A-Z 2021 - B: A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess, 1963)

 

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

First-person narratives seem to come in two general varieties.  There's the ones where everything is still written like a book, just from the viewpoint of one of the characters; in these cases, while that character's way of speaking might appear in the dialogue, it stays out of the narration.  Then there's the ones where it's formatted more as if the narrator is actually telling the story to you out loud, where everything is filled with the slang they use in their conversations with others, where even the most straightforward things might be obscured by the argot that they fill their speech with, so that until you crack the code, as it were, you need a glossary just to keep up.

A Clockwork Orange is perhaps one of the most quintessential examples of this second form of narrative.  Alex, "Your Humble Narrator", govoreets in nadsat as he tells the horrorshow good raskazz with aplomb, and no appy polly loggies if thou art no oomny lewdie who ponies the slovos he skavats, O my brothers.

OK, it's not quite that bad.  But there's times where it's not not that bad.  It creates a kind of strange effect where the language is utterly jarring at the start, but as you read through the book, it starts to sink in, so that everything makes sense by the end and you're not flipping to your Nadsat-English glossary nearly so often, if you even have one available.  This is actually by design; Burgess created an entire slang for the teenage troublemakers in his novel, sort of a combination of the wordplay in Cockney rhyming slang and a sort of pidgin Russian, in an attempt to make everything have a quality that falls outside of any specific time and instead just evokes, well... a dense argot made of near-impenetrable vocabulary that requires the reader to work out meanings from context, unless Your Humble Narrator actually defines the term for you.

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

Alex is... not a likeable character, at least initially.  He's unapologetic, and just comes right out with it, talking about how he and his droogs get themselves high on milk laced with amphetamines, go out on the town to cause havoc, and just generally act like complete hooligans.  It's not pleasant; the nadsat patterns do a little to abstract it, to give a sort of versy quality that straight narration wouldn't give, but that doesn't change that the end result of the first two chapters is that they've beat up an old man, destroyed three rare books, broken into a tobacconist's and ransacked the place, gotten into a gang fight that ends with someone potentially blinded and another with his cheeks slashed with a razor, stolen a car (which is later dumped into a lake), and gangraped a woman before beating her to death.

Yeah, that's what it's going to be, then.

Alex is profoundly disturbed, clearly.  The first third of the book is largely devoted to illustrating this, and there's a lot of it that, well...  He seems downright proud of the chaos he's creating, and there's no getting around that he has no sense of the consequences that his actions actually hold, just living his life in a pattern of doing violence, going home, listening to classical music while fantasizing about doing more violence, sleeping, going out during the day and getting into more trouble (on the day we get to see, this involves statutory rape), then going to meet his droogs and starting the cycle all over again.  This all ends when his crew decides that they're going to break off from him, and contrive to leave him holding the bag, as it were, when they break into an old woman's house and everything goes sideways.  He gets knocked in the head, the droogs run, and he's picked up by the police and carted off to prison.

There's a two-year time skip after that, and we get to see that he's putting on an act of false contrition, working as the audio guy in the prison chapel on Sundays, and getting into conversations about religion with the chaplain, during the seven years he's been sentenced to.  He's a fan of the bible, but much more the first part, where there's all the sex and violence.  Not so much the later part that's all preachy.  It's almost like he's not actually learning anything, but it's at this point that the actual primary theme of the book comes out, the question of free will.  See, there's this new treatment that he's been hearing rumors about, where they'll train you to be a good person and then let you out early, and wouldn't that be nice?

Spoiler alert: It's not nice.

After an altercation involving the entire group of his cellmates beating up a new prisoner for making a sexual advance on Alex, and Your Humble Narrator going completely overboard on him after he's already down, Alex is 'volunteered' to be the test case for the Ludovico Technique, which he's initially pleased about, as he thinks this is a perfect way to get out early, and it certainly can't be that bad, right?

Spoiler alert:  It's very bad.

It takes a full day for Alex to realize what's actually going on here, and even when he starts to fight against it, he simply... can't.  Any thought of resistance makes him physically uncomfortable, so that he's rendered into a state of, well... effectively being an automaton, unable to defend himself, only able to act honorably and nicely toward others, and due to its use in the Technique, even robbed of his ability to enjoy classical music.  And then... he's simply turned out, after the proof of his utter rehabilitation has been publicized by the government as evidence that the prison overcrowding problem will soon be over so they'll have room for political prisoners.

Oh, hello there, totalitarianism.

The last part of the book focuses on how miserable Alex's life becomes in the days immediately after his release, culminating in his being manipulated into a suicide attempt by opposition agitators, and... the government undoing the brainwashing through hypnopaedia while he's recovering, and turning him back loose again with his ability to listen to music and his ability to choose between right and wrong restored... which means his ability to do wrong is also restored.

Here's the optional endpoint.  The American version of the novel ended here, on its initial release; Stanley Kubrick's film version was based on the American version; though he was aware of the final chapter's existence, he chose to take the indication from Burgess's manuscript and end it right here.  Alex comes full circle, and he's just been turned loose again, free will restored, and we don't know what he's going to do from there.  He's either learned from his experiences, or he's still a sociopathic monster.

