March 2010 Selection: The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property

At our March 3, 2010 meeting, we will discuss the following book suggested by Roger Erickson:

Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Vintage; 1st Vintage Books ed edition (February 12, 1983).

February 2010 Selection: “The Away Place”

At our February 3, 2010 meeting we will discuss the following book suggested by Mohsen Mirghanbari:

Ruth Tiger, The Away Place, Eloquent Books, 2009

Malcolm Lowry’s Day of the Dead-Drunk

Hallucinations in the Eye of the Volcano
Thoughts on reading Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano in Harper Perennial edition, published 2007.

“Everything becomes disgusting when you are false to your own nature and behave in an unbecoming way.” Sophocles in Philoctetes.

Under the Volcano presented many, perhaps too many, avenues for the reader to wander or stagger through in contemplation of the historical settings and the personal psychic dilemmas encompassing the story of an exiled British Consul in Mexico. It is interesting to be reminded once again how the Spanish Civil War played an important role in motivations of characters in 20th-century literature. Margaret Atwood in Blind Assassin gave it great mention to show ideological differences of her Canadian characters. Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent reviewed for us the century’s train of miserable wars and fascist despoliation of culture, which major events figure in the historical background of Volcano, written (and rewritten) over many years from mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. (Disappointing to me, in Mazower’s Continent, the victory of Franco’s totalitarian regime was given short shrift considering the dark oppression than fell like a death pall during that pseudo-Mussolini’s 35-year reign.) Serious novelists, like Lowry in emphasizing his grim geographical-historical vision, do deliberately arouse readers toward a greater historical consciousness or remembrance, mostly about events now forgotten and so we are not moved to political action by the reminiscence. The humanities, ivory-tower stuff, often don’t seem to excite readers to participate in the present crises of war and political unrest.

Viewing Geoffrey Firmin’s despair in the Mexican pre-World War II setting made him more intriguing, his exposure to nasty Mexican prejudices against Americans and Jews (no matter his Englishness), called upon him by his unseemly, flustered, comical drunkenness. Reminded of drunks: Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, the lovely Brett, and Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises, to which I think Volcano gives a sideways nod, experienced their romantic dilemma in 1920s Spain, too soon to bring any new wars into the political or historical climate. The Hemingway expat trio encountered no cultural restrictions on their freedoms. In Volcano, we see Mexican authorities chose to exert the Nazis’ bully-power as control of the people and ugliness of the government police was essential for the bad-luck ending Geoffrey suffered being drunk and fucked in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, especially in our time, we know of even greater dangers of living in Mexico. That Mexican perspective, not to mention the lavishly described woods and other flora, gave Lowry a poetic window into his story and one he could open periodically as his characters journey to other towns for bull-fight events and Day-of-the-Dead festivities. He was a fine descriptive writer.

Character and story are also important—how the hero suffers and what can be learned of human nature. I’ll spend some time in a later hallucination, focusing on this matter.

Besides the history and culture, Lowry’s style of writing was a fertile jungle for this reader to get lost in. In past months and weeks—a bit obsessive given my reluctant, slow reading of the book this second time around –I’ve gone on library searches for Edmund Wilson’s critical works of the 30s and 40s, essays of mid-century Aldous Huxley, George Steiner’s literary criticism, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and James Joyce’s work. And, because Geoffrey is a most sorrowful, pathetic hero, I’ve rummaged around in mythologies and treatises about the saddest heroes of past ages. Well, I’m retired. I have the time and the quixotic urge to write something fresh, to find an unusual angle from which to perceive some new understanding about the world we’re in today and how the nature of human beings might be improved. Don’t see it much, not even in myself. I like Scotch a lot, but I still want to keep a hair back from sloppy addiction until the “Great Alcoholocaust” (my friend Gerry Sperry’s term) is a necessary exit. To supply us with another type of fortitude, Lowry, by his own example or that of his protagonist, does not help much in this last regard. Sadly, I remain a pessimist who sees very little change for the better in the human condition.

History Never Changes
The slim set of essays entitled Science, Liberty and Peace, published in 1946 by Aldous Huxley, begins as follows:

If the arrangement of society is bad (as ours is), and a small number of people have power over the majority and oppress it, every victory over nature will inevitably serve only to increase that power and that oppression. This is what is actually happening.

Though true from mid-century assertions, we have seen humankind’s victories over nature continue (Lowry’s warning sign “¡Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!”). And yet, Huxley’s passage comes not from 1946 but from 1900; it’s Tolstoy’s observation. If the view of the world was bad in 1940’s Mexico, Lowry should have lived to see the natural world today: the planet endangered by population densities and human biospheric devastation. How do we get people to change—for the good of all nations–and pity Mother Earth when we know the power-mongering leaders of industrialized nations, no matter what they say in the 2009 climate convention in Copenhagen, will go on plundering the earth for its remaining resources? We still remember Lord Acton’s dictum: “The most important lesson of history … is that nobody ever learns history’s lessons. The enormous catastrophes of recent years have left the survivors thinking very much as they thought before.” Alas, Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut’s: “So it goes, so it goes.”

Dream: Enjoy the Poetry While We Can.
Literarily (does that word mean anything?), beyond story or character interests, as I’ve said, much else can interest me in novels. There’s a much of muchness in Volcano. The styles of writing and exceptional or anomalous passages are what prick up my aesthetic senses. In the quite fine poetic section of the first chapter when Jacques Laruelle reads Geoffrey’s post-divorce letter left in the book of Elizabethan plays, I loved the delirious never-ending composition in Geoffrey’s vision of himself and Yvonne, once he had traversed the path of hell:

… living in some northern country, of mountains and hills and blue water; our house is built on an inlet and one evening we are standing, happy in one another, on the balcony of this house looking over the water. There are sawmills half hidden by trees beyond and under the hills on the other side of the inlet, what looks like an oil refinery, only softened and rendered beautiful by distance.

…a light blue moonless evening, but late, perhaps ten o’clock, with Venus burning hard at daylight, so we are certainly somewhere far north, and standing on this balcony when from beyond along the coast comes the gathering thunder of a long many-engined freight train, thunder because though we are separated by this wide strip of water from it, the train is rolling eastward and the changing wind veers for the moment from an easterly quarter, and we face east, like Swedenborg’s angel, under a sky clear save where far to the northeast over distant mountains whose purple had faded, lies a mass of almost pure white clouds, suddenly, as if by a light in an alabaster lamp, illumined from within by gold lighting, yet who can hear no thunder, only the roar of a great train with its engines and its wide shunting echoes as it advances from the hills into the mountains: and then all at once a fishing boat with tall gear comes running round the point like a white giraffe, very stiff and stately, leaving behind a long silver-scalloped rim of wake….” (Ch. 1, p. 38-39.)

