Signs and Symbols

Those who love and appreciate art – true art, not the popularized kitsch that pollutes all too many of our modern museums – are blessed in more ways than one.  Art is the pleasure of human ingenuity, thought, feeling and remembrance, but it is also a way of life that encompasses and weds every fabric of our being.  From art  we can derive all the postulates of the Ancient Greeks, all the science of Leibniz and Da Vinci, all the politics and history of every politician and historian that has ever lived.  My hyperbolic waves might cause you to snicker, and snicker you may (I am a staunch believer in freewill).  Yet for many of us art and reality are coterminous.  My world may not be perfect, or even particularly beautiful at times, but sooner or later, out of the corner of my watering eye, I will catch a glimpse of something that will return me to the fold, to the other lambs I call human beings and their love for what is greater than they are.  Literary criticism, that unwieldy shapeshifter, has long been aware of the vicissitudes of its subject matter and has mutated appropriately.  Often it adheres to the spirit of the age or whatever else seems trendy; sometimes, however, it ventures out on a bare, untenanted limb and makes a bold declaration only then to find it in a text written two hundred years earlier.  One of literary criticism's more recent chestnuts, concocted in the mad throes of the modernist interbellum, is a holistic approach to the ineluctable modality of the visible.  Everything is reflected in everything else, a prison of a thousand mirrors with only one original – a solipsistic view as old as literature itself.  What is literature if not the mimicry of the omnipotent?  What is art if not a new universe reinvented at the whims of a minor god?  What if that same god senses that his world is rebelling against him, a conspiracy of trees and grass and air?  One answer can be found in this magical short story.

We are taken, rudely, into the life of three miserable people.  An elderly couple, Russian in culture and language but now residents of a foreign land after a great war destroyed everything they loved, is about to visit their only son.  He is twenty and not well, although his gigantic intellect has not been damaged as much as warped.  The white-garbed priests of the new religion have subjected him to countless doses of unpronounceable medications, ink blots, and other brilliantly subversive tactics with no results except a filing cabinet stuffed with lengthy reports about things that will make you and me wonder what on earth is being taught at modern universities.  Our patient remains sick, if sick is the right word:

In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence.  He excludes real people from the conspiracy – because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men.  Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes.  Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him.  His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees.  Pebbles or stains or sun flecks from patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept.  Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.  Some of the spies are detached observers, such as glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart .... he must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things.  The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away.

Some may consider the above description a perfect clinical analysis of one of science's great advances in human psychology; others more discerning in their perceptions, however, might see something else.  Instead of a young man with no future, we might be dealing with a young man who sees the future, past, and present simultaneously;  instead of an illness we might see an obsessive and creative part of our consciousness that devours all slaves to art from their first moments of self-awareness to their dying breath; and instead of an arrogant eccentric, we might see the outline of a great artistic soul imperiled by a tidal wave of sensation, the totality of an open mind exposed to an endless universe.  In those cases, as it were, the universe will always win.    

A lesser writer might have said much more about our patient, who is obviously talented (after all, his cousin, perhaps the paranoid protagonist of this novel, is a chess grandmaster) if unsociable.  But Nabokov lets us examine the patient from the point of view of his parents who are impoverished, unable to communicate well in English, and completely distraught over the separation from their beloved offspring.   Mothers tend to take such things a bit harder, and his proves to be no exception:

After all, living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case – mere possibilities of improvement.  She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.

And the story (taken from this magnificent collection) draws to an unexpected close.  The lonesome couple is bent over a kitchen table as a phone rings again and again and a voice asks, rather insistently, a most peculiar question.  We are told little more than that "it was an unusual hour for their telephone to ring" and that "the same toneless anxious voice asked for Charlie."  What is a young girl calling an old couple in the middle of the night about a young man a symbol of?  I for one can think of a few things.  But they, like the thoughts of our clearly sick patient, do not need to be expressed.

