A-Z 2021 J: We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson, 1962)

If you read American fiction, you have probably encountered Shirley Jackson's writing at some point, even if you don't remember her by name.  She's especially known currently as the author of The Haunting of Hill House (thanks, Netflix), but she first made her name rather earlier than that, with a 1948 short story in the New Yorker.  In that story, a small New England farming town is engaging in an annual tradition.  It's quite a festive occasion, except...

If by some chance you haven't read that story (and believe me, if you've read it, you know exactly what story that is, just from that one sentence), do please take a moment to follow that link.  I'm not going anywhere.

...

...I know, right?

So, why do I bring this up?  Well...  I think I could safely argue that We Have Always Lived in the Castle takes place in, if not the same small town, one very nearby, perhaps just a few miles farther down the highway from Haunting's Hillsdale.

This is a story told to us by the very neurotic tomboy Merricat (Mary Katherine Blackwood), about how she and her older sister, Constance, came to live alone in their family home.  Merricat is... Something.  She's eighteen years old, but in a similar fashion to Nell in Haunting, she seems somehow emotionally stunted, younger than she actually is.  She's obsessed with mushrooms and other forest foraging, buries treasures as protective amulets around the house, and has a very hard time with breaking rules that determine what she is and isn't allowed to do.  I'm going to be honest, with her intense reliance on schedules and ritual, not to mention the insinuations by the most obvious "villain" of the piece (not that he ever actually states it outright) that she belongs in an institution , I read her as being somewhere on the autism spectrum, though that's never stated in the text (not that the "spectrum" was even an idea at the time).  That or she's actively a budding Baba Yaga sort; she does specifically say early on that she prefers her library books to be fairy tales.

Merricat opens right up with laying out for the reader that she has Constance, and all the rest of her family is dead (though this isn't completely accurate), along with making it rapidly clear that the people of the village all hate her family, mercilessly teasing her whenever she goes into town to get groceries and library books.  Constance, who is rather mentally broken in other ways, unable to handle other people for the most part and rarely willing to leave their manor house any further than the edge of her vegetable garden, is acting as the caretaker for the family, primarily for their sick Uncle Julian, the only other member of the household, who is wheelchair-bound, half-senile, and obsessed with trying to recreate the night that, according to the schoolyard rhymes that continually appear, Connie poisoned the whole family with arsenic in the sugar.  After all, Connie could never be that subtle, and if she was the poisoner, why didn't she do something earlier in the day, like the rarebit at lunch?

This mystery floats through the whole book.  Julian survived the poisoning because he only took a very small amount of sugar on his blackberries for dessert, Constance doesn't especially like sweet things so didn't take any, and Merricat had gotten in trouble for something and was sent to bed without dinner, so wasn't present.  It didn't help that Constance, before help arrived, had washed out the sugar bowl, "because there was a spider in it."  She really doesn't like spiders.

There are a few visitors, now and then, people who were friends of Merricat's mother and insist on inviting themselves to tea in order to try and coax Constance out of her fear of other people and leaving the safe space that is their home, but Merricat is distrustful of all of them.  Anything that might change the routines that she relies on; she gets a chill when Constance even mentions the idea of venturing beyond the garden's edge.

Into Merricat's orderly world comes Charles Blackwood, a cousin from a part of the family that completely cut themselves off when Constance was arrested (though later acquitted) for the mass murder.  Charles very quickly insinuates himself into the household, using Constance as his route of choice, and begins efforts to convince her that his way of addressing everything is better, that it would all be better if he and Constance were the only ones in the house, that Uncle Julian should be in a hospital with trained nurses and Merricat should... he never says it outright, but it's clear what he thinks.

Merricat is distrustful of Charles from the start, and Julian seems to agree in his lucid moments.  This seems to be borne out as the interloper seems to have no compunctions about making himself completely at home, making use of her father's valuables (after noting the value if they were sold, more than anything else), and continually finding Merricat's buried talismans, none of which are given anything less than an utter rage-filled rant that drives her from the house repeatedly.

