Empty Your Heart Of Its Mortal Dream

I have been busy over the holidays so I haven’t had much time to read, but I did buy an iPad with my Christmas bonus, so I have been catching up on a lot of comics. I thought I’d spend a little time today talking about comics that I love, and that I’m excited about coming up in 2012.

Out Now

Demo

Demo is my favourite book of the last few years, to the extent that I own two original pages from volume two. I’ve been a fan of Becky Cloonan’s art for over ten years, since a friend in NYC introduced me to it, back when she was xeroxing her own copies of Social Unrest. I always knew she was going to be big, and it has been great to see her get better over the years and get the attention that she deserves. Brian Wood’s writing is very understated; each story in Demo is encompassed within a single issue. While there is always some unusual, sometimes supernatural, element to the plot, Wood’s writing is always about people. People in love, who suffer from loss or grief, have been abused, who cannot escape their pasts. It is refreshing to see in a medium where the narrative is obsessed with “things that happen” a comic that is more interested in the effects  that events have on people. Combined with Cloonan’s breathtaking art, Demo really packs an emotional punch. I’d happily recommend anything that Wood has written to people, from his indie work like Local, to his Vertigo series’ DMZ and Northlanders. Becky is also getting back into showing that she has serious writing chops too, her self-published Wolves (available at her website) is highly recommended.

Casanova

I’ve been a big fan of Mike (Moorcock) since I was a teenager, so when I heard that one of the biggest influences on Casanova was Jerry Cornelius, I was pretty sure I was going to like it. Fraction’s comic has everything that you could want in a crime/spy science fiction comic: reality hopping, time travel, and gender bending, with copious amounts of sex, drugs and rock and roll. The master criminal, libertine, Casanova Quinn finds himself dragged from his own reality and forced to work as a double agent for both an insane super villain and his spymaster father. Fraction is a clever guy though, so underneath the super cool exterior is a story that is essentially about the psychological damaged inflicted on Quinn by the situation that he finds himself in. It also doesn’t hurt that the art, by those super-talented twins, Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon, is absolutely gorgeous, updated from the original single spot colours with beautiful watercolours. If that doesn’t sell you, it has Burroughs and Pynchon references, how can you not like that?

Parker: The Hunter and Parker: The Outfit

I’m not a big superhero guy, but I read The New Frontier on the advice of a friend and I loved it. Darwyn Cooke’s art was fantastic, and really captured the feel of the comics of the late Golden era/early Silver era. As an Eisner fan, I also really enjoyed his work on The Sprit series that he did for DC a few years ago. Lately, he has been working on adapting four of Richard Stark’s (a pseudonym of the late crime writer Donald Westlake) Parker novels for IDW, the first of which, The Hunter and The Outfit, are out now. Stark novels all revolve around the exploits of Parker, a master thief and all round tough guy betrayed by his partner and his wife in The Hunter, and left for dead. Cooke’s adaptations are very faithful to the original novels (they remain set in the 60s), and unlike the many film adaptations, Westlake was so impressed that he allowed Cooke to use the name Parker. The art is fantastic; there are some really wonderful, ingenious panel layouts. The one that sticks in my head the most is in The Outfit, when Cooke uses Monopoly iconography (because characters are playing it) to advance a story about criminal undertakings. Cooke’s Parker is traditional hard boiled noir of the highest quality, and it pulls no punches.

Criminal

Sticking with noir, another comic I’m very fond of is Criminal, by the long time pair of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. While it is still a hard crime comic like Parker (and at times, perhaps almost nihilistic), Brubaker takes a more communal approach. Each Criminal arc is about a different person, who has his or her own reasons for doing the things that they do. Some are career criminals, some are forced against their will, others feel compelled by duty or revenge. In a sense, Brubaker’s choice to approach the narrative as a sort of longitudinal study by showing connections between his protagonists, not only in the present but also through the history of the city, illustrate how many of his characters are unable to escape the past. In Brubaker’s world, violent acts are causal effects that only lead to more violence. Phillips is a fantastic artist, and his work on Criminal is as good, if not better, than anything that he has ever done. I’d also be glad to recommend to anyone any of the books that the pair has worked on, from Sleeper and Incognito to their new ongoing, the Lovecraft inspired noir, Fatale.         

Upcoming

Conan

I’m not the biggest Conan fan in the world. I read Howard’s stories a few years ago, and like a lot of his work, there is the problematic issue of some pretty ugly racism. I’ve read a few of Dark Horses Conan comics though, mostly because of Cary Nord’s great art (and of course, Frazetta’s old art is pretty amazing too). When I found out Wood and Cloonan were going to be doing Conan starting from February though, I got excited. Wood has proven what he can do with this style of comic with his Vikings based Northlanders, and the preview art has been amazing. You can see sample pages here and here.

Parker: The Score

The latest in Cooke’s Parker adaptations is due out in May, which sees Parker taking on his biggest heist yet, and with Parker’s luck, something is bound to go wrong.

The Firelight Isle

The latest project of Paul Duffield, who you may know from his work on FreakAngels with the mighty Warren Ellis. Even though the internet has been around for a long time now, we are still not really seeing the full possibilities that it provides for self/digital publishing. Ellis and Duffield pushed the boat out on FreakAngels, and now Paul is following it up with The Firelight Isle. While I admire his work on FreakAngels, I saw Paul talk about his Carl Sagan inspired science-fiction book Signal last year at Thrilling Wonder Stories, and was really impressed. For The Firelight Isle, he is interested in world building and creating a whole new culture, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he can do. You can find more information about the project here, as well as how to donate if you feel that way inclined.