Lolita

It was a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday when this famous novel entered my stratosphere, and it has been orbiting ever since.  True to my age, I was completely enraptured by both the language and dexterity of Nabokov's prose, an impression that with regard to his corpus as a whole remains to this day.  Yet there was the matter of the content.  Young fellows barely a few years older than poor Dolores Haze and many years away from fatherhood tend to be rather cavalier about such a lurid affair because they have not experienced the plight that afflicts many middle-aged men who wake up one dark morning and realize they are no longer young.  As we get older, however, our perspectives on these matters can and should change.  When I read the novel for a third time four years later, my professor (a conservative bowtied gentleman in his mid-fifties) said something that I didn't believe at the time, but which now makes perfect sense.  He admitted that when he first read Lolita at college in the sixties, "it was the greatest thing I had ever read; but now I don't think that any more."  Although I don't agree with how he ultimately broke down the novel into a series of forced readings, I do concur that the sheen of the work is dulled by its inherent immorality.  Readers of Deeblog are duly aware of the thick red thread that hems each and every one of my reviews, essays and commentaries, and that thread is a belief, for what it's worth, in an innate moral law that separates us from the other beasts that roam this lonely planet.  And despite the farrago of relativism and other forms of despicable nihilistic trends that allow simple minds to sleep at night, this thread is of particular value when examining our works of art.  Those of us constantly in search of great literary works want bliss and ease of composition, originality and vitality, but we also want to feel that the logic and values promoted are in concurrence with our own.  That is not to say that they must speak the same language, have had the same series of life events, or even have anything ethnically, religiously, or sexually in common with us; what they must have is a sense of right and wrong, not a volatile list of justifications for taking advantage of others and, in the end, themselves.  Knowing right from wrong is the one law that unites all of us, and the one thing missing in the excellent film version of the tale of Humbert Humbert.

Moviegoers will be quick to point out that this is the second cinematic adaptation, the first one having been written by Nabokov himself, and then, to his great chagrin, completely reworked by the film's director.  I saw this first version many years ago and recently enjoyed a reviewing; it has its good points, but it lacks (perhaps a sign of the times more than anything else) the necessary layer of sleaze to make its wheels burn in full rotation.  Humbert (a genteel James Mason) has nothing unsavory about him except an itch for a young girl who, truth be told, could easily be nineteen or twenty, hardly a crime in most societies of the world and not even unusual, and the whole film focuses more on the parody of kitschy 1950s mores than the tense undercurrent of lust.  Thirty-five years and a movie ratings system later and we have the real deal: a study to a porn film with sensational casting, a wickedly funny script, and, thankfully, very little nudity.  Humbert (the incomparable Jeremy Irons), Charlotte Haze (Melanie Griffith), and the title girl herself (first-timer Dominique Swain) are superb not only because each of them masters his role with relish and wit, but also because they have many of the natural attributes that inhabit Nabokov's creations.  Irons's Humbert is gallant, educated, wry, and a complete fool for a teenager with whom he could not possibly be happy in this world or any other; Griffith is voluptuous, vulgar, and sad, the epitome of a nice-looking widowed mother hoping that a smart man could still love her; and Swain is a ball of frisky tantrums, half-woman, half-girl, but, like the other characters in the film, glazed with a morose tendency towards anger.  None of these people is happy, that much director Adrian Lyne got right (not so in Kubrick's version, which has far too many scenes copied from sitcoms).  They all yearn for something more: the Hazes want something beyond their small, picketed worlds of (dis)comfort and conformity; while Humbert's wish is much grander – the restoration of his childhood and all its freedoms.  When Lolita leaves for camp, Humbert does a swan dive into her closet; and when she finally seduces him, his pajamas are buttoned all the way to the top.  This contradiction is exactly the tone that needs to be set in a story of all-consuming obsession, but it is also indicative of the wrongness of the whole enterprise.  And that wrongness begins and ends with Lolita herself.             

