A-Z 2021 K - Plain Tales from the Hills (Rudyard Kipling, 1884-1888)

We may as well start today with addressing the elephant in the room.  Rudyard Kipling was absolutely a believer that British colonialism was fundamentally a good thing.  He doesn't write of it as a uniform good, but in many ways this is because he sees that humans are flawed.  He isn't supporting colonialism out of a nationalistic notion of Empire, but rather, he sees it as an almost sacred duty of good European folks (though especially the English-speaking ones) to bring civilization and Christianity to other parts of the world, whether they already had perfectly good civilizations and religions or not.

We will not, however, be addressing any elephants in today's book, as despite their appearance on the cover of my copy, there are no elephants as significant parts of the narrative in any of Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills.  Sorry, Hathi, I didn't read the book you're in quite yet.

Plain Tales was Kipling's first widely-published work, so what we see here is a very young writer (these stories are from when the author was between 19-23 years old), working as a journalist in British India, turning his pen to (generally comic) fiction in order to fill a few columns in the newspaper he worked for.  This, then, indicates the initial audience as well; he was writing for English folks in and around Lahore.

Perhaps due to that audience, Kipling has a particular focus on English characters; few stories have "native" protagonists, and many have only white characters at all.  There are recurring characters at times, references to earlier stories abound, and it's very clear that the readership were following along from episode to episode.

The subject matter varies widely.  There are a number of short romantic comedies and tragedies alike, tales of pranks gone horribly wrong or spectacularly right, several stories told in a remarkable vernacular about the goings-on of a military regiment...  In short, a cross-section of what life in and around Simla during the mid-1880s was like, at least if you were an Englishman.  The mental imagery created in some of these tales is amazing, particularly in the case of the military regiment's offerings, one of which includes a ghost horse with a skeleton and a pair of timpanis on its back galloping toward a whole battalion.  It makes sense in context.

Kipling's narrator is a sort of self-insertion, usually standing to one side of the stories and simply observing what happens through his journalist's eye; while several times he is drawn into the narrative, this is rarely done in a way that gives him any great agency within the story.  Rather, this device is used to allow him to act as a sort of straight man for the other characters' foolishness (in one case, having to race on a horse in a dust storm to try and stop an unfortunate aftermath to a friend's proposal to the wrong sister; the obvious mistake having been to propose to someone you can't clearly see in a dust storm).

It's hard at times to tell if some of the things Kipling says about India and its people are actually his views or if they are intended as satire.  He clearly feels strongly for the country and its culture, but at the same time, he has an outsider's view, and especially feels that Western culture has some degree of primacy that should be brought in to sort of... improve on what's already there.

It's worth noting that the text that Penguin has used, at least in the edition I have (which is not identical to the one currently in print), is from the third compiled printing of these stories, which was partially adjusted by Kipling due to its nature as a book intended for the "Home" market, back in the British Isles.  This has required some adjusting of text here and there, largely to make things that would have been obvious to his readers in Lahore more clear for readers in London.  The endnotes provided do a good job of making it clear where this has happened, however, and much of the content that one looks at slightly askance now was there all along.  It's not a surprise that this is coming from the same author who would, ten years later, write "The White Man's Burden".

One last thing that I really have to wonder about, and do want to bring up, is the way of referring to race here.  For some reason, the Indian peoples are referred to as "blacks" if their race is mentioned at all, as if they're the same as Africans.  I really don't know for sure what to make of that; in a couple of places it's been described as looking similar to a "Spanish complexion", perhaps indicating that any darker complexion would be considered 'black' in this case.  This would line up with one of the knights in the Arthurian legends, Morien, a half-Moorish knight described as "black of face and limb", despite by all indications being someone who would have something akin to a middle-eastern or, indeed, Indian complexion.  This is one of those places where being American may be to my detriment in this case, as my specific cultural background gives a likewise-specific idea of what 'black' means that may not line up with literature that comes from a British background, particularly that from other centuries.

It's ultimately impossible to separate Kipling from the colonial views and mindset, in any case.  He's a product of his time and culture, and his writings show that.  While the racism on display isn't as hateful as, say, that of H.P. Lovecraft, it's still a clear through-line of sorts in the stories where Indian people appear.  This isn't to say that the English get away without some solid jabs, but the overall form of Kipling's work still celebrates imperialism.  It's simply impossible to escape from that in many of his works, and this early fiction puts it front and center.

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 I: The Cheapest Nights (Yusuf Idris, 1954-1978)

I think I've mentioned the idea of a curate's egg before.  I have to say, at least from my perspective, Egyptian writer Yusuf Idris's short fiction definitely falls into that category.  I loved the writing style, the way that he captures the world that his characters live in, the descriptions that make places I don't know if I would ever go come alive in my mind.

