Getting Back to Them Good Ol’ Days

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

“Testing the Limits”

 Samuel L. Clemens (1835-1910), like many beginning writers, recounted in his early writing career , through the vernacular of Mark Twain, what he had experienced: his travel stories (Innocents Abroad, 1869), the rowdy life in the maybe-strike-it-rich Territories (Roughing It, 1872).  His earliest fiction The Gilded Age, a social satire written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873, showed the problem of narration through two distinct voices; however, Mark Twain’s voice is noticeable and he learned how to incorporate history and events, past and present, in the process.  When he realized the witty narrative persona of Mark Twain, he gave free will to his imagination and expression.  Before The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Clemens, as Mark Twain, struck a rich vein with some short fiction and especially his hilarious social commentary.  As a newspaper man, he also published some of his stories or yarns through journalistic presses, e.g. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” one of his early hits.  When I taught English Lit. (1970s), this short story could still be found in certain college literary anthologies.

 From the start the well-travelled Clemens had much natural skill with stylish folk-storytelling, discovering his genius as raconteur especially when he went on stage before the ordinary folk.  Wit and humor, his fame dependent on them, informed his artistic medium, and though he aspired to write more seriously, i.e. in a more refined style, he still wanted to incorporate humor, believing it the way he knew best to expose hypocrisy, deride shams, and eliminate stupid superstitions.  The purpose of his satire and parody, he felt, was to raise consciousness about human rights and human liberties. He worked hard to make his writing look deceptively simple.  In this effort to reach the masses, Twain began his longer fiction by turning to stories of his Missouriboyhood.  In Tom Sawyer Mark Twain’s narrative voice, reveling in his childhood mentality, carries most of the storytelling, especially where the dramatic, dialectical dialog occurs.  However, that voice does grow more serious as the adventures develop and the crises become heavier. Sam Clemens omniscient editorial voice intervenes at times. For example: At the end of the church school scene when Tom guesses “David and Goliath” as Jesus’ disciples, Clemens quickly calls for an end to further failed antics of play: “Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene.” (End Ch. 4, Penguin Classics, (2005), p.40.) 

 [Sidebar:  Most of us, I’d assume, have seen Hal Holbrook’s expert yarn-spinning impersonation of Clemens's Mark Twain performances.  Who are other contemporary versions?  Club member Ron Powers felt that Twain had his early 20^th-century avatar in Will Rogers.  I think that’s right on the mark.  Perhaps George Carlin had some of the crackling, street-wise commentator in his stage persona when he told satirical stories.  Certainly Garrison Keillor of “LakeWobegon” fame has perfected a modern Twain-ish persona in his wry narratives. As early as the mid-1860s, Mark Twain, the stage performer, became not only a national celebrity but a world-renowned personality; his fame was global.]

 At our discussion, RMBC member Richard Smaby raised the question about how Sam Clemens got his publications out.  Larzer Ziff’s book (*see below) points out that Twain’s early works became published through a subscription method by which door-to-door canvassers took samples into towns and outlying counties and got orders before a printer put books together.  Big-city bookstores offering trade issues were available to sell to the cultured public.  Feeling beyond the fringe of the snooty cognoscenti who might learn of books through reviews, Clemens found success as his works spread throughout the wider population eagerly receptive of Twain’s style and genre of storytelling.  As it is today, women were mainly the novel readers in Clemens’s time, but the works of Mark Twain found audiences equally among men, women and children.  He remarked: “I have never tried … to help cultivate the cultivated classes.  I was not equipped for it either by native gifts or training.  And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game—the masses.” [*Ziff, p. 28. A short work, Mark Twain by Larzer Ziff, in the Lives and Legacies series (Oxford, 2004) contains some of the data I found about this aspect of Clemens’s life. ]

 A decade or so ago, in a writing workshop I was taking, it was recommended we write something about ourselves, how it was when we were children.  I recall one of the women readers said, after reading one or two pieces about boys’ lives, “Ugh! I never really wanted to know what horrible mischief boys got up to.”  Mine were about vicious stone fights among rival gangs, about strategies to escape from attending church service or Sunday school, about being discovered rifling the immature berries and vegetables in community gardens.  Like the above response of the woman in my class, in early reviews of Tom Sawyer, similar prudish objections can be found by those who felt children would be influenced to imitate adventurous Tom and his pals. By my time, perhaps the genre had become shopworn; no matter, I found myself caught up in fun-filled rascally acts for which I, as an amoral original, deserved and received punishments.  Unlike Twain’s Tom Sawyer, my unwitting personas were never to obtain fame or glory, but they were good mediums to journey back through the mists of time to a simpler age.  The benefit was to have a known subject, through which to lose myself in reminiscences and to have something familiar to practice composition on.  

Antique villages, hidden in woodlands, or surrounded by moorlands, ponds and lakes, or nestled in hills and dales, can be, as Agatha Christie proved in her repertoire of popular mysteries, just as deadly boring at times as they are deadly environments where murders and violence quite regularly occur.  When a village, like Mark Twain’s St. Petersburg, borders a mammoth river, spotted with sandbars and uninhabited islands and has networks of caves the reaches and depths of which “No man knew,” [a Homeric reference perhaps?] not to mention the wasteland territories that beckon adventurers to go beyond the accepted culture, then the expectation of adventures of danger and violence is greatly heightened by the very mythic dimensions of the landscape.  Sleepy St. Petersburg was more than a place for whitewashing fences, going to school for whippings and Sunday school for acting-up.   