Everything comes to a head when a fire is "accidentally" started by Merricat, thanks to the newspapers that Charles leaves strewn everywhere and a tobacco pipe left smoldering in his room, at which the entire town becomes involved in a mass riot and looting event.  And here's where we see just how bad the village actually is; when everyone in town follows the fire engine to watch the biggest excitement they'v'e seen in a long time, the crowd includes calls to just let it all burn down, and laments that the girls should have been inside, rather than having been allowed to run for safety.  Even when the fire is put out, it doesn't stop them from, en masse, storming into the manor and starting to just destroy everything they can get their hands on; the only thing that stops them, in fact, is the discovery of a dead body.

So, here's the thing...  After Merricat and Constance they start putting their world back together, the townsfolk, for the most part, seem to realize they made a huge mistake, and it becomes clear that they're going to be trying to make up for it for a very long time.  They know they went beyond the pale, they feel remorse for the way they've treated the Blackwood girls.  It's unclear how long they'll be continuing to try to make up for it, but it's perfectly clear that everyone in the village knows exactly what their mistakes were and are going to apologize specifically.  They know they did wrong, even if it took a complete catastrophe to realize it.

Shirley Jackson has a reputation for being a horror writer, but I think labeling her that way does her a severe injustice.  Her themes are, for the most part, extremely mundane and human; what she writes about isn't as innocuous as a monster or a ghost.  Rather, what her books reveal is the weakness of the human mind under stress, the fragility of peaceful existence, and the ease in which humans are capable of inhuman acts.



It seems that there's been a movie made of this recently, with Crispin Glover as Julian.  Which...  Yeah, I can see Crispin Glover fitting in rather well in any Shirley Jackson project, really; he just fits in this kind of creepy plotline.  It's even on Netflix.  Kind of makes me want to see if it's closer to The Haunting (1963), The Haunting (1999), or The Haunting of Hill House (2018) in terms of how well it works with the source material.

A-Z 2021 F: The Autobiography and Other Writings (Benjamin Franklin, 1722-1790)

The founding of my country is taught fairly thoroughly in school; we're exposed to the great heroes of the American Revolution early on, though largely in their mythic forms.  George Washington and the cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln and the log cabin, Paul Bunyan and his digging of the Grand Canyon...  well, OK, that last one's not real, but you get the picture.

For the longest time, my idea of Benjamin Franklin was to the effect of 'bifocals and electrified kites'.  It wasn't ever really clear what his position in everything was, and I quite honestly learned more about him from Robert Lawson's Ben and Me (and its Disney adaptation) than I ever did from anything formal in school.  Even then, and even knowing that he was important enough to get his face on the $100 bill, it really didn't give me a solid feel for just what his place in history was.  Even to this day, what I know of the man is largely based on tangential stories, his interactions with the other figures of the day, and less about his story itself.  Unfortunately, reading The Autobiography and Other Writings did little to demystify this.

The first, and perhaps most relevant, reason for this is simply the nature of the work, cut short by the author's death in 1790, and thus not having actually reached the end of his life.  Unfortunately, from what I can tell, the vast majority of his truly important achievements and his adventures in international politics come during the portion that went unwritten.

So, what are we looking at, with Franklin's autobiography, if not an exploration of his place in the Revolution and the early days of the United States?  To begin with, it's a story of his early life and where he came from.  Roughly the first half of the autobiography was written when he believed it was going to serve largely as a set of family anecdotes for a son, and it takes a form akin to that of a Horatio Alger novel, where he begins in a considerably less than ideal financial situation and, through hard work and perseverance, brings himself to respectability and wealth.  It's very much a rose-tinted look at the man, and indeed the work as a whole acts that way, with even the later part where he knew he was writing for posterity focused on his tendencies toward altruism and the pursuit of knowledge.

Franklin's wit is on clear display through all of this; he's self-deprecating when appropriate, pointing out his own faults and making note of when he made mistakes that it would take him years to remedy, both when he made the error of judgment and when he fixed the issue.  His gift for careful writing and ability to think of solutions that are best for everyone involved is shown, largely through his interactions as part of the Philadelphia city council and the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly, and as postmaster of Philadelphia (his later positions as postmaster-general not being covered here).  These positions gave him the ability to cross paths with British colonial leadership on a regular basis, and his civic-mindedness leads him to go out of his way to set up defensive sites during the French and Indian Wars, even managing to get the anti-military Quakers to help.