And yet, I can't really bring myself to say that I enjoyed my time reading The Cheapest Nights.

So, what's the problem here?  There's a lot to unpack in this short volume.  First, it's worth noting that collection this is not the same as Idris's identically-titled first collection, أرخص ليالى, which I don't believe has ever been released in English in its original form.  This collection does, however, include six of the stories from that earlier one, along with nine from his later collections.

There's a throughline here, of people trying to find their ways out of poverty and dealing with the societal problems that prevent that escape.  Sexuality is almost omnipresent, but it's dealt with in a very matter-of-fact way, never graphic.  The title story, for example, deals with a man who made the mistake of drinking black tea in the evening being unable to sleep, wandering his village that has too many youth, but unable to find anything to fill the time with that doesn't cost the money he doesn't have due to having six children, so he goes home, wakes his wife, and they pursue the least expensive entertainment available... nine months later, he now has seven children, and still wonders where all the youth running around in town are coming from.

Everything is that simple, matter-of-fact, straight-forward.  A man who can't hold a job discovers that he can sell his blood at the hospital, allowing him to make ends meet for a time, only to be told eventually that he's sold too much and has anemia, and to come back when he's stronger.  A landowner attempting to charge tolls to get into a marketplace on his land is stymied by the merchants' refusal to go around to the one entrance he wants them to traverse, and instead make their own way through the fence where it's more convenient for them.  An old tradition in a slowly-failing rural farming region regarding offers of hospitality to a wedding party traveling down the road goes awry when one particularly large example of such a party decides to take everyone up on their offers.  The word selection is surgical in its precision, leaving no doubt as to what's going on.

That said, I can't say that the stories on display here are even remotely pleasant for the most part.  Especially when Idris is trying to point out a particular social ill, there are rarely anything like positive conclusions (of the fifteen stories, I would only argue that three have particularly happy endings), and more often than not, the protagonists are left in worse states than they began the stories with.

I think the most frustrating thing, though, is that the two longest stories in the collection are driven largely by sexual assault.  The first of these, "The Dregs of the City," starts out looking like it's going to be about a judge looking for his missing wristwatch, and indeed that's the top-level narrative, but much more of the story is about the judge taking advantage of a married cleaning woman whom he has hired and pushing her into eventually becoming a prostitute; the second, "The Shame," is about how an entire village decides that an innocent girl has had sex with one of the young men in town, and virtually frog-marches her to have the one "trustworthy" woman in the village inspect her, a test that apparently involves several women holding her down while she's stripped, with the potential result of a failed "inspection" directly stated to be an honor killing.

And... I mean, this isn't pleasant stuff to read about.  We've got a guy taking advantage of a woman who lives in abject poverty and can't effectively say 'no', and a whole village working as a mob to rob a girl of her innocence, despite her (truthful) pleas that nothing happened.  Elsewhere, we have religious leaders giving in to sinful behaviors, anonymous murders of physically-and-mentally-disabled people, and bureaucratic red tape hindering even those who are trying to do something resembling good work within the system.  Frankly, it's not surprising that Idris wound up jailed for the political views in some of his writings, given how much of a focus his writing places on the realities of poverty in Egypt.  It's very well-written, very powerful stuff, of a kind with Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or John Steinbeck.

But powerful doesn't mean pleasant.  And like I said before, I can't say I enjoyed reading this.

Doesn't mean it doesn't belong on my shelf, though.  Or that I would pass up reading more of Idris's writings.

A-Z 2021 H: Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse, 1922)

 

You know, I've encountered this book before.  I hadn't read it before, mind; rather, a class on world religions that I was going to take years and years ago but ended up dropping before the end of the first week had it on the syllabus.

So, the book on the table today is Hermann Hesse's novella, Siddhartha.  This is an incredible book, for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it does actually do a good job of bringing the concepts of samsara and nirvana into very clear view for someone not familiar with them.  There's a general sense in Western culture as a whole for what Buddhism is teaching about nirvana, but very few who don't actively practice Eastern religions have a solid idea of what the actual nature of that state is, which does give some good value to this read.

The book itself is about the life of Siddhartha, a member of the Brahmin caste, who decides early on that the religious life that has been set out for him by his father doesn't interest him and that instead, he wants to give up the comfortable life that exists for him and go into the wilderness, to become an ascetic and search for enlightenment in other ways.  This leads him to encounter the Gautama Buddha (not-coincidentally also one whose original name was Siddhartha, though the text of the book doesn't mention this), an experience which sends him into a life of learning from everything, trying the lives of a rich merchant and a poor ferryman before finally reaching his own enlightenment and, presumably, escape from the cycle of samsara.