And then there's the final chapter.  It starts out as a near-mirror of the first chapter; Alex in the milk bar drinking milk-plus laced with uppers before going out for a night on the town with his new droogs.  There's a few differences, though.  As part of their apology, the government has given him a job in the music archives, and he gets free discs as part of the perks.  So he has money, he doesn't need to steal it.  And when the crew gets ready to go cause some havoc, he... feels bored with it.  He doesn't really want to.  Instead, he tells them to go ahead without him, and leaves them behind, instead going to a tea shop for a cup of chai, and runs into one of the original droogs, who is now married and gainfully employed.  And he realizes... maybe being eighteen is too old to be getting up to all this stuff now, maybe he should see about finding himself a romantic partner, and perhaps dropping the nadsat and starting to talk like an adult.  In short, maybe he needs to actually grow up.  It was all just teenage directionlessness, after all, and you can grow out of that.

So instead of the unclear ending that could go any direction, we get a happy ending where he's off to become a productive member of society.  Maybe he'll be a composer.  He'd enjoy that.

...I honestly don't know if that last chapter is good or not.  There's a collection of essays from Burgess and reviews from others and various relevant writings in the back matter in the copy I have (almost 100 pages' worth, in fact), and it seems like opinions are rather sharply divided on whether that final chapter is or isn't important.  Even Burgess seems unsure, and he's the author.  It's a very sharp tonal shift from the rest of the book, and honestly feels like it wasn't written with the same vicious energy as the rest of the piece.  While it does further the question of what Alex's free will actually entails in the end, it also... just seems like it's not what the rest of the book was building to.  It kind of feels like taking the fairy tale Bluebeard and ending it with 'And they all lived happily ever after.'

Yes, she inherits Bluebeard's wealth and gives all the previous wives proper burials and gets herself remarried herself... but no way she's just living happily ever after.  Not after that trauma.  That's not how psychology works.  Darn fairy tales and their need for happy endings.

I dunno.  I genuinely can't decide if I prefer the book stopping with the open ending or with the happy ending.  I do think the happy ending is horribly flawed.

A tough, but ultimately worthy read.

A-Z 2021 - A: Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813)

 

Is this a kissing book?

        -The Grandson, The Princess Bride

I don't really know why it took me so long to get around to reading Pride and Prejudice.  Somehow, even with being very much a reader and focusing quite heavily on literature in my schooling in recent years, the only Austen I had read before now was minor works, and never any of the full-length novels.  At least in part, it's likely because I've traditionally had a preference toward reading sci-fi and fantasy, and perhaps away from romance novels, even ones considered major works of literature, such as Austen.

This is not to say that Austen is precisely what would be suggested by that simple genre label.  There is, after all, a big difference between the social satire that her novels contain and the Harlequin and Silhouette novels that are present in any bookstore and in most grocery stores, and it's rather doubtful that any of the latter are going to still be read 200 years after their initial publishing.  But what is it that makes Austen have such staying power?

Pride and Prejudice comes at this in several ways that give it some literary heft.  The first, quite simply, is that the first half of the book doesn't seem to be acknowledging that the protagonist is actually in a romance novel.  Elizabeth Bennet is quick-thinking, rational-minded, with an acerbic wit, and quite willing to express herself, even to those who exist on a different social stratum.  Fitzwilliam Darcy, the male lead in the piece, makes himself decidedly unlikable in his first introduction, acting aloofly toward anyone he doesnt already know and refusing any invitations to dance when it's rather a social faux-pas to not take part.  Lizzy pretty much hates him immediately, and this remains her position for much of the story.

The book was originally published in three volumes, and these actually function remarkably well as dividing lines for the action, as the first covers Darcy's initial visit to Lizzy's home township of Meryton, the second covers events when Lizzy runs into him again while staying in Kent, and the last detailing her brief visit to his home of Pemberley and the aftermath of that encounter.  We see how Darcy is slowly won over by Lizzy's charm, and how the mutual misunderstandings of the people around them both has brought about unfortunate consequences for Darcy's actions, to the point that he surprises her with a wedding proposal that she very firmly declines.  And yet, this mutual misunderstanding can be fixed, the actions remedied, and in fact Lizzy's hatred can be turned to admiration, and his essential good nature brought forward to counter his pride, letting him admit that he misread situations and is able to forgive past injury when it's best for all involved.

There is kissing in this book (sorry, young Fred Savage), but not between the characters that might be expected; this isn't a "kissing book".  In fact, all of the kissing is either familial in nature, or one case of a brother-in-law kissing Lizzy's hand.  Notably, not only is no physical affection between Lizzy and Darcy shown, but in fact anything more than walks in the country or organized ballroom dancing is kept out of sight; even the four marriages that happen are all 'off-screen', either happening far from Elizabeth's sight or between chapters.  It's not what I suspect most readers would expect out of a romance novel.

Perhaps my favorite set of interactions in the book, truly, were the verbal sparring that happened between Elizabeth and Darcy's aunt, Lady Catherine.  I had a sort of mental image, though both characters in the book are younger than this, of the way that Lady Violet and Isobel Crawley reacted toward each other on Downton Abbey.  Lady Catherine is quite open about her disapproval of the very idea of a man marrying "beneath" himself, and is very much set on trying to force a match between Darcy and her daughter.  This goes so far as to have Lady Catherine visit the Bennet household purely to threaten Elizabeth with societal ostracization if she doesn't decline an impending second proposal from Darcy.  She is quite unprepared to handle Lizzy's utter lack of fear of her threats, and Darcy's own response to her subsequent attempt at interfering directly with him only results in, well...  The very proposal that she didn't want to happen.  Oops.