And the poetic freight train rumbles along for as many lines as I’ve quoted before it peters out with an ellipsis. Beautiful language in motion, a dream passage to be remembered. Actually, this was, at least in part, a real vision, the bay Lowry and his wife lived on in Dollarton, North Vancouver BC. Like so much in Lowry’s work, this is his life; his education floods back in all literary references and his drinking gave him the rhetoric for Geoffrey’s meandering, barely-holding-onto-reality stream-of-consciousness.

Pity the Sad Hero
In 1948 it must have been difficult for a publisher and editor to present Malcolm Lowry’s Geoffrey Firmin, the protagonist of Under the Volcano, as a plausible heroic symbol of the age. As the drunken, demoralized British Consul in Quauhnahuac, he appears all “wibberly-wobberly” on the outside. Does his name mean that Firmin, no matter his outward appearance, was “firm (on the) in(side)”? Or does the name have a rhyme-pun on “vermin”? Such contrarieties are everywhere noticeable: one says “Pobrecito,” another says “Chingar” beholding the robbed and injured Indio dying by the roadside on the way to Tomalín. In the final Farolito scene, Geoffrey is both Consul and “spider”, meaning “spy.” He is addressed as “compañero” by the musician and “pelado” by the police. At the conclusion his corpse is rolled into a ditch and a dead pariah dog is thrown after him, human and beast together.

Under the Volcano, in 1947, after America’s victory against Hitler’s mad, nationalistic, imperialist, military debacle (the British called the victory theirs), came to the public with a weird protagonist. Vanquished from the very start, he’s not the “hero” to appeal to audiences favoring the stereotypical winner. This also is difficult storytelling when so much background development must be sketched in by historical flashbacks, and the writing is never so good as when we are in the mind of Geoffrey, a despairing hero, totally addicted, a victim of tough life and hard liquor, who labors on the border of nothingness, except for the carnival-of- life reminiscences and literary images of the Bible and Western Classics that spiral poetically on his mental ferris-wheel. The Oedipuses, Christs, Quixotes, Fausts, Werthers, and other saintly types flashing on and off in his Broca’s brain do not help the sad hero out. As prose, it is fancy and heavy writing for literati seeking the bizarre and macabre. T.S. Eliot could do it after World War I with his symbol-packed, richly footnoted long poem, The Wasteland. It took time for people to understand and rave about it. Lowry, admittedly a Joycian imitator, was decades past James Joyce, to whom much freedom of verbal and philosophical difficulty had been granted to compose in a poetic style. He presented his dour hero Stephen Dedalus (Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man) as a rebel Irish lad, abandoning family, church and country, who, at the face of the abyss, bucks up and decides to go forth into the outer world to create the uncreated conscience of his race. For Lowry to have brought forth the disreputable drunk, the sacked Consul, the divorced husband of beautiful Yvonne, the disgraced Englishman, this displaced Old Bean might well have matched the state of the collapsing British Empire in 1948, but that was a larger historical metaphor for the public to accept at a much later time. No, Lowry was working against the spirit of the times to ask forgiveness and humane sympathy for such a sorry martyr as his Geoffrey. He had to expect his audience would be small, a readership who would bask in the glory of past literatures, English scholars and their graduate students of English Lit.

Ron Boothe expresses romantic reminiscences of reading Volcano, along with other somewhat grueling writings of his college youth, enjoyed as escapades from his academic specialism. Geoffrey Firmin’s mind must have been a wonderful carnival ride for a psychologist to analyse. As a classicist, browsing Volcano, I found attractions in ships named Oedipus Tyrannus and Philoctetes playing bumper-cars at sea, one of which Hugh learned would return his fellow seamen home sooner than the other. He chose the more tragic Oedipus. In popular fiction, these symbolic names of tragic heroes are difficult to make good use of, just as the dilemmas of great tragedies are hard to interest the general public in. They present very serious crises of great sadness. To read Volcano in the 1960s or 1970s, the time of the Vietnam War, a continuation of the 20th century’s gross inhumanity, was a cerebral journey to the heart of darkness: World War I, World War II, and the Korean War presaged not the end of wars but the serialized belligerency of nation against nation that continued apace with incomparably more destructive machinery and weaponry. Did Malcolm Lowry create a learned prose-poetry, an artistic style difficult and good enough to express, through Geoffrey Firmin, the consciousness of his time? I think not; the stylistic stew is strangely spiced and too queer for the mosaic composition to make itself thought of as a coherent whole. Not only did Lowry test the daring of publishers, he also put every surprised reader to test: can one grasp the thematic clues; can one empathize deeply with the characters; can one find Geoffrey redeemable in the sorry, helpless state he has chosen for himself?

When in the 1970s I taught Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, I remember struggling to defend Willie Loman, to point to the need for us readers/hearers to notice the humanity in this sorry, outdated salesman to whose plight as a human being, Willie’s wife screamed out, attention must be paid. Albert Camus with his conscienceless anti-hero Meurseult of The Stranger was another writer testing the heart and mind of readers to have sympathy with and forgiveness for a careless murderer. Lowry takes us back to antiquity with his symbolic character names and likenesses. Among others, he brings to mind Sophocles’ Antigone, that stubborn girl, a suicidal martyr, against her uncle Creon, as one indicator of his difficult theme. Using the choral ode “Wonders are many” in his quoted frontispieces, he implies what a strange and terrible creature the human is who tames all nature to feel in control, to seek superiority. Geoffrey, in his way, may also be a wonderful, strange and terrible man, but just such a serious and strange character is difficult to like and certainly to admire. Another tragic wonder appears in the role of the stricken hero Philoctetes, the name of Hugh’s ship, along with the Oedipus, taken from two more of Sophocles’ seven extant plays. Sophocles tragic heroes must have had a deep influence on Lowry.

The Diseased Hero
You might ask, “Who is this Philoctetes?” Reading Edmund Wilson’s Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 40s (Library of America, 2007) I came upon this idea for an interpretation of Volcano. It’s far-fetched, but how often does one get a chance to revive the memory of Philoctetes? Believe me, I don’t know if I can convince any reader of the name’s importance, since it is just a ship’s name, and, like most symbols and metaphors in the novel, it doesn’t last for long in its context. Nevertheless, I think Geoffrey himself comes from the same mould of the archetypal wounded hero, though he’s a depressingly negative case study, just as Volcano might be termed a dystopian novel. The positive diseased hero inevitably finds a cure or is granted salvation, and the world is put right.

