Oh God Where Art Thou?

When I think of the collective works of American literature (and by American here I mean the U.S.) only a handful come to mind as indisputably great, that is as works to hold up against the greatest writers that have ever lived, against the likes of Cervantes, Dickens, Victor Hugo, or Dostoyevsky, and one of them is this slim volume by John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men.

On the surface it seems plain enough, a story about a couple of hard luck cases, one of whom is mentally disabled, who end up getting jobs on a ranch in California. It soon becomes clear that the simpleminded Lenny, who is a great ox of a man possessed of tremendous physical strength, has been relying on the other man, George, for quite awhile to help him cope with life. Lenny likes small animals but with his great strength often accidentally kills them (and here we have the first instance of the profound metaphor that dominates the book, for Lenny's ineptitude in taking care of these small animals is seen in the light of the equal ineptitude of either God or fate to provide for Lenny.)

So to go on without giving away too much of the plot for those unfamiliar with the book I will just say that it is this motif - rage at the sheer lack of pity, at the sheer haphazard, arbitrary, and capricious nature of life played out in manifold and interwoven themes - that is what makes up "Of Mice and Men." Steinbeck handles these themes in the stark, minimalist prose, so admired in the mid-twentieth-century with singular mastery. It is clear that he exerted painstaking effort to make every passage resound with understated yet monumental indignation at the plight of mankind (for the people on this ranch are mere microcosms of mankind, caught up in a universal play) in a set of circumstances they are no more in control of then are the mice that Lenny loves and haphazardly destroys.

The book is an extended cry of outrage at the capricious fate we all endure, and at the apparent absence in all the vast universe of any chord to vibrate with a single note of sympathy. Of all the existential works written in the era of existentialism, to me Of Mice and Men stands alone as a work of art.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2015 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

Justine

Justine was something of a rarity for me, a genuine classic recommended by a friend that I came across fairly late in life (in my late forties)and as such it was a real delight to read. I went on to finish the three remaining volumes of Durrell's 'Alexandria Quartet' in succession and the whole did not disappoint one bit, but of these four great novels I think the first volume, "Justine," is the best.

Durrell is one of those rare writers whose prose is genuinely poetic. It is sensual. I have rarely, if ever, read prose of such grace. One is conscious of the care given to each sentence - and the manner in which he weaves this descriptive sensuality into a cohesive picture is reminiscent of the brush strokes of Monet or a Cezanne. It leaves you not with just a vivid impression of Alexandria, or of the characters that people the book, but with something more. When I finished I truly felt, to a unique degree, an intimate knowledge of the city. It felt as if I had been there.

It's not that other authors haven't produced a vivid impression on me, it's just that they have not produced the same impression. Durrell gives us Alexandria as an epicure gives us a fine Parisian restaurant, or as a lover describes a new romance. One can smell the profusion of flowers in that city, know the way the city felt at sunset. The novel is intimate: but there is something else here, something a little disconcerting: perhaps the hint of genuine decadence? It's reminiscent of Baudelaire, a profoundly beautiful writer, who yet strongly veered towards decadence.

Clearly Durrell was in love with Alexandria, and in this beautifully written series of novels he communicates that love with singular power, while accomplishing something even more remarkable: he ties together the personal with the universal and these things in turn with our strangely personal perception of time, creating a unique perspective. In Justine he successfully interweaves all these elements in a manner original enough to be an artistic triumph of the highest order.

Yes, he was in love with Alexandria, and he was in love with "Justine. . ."

Yet the title character of this novel remains a mystery. We know the city whereas we cannot know Justine - and she remains a mystery throughout the series of novels. Her mystery forms the thread in this quartet of books, and as she is seen from the perspectives of the differing characters who narrate each separate book she changes, she transforms.

This question "who is Justine?" and through that question the question of "who is the narrator?" is the driving force in these books. Our view of her, and all those involved in the story, expands through the perspectives of different observers until finally we are forced to ask the question, "Can we really know any of these people at all?"

It is here that although I retain the highest admiration for Durrell as a descriptive writer and a writer of many other great attributes, I am confronted with the pervasive moral ambiguity of so many mid-twentieth-century writers. Durrell, it seems to me, answers this question in the negative. "No, we cannot ultimately know these people, he seems to say. We cannot ultimately even know ourselves." And here I, your humble reviewer, will go out on a limb and say I believe this embrace of moral ambiguity has contributed greatly to the decline of Western culture since the mid-twentieth century.

Each generation has its dogma, its beliefs that must be held for the individual to be taken seriously, and it was this I believe shallow cynicism in the guise of existentialism that was his generation's dogma absolute. It was a world-view so widely held at the time that my admiration for Durrell's accomplishment here is only slightly dimmed by his acceptance of it, and I believe it is partly this moral ambiguity that created a tinge of decadence in Justine.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2015 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

On The Emerging New Class Of Writer

(Please see my article, "A few More Inconvenient Truths," about Alan Turing and the Universal Machine, as a companion piece to this article.)



