Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Tess was next:

So I decided to keep going with Thomas Hardy for a while. This seemed to be the obvious next step. It didn’t move me quite as deeply as Jude did, for some reason, but I’d have to say, objectively, that it’s just as fine a novel.

Tess is a peasant girl whose layabout father has just discovered that he is the last of the ancient noble line of the d’Urbervilles (corrupted by his time to Durbeyfield). This gives him airs, and when a sudden disaster puts them in economic difficulty, Tess finds it her responsibility to seek out a wealthier branch of the line and ask for assistance. Thus she meets Alec d’Urberville, whose father, a self-made man, had forged ties with the supposedly-defunct d’Urbervilles to give his family an air of respectability. Alec takes Tess into service, rapes her, and then she leaves him.

She goes home, where she has his baby and refuses his offer to marry her—she’s incensed at his cavalier treatment of her. The baby dies, and after about a year of seclusion, Tess realizes she’s a burden on the family and goes to work on a dairy. Here she meets Angel Clare, the third son of a very conservative parson. Angel is a freethinker who has elected to become a gentleman farmer instead of a clergyman like his father (his father won’t send him to the university since he won’t toe the line, doctrinally, so he really has no choice but to learn how to support himself); he’s at the dairy to learn that aspect of farming. Soon he falls in love with Tess (who he’s seen once before, briefly, at the beginning of the book—she remembers, but he doesn’t). He’s taken with her pure peasant virtue, and refuses to take no for an answer. She loves him, too, but knows that he’d reject her if he knew about her past, and resolves to reject him. But he prevails, finally, and then prevents her when she tries to tell him before the marriage.

Finally on the night after the wedding, they confess their past sins. He admits that he dallied with a woman in London right after he lost his faith. She forgives him frankly, and then tells of her past. He goes ballistic and leaves her, blind to his own hypocrisy.

For a year she scratches out a living, while he’s off experimenting with farming in Brazil. She becomes worse and worse off financially, while her pride prevents her from appealing to his parents, who never supported the match and to whom she’s never even been introduced. Finally Alec comes back into the picture—at first he’s a religious fanatic, having been converted by Angel’s father, but then his love (lust?) for Tess reasserts itself and he tries to get her to come with him. Finally, when she’s given up on Angel ever returning, and her father is dead and her mother and siblings made homeless, she gives in to Alec. This is when Angel chooses to come back and declare that he’s forgiven her. Too late. This drives her out of her mind, and she stabs Alec to death. She and Clare enjoy a week’s happiness on the run before the cops catch up with them at Stonehenge.

So, clearly it’s an indictment of traditional English Christian morals, which allow a man, be he a scoundrel like Alec or just a headstrong gentleman like Angel, to sin and get away with it while condemning a woman to a lifetime of shame for something she didn’t do willingly in the first place. As such, it’s a powerful book. It’s also a very perceptive look at Angel’s particular brand of hypocrisy—you can see it coming a mile away but it’s still effective when it gets there.

There are other aspects that I didn’t pick up on as readily—Hardy is allying Tess with the old pagan nature-spirit aspects of the English peasantry, those things that are prior to the Christian overlay. There are some mythological overtones that I didn’t quite get.

It’s also a detailed look at how the country ways were changing in one particular stage of the industrial revolution—he’s very detailed on farming techniques and how they affected social patterns. It’s here in particular that I could have used some notes—the Pan edition I read is a reprint of an annotated version, shorn of the actual notes—it leaves spaces where the asterisks were, and sometimes the telltale asterisks

Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure

A couple of summers ago, I went on a Thomas Hardy jag. (Can you use "Thomas Hardy" and "jag" in the same sentence? I guess you can if you make an appropriately meta and self-deprecating parenthetical remark immediately afterward. At least, I hope so.) This surprised me - that is, it surprised me that I got so into Thomas Hardy - because the summer before my senior year of high school I had to read The Mayor of Casterbridge for AP English, and it took me all summer and I hated it and I almost gave up on serious books for good and I spent the next fifteen years bellyaching about Thomas Hardy being the most boring writer in the world. But: as it turns out, I was an idiot, and Thomas Hardy is one of the greats. One of the stalwarts, fighting the good fight down there in the trenches with the words and the feelings and the ideas.

