and immediately went out, searching for more Dostoyevsky.

It was the depiction of a potential murderer, and a murderer of an old lady, that grabbed me. Raskolnikov was not a raving, drooling monster. He seemed to be a relatively normal individual, even if highly distraught, and possessed some strange philosophical ideas, that really weren't that strange, if one considers the range of ideas that humans have come up with over the centuries. He just didn't seem like a murderer, or at least what I considered to be a murderer at that time.

Dostoyevsky showed parts of Raskolnikov's character that I recognized but had never before seen in a literary work, or at least showed it to a depth that I had never seen before. He was of two minds about his plan to murder the old pawnbroker. One part of him doesn't think he could ever commit a murder, but he goes about as if he actually intends to do it. Which is the real Raskolnikov--the thinking Raskolnikov or the acting Raskonikov?

Throughout the days leading up to this day, he acts as though it were only an experiment, "no more than a test and a far from serious one." It was only "an idle fancy" that caused him to visit the old pawnbroker and note the layout of the apartment, the room where the painters are working, and the traffic around the doors to the building. He can't believe he will go through with it as he sews a loop inside his coat where he will hang the hatchet.

But, when the day he had decided upon arrived, he found himself almost as a prisoner in his own body which now seemingly acted on his own.

"His reactions during this last day, which had come upon him so unexpectedly and settled everything at one stroke, were almost completely mechanical, as though someone had taken his hand and pulled him along irresistibly, blindly, with supernatural strength and without objection. it was as if a part of his clothing had been caught in the wheel of a machine and he was being dragged into it."

While I have never murdered anyone, I have done some dumb things, which I knew were dumb, but I still went ahead and did them anyway, even while part of me insisted that I couldn't do such a dumb thing. Nor was I unusual in this respect, for I knew of others who had acted the same. No other writer that I had encountered up to this time had ever portrayed a person so completely, so thoroughly, and so convincingly in that state of mind.

As numerous critics have pointed out, Dostoyevsky has his flaws, but he shows us the depths of the human being as few writers have ever done before him, or after him. Dostoyevsky's characters are alive and breathing, and he cares for them, good or bad, virtuous or evil, or, which is most common in his characters, a mixture of both.

Perhaps there may be others who can do as well, but I don't think there are any who do it better.

Overall Rating--Very highly recommended.

Dostoyevsky and Poe: Perversity

One of Dostoyevsky's most unusual works is Notes From The Underground. It was the selection for a book discussion group on Yahoo--19th Century Literature-- if I'm not mistaken. It was while I was reading it, for the third or fourth time actually, that I began to see some similarities between Dostoyevsky's short novel and Poe's short story, "The Imp of the Perverse." "The Imp of the Perverse" is another of Poe's first person confessions--the individual attempts to explain why he committed his act from a jail cell, with a gallows outside awaiting him.

One of the similarities is format: both begin with lectures on one or more topics which are of considerable length in comparison to the work and then follow this with an incident that exemplifies the topic(s) discussed in the first part. Poe's lecture is solely on the nature of perverseness in human behavior while Dostoyevsky's contains several themes, one of which is perverseness.


The following is a quote from Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse." He is speaking of perverseness when he says, "Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not." In plain English, he states that we sometimes do things simply because we know that we shouldn't.

In Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, we find a similar theme. One of Dostoyevsky's first examples is that at times he is sick but doesn't go to the doctor out of spite. Who is he injuring--himself. He knows he should go because he is "only injuring [himself]...My liver is bad, well--- let it get worse." He is knowingly acting against his own best interests. Later he speaks of a "friend" of his:

"When he prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with the laws of reason and truth. What is more, he will talk to you with excitement and passion of the true normal interests of man; with irony he will upbraid the shortsighted fools who do not understand their own interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and within a quarter of of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through something inside him which is stronger than all his interests, he will go off on quite a different tack--that is, act in direct opposition to what he has just been saying about himself, in opposition to the laws of reason, in opposition to his own advantage, in fact in opposition to everything..."

Dostoyevsky here, like Poe, argues that humans will act at times in direct conflict with what they know to be their best interests.

Dostoyevsky postulates an advance in science which might provide accurate prediction of human behavior while Poe points out a combination of phrenology and metaphysics that attempts do the same. Both then attack the possibility of a completely accurate science of predicting human behavior.

