What I Read in September 2011

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. I was moved and impressed by these graphic novels about growing up during the Iranian revolution.

Anna Maclean, Louisa and the Missing Heiress. A rather lightweight mystery story set in 1850s Boston in which Louisa May Alcott is the detective.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life. A woman is not a man. Sounds obvious, but when a woman achieves something a man might have achieved — written a novel, for example — it must be because she is less than a “woman”.

Homer, The Iliad. We experience War, with its heroism and cruelty, and the interference of the gods. I have posted on The Iliad: How They Die and The Iliad: Fate.

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone. This is an excellent medical novel with wonderful characters, but not for the squeamish. I finished it the night before the moving cataclysm and could not find it for several days. Here is a scan of its somewhat battered cover.

September has been an unusually lean reading month, although any month in which one completes The Iliad is memorable for that. We have been engaged in moving out of our house, in which we have lived happily but somewhat messily for 32 years. As a non materialistic person, how did I accumulate so much stuff! After days of packing and unpacking boxes we are not through yet.

The Iliad: Fate

That’s Zeus. Feel his power. Some say this bronze statue, recovered from the sea, is Poseidon. It is not. It is Zeus because he is about to hurl his thunderbolt, and even earthshaker Poseidon must yield to that.

With all his power over gods and men, Zeus must not change fate.

Then the bright-eyed goddess Athene said to him: ‘Father, master of the bright lightning and the dark clouds, what is this you are saying? Do you intend to take a man who is mortal and long ago doomed by fate, and release him from grim death? Do it then — but we other gods will not all approve you.’

Fate is for men, and all men have the same fate: to die, whether heroically or not. So Patroklus “met the day of his fate” but, intentionally or not, he chose the day.

…this was a fatal error, poor fool — if he had kept to the instruction of the son of Peleus, he would have escaped the vile doom of back death. But Zeus’ mind is always stronger than the mind of men…. And it was Zeus then who put the urge in Patroklos’ heart.

So Homer provides us with a confused accountability. Your fate is determined, yet you can make the decision about when to meet it — and Zeus can influence that decision. So why can’t he change the fate itself? Fate is for men, not gods.

Then lord Apollo the far-worker said to him: ‘Earthshaker, you would not say I was in my right mind if I do battle with you for the sake of wretched mortals, who are like leaves — for a time they flourish in a blaze of glory, and feed on the yield of the earth, and then again they fade lifeless. No, let us withdraw from battle immediately, and leave the mortals to fight for themselves.’

You may wish for immortality, but it has drawbacks, Thetis, the goddess mother of Achilles, lives forever while her mortal husband ages and she know that Achilles must die and she cannot prevent or postpone it. A man may live on in his achievements and, if he is a warrior, his greatest achievement is to kill. The greater the man killed, the greater the glory. Thus, Hektor,

And people will say, even men of generations not yet born, as they sail by over the sparkling sea in their many-benched ships: “This is the mound of a man who died long ago. He was the greatest of men, and glorious Hektor killed him.” That is what they will say: and my glory will never die.

And the gods? They live forever and do not care about us. As Hera says, “Let them die or live as fortune has it….”

Writing a Woman’s Life

Carolyn Heilbrun had two careers: as a university professor and feminist critic and, under the pen name Amanda Cross, as the author of 14 detective novels. Writing a Woman’s Life tells us a bit about both, as Heilbrun (in 1988) reflects on the difficulties of writing a woman’s life.

I take the title in two senses. The first, and most obvious, is the matter of biographies of successful women, writers especially. A woman without a man is too often presented as someone who “failed” and thus was driven to the expediencies of intellectual effort and career ambitions. After Eleanor Roosevelt died, her longtime friend and confident Joseph Lash wrote a book about her life after FDR died entitled Eleanor: The Years Alone. Eleanor Roosevelt called her own book about that same period On My Own. Lash did not understand that one person’s loneliness may be another person’s freedom to express and to achieve. Heibrun’s comment on this setting free:

The true representation of power is not of a big man beating a smaller man or woman. Power is the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part matter. This is true in the Pentagon, in marriage, in friendship, and in politics.

A woman whose primary assignment is to provide emotional support for another person (male or female) rarely has the power necessary to achieve in her own right.

The second sense of writing a life is how women see the narrative of their own lives. Independence and ambition are not in the stories with which they are familiar.

Had they done so [read Freud's work], they would have recognized his clear assertion that women daydream erotic scripts, men ambitious ones. Freud saw men as able to combine the erotic and the ambitious–there may be a woman in the dream for whom the tasks are undertaken–but for women, the ambitious is not considered as an alternative.

Those who want to tell a different story with their lives may be seen as damaged or even socially dangerous. In my own childhood the parental ideal was the “well-adjusted child”. For girls, that ideal meant the one who conformed.

Misfits are often our most gifted children and, for girls, those most likely to require a different story by which to write their lives.

The Iliad: How They Die

The Greeks and Trojans fought man to man. It was personal. You saw your opponent fall.

He fell to the ground in the dust, like a poplar….

He crashed down on his face, and his armour clattered about him.

Life and strength collapsed where he lay.

Death was darkness.

…darkness covered his eyes, and he crashed, like a tower….

…and black night covered over his eyes.

…he crashed from the chariot, and the hateful darkness took him.

It was the same experience for both sides. No remote weaponry separated winners and losers.

So he fell, and the bronze of his crafted armour rang over him

…..many of the Trojans and Achaians lay stretched side by side, face down in the dust.