I started with Jude the Obscure (1896), and here's what I wrote about it then:

Another lunch-break library book [ed.: I was doing dissertation research in Japan at this time, and strayed into the school's small selection of English literature in English, and ended up spending a lot of lunch hours reading]. We watched the film version, with Kate Winslet, and the next day I saw this on the shelf and picked it up. I couldn’t believe I was reading a Thomas Hardy novel—reading The Mayor of Casterbridge the summer before my senior year of high school was one of the most annoying experiences I’ve ever had with a book. What’s even more unbelievable is how much I loved this one.

Jude Fawley is an orphan in a village in Wessex who dreams of going to study at Christminster (Oxford) and then entering the ministry. Of course, in his day this is impossible for anybody born poor like him, but he doesn’t realize it, and sets himself to studying on his own. When he become a man, he picks up a trade (stonemasonry), and is saving up to go to Christminster when sex intervenes. He’s seduced by a local girl, Arabella, and she tricks him into marrying her by saying she’s pregnant. It’s an unhappy marriage, and when he finds out he was tricked they argue, and she then leaves for Australia with her parents.

He goes to Christminster. Here he meets his long-lost cousin Sue Bridehead, also an orphan, and falls in love with her, although because he’s married and bound for the priesthood and her cousin and they both come from families cursed to miserable broken marriages, he treats her as a friend only. But of course they’re both falling in love. She’s independent-minded— skeptical about religion and social mores. Meanwhile, he finally realizes that the colleges won’t have anything to do with him because he’s a working man. Meanwhile, she starts teaching for Phillotson, Jude’s old schoolmaster. Then she goes away to a teacher’s training college.

Jude visits her, and they go on an outing from which she’s late returning. They’re clearly falling in love, everybody around them can see it, but they don’t do anything bad. However, the scandal gets her expelled from the college. Then he tells her he’s married, when he finds out she’s engaged to Phillotson, and she’s so upset that she goes and actually marries Phillotson. But she doesn’t love him: she loves Jude.

Thus far, about halfway through, the book has this wonderful sense of tragedy: their love is evoked quite intensely, and the fact that they’re both married to other people makes them nicely star-crossed lovers.

But then their respective spouses actually grant them divorces: Arabella so she can remarry, and Phillotson because he pities Sue. This is an interesting turning point in the book, because now they’re actually free to legally marry. But they don’t—Sue is too delicate on the matter of physical relations, and afraid of the legal responsibilities that marriage will entail. She doesn’t want the law to force her to love someone forever. Independent-minded.

But from this point the novel ceases to be a tragedy of star-crossed lovers, really: they could marry, and thus legitimize their relationship and go on with their lives. But they don’t. But they have kids anyway (including taking on one that Jude had unknowingly fathered with Arabella). And every town they go to eventually chases them away as a scandal. Then the kids die (Arabella and Jude’s is preternaturally doomy, and kills himself and the others), and Sue takes this as God’s judgment on her. She abruptly abandons all her modern ideas, even as Jude has abandoned his beliefs, feeling that they can’t be true if they so conflict with his natural human impulses.

In the end Sue goes back to Phillotson and forces herself to endure physical relations with him as a penance. Jude is once again tricked by Arabella into marrying her (she keeps him drunk for a week), but once he learns that Sue has truly given herself to Phillotson he basically wills himself to die, and does.

Well, put like that it kind of sounds silly in places, but he pulls it off nicely. As I say, halfway through it ceases to be a tragedy of mythic dimensions. Instead, it becomes this fascinating character study. Sue is a woman the likes of whom I’ve met, and probably all men secretly fear women are: at the root of her modern ideas of love and marriage is the wish that sex didn’t have to enter into it at all. She’s ethereal, mental, even spiritual, but not sexual. As a result, her treatment of Jude is what we would now call a cock-tease. But Jude understands that she’s not trying to torment him, and he’ll forgive her anything. Both of them do what they do out of choice, which makes it not so much a tragedy as an inquiry into their psychologies, and into the social forces that make them both so wary of marriage in the second place. Of course it’s also an indictment of a society that thinks it’s anybody’s business what two consenting adults do in private.