 Twain established Tom Sawyer’s role as a juvenile rascal, a playful sui generis, hungry for action, games, and play that released him from the constraints of village boredom, that allowed him to rebel against rules of authority and accepted mores.  Through many of Tom’s adventures, playing the little devil and getting away with it sufficed for entertainments that might cheer up and delight the boys and girls the book was purportedly aimed at.  However, as many critics came to see in time, there are serious undercurrents in the games played and substructural layers of meaning in the imagery, and as the adventures proceed, the overall design leads the reader to encounter complex psychological crises, with consequences that shake up the lives of the young “heroes” (I mean “heroines,” too) and the nature of the community.

 In the steel town of Corby in the Midlands of England where I grew up, there was, or seemed to my young mind, a vast rustic territory to explore, no more than a few hundred yards from our semi-detached council house.  A street gang of children formed as we grew up, adventurous enough to hie out for places we were told to avoid—the bankless clay-hole water-filled quarries of immense depth in which monstrous ancient pike were said to lurk, the lines of slag heaps by the works which contained the detritus of the open-hearth furnaces, the seemingly-clear, rippling brooks and leech-ridden slimy sloughs that were fed by who-knows-what other running waters, and many distant fields and hills too far from home where the farmers would not have been looking out for wandering children.  Like Tom Sawyer, we sensed that freedom and adventure lay beyond, out there somewhere beyond the garden hedge, across from the tarred roads, the stone walls, and the pasture hedgerows in places we had not yet searched out or partially tromped through to inaugurate a track for a tribal pathway.  The stories I might recount of these adventures, if I were lucky to meet some old street pal in a pub, would probably come forth as myth-dreams, outrageously re-elaborated with illustrations way beyond the reality of events.  Mark Twain had his Hannibal community of characters to draw on for Tom’s adventures and the landscape may have become somewhat far-fetched, e.g. the caves of never-ending labyrinths. Just so, memoirs are made up of myths, our own and the collective’s, whenever we want to attract an audience.

Sometimes one does not have to be far-out to get caught up in adventure.  Tom was “lost” or “gone” to Aunt Polly in the very opening of the novel, but we find he’s right under her nose, sneaking jam treats in the closet.  Later he is hiding inside his home again, in a most intense scene when he returns from pirating on Jackson’s Island to hear Aunt Polly’s worries over the loss or possible death of Tom and the other boys.  From the very beginning scene of Tom Sawyer, I can throw myself back to my childhood in England.  One of my own dream-myths occurred in the pantry of my godparents’ kitchen where I found myself lost, paralyzed in hiding, because, so conscious of the punishment to come, I was unable to comfortably reveal myself as anything but a rotten thief.  The story was told for years afterwards, repeated almost as folktale for a good laugh by our family circle, but at the time, shades of nightmare, fears of complete loss, perhaps by my drowning in one of the aforementioned clay holes, caste a pall over any humor or lightheartedness of the situation.  

It goes as follows: Out of curiosity or perhaps boredom, I had wandered into Aunt Annie’s open pantry, a dropped-floor room off the kitchen, in which foods were placed to stay cool in those days of the 1940s before electricity and refrigerators were common in the cottage-like dwellings down on old Corby village outskirts.  There I spied the dessert for Sunday tea; my aunt had made a large egg custard in a copious casserole bowl.  As one of my favorite dishes, this pudding she had obviously made because she knew I was coming to tea.  The bronzed, nut-megged crust invited me—no, seduced me–to sample the pudding, and in savoring it, I was lost, drowned, in ladling the glorious, golden, creamy custard.  Before I awoke to my crime, I had made quite a divot or ditch in the bowl, and sat petrified in the pantry corner, imagining what dread punishment I’d receive for such a serious theft.  Not showing myself, I heard a pandemonium of concern grow outside the door—name-calling, shouting and hallo-ing, sending for the constable to help scout for me, a hullabaloo of ooh-ing and oh-no-ing, grim mentioning of the worst possible places—“He wouldn’t have gone down by the clay hole, would he?”  Eventually I came forth, showing myself safe inside the house, never having ventured outside.  I’m sure, out of relief, I must have cried my eyes out for what I’d done and how much trouble I’d caused, spoiling everybody’s Sunday teatime.  In time, the folk-tale of Lost David and the Spoiled Egg-custard cast me as a folktale hero, but at the time of occurrence the action did not allow me much showing-off.   I dread thinking back how much I must have paid for that high-jinks whether in spank-counts or in miserable seclusion.  The point is, I did all this mischief in rascally abandon, right within the kitchen walls, without going beyond the physical bounds of authority, hardly aware of the serious consequences of my actions.  The kitchen pantry was my dark cave that Sunday teatime.

 From enjoying Tom Sawyer’s adventures, perhaps several of us readers had some reflections of dream-myth adventures of their childhood years.  Samuel Clemens, on the cusp of turning 40, was busy reviving and embellishing memories of his past in Hannibal; he fictionalized characters and events, as he says in his introduction, in the ways of architectural combination.  To impose a design on the novel, what he had to use of past traditions was perhaps very different from a novelist’s approach in our times.  Twain had a number of Bad Boy stories by authors of his era: he had Charles Dickens’ stories, tales of Robin Hood, James Fenimore Cooper’s adventures, Walter Scott’s knightly romances, and a host of folktales and myths to think back on for imitation or refashioning.  I wonder how many common readers today could actually detail the literary, folktale or mythological motifs Clemens employed. 