Dostoyevsky says, "science itself will teach man that he never really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano key or the stop of an organ, and that there are , besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will not longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms..."

And then, when complete rational harmony and prosperity is established, someone will stand up and say that we should "'kick over the whole show here and scatter rationalism to the winds' ... [and] he would be sure to find followers--such is the nature of man. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning; that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated."

Poe's narrator attacks this tendency to develop laws of behavior by pointing out several examples of when he and others went against their own best interests, both by acting and by delaying to act until it was too late.

Poe's story was published in 1845 while Dostoyevsky's came out in 1864. I don't know if Dostoyevsky had ever read Poe, so I can't say he was influenced by Poe.

What I also find intriguing about them is that both authors wrote "double" stories, in which the main character discovers there is someone else who looks just like him, who even has the same name, but who acts in a way that is completely the opposite. In addition, for some inexplicable reason, no one else notices the resemblance. This forces the reader to consider the possibility that the "double" is not a real person but an hallucination.

Dostoyevsky's story is titled "The Double," while Poe's double story is "William Wilson." I wonder if there is some relationship between these two themes--perverseness within the individual on the one hand and the doppelganger on the other.

Akira Kurosawa: East and West

It was Kipling who wrote:

OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.


I don't know what Kipling would think today if he saw the many Japanese and Korean cars parked in driveways and parking lots in Western countries, or what he would make of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean singers, violinists, pianists on the concert circuit playing those exotic "Eastern" composers--Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Perhaps he might think differently today.

One of the most fruitful and interesting "meeting places" is in the work of Akira Kurosawa, one of the greatest of Japanese film directors, and arguably one of the twentieth century' s great film directors, regardless of race or nationality.

I don't claim to be an expert on Kurosawa, and what I know about him comes from viewing many of his films, the bonus features on the DVDs, and the Wikipedia page about him. But, even a cursory glance at material about him reveals the West's influence on him and his influence on the West.

For example, at least four films directed by Kurosawa are directly or indirectly inspired by Western texts. There are others, no doubt, but these are the ones that I've been able to identify.

Ikiru, Kurosawa has been quoted as saying, was inspired by Tolstoy's novella "Death of Ivan Illych." Both the story and the film concern a man who realizes he is dying, without ever really having lived. Illych is able to accept only near the end that his life has been empty and wasted; the novella therefore focuses on his struggle to achieve a true picture of his life. Kanji Watanabe, on the other hand, comes to the same conclusion about his own life much earlier, and the film explores the various ways he attempts to make his life mean something at the end.

Kurosawa's film The Idiot is a faithful adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot, in which he changes the setting from 19th century St. Petersburg, Russia, to post WWII Hokkaido. The subplots in the novel have been dropped, and the film centers on the interrelationship among the Japanese counterparts of Myshkin, Rogozhin, Nastasya, and Aglaya. Kurosawa's winter scenes are a clear reminder of Russian winters.

Ran tells the story of a warlord who tires of the responsibilities of rule and divides his territory among his three sons. He, however, retains or attempts to retain, the privileges and benefits of power without actually possessing it. The plot is based partially on actual events from Japanese history and, of course, Shakespeare's King Lear.

Throne of Blood opens with two men returning from a great victory over their king's enemy. They meet three "weird sisters" who foretell that one of them will be greatly honored and rewarded by the king and eventually will become king himself. The film is a faithful adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, including the forest that comes to the castle.


However, the influence or inspiration has not been entirely in one direction. Kurosawa's films have influenced a number of Hollywood directors.

For example, The Seven Samurai is a film about a small village, repeatedly attacked by bandits, that decides to take action and hires seven samurai for defense. John Sturges moves the setting from Japan to Mexico and casts Yul Brynner as the leader of a group of seven gunfighters in The Magnificent Seven. It is interesting to view the two back-to-back and see what Sturges kept and what he dropped. What is also intriguing is that Kurosawa has said that this film was inspired by US westerns--perhaps a full circle here.