Philoctetes is an unusual mythological figure, a wounded, disabled soldier hero, abandoned for a decade by Agamemnon’s Greeks in a cave on the island of Lemnos. Hobbled though he was, he was necessary as a savior figure at Troy in the final conquest of the Greeks against the Trojan forces. His bow and arrows were the magical weapons that must be on hand and shot against Paris in order to assure the Greeks’ victory. Nevertheless, Philoctetes’ invalided condition required exceptional artistry to make him interesting and dramatic. Certain disgusting motifs had to be tolerated by the audience: bitten by a poisonous snake, Philoctetes suffered a suppurating, tumorous ankle wound, giving off an unbearable stench; the pain moved him to paroxysms of howling and wild physical gyrations. These features were essential to the illustration of heroic or saintly fortitude in this exiled soldier whom his companions would not tolerate as a comrade in camp, so bad for morale would have been his unseemly stinking, noisy presence. Sophocles felt there was tragic material in the story of such a lone, tortured martyr; however, very few other writers in all Western literature have thought to make so troubled a hero their study in virtue. Job might be imagined his biblical representative. The Fisher King of medieval folklore a later one. The modern type might be seen in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, a patient who suffers from horrible psoriatic arthropathy; he constantly grumbles about his and the world’s sorry state, arthritically rigid in a hospital bed, entertaining his grim mind by, among other fantasies, fictionalizing a Philip Marlow detective story, featuring some horrid Nazi badmen. In his way, psychological wounded, Geoffrey Firmin is a pariah hero–anti-hero in the commonest term–but one who exhibits the fortitude of the loser, disgusting to proper tastes, a crank, reviled and rebuked by the town and the authorities. He is one who knows the game is up. Fortitude, rather than the brave deed, is a heroic quality shown much more in the vanquished, the underdog, in the disabled and despairing person for whom the world and the human condition allow no escape. Santa Teresa of Ávila said it is much harder for an ordinary, imperfect human being to press onward along the road to perfection than it is to take martyrdom in a moment of wild mental seizure. Such a hero comes across, superficially, as ridiculous, especially using drugs, alcohol, sex, or other escapes from the maddened, debased world and barbarous, inhumane behaviors he sees around him. Very few writers attempt to give the mad, bedeviled, diseased hero stage front and center.

Considering Sophocles’ Philoctetes: in that tragic drama, the real hero is not actually the wasting sufferer with the magic bow but a newcomer, a young hero. To bring back Philoctetes to move the Trojan War toward its prophesied destiny, Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, is sent with Odysseus to retrieve the wonder weapons by hook or by crook. Odysseus, the man of many wiles, has the ruthless strategy of distracting the tortured hermit long enough so that Neoptolemus can steal the weapons. Neoptolemus rejects the plan as cowardly and inhumane, because he claims the person of Philoctetes is just as important as the divine weaponry. The pathetic shrieking, the painful writhing, and the loathsome stench of the human state have to be accepted with the magical prowess of Philoctetes’ archery to surmount the difficulties that beset the Greek armies. So it is with Geoffrey Firmin: can we accept the decrepit state of this man and feel for his desperate human plight: we know why he suffers and that his inner life, with all his torments, though rich with learning of ages, still has not the power to save him from the injustices and hatred of malignant forces in the world. If we can understand Neoptolemus, we must take the side of the abysmally unhappy Firmin, sympathize with him in his helplessness, even to wish to have a morning Mescal drink with him, to climb in the sewer to help him out of that hell. (O, come on, Gilmour! You might be saying.) Neoptolemus, confronted with the critical dilemma, risked the anger of wiser, practical Odysseus, his superior, by accepting Philoctetes as a human being, not just as an exploitable resource for winning the war. So it happened in Sophocles’ drama that through Neoptolemus’ kindness, not in large supply among early Greeks, by tolerating and accepting the monstrous state of Philoctetes, the suffering exile consented to return with the ship, to defeat his Trojan foe, and in time his wound, with help of the physician Asclepius, began to heal. The incurable wound is cured following an initial act of compassion.

So Lowry presents a dilemma: Can I realize a human relationship with his alcoholically diseased, nightmare-haunted hero? Am I not in the same vise, tormented by my mistakes, shameful of what I haven’t done to improve the fate of the commonweal, self-hating because of my impotence to change the tragic state of man’s inhumanity to man, angry that I have been complicit at times, by acting out of hatred, to add to that inhumanity?

(I need a Scotch before I proceed to my next hallucination.)

Geoffrey, an Avatar of Philoctetes? How can I possibly think this?
Taking Geoffrey as an avatar of Philoctetes, I have pondered whether Yvonne might have taken as a failed Neoptolemus and Hugh as an Odysseus. Certainly Hugh, though he came back to Mexico to visit his ailing brother, is the principled hero who craves to return to Spain to help the anti-fascists at the battle on the River Ebro. He’s still the old-style soldier who wants to win the day. He will have to abandon his brother to further this cause. Stubborn in his pessimism, Geoffrey upbraids his brother for his foolish loyalties to some political or military leader. Yvonne, a hopeful innocent, returns to her ex-husband perhaps to see if she might turn him around from his addiction, to find him the loving man she once felt she knew. Nevertheless, she does not throw herself at Geoffrey, being reluctant to join him again in the nightmare of drunkenness, and not very friendly, choosing the companionship of Hugh and even M. Laruelle. Yvonne, the enabler who disables, mostly hopes that the Consul will turn himself around and in sobriety see what beauty and innocence he has lost by divorcing her and perhaps will rejoin her as a loving partner. This was Geoffrey’s vision in the letter I quoted above. Still, Geoffrey perseveres in his lonely, downward journey. He is resolved to suffer and retreat into alcoholic delirium. He does not (cannot?) show affection openly and generously towards Yvonne; outwardly he holds back all loving gestures, though inwardly he has intermittent feelings of regret and love. He loves and hates Yvonne, and like all frustrated lovers, though he doesn’t know why, he is tortured by this distress. He has given up on hope through literature and philosophy: to write of utopian Atlantis, that golden-age city of Platonic lore, has become an impossible dream. He has given up on religion and cannot find forgiveness anywhere within himself. He has abandoned himself, just as Philoctetes thought it was just for the Greeks to have exiled him. If Yvonne, who can’t bring herself to save Geoffrey, is not the tolerant, tragic Neoptolemus in this triangle of desperate souls, it remains for me, the reader, to redeem Geoffrey, to see humanity in him, to pity and fear him. Solving the tragic dilemma is my decision. How do I, pessimistic and despairing of humanity’s turnaround in our age, seek catharsis? I don’t feel cleansed after the conclusion of Volcano; quite the opposite. Surely I wished Geoffrey to be healed, to struggle his way out of hell, to surmount all difficulties of his life and go forward to prove to his fellow human beings that a bright, new day can be wrought out of the present darkness and ash. Instead, Lowry asks me to dig deeper to find his disgustingly pessimistic Geoffrey forgivable. It’s not at all an easy thing to do.