In the matter of structure, which our member Sid Whaley brought up for consideration, ever since Walter Blair’s article in the journal Modern Philology (August, 1939), Tom Sawyer’s adventures have been accepted as having some artistic design: the narrative thread of Tom and Becky’s romance moves from immature show-off beginnings, through Tom’s brave intervention on Becky’s behalf to take the punishment for tearing the school master’s anatomy book, and finally the outcome of the cave experience for which Tom is regaled as heroically courageous.  Likewise, when conscience burns more responsibly in Tom, he is concerned that Muff Potter be revealed as innocent in court and the true murderer named.  His courage to act in spite of great fear is highlighted.  Also, his agitation is exacerbated by keeping his oath not to disclose Huck’s having witnessed the crime.  This crisis is managed successfully as Tom accepts the balance between speaking the truth and his fear of the consequences.  Other crises are not so successful.  Tom’s conscience motivates him to return to Aunt Polly’s from the Jackson’s Island adventure once he realizes the families and townsfolk think the boys are dead.  However, like the confidence man he is, he prefers to exploit the situation.  Thus he shows off in his accustomed ways in a mock resurrection at the town funeral.  In this part, he plays the schemer parodying heroism and his clever games get the better of him.  The climactic success of the story–the saving of Becky from the caves, the discovery of Injun Joe’s cache of treasure, and the grand reception by the community, especially the praise from Judge Thatcher–bathes Tom more truly in heroic light than in any other success of his less virtuous actions. 

At our discussion, I suggested the term “rite of passage” as a measure of character growth or change from one station or role in community to a new level.  Used as a term for rituals of transformation by anthropologists, “rites de passage” was defined by Arnold van Gennep as having three parts.  The stages are separation, liminality, and re-aggregation.  These stages of coming of age or status change can be shown in modern communities; many myths and stories contain the three stages.  Basically the idea is the hero (or heroine) must leave his community (separation stage), the comfortable realm where he is taken care of, if he is to learn how to grow up.  Then he sets out for a place-between, limbo, the liminal or marginal world.  This realm is a place of new experience, for discovering one’s wits, skills, and resources in order to survive and thrive.  Finally, the hero returns to—re-aggregates with–his community, who, when the ritual passage has been successful, welcome him back as a transformed being, and promote him to a new station in life.  We can see signs of such a passage in Tom Sawyer’s career, but the adventures are mostly situations which allow Tom to exercise himself in surmounting obstacles.  Success in solving crises does not necessarily change one’s identity.  The courtship with Becky is a checkered affair, the limbo of exhilaration and melancholy represents an emotional venturing in the normal childhood ways, and has its climax in the nightmare limbo of the caves from which Tom, constantly searching and applying his skills, is born anew out of the hillside opening.  The reception in town is celebratory and grand plans for Tom’s bright future are expressed.  Nevertheless, he is still the juvenile Tom Sawyer, for years of imaginative scheming and romantic play lie ahead before he will realize his youth or manhood.      

 The three stages can also be described for the Jackson’s Island escapade, where the tri-part ritual shows itself a form of play-acting.  Eventually after the boys’ return, Tom’s imaginative brilliance is shown to be tarnished after his schemes are exposed.  In the Muff Potter affair, he receives due admiration, for his court testimony was the action of a responsible citizen to save an innocent from hanging.  Without doubt, Tom wrestled successfully with crises and solved a dilemma or two.  He achieved much of the fame and glory his schemes aimed at through the spring and summer of his adventures; however, his boyhood is still intact.  At the tale’s end, Tom is persuading Huck, who dislikes the proper life of the Widow Douglas, to try out longer his new circumstances; he encourages Huck to join the Sawyer gang of merry robbers, who after initiations of blood oaths, will enjoy games much more exciting than playing pirates.                                                 

 Reading the Adventures of Tom Sawyer for its thematic core, though there may be many moral lessons expressed throughout the course of the narrative, one might see patterns of one or two predominant myths or folk-tales.  For example, the rags-to-riches folk-tale motif one can find throughout world literature, especially in romances, comedies, and other melodramatic works.  Robert Regan in his monograph Unpromising Heroes: Mark Twain and His Characters (U. of California Press, 1966) sought to explain how Tom Sawyer fits squarely in the traditional pattern of a Folktale Hero.  In a nutshell, the story of the Unpromising Hero tells how the poorest or worst becomes the richest or best.  One might consider Cinderella a heroine of this type.  However, Regan sees nearly all facets of this folk-tale motif in Tom’s life:  “sibling rivalry, the derisive community, the moral test, even the descent into the underworld for the ritual of courage, at length the rewards, the hand of the princess, the favor of her father, and the plaudits of the citizenry.”  Also present:  “the giant to be conquered, the treasure to be discovered, the special equipment required for the descent to the treasure’s hiding place.” (Regan, p. 110)  Clemens may have initially conceived of his boyhood adventures to entertain as comic anecdotes, showing off the smarty-pants games and schemes of his day, with a childhood romance of the simple kind detailed in Tom’s and Becky’s first encounters.  The first half of the work illustrates this original plan.  Then, over the course of composition, the romance became serious and played into the greater tale of the hero’s successful quest for treasure and fame. (pp. 110-111)   Regan’s detailed account of Tom Sawyer as an Unpromising Hero is one insightful study I’d recommend for those of you who wish to look under the surface of Mark Twain’s storytelling.  How the folk motif applies to Clemens’ other works makes fascinating reading.   In recent years, many other critical articles and monographs have brought to light features of Adventures of Tom Sawyer that open one’s eyes to Twain’s literary genius.