Even so, it's difficult to see in the autobiography a man who would later become an important figure of the Revolution.  At the point where the narrative cuts off, what disagreement Franklin has with British royalty is limited to his ongoing battle with the Penn family over their general refusal to give their share of taxes.  While the problems that led to the Revolution are still present, at the end of the narrative (in 1757), he's still rather firmly a monarchist.  Granted, there are two decades of gap between this point and the later outbreak of open hostilities, but this simply means that the 33 years left out of the Autobiography are perhaps the most important.

The Penguin Classics edition of the Autobiography includes about 60 pages of other writings from across the length of Franklin's life, as an attempt to give a more well-rounded view of the man than what his own writings reveal.  These are perhaps too sparse, though; I found myself wanting more context for where some of the essays were coming from ("Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress" being a particular question, as I had a hard time telling if it was intended as satire or not).  Penguin does have an alternate volume, The Portable Benjamin Franklin, which includes a larger selection of writings, and in fact seems to focus more on his political life.  This is an unfortunate omission in the volume I read; the political writings on display here are the satirical "Edict from the King of Prussia" and more serious "An Address to the Public; From the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage," neither of which serves to give any solid view of the man's place in the Revolution.  For someone who met five kings in person, signed all four of the major documents of the founding of the United States, and, well... is pictured on the largest banknote still in use in this country.

For that, I suspect my best source will come up during my next intermission from the A-Z run; at the library today, I picked up The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin, a work compiled by Mark Skousen (who otherwise seems to be an economics/Wall Street writer) in which Franklin's writings and speeches during the 1757-1790 period have been reworked into a continuation in his own words, albeit through an editorial lens that, based on the cover flap blurbs, may be biased toward the founding mythologies and the modern view of American Exceptionalism.

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.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey, 1962)

There's an issue that films often seem to run into, where they choose to simply view the general narrative of a book they are adapting, rather than the narrator or any of the deeper nuances of the book.  This happens all too often; entire characters might be removed, causing events to change their form, and eventually you wind up with a vastly changed narrative.

Ken Kesey disliked the film version of his first published novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  On an initial viewing, it might be difficult to see why.  The battle of wills between Jack Nicholson's Randle McMurphy and Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched is depicted well, and the way he builds up his fellow inmates in her ward at the mental hospital to rebel against her is well-scripted, well-acted, and paced brilliantly, with everything seeming slow-paced until the rising tensions make it all explode into a flurry of action in the second half of the film, with a breakout from the asylum, the theft of a fishing boat, and eventually a huge drunken party in the ward.

The filmic Nurse Ratched has a rather chilling way about her, being able to use just a few levelly-spoken words in a sort of 'mom voice' to utterly destroy any thoughts of changing their situation that her patients might express, keeping them in their places.  She holds all the power, until McMurphy appears and starts to disrupt the ward, but her power is ultimately limited to her little fiefdom.

The novel's version of Nurse Ratched is far, far more daunting of an opponent, however, and that is amplified in the text by how she is being viewed through the eyes of a hallucinating, schizophrenic narrator.  The Big Nurse is less a human and more the avatar of the Combine, a vast machine which, in "Chief" Bromden's eyes, is working to grind everything and everyone in America down into a homogenous sameness that makes everything run absolutely perfectly, and that sees variation as a danger to the system.

It is spelled out rather clearly, both by Bromden's narration and by the words of other staff in the book, that the Big Nurse actually rules over the entire hospital.  It's stated that hiring and firing is largely down to her preferences, that she uses dangerous and invasive treatment methods (such as electroshock and icepick lobotomies) punitively rather than therapeutically, that even the doctors are afraid of her.  Bromden sees this as her being a sort of giant; while he may be physically much larger than she, his spirit was broken long before he set foot in the asylum, his schizophrenic hallucinations beginning when he saw how the loss of his tribe's lands and way of life destroyed his father (the tribal chief), his deaf-mute affectation a self-defensive measure to keep himself from her attention, and his view of other's size is based on their force of will.  He sees everything through the lens of the Combine, orderlies viewed as robots, the Big Nurse's medical bag full of gears and machine parts, everything moving about on wires and strings to do the bidding of the machine, Ratched herself having a literally-molded face, her lips standing out garishly, her eyes the only sign of what is going on in her head.