I'd like to write about an aspect of the complex world of literature in this era, that is in part, contradictory to what I wrote in an essay about poetry. In that earlier piece I wrote about the descending spiral affecting modern poetry, in that because people do not buy poetry,the quality of poetry declines, resulting in even fewer people buying poetry, and so on...

I would just like to say, as an aside, that I'm not particularly uncomfortable with contradiction, if it concerns aspects of a problem as convoluted, and contradictory, as that of modern publishing. Life presents us with contradictions, and when that is the case acknowledging it is necessary to the pursuit of truth.

At any rate, having made the case for the necessity of writing as a profession, I would like to look at the issue of the emerging new class of writer in our society, the blogger, the internet writer, the citizen journalist.

In at least one important way this new class of writer is a boon to the integrity of modern publishing, in that unpaid, unaffiliated, citizen writers, can simply say anything they want to. Whether it is acknowledged or not, established writers who work for newspapers, or publishing houses, or almost any profit driven entity are inevitably influenced in what they say by such affiliation. The academic writer is freed from this pressure to a great degree, but the academic writer must always think of how his or her writing will be received by peers, a thing which is a double edged sword. It enforces a high standard of production, professionalism and rigorous thinking, but also reduces creativity and discourages original thought, and perpetuates conformity and redundancy in expression. So the freedom of expression attained by this new class of unpaid writer, in the era of the internet, is probably unprecedented since the invention of the printing press! A completely unaffiliated writer, unpaid for their work, can now say whatever they want to say, while also reaching an audience! There is no one to prevent them from publishing whatever they want to, as I do here on this blog, and there is a tremendous amount to be said for that!

Yet we are left with this quandary: although this unprecedented freedom of expression is a boon to writing, it is also anathema to writing, in that it allows for an enormous amount of expression, while at the same time allowing for no effective means of separating the wheat from the chaff. The sheer amount that gets published makes any serious attempt at critical evaluation of that content impossible, and so there is no way for anyone to know what part of that output is of real value. Many people might say to this: "Fine, then we have a 'free market' of ideas in which people can pick and choose what interests them."

The problem with such thinking is that we run into the above cited problem with poetry. Not all ideas, not all art, not all critical thinking, not all journalism - or whatever writing is in questio - is created equal. And if nobody is able to make a living in writing, as well as having the freedom of expression to write what they will, then the quality of writing (and thus of culture, and of thought itself) will rapidly devolve to the lowest common denominator.

This problem is quite humorously laid out in the movie Idiocracy, and has been understood since at least the time of Plato. To avert such cultural and intellectual decline, somehow the quality of creativity must be protected and advanced. So here perhaps, more than anywhere else the question must be confronted. . . "If the computer replaces human labor, even in intellectual endeavors, as it is already doing, then as technology advances, will we lose the ability to preserve meaningful culture altogether?

Those most enamored of the "free information" generated by the computer are consumers of that information, not its creators, and that inherent imbalance between these interests could spell the end of higher culture over time, resulting in "Idiocracy."

I don't have the answers to all the questions generated here, but I think, as a society, we need to seriously grapple with those questions, in order to preserve a society worth living in.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2015 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

A Masterful Synthesis

The impression many readers have of Walter Scott is that he is a dull writer; and it's true that his prose seems at first unapproachable for those used to twentieth and post-twentieth-century fiction. That is why I would recommend Old Mortality as an introduction to any reader unfamiliar with his work. It is a flat-out barn burning adventure story, really thrilling to read, and as is much of Scott's work also a vivid window into history - the history in this case fascinating for both its foreignness from our times (far greater than one might suppose reading a book about such a relatively recent era in Scotland), and also for its stark, even frightening, similarity to our times.

It is set in the late seventeenth-century, in a nation still in the throes of a decaying feudal system, beset by religious warfare and corresponding conflict between the impulses of modernity and reaction; and this feeling of both closeness and contrast to modern times holds one of the book's fascinations.

The setting is of course also memorable, and finely drawn. What better scene could there be than this brooding landscape of castles and mists - rugged coastlines and crags - carved everywhere by ever-flowing water? Something about that land seems to endow all human action with an epic grandeur, and the undoubtedly epic action of the book is enhanced by that backdrop and finally by another of Scott's great strengths - the brilliance of his characters. Every character in this novel rings true to life, but particularly the mad, indomitable, religious-zealot at the center of the action. He is a man one cannot like (or at least I cannot) but whom I found fascinating and came to have a grudging admiration for, if only in the manner one admires a sheer force of nature!

And finally, Scott had a mastery of the structural architecture of the novel. This intense, complexly interwoven story of a love torn apart by differing visions of life is rendered seamlessly and with vividly clarity, so that in the end one feels they have not only read a ripping adventure story, but also seen a brilliant picture of a very remote world, vivid enough to afford a new perspective on the meaning of our current age.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2015 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com