Beyond Good and Evil

If possible (and no ‘if possible’ can be more crazy) you want to abolish suffering! And we? – it seems that we want it to be, if anything, worse and greater than before! Well-being in your sense of the word – that certainly is no goal, it seems to us to be an end! A condition that would immediately make people ludicrous and contemptible – make us wish their downfall! The discipline of suffering, great suffering – don’t you know that this discipline alone has created all human greatness to date? The tension of the soul in unhappiness, which cultivates its strength; its horror at the sight of the great destruction; its inventiveness and bravery in bearing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting unhappiness, and whatever in the way of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cleverness, greatness the heart has been granted – has it not been granted them through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

Despite his prominence in the twentieth century, Nietzsche wasn’t a very popular philosopher in his own time. While he was able to get his work published, it didn’t sell well, which lead to a falling out with his publisher, who was more interested in publishing anti-Semitic literature which was in vogue in Germany. As a result, Nietzsche had to pay for Beyond Good and Evil to be printed out of his own pocket, and owing to poor sales, didn’t recoup his expenses. Despite what the title suggests, it is not an ethical treatise (Nietzsche never wrote one as he considered himself a moral-historian as seen in On the Genealogy of Morals), but instead a collection of aphorisms on a number of subjects ranging from philosophy, religion, psychology, and art. Written in Nietzsche’s instantly recognizable hyperbolic style, he eschews the scholarly density and heavy use of jargon of the philosophic tradition that followed Kant, making him infinitely more readable then Schopenhauer, Hegel, et al. That isn’t to say reading Nietzsche doesn’t require effort, he is still dealing, as all philosophers do, with complex ideas, and is in dialogue with a great deal of sources, from Homer and Plato to Wagner and Goethe.   

Nietzsche’s aim in Beyond Good and Evil, as the subtitle, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, suggests, is to proclaim the coming of a new type of philosopher. One who will stand beyond good and evil, with hammer in hand, and destroy the idols of Platonism and Judeo-Christianity (Platonism for the masses). He argues that Philosophers have long been engaged in shaping their philosophical theories to support what they already believe, and as a result their philosopher shows their inherent bias, “creating the world in [their] own image”. He rejects “Old Kant” and his synthetic a priori judgements (for those not well versed in Kantian: things that we know to be truth even though they cannot be proved by experience), and likens his faculty of faculties to being somewhat akin to opium. He also distains “the hermit” Spinoza’s attempts to turn philosophical judgements into a pseudo-mathematics, Descartes for presuming that the “thinking” presupposes the “I”, and Schopenhauer for presenting a view of will that he finds far too simplistic. As an anti-modernist, he also scoffs at the arrogance of scientists for believing that existence can be understood purely by atomics. The philosopher of the future, as heirs of Nietzsche, will reject dogmatism in the search for objective truth.

For Nietzsche, Judeo-Christianity is the worst thing that has happened to Europe. While he is willing to accept that it has had its uses, and perhaps that even Europe would not have survived without it, it is the morality that it has imposed on society that is holding mankind back. Philosophers are at fault, he argues, for refusing to acknowledge the real problem with morality, that in by accepting it as an a priori condition of humanity, they ignore the thousands of years in which man was essentially pre-moral. Our ideas of good and evil, as they stand today, came with Judeo-Christianity, and such ideas are something to be overcome. They serve as a sort of levelling, that serve only to bring us down into “the rabble” or “the herd”, as he refers to the unenlightened. Pity is his chief target, and he even goes as far as to state that it is through pity that we have allowed those to survive that ought not to have, echoing Thus Spake Zarathustra’s thoughts on how the overmann should not be forced to bow down to help the weak. Cruelty is an important part of life, both in absolute honesty, something Nietzsche believes is a virtue, and as an integral part of art, particularly tragedy. Religion has lead to a shift from what Nietzsche calls master morality to slave morality, (a purposely perverted twist on Hegel), something discussed at great length in The Genealogy of Morals. Like Zarathustra, who exclaims that the tablets are broken so we must make new ones, the philosopher of the future must break free from the shackles of value systems to form their own morality, judgements, and laws.

That isn’t to say that, like most of Nietzsche’s work, Beyond Good and Evil isn’t without its problems. His misogynist comments approach the level of parody, especially when he compares women to being like “cats”, and argues that enlightenment is the work of men, where as pregnancy is the work of women. His claims that the whole of Europe are laughing at female authors such as George Sand is also quite out there. He also says some rather odd things about nobility and breeding that is strange even for the nineteenth century. While certainly not defensible, it is still worth noting that Nietzsche did not believe in equality in principle, because he saw it as yet another form of levelling. For women to want to be like men was baffling for Nietzsche, who thought they should inspire to be different. His disclaimer beforehand that these are “[his] truths” only does little to mitigate the damage, but as Nietzschean scholars like Walter Kaufmann have noted, Nietzsche is often purposely contrary and offensive. At times, it becomes difficult to tell if he is telling the truth or playing a character. That being said, despite his flaws, Nietzsche remains perhaps the most important philosopher of the modern age, foreshadowing most of the themes that would make up the narrative of the twentieth century. He always believed that he was born too early, and with the hindsight of over a hundred years of history, we can see that he was correct in thinking so.

Waiting for the Barbarians

What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.

Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians has much in common with Dino Buzzati’s earlier novel, The Tartar Steppes. Both take place in a remote fort under the constant threat of phantom attack, and both demonstrate the fear that can dehumanise people. The protagonist of the novel is an unnamed aging magister, living out his days in peace in a frontier fort far from the centre of the Empire. His quiet life comes to an unfortunate end with the arrival of Colonel Joll, an officer of the Empire’s special forces, the Third Bureau. He is on a mission to investigate rumours that the barbarian tribes of the region are planning to unite against the Empire, despite the fact that the barbarians are rarely seen as they live a nomadic existence. Seeing the sadistic, sometimes even deadly, nature of Joll’s interrogative techniques, the magister takes pity on a barbarian girl blinded by Joll’s methods, which leads to disgrace and imprisonment on the grounds of treasons against the Empire.   