This, then, sets up the ultimate nature of the novel's struggle: Randle McMurphy, the Coyote-like trickster who is armed with a quick wit, an irreverent attitude, and a need to assert his absolute individuality, enters the ward and clashes against the god-like figure of the Big Nurse, with her emotion-hiding face and gender-obscuring uniform.  The men on the ward make it clear what the stakes are in this conflict: McMurphy certainly can't win the war, and if he loses a single battle, he loses everything.

The general plot beats of the book do mirror the film, but in a way that leaves the film's version of the battle between McMurphy and Ratched seem watered down.  Where McMurphy's attempts to get TV privileges swapped around for the ward to watch baseball are a single incident on the film, it is a repeated event in the book, his act of civil disobedience in pretending to watch on the blank screen and giving a running commentary recurring in a way that deliberately draws attention for the other staff to the taking of power it represents.  Rather than simply sneaking out for the fishing trip that he takes the other inmates on, he plans it in the open, ostentatiously flaunting it in front of Ratched, and even drawing one of the doctors into it.

Perhaps the most important difference, the one that matters most, is in the final showdown between the two, with McMurphy trying to choke the life out of Ratched.  The film shows the aftermath of this being the nurse in a cervical collar, calmly reasserting her control over the ward, McMurphy's self-sacrificing attack on her having done little more than push Chief Bromden to make his escape on the night, after putting McMurphy out of his misery.

The book's version of this is vastly different, and serves to make McMurphy much more of a heroic figure.  His attack on the Big Nurse is much more intense, and allowed to last longer; the orderlies don't move to pull him off, and in the struggle her clothing is torn open, revealing her femininity in that moment of rage on McMurphy's part, but his attack isn't sexual; rather, it's an assault on Ratched's very godhood within her realm. The aftermath includes a far kinder nurse in her position until she recuperates enough to return, allowing the patients to begin their escapes, the voluntary patients checking themselves out or being transferred, leaving only those who can't leave to witness the ultimate destruction of her power, McMurphy's attack leaving her communicating via writing as she has completely lost her voice.  Where the film ends with Ratched maintaining the status quo, seemingly without any change to her confidence, the novel's McMurphy succeeds in bringing her down, the remaining patients very openly mocking her impotent attempts to control them with writing.

That said, McMurphy has sacrificed himself in both cases, and where the film has him surgically lobotomized, a presumably controlled action (though the effects are clear enough), the book has him having received what honestly looks like it was a double icepick procedure, with both eyes left bruised shut.  It's even less clear whether anything of McMurphy remains within the husk that is rolled back into the ward; Bromden's mercy killing is less giving the man rest than putting down the spiritless body so that Ratched can't use it as a symbol of what happens to those who resist her.

Even Chief Bromden is changed by the experience; by the end of the book, he has begun to speak openly to the other ward inmates, has openly stood up to the orderlies (breaking one of their arms in the scuffle that earns an electroshock treatment for himself and McMurphy), and feels himself large enough that when he tears the hydrotherapy controls from the floor and throws them through the window to effect his escape from the confinement, he has no doubt that he's a big enough man now to do it, to return to the world, to see how the remnants of his tribe are struggling against the Combine in their own way, to return to the lands of his youth.

He's been away a long time.

Passing (Nella Larsen, 1929)

...wow.

For a thin volume like Passing, which is all over in a mere 120 pages, there's a lot of stuff to chew on, and I know from the start that I'm probably not especially qualified to talk about much of what's going on here.  There's this thing called white privilege, you see, and, well...  Yeah.

It's probably best to start with the title, "Passing".  I became most familiar with this particular definition of the verb through the trans* context, where it refers to the act of looking enough like your correct gender that a stranger wouldn't know you're trans*; the term is used here in the earlier racial context, specifically in terms of pale-skinned Black folk who are able to "pass" as being White.  Even people like me, who have no experience of being on the receiving end of racism, can see what the point of that would be, especially in the 1920s, but also, well...  motions at the need for the Black Lives Matter movement to exist

The lead characters in Passing are Irene, a pale Black woman (her skin is described as "olive") who grew up in Chicago but now lives in Harlem; and Clare, similarly pale-skinned, who grew up alongside Irene until her father died, then was shuffled off to live with a couple of White aunts until she got herself married to get out from under their thumbs.  Her husband has no idea she's not pure White, which seems to be rather playing with fire on Clare's part, given that he is incredibly racist.

