Ever since I was aware of literature, I've wanted to read Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, mostly because the title sounded so, you know, like, cool. First of all, I had never met anyone with the mysterious name of Jude, a name that sounded to me as if it were Jewish, even though I knew it was Christian. Then there was the "the Obscure" part. How could someone with such a lofty, regal-sounding name and title be "obscure"?
Even though I'd read some of Hardy's other work and enjoyed it, I stayed far away from Jude. I'd been warned off by English teachers, professors, even my sister-in-law, that the novel was dark, depressing, twisted, heavy, dense. A good read if you enjoyed uttering Satanic chants or tearing wings off butterflies in your spare time, or a chore to complete for school. Definitely not something to read for fun.
Recently I was in a bookstore and happened to see the intriguing title once again looming in front of me. I felt old enough, brave enough, experienced enough to handle the tortures within its covers, so I picked it up and began reading.
After finishing the first few chapters, I noticed the experience I was having was much different from the one to which I'd become accustomed when reading fiction, watching movies, looking at art, even riding in the subway. At first I couldn't put my finger on what was so strange about the book. Then it hit me. I wasn't being entertained.
Today, it seems as if not being entertained has become impossible. Life is now the ultimate spectator sport, underscored by constant commentary and scores from other games around the world. The news is now accompanied by flashing lights, music, subtitles, and a constant crawl of headlines to keep your eye moving. Picking out groceries is now a performative-theatrical experience. It's no longer enough for a food to be strawberry-flavored, for example. It must be strawberry-kiwi-boisenberry flavored, with silver packaging and a free toy inside, or a diet plan, or an easy, quick, delicious low-fat recipe. Also, it must be bite-sized and come in bright colors like hot pink and sky blue. Waiting for a movie to begin is now a chance to be entertained by songs designed by corporate executives who've learned which chords and melodies appeal to the largest common denominator, or by snippets from TV shows about waiting in line for soup, or on-the-set "exclusive peeks" from made for TV movies featuring B-movie actors. Everything we see lights up and flickers, comes with extra features we've never asked for but accept, because, A) they're free, and B) most importantly, they're new. As soon as we wake up in the morning, we're being entertained by something. And if something doesn't entertain us, like a friend's over-long illness, the genocide in Sudan, or modern dance, then we dismiss it with the ultimate of damnations: boring.
Indeed, a new crop of writers, perhaps feeling the heat from their multimedia cousins on the internet and in film, have declared their aim to thrill, to entertain, to join in the Roman circuses instead of offer a refuge from them. Their stories are chock-a-block with cliffhangers and climaxes, thrills and spills, more fun than a day at Six Flags.
Of course entertaining audiences isn't new to literature. Just check out Ben-Hur or the novels of Charles Dickens, who wasn't above writing a scene of spontaneous combustion or two.
What's new is that we live in a time when we don't need literature as an escape from our boring, drab, gray lives. If anything, life offers too many vehicles for "excitement" these days. What we need from literature now, more than ever, is a jolt us back to reality and out of our constant state of caffeine-rush alertness to the latest over-the-top news headline on our computer, the latest Hollywood exclusive (available to millions of viewers in the English-speaking world), the latest internet porn fantasy.
Unfortunately, many of the writers who aren't trying to thrill us are putting us to sleep. I'm taking about authors of literary fiction whose characters putter around the house and in the yard waiting to be struck by an epiphany that their lives have been a waste, though it's too late to change and it's all so pointless anyway. These "slice-of-life" stories are in their own way as much removed from reality as the chills-and-spills approach.
Jude the Obscure is not so much a slice of life as it is a slice out of life. Its mix of Biblical references and antiquated rustic slang can sometimes be impenetrable; the characters' hemming and hawing can be infuriating; the bleakness of their world is overpowering. As readers, we don't know quite what to make of Hardy's vision. We become angry, uncomfortable, and best of all, confused. In other words, we feel alive.
And what's wrong with that? In this age of you're on my side or you're against me, what's wrong with a little uncertainty? Are we so insecure in our selves that we can't handle being provoked, unsettled, and even upstaged by a work of art?
We have artists today who make deliberately confusing work. That's easy. What's hard, and what's so admirable about Hardy, is that he writes novels that seem almost understandable, which is what makes them so lifelike. He veers back and forth between naturalism and surrealism, riveting action and obscure, repetitive scenes in which nothing seems to happen. We as readers feel we ought to understand it all, but when we finish his work, we come away scratching our heads, angry with ourselves for not knowing what to think. We become more skilled at living with uncertainty, a skill we're in desperate need of more and more.
So who else is teaching us this lesson now? Who is our Thomas Hardy today? I'm open to suggestions, if you have any.
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Saturday, November 13, 2004
The Literary Meaning of the Election of 2004
In my writing classes, my students often like to deflect criticism of vagueness in their work with the mantra, "But it sounds good." In response, I tell them it isn't good enough for words to sound good. They have to mean something as well.
Unfortunately, the relationship between word and meaning is becoming a radical concept, an outmoded value. We live in a country and a time when musicians lip sync and call it "singing," when museums exhibit bicycles and Armani dresses and call it "art, when performers preen for the camera and call it "acting." Evangelical preachers support the death penalty to promote a culture of life; bacon, raw fish, and candy bars are marketed as health food; people appear on reality TV shows as "characters."