Another of Kurosawa's films that made it to Hollywood is Rashomon, the story of the death of a samurai as seen by three people: his wife, a bandit, and the samurai himself (as revealed by a shaman who went to the underworld to get the husband's version). Director Martin Ritt also moved the setting from Japan to Mexico and cast Paul Newman as the bandit, Claire Bloom as the wife, and Laurence Harvey as the husband. The film, The Outrage, did not gain the same recognition as The Magnificent Seven. It will finally be released on DVD next month, and while I haven't seen it yet, the list of characters does show some resemblance to the cast list of Rashomon.

George Lucas has been quoted as saying that one of the sources of inspiration for Star Wars was Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. In Kurosawa's film, a young woman is trapped within enemy territory and must make her way back to her homeland in order to rally the people to resist the coming invasion. Accompanying her are a wise old general and two mostly cowardly and greedy country bumpkins, included apparently for comedic relief. If we add two young men to this group, we have Ben Obi-Wan Kenobe (the wise old general), Hans Solo, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia (the perky princess) , and R2D2 and C3PO as the two country bumpkins.


My last example seems to be one that is best described as a full circle. Dashiell Hammet's Red Harvest is a 1920's novel about a nameless private eye who is hired to save a small town that is being destroyed by two gangs of bootleggers, struggling to gain complete control. Kurosawa's Yojimbo is the story about a wandering samurai who enters a town that is being torn apart by two gangs in their struggle to eliminate each other. Sergio Leone transported the setting from Japan to (where else?) Mexico where the sword-wielding samurai is replaced by Clint Eastwood with a short cigar, a serape, and a six-shooter. In 1996, director Walter Hill decided the world was ready for yet another version, and the result is Last Man Standing, starring Bruce (these guns never go empty) Willis. Both Leone and Hill kept the plot very close to Kurosawa's, but both, especially Hill, focused more on the violence and less on character development.

One last point that I would like to make is that these are all excellent stories which, no doubt, is why Kurosawa borrowed them from the West and why Western film makers adapted his films. I would recommend that those who are interested should read the stories and see the films, both Kurosawa's efforts and the Western adaptations and the various sources.

I suspect there are numerous others that reflect a Western influence on Kurosawa and his influence on Western film makers. But the ones I've discussed give some idea of the interrelationship that existed even half a century ago and is probably even more true today.

The Greater Good

Democracies work, more or less, on the utilitarian principle that the good of the majority outweighs that of the minority--the greater good. In other words, some suffering is acceptable if the good outweighs the evil that might result from a particular action or law or process. For example, some people may lose their homes or jobs if it is determined that such losses will result in a greater good for the majority.

The question that bothers me is to what extent this may be carried out. At least three works that I'm aware of have either mentioned this point or based the story completely on this issue.

One of the first works that I can find that has brought up this issue is Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan, the skeptical brother, in a discussion with Alyosha, his younger brother who is a novice monk, brings up the issue in a discussion about justice--how could a just God have created a world so filled with evil in which good people suffer and evil people flourish?

At one point he poses the following hypothetical situation to Alyosha, "Tell me straight out, I call on you--answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at least, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears--would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth."

Peace and happiness for the human race--but at the cost of one child's suffering. Is that going too far with the philosophy of the greater good?


A second work one might read is a short story by Ursula Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." In this story, Le Guin posits such a perfect society and goes into considerable detail describing it. While some might not like this society, many would consider it an ideal world. However, there is a catch--as the old cliche goes, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." In the story, Le Guin describes the life of one small child that resembles horror stories that emerge in the news media about a dreadful example of child abuse--a child being locked in a dark room for years, with no sanitary facilities, physical and mental abuse alternating with complete isolation.

She continues: "They all come to know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvests and the kindly weathers of the skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery."

If that child were released, then "in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one..."

The title, of course, points out that there are some who cannot accept this situation and leave. But, most stay. Are they monsters?


A third version of this hypothetical situation is found in Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X. This tale differs in that it isn't one child who suffers for the good of the whole, but each member unknowingly, as an infant, undergoes a procedure that produces an idyllic society. In one sense they are now less than they could be, but their lives appear to be happier and more satisfying and creative than any contemporary society today. In fact, it is quite similar to Omelas. In this case, the issue is that the members of this society do not have the chance to make a decision, for it is made for them as infants and most do not know the true situation. The question is therefore whether the authorities in this society are justified in their decision to not allow each member to decide whether to undergo the procedure. Could they fear that most might not agree?