It's a beautifully-written book, and Joachim Neugroschel's translation retains the lyrical quality of the work.  The language is almost dream-like at times, flowing like a river and pulling the reader along on Siddhartha's journey to enlightenment.  While Siddhartha is really the only character who is fully built out into three dimensions, the supporting cast, drifting in and out of his journey, are all making their own similar journeys, though perhaps not all with as much success as his own spiritual awakening.

So, with the book review part of this post done, let's look a little more at what's actually going on in this work.  The overall theme seems to be that you can teach knowledge, but you cannot teach wisdom, and any attempt to do so will just sound foolish.  Wisdom must be learned from the self, through experience with the world, and can only be found when you're not looking for it.  As long as you actively search, the search itself will keep you from finding enlightenment.

The key concept to be aware of here is, again, samsara.  Generally, those of us in the Western world have an understanding of the Eastern religions in question here, Buddhism and Hinduism, that really begins and ends with reincarnation and possibly karma if you look a bit deeper.  Coming from a primarily Abrahamic cultural background, these aren't concepts that are easy to really understand properly, simply because that background gives an idea that you get one pass at life, and how you conduct yourself will determine what your afterlife will be.  This isn't the understanding of life that Eastern religions have, where everything is instead seen as cyclical, with the eternal return to life and traversal of the world as a core aspect of the soul's existence.  The world is seen as illusory, as a source of suffering, and the escape from that world into enlightenment and peace, the nirvana state, is the only way out of the endless cycle.  Everything, every action, every encounter, everything around us, is all part of samsara, the constant metempsychosis shaped in each cycle by karma, the return of all good and ill that you created in the world being brought back around to you in the next life, that all are trapped within, for better or worse.

This is where the message of searching being counterproductive comes into play.  Nirvana is a state of being free from desire, pain, and guilt; the act of searching for it, therefore, is succumbing to a desire.  Siddhartha only reaches his enlightenment when he gives up even the search for it, releases himself from the pain that comes of his life experiences and the path he has taken by understanding that his life has, itself, come in a cycle, and discovers the underlying oneness of everything.  He exists in a simple life, in the end, simply ferrying travelers across the river that has become his world, that is the source of his final escape from samsara even as he realizes that water itself is fundamentally caught in its own eternal cycle.

The river is everything, and everything is contained in the river.

A-Z 2021 G: Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1808/1832)

This was going to be two posts, but no, I should treat this as one long work, albeit one that would be ridiculously long and expensive to produce.  Goethe's Faust is perhaps a harder work to get a firm handle on than I expected, largely because my only previous exposure to the Faust legend is through Christopher Marlowe's 1592 play Doctor Faustus.  While Marlowe held closely to the legend in his treatment, Goethe's drama goes rather farther afield, resulting in a work that is about more than simply hubris and wastefulness.

Faust comes in two parts, with a gap of indeterminate length between the two parts of the narrative.  The thematic concerns of the two differ, as well, with the first part focusing on human sorts of concerns, while the second jumps into a mythic space that operates far more in the realm of allegory than anything else.

The general form of the Faust legend is that a scholar who wants to know things beyond human understanding makes a deal with the devil Mephistopheles in order to gain access to those secrets of magic for a set length of time, at which point he will be dragged bodily to Hell forever.  Marlowe held tightly to this narrative; the second half of Doctor Faustus is largely made up of Faust running around being a ridiculous buffoon and wasting the time he bought at the cost of his soul.  Goethe gets this out of the way very early on, and instead uses the legend as a framework to build a far more ambitious tale upon.

The first, and possibly most important, change that Goethe offers is in the nature of the deal between Faust and Mephistopheles.  Faust is frustrated by the limits of human knowledge, and how he can never experience a moment of satisfaction knowing that there are whole realms that he can never even become aware of.  Rather than summoning the devil himself, however, the devil instead comes to him directly, offering a wager that Mephisto can find a way to bring about that satisfaction.  If Faust ever finds himself in a moment that he would want to last forever, the devil wins his soul.

Interestingly, this wager seems to be OKed by God Himself; one of the two prelude scenes in Part One features God and the devil agreeing that the wager is OK.  This has some echoes of the biblical Job, where the Adversary requires the go-ahead from the boss in order to begin.  Of course, Faust is being given everything he desires in order to try to steal his soul, rather than being punished needlessly because...  Well, it's not worth getting into the whole philosophical and theological question of Job here.  Suffice it to say that Goethe's Mephisto got permission for what he's doing from the big guy upstairs.