The general, overall theme underlying the comedy of manners that makes up the book is that people shouldn't trust their first impressions of others.  This seems to have been the original intention; Austen's original title when she first wrote this novel in the 1790s was to be First Impressions, though there is evidence that it was substantially rewritten over a decade later.  It is difficult to say what that earlier manuscript might have looked like, as there is no evidence of its continued existence; perhaps that is in some ways for the best, however, as what was published is an excellent read that I honestly wish I had picked up a lot sooner than I did.

A-Z Reading Challenge 2021 - Introduction and Progress Tracking

Penguin has this kind of wonderful-looking line of hardcovers that they call Drop Caps, where they have selected books from the across the Penguin imprints (though mostly from Classics and Modern Classics) from authors whose names start with every letter in the English alphabet.  This post is not about that line.

One of the things that is driving me to read so many classics right now is knowing just how much literature I've never read, despite having been reading since before I can remember.  Some books, I may have read in the past but wasn't mentally prepared to fully appreciate (The Turn of the Screw stands out especially, but also the works of Homer, and even though he's one of my favorite authors, some of Ray Bradbury's works that I haven't revisited since high school), while others may have simply been avoided because they seemed unapproachable, or simply outside my interests, as it were.

Even just focusing on Penguin Classics and the associated lines, there's a vast selection to choose from.  My shelf finally reached the point where I have authors for every letter of the alphabet now, so I decided that my summer reading is going to largely focus on making use of that and reading through the alphabet, in order.  Maybe I can make an annual thing of it, though I suspect that certain letters may require some fudging of the rules in the future. (especially looking at Q here)

For this year, though, I can do authors, like Penguin did with the Drop Caps line.

A: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (started 5/12/21, completed 5/18/21)

B: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (started 5/20/21, completed 5/21/21)

C: The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (started 5/22/21, completed 6/28/21)

D: A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (started 6/28/21, completed 7/5/21)

E: Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (started 7/5/21, completed 7/12/21)

<Break #1 - Uprooted by Naomi Novik> (started 7/13/21, completed 7/18/21)

F: The Autobiography and Other Writings by Benjamin Franklin (started 7/18/21, completed 7/25/21)

G: Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Part One started 7/26/21, completed 7/27/21; Part Two started 7/28/21, completed 7/30/21)

H: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (started 7/30/21, completed 8/1/21)

I: The Cheapest Nights by Yusuf Idris (started 8/1/21, completed 8/2/21)

J: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (started 8/3/21, completed 8/3/21)

<Break #2 - Look Me in the Eye by John Robison> (started 8/4/21, completed 8/4/21)

K: The Complete Poems of John Keats (started 8/5/21, abandoned 8/9/21)

K: Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling (started 8/10/21, completed 8/12/21)

L: Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot (started 8/13/21, completed 8/24/21)

M: The Crucible by Arthur Miller (started 8/25/21, completed 8/27/21)

N: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda (started 8/28/21, completed 8/30/21)

O: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (started 8/31/21, completed 9/5/21)

<Break #3 - Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. (Started 9/6/21, completed 9/7/21)

P: The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki (Started 9/7/21)

Q: Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau 

R: Reveries of the Solitary Walker by Jean-Jacques Rousseau 

S: Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw 

T: Roughing It by Mark Twain 

<Break #4 - A Pocketful of Crows by Joanne Harris>

U: Kristen Lavransdatter I: The Wreath by Sigrid Undset 

V: Candide by Voltaire 

W: Monkey King by Wu Ch'êng-ên 

X: The Persian Expedition by Xenophon 

Y: Hungry Hearts by Anzia Yezierska 

Z: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin 

The Yellow Wall-Paper and Selected Writings (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1884-1916) (Penguin Classics Charlotte Gilman, 2/2)

Coming back around after wrapping the local library's challenge so that I don't leave any books unfinished, so I'm back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman once more, reading the back half of this particular volume that I started last week.

After Herland, the remainder of this book is a selection of short stories and poetry from along the length of Gilman's writing career.  The short fiction section sort of comes in two sections, early stories and stories from The Forerunner.  There's a 17-year gap between the two groups, and a very clear change in what Gilman's focus is.

The first six stories in this collection all date to the 1890s, including perhaps Gilman's most famous piece, "The Yellow Wall-Paper".  There is a clear leaning toward feminist thought on display here; of the five early stories chosen, only one doesn't seem to fit in with the others.  "The Unexpected" is a story in four chapters, in which an artist marries a young lady, becomes convinced that she's immediately engaging in an illicit affair, attempts to catch her in the act, and finds that her secret is far more wonderful than he expected.  "The Giant Wisteria" begins as a story about Puritans dealing with a daughter who had a child out of wedlock, then jumps a century forward to people staying in the same house, experiencing a haunting, and discovering the fate of the daughter from the start.  The outlier, "The Rocking-Chair", features two men taking rooms in a boarding-house after seeing a young girl in the window, and having their friendship crumble as both think the other is hiding having gotten to meet the girl, apparently the daughter of the landlady.