Do the Humanities Humanize?
Considering Volcano as literature of the Humanities, into which branch of art it must be classed, I wonder if such works, though they might be replete with multitudinous references to and allusions from the world’s great masterpieces, are able to humanize readers. And in what element of a work is the humanity expressed? Does Geoffrey Firmin’s story help us to cope with our world-gone-mad, the abyss of despair we might find ourselves in? For many of us, the 21st century holds even less hope for finding solutions to humanity’s injustices, warring, industrial plunder and waste. The Earthly Garden is showing signs of irreparable devastation. ¡Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan! What does it show of love? No se puede vivir sin amar. Do we have hope of Good Samaritans if we get caught in a big fix out in the boonies or do we hope the police will find us first?

No longer do I believe the humanities humanize. Monstrous leaders have been well educated in the humanities. All those nationalistic Germans, brought up on 19th century classics and culture, who became Nazis and SS officers under Hitler, what did they imagine they were doing for the good of humanity? We can cry over characters in books, movies, plays and poetry, whom we would overlook, walk past, in real life. George Steiner, in Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1970)) felt deeply the dilemma of humanities in the 20th century: How to teach them effectively. What are they good for? I looked for Lowry in his writings but he, like Wilson, was mute on the importance of Under the Volcano. The polyglot aptitude—Spanish, Latin, German, and foreign word-play–of Lowry would have pleased him. Steiner did encourage English literature scholars to learn foreign languages and to branch out into comparative studies:

Why do we not study the history of English poetry in close comparison with that of another expansionist and colonizing tradition, say Spanish? How have the characteristics of the language in far places developed in relation to the home tradition? Are the problems of form and consciousness met by the Spanish poet in Mexico comparable to those of the Anglo-Indian; are certain languages better media of cultural exchange than others? The directions of vision are manifold. The alternative is parochialism and retrenchment from reality. The almost total lack of comparative studies in English academic circles … may in itself be a very small thing. But it may also be a symptom of a more general withdrawal, of the fist closing tight against an altered, uncomfortable world. This would be alarming because in culture, no less than in politics, chauvinism and isolation are suicidal options. (L&S, “To Civilize Our Gentlemen,” p.63.

Steiner, back in the 1960s, felt the humanities were becoming effete. Here’s the difficult part:

We do not know whether the study of the humanities, of the noblest that has been said and thought, can do very much to humanize. We do not know. And surely there is something rather terrible in our doubt whether the study and delight a man finds in Shakespeare [or Goethe] make him any less capable of organizing concentration camps. … before we can go on teaching, we must surely ask ourselves: are the humanities humane, and if so, why did they fail before the night? [meaning WW II and the Holocaust] (p. 67)

Franz Kafka, when he was twenty wrote about the impact of books on the reader:

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering against our skull, why then do we read it? So that it makes us happy? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write for ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

To which Steiner concludes:

Students [i.e. serious readers] of English literature, of any literature, must ask those who teach [read with] them, as they must ask themselves, whether they know, and not in their minds alone, what Kafka meant. (p. 67)

Lowry’s Geoffrey Firmin is himself the literary anti-hero who proves to us that a humanities education in great universities, all the learning of the Great Books, and his worldly experience from a privileged position in society have not helped him find sane ways to help, to strive to help, his fellow man. Nor has love, without which he chose to live, helped him to improve his wretched condition. Volcano teaches us not to act like Geoffrey. There are many other intoxicating ways than alcohol to loosen control of absurd rationalism, to give up on the practical life, and continue to live out one’s desperate existence slowly into death. In Firmin’s time, he could have tried Aldous Huxley’s approach to life’s bitter end: psychotropic drugs—mescaline, psilocybin, even peyote. The strychnine? Were Doctor Vigil and Hugh trying to help Geoffrey to a quicker death with the strychnine? Even morphine might have been preferable. Hell, after a while, if one is physically healthy, with fantasy drugs one might realize the futility of ritual ecstasy, or painlessness, and become a man of mystical wisdom, like Carlos Castaneda’s “brujo” Don Juan (The Tales of Don Juan). Alcohol is physically and mentally debilitating, totally sickening to suicide on.

So, let’s put the Scotch away till evening, bringing it out for cocktails, nightcaps and parties and let’s find a way out of this hellhole we’ve dug ourselves into as a greedy, frightened, constantly warring nation. For a start, with healthcare in mind, let’s get fit. Let’s continue to act, really strive, to affect our leaders and to change life for the better in small incremental ways, with family, friends, acquaintances, clubs, churches, etc. and let’s hope that we can each make a difference to alter the trends of inhumanity at work in this world. (“O, come on Gilmour!” you might say again. “It’s hopeless to think that.”) Sure, it might be impossible, but let’s continue to strive ever more thoughtfully and passionately to change things for the better.

David Gilmour

Bill Hagens’ Summary of “The Healing of America”

Note: I have reformatted this post to include all of the documents provided by Bill Hagens: The summary he provided us before our discussion along with the documents he provided during our meeting. Each of the documents are attached here as links that you can click on to open and/or download onto your local computer for later viewing.

Bill’s Summary Posted Prior to our Meeting

Defining Health

WHO Social Determents of Health

Health Care Determants and Expenditures

January 2010 Selection: “Broom of the System”

At our January 6, 2010 meeting, we will discuss the following book suggested by David Gilmour:

David Foster Wallace, Broom of the System Viking Books, 1987.

Ron Boothe’s Commentary on Under the Volcano

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry was my selection for discussion at our November 2009 meeting. I post here a few of my own comments and impressions of the book.

Why did I pick this book for us to discuss?

When I was in graduate school in my twenties back in the 1970’s, I had little time to read works of fiction because I was too busy reading technical scientific articles and books. However, about once a year I would take a week or so of vacation time in which I would leave thoughts of science totally behind and engage in other activities such as reading a novel or two. I would typically ask one of the professors I was working with to give me a recommendation of what they would read if they only had time to read one novel. This system provided me with some great reading experiences, short on quantity but rich in quality. Some of the books I remember reading during that period of my life are James Joyce’ Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, J. P. Donleavy’s The Onion Eaters, and Ken Keesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. However, the novel that made the strongest impression on me was Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. I considered it, at that time, to be the most amazing piece of fiction I had ever read. Forty years have passed since then, and I wondered if the book would still seem as good if I were to reread it now.