The book follows a three-act structure, with sections titled "Encounter", "Re-Encounter", and "Finale".  The first is largely a flashback to Irene and Clare's first time encountering each other as adults.  Irene is in Chicago to visit her father and old family friends, and happens to encounter Clare while taking tea at one of the higher-class hotels (choosing to "pass" for that moment).  Clare is so far into her façade that Irene doesn't recognize her, while the reverse is anything but true; it takes a minute of trying to figure out where she might have met this White woman who knows her childhood nickname, and in fact Clare laughing, for Irene to figure it out.

Clare's separation from the Chicago neighborhood (and in fact all of Black culture) is so complete that it has become a sort of forbidden desire to get news, to attend gatherings, to surround herself with the Blackness that she very intentionally left behind.  This becomes particularly problematic when Irene is introduced to Clare's husband, a truly unlikable character who makes it clear that he so proud to have no N-----s in his family and he knows the whole race better than they know themselves because he only believes the negative things he's heard or read.  Irene holds her tongue, but only barely, and decides to cut off contact with Clare altogether.

This would work fine, right up until Clare shows up at her door in Harlem.

The second half of the book deals with Clare's increasing insertion of herself into every Black cultural event she can manage while hiding it from her husband, and the increasing irritation and outright anger that this causes Irene to feel.  Everything builds to a breaking point as Clare's intrusions start to appear to include an illicit romance with Irene's husband... And then Clare's husband encounters and recognises Irene shopping with another Black woman, and, well...  Things do not end well.

Clare is almost a sort of Icarus figure, here.  She has, through a combination of happenstance and pluck, a way to escape the racism inherent in the system; she's unable to resist the temptation to go beyond the safe limits of that escape, though, to try to safely get back the heritage that she has left behind. Ultimately, that hubris, her playing with fire and disregard of the warnings that Irene initially gives her, ends up destroying her.

Irene, meanwhile, knows her limits.  She's playing a somewhat dangerous game of her own, using her children as a way to hold back some of her husband's ambitions, but she's much more careful about it, keeping within her means and only starting to act in less than well-thought-out ways than Clare has pushed her to the breaking point.  The growing resentment in Irene is quite obvious in the narration; while the novel is told in the third person, everything is through Irene's point of view, her head the only one we ever inhabit.

I'm going to admit, there is a lot that I'm sure I missed here.  Even with the usual Penguin Classics introduction and endnotes, I'm about as far from having an understanding of the cultural politics here as it's possible to be.  I can look at what's in the text, and draw my own conclusions, and it does give me some understanding of the author's own viewpoint (Larsen herself being pale-skinned Black), but I'm ultimately not going to be able to appreciate this in the way that a Black reader, or indeed a reader from any outwardly visible minority group, is going to be able to.

My own first-hand experiences as far as "passing" goes are limited to situations where my neurodivergent mind has gotten in the way of what might be considered "normal," and that's usually situations where I'm failing to "pass".  Not having even realized that I'm not neurotypical until relatively recently didn't help, of course.  It does give me at least a little insight into why someone would want to hide aspects of themselves for the sake of making life easier, but it's still not the same experience.

I'm glad that I read this, though.  All too often, the "classics" are overwhelmingly things written by white guys in Europe, and this was a marvelous change of pace, even if it's nowhere near a "feel-good" book.  But then, how many of the books that are really worth reading are?

The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson, 1959)

 ...well, that was certainly an unexpected ending.

So, I watched Netflix's adaptation (for lack of a better term) of The Haunting of Hill House back in October/November.  Enjoyed it a lot, thought some of the directing decisions were brilliant, but also knew pretty quickly that it was going way off-script.  Years and years ago I remember having seen the 1990s film version, and thinking it was... less than great... but not really having a way of articulating why.  However, it was pretty clearly a haunted house movie.  The Netflix version spends very little time with the adult characters in the titular house, which is a big change from the previous plot.  Now, though, having read the book, I think I can explain what's so wrong with the 1999 version, and the trailer I linked there does a very good job of spelling it out exactly.

"There once was a house. A bright happy home. Something bad happened. Now it sits all alone."