 What is noteworthy today is that we still read Mark Twain, especially the adventures of Tom and Huck, and the reader believes the motivation and action of the characters and plots.  One does not have to sit with one’s feet in the sand talking about pirates and Robin Hood to feel that Tom or Huck’s adventures were based on real happenings.  Vicariously they are possible for us.  By the nature of his writing, Samuel Clemens cajoles or convinces us that even in these modern times such escapades are still possible, for his iconic characters are still recognizable in our day.  And it wouldn’t matter if we lived in Borneo orIndia.   

Appendix: A Look Back at The Kid

[Spoiler alert for those who have not read Russell Banks' Lost Memory of Skin]

 In Russell Banks’ Lost Memory of Skin (the Retired Men’s Book Club choice for December 2011) many of us picked up on the allusions to earlier literature of young boys’ adventures, comparing or contrasting them with the Kid’s pathetic existence.  Banks did not conceal the references with great subtlety:  the idea of treasure maps and pirates was brought into play by the sociology Professor’s explicitly naming Robert Louis Stevenson’s *Treasure Island.*  Add to that the open-air bar of Benbow and his sidekick Trinidad Bob.  Another explicit reference occurs in the following:

 “The Kid reminds the Professor of Huckleberry Finn somehow.  Here he is now, long after he lit out for the Territory, grown older and as deep into the Territory as you can go, camped out alone, where the continent and all the rivers meet the sea and there’s no farther he can run to.” [Lost Memory of Skin (HarperCollins, 2011), p. 105]

 Captain Kydd of pirate history and folklore is referred to and becomes a somewhat fantastic dream of treasure-hunting on theBarrierIslandsfor the Kid to imagine and focus on, to lead his mind forward, beyond his pornographic memories, his “crime,” and the miserable life incarcerated among the homeless under the Claybourne Causeway.  Also, Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn arise from memory’s cave when the Kid dares to go floating on a houseboat to his Barrier Island with his sidekicks Annie and the parrot, thinking of finding pirates’ buried treasure.  Like Tom, the Kid fishes and stays on the island until boredom sets in, then returns to the docks he floated from.  In the bizarre strategies of the monstrously large Professor, the Kid receives a large sum of money as a treasure he can live off for quite a long time.  This treasure is “buried” in the Professor’s basement safe, not in a cave, and it is deliberately handed over to the Kid.  In the end, like Injun Joe behind the iron gates of the cave, the Professor is found “buried,” drowned in a concrete canal, trapped in his van, locked to the wheel of his SUV.

 Enough said, for perhaps this material is best to include in comments related to Banks’ book.

David Gilmour (January, 2012) 

 

 

 

 

  

Discussion Questions for “Thinking Fast and Slow” with some of my own answers

I’ve now finished “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. Probably more than any other non-fiction / scientific book, I found it so informative and interesting that I could hardly put it down. Yes, it was not easy reading, requiring a lot of thought and remembering, but for me each section brought new insights that fundamentally changed my view of myself and the world.

I sent out (through Ron) a note telling everyone how I would run the discussion. When we meet, I won’t even attempt to summarize the book and give a lecture on its contents. Rather I will ask you to give your personal reactions to the book, perhaps by addressing the questions below.

Here are the questions I asked you to think about:

1. What did you learn from this book about how you think, make judgements, decisions? How active/accurate is your “System1″, is your “System 2″ energetic or lazy?

2. The author discusses many research studies concerning what influences our minds such as “Priming”, “Anchoring” (think of negotiations), and many others. Which of these phenomena was most interesting/surprising to you? Why?

3. Were you always convinced by the author’s description of the various scientists’ methods, or did you sometimes doubt their conclusions? Give an example of strong or questionable conclusions.

* For example: would you pay more for a set of dishes containing some broken cups and saucers or an identical set with no cups or saucers at all?

* Consider the experiment where a person chokes and very few people offer to help. Is it because they suspect it’s part of the experiment? (Reverse Hawthorne Effect?)

4. Are you convinced that “highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are”?

5. Does his finding that professional financial firms do no better in returns than the long term market average make you want to rethink your retirement investment strategy?

I’ll add a 6th because I found his discussion of happiness so interesting.

6.  Studies have shown that our memories of what we have experienced are a function only of the peak part of that experience (e.g. the point of most pain in a colonoscopy) and the end of the experience. In particular he found that the duration of the experience was unimportant to how we remember it. If we had a vacation in which we saw something spectacularly beautiful and the vacation ended with everyone feeling happy then our memory of it will be good even if it rained and was cold most of the rest of the days. For some reason Kahneman thinks our minds are wrong when it forms memories this way. He says “Duration neglect and the peak-end rule in the evaluation of stories…are equally indefensible.”