The Basic Storyline

The basic storyline is simple, and told pretty much in a linear fashion. Most of the story takes place during the Day of the Dead festival in Quauhnahuac Mexico starting the morning of November 1, 1938 and ending on the morning of November 2, 1938. The exception is Chapter 1 in which two of the characters get together during the Day of the Dead Festival one year later in 1939 and reminisce about what had happened one year earlier. This first chapter ends with an image of a Ferris wheel turning backwards, which rewinds time to the prior year as we launch into Chapter 2 and the remainder of the book.

However, there is a context to the events that unfold that spans a longer period of time, and this sequencing of events over the longer period of time is not told in linear order. It is revealed in bits and pieces throughout the book through dialogue or through internal thoughts of the characters. The reader must construct this larger context. I show below in the form of a Table my own construction of the sequencing of some of the major events that pertain to the story. I did not take a lot of time to work this out, and there might be errors (if so, feel free to add corrections to the comments section of this posting), but I think the list shown in the Table gives an overview of the main events in approximate chronological order.

Note that each chapter of the book is written from the point of view (POV) of a single character. For example, Chapter 2 is written from the POV of Yvonne, and everything we learn in that chapter is something that was either seen or heard by Yvonne, and whenever we go “inside the head” of someone in this chapter to reveal mental thoughts, it is Yvonne’s head that we are in. Similarly, each of the other chapters of the book is written from the POV of one single character. In the Table below I indicate which character provides the POV for each chapter.

START OF TABLE LISTING MAIN EVENTS

———-

Early years of Geoffrey Firman, British Consol to Quauhnahuac

1896

42 years earlier

Geofrey born in India

Mother dies when just a child in Kashmir, India

Father remarries, has another child, Geoffrey’s half brother, Hugh

Father disappears, leaving Geoffrey, Hugh, and stepmother in Srinagar

Stepmother dies.

Child Geoffrey and toddler Hugh sail back to England to live with guardians

1911

27 years earlier (15 years old)

Geoffrey meets M. Jacques Lauruelle, while staying with English poet Taskerson family. They spend their days walking and drinking. Geoffrey, the old bean, is a sad soul.

Early years of Yvonne Firman

1908

30 years earlier

Yvonne born

1914

24 years earlier (6 years old)

Yvonne’s mother dies

1921

17 years earlier (13 years old)

Yvonne becomes actress in serials to support family because father is an alcoholic

Father dies, goes to live with uncle, attends U Hawaii, majors in astronomy

Marries and then divorces playboy Cliff Wright

1932

6 years earlier (24 years old)

Yvonne has a child, also named Geoffrey, but the child dies. Returns to Hollywood,

Events shortly before main story

1935

3 years earlier

M. Jacques Laruelle, film director, drives from LA to Quauhnahuac where he now lives.

In same year, Consol and Yvonne marry in Grenada, Spain

Yvonne and Hugh start an affair (date uncertain)

1936

18 months earlier

Consol and Yvonne arrive in Quauhnahuac where he will be working as British Consul

Shortly thereafter, Jacques stumbles upon Consol and Yvonne embracing at Maximillian Place and recognizes his old childhood friend from their days at the Taskersons.

Consol and Yvonne visit Oaxaca in happier times (date uncertain)

1937

one year earlier

Jacques and Yvonne start an affair in his apartment, while waiting on Consol who, as usual is somewhere drunk.

11 months earlier

Consol and Yvonne leave Quauhnahuac in plymouth car for Mexico City, staying in Hotel Canada

Yvonne leaves Consol in Mexico City. Depressed, he drinks mescal in Hotel Canada.

Sometime later, Consol travels to Oaxaca in deep depression. Stays in Hotel Francia; drinks at Inferno 4am each morning.

Around this same time Consol writes long unsent letter to Yvonne while sitting in Hotel Bella Vista. Leaves unsent letter folded in pages of Elizabethan Plays book.

6 months earlier

Consol loans Elizabethan Plays book to Jacques

1 week earlier

Hugh shows up at Quauhnahuac and is staying with Consol

Hugh trying to stop Consol from drinking, using Strychnine that was prescribed by Dr. Guzman.

1 day earlier

Yvonne sails into Acapulco Harbor with butterflies.

Consol meets and gets drunk with Dr. Vigil at Red Cross Ball

Events on Day of the Dead (November 1 and 2, 1938)

Chap 2

Yvonne POV

Yvonne arrives in Quauhnahuac, finds Consol drinking in Hotel Bella Vista

Consol and Yvonne walk towards home, see photo of La Despidida, see Jacques house

Chap 3

Consol POV

Yvonne goes into bathroom, Consol sneaks out to go drinking, but passes out

returns home, takes breakfast to Yvonne who is now in bed

tries to seduce Yvonne, but impotent, starts drinking seriously, passes out

Chap 4

Hugh POV

Hugh arrives and he and Yvonne go for horse ride while Consol passed out at home

Chap 5

Consol POV

Consol wakes up goes out in garden in search of Tequila, first hear voices of familiars

comical interaction with Mr Quincey, sign in neighbor yard: do you like this garden…

Consol sees Hugh and Yvonne standing on porch, passes out and wakens in bathroom

Chap 6

Hugh POV

Consol, Yvonne, Hugh set out to go to Tomalin. Meet Jacques on way.

Postman delivers lost postcard from Yvonne to Consol, “Why did I leave you?”

Chap 7

Consol POV

At Jacques house, writing on wall says “no se puede vivir amar”.

Consol hides postcard under Jacques’ pillow.

Hugh and Yvonne leave. Later Consol and Jacques leave to go drinking at Paris.

Jacues leaves Paris. Consol, alone, also leaves and is followed by children, rides loopy the loop.

Chap 8

Hugh POV

Yvonne, Consol, and Hugh on bus ride to Tomalin. Indian lying on side of road. Pelado on bus.

Chap 9

Yvonne POV

Yvonne, Consol, and Hugh in bull ring in Tomalin.

Chap 10

Consol POV

Consol, Yvonne, and Hugh go to Salon Ofelia in Tomalin.

Consul drunk on mescal, sits in toilet overhearing conversation between Hugh and Yvonne.

Consol runs off towards Parian so he can drink mescal in peace in Favolito.

Chap 11

Yvonne POV

Hugh and Yvonne walk towards Parian looking for Consol. They take a different fork in road

than he did. Yvonne hears shots fired. Horse comes running up trail and runs into her.