"The Yellow Wall-Paper" is a very clear indictment of Silas Weir Mitchell's methods of treating psychological illnesses, a semi-autobiographical account of the slow decline of a woman's sanity when she is forced to remain in a room with nothing to do but look out the window or study the wallpaper; Gilman had been a patient of Mitchell's and sent him a copy of the story in an attempt to convince him that this was a treatment that did more harm than good.  She later wrote in The Forerunner that she had learned the story had the intended effect, and Mitchell stopped using the "rest cure".  The other two stories, "The Extinct Angel" and "Through This", are shorter pieces that are more directed, more obviously focused on feminist ideas, dealing with how the traditional female roles in society completely subsume the personality, the purity, and eventually the sanity of women.  Gilman is decidedly outspoken even in these early pieces, and you can see the beginnings of her focus on feminist social justice that would eventually culminate in Herland.

The remainder of the stories come from later, and are largely devoted to showing how Gilman's views on a perfect society would potentially work in practice.  The women are resourceful, willing to think outside the box when necessary, and more than willing to do what's best for everyone, rather than just themselves.  Additionally, there is the continuing theme, as seen in Herland, of motherhood being a sort of sacred duty, and that those who cannot perform that duty well should be willing to pass it to others who are better-suited.  Everything seems to just be these perfect little settings where all the ills of the world could be quite nicely sorted out if the women were just allowed to have some say in things instead of being buried under all the stresses of their place in a male-dominated society and...

Yeah, they're very didactic, and very much of a kind with the other material from The Forerunner.  While they are well-written and are fun reads, they do begin to feel somewhat the same after a time.  The general formula is: female protagonist is wronged somehow, female protagonist either learns of her own ability to effect change or works out the best way to do so, that change is effected, female protagonist ends the story in a much better position.  The whole theme is women's empowerment, and the various ways that it is illustrated are enjoyable, but in retrospect, the stories really do kind of start to blend together.

The poetry section is somewhat similar in formatting; early poetry holds more varying topics but a general feminist leaning, while later poetry starts to become more obviously political.  While there are a few poems from the period between the early fiction and Gilman's self-publishing, it's a very slim selection, and it's harder to see the development of ideas when they're confined to slim pieces of verse.

This raises perhaps the most important issue I have with the volume I've read here.  There's a 17-year gap with very little of Gilman's material on display here, and importantly, much of her writing during that gap was a mix of nonfiction essays and several nonfiction books, showing the development of her ideas into what would eventually become the topics of The Forerunner in general and Herland in specific.  And yet, for some reason, the "Selected Writings" on display here have completely missed that arguably-important part of her oeuvre.  Not even the piece she wrote on the topic of why she wrote "The Yellow Wall-Paper" made it in, and that story is the first part of the collection's title!  It feels like an unusual omission, especially in a collection edited by a scholar with multiple Gilman-themed works to her name.

All this is to say that I certainly see why Gilman belongs on a classics shelf, and while the shape of her ideas is clearly on display in the stories and novel included here, I do wish that the collection hadn't had such a large piece of time left obscured.  There is value in seeing the development of ideas, and I would be very interested to have been able to see the evolution from what is on display in "The Yellow Wall-Paper", "The Extinct Angel", and "Through This" to become what was spelled out in Herland and The Forerunner.

The Stonewall Reader (ed. New York Public Library, 2019)

I'm not really sure why, but one of the common traits that seem to exist among the friends I've made in my adult life is that a majority seem to exist somewhere on the queer spectrum.  Sure, part of that might be because I identify as asexual, which is the eighth letter in the common alphabet soup of inclusive lettering and is frustratingly-often understood as meaning 'ally' or something similarly missing-the-point, but I wasn't even aware of that as a term before 2017 or so.

I know there's a lot of question of the value of labels, whether they're forcing people into boxes, but when you don't have a word to describe how you feel and suddenly learn that there is a box you fit into, it's remarkably freeing, interestingly enough.  It's knowing 'I'm not alone!' that makes all the difference, really.  And even if it's not something that carries any real stigma, comparatively, it does complicate things; I'm not aromantic, I definitely want a life partner at some point, but... sexual desire isn't really part of it, and I haven't the slightest clue how I would even bring up the subject with a prospective partner.

Darn neurodiverse brain.

Anyways, getting back to the topic on hand.  I've had a lot of queer friends over the years, and tend toward being very much in favor of acceptance and normalization and... other words that mean 'bigotry bad' and such.  I'm a millennial, I grew up in a time where queer topics just weren't as taboo as they might have been in the past (Ellen's 'coming out' episode ran when I was in seventh grade, and Will & Grace was on the air during my time in high school), I knew people who were out of the closet by the time I graduated, and my sophomore year in college included someone coming out as the first of many trans* friends I've had over the years.

Even with all that, though, largely because of the media landscape when I came of age, I never really had a solid understanding of just what the struggle for civil rights looked like for queer communities.  You always learn about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when you're in school, and maybe you learn about Cesar Chavez, but that's about it, when it comes to mid-twentieth-century civil rights.  Even with the college history classes I've taken, I never really got a good understanding of exactly what the Stonewall uprising was.  Thanks to the New York Public Library, that particular blank space in my knowledge of history has been filled, at least a bit.