I find it incredible that a Nobel prize winning psychologist could discover some aspect of the way humans function, then judge it to be wrong. In doing so he is putting himself in the role of a god, above and beyond the scientific results he has produced. He thinks for some reason he has earned the right to judge creation. I don’t think he has earned that right and his attempt to claim it diminishes him in my mind.

I’ll briefly say a bit about some the questions I asked you to address. I will elaborate more when we get together.

1. What did you learn from this book about how you think, make judgements, decisions? How active/accurate is your “System1″, is your “System 2″ energetic or lazy?

This part of the book was devastating to how I understood myself. I had taken lots of psychology tests at work and learned that I was deliberate and logical. Yet in reading this section I could see that most of the time I accept what my system 1 tells me, and that my system 2 is quite lazy. There are times when I can make my system 2 dominant, but they are the exception not the rule. Most of the time I’m impulsive based on what System 1 tells me.

3. Were you always convinced by the author’s description of the various scientists’ methods, or did you sometimes doubt their conclusions? Give an example of strong or questionable conclusions.

I thought there were many cases in which the result might have occurred because the subjects knew they were in a psychological test and not in the real world. For example in one experiment one of the students started to choke and received very little aid. If I had been there I would have immediately assumed that the choking was part of the experiment and I would not have reacted like I would in real-life.

4. Are you convinced that “highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are”?

I am convinced that my wife is smarter than I am. I am also convinced that very few people really understand what “regression to the mean” is and how powerful a force it is.

5. Does his finding that professional financial firms do no better in returns than the long term market average make you want to rethink your retirement investment strategy?

My financial portfolio is made up of funds like the one that mimics the performance of the Standard and Poor 500. I buy and hold for a long time. I tried an experiment once taking a “small” sum of money and doing active buying and selling of single stocks. It didn’t take me long to lose more than half of it. 

February 2012 Selection: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

At our February meeting we will be discussing the following selection from Peter Farnum:

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 edition (October 25, 2011), 512 pages.

Peter provides the following information to help us prepare for the discussion:

————————–
I found “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman to be a remarkably interesting and instructive book. Since it was written by a Nobel Prize winning scientist, rather than a writer who popularizes scientific results, the story line may be less dramatic than other books, but we know the science is accurately described (though there is still plenty of room for scientific debate.)

I’d like to focus on your personal reactions to this book: what you learned about yourself or others, what was most surprising, what you found most credible, what you had trouble believing.

I’ll start off the discussion with a brief description of “System 1″ and “System 2″, and then give my own answers to a few of the questions below. Then I’ll open up the discussion to other member’s answers or any other comments they have.

1. What did you learn from this book about how you think, make judgements, decisions? How active/accurate is your “System1″, is your “System 2″ energetic or lazy?
2. The author discusses many research studies concerning what influences our minds such as “Priming”, “Anchoring” (think of negotiations), and many others. Which of these phenomena was most interesting/surprising to you? Why?
3. Were you always convinced by the author’s description of the various scientists’ methods, or did you sometimes doubt their conclusions? Give an example of strong or questionable conclusions.
* For example: would you pay more for a set of dishes containing some broken cups and saucers or an identical set with no cups or saucers at all?
* Consider the experiment where a person chokes and very few people offer to help. Is it because they suspect it’s part of the experiment? (Reverse Hawthorne Effect?)
4. Are you convinced that “highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are”?
5. Does his finding that professional financial firms do no better in returns than the long term market average make you want to rethink your retirement investment strategy?

Finally since this Ron’s field, I’ll feel free to ask him to contribute liberally and referee any intense discussions. Which brings me to my final question. Kahneman saves some of his most strongly worded criticism for those who make public long-term predictions in an uncertain world. Ron certainly knows this, so why is he so insistent that computers will pass the Turing Test over time in every human endeavor??

Peter
——————————–
Ron responds — Guess I need to study up on “What is a Turing test?” before our discussion!

January 2012 Selection: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer

At our January 3, 2012 meeting we discussed David Gilmour’s selection:

Mark Twain, Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876.

David provides the following information about his selection:

There are many of Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer at Half-Price books, in the Banned Books series ($3.98). It contains a brief introduction to the bad-boy anti-hero attraction of this 1876 American novel. There are swanker editions, with Adventures of Hucklebury Finn combined with Tom Sawyer. The Penguin edition contains a longish introductory essay by John Seelye and selected notes on arcane language, historical references, and geography. Since there’s a long and detailed literary history concerning Twain’s Tom and Huck novels, a list of 20th-century critical literature helps if you have time to look up another journal article. The Penguin has a few pages of Further Readings.

Post-Discussion Commentary on Lost Memory of Skin: Better the Second Time Around

Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin, 2011.

I read this book twice in preparing for our discussion. The first time through I had ambivalent feelings about whether or not it was a significant enough work to warrant spending much time and effort analyzing it. However, during my second reading I was more favorably impressed, and now concur with those critics who deem this a major literary work. The crux of my difference in opinion on the two readings has to do with my interpretation of the narrator(s) of the story. In this commentary, I am going to describe how my interpretation of the narrator changed between my first and second readings.