Yeaaaaaah, no.  Hill House is not at all supposed to be a happy home.  Or have a villainous scientist doctor going on, or crazy Winchester House-like bricked-up doors, or...  any of the weird stuff that you see in that trailer.  But then, that's what you get with a 1990s action film director doing a haunted house thriller, right?

Let's instead look at what Shirley Jackson had to say about the house, hmm?  A passage that she not only starts the book with, but also ends with.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.  Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.  Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

That does not sound like a bright happy home, to me.  And indeed, the house seems, by the descriptions given in the book, to have been purposefully designed to be unsettling to those inhabiting it.

The first thing that's really worth noting, though, is that at no time do we actually see a ghost in the text of the book.  Suspenseful scares, sure, but never anything visible.  Instead, it's a series of ways that the house is just subtly deranged.  Now, that may be anthropomorphizing, to suggest that the house itself suffers some mental instability, but... well, Mrs. Jackson helpfully established that in the second sentence of the book, and the house itself is almost as much a character as any of the leads.

Our primary protagonist in the book, and presumably the 1960s film version (the only one of the three adaptations I haven't yet seen; I wanted to read the book first, as it's apparently also the only one of the three that actually follows the book at all), is Eleanor Vance.  Those who have seen the Netflix version may know Eleanor, Nell, as the youngest of the Crain children, who was the most affected by the strangeness of the house, and who spends most of the series, well... dead.  Other than the first two chapters (about six pages which serve to give some general background for the characters as a whole, and set up why they all find themselves together in Hill House) and the last chapter (half a page giving a very trim epilogue of 'Here's what happened after all that just went down,' we spend the entire book in Eleanor's head.  Very much so, in fact; every little flight of fancy that her mind wanders down is spelled out for us.  She lives a very active fantasy life, perhaps understandable as she has spent her entire adult life, up until three months prior to the events of the novel, taking care of her invalid mother, who was apparently equal parts needy and abusive; she now lives on a cot at her sister's house, generally aimless, unemployed, and seemingly still subject to a certain amount of verbal abuse.

Eleanor is joined in our insane manor by Theodora (just Theodora), an artist with a generally lackadaisical view of cultural norms or even generally planning ahead; Luke Sanderson, a character somewhat in the vein of Shakespeare's Prince Hal in that he's got all the advantages being in a rich family brings, but somehow manages to be a bit of a roguish sort nonetheless, and who stands to eventually inherit Hill House; and the three have been brought together by the invitation of Dr. John Montague, a psychologist by training who is trying to bring some scientific credibility to the study of the supernatural, primarily through a method of 'Get some people who have been even tentatively associated in the past with some kind of paranormal occurrence into the house, and have everyone take notes while we stay here for the summer.'

Note: Luke is there because the family that owns Hill House wants a member of the family there; Theo is apparently clairvoyant or something but it's never actually something that plays into the narrative; and Eleanor's house was apparently bombarded with rocks for three days when she was a child, for no apparent reason, though she believes it to have been a prank perpetrated by the neighbors.

Eleanor is a likeable character, though shows signs early on of having a rather less than firm grasp on right and wrong, or even adult life.  In order to participate in Dr. Montague's research, she has to steal her sister's car (telling herself that it's OK because "it's half hers," but also not bothering to actually tell anyone where she's going), and consistently lies to everyone she meets once she's started her drive down the road about who she is and what she has waiting for her back at home.  It's only in the final pages of the book that anyone finds out the truth about her life, and by then... well, the house has done its damage.

It's very well established from the early pages that, in the small nearby community of Hillsdale, everyone knows precisely what the house is, and knows to stay away from it.  We only see the little community long enough for Eleanor to stop in, buy a cup of coffee, and have a very brief exchange asking about how often they get visitors (never).  The groundskeeper at the gate to the house is surly, wary of letting anyone in, and once she talks her way past the gate and gets up the driveway, her first impression of the house itself is, well...

The house was vile.  She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.

If only she had listened... well, then the novel wouldn't have happened at all, but such is the way of things; many horror and suspense novels wouldn't happen if the characters listened to their gut.