The Stonewall Reader, published in honor of the 50th anniversary of the uprising, was very much an eye-opening read for me.  It's separated into three sections, and each provides a number of voices to give a feel for what the general feel of the era was like, in a way that is sort of a cross between an anthology and an oral history.  The first section of the book, "Before Stonewall", is designed to give an idea of what the state of queer rights was like in the 1960s, followed by "During Stonewall" that gives accounts by people who were actually there during the uprising, and "After Stonewall" to go over the civil rights movement that arose in the aftermath, and the changes in the culture through the last decades of the 20th century.

There's a distinct lack of voices on display here for gay white men, but that's somewhat by design; there's a definite intention on display here toward amplifying marginalized voices, so that there ends up being a focus on non-white writers and interviewees, but also a noticeable emphasis on trans* voices.  This was particularly surprising to me; sure, I had always understood Stonewall to have been about the police cracking down on a gay bar, but I had no idea of the specific nature of that gay bar, that it was the only one that would really let the drag queens and transvestites in, that the police crackdowns would go differently for pre- and post-op transsexuals...  And the number of accounts that include a mention of a chorus line stretching across the street and singing and doing Rockette-style dancing in front of a phalanx of riot police?  Amazing.

What is rather less amazing, however, is the way that everything kind of changed in the aftermath.  It's easy to look at the news right now and see how trans* rights haven't kept pace with the rest of the queer alphabet soup, and it's kind of obvious why, when you see how they were treated by the movements as a whole.  Several of the interviewees in the "After Stonewall" section are downright bitter about how, after being such a fundamental part of that initial bout of civil disobedience, the trans* community was just kind of pushed aside, always stuck on the sidelines and getting strung along without nearly as much effort put into their rights.  It's honestly infuriating to me.

I'm glad I took the time to read this.  It's one of those important parts of American history that I had somehow never really heard about, and given its relative importance, it feels like it should be better-understood, better taught.  Good on Penguin for publishing this, and amplifying the voices within.

No-No Boy (John Okada, 1957)

 

Question 27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?

Question 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attacks by foreign and domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or disobedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?

In one of the more shameful episodes of American history, roughly 120,000 people of Japanese descent, about 2/3 of whom were American citizens (the rest being Japanese immigrants who were at the time forbidden by law from becoming citizens), were forced into concentration camps on U.S. soil over the course of 1942, out of a misguided fear that they might act against the country's interests and be secretly working for the Japanese military.  While these camps weren't anything remotely like the horrors of the camps seen in Europe, they were still a traumatic experience for the Japanese-American population, unlike anything seen by German- or Italian-Americans.

In 1943, a questionnaire was circulated among the U.S. citizens in the camps, ostensibly trying to judge how "American" or "Japanese" they were, labelled as an "Application for Leave Clearance".  The first three pages of this questionnaire were much like a combination of a Census form and a job or college application, asking for identifying information, relatives, where they had lived, education, work experience, and foreign language skills.  The true nature of the form only starts to become clear with the last question of the third page, asking about any foreign investments; the last page starts out seeming fairly innocent, but after asking about contributions to community organizations and magazine readership, suddenly veers into asking if the person filling it out has Japanese citizenship, if they have applied to cancel said citizenship, and then ended with the two questions I opened this piece with.

Most of those who filled out the questionnaire answered "yes" to both questions.  Those who didn't, whether because a 'yes' to 27 might mean they could be fighting their own relatives in the Pacific theater, because they thought a 'yes' to 28 implied that they had previously held foreign allegiances, or even because they were just plain angry that a government that was treating them like criminals would ask them to show it any loyalty, were further segregated from the others and sent to an entirely separate camp, Tule Lake, for the more "troublesome" inmates.  Referred to as "no-no boys", hey faced a similar degree of ostracization after the war to those who had refused to join the military when called for the draft.

This serves as the historical background for John Okada's 1957 novel, No-No Boy.  While some of the details are inaccurate (the protagonist, Ichiro Yamada, was incarcerated for refusing the draft, which would not have happened in real life if he had answered "No" to both questions), the essential situation is the same: Ichiro has just returned home to Seattle after being let out of his imprisonment at the end of the war, and immediately encounters the accusations of disloyalty and treason that the community levels toward those who didn't join the war effort.  He wasn't actually a "no-no", more a "no-yes", but he was sent to Tule Lake, all the same.

He comes home to a mother who is completely unable to believe that Japan lost the war; she's so sure that Japan is superior that all evidence to the contrary, including letters from family in Japan asking for aid, is just a hoax perpetrated by the American government.  Any day now, the ships will arrive to bring the loyal Japanese who never doubted the cause back home where they will be celebrated, and she knows it's true because she got a letter from Brazil telling her as much.

...yes, this is something that actually happened.  A lot of people, especially in Brazil, lost everything they had because of this particular hoax.

Mrs. Yamada is an interesting character.  She's depicted as someone who is so devoted to the idea of making money so she can go back to Japan and live well in her old age that she is completely unable to assimilate into American culture, doing her best to prevent any aspect of it from entering her house.  No radio, no television, the one time that a young Ichiro borrowed a phonograph ended with her utterly destroying the device.  She is completely unable to see why her children, who are barely able to speak Japanese, might want to remain in America.