Yvonne dies, soul escapes to stars.

Chap 12

Consol POV

Drinking mescal in Favolito in Parian. Has sex with whore. Accused of being spider.

Consol is shot, falls into ravine and dies, dolente dolore, dead dog thrown into ravine after him.

Events that follow

1 day later

Jacques gets call from Hugh, discovers postcard under pillow.

Jacques learns a lot about Hugh. He had not liked Hugh when they met, but when

3 days later

Hugh catches ship at Vera Cruz, “it was as though Jacques had lost a son”

Chap 1

1 year later

Jacques and Dr. Vigil meet for drinks at Hotel Casino de la Selva in Quauhnahuac on Day of Dead.

They reminisce about what events that happened one year earlier mean. “But she came back.”

Jaques walks to train station, then to ruin of Maximillian. Eventually ends up at movie theater.

Owner of movie theater gives him Elizabethan Plays that he had apparently lost there earlier.

Jacues finds letter Consol had written to Yvonne inside book. Burns it.

Next day Jacques will be leaving to go to Vera Cruz (same place Hugh went), and then, God willing, to Paris.

Bookends

preface has three quotes:

one from Sophacles, “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man…

one from John Bunyan, “Now I blessed the condition of the dog…

one from Goethe, “Whosoever unceasingly strives upward…

Book closes with quote seen several places in book, first in neighbor’s yard, translated roughly as

Do you like this garden? Is it yours? Do not let your children destroy it!

Or, as the consol translates it in the book while in a drunken state: We evict those who destroy it!

END OF TABLE LISTING MAIN EVENTS

———-

Some Background information about the Author, Malcolm Lowry

A good recent source of information about the life and death of Malcolm Lowry can be found in the article in the New Yorker in 2007: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/17/071217fa_fact_max

And a more recent short piece about the book appeared in the New Yorker in August of this year:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bookclub/2009/07/reading-in-august-malcolm-lowry.html

An excellent documentary about Lowry was made in 1976, that can be viewed online:

http://www.nfb.ca/film/volcano/

and is also available as a special feature on the second disk of the two-disk criterion collection release of John Huston’s film of the book.

Summarizing the information about Lowry very briefly, he was an alcoholic who spent much of his life drunk. He also suffered from serious mental disorders that were serious enough to cause him to spend time in mental hospitals on more than one occasion. It is not clear whether the mental illness was caused by the long periods of alcoholism (a common symptom in the late stages of delirium tremens), or whether the alcoholism was a reaction to an underlying mental illness. Most likely some of both. Regardless, it is obvious that in addition to whatever else he was, his novel provides convincing evidence that he was also a genius.

Is the book a “masterpiece”? (Literary Critics reaction)

In a word, yes. The book shows up on numerous top-ten lists of novels prepared by academics, and it was ranked #11 on the list of the most important works of fiction published in the 20^th Century by the Modern Library Board:

http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/about/board.html

Typical of the reaction of many academics and literary critics is the response of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Columbian novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982.  He stated that Under the Volcano was the novel he had re-read more than any other in his life. (I have more to say about this in the next section on my personal reaction).

Even though I am officially retired, I continue to teach part time at the University of Washington. Just out of curiosity I visited the online card catalogue and did a quick search for items pertaining to Under the Volcano. I discovered over 50 academic books published about Under the Volcano! And doctoral dissertations about Under the Volcano run into the hundreds! And the influence of the book continues up until the present. Dozens of papers being presented at academic conferences within the last few years relate to the book.

Regardless of whether one loves, hates, or is indifferent to the book personally, I don’t think there can be any serious argument about whether or not the book is a masterpiece as judged by the reaction to it by academics and literary critics.

Is the book a “masterpiece”? (My personal reaction)

As I stated at the beginning of this commentary, when I first read the book in my early 20s, I thought it was the most amazing novel I had ever encountered. My reaction now that I have reread the book in my 60s is only slightly muted. I would include this book on my personal top-ten list of the best novels I have read during my lifetime.

However, my reasons for liking the book are somewhat different now than they were when I was a young adult. In my 20s, part of the appeal of the book was its romantic quality; romantic in the sense of Byron, or Goethe. Although I did not do it, I am sure I was at least tempted by the romantic lure of driving to Mexico, finding the pulquerias featured in the novel, and spending days, weeks, or months drinking mescal at 4am. The book quickly gained a cult following of young people who did (perhaps still do) just that after reading the book. It is interesting that Goethe, referenced frequently in Under the Volcano, himself published a book romanticizing suicide, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which garnered a similar cult following in his time. Now that I am older (arguably wiser) the book no longer has that kind of romantic appeal for me.

The primary reason I now judge the book to be a masterpiece has to do with the many levels of interpretation that lie in superposition. That is why it has been able to spawn over 50 published books about it. None of the individual levels of interpretation is, in itself, sufficient to evoke a label of masterpiece. For example, it is a story about an alcoholic. However, as Steven Spender states in his introduction to the book, asserting that it is a book about drunkenness is akin to asserting that King Lear is a book about senility. At its most basic level, it is a simple story about what happens to a man, his wife, his half-brother, and his friend from childhood during a short period of time in a particular place at a particular time. But it is also a timeless novel about existential choices and the consequences of those choices. And it is a religious allegory that can be evaluated through the filters of numerous religious traditions. The strong metaphor of a garden, used throughout the book, provides allusion to the religious myths of the Garden of Eden. On the other hand, that same metaphor of a garden can, and has been, applied to environmental issues and what humans are doing to the planet. It can be read as a moral investigation into the evils of drunkenness, but it can simultaneously be read as a love poem espousing the virtues of drunkenness. It is a tragedy. It is a comedy. It is a socio-political essay about the fascism that was rising in Europe, particularly in Spain, in the 1930s, and the spread of its influences to North America. It is a polemic about the futility of trying to change the world. It is a heroic tale of someone who did try to save the world. It is a psychoanalytic study of psycho-social sexual relationships, including relationships that are homosexual and incestuous. It is prose poetry written in the language of stream of consciousness. I could go on, but I think I have (perhaps over)-made my point.

But what makes it a masterpiece, is not any one of these levels of interpretation, but rather the ways all of these interpretations are weaved into one seamless novel. Lowry himself, in a quote that Neil read to our book club group during our discussion, described the book as being like a machine composed of lots of moving parts, cogs and wheels and gears, that when they are put together to make a single machine, it just somehow works. That metaphor captures the essence of why I think the book is a masterpiece pretty well.