The protagonist, having become an old man who only wants to live an uncomplicated life, is at odds with an Empire that seeks only to perpetuate itself, and career soldiers like Joll, willing to do anything in the name of imperialism. The brutal treatment of the barbarians, which he has seen to be a mostly passive group in his years of experience dealing with them, shocks him to the core. In his relationship with the barbarian girl, he sees himself as a ridiculous old fool. Each night he washes and anoints her body, but cannot seem to conjure up any sexual desire for her. The result of which is that she remains confused at what is expected at her, and he wonders if he is trying to take something from her like Joll did, albeit through a different method. When they eventually part, he wants her to stay, but she is unable to understand why. By the end of the novel, having been humiliated, starved, beaten, and eventually vindicated, he struggles to understand the meaning of everything that has happened. He feels like there is something that is right in front of him that he just cannot grasp.  

The people of the town display the usual tendencies of the crowd when faced with a threat to their safety, bringing the worst out of them. In one of the novel’s most powerful scenes, Joll returns, barbarian prisoners in tow, with their hands clapped to their mouths by wire that runs through both the hands and the cheeks. The populace not only cheer for the soldiers to abuse the prisoners, but join in when asked. The protagonist, who cannot take seeing Joll corrupt the town in such a way, tries to protest but is brutally beaten for his attempt. When he is accused of treason, removed from his position and placed in a cell in the garrison, he is never tried or convicted. His enemies know that he has no power because the town has already turned on him. They have forgotten everything that he has done for them, instead whispering rumours about his conduct with the barbarian girl and his supposed treason. The Empire understands that humiliating your enemy and making him look ridiculous is far more useful that imprisonment or death. They only have to parade him around the grounds naked, and hang him from a tree in a woman’s dress for the entertainment of the citizens for his former subjects to despise him. Of course, when the soldiers abandoned the town, it is the magister that the remaining citizens once again turn to for help.

While written in the seventies, Waiting for the Barbarians still resonates strongly, because the central themes are ones that have been major ones in the narrative of the twenty-first century. When Joll arrives in his wire glasses with dark lenses, the newest fashion in the Empire, one can also see a CIA spook arriving on a flier for a little extra-ordinary rendition. The torture that occurs in the novel has never gone away, we have just a little more nuance about it now. The erosion of civil liberties in the name of security (and the terrorist act that leads to them, the destruction of facilities that leads to flooding of the crop fields), the ridicule and unlawful imprisonment of those who oppose imperialist thought, and the frenzy of a populace against a shadowy threat are all things that we still see on a day to day basis. Coetzee’s novel is visceral, all brutality, flesh and filth; it exposes the dark heart that lies not only in Empire, but also in its people, and as a result it remains a very unsettling thing to read.

The Kreutzer Sonata

Take that Kreutzer Sonata, for instance, how can the first presto be played in a drawing-room among ladies in low-necked dresses? To hear that played, to clap a little, and then to eat ices and talk of the latest scandal? Such things should only be played on certain important significant occasions, and then only when certain actions answering to such music are wanted; play it then and do what the music has moved you to. Otherwise an awakening of energy and feeling unsuited both to the time and the place, to which no outlet is given, cannot but act harmfully. At any rate that piece had a terrible effect on me; it was if quite new feelings, new possibilities, of which I had then been unaware, had been revealed to me. “That’s how it is: not at all as I used to think and live, but that way,” something seemed to say within me. What this new thing was that had been revealed to me I could not explain to myself, but the consciousness of this new condition was very joyous. All those same people, including my wife and him, appeared in a new light.

In The Kreutzer Sonata, jealousy drives a man to kill his wife for her infidelity, but, as becomes apparent to his confession to the protagonist of the tale on a trial after his acquittal, he places the real blame on the nature of relationships. A former libertine of good social standing and relative wealth who decides to marry a poorer “pure” woman, he finds himself trapped in a marriage characterized by seething animosity. The first few years, although turbulent, are bearable because of the children, but after the doctor advises her not to have any more children, she regains a great deal of her former beauty which aggravates her husband’s jealous nature. When an immoral musician arrives and attempts to seduce his wife, his cordial nature to the pair almost goads them on, until, returning from a business trip early on suspicion of an affair, he catches them together and fatally stabs his wife.

It is always dangerous to examine an author’s biographical details in relation to their work, there are nevertheless a few interesting things to note about The Kreutzer Sonata. The first is that Tolstoy had many sexual liaisons before meeting the woman who would become the Countess Tolstoy, Sonya Andreevna Behrs, like his libertine main character, and before their marriage he gave her his diaries documenting those affairs and also had to admit that he had an illegitimate child. The husband of the novella also has to tell his fiancée prior to the wedding about his decadent past, as he fears one particular event will soon become public knowledge and too gives her his diaries. Also, like the marriage portrayed in the novel, Tolstoy’s own had begun in passionate fashion only to become more and more strained as the years went by, particularly following his moral crisis and conversion in 1878. The frustration of a strained marital relationship is something that he was no doubt able to draw upon from his own experiences.

The Beethoven piece that the novella is named for, Beethoven’s Sonata no. 9 in A Major for violin and piano, Op. 47, forms the centrepiece, as it is the recital performed by her wife and another man that represents her betrayal. The actual relations between the two are purposely left vague, even when they are caught together it is not in the act so to speak. In the performance though, the husband sees the secret, wordless communication between his wife and the musician, even if the rest of the onlookers do not notice it. The part of the piece that Tolstoy explicitly references is the presto of the first movement, a tonally darker section that follows a slower chordal adagio sostenuto. The faster tempo of the presto and the angrier tone serve as a musical accompaniment to the husband’s violent jealousy and give an intensity to relationship of the wife and musician, the latter emphasised by rising violin passages that are answered by the piano. It is almost as if the playing of this particular piece at this place and time is what gives rise to the events that follow; the charged Sonata of Beethoven engendering the emotions within them to a higher degree.