In the novel, everything that happens before Humbert and Lolita finally engage in that most adult of pursuits can be seen as a voyeuristic parody of a romance; readers with no taste for Nabokov's comic genius would not, in any case, reach page one hundred and forty.  Once the deed is done the landscape darkens, and Humbert decides that they must flee, moving from no-tell motel to seedy rest stop with nothing behind except – well, in fact, someone is indeed on their trail, but who or what their stalker is makes the whole film lose any romantic or idyllic charm.  What actually follows, plagues, then assaults Humbert is nothing less than his own conscience manifested in the form of another human being whose fantasies coincide with the worst of Humbert's dreams.  So when Lolita screams 'murderer' as she (and we) and Humbert spin vertiginously down a staircase, we know she speaks the truth; not so when Humbert begs her to reveal her secret and she smears him with lipstick kisses like incestuous blood.  Perhaps the film's essence is best captured by its soundtrack: the lush sounds of modern romanticism from the famous composer of another of Irons's films pockmarked by a slew of cheap jukebox hits.   Is there any place less romantic than a motel?  Yes, there is: a prison.  And there in his humble humble cell our Humbert is trapped forever, unable to spread his wings and elevate to some higher plane.

Turgenev, "Весенний вечер"

A poem ("An evening in the spring") by a young Ivan Turgenev.  You can read the original here.

O golden beams that wave and prance    
Above the land in restful lay;                    
O spacious fields in silent trance        
That glisten, gorged on dewy day;      
O streams that purl in valley's dark   
Beyond the springtime thunder's break,   
And lazy winds sweep aspen bark,           
As wings wax lightly in their wake. 

O lofty woods, O soundless thrill,             
So green and dark this forest deep!         
Where thickest shade can linger still    
And court these leaves deprived of sleep.
O star awake in sunset's flame,         
O beauteous star where love can't die ,      
My soul's as light  as spirit's name, 
As light as childhood years gone by.

The Painted Veil

For many years now – indeed, since my adolescent ken expanded past the usual barrage of books for children and young adults, perhaps around the age of thirteen – I have heard of the alleged talent of this British writer of moralistic tales.  And for those same twenty years I have tried, often with a heavy heart, to inculcate myself into his world that seemed to be not so much dated as never properly alive.  Take for example a selection from this famous novel about an unusual triptych – betrayal, the goodness of man, and China:

Her happiness, almost more than she could bear, renewed her beauty.  Just before she married, beginning to lose her first freshness, she had looked tired and drawn.  The uncharitable said she was going off.  But there is all the difference between a girl of twenty-five and a married woman of that age.  She was like a rosebud that is beginning to turn yellow at the edges of the petals, and then suddenly she was a rose in full bloom.  Her starry eyes gained a more significant expression: her skin (that feature which had always been her greatest pride and most anxious care) was dazzling: it could not be compared to the peach or to the flower; it was they that demanded comparison with it.  She looked eighteen once more.  She was at the height of her glowing loveliness.  It was impossible not to remark it and her women friends asked her in little friendly asides if she was going to have a baby.  The indifferent who had said she was just a very pretty woman with a long nose admitted that they had misjudged her.  She was what Charlie had called her the first time he saw her, a raging beauty.  

Without further context, we note that we have learned nothing of detail about the character.  These are surely platitudes, but they are also platitudes about something in which the author is no way interested, which should make us even less likely to believe its genuineness (Maugham was not particularly interested in young women and had trouble describing them).  The other extreme, all too common in our sullied times, is to depict a character as the sum of his neuroses, ticks, or freakish qualities, the reason for such delineation allegedly being to allow less attentive readers to distinguish among a large cast – a strategy which should tell you all you need to know about their less attentive creators.  In between these two oversimplifications lies true art, a tapestry of subtleties, mild contradictions, and occasional flashes of fatidic overlap.  We will not say that the most recent cinematic version of the novel quoted above is a perfectly woven rug, but it improves markedly on the plain fabric of the original.