Anyway, I really loved it. It reminded me a little, in the intensity of its anatomization of their emotions, of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow—I was happy to read somewhere that Lawrence liked this book.

Robertson Davies's Salterton Trilogy

Tempest-Tost (1951)

An amateur theatrical company in the fictional city of Salterton, Ontario, has decided to put on an outdoor summer production of The Tempest.

The company (calling itself the Little Theatre, a nice touch of Davies’, perfectly highlighting the self-satisfaction that can lurk under the most determined self-deprecation) is run by a middle-aged woman named Nellie Forrester, but instead of directing the play herself she asks back an old acquaintance named Valentine Rich, who has since gone into the professional theater world in New York. Val, single, is back in Salterton to supervise the estate sale of her recently-deceased father (?), and consents to direct the play as a favor.

There’s a slight whiff of the predictable to what ensues: Davies’ satirical target in this, his first novel, is the familiar pretensions of amateur theater people. This has never seemed to me quite as rich a source of satire as many others think it is; I didn’t particularly like Waiting for Guffman, either. Too much like shooting fish in a barrel. Maybe the topic was fresher in 1951, however.

And of course Davies is a more dedicated humanist than that. He’s not really after amateur actors; he’s setting his sights on nothing less than a comic anatomy of mid-century provincial Canadian life. Unlike his later trilogies, this one is told through the eyes of a wide variety of characters – we shift around between the points of view of Val (occasionally), Griselda and Freddy Webster (daughters of the rich man on whose lawn the play will be performed), Hector Mackilwraith (a local math teacher who falls in love with Griselda), and a wide variety of other actors.

The larger plot is, of course, the preparations for the play, culminating in opening night. The real interest lies in the main subplot, which is Hector’s growing love for Griselda. Hector is over forty, and Griselda is eighteen; they’re mismatched in other ways, too, Griselda being a thoroughly modern, socially well-adjusted girl, and Hector being, well, a stuffy old math teacher whose sole experience with women was a not-very-near miss at a Normal School dance when he was Griselda’s age.

Hector has two rivals for Griselda’s affections: Solly Bridgetower, a Cambridge boy home from school, taking care of his decrepit and controlling mother, and Roger Tasset, a womanizing soldier.

I believe Davies’ truest milieux are the worlds of art and academia: the life of the mind is what he’s going to show you. His own learning is so broad and joyful, and so connected to a voracious and unbound love of life, that he’s at his best when he’s dealing with characters who can express themselves in conversations with the best that the best minds past and present have offered.

Here he hasn’t quite found that out yet. He’s concentrating mostly on people from other walks of life. As I say, his task here is to take apart provincial society. And he does this well: already he’s displaying his sharp eye for character, his sure hand with plot, and his sure, sharp tongue. But, and perhaps only because I know what he’d do in the future, I do get the feeling that here and there something a little wilder is trying to burst out. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is a very accomplished novel, thought-provoking and entertaining, but a little conventional compared to the sublime oddities he’d ascend to later. But there are hints, such as the chorister Humphrey Cobbler, a wild-eyed freethinker whose iconoclasm is drawn from a familiarity with the arts and thoughts of premodern Europe, rather than from any jejune bohemianism – which is, after all, a pretty good blueprint for the Davies hero.

Most of his female characters here are already strong, well-rounded, and lively, a mark of his later fiction. Various of his narrators and male characters speak in terms of an essentialist view of women, and do all through his fiction, but the sheer vitality, the intelligence and strength, of his women tends to mean more. And in Freddy, the precocious fourteen-year-old ciderist and book-collector, he’s created perhaps the most intriguing character in the book.

If the book has a main character, it’s Mackilwraith. I think his name is meaningful: his father was a depressed pastor who not only found no joy in life himself, but killed it in his wife and son. Son of Kill-Spirit: he’s spiritually dead himself. Hector’s a self-made man, of sorts: through the rigorous application of planning and common sense, as he formulates it, he’s worked himself up from a position of abject poverty to where he is now, which is not quite as abject poverty, and a position of authority over a classroom. For most of the book he’s a classic, almost cliché, figure: the rationalist whose plans are overthrown by the sudden intrusion of a disordering love. But Davies never sentimentalizes him: in fact, he reserves his harshest satire for Mackilwraith, who never stops being both comical and repulsive. It’s a shock, then, when at the end of the book (in the aftermath of Mackilwraith’s botched suicide attempt) we find ourselves pitying him. Not liking him, but able to pity him for the thing his life and soul have made him. It’s even more of a shock when Davies lets him hint at a capacity for redemption – which in his case simply means unclenching himself a little bit, and seeing himself for what he really is.