For the husband, the primary cause of the events is the sexual, “swinistic” nature of human relations, and he argues that despite the advances in equality in the late nineteenth century, women can never be equal until they cease to be seen as objects of desire. True to Tolstoy’s late radical position, he also advocates abstinence as an ideal, as opposed to sex and marriage, as a purer love, “the love thy neighbour” of Christ. Whether this rejection of pleasure is almost akin to misanthropy as Chesterton suggested is a point to be debated, but what The Kreutzer Sonata does present us with is a portrait of a very dangerous kind of love that soon becomes hate and not only drives a man to murder, but condemns him to spend the rest of his life seeking in others the forgiveness that his dying wife refused to give him.

The Death of Ivan Ilych

For three whole days, during which time did not exist for him, he struggled in that black sack into which he was being thrust by an invisible, resistless force. He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles at the hands of his executioner, knowing that he cannot save himself. And every moment he felt that despite all his efforts he was drawing nearer and nearer to what terrified him. He felt that his agony was due to his being thrust into that black hole and still more to his not being able to get right into it. He was hindered from getting into it by his conviction that his life had been a good one. That very justification of his life held him fast and prevented his moving forward, and it caused him the most torment of all.

As he approached the end of his life, Tolstoy became more and more worried about the meaning of life. The Death of Ivan Ilych, one of his late masterpieces, is not so much about death itself, but the anguish the individual experiences when forced to evaluate his life in relation to it. The titular Ivan, already dead when the story begins, is tortured by the schism between the fact that he has wasted his life and his belief that he couldn’t have lived it any other way. In Tolstoy’s choice to make Ivan’s fatal illness ambiguous, it is almost as if his failure to bridge that gap is what causes his physical suffering, his metaphorical “black sack”, and it is only by accepting the truth about his life that he is able to find peace.

The novella is also a scathing attack on the self-importance of bourgeoisie life. Ivan is a judge, a man who enjoys his position purely because of the power that he has over other people, even if he does not abuse this power. He takes a great deal of pride in helping other people when he is legally required to do so, but refuses to do so unless they have the correct legal paperwork. He gets married to a woman, partly because he finds her agreeable to his tastes, and partly because society would see it as a fitting match. The relationship doesn’t go well though, and for the most part they argue. The only reason that his wife doesn’t wish that he would die is because the allowance she would get from the government would be less that his salary (Tolstoy’s rejection of the institution of marriage is well noted). Attaining a good position in Petersburg after fading into obscurity, he becomes almost obsessed with making the house look impressive, not realising that it in fact looks like all the other houses in which people purchase lower priced antiques in an attempt to emulate the style of the wealthy. Rather comically, it is an incident that occurs when he is arranging these antiques that causes the injury to his side that serves as the catalyst for his existential malaise.

If the unexamined life is not worth living, then the examined life can be a dangerous thing. Suffering in a great deal of agony, with no cure from contradicting doctors who are unable to decide whether it is an appendix problem or a floating kidney, Ivan has to take a good hard look at the superficial life that he has lead. In looking back, he sees that all the things that he used to think were important don’t have the meaning that they once did, and the only time when he was truly happy is the one time that is completely inaccessible to him now, his childhood. As mentioned earlier, he refuses to believe that he could have lived his life any other way, thinking that his superficial life was still a good life. The unthinkable horror is that to admit otherwise would be to admit that the entirety of his life had no real meaning, a leap that he is unwilling to make until the end. The only thing that can soothe his pain is the presence of Gerasim, a young man from who country who serves as Ivan’s butler’s apprentice. The innocence of his youth, his kind-hearted nature, and compassionate pity serve as a panacea for Ivan’s existential anguish. 

In The Death of Ivan Ilych, we see the literal representation of the problem that had come to plague Tolstoy as an older man, how is one to live their life? The real problem of this question is uncertainty, even if you can provide an answer there is no way to know if it is the right one. This is the black sack that so haunts Ivan as a manifestation of his physical suffering, a harbinger of the unavoidable appearance of Death. He will not make his appearance though until after Ivan has accepted that his life was a wasted one because it was not a moral one. As Nabokov writes in his lectures on Russian literature, for the deeply Religious Tolstoy, it is only by doing so that Ivan is able to begin his new life, his Life in the Kingdom of God.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one’s own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one’s fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one’s wit before hidden microphones – I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own ‘I’ ends) which attracts me the most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

One of the great tragi-comedies of the twentieth century, Kundera’s novel is primarily concerned with duality. He opens with an account of Nietzsche’s rather strange ideas about eternal return; the theory that everything reoccurs eternally in the same order. The horror of such a burden, that everything that we do should be repeated ad infinitum, is pure existential terror; Nietzsche calls it das schswerste Gewitcht, the heaviest of burdens, and Kundera writes “If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross”. The unfortunate truth is that the antithesis is no less terrorizing, a line is even less comforting that a circle. If everything that we do only ever occurs once, then existence has an unbearable lightness. Einmal ist keinmal, what happens once may just as well not happened at all. Without another life in which to make different choices, we have no way to measure the weight of our actions. In the novel, love and sex, life and death, everything is permeated by this unbearable lightness.