The title is a metaphor for life culled from a sonnet by Shelley, who died young at the height of his powers.  To whom it may apply will depend on your knowledge of literary conventions and mores; let's just say that Maugham was not averse to relying on such formulas when bringing a story to its close.  But it will also depend on the rest of the poem itself, a point to which I will return.  The ostensible protagonists are three: Kitty Garstin (Naomi Watts), the type of vapid and materialistic young woman for whom sympathy is not an option; Walter Fane, (Edward Norton) a painfully shy doctor and bacteriologist; and, in due time, Kitty's dashing, politically-connected boyfriend, Charles Townsend (Liev Schreiber).  Kitty marries Walter mostly owing to parental influence: there is no love evident on her part and only infatuation on his.  They travel together to mainland China (before, as it were, such terminology was used) so that Walter might investigate a cholera epidemic in the more provincial regions; initially, however, they take up residence in cosmopolitan Shanghai.  What Kitty is supposed to be doing with her time while Walter devotes all of his attention to microbes is not hard to imagine, and she soon falls under the sway of Charles, or Charlie in the above passage, Walter's perfectly scripted foil.  While Walter is meek, slight, almost squeaky in his mannerisms, not to mention completely devoted to causes that would make ordinary men shudder, Charles is tall, muscular, macho, and maliciously selfish.  Many men are still befuddled as to why women at all times and from all places continue to find the Charles type, looks notwithstanding, irresistible, and it has little to do with blindness (a more masculine trait).  No, Kitty, like so many other women, knows what Charles is all about.  Charles is married and has no incentive whatsoever to leave his wife, but Kitty thinks she can convince him otherwise because even the most rebellious and unruly of men can be tamed by the right tamer.  When Walter learns of their affair, he sadistically suggests that Kitty accompany him to rural China to help battle the epidemic or face a rather ugly divorce.  Kitty runs crying to Charles – and, well, you know what effect crying, manipulative mistresses with no other recourse tend to have on their married lovers.  The unhappily married couple leave together in silence to parts where few foreigners venture, and there our story, like its characters, starts to snake into more interesting territory.  

The melodrama that obtains cannot be called creative or even pleasant, but it is in all ways correct.  Norton is superb in his inner strength and outward patheticness, and Watts does embody someone for whom you could give everything up in an impulsive swing of mood.  Their characters are cut from rather old stone and could easily be played with less proscription of emotion, yet a certain restraint, even on Kitty's part, evinces the need for human beings – all human beings – to justify what their life has become, whether or not they are mostly responsible for the results.  Other figures float in and out adding some local and colonial color (another topic that is beaten past death and into purgatory), but the notes are held when needed and the arias replaced with incisive dialog that reveals much about each side of the argument.  And there are arguments.  Screams, hysterics, devastating accusations, but all with the placidity of a Sunday morning breakfast.  What are they arguing about?  Ultimately about morals, of course, in the guise of their own relationship, but also about what we are to find among our fellow men and women, even those from countries we don't really wish to visit.  Which brings us perhaps to the end of that same poem and the fate of those same characters who seem to stare down destiny and march on:

I knew one who had lifted it – he sought, 
For his lost heart was tender, things to love,
But found them not, alas!  nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve.
Through the unheeding many he did move, 
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot 
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

Quiz Show

About fifty years ago, a cathodic ray tube apparatus began spreading across the United States and was soon recognized as the most dynamic and wondrous invention of modern times.  No longer were we restricted to our reality, that dark corner that it can be, or even the boxed and timed microwave reality of the cineplex.  Instead, our homes became a window to other worlds, other lives, and other destinies (more recently, a similar experience was enjoyed by those old enough to remember a pre-internet world). The price for such a miracle was its eventual degradation into a corporate tool, one designed at the usual lowest common denominator to amuse all and edify none.  Now these pages are not the place for berating the public for their television habits (nor, I might add, to speculate about their concomitant unwillingness to open any of the bound leafy jewels sitting upon their shelves).  That said, even back in the fledgling days of television there were many people who objected to what they saw as its potential for the promotion of kitschy, simplistic values and a popular culture in which our knowledge of the world would barely extend past our backyard fence.  The bitter fate of one of those commendable people is dramatized in this fine film.