And it is these multiple levels of interpretation, all simultaneously intertwined, that make the book amenable to multiple readings. I referenced earlier the response of Gabriel Garcia Marquez who stated that Under the Volcano was the novel he had re-read more than any other in his life. There are few works of literature that warrant those kinds of repeated readings, and those that do, I would call masterpieces. I have now read the novel 3 times, once when I was in my 20s, once quickly earlier this year to decide if I wanted to make it my selection for our book club, and once more with a “deep reading” (a la Birkerts) the week prior to our discussion of the book. After these three readings, I still have a desire to read it again, and I cannot off the top of my head think of any other novel I have read that I would consider reading more than three times.

For me, the book is reminiscent of the great operas. Of the hundreds of operas that have been composed over the centuries, there are many that have a powerful libretto, many others that have exceptionally powerful musical scores, many others that have spectacular staging and drama. But there are only a relatively small number of great operas that are labeled as masterpieces, and these are the ones where the libretto, music, and dramatic content coalesce in such a way that the whole is greater than the individual parts. It is these masterpieces that form the canon  of great operas, the ones  that  are shown repeatedly in opera houses because they warrant repeated viewings. I think of Wagner’s Parsifal, an opera that lasts over 5 hours.  At the end of the opera the chimes resonate through the opera house as the curtain falls. I come out of my trance, hardly aware of where I have been for the past few hours, and the primary emotion I feel at that moment is a desire that I wish I could go back to the beginning and watch it again. Similarly, at the end of a long period reading the last few chapter of Under the Volcano, I hear Dolente … Dolore, and I have the same emotional feeling. I wish I could go back to the beginning and read it again.

Ron Boothe

Peter Farnum’s Summary of Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood, 2000

Addresses the question:  “How much are the bad turns of one’s life determined by things beyond our control, like sex and class, and how much by personal responsibility?’[1]

It also works as a mystery novel if one does not choose to address the moral question.

Structure:

Four Voices:

1. Iris Chase, writing in retrospect during the last year of her life.                                                  Within a novella, “The Blind Assassin” attributed posthumously to Laura Chase.  There are two voices:
2. A female voice describing trysts with her lover,
3. The male voice of her lover mostly telling a science fiction story about a war on the planet Zyrcon.
4. Various stories in newspapers and bulletins

Four mysteries for the reader to figure out: They are introduced by the “newspaper” voice at the start of the book:

1. Page 3.  Laura Chase, Iris’s sister, killed herself by driving off a bridge under construction.  She was 25.
2. Page 14.  Richard Griffen, Irish’s husband, is found dead in his boat after being missing.  He is in his late 40s.
3. Page 19.  Aimee Griffen, Iris’s daughter, is found dead at the bottom of stairs.  38 years old.
4. Page 31.  Iris presents high school writing award in Laura’s name.  Question:  who is the woman in The Blind Assassin?  We assume it’s Laura.  Is it?

Iris Age	Laura Age	Event	Event Continues		Page	“Voice”
0		Iris Born			73	Iris
3y 5m	0	Laura Born (see her age at picnic/Mounties visit)			177, 210	Iris
6	9	Mother dies (during heat wave so probably Sept)			88, 90	Iris
18	14	Company Picnic when Laura and Iris meet Alex			170	Iris
18	14-15	Laura sees Alex in public around Port Ticonderoga			199	Iris
18	15	Laura hides Alex in cold cellar			210	Irs
18	15	Mounties Visit Laura re Alex			210	Iris
18	15	Alex sexually attacks Iris			217	Iris
18	15	Alex escapes to Toronto			218	Iris
18	15	Father arranges marriage of Iris to Richard			223-5	Iris
18	15	Iris marries Richard			127, 239	Paper / Iris
18-19	15	Honeymoon			300-306	Iris
18	15	Laura’s, Iris’s father dies, Richard doesn’t tell Iris			307	Iris
19	15	Richard’s first attempt to seduce Laura, unsuccessful			500	Iris
19	15	Larua runs away, found at Sunnyside amusement park			258, 307	Paper / Iris
19	15	Iris sees Alex in Toronto, “commits treachery in her heart”			321	Iris
19	15	Iris’s first meeting with Alex (“hard boiled egg”) / starts affair			11, 510	BA-I / Iris
19-20	15-16	Laura lives with Iris/Richard, repeated unsuccessful seductions			500	Iris
19	16	Iris, Richard, Winifred, Laura go on maiden voyage of Queen Mary			9, 345, 347, 377	BA-I / Paper / Iris
19	16	Alex leaves for Spanish Civil War, wants her to leave Richard,         “I wouldn’t have any money” she says			359-61	BA-A/I
20	16	Spanish Civil War starts			390	Iris
20	16	Richard successfully seduces Laura on Water Nixie			393-4, 500	Iris
20	17	Laura gets pregnant			500	Iris
20	17	Laura sent to Bella Vista for abortion			405, 428-30	Letter / Iris
20	17	Aimee born (with dark hair)			432	Iris
20	17	Iris reads “Lizard Men of Xenor” by Alex, all  romance is gone			399-402	BA-A/I
21-22?	17-18?	Reenie helps Laura escape from Bella Vista, Laura goes to Halifax			443, 484	Iris
23-24?	19	Alex leaves for WWII, after seeing Iris the last tiime			462	BA-A/I
28	25	Alex killed in Holland / Destruction of Sakiel-Norn			466-9, 488	BA-I, Iris
28	25	VE Day
28	25	Laura and Iris meet in Toronto			483-89	Iris
28	25	Laura commits suicide			1, 3, 491	Iris, Paper
28		Iris learns that Richard was the father of Laura’s baby			500	Iris
29		Iris Leaves Richard, takes Aimee to Port Ticonderoga			501-2	Iris
31		Blind Assassin Published			4, 509-511	Iris
31		Richard Dies			14, 510-11	Paper / Iris
54-55		Sabrina born			19	Paper
59		Aimee Dies /Winifred Takes Sabrina			19, 434-7	Paper / Iris
81		Winifred Dies			24,	Paper
82		Iris starts writing her book			31, 43	Iris
82		Iris Dies			519	Paper
83		Sabrina comes back			519	Paper
		Legend for Voices
		Iris – the book Iris wrote for Sabrina in 1998
		Paper – news articles or bulletins
		BA/I – Blind Assassin the female voice about their trysts
		BA/A – Blind Assassin the male voice – Alex
		BA-A/I – Blind Assassin where both voices talk about event

Iris On “The Turns Of Life” And Personal Responsibility

• On Motives
  • “Curiosity is not our only motive:  love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on.” P. 494

• On Her Motives
  • “I did believe, at first, that I only wanted justice.  I thought my heart was pure.  We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we’re about to do something harmful, to someone else.” P. 497

• What She Wanted:  with respect to Richard
  • “What did I want?  Nothing much.  Just a memorial of some kind.  But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured?  Endured and resented.  Without memory there is no revenge.” P. 508  Underlining added

• Self Serving Epilogue:
  • “If you knew what was going to happen next – if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions – you’d be doomed.”  P. 517.