The novel’s plot revolves around four linked individuals and a dog during the Prague Spring, demonstrating the repercussions of the Soviet invasion of 1968. Tomas, a prominent surgeon who eventually loses his job due to his failure to support the despotic communist regime, meets and falls in love with Tereza. For Tomas, love and sex are characterised by lightness and he operates on a system where he keeps a number of mistresses that he sees at various intervals. He does not take these relationships seriously, and takes pleasure from collecting those small details that make a woman different from others during sex. With Tereza, he has something different though, she comes to him like the baby Moses in a basket, but even that love is defined by lightness, the lightness of the coincidences that lead to it occurring. If his colleague had not been sick, he would not have gone on the trip where he met her, and if she had not been sick when she visited him, he would not have allowed her to stay after they made love, and fallen in love with her. Despite his love for Tereza, he refuses to give up his philandering, although he tries to hide is best as he can as not to hurt her.

While Tereza does her best to try and accept Tomas’ little trysts and not be jealous, it causes her a great deal of anxiety. In order to try and make her happy, Tomas gets her a dog, named Karenin after the husband in Anna Karenina, that becomes between the pair a shared point of reference, the clock winder of their days.  She often has nightmares about executions, in which it is Tomas that sends her to her death, perhaps as an unconscious realisation that he could order her to leave at any moment, just like the rest of the anonymous women who also feature in some of her dreams. Due to a complex relationship with her mother, Tereza is obsessed with the duality of the body and the soul, spending hours as a girl standing in front of the mirror in an attempt to see her soul. When she first arrives at Tomas’, her stomach is rumbling, and she is grateful for the rest of their lives that he never mentioned it. In an encounter later in the novel when she attempts to have an affair because she believes it will help her be less jealous of Tomas, she becomes fixated on the idea of an alien penis (as opposed to a specific one) in close proximity to her own body. Ultimately she believes she is a burden to Tomas, but it is being with her that makes him happy, regardless of his dalliances.

The other two characters of the novel are Sabina, an artist and mistress of Tomas’, and her lover in Geneva, a well-regarded scholar called Franz. Their relationship is doomed because they meet too late in life, after they have formed different semiotic histories. Franz’s idealism is the opposite of Sabina’s own feelings, who sees it as the highest form of kitsch, which she sees as her enemy. Due to a puritanical upbringing, Sabina is obsessed with betrayal, seeing it as a way at getting back at her father, even long after he is gone. She leaves Franz after he abandons his wife to be with her, and continues ever westward, repeatedly betraying each place she settles until she ends up old in California with no further to go. Franz moves on to another woman, but the spectre of Sabina hangs over him like a deity that he lives to please. He dies at the result of tragic misunderstanding, first believing he would please his deity by travelling to Thailand to demonstrate against the Khmer Rouge, and then being fatally wounded in a mugging. He believes in fighting back he is displaying his strength, but he has failed to understand that the strength that Sabina wanted from him was not physical, but sexual. 

Kundera’s central question is whether or not, like Parmenides states, lightness is good and weight is bad. Is it worse to be chained to meaning or to suffer from a lack? Neither seems particularly appealing. In her final dream, Tomas is no longer Tereza’s executioner, he shrinks away until he vanishes and he she is handed a rabbit by the gunman. Tomas has grown old and tired, no longer a surgeon or a womaniser, and has become the domestic pet that she always wanted him to be. At the end, in fleeting, they are both happy though, and regardless or light or weight, that is the best that any of us can hope for.

The Idiot

Nor is there any embarrassment in the fact that we’re ridiculous, isn’t it true? For it’s actually so, we are ridiculous, light-minded, with bad habits, we’re bored, we don’t know how to look, how to understand, we’re all like that, all, you, and I, and they! Now, you’re not offended when I tell you to your face that you’re ridiculous? And if so, aren’t you material? You know, in my opinion it’s sometimes even good to be ridiculous, if not better: we can the sooner forgive each other, the sooner humble ourselves; we can’t understand everything at once, we cant start right out with perfection! To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well. This I tell you, you, who have already been able to understand… and not understand… so much. I’m not afraid for you now.

Of all of Dostoevsky’s post-exile novels, The Idiot is perhaps the most typical of the form in the nineteenth century as it is essentially a social novel. His primary aim was quite simple, to “portray a perfectly beautiful man”, and that man is Prince Myshkin, the titular idiot. With Myshkin, Dostoevsky choose to integrate autobiographical details into the novel. Myshkin, like Dostoevsky, suffers from epilepsy, and he has a keen interest in capital punishment, at one point in the novel describing the story of a mock execution that was Dostoevsky’s own. The reason he is an “idiot” is two fold; he considers himself one because his illness meant that he was not educated as a child and has spent very little time with other adults. Other people consider him an idiot because he is always honest, never acts in his own interest to the detriment of others, and always forgives the people who wrong him. He is not as stupid as they take him to be though, as he often knows that the people who are deceiving him are doing so, but he allows them regardless. In reality, he has a very keen sense when it comes to seeing other people’s true natures. As a result of his honesty and kindness, he is openly mocked and made the subject of gossip and intrigue by those who are supposedly his friends. In the end it is his almost boundless compassion that is the ruin of him, not only robbing him of his chance to be happy, but returning him to the ill state of mind that he suffered from as a child.

The novel revolves around a love triangle involving the prince, the beautiful Nastasya Fillipovna Barashkov, and the rich, obsessed merchant heir Rogozhin. When the prince arrives in Petersburg from having been treated for his illness in Switzerland, he seeks out the Epanchins, a family of good social standing, to whom he believes he is distantly related. Unfortunately, he arrives in the middle of a precarious situation involving Nastasya. Nastasya had arrived in town five years previous to the surprise of her benefactor Totsky, a man who arranged for her to be raised and educated after the death of her parents. Owing to the fact that he molested her when she came of age due to her extraordinary beauty, Nastasya has made his life a living hell, and in order to be free of her he is planning with the patriarch of the Epachins, General Ivan Fyodorovich, to marry her off to a friend of the Epachin house, Gavrila Ivolgin. Rogozhin, newly rich, has fallen in love with her at first sight, and decides that he must possess her to the point of violence. The prince, however, does not fall in love with her because of her beauty, but because of the suffering that he sees in her eyes. He later realises that he never loved her in a normal way, but only because of his great pity for her. The conclusion of the first part takes place at Nastasya’s home, where she is holding a party to announce whether she will marry Gavrila or not. The scene descends into chaos when she asks the shy prince whether she should, and he knowing that neither love each other, begs her not to. He offers his hand instead, believing that he can save her from her madness, but while she knows that he is a beautiful soul and that he does love her (albeit in a different way), she also believes she is a fallen woman, and so she elopes with Rogozhin, who attempts to buy her for one hundred thousand roubles. 