Faust Part One starts out looking much like Doctor Faustus, with Mephisto's first attempts to reach a quick win backfiring spectacularly; an old scholar who longs for ever more knowledge just isn't going to be that interested in drunken buffoonery, and when the devil tries to tempt him with pleasures of the flesh, the only one Faust is interested in is a girl far too innocent and pure for the devil to work in her.  Suddenly, the Tragedy of Faust becomes the Tragedy of Gretchen as we are shown the effects of Faust's interest upon her.  He manages to win her heart, appearing as a noble who is strangely drawn to the innocent commoner, but the manipulations result first in the death of her mother, then with the devil killing her brother in a duel, and finally with her becoming shunned by the community due to getting pregnant by Faust.

In the end, the baby winds up drowned by Gretchen in order to spare the child the life that has resulted, and the girl herself winds up imprisoned and sentenced to death.  Faust, who has left her by then, sees a vision of her while he's caught up in a witches' Walpurgis Night festival, but is delayed by a truly bizarre take on A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Mephisto trying to keep Faust under thumb; the only indication we get that this doesn't end as a complete loss for everyone involved is a disembodied voice announcing that Gretchen has been redeemed through her own prayers and pleas to Heaven.  Faust himself is left grieving.

And that's where Part One ends.  Literally.  Mephisto announces that Gretchen is dead, the Voice declares her soul saved, and Faust laments.  It's three lines of text and then it's just... Done.

And then Goethe took 30 years to write the second half, which wasnt even published until after his death.

So, with that cliffhanger ending, we'd surely expect this to be addressed in Part Two, but no.  Instead, it opens with Faust exhausted in a flower field, being sung first to sleep then awake by Ariel from The Tempest for some reason, being assured that the spirits of Nature are siding with him and the elves should restore him to good humor.  Which... Ok then.  A little surreal, but given that the fairies and spirits were running around during Walpurgis Night, not totally out of left field.

Next, we're introduced to the Holy Roman Emperor, who is just installing Mephisto as his new fool.  That's surely a good thing to do, as this leads quickly to drunken revelries in which many of the Roman mythic nymphs, along with the Moirae and the Erinyes, show up in the palace to cavort and maybe get the Emperor drunk enough to think that printing paper currency guaranteed against buried treasure that's surely there even though it hasn't actually been dug up is a good idea.  Definitely a good way to get yourself out of debt.

This leads into Faust deciding that the best life for him would be as the husband of Helen of Troy, and we get a Classical Walpurgis Night sequence, featuring a homunculus floating around in a jar, a succession of Roman mythic figures, and Mephisto running around feeling inadequate because he has no power to meaningfully work in a pagan framework. Eventually, he is forced to borrow the form of one of the Graeae in order to have any ability to interact with the narrative.  Meanwhile, Faust inserts himself formally into the Classical narrative by rescuing Helen from her post-Troy fate as a human sacrifice by Menelaus(‽), so that he can take her to Elysium and live a life with her in a blending of Classical and Romantic philosophy, taking the place of Achilles as the father of Euphorion, only to suffer the preordained death of that winged youth due to... whichever one of the many ways of causing him to fall to his death actually happens, because it occurs somewhere up above the top of the stage curtains.  It's a play, remember.  

This whole sequence may or may not be all a dream.  This is a truly strange play.

The final segment of the play features Faust, back in reality, deciding that he wants to control nature, and sets about a plan to reclaim a section of land from the sea through dykes and dams, only to be interrupted by a war that the Emperor got involved in and having to sort it out.  He eventually reaches a point where he can see that the moment he would want to prolong, the endpoint of his wager... he even says out loud, where Mephisto can hear, that the moment is nigh... then drops dead of old age, not having reached it.  The devil decides this means he's won, and prepares to take Faust's soul to Hell, only to have a flight of angels overwhelm him with flowers and take Faust off to Paradise, as Gretchen has successfully interceded on his behalf with the Virgin Mary.

So... yeah.  That happened.  This is somewhat unique as, so far as I can tell, it's the first time that the Faust legend is depicted with a positive ending for the titular scholar.  The second half is far less referenced than the first, perhaps because it's a far more... I'd almost say esoteric work.  The allegory and symbolism is thick here, far more than the comparatively straight-forward first half, and the story harder to keep a solid handle on.  It also has a far more complicated relationship with the fourth wall, with several times where the characters on stage seem to slowly wind up in the audience, and Mephistopheles himself repeatedly talking directly to the audience.  It's not quite to the point of being Modernism, but certainly prefigures it.  This is actually an unusual trait for the devil; he says several times that his power has begun to wane to the point that he needs lesser demons to assist him with his machinations, yet he seems somehow able to reach forward and take this bit of forward-looking dramatic license.

There's a lot to unpack in here, to say the least.  I'm pretty much certain that I'll be coming back to Faust again at a later date, when I'm perhaps a little better-established in my knowledge of the Classical literature that is so heavily referenced here.

Also when I have a copy of Part Two that doesn't have a binding that's falling apart.