These are all hypothetical or fictional situations, but the principles behind them are not. I wonder what I might say if I were really in an actual situation similar to ones posited in the three stories--to exchange the complete happiness and joy of thousands or more people for the suffering of one person. I wonder which is the greater good.

The Fight Club--who is the real opponent? Pt. 1

POILER WARNING:

THIS COMMENTARY REVEALS CRUCIAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE OVERALL PLOT AND ENDING OF THE STORY. IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN FIGHT CLUB, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU READ NO FURTHER.


The Fight Club is a unique film. Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are completely believable in their roles, as are Helena Bonham Carter and Meatloaf, who play two of the most important supporting roles. You may not like one or more of them, or possibly all of them, but they are convincing, and they engage the viewer to the point that liking or disliking becomes irrelevant.

Unlike too many films I've viewed recently, this one was unpredictable. I never expected what was going to happen, and when it did, it seemed perfectly natural. It was unexpected but reasonable.

Fight Club begins with a chance conversation on a plane and ends with a catastrophe possibly greater in its effect than that of 9/11. Each step is a small one, but seemingly inevitable, so that the viewer will accept it as being the next logical step. Only at the end does the viewer realize just how far the inexorable logic of the film has taken the characters and the viewer.

The plot twist comes near the end of the film and radically changes the viewer's perception of what has been going on in front of him. Frankly, I found it as hard to accept as the nameless narrator, but like the narrator, I eventually had to accept what I was seeing on the screen.

The twist or reversal of the foundation of the story is based on a literary device which was developed in the 19th century and has produced some of the most memorable literature ever written--the double or the doppelganger. Briefly, the main character or the protagonist is doubled in some way--there is another person who bears a striking resemblance to the main character, but strangely only the main character seems aware of this. But, the double is not the exact duplicate of the main character in all respects; while the double may physically resemble the main character, the personality differences between the two are most often exactly the opposite.

As it is in this film, the double has been used to illustrate the dual nature of the human being: sometimes it's the good and the bad within all of us or at other times it's the difference between our external behavior and our repressed inner nature. It does this by completely separating the two opposing elements in our nature that are, in reality, hopelessly intermingled.

One of the first examples of the double occurs in Dostoyevsky's short novel, The Double. In this story, the main character is a meek and mild civil servant, who is so shy and retiring that he has no friends and hasn't spoken to his supervisor at work in weeks, if not months. He is unable to put himself forward. One day at the office, he sees a man who resembles himself to a remarkable degree. However, this man is outgoing and, in spite of just having appeared for the first time at the office, engages in a conversation eventually with everyone at the office, including the head of the department. Later, at a party given by his superior, our unnamed narrator again sees his double. While the narrator spends most of his time buried in the crowd and isolated from everyone around him, his double is the life of the party, acting in a way the narrator wishes he could.

Edgar Allen Poe's "William Wilson" features a schoolboy who discovers that he has a double among his fellow pupils, one with the same initials, the same physical appearance, and the same birth date. No one else seems to be aware of this. This double also frequently whispers advice and warnings to William Wilson that nobody else notices or hears. Moreover, the double frequently interferes with Wilson's activities for Wilson is an evil person. Either the double advises him to avoid actions which are harmful to others or frustrates them in some way.

Probably the most famous "double" tale in literature is Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so much so that the names of the characters have become embedded in our everyday language. People are frequently characterized as being a Jekyll and Hyde. In this story, Dr Jekyll has discovered a drug that will allow either his good side or his evil side to dominate his entire being.

In a more modern retelling, one of the Episodes of the original Star Trek series had Captain Kirk the victim of a transporter malfunction which somehow separated him into two separate beings. One of these beings was his good side, and the other his evil side--an up-to-date version of the Jekyll and Hyde tale, but with the difference that both sides existed independently of the other. What was intriguing about the division was that the evil side had Kirk's energy and drive, while the good Kirk was weak and ineffectual throughout most of the episode.

There are other examples of the double in both literature and in film, but I think this post is long enough. If any wish to look further into the topic, I would recommend the following work as an excellent starting point:

C. F. Keppler, The Literature of the Second Self, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson , Arizona, 1972. He has also published a novel, The Other, in which "centers in the unique relatiohship between the first self and the second self.