During my first reading I was puzzled, confused, and unimpressed by the narrator of the story. The narrator sometimes came across as a pompous moralizer or an uptight, and somewhat incompetent, social critic. For me, the experience of reading the book frequently felt less like an enjoyable novel where one inhabits the lives of the characters, and more like I was listening to a sermon or to a lecture in a classroom. Consider passages like this one:

“When a society commodifies its children by making them into a consumer group, dehumanizing them by converting them into a crucial, locked-in segment of the economy, and then proceeds to eroticize its products in order to sell them, the children gradually come to be perceived by the rest of the community and by the children themselves as sexual objects.” (p. 159)

This particular passage is describing the social theory of a character identified as The Professor and a charitable interpretation of this passage might be that The Professor really described his theories with this kind of language, but even if so, it still reads as pretty stultifying prose. If I wanted to read this kind of stuff, I would most likely go find a sociology textbook instead of having it force-fed to me while reading a fictional novel. Even worse, are moralizing passages whose voice seems totally inconsistent with the character who is stating them. Consider the following passage attributed to The Kid, a High School graduate who we are told “had not once read more than the first few pages of any of the books that had been assigned over his entire four years of high school. (p. 222). The Kid is nevertheless able to wax philosophical about the theological implications of the biblical story of The Garden of Eden:

“Maybe from the beginning the Snake was secretly working for God who was mainly interested in testing Adam and Eve because in spite of being all-seeing and all-knowing He couldn’t be there in The Garden of Eden 24/7 to watch over them and protect their innocence. If God was going to trust them to behave themselves and follow His rules when He was elsewhere in the universe they would have to be capable of protecting their innocence from temptation on their own. They would have to be like angels. God probably wasn’t sure they could do that.” (p 75).

So, not only is the narrator of this novel frequently preaching to us omnisciently, but he is putting his philosophical and theological ideas into the mouths of characters in the novel, even characters where the words being put into their mouths do not appear to fit.

The narrator also has the annoying tendency of explaining his allusions to us readers as though we are too ignorant to pick them up on our own. For example, I am reading along on page 187 and come across the phrase, “… the Professor shows up early and checks the place out and is pleased by what he sees.” I read this phrase with pleasure, picking up the obvious allusion to a biblical reference. This pleasure is quickly spoiled when the narrator feels compelled to inform me later in the same paragraph, “The Professor is like God stopping by to visit the Garden of Eden and approving the way his human beings are running the place.” Similarly, I am enjoying the plethora of allusions to Treasure Island until the pleasure is ruined by dialog that makes the allusions explicit (e.g., “That DVD is like Captain Kydd’s treasure, man.” p. 294)

Adding insult to injury, the narrator frequently repeats himself. For example, we learn on page 162 that “The map he copied was the frontispiece in a 1911 edition of the novel Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth.” But just in case we weren’t paying close enough attention the first time, the narrator repeats it for us when he describes on page 193 “the map that the Professor drew from his memory of the map drawn by Robert Louis Stevenson to illustrate his novel Treasure Island.” At the end of my first reading of the novel, I am wondering to myself, Is Russel Banks carefully constructing an important literary work, or is this just a quickly conceived and written hack-work, bereft of careful editing?

All in all, I found there was something odd and off-kilter about trying to figure out the point of view of this narrator. The experience created in the reader (at least for me) was not that of feeling as though one is present in the situations described. It did not even feel as though one was hearing about the events as they are remembered by the characters involved. Even the dialog attributed to the characters often has a false ring to it. It tended to feel more like the narrator is someone who has talked with, and/or interviewed these characters, and is now writing a story about what he thinks happened to them based on these interviews. But the narrator is not very gifted as a writer.

When I got to Section V of the novel, something seemed to change in the point of view. Somewhere within this section I became aware that I was not exactly sure if it was the same narrator. And a new character is introduced, The Writer who works for Outside Magazine. The writer learns about the events that have been described in the first four sections of the novel indirectly, first by spending time talking with The Kid and second by watching videotaped interviews The Kid had carried out with The Professor. The writer is obviously considering writing a story about what happened to The Kid and The Professor. However, The Kid does not trust that The Writer would be able to do justice to the story because “Something about hearing the Writer’s version of events makes [The Kid] uncomfortable: in [The Writer's] telling the story gets simplified and crude even though everything the Writer says either is factual or if the facts aren’t known is rational.” (p. 372).

The Writer himself later asserts that he is not likely to ever write this story:

“No way I’ll write about it. … Who’d want to read it? Kiddie porn and child molesters, pedophiles and suicidal college professors? Jesus! Besides, I’m just a freelance travel writer, not some kind of investigative journalist or a novelist trying to depress people. I have to make a living. The stuff I write is designed strictly to make people want to spend money on hotels and airlines that advertise in my employers’ magazines.” (p 378)

I go back and re-read the novel from the beginning, this time adopting the frame-of-mind that what I am reading is perhaps a hack Travel Writer’s attempt to tell the story of what he thinks happened to The Kid and The Professor based on what he has learned after the fact. Read from this perspective, I discover that the point of view of the novel no longer seems off-kilter and odd, and those aspects of the novel that I originally thought annoying (the poor editing of repeated sections, the apparent need to feel one has to explain one’s allusions, the clumsy attempts to put moral lessons into the story and into the dialog of the characters) now end up making for a delightful read. During my second read, I am able to engage in the outer-layer fun parts of the novel, such as discovering that several of the place names used in the book refer to tourist attractions in southern Florida, and that the book is full of puns and codes and Treasure Hunts.