Ichiro's father, on the other hand, is much more of a realist.  He knows that original goal is long last being possible, that the war is over, that Japan lost.  He's decidedly henpecked, however, and can't do anything without Mrs. Yamada's approval.  He reads the letters asking for food and clothing but can do nothing to help, because she is so convinced that they are fabrications to help the American government steal from them.

The last member of Ichiro's family is Taro, his days-from-being-18-year-old younger brother.  We don't see much of Taro; he resents Ichiro, and has already decided that as soon as he is of age, he's going to drop out of school and go join the army, because his brother wouldn't.

Ichiro's homecoming drops him right into the middle of all of this.  He's one of the last to return after the war, so he falls into a situation where all the resentment of the "no-no boys" is at its height, while his mother is proud of him for "doing the right thing" and eagerly wants to show him off to all the other Japanese families, while he is struggling with what he feels is an unforgivable crime against his home.

From there, Ichiro moves about his neighborhood in Seattle, meeting back up with friends from before, friends from the prison camp he spent the previous two years in, and, well... People who hate him for what he did, without any understanding of the thought processes that led to the choice.

One of the voices of reason in all of this is Kenji, a friend who did go to war, and lost his leg, though the wound has never healed properly, and they keep having to remove more and more of it.  Kenji is the first character we meet who really treats Ichiro well; he understands the pressures that complicated Ichiro's decision, and a recurring thread in their conversations through the book is which one of them has it worse.

The biggest impetus for the plotline ends up being Taro's decision to leave on the evening of his birthday to join up.  This devastates his mother, still holding on to the hope that Japan actually won the war; Ichiro can't deal with it and goes out drinking with Kenji.  Unfortunately, the club they go to also serves minors, and it's where Taro has gone to party with his fellow new enlists.  This leads to Taro luring Ichiro into an ambush, albeit one ended by Kenji's intervention.

While all this is going on, a letter from Japan for Mrs. Yamada arrives, from her sister, attempting to make clear the urgency by relating a secret from her past that nobody else would know.  This is devastating for her; she goes into a sort of fugue state, enough that when Ichiro leaves to go with Kenji to the VFW hospital in Portland, she barely notices.

In Portland, while Kenji is in the hospital, Ichiro starts to look for work that would get him away from the people who know his shame; it slowly starts to dawn on him that his actions are no less unforgivable than those of his country toward him.  Kenji outright tells him that it's going to get better, that the issues are because the returning soldiers are angry that the same old racism is still present and want someone to blame, that Ichiro needs to go home and face his issues head-on.

Ichiro's return is rather unfortunately timed; he arrives in the midst of a series of tragedies.  Even in the middle of all of this, though, Ichiro is able to start healing himself, finally.  The tragedies of the past and present come together to give him sufficient perspective to see a way forward, and he seizes it.  There's the potential for him to return to school, a possible romance, and reconciliation with his father, who is finally able to start assimilating into American culture.  Not everything is perfect, and it's impossible to escape the racism that underpins everything in this country, but there's hope, and he ends the book having come to terms with himself, even if that point hasn't quite come for all of those around him.  There's a glimmer of hope, even if he's going to have to work to reach it.

There are a lot of parallels that can be seen between this book and current events.  Let's face it, people clinging to their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is how we get things like the events of January 6, and one of the Supreme Court cases that were litigated in the 1940s over the legality of the concentration camps was just overturned in the last few years... Ironically, in the same decision that upheld the Trump-era bans on Muslim travel.  Immigrant families are being rounded up at the borders and shoved into detention centers on a regular basis, and work is only just beginning to reunite families that were forcibly separated in those locations.  The underlying injustices involved in No-No Boy are still here, still happening, just with different skin colors and terminology.

If we don't learn from the past, we can't overcome it.  It would be nice if those in power could learn that.

A final note on this:  I learned after picking up this book that there was some significant controversy over its Penguin Classics edition; apparently, arguing that the book was in the public domain because it was originally published in Japan, and ignoring a later copyright established in the 1970s, Penguin decided to publish it without notifying John Okada's family or paying any royalties.  They quickly backpedaled after the story blew up on social media, and ceased marketing it in under a month, though it can be found on their website.

My copy was purchased used, so Penguin didn't see any money from it, but I'm going to make the rare assertion that in this case, the Penguin edition is absolutely not the correct way to go.  If you're going to read this book, buy the University of Washington Press edition, instead; that one pays the royalties properly.

Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915) (Penguin Classics Charlotte Gilman, 1/2)

 

I think it says a lot for the quality of a book when I can plunge through the whole thing in a matter of hours.  I mean, sure, I'm a fan of well-written utopian/dystopian literature anyways, when a great deal of time is spent exploring the world with some considerable depth, but being able to plunge through a whole novel, even when it's perhaps somewhat short, in a single day, even with interruptions?

Herland is one of the few instances of true utopian literature that I've actually read; the closest thing I can think of is H.G. Wells's "The Country of the Blind", in that the ramifications of the cultural change have been fully explored.  Usually, there's some clear drawback to the society explored; what is Utopia to one is Dystopia to another.  There is some aspect of that in Herland, where one of the 'outsider' characters definitely finds it to be anything but paradise for him, but, well...  I'll get to that.