What we come to find out is that the house was designed by Hugh Crain as a sort of...  experiment, almost, in making things purposefully unsettling.  There are no right angles in the house; everything is off by just fractions of a degree, perhaps one or two at most.  The end result ends up being that doors like to shut themselves if not propped open, rooms feel just a little bit off, and it's easy to think that the house is differently shaped than it actually is by looking out a window.  This isn't helped by a floor layout in which there are a great many rooms with no windows to the outside, halls that seem to go just a little too far, a kitchen with three doors out onto the veranda...  But not any secret passages or completely hidden rooms, we're assured.

The house is relatively benign by day.  Mrs. Dudley, who takes care of the house and cooks for the guests, is very curt, not talkative at all, and very open about how she does not stay there after dark, under any circumstances.  In fact, it's stated early on that leaving the house at night is a poor idea; there's a history of people not actually making it down the driveway if they attempt it.

The first part of the novel, then, is taken up with the characters getting to know each other, exploring the house, and Eleanor forming a close friendship with Theo.  This becomes a sort of safety mechanism for Eleanor, particularly after the strange events begin at night.  Banging on doors, doorknobs jiggling, and so on, with sounds coming from too high up on the door for any of the people present to make them.  You know, haunted house stuff.

This starts to change, however, after the house starts directly going after Eleanor.  Or maybe not.  It's hard to say what's really going on.  The first directed occurence is a chalked message along the length of an entire hallway, HELP ELEANOR COME HOME.  Whispered voices, seemingly only heard by Eleanor.  A scene where Theo's room is vandalized with what seems to all those present to have been blood, the message HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR on the wall in the red paint-that-isn't-paint.  This particular incident is perhaps the most perplexing in the novel; all four of the primary cast see the way the room has been left, and the room is locked up afterward, to preserve the evidence for Dr. Montague to later sketch for the book he plans to write about all this, but later, when it's opened up again by Dr. Montague's wife, who shows up in the last part of the novel to "helpfully" offer her skills as a medium, everything has been returned to the way it was, as if nothing had happened.

The vandalism in Theo's room drives a wedge between the two women, and Eleanor spends the second half of the book gradually becoming more and more paranoid, convinced that everyone is talking about her when she's not around, that they all know she's a fraud, that none of them are actually her friends at all.  This builds to a point where she has a complete psychotic break, in a scene that was very much channeled in the Netflix series during Nell's return to the house, though with a very different endpoint.

The biggest thing that stands out in the novel, really, is that most of the events could, theoretically, be explained on a purely scientific basis.  The chalk message could be Luke pranking everyone (though he denies it).  The banging on doors could be the house settling.  The shadows and unsettling feeling, well, that's explained by the unsettling architecture of the house itself.  Eleanor becoming convinced that she belongs in Hill House, that it's her home now and she won't leave, she's going to stay here forever...  she's got a less than coherent grasp of reality, as it were.

Theo's room, though, remains the biggest question.  What really happened there, and how did it get returned to the way it was?  The characters establish early on a rule that nobody should go anywhere alone, and indeed, until Eleanor's breakdown, nobody goes anywhere on their own.

All the same, there is never any indication that there's a real ghost in Hill House.  Mrs. Montague may argue that her planchette told her there's a nun bricked up in the walls, or a defrocked monk, but nobody pays her claims any credence.  Rather, the implication given by the text is that it is the house itself that is doing the haunting.  A mass hallucination seems somewhat unlikely, given the detail of the episode in Theo's room, but seems the only other potential explanation, short of the house being, well...

not sane.

Jólabókaflóð 2020 (1): The Lost Book of Adana Moreau (Michael Zapata, 2020)

Those who have known me for a long time, who have really gotten to know me, know that I have a deep-seated love of story. Not a preference for fiction or nonfiction, not a preference for the medium that it exists in, but for the way that it progresses, the way that the viewpoint on display interacts with the events being discussed to create a unique narrative. The best authors, in my opinion, are the ones who can tap into that aspect of story, who can display an understanding of how to craft a viewpoint as well as a narrative sequence.

Michael Zapata shows a skill in this ability in The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, a book that I went into with an expectation that it was going to be science-fiction flavored, but instead found something much more interesting. While nothing in the book exists anywhere outside of realism, there's an almost dreamlike, magical-realist quality to the way that the story's characters drift through the events on display. At the same time, however, this is a story about trauma, about loss, about exile, about moving forward after losing someone irreplaceable, after losing your home and the safety it represents.