Following the events of that night, the prince travels to Moscow for six months to get his affairs in order, after discovering that he has been left a sum of money by his recently deceased benefactor. When he returns to the city, while still honest and kind, he started to become cynical. Having given up Nastaysa to Rogozhin, he falls in love with the youngest daughter of the Epachin’s, Aglaya, and she loves him too, despite her mocking and often mean behaviour towards him. He also learns that Nastaysa has been sending letters to Aglaya imploring her to marry the prince, so that he will be happy. The Epachins are initially against the idea of the pair getting married, especially the matriarch, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, a ridiculous but ultimately likable character who often finds herself trapped between her love for the prince and her notions of how proper society functions. The family even forgive him after he makes a fool of himself in a high society situation that is meant as a test, rambling about how Catholicism perverts the message of Christ, giving an odd speech about the nobility, and ultimately breaking an expensive Chinese vase. The prince is happy, but tragedy strikes when Aglaya forces him into going with her to meet with Nastaysa. When seeing Aglaya’s jealousy, Nastaysa realises that she isn’t the perfect being of light that she had imagined that she was, and threatens to take the prince away from her. Forced to choose, the prince does choose Aglaya, but seeing this, Nastaysa becomes hysterical. His compassion getting the better of him, the prince stays so that she will not kill herself, with disastrous consequences.

Throughout the novel, Dostoevsky refers to an event that had recently occurred in Russia that he had read about in the newspapers, in which a lawyer argued that a poor man who had murdered six people should be found innocent because his situation was responsible. The prince’s biggest mistake is not his honesty or his compassion, but in voicing a similar argument to Nastaysa on the night of the party, when he tells her that she is pure and not responsible for her actions. Nastaysa, who sees herself as fallen and is determined to ruin herself ultimately does so, and after she flees once more on her wedding day with Rogozhin, the latter puts the knife into her, as many of the novel’s characters always suspectedthat he would. In ruining herself, she ruins Rogozhin, sentenced to exile and hard labour in Siberia, and the poor prince, who suffers a mental break. A reoccurring theme is a painting that Dostoevsky had seen in Basel, Hans Holbein’s Christ Taken Down From The Cross, in which “one doesn’t see anything of God”, merely a dead man who has suffered greatly in graphic detail. At one point the prince and Rogozhin have a conversation about the replica that Rogozhin owns, where the pair wonder if such a painting is enough to make you lose your faith. Dostoevsky wonders whether if Christ had seen what he would look like after crucifixion, would even he have doubted the resurrection. The reader is left to wonder whether if the prince could have foreseen how it would all end, he would still have had such overwhelming compassion.

Wise Blood

Enoch never nagged his blood to tell him a thing until it was ready. He wasn’t the kind of a boy that grabs at any possibility and runs off, proposing this or that preposterous thing. In a large matter like this, he was willing to wait for a certainty, and he waited for this one, certain at least that he would know in a few days. Then for about a week his blood was in secret conference with itself every day, only stopping now and then to shout some order at him.
On the following Monday, he was certain when he woke up that today was the day he was going to know on. His blood was rushing around him like a woman who cleans up at the house after the company has come, and he was surly and rebellious. When he realized that today was the day, he decided not to get up. He didn’t want to justify his daddy’s blood, he didn’t want to always be having to do something that else wanted him to do, and he didn’t know what it was and that was always dangerous.

Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor’s debut novel, was assembled from four short stories, one of which was her Master’s thesis, The Train. The protagonist of the novel, Hazel Motes, is a war veteran who, despite planning to be a preacher from a young age, returns from the war having lost his faith. Returning to his home in Georgia, he finds it deserted; the only thing that remains is the chifforobe that belonged to his deceased mother. Despite being an atheist and vowing that he wants nothing to do with Jesus from the beginning, which takes place on a train journey to the city of Taulkinham, throughout the novel he gets drawn more and more into being involved with religion. When the reader first meets him, he has bought a suit and hat that give him the appearance of a preacher, taking great offence when anyone points it out to him. Shortly after arriving in the city, he meets a blind street preacher and his daughter, which acts as a catalyst for him to start preaching on the streets for his own new anti-religious movement, the Church without Christ.

The only person interested in Motes’ prophesising is Enoch Emory, an eighteen year old abused by his father and sent to by him to live in the city alone. He works as a guard at the city zoo, but despises the animals, and has a routine of passing their cages in order to yell obscene insults at them. This culminates in an absurd scene in which having been insulted by a man in an ape suit promoting monster movies, he buries all his clothes and pretends that he is an ape. He believes in the concept of “wise blood”, that what the head believes and what the blood believes are two different things, and as a result a person can be driven to do things against their will because it is in their blood. At one point in the novel, he displays almost a supernatural talent in being able to locate Motes despite not knowing where he is living at the time. His “wise blood” also drives him to steal a mummified dwarf from a local museum that he is obsessed with, as he believes Motes will need it for his church.