The central conceit in Herland is that there is a hidden country high in the mountains of... Somewhere; the narrator specifically says he has no intention of making it clear exactly where this country is, but it's about the size of Holland and impossible to reach except by air.  A combination of volcanic activity, slave uprising, and self-defense killings resulted in the complete cutting-off of this land, along with the utter destruction of the entire male gender.  Spontaneously, one of the young women left behind turns out to have the ability to reproduce parthenogenically, which is also passed on to her daughters, and their daughters as well, eventually leading to the country being entirely populated by what is essentially one big family.  Without any outsiders to contend with, the women are able to instead focus on improving the land and their culture for future generations.

Genetic diversity is somewhat handwaved here, but we're in some light fantasy territory so let's just see where this goes.

It's probably most useful to take a moment to consider the author.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent feminist writer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a socialist leaning in her philosophies, and a particular focus on the inequalities created by capitalism and the tendency for women to have to rely on men instead of being fiscally independent.  During the early part of the 20th century, she even wrote and published her own magazine from 1909-1916, "The Forerunner", in which she expressed her views to her readership. 

This comes out quite clearly in the all-female culture we see in Herland.  The women have no money, few personal belongings, and little need for anything in their lives.  The population, stated as being around 3 million, is kept steady simply through each woman being allowed one child (with certain exemplars being allowed to have a second if others are considered unsuitable), and once a baby is able to leave her mother's side, her upbringing is in a communal child-rearing environment much like a 24/7 Montessori school where all activities are designed to be educational without the child realizing she is learning.  There is an intense focus on lifelong learning in the culture; while children are expected to choose a profession by which to better the land when they reach their teenage years, this is purely based on their interests.  

This way of choosing a calling is exemplified by the character of Ellidor, one of the first women met in the narrative.  At one point, she describes how she brought a moth she had caught to an "insect teacher" to ask what it was, learned that it was a pest that threatened a particular variety of nut tree and that was actively being eradicated as a result.  The ensuing course of education as she dug deeper and deeper led her to decide to devote her life to forestry.

Spirituality is somewhat passive; the belief is that the Deity lives within everyone, expressed as the feeling of motherhood that drives the culture as a whole, with no afterlife, everything instead being focused on the betterment of society for future generations, with little reverence for the beliefs and laws of the past if they can be made more just and equitable.  Those whose callings lead them to be able to serve as counselors to those who need psychological help spend part of their days in the temples located in each town, so that someone is always there to listen and offer guidance to the troubled.

Into this idyllic country, where the focus of everything is to make the land better than it was before, come the three outsider characters: Terry, a swaggering alpha male sort who is convinced that the legendary "Land of Girls" that they are searching for is sure to make him king because obviously they're all going to fawn over him; Jeff, a romantic sort of man who believes that his one purpose in life is to worship and serve a woman who loves him; and Vandyck, the narrator, who holds a view somewhat in the middle.  All three come in with an essentially androcentric worldview, and while they exoect to find a patriarchal society, they very much don't expect to find a complete lack of the Y chromosome.

The three reach the plateau where this country exists via a biplane, but find themselves quickly captured, imprisoned in decidedly comfortable surroundings, and forced to simultaneously learn the native language (streamlined and made elegant over time so that it is easy to teach and learn) and teach English to the inhabitants (who show little difficulty in learning).  This is quite fine with Van and Jeff, but Terry quickly grows frustrated by the captivity and the fact that the teaching staff and guards are all middle-aged, and talks the others into engaging in an escape.  This works well enough, and they manage to make it all the way back to the plane, only to discover that it has been seen into a gigantic cloth bag to protect it from the elements, and also that their entire escape and flight into the forest has been observed without their knowledge.

The book progresses from there as the three learn about the culture they have dropped into (which all three men find disappointing in certain ways, though only one is unable to come to terms with it), teach the women about the outside world, and slowly find love, of a sort.

And then Terry tries to get overly macho about his unchanged notion of gender roles, attempts to force himself on the woman he loves, is thoroughly and physically rebuffed, and gets himself thrown out.  The last chapter deals with this final part, and the preparations for a return to the outside world.  Van will come along to make sure he gets back to the outside world safely, and Ellidor won't allow Van to leave without being by his side.  Jeff has no intention of leaving; his lover is pregnant with the first two-parent child the country has seen in 2000 years, and he wouldn't dream of leaving her side.

Throughout the book, the injustices and inequalities of the outside world are shown to be problematic, not only when Van is forced to consider them, but also through the reactions when the women are told about them.  The final chapter includes a lot of foreshadowing about how Ellidor reacts when faced with these injustices up close, but only that; it ends with the three who are leaving, well... Leaving.

Herland was originally published in a serialized form in "The Forerunner".  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the very next month she began serializing the sequel, With Her in Ourland.  Unfortunately, the volume I'm reading from doesn't include that novel, instead following Herland with a selection of short stories and poetry from the whole of Gilman's career.  I find myself rather disappointed by this; I rather want to read the sequel now just to see where she chose to look for the contrasts that would surely be offered.