At last this country has found a president to match our predilection for falseness and inversion, our ongoing project of divorcing word from meaning. In 2004, we re-elected a president who goes to war to keep peace, who imposes democracy on other countries so their inhabitants can express their free will (under the watchful eyes of our troops), who builds a case for war on the grounds of "weapons of mass destruction," and when that evidence is disproven, takes no responsibility for the falseness of those words, but instead changes the grounds for the war. Now we are fighting to spread democracy. The words about WMD, peddled for months by the president and his cohorts, don't matter because they are only words. They sounded good at the time, but their meaning is fundamentally unimportant.
It will probably strike future generations as more than a little odd that a president with such a penchant for falseness is so beloved for his honesty. But then, we as Americans on both sides of the red/blue state divide have lost our ability to judge and interpret language. Many of Bush's supporters like him because they think he sounds honest, not because they have spent five minutes parsing his words to see if he really is honest. Many of Bush's detractors compare him to Hitler, and especially to the terrorists themselves, but these comparisons are unfortunate exaggerations that obscure the real danger of Bush's presidency.
The problem is not that Bush is a terrorist. A terrorist is an individual or a member of an organization who cannot be held accountable for his actions by the citizens of a state. The problem is that in his careless disregard for words and their meaning, Bush uses language in the manner of a terrorist because terrorists revel in doublespeak. They fight holy wars by the unholy method of slaughtering women and children. They fail to distinguish between civilians and soldiers because distinctions are useless when you want to paint your message in broad swaths of blood. Unfortunately, our president has as little use for truth in language as our old vanquished foes, the Communist dictators of Eastern Europe.
Sadly, this is the level to which we as Americans have sunk long before "Black Wednesday," lulled by our Ipods that play music only we can hear and video games in which we score points for committing vile crimes that don't matter and "healthy" chocolate covered energy bars that satisfy our cravings for sugar our body doesn't need. In such an atmosphere, can anyone be surprised that we've re-elected President Bush? (I say "we" to include myself in the decision because we are all responsible for the outcome of the election, however we voted.)
In 2004, we said to our enemies: we in the free world think just as you do in the land of shackled. The ideals of our Constitution, of our two hundred year old democracy, those are mere words, easily sacrificed in the name of "security" on the streets of Baghdad, in Abu Ghreib, in Guantanamo Bay, and in the halls of our own Congress when the Patriot Act was rushed into law. Might makes right. We do what we do not because we should but because we can. And in sacrificing our ideals, we believe, we have made America safe. We have also lost a little of what "America" used to mean.
And so in November 2004, we sent our message loud and clear to the terrorists, the jihadists, the religious extremists and petty dictators who wish us ill. We should not be surprised when we hear their response.
Unfortunately, the relationship between word and meaning is becoming a radical concept, an outmoded value. We live in a country and a time when musicians lip sync and call it "singing," when museums exhibit bicycles and Armani dresses and call it "art, when performers preen for the camera and call it "acting." Evangelical preachers support the death penalty to promote a culture of life; bacon, raw fish, and candy bars are marketed as health food; people appear on reality TV shows as "characters."
At last this country has found a president to match our predilection for falseness and inversion, our ongoing project of divorcing word from meaning. In 2004, we re-elected a president who goes to war to keep peace, who imposes democracy on other countries so their inhabitants can express their free will (under the watchful eyes of our troops), who builds a case for war on the grounds of "weapons of mass destruction," and when that evidence is disproven, takes no responsibility for the falseness of those words, but instead changes the grounds for the war. Now we are fighting to spread democracy. The words about WMD, peddled for months by the president and his cohorts, don't matter because they are only words. They sounded good at the time, but their meaning is fundamentally unimportant.
It will probably strike future generations as more than a little odd that a president with such a penchant for falseness is so beloved for his honesty. But then, we as Americans on both sides of the red/blue state divide have lost our ability to judge and interpret language. Many of Bush's supporters like him because they think he sounds honest, not because they have spent five minutes parsing his words to see if he really is honest. Many of Bush's detractors compare him to Hitler, and especially to the terrorists themselves, but these comparisons are unfortunate exaggerations that obscure the real danger of Bush's presidency.
The problem is not that Bush is a terrorist. A terrorist is an individual or a member of an organization who cannot be held accountable for his actions by the citizens of a state. The problem is that in his careless disregard for words and their meaning, Bush uses language in the manner of a terrorist because terrorists revel in doublespeak. They fight holy wars by the unholy method of slaughtering women and children. They fail to distinguish between civilians and soldiers because distinctions are useless when you want to paint your message in broad swaths of blood. Unfortunately, our president has as little use for truth in language as our old vanquished foes, the Communist dictators of Eastern Europe.
Sadly, this is the level to which we as Americans have sunk long before "Black Wednesday," lulled by our Ipods that play music only we can hear and video games in which we score points for committing vile crimes that don't matter and "healthy" chocolate covered energy bars that satisfy our cravings for sugar our body doesn't need. In such an atmosphere, can anyone be surprised that we've re-elected President Bush? (I say "we" to include myself in the decision because we are all responsible for the outcome of the election, however we voted.)
In 2004, we said to our enemies: we in the free world think just as you do in the land of shackled. The ideals of our Constitution, of our two hundred year old democracy, those are mere words, easily sacrificed in the name of "security" on the streets of Baghdad, in Abu Ghreib, in Guantanamo Bay, and in the halls of our own Congress when the Patriot Act was rushed into law. Might makes right. We do what we do not because we should but because we can. And in sacrificing our ideals, we believe, we have made America safe. We have also lost a little of what "America" used to mean.
And so in November 2004, we sent our message loud and clear to the terrorists, the jihadists, the religious extremists and petty dictators who wish us ill. We should not be surprised when we hear their response.
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