Leaven of Malice (1954)

Continues very much in the same vein as Tempest-Tost. Same strategy of shifting the point of view around between a number of different characters, aiming at a composite view of Salterton and its ways; same interest in exploring various levels and facets of Salterton society, this time even delving into the working class. It has in common with the middle installments of the later trilogies the notion of involving characters from the first book, but shifting the focus so that previously main characters are now minor, and vice versa, and both are supplemented by lots of new characters.

The milieu this time is the town newspaper, The Bellman. Someone places in it a notice that Solly Bridgetower and Pearl Vambrace, both of whom we know from the first book, are engaged. Not only does this turn out to be false, but it turns out that the Bridgetowers and the Vambraces are enemies from many years prior.

Of course in the end Solly and Pearl do get engaged – that you can see coming a mile away. But the fun is in how they get there, because it represents a triumph of common sense and goodness over the ingrown spitefulness of their parents.

That spitefulness seems to be the book's main target, if you believe its title. And inasmuch as the book is a condemnation of malice, it's in the end a rather small book. Like its predecessor with its warning against pride, if it all boils down to a satire on familiar human venalities, then it's pleasant, accomplished, full of delights, but not spirit-shaking. Later, he'd write spirit-shaking things, and not coincidentally his later books would take a much different view of pride, malice, and indeed sin.

What this book is really about, though, is the different ways in which Pearl’s father and Solly’s mother domineer over their progeny. Vambrace is an undisguised egoist, a large man who has cowed his family with his histrionic behavior as well as his physical strength. Mrs. Bridgetower, on the other hand, is an unfailingly genteel little woman, hiding her poison behind Old World pretensions to class and taste. Pearl is just plain scared of her father, while Solly is scared for his mother, who (to steal an idea from The Godfather) has been dying from the same heart condition for decades.

We meet Gloster Ridley, editor of the Bellman, and the occasion for much humor at the expense of small-town papers. This kind of humor is a bit dated: in an age when the news media, at least in this country, seems actively interested in torching our society, the kinds of foibles Davies points out (banality and a certain self-importance) just seem quaint. But I would imagine this aspect of the story is the most deeply-rooted, since Davies himself was a newspaperman for a while.

We also meet Dean Knapp of one of the city’s cathedrals; the first of a long line of Davies religionists. He’s a great comic figure, striving mightily toward an ideal of clerical urbaneness that nobody else in town has even heard of.

But it’s the image of filial children that makes this novel memorable. Children, that is, who are filial to parents who hardly deserve it. Children who are, therefore, self-sacrificing to an ideal that their parents have self-servingly taught them. I don’t know enough about Canadian history to really say, but I get a real sense from this trilogy of the ‘50s being a period of change in Canadian society. There are a lot of vestiges of Englishness everywhere, a class consciousness and a Toryism that seem to be under siege, but not giving ground gracefully. Solly’s battles with his mother seem to have sociopolitical overtones to them. His very meekness (not quite spinelessness, but close) in the face of his mother’s implacable disapproval seems to say something about relations with England…

A Mixture of Frailties (1958)

Mrs. Bridgetower dies and leaves her considerable fortune to her son Solly and his wife Pearl (Veronica, as she’s called here – she chooses to go by her other name when she marries Solly), on one condition: they must bear a son first. Until then the money is held in trust; Solly gets virtually nothing. He gets to live in her mansion, but only on sufferance – it belongs to her Trust – and in fact he goes broke trying to keep it up. The income from her trust goes, not to him, but to a young Salterton woman who is to be sent to Europe for an education to become an artist.

These impossible conditions are called by Solly and Veronica the Dead Hand of his mother. Of course they can’t admit it – one of the interesting motives of this book is the inability of people to admit that someone they love can be truly, unreservedly cruel toward them.