Iris’s Actions Regarding, Laura, Richard, and Aimee

In Her Own Words

• Aimee’s death

The last time I went to see Aimee; she was living in a slummy row house near Parliament Street, in Toronto.  A child I guessed must be Sabrina was squatting the square of dirt beside the front walk – a grubby mop-headed ragamuffin wearing shorts but no T-shirt.  She had an old tin cup and was shoveling grit into it with a bent spoon.  She was a resourceful little creature:  she asked me for a quarter….

I knocked on the door, and when there was no answer I opened it and walked in, then climbed the steep, dark, narrow stairs to Aimee’s second floor apartment.  Aimee was in the kitchen, sitting at the small round table, looking at her hands which were holding a coffee mug with a smile button on it…I can’t say I found her very attractive…Most likely she was under the influence of some drug or other.

I tried to talk to her.  I began gently, but she wasn’t in the mood for listening…She was tired of the feeling that things were being hidden from her.  The family had covered it up; no one would tell her the truth…

“I may not have been a perfect mother,” I said.  “I’m willing to admit that, but I did the best I could under the circumstances, circumstances about which you actually know very little.  What was she doing with Sabrina? I went on. Letting her run around like that…”

“You aren’t her grandmother,” said Aimee.  She was crying by now, “Aunt Laura is, or she was, She’s dead, and you killed her!”

“Don’t be stupid, “ I said.  This was the wrong response…When I said the word stupid she began to scream at me…Then (she) picked up the smile-button coffee mug and threw it at me…I retreated backwards, clutching the banister, dodging other items – a shoe, a saucer.  When I got to the front door I fled…

It was only tree weeks after this that Aimee fell down the stairs.

pp. 434-437

• Richard’s death:

I sent the book off.  I due time, I received a letter back.  I answered it.  Events took their course.

The moralists grabbed hold of it, and the pulpit-thumpers and local biddies got into the act, and the uproar began.  Once the corpse flies had made the connection – Laura was Richard Griffen’s dead sister-in-law – they were all over the story like a rash.  Richard had, by that time, his store of political enemies.  Innuendo began to flow.

The story that Laura had committed suicide, so efficiently quashed at the time, rose to the surface again.  People were talking, not just in Port Ticonderoga but in the circles that mattered.  If she’d done it, why?

Someone made an anonymous phone call – now who could have that have been? – and the Bella Vista Clinic entered the picture. Testimony by a former employee…led to a full investigation of the seedier practices carried on there…There was some correspondence between Richard and the director that was particularly damaging…

…“That book!” he (Richard) said.  “You sabotaged me!  … I can’t believe Laura wrote that filthy – that piece of garbage!”

“You don’t want to believe it,” I said, “because you were besotted with her.  You can’t face the possibility that all the time you were having your squalid little flight with her, she must have been in and out of bed with another man – one she loved, unlike you.  Or I assume that’s what they book means – doesn’t it?”

pp.  509-510  underlining added

• Laura’ death:

“Laura, I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but whatever it was you did, it didn’t save Alex.  Alex is dead.  He was killed in the war, six months ago.  In Holland.”

“How do you know?

“I got the telegram,” I said.  They sent it to me.  He listed me as the next of kin.”  Even then I could have changed course; I could have said, There must have been a mistake, it must have been meant for you. But I didn’t say that.  Instead I said, “It was very indiscrete of him.  He shouldn’t have done that, considering Richard.  But he didn’t have any family, and we’d been lovers, you see – in secret, for quite a long time – and who else did he have?”

Laura said nothing.  She only looked at me.  She looked right through me.  Lord knows what she saw.  A sinking ship, a city in flames, a knife in the back”…

After a moment she stood up, reached across the table, and picked up my purse.  Then she turned and walked out of the restaurant…Laura was gone.

Page 488 italics in original, underlining added

Judging Iris

“How much are the bad turns of one’s life determined by things beyond our control, like sex and class, and how much by personal responsibility?’⁽¹⁾

Below are some events in Iris’s life.  Please indicate for each whether you think she had personal responsibility for them or if things beyond her control determined them.

If she had personal responsibility, please characterize it (negligence, thoughtlessness, deliberate attempt to cause harm.)  For example Iris’s marriage might be due to things beyond her control.  Or, the role she played in Richard’s death may have resulted from deliberate conscious action on her part.  Her role in Laura’s death may have been due to a mistake due to thoughtlessness, or a deliberate attempt to claim Alex for herself only.

Here are some events:  (the number in ( ) is her age when the event occurred.)

• Getting married to Richard (18)
• Not figuring out that Richard was sexually pursing Laura (19)
• Her decision to have an affair with Alex (19)
• Her decision not to leave Richard when Alex asks her to run away with him (19)
• Not figuring out that Richard had successfully seduced Laura (20)
• Not doing anything when Richard sent Laura away to Bella Vista. (20)
• Not helping Laura escape from Bella Vista like Renee did (21-2)
• Telling Laura that she had had a longstanding affair with Alex and not seeing the impact that would have on her.  (28)
• Her degree of responsibility in Laura’s suicide. (28)
• Her responsibility for Richard’s death.  (31)
• Her responsibility for Aimee’s unhappy life (20-59)
• Her responsibility to care for Sabrina (54-82)

Add other events that come to mind, and characterize them.

---

[1] Houppert, Karen.  2000. “’The Blind Assassin” by Margaret Atwood” Salon.com.  September 12, 2000. http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/09/12/atwood/ Accessed on 10-11-2009

The Healing of America (2009)

On Wednesday, December 2 we will discuss the following book recommended by Bill Hagens:

T. R. Reid, The Healing of America, Penguin, 2009.

Under the Volcano (1947)

On Wednesday, November 4, we will discuss the following book recommended by Ron Boothe:

Malcom Lowry, Under the Volcan0, first published by J. B. Lippincott, 1947.

The Blind Assassin (2000)

NOTE: Several members will be out of town on our regular meeting date that would have been this week. Therefore, we have changed date (for this month only) to one week later, the second Wednesday of the month. On Wednesday, October 14, 2009 we will discuss the following book recommended by Peter Farnum:

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, originally published in hardcover in USA by Nan A. Talese, 2000. This book was the winner of the Booker Prize.