Our intellectual is Charles van Doren (Ralph Fiennes at the height of his fame), scion of a long line of writers, professors and graduates of this university.  I cannot say I am personally familiar with the work and commitments of his family; but it did please me to learn that Charles's uncle Carl was apparently responsible for the revival of interest in this artist of genius.  Charles, presumably like his forefathers, is a typical intellectual.  That is to say, he is interested in learning for learning's sake alone; he has original theories about certain approaches to the material he loves; and, in the end, some if not many of his conclusions are correct.  What separates a truly brilliant mind from that of the typical intellectual, however, is the decision – a very conscious decision – not to rest on one's proverbial laurels.  That old chestnut about academics teaching the books or subjects they used for their oral exams has proven more often than not to be the rule rather than the exception.  Van Doren has a broad range of interests, but seems content with his knowledge of English literature to study astronomy and try, as many intellectuals do, to merge the systems in his brain into one coherent perspective (intellectuals, you may have noticed, are holistic beasts).  Yet van Doren is atypical in one important way.  Both he and his ethereal understudy Fiennes exude a glamorous charm and natural presence that distinguish them from our normal idea of what bookish people devoted to learning might allow themselves to resemble.  In fact, given van Doren's pedigree, looks and wit, he would be the perfect person to flaunt on this cathodic ray tube apparatus and help educate the country – even if he is rather skeptical about the likelihood of achieving that aim.  For that reason, Charles is recruited by two television producers (David Paymer and Hank Azaria) for that most American of events, a game show.

The show is called Twenty One, and its gambling connotation is hardly coincidental.  Contestants are asked a series of trivia questions, much more of a novelty in 1957, and win by being the first to get to the magic number, although ties are also possible.  When van Doren enters upon the scene, the reigning champion is Herb Stempel (John Turturro), a worrywart underachiever who really could have been the champion with a little more effort.  The problem, and lifeblood of the film, is the moral quandary in which Stempel finds himself.  Although a smart man, Stempel is not quite as learned as his long run on the game show might indicate.  His image remains that of a hopeless nerd whose social dysfunctionality is supposed to underscore his recourse to the little details of life that only interest the very few and the very lonely.  And yet he has been cheating.  His whole act as an invincible fortress of esoteric learning has continued at the behest of his producers, who give him the answers beforehand in reliance on his excellent memory.  Yet the trouble with every puppet despot is the lack of respect which his puppeteers ultimately show him.  He may outlive his usefulness as soon as a more attractive alternative presents itself – and life is full of attractive alternatives – but he will certainly be undermined by that feeling of unworthiness that prolonged cheating inevitably produces.  Stempel does not respect himself, and no one in the know (most of, as it were, the television executives) respects Stempel.  So the man hand-picked for his intelligence and credibility really possesses neither one, which makes van Doren and his effervescent ease in the spotlight all the more tempting.  Once the switch is made – Stempel is told to lose and van Doren, fully aware of the ethical consequences, is informed in advance that he shall win – each of the men, so opposite in every way that we could only be dealing with fiction, plummets into self-loathing.  For Stempel this means squabbling, lying, and paranoia; for van Doren, remorse that he cannot shake.  And when an investigator (Rob Morrow) appears and starts asking all the wrong questions, van Doren is obliged to confront his hypocrisy with his usual grace.  You may be surprised at the end, but you will certainly be underwhelmed at the moral valence of the characters and their decisions.  Is it because trivia and its pursuits will always be of secondary importance?  I don't think I need to tell you this answer.