At its core, this novel is about storytelling. Jumping back and forth between events in the 1930s and 2005, the core narrative deals with the titular "lost book". Adana Moreau, a character whose literal presence ends less than a fifth of the way through the book, is a Dominican refugee living in New Orleans after escaping the conflict that took her parents during the United States occupation of the Dominican Republic. While she speaks no English when she reaches Louisiana, with the help of her husband (a literal pirate whose name is never given), her son Maxwell (an avid reader with a severe case of wanderlust), and a librarian, she is able to teach herself the language, becoming quite fond of the early science fiction that would have been available at the time (specific examples include Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and some of the works of H.P. Lovecraft).

After finding a newspaper article about Percy Fawcett, who disappeared while searching for an ancient lost city that he believed to exist in the Brazilian rainforest, Adana gets the idea to write her own science fiction novel, Lost City, which is described and summarized as being an early example of post-apocalyptic fiction, influenced in large part by her own life story and what she had read of Fawcett's story, dealing with the search for lost cities and eventually with parallel universes. She is tapped to write a sequel, A Model Earth, but after completing it, she becomes ill, and decides to destroy the manuscript before it's published. Her son has read the unpublished novel, though, so it lives on through him.

After Adana's story ends, the narrative jumps forward to late 2004, and the viewpoint changes to Saul Drower, an Israeli living in Chicago who cares for his grandfather, and who immigrated to the United States in his childhood after his parents were killed by Fatah militants in the Coastal Road massacre. After his grandfather's death, he is given a package that he's instructed to send to Maxwell Moreau, a theoretical physicist specializing in the theory of parallel universes at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago. However, Moreau has retired, left Santiago, and did not leave a forwarding address, so the box is returned. Opening it to see what the heavy package was, Saul finds a 926-page manuscript for A Model Earth by Adana Moreau.

Enlisting the help of his lifelong friend Javier Silva, a journalist who has been reporting on protests and human rights issues in South America and Mexico but returned for a new job at the Chicago Tribune, Saul is able, after a number of months, to track down Maxwell's new address in New Orleans. Packages to New Orleans are not being shipped, due to events in August 2005, decides that he needs to hand-deliver it.

From there, the book shifts back and forth between the stories of Saul and Javier's search through the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina for Maxwell, and Maxwell's childhood experiences growing up in New Orleans and Chicago. At the same time, the underlying story of where Saul's manuscript came from is slowly revealed, only becoming totally clear when everything finally comes together at the end.

If the book was just about these characters, it would be interesting enough... but there's more to it. Saul's grandfather was a historian who showed a particular ability to get people he interviewed to open up and tell their stories, always nudging them on with a "Tell me more" sort of prompt. Throughout the novel, there are brief interludes, always several pages long, where a character tells a story about their history, about how they came to be where they are, about who and where they have lost and how they have coped with those losses. These stories range from a man who was a translator for the Bolsheviks in 1910s Petrograd fleeing to America, to a Sicilian WWII soldier's long-buried wartime memories, to a Chilean widow in the early 2000s searching for evidence of the fates of her family members who were "disappeared" by the Pinochet regime.

The theory of parallel universes appears commonly as well, with Saul in particular thinking about all the worlds where things happened differently, where he was with his parents when they were killed, or where they had taken a different bus and he grew up in Israel, or where Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla suffered a brain injury as a child and never rose to power... all the possibilities that can be explored but which we can never know the full ramifications of, as they didn't happen in our universe, our timeline.

That, then, becomes the true message of the book: we can't know or experience how things might have gone differently, but dwelling on that makes loss meaningless. We can move forward after a loss, though. We can learn from the past, and remember our losses, but we can also make new lives, and make the most of what we still have, even in the face of the unimaginable. Just as New Orleans, in the fifteen years since the hurricane, has bounced back from that destruction and reclaimed its heritage as the thriving cultural center it was, we as people can do the same.

A very strong work to come out in the Year of Covid, to say the least. The entire world is being reshaped by loss on a scale unseen in most lifetimes, whether or not people want to admit that it's real. This has been the year that showed what damage ignoring an impending disaster, an ongoing disaster, can wreak; the way we move forward from that is to learn from the experience, to let it shape but not stop culture, and to remember.