The blind preacher, Asa Hawks, serves as a sort of foil to Motes, as he claims to believe in Christ and therefore has been redeemed, but in reality he is a fraud. Unbeknown to Motes, early in the novel, Hawks isn’t actually blind, but just a conman who once staged in public an attempt to blind himself as a show of faith, before chickening out. His attempts to “save” Motes only make him angry, and Motes decides to seduce his fifteen year old daughter, Sabbath Lily Hawks, in order to hurt him. Also unbeknown to Motes though is that she is really a nymphomaniac who has wanted to be with Motes since they first met, and he falters in the face of her sexual aggression. After Motes sneaks into their apartment one night to see if Asa is really blind and discovers the truth, the preacher flees town and Motes is stuck with Lily.

Much has been made of the grotesque nature of O’Connor’s stories, as her characters are often low characters with exaggerated features that find themselves in absurd situations. This is certainly the case in Wise Blood, and can be seen as early as Motes arrival in town, when he goes to stay with a prostitute described as by O’Connor as “a big woman with very yellow hair and white skin that glistened with a greasy preparation” with teeth that were “small and pointed and speckled with green.” The most grotesque scene takes place later in the novel though, when Enoch has stolen the dwarf and brings it to Motes, only for it to be intercepted by Lily. Lily, wanting to play a joke on an ill Motes, cradles the dwarf like a babe, becoming a sort of reverse Madonna and Child, where purity and life are transposed to depravity and decay. This is all too much for Motes to bear, which snatches away the dwarf and bashes it against the wall before consigning it to defenestration.

In the end, despite his hatred of religion, his wise blood drives Motes to a violent conclusion. He murders a false preacher, angry that he is trying to tell people the truth, while the other preacher was using that to exploit people. He attempts to leave town and start his Church again somewhere else, but he is stopped by a police office who destroys his car because Motes has no licence. Despite all his protestation, Motes is unable to escape the doctrine of Origin Sin, and upon returning to the city, he does what Hawks didn’t have the nerve to do, blinding himself with quicklime. He fills his shoes with sharp rocks and glass, something that he had done as a child to punish himself after seeing a naked woman. He even goes as far as to wrap barbed wire around his torso in his own personal imitation of the Passion. His death is almost an after note, killed by a blow to the head by a police officer that discovers him sick in the gutter. Despite his best efforts to denounce religion and Christ, sin was in Hazel Motes’ blood. He was doomed from the start.

The Loser

We never forgive our fathers for having sired us, nor our mothers for having brought us into the world, he said, nor our sisters for continuing to be witnesses to our unhappiness. To exist means nothing other than we despair, he said. When I get up I’m revolted by myself and everything I have to do. When I go to bed I have no other wish than to die, never wake up, but then I wake up again and the awful process repeats itself, finally repeats itself for fifty years, he said. To think that for fifty years we don’t wish for anything other than to be dead and are still alive and can’t change it because we are thoroughly inconsistent, so he said. Because we are wretched, vile creatures.

The Loser, Bernhard’s ninth novel, is essentially a novel about how much damage one little word can do (a more literal translation of the novel’s title, Der Untergeher, is one who goes under).  The structure of the novel is typically Bernhardian, one long unbroken paragraph presented as monologue narration, constructed mostly of long, complex sentences. The prose often defies grammatical convention, Bernhard will italicise and capitalise the names of people, musical pieces, etc. on some occasions, and treat them as common nouns on others. He also uses repetition heavily, usually a variation of the phrase “I thought” (such as “I thought on the way to the inn”, “I thought in the inn”, etc.), which gives the prose a sort of circular, almost mesmerising rhythm. In combining autobiographical material and real people with fiction, it blurs the lines between in a similar fashion to his other novels, such as Correction, Wittgenstein’s Cousin, The Woodcutters, etc.

The narrator of the novel, unnamed although referred to as the philosopher, is on his way to the home of a friend who has recently committed suicide, the loser of the novel’s title. The novel consists mainly of his recollections of his relationship with the deceased, as well as a third man, a fictional version of the virtuoso piano player Glenn Gould. Wertheimer, the loser, was once extremely talented, but was unfortunate in applying to study at the Mozarteum conservatoire under Vladimir Horowitz at the same time as Gould. Paralysed by the genius inherent in Gould’s interpretation of the aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, he realises that Gould is an actual genius talent and no matter how hard he works, he will never be able to reach the same level. He abandons the piano for “the human-sciences”, isolates himself in an estate in the woodlands, and eventually hangs himself.

Throughout the novel, the narrator interrogates his memory of the relationship between the three and the time that they spent together in order to try and understand what it was that caused Wertheimer’s suicide. He has also given up the piano, but realised that he did so because he never really wanted to be virtuoso, he just wanted to rebel against his wealthy, business-minded parents. He believes that the suicide was triggered by the betrayal of Wertheimer’s sister, who he terrorized until she left their shared home to marry, disturbing their almost quasi-incestuous domesticity. He also believes that he is jealous of Gould’s recent death, at the age of fifty-one whilst playing the piano. The true motivation goes much further back, to the time twenty-eight years earlier when Gould astutely labelled Wertheimer “the loser”, and Wertheimer knew that Gould was right to do so. His fate was sealed when he passed the room in which Gould was playing the aria from the Goldberg Variations, he was destroyed when he heard the first few bars and knew that he would always be inadequate by comparison. As the narrator says, he was better than all the others at the conservatoire, except Gould, and he knew it. Trapped between admiration and hatred, he is ground down to dust. He becomes, in his own words, a writer of pointless aphorisms, and finally hangs himself on a tree one hundred yards from his sister’s marital home in Switzerland to spite her, having finally run out of “existence coupons”.