But most of the book is only peripherally concerned with Solly, Veronica, and the rest of the Saltertonians – although they make for some rich comic scenes. Instead, once they’ve chosen the lucky beneficiary of the trust, we focus on her for the rest of the book. (In this the concluding book of the trilogy breaks the pattern of the first two.)

This is Monica Gall, and she’s a fascinating creation, certainly Davies’ most vivid and intriguing character to date. Daughter of a family of fundamentalist Christians, she’s blessed with a wonderful natural singing voice that just might benefit from serious training. The Trust selects her to go to England to find out.

Most of the book concerns Monica’s education in England. It’s both an artistic and a sentimental education, as she moves through a succession of teachers who give her wisdom about her art and through one epic, disastrous love affair that gives her the emotional depth she’ll need to complete her art.

Her teachers are: Sir Benedict Domdaniel, a middle-aged singer; Murtagh Molloy, an Irish voice coach, poor and old-fashioned but full of the pith of art; and Giles Revelstoke, a young composer who is constantly at odds with Domdaniel, but who also has valuable insights to impart. It’s Giles who Monica falls in love with, too. All three of these men are sharply evoked: Domdaniel the slightly fulsome gentleman artist, hiding the essential disreputability of the artistic nature behind the cloak of his peerage; Molloy the eccentric whose incompatibility with the modern world, not to mention common propriety, signal a true alignment with the truths of the ages (he in particular is already a familiar figure in Davies, and will remain so; he’s almost a double of Humphrey Cobbler, and is echoed in just about every character in the Deptford Trilogy); Revelstoke the insufferably pretentious young artist, completely gorged on his own needy ego, able to use Monica horribly without a second thought.

It’s a bildungsroman, in a way. Monica is the ne plus ultra of Salterton provincialism, and thus of Canadian provincialism (in Davies’ eyes), and the book is the story of how in learning to master and honor her gift she also learns to navigate a wider world, and to find herself within it. She’s fiercely loyal to her upbringing at first, both because she believes in loyalty and because her proudly ignorant mother has conditioned her to resent anything that smacks of greater education and sophistication than she was born to. Of course Monica quickly realizes how limited that worldview was, and struggles to locate herself between authenticity to her familial and national roots and honesty toward the new things she’s learning.

Davies is wonderfully clear-eyed about this process. He doesn’t romanticize England; Monica’s culture shock upon arrival and her never-fading outsider status are brilliantly rendered. At the same time Davies doesn’t allow Monica to kid herself or the reader that the opportunities back home are anything like what she needs. There’s a rich tension here between a cultural-political pull toward Canada – or more precisely toward a wise and proper refusal to completely renounce one’s background – and an intellectual-artistic pull toward England – a place where Monica can fully develop her art, her heart and mind. This tension is never resolved, which is one of the strengths of the novel: how could it be resolved?

Her love affair with Giles is also left unresolved, in a way. The reader sees immediately what a cad Giles is, and that he’s no good for her; others around her see it, as well. He uses her body and her money – she’s madly in love with him, so she gives himself to her sexually, but he never reciprocates her love, and she diverts her trust to finance his first opera, but he only resents her for it. Monica never admits to herself how miserably he treats her, but the reader can sense that she knows it, just under the surface. But she chooses to stay with him anyway, and I think Davies convinces us that she does it, not because she lacks autonomy, but because she has autonomy – she believes in his talent, and is willing to abet it, and because in the process she’s also abetting her own talent she ends up coming across, not as stereotypical artist’s moll/muse, but as an artist in her own right who has to go through this for her own reasons.

The ending. After his opera is a smashing success in Venice, but he’s humiliated in his attempt to conduct it, Giles throws a huge temper tantrum and goes back to London. Because he’s finally dealt Monica too much emotional abuse, she writes him that she’s breaking up with him. He kills himself – turns on the gas. She finds him, finds her letter in his hand, and takes the letter away so as not to implicate herself, then doesn’t alert anyone until the following morning, when she pretends to find him in the company of his landlady. This is a wise move for her, in terms of her career; but the autopsy reveals that he was probably still alive when she first found him. She could have saved him, in other words, although she didn’t know it at the time.