So after two readings I am now ready to re-evaluate my initial impressions, and consider the novel to be a carefully constructed complex structure in which a somewhat playful outer-layer framework is used to embed a serious, dark, and important inner story, one that can itself be read on many levels and speaks to many important issues affecting our society. (Some of which I outlined in my previous posting, and several of which came up during our group’s discussion of the book).

Ron Boothe
psyrgb@emory.edu

What is a Novel?

David Gilmour sent me the following:
“For the book club’s information, there’s a two part BBC program well worth listening to. Noah Richler has two 25 min. episodes on how stories play a part in cultural history, going through genres and detailing myths, epics, novels, and even including the digital world of gaming and social media.”

I include links here:
A Short History of Story, episode 1
A Short History of Story, episode 2

I listened to both, and they are excellent. There are many ideas discussed that relate to broad issues we have discussed regarding a number of our recent book selections.

December Selection: Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin, 2011

At our meeting on December 8 we will discuss:

Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin, 2011.

I picked this book because I saw a review in the New York Times calling it
“a major new work by Russell Banks destined to be a canonical novel of its time.”

I have not read any of Banks’ earlier books. Two things I know about him are that he is known for creating characters and situations full of “moral ambiguity”, and I really like the Atom Egoyan film The Sweet Hereafter (1997) that is based on an earlier Banks novel.

As we prepare for our discussion of this book, here are some topics I would like everyone to think about.

This book is chock-full of thematic and character parallels, allusions, symbols, moral lessons, and coded puzzles. Too chock-full perhaps; something we can discuss at our meeting. I provide a few examples here, and one of your pre-discussion assignments is to fill in these lists with others.

Here are a few examples of parallel characters and themes:
1. The most obvious is that the lives of The Professor and The Kid have many parallels.
2. The narrator suggests to us that perhaps The Kid should not have been allowed to have pets, and that The Kid’s Mother perhaps should not have had him.
3. The Kid trusts Iggy; Iggy is killed. The Kid trusts The Rabbit; The Rabbit commits suicide. The Kid trusts Brandi8; The Kid ends up designated as a sexual predator for life. The Kid comes to trust The Professor; The Professor is either killed or commits suicide. And I was intrigued near the end of the novel with the question, Should The Kid trust The Writer?
4. One of the chapters states that The Kid’s life parallels the history of The Seminole Indians.
5. The Kid’s ankle bracelet parallels the manacles worn by the prisoners seen working at the park. And these seem to be related in some way to the locks used by The Kid to secure his bicycle and by The Professor to secure himself to his van when he commits suicide.
6. The Kid was caught in a sting operation. The Sheister was caught in a sting operation. Perhaps The Professor was caught in a sting operation. And perhaps all of us, except by luck or the grace of God, could have been caught in a sting operation based on acts we committed when young.

Here are some examples of allusions I noticed in the book:
1. Treasure Island throughout (Benbow’s, pirates, treasure maps, etc).
2. The Bible, in particular the Genesis story of The Garden of Edan, the Serpant, Paradise and Hell, and discussions of God’s Law versus Man’s Laws of good and evil.
3. There are many implicit allusions and at least two explicit references to fact that Kid’s life has some similarities to Huck Finn.
4. There are several implicit allusions and at least one explicit reference to Heart of Darkness.
5. There are several allusions to Russell Banks’ earlier novel, The Sweet Hereafter, including the character Dolores Driscoll. (I am curious to hear from those of you who have read other Banks’ novels, whether or not there are obvious allusions to some of his other work).
6. There are allusions to Moby Dick, most directly in the descriptions of the Professor’s van being pulled from the water, Like a Harpooned whale.

A listing of possible symbols used in the book could run for pages. Here I will simply list two of the most obvious. Please come to the discussion prepared to discuss other examples.
1. The Professor is obviously too big to be considered simply as a single character in the story. He is used as a symbol for, among other things, God, Do-gooder social scientists who think they can remake society for the better, and all of us who carry around secrets about our pasts.
2. The Kid, in addition to being an actual character, is a symbol for our society and its values, including the expanding role of the internet in forming our consciousness, the pervasiveness of sexual imagery and pornography, the literal and figurative ways that technology now allows us to be “connected” with others and also allows corporations and governments to monitor our activities.

I am also interested in the significance of the structure of the book. The facts are laid out to us in 5 sections (Why not 1, 2, or even 100?) each of which has several chapters. Some chapters describe events “in the present”, others give background information about events that happened in the past to both The Kid and The Professor, and some chapters include a combination of both kinds of information. Most of the information in the book is provided to us by a narrator (more about that below), with interspersed snippets of dialog. However, some of the chapters are completely dialog (the interviews). How does this structure (the organization and order in which the information is presented to us) relate to the story being told? Are there parallelisms in structure and prose that match up to the parallel themes of the book?