Bernhard’s relationship with Austria is well documented, he saw it as a place mostly populated by cretins, ruled over by a corrupt government and a hypocritical Catholic Church, which actively hated and suppressed art. Austria saw Bernhard as a Nestbeschmutzer, one who dirties his own nest. In The Loser, as in his other novels, he takes every opportunity to skewer Austria, describing Salzburg as a town populated by cretins, where you either become a cretin yourself or face attempts to destroy you. The narrator at one point embarks on a long rant at an uncaring innkeeper about the corruption of the socialist government, who have co-opted the word socialism to serve as a means to an end. His contempt for Austria was so strong that he specified in his will that after his death (in 1989), his work is not to be published or performed in Austria until after it had legally passed into the public realm.

The Loser shares themes with many of Bernhard’s novels, but the most important is the danger of obsession with artistic perfection, represented by the fictional version of Glenn Gould. Subscribing to such an absolute is what destroys Wertheimer, not his depression, his isolation, or his sister’s betrayal. As the narrator notes, his life could have been so much different had he not applied to study with Horowitz the same year as Gould, had he not walked past that room at 3:30 twenty-eight years earlier and heard him play the aria. The moment that he heard those first few bars, he was doomed. He could no more be as good a piano player as Gould than Gould could bypass himself and become the Steinway like he wanted. The narrator judges Wertheimer too harshly, something that he admits to and something that we are all guilty of, but with his two closest friends dead, he finds himself alone. Despite their faults and the ups and downs of their relationships, they were still the closest that he had to real friends. There is never any sentimentality in Bernhard, but in this fact, we see that he certainly isn’t the misanthrope he is often accused of being.

The Sound and the Fury

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury remains one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, but like Joyce’s Ulysses, it is also one of the most difficult. The novel is difficult because of the modernist techniques that Faulkner to illustrate the different mental states of the characters in the novel in the four different point of view sections. In the first, the point of view is that of Benjy, the mentally disabled Compson scion, and due to his mental illness, he has no conception of the passing of time. Therefore, his section is non-linear, with only italics to inform the reader when the time period has shifted. As his perspective shifts from a young age through to the present day, we see the lives of his siblings at different ages and how the situation of the present occurred, although it is too fractured for the reader to understand on first read. We all see the strong bond he has with his sister Candace (Caddy), and heartbreakingly, his inability to understand why she is no longer around in the present. He returns to the school where he used to wait for her at the gate, unable to understand that she is no longer a child, and hangs around the golf course so he can hear people say her name. Benjy is unable to communicate verbally, he can only “moan and slobber”, through the way he is treated by others when they are alone, we see their true nature.

The second point of view section occurs eighteen years earlier to the rest of the novel, when Benjy’s brother, Quentin, is studying at Harvard. In this section, Faulkner utilises the modernist stream of consciousness technique, fracturing the narrative, and showing the reader the gradual breaking down of Quentin’s sanity. Quentin believes strongly in the concept of Southern honour, but finds the old ideals at odds with the current reality of the twentieth century, which causes a schism. Tortured by his alcoholic father’s moral nihilism and his inability to save his sister from her own promiscuity, he is eventually driven to suicide. Through the intrusion of his consciousness on the narrative, we learn that Caddy falls pregnant and has to get married to avoid shaming the family. He also feels a great deal of guilt over the pasture that the family had to sell for the tuition fees as it rightfully belonged to Benjy. Quentin seems to have a history of mental illness in the past, as we learn he once tried to kill Caddy and himself, but couldn’t bring himself to do it, and even wishes they had committed incest, so then at least they would be together in hell.

The last two sections are more straightforward, one of which is from the point of view of the Compson’s other son, the racist, mean Jason, the favourite of their emotionally blackmailing hypochondriac mother, and the black matriarch of the Compson’s servants, Dilsey. Even though Caddy marries, her husband discovers that the child, also named Quentin but female, is not his and she is sent to live with her grandmother. Jason blackmails Caddy so that she will not return and embezzles the money that she sends as child support. Quentin, stifled by Jason’s meanness and spoiled by the Compson matriarch, becomes a promiscuous young woman like her mother. While Caddy is “ruined” and (the male) Quentin is forced to suicide, Jason is able to survive is the new age and prosper, signifying that the old ways are no longer of any use and only those who can adapt are the winners

Although she is only a servant, Dilsey is the true heart of the Compson house. She works hard to ensure that everything runs smoothly, despite the attitudes of Jason and Caroline towards her, and it is her who protects Benjy and Miss Quentin from Jason’s meanness. Her life is hard but her faith in the Lord, and her duties towards the Compson children and her own help her to endure, even though she knows that the family is cursed. She witnesses it firsthand, as she herself says, she has “seen the beginning and the end”, but she stays and does her best despite the abuse. Like most African-American characters in Faulkner’s novels, she is a lot smarter than most others give her credit for, and in the final section, the reader sees how perceptive she really is despite her lack of traditional education.   

Albert Camus once said of Faulkner that he had invented the modern language of tragedy, and The Sound and the Fury remains, arguably, the best tragedy of the twentieth century. Doom hangs precariously over the head of the Compson family like the Sword of Damocles, as it did the House of Atreus before them. Caddy, the true hero of the novel according to Faulkner, is never given a voice. We never understand what her motivations are (although we can certainly speculate). All we know about her is what we see in the way that the others feel about her. The adoration of Benjy because of her kindness, the horror of Quentin because of her shame, and the hatred of Jason for costing him a job that was promised to him by the man she married. Although absent for most of the novel physically, she remains everywhere. Benjy, through his sixth sense, foresees the tragedy that will befall his siblings, but like Cassandra, his prophesying is for nought, he lacks the capacity to communicate it. He may be, as Shakespeare put it in the Scottish play, “an idiot, full of sound and fury”, but that fury is the fury of a man cursed, forced to watch those around him suffer, and unable to save them from the capricious nature of the fates. In the end, all his moaning signifies nothing.