The guilt almost destroys her, but doesn’t quite; we’re told through hints here and there that after the novel ends she’ll go on to fame and fortune. As the novel ends she’s gotten a proposal of marriage from Domdaniel, the only person she’s told about her role in Giles’s death. We don’t know how she answers him; most likely yes, since Domdaniel has been set up as a voice of reason and wisdom throughout the novel, and furthermore as a voice that Monica ends up listening to when she most needs to.

I find it really interesting, though, that Davies would load his heroine down with such a burden of guilt – guilt that she and we can only partially rationalize away – right at the end of the book, right when she’s about to be left truly independent by the disappearance of the trust and her entrance into professional singing. As I say, Davies is wise enough to set out a lot of conflicts that he leaves unresolved because they’re unresolvable, and in this book I think many of them come down to the idea that it’s wrong to be too ready to cut ties with parents, home, teachers, mentors, etc., but that at the same time it’s often necessary to leave them behind. If we want to grow, we leave home; but we shouldn’t be too happy about it. It’s right to feel conflicted – to feel guilty. Is this last guilt Monica feels the secret burden that lets her become an adult and a true artist?

*

I doubt this trilogy was conceived as such. It doesn’t have anything like the fine symmetry of the next two. Rather, it’s two novels in one style and one in another; they happen to share the same setting and a lot of the same characters, but the glaring fact is their disunity, not their unity. In fact A Mixture of Frailties is much closer in spirit to the Deptford and Cornish trilogies than it is to the two previous books in this series. I don’t know much about Davies’ biography, so I find it really curious that he took over ten years off from novels after this. Curious, because he so clearly hits his stride with this book.

Death Note (manga, films)

We watched the two Death Note films a few days ago.

I read the manga in Japanese a few years ago. Here's what I thought about them then:

*

Ôba Tsugumi, Obata Takeshi　大場つぶみ・小畑健. Desu nôto デスノート. Shûeisha – Jump Comics, 2004-7. Vol. 1-12.

A psycho-horror thing. Basic premise is this: there are a bunch of Death Gods out there somewhere who kill humans by writing their names in their Death Notebooks (Death Note, in J). One, Ryuk, gets bored and drops an extra Death Note into the human world, where bright high schooler Yagami Light finds it. Ryuk has kindly written the instructions inside the book, so Light realizes he now has the power to kill anybody whose face and name he knows, merely by writing their name in the notebook. He commences a campaign of secret assassinations of known criminals, with the goal of forcing everybody in the world to be good. Light’s ultimate goal is to become the god of this new world.

This all happens within the first couple of episodes. The rest of the thing is concerned with all the people trying to figure out who the killer—nicknamed Kira on the internet—is and to catch him. It’s pretty suspenseful up through the first three or four volumes, then gets tedious for a while, as Light has to go underground—lose his Death Note and forget he ever had it, joining the police search for Kira—for a while. Picks up again when Light recovers his powers and does away with his nemesis, a superdetective nerdboy called L. Then it gets tedious again until the end, when Light’s final bid for world supremacy (against L’s successor nerdboy, Near) fails, and Ryuk kills Light, because he’s washed up. No more fun.

Jump Comics are aimed at teenage boys, on the young side. And that’s the real flaw with this. It’s an interesting premise—absurd, of course, but pregnant with possibilities—it could verily easily have explored the typical teenage-boy fantasy of being able to do away with one’s enemies. Typical at least of some teenagers, certainly in these troubled times. But they skirt that kind of psychological penetration; Light’s pretty much a one-dimensional guy: so strictly virtuous in his application of murder that he’s kind of boring. And they don’t follow too far the philosophical implications of what he’s doing: they try, of course, attempting to depict a world divided between people who think murder’s murder, no matter what, and those who think, either through fear or admiration, that Light’s got the answer. But once they set out this debate, quite early, they never really advance it too far. And there are all sorts of opportunities for irony that are passed up in the ending, which is just a basic shootout.

Actually, not really a shootout, but a chess match. That’s what the whole series is, essentially—some action early, and a few action sequences later, but basically it’s a chess match between Light and whoever his opponent of the moment is. And this is what gets tedious—endless scenes of Light furrowing his brow as he reviews his plot and what he thinks the other guy’s plot is, and what he thinks the other guy thinks his plot is, and what the other guy thinks he thinks the other guy thinks his plot is—and lots of the other guy doing the same. It amounts to