They lay dead on the ground, a sight now to gladden the vultures, not their wives.

It was the fate of the warrior to die.

…over his eyes came the surge of death, and strong fate took him.

…filled the measure of their fate at the hands of king Agamemnon, and sank down into Hades.

Hades is below the earth and from Hades you do not return. Earth could sustain life, but it does no more.

…all these, one after another, he brought down to the nourishing earth.

…he crashed in the dust and his hand clawed earth.

…the life left his bones.

I am rereading The Iliad after many years. During my previous reading I was disgusted by the fighting and maiming and dying and those warriors who gloried in it. But it is not glorious to claw the earth, and surely that is the point.

Louisa and the Missing Heiress

Louisa is Louisa May Alcott acts as the detective in this mystery set in 1850s Boston. Author Anna Maclean has a promising premise here — take a known historical or literary figure and use her as a fictional character. Elliot Roosevelt did something similar in his mystery series in which his mother, Eleanor Roosevelt, was the sleuth. This sort of thing works best when the story uses believable aspects of the real person’s character. For example here, Louisa is presented as energetic and impatient, with a thirst for justice.

This book didn’t work very well for me. The development of the mystery was very slow. The action mostly consisted to Louisa going from tea party to tea party and talking with the principal suspects, meanwhile expressing great concern for her reputation. A historical novel in which a real figure appears must draw on the known character of that person, while providing a believable setting. Louisa here is energetic and impatient, with a thirst for justice. True enough, if a bit obvious, but she also expresses some gratingly modern opinions. The other figures — Abba and Bronson Alcott and sister May — are conventionally as we would expect them to be, without much sparkle.

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi – I loved these books. The first one is subtitled The Story of a Childhood, while Persepolis 2 tells the story of Satrapi’s teenage and young adult years. Born in Iran Satrapi  identified with her family and culture, but she was sent at 14 to continue her education in Austria. Her parents were apprehensive about the trouble she was likely to get into with an increasingly repressive regime. They were right to be apprehensive. Satrapi was rebellious and the monitors could whip you for showing too much hair or wearing the wrong color socks.

Initially Satrapi’s liberal parents welcomed the revolution. Down with the Shah! What came after was just as bad. They passed from an extreme of imposed secularism and corruption to an extreme of imposed religiosity and corruption. This is similar to the story told in Reading Lolita in Teheran, where the restrictions also increased, step by stop.

As you can see from the sample here, the Persepolis books are graphic novels. I used to be rather sniffy about this literary form — adult comic books — until I read the Age of Bronze series by Eric Shanower which brings the time of the Trojan War to life with his drawings of people and places. Satrapi’s illustrations depict the emotional truth of the events she experienced. As a child, she saw and felt as a child. As a teenager, she became something else.

My angry feminist comment: This is what happens when men define what women are and what they ought to be. Women must cover their hair and shroud their bodies because when men see these desirable objects, they are sexually aroused and that is sinful. Their own responsibility is nowhere considered. It is all the women’s fault and so they must be strictly controlled to prevent men from sinning. Poor weak men! As Majane Satrapi’s grandmother said, if God knew that women’s hair would cause so much sin, he should have made them bald.

Emile Zola, The Masterpiece

As I read Zola’s The Masterpiece about the struggles of an innovative artist in 1880s Paris, I felt that Zola had lived that life. Although the central figure is the struggling artist, Claude, the next more prominent character is the writer, Sandoz. Claude’s experiments in artistic technique are not understood and are ridiculed; Sandoz (Zola) is also a victim.

His poor book! It was getting a fine old trouncing! Talk about butchery and massacre, he’d got the whole pack of critics at his heels, yelping and cursing him as if he’d committed murder most foul! It made him laugh, it even stimulated him, for he had the quiet determination of pursue the course he had set himself.

Claude is not full of quiet determination. Whereas Sandoz makes a plan for his series of related novels and proceeds diligently to produce them, Claude paints and destroys, paints and destroys. He seeks a single work, a masterpiece, to express his entire artistic vision. His first attempt has the significant title “Open Air” and is a light-filled contrast between a nude woman and a fully clad gentleman. Zola’s description of the picture suggests something very much like Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe.

Claude’s model for the nude is the beautiful Christine. They live together, have a child and eventually marry, while Claude paints version after version of what is to be his final masterpiece. He wants to show the heart of Paris with a glorious standing nude as its centerpiece. Christine continues to model; the picture does not work and Claude cruelly blames her.

“The colouring’s still splendid,” he went on, “but not the line. Not now…. The legs, oh, the legs are still all right; they’re usually the last thing to go in women…. But the belly and the breasts are certainly going to pieces. There, just take a look at yourself in the glass. Near the armpits now, you can see the way the flesh is starting to sag? Not very lovely, it it?”

It is not Christine who is deteriorating; it is Claude. The more he paints, the wilder and more improbable his picture becomes. His aspiration to create a single stunning masterpiece destroys him in the end.

This is only the second of Zola’s novels I have read but already I am impressed by his versatility. There is a central story — the returned political prisoner in The Belly of Paris and the artist-writer duo of this book — but there is also a host of other characters to play out the various possibilities of the situation. The Belly of Paris is the great food market, Les Halles, and Zola’s text is full of the tastes and smells of its fruit, fish and cheeses. In this book, we have word pictures of the colors and forms in the world the artists see and the works they create.