The Naked Civil Servant (Quentin Crisp, 1968)

I really don't read as many autobiographies as I probably ought to.  There's a lot to be said for being able to get a look at someone's life through their own eyes, especially when they're a person who has a vastly different lifestyle to your own.  Add in a remarkably self-deprecating sense of narration, and it's difficult to say that The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp's autobiography (actually the first of three), isn't worth spending the time to read.

Prior to this, I didn't actually have an idea of who Crisp was.  I'm in the middle of doing the local library's 'Own Voices' challenge, where they want participants to read literature coming from various marginalized communities, and one of the categories was LGBTQ+.  I was reasonably certain at the time that my shelf didn't actually contain any queer literature, so I did a quick search to see what options exist in Penguin Classics, and this one stood out, largely because the description mentioned the author's dry wit.  I'm always down for a bit of dry wit.

Yeah, I've been focusing almost exclusively on Penguin Classics lately.  It's a good way to curate a selection of literature, even if it's taken until comparatively recently for them to start getting a decent selection of non-European literature.  I'm trying to reflect that at least somewhat on my shelf when I buy online rather than getting what I can find at thrift stores/used book stores, but it's slow going.  It does give me a good, inexpensive way to fill the gaps in what I've read, with solid translations and (usually) plenty of context notes, though I wound up reading this book with my phone at my side so I could look up names and unusual terms when necessary, as there weren't any notes whatsoever in this one.

Anyways.  This covers about the first 50 years of Crisp's life, starting with his realization that he was "different" and the difficulties in dealing with that, quickly moving into his decision to lean into his effeminacy, a decidedly problematic choice to make in 1930s Britain, particularly when homosexuality was very much against the law in that country.  He goes over his difficulty in maintaining employment, his struggles with keeping financially afloat during the first half of his life, and his general view that, well... everything that wasn't himself was pretty hard to maintain interest in.

I don't really get the sense that Crisp was a particularly likeable person to get close to.  There's a general tone to the work where he's sort of leaning into this; he's rather open about how he was almost confrontational about his camp aesthetic, and being out in the open with it rather than keeping it to the underground clubs that most gay men of the era limited their expression to, but it's very much camp; he outright states that he only actually dressed in drag once, and doesn't seem to have enjoyed the experience.

Crisp spends much of the book going through various art/design-related jobs, doing book covers and logotypes for films and the like; he outright states at several points that a large part of why he perhaps struggled to keep these jobs was the combination of 'no formal training', 'rushes to get it done quickly', and 'never learned how to be detail-focused'.  He has a general dislike of art and, in fact, all culture; the brief period he talks about in which he was going to movies on a regular basis is explicitly described as not having included anything with English-language audio, but also he actively refused to go to anything alone, preferring to have a companion, as if the idea of being alone in attending a film was somehow anathema.

During the Second World War, Crisp was actually quite willing to go, but received a discharge when he reported, due to "sexual perversion," so that he instead remained in London.  This resulted, however, in his first encounters with Americans, and particular with the many gay servicemen who passed through Britain when on leave, especially sailors.  This actually surprised me, in large part because of the numbers of servicemen involved; given the U.S. Military's rules at the time, congregating as groups could easily have resulted in mass delivery of blue discharges, which could have been seen as an easy way off the frontlines, but just as easily caused a lot of problems upon returning home, given that such discharges were treated as 'dishonorable' in many cases.  And yet, here are large groups of sailors aiming to sleep with Crisp, even if he was much more interested in just talking.

It's clear, in fact, that he's very interested in talking about himself.  He states as much, it's true, but we're talking about someone who wrote three autobiographies, had a successful one-man stage show, and had a healthy career as a raconteur in his later life, after this particular book's timeline ends.  The beginnings of that career are visible as he has his first few times speaking, as it were, during the period covered (though rather than public speaking as one might expect, they were instances of speaking at a mental institution).  He's quite open that he's not sure what anyone expected out of him in that case, especially as he told them up front that he wasn't much good at talking about any other topic.

The book's title comes from his primary employment during the second half of the book, working as a (mostly) nude model for various figure-drawing classes at local universities, a job which eventually came to feel less as exhibitionism and much more as a sort of government job.  He acknowledges the difficulties involved early on, the physical demands necessary for maintaining a pose for hours, and that his flamboyant style made the students actually dislike him because he tended to make exaggerated poses that were anything but 'usual' for the classes.

The overall feeling that one gets from reading Crisp's autobiography is that he didn't much care what anyone else thought of him, really; his more public later life included a number of controversies when he made comments that seemed either tone-deaf or actually anti-gay, and refused to retract them.  That would largely seem to be material in the other two autobiographies, which cover his life after this book was made into a film starring John Hurt, his relocation to New York, and the end of his life (the third autobiography having been published posthumously and actively worked on during the last year of his life).  That he lived to almost 91 may be surprising after the way this book ends, however; he gripes openly about the state of elder care, that nobody should be forced (or even allowed) to live past 60, and that there ought to be a Nineteen Eighty-Four-style "Ministry of Heaven" which would enforce this.

I'm definitely left with a good idea of why Crisp seems to have been a divisive figure, at the very least; his sardonic writing style at least kept me interested in seeing where his life went, and I could definitely see myself reading the other two autobiographies at some point, but for the moment, I think I'm more interested in just moving on to my next book.