Probably the question that intrigues me the most about the book has to do with the narrator. He (I am going to refer to the narrator as a male although I suppose it could be a female) comes across frequently as a pompous moralizer, constantly lecturing or sermonizing to us. Is the narrator perhaps The Writer (of “Outside” magazine). I think The Writer would potentially have access to all of the information that is revealed to us in the book. Or is the narrator someone else, and is it even the same narrator in every chapter of the book? Is the narrator trustworthy? Why does he repeat himself so much, and why does he feel compelled to talk down to us readers in a condescending way, making allusions and symbols explicit as though we are too ignorant to pick them up on our own. For the same reasons that a joke teller who feels he has to explain his jokes is usually not very funny, a narrator who feels compelled to explain his allusions and symbols is not very impressive. Obviously, a writer with the skills of Banks could have created a narrator that lectured to us in a more subtle way such that it was not annoyingly apparent that we were being lectured to, and who made references and allusions without explaining them to us, and who did not repeat himself so much. So I assume Banks had some purpose in mind with this choice of narrator, but I am not sure what that purpose is. Hopefully some of you will be able to enlighten me about this issue during our discussion.

A final thing that interests me about this novel is the suggestion that it contains a mystery that can be solved by a discerning reader. All of the allusions to Treasure Island would automatically make one curious as to whether the author had playfully included clues that would allow us “find the treasure”, i.e., to solve some of the issues that would appear on first reading to be ambiguous. The clever inclusion of codes and puzzles throughout the novel furthers that impression (e.g., The Professor committing suicide by using a combination lock that he knew he would not be able to figure out how to open if he changed his mind at the last minute when his van entered the water, the address where the van entered the water being “Lock one-oh-seven”). Finally, Banks plants two specific messages into the novel informing us readers that, unlike real life where the truth is often ambiguous, in novels the truth can often be discerned by a careful reader. That makes me think there is a treasure to be found for the reader willing to take the time and effort to break the codes in the book. I haven’t found it yet, but haven’t looked very hard. I am not sure how much time to spend on this because perhaps Banks is just playing with us with these passages and sending us on a wild goose chase. My hope is that I will not have to figure this out because some of you who are more clever than me will have already figured it out and will fill in the rest of us during our discussion!

Black Mass

Reading John Gray’s Black Mass is I believe a way of tapping into the root mass of the western civilization. From the knee we in the west have been fed the mythos of many different versions of Christian salvation and the language has been interred in our bones in each and every way. What we take for granted as truth and fact to a large degree can be freely distorted and reframed with the lens of western religion and now anything somehow seems acceptable almost in any version.

It all was done so very subtly over millennia that we take these ideas of eschatology, teleology, apocalyptic thinking and millennialism for granted even while we on their face deny them and embrace science and The Enlightenment. : The next contradiction. This is our schizophrenia.
What is wrong with thinking that life has a purpose? We all know that the new and improved I Phone is going to be released next week. Better schools, better transportation are a fact of life and it shall go on forever. I watch Star Trek!

Sadly, thinking like this keeps us on our historic treadmill. We are being perpetually setup up for the next rationalization from Augustine’s Interchange, to the Reformation and Enlightenment and on into secular politics. The desire for human salvation continues, as the economic system remains exploitive both of the people and the earth. The latest chapter is of Robes Pierre boosting violent revolutionary human transformation and national salvation outside of religion. That happened about 220 years ago and many people and things are still trying to figure out if that will work, among them Napoleon, Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin come the magic market, Wolfowitz, Bush, Goldman-Sacs and Cheney. All of this is going on while the planet heats up which is new.

“The myth of the end has caused untold human suffering and is now as dangerous as it has ever been. In becoming (secularized as) a site for projects of world transformation political life (politics) became a battleground. The secular religions of the last two centuries, which imagined the cycle of anarchy and tyranny could be ended, succeeded in only making it more violent.” What we have though now is the inability to grasp the present be it a cycle like the last ice age or a trajectory of postmillennial progress. Religion accounts for much of this reticence “While humans are unlikely to become extinct, the world in which they evolved is vanishing” due to climate change. Their ability to alter their projected trajectory is a great uncertainty.

November Selection: Lauren Belfer, A Fierce Radiance

Our discussion book for November is a selection from Burk. He provides the following information about his selection:
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We have had some heavy nonfiction reading of late and I think it is time for a change of pace to some fiction.

A Fierce Radiance by Lauren Belfer published in 2010 by Harper Collins came to my attention quite by accident. In early September I was rowing at the world’s master’s championships in Poznan, Poland and following the races traveled around Poznan and vicinity with a rowing friend from Massachusetts and his wife. Before they returned home she offered me the book she had just finished. I did not start A Fierce Radiance till my return to Tacoma and have not quite finished reading it. I have found it to be a page turner set in the early days of WW II in New York City, One of the major themes seems to be greed – a timely subject in view of the current Wall Street protests. A good example of greed in the US is the finding that the ratio between CEO’s pay and that of the average worker in the US is way out of line with the rest of the world. See chart below:

Subject: Why we are the 99%

This is a chart of Ratio between CEOs pay and that of the the average worker in a variety of countries. Japan has the lowest at 11:1; Venezuela is the next to highest at 50.1; the US is 475:1

Burk

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Note: For this month we will be meeting on November 10 (the SECOND Thursday) instead of our usual date of the first Thursday.

Its “all about looking” and “ways of seeing” as John Berger might say

Jim Robbins sent this to me via email. Seemed like a good talisman for our group, so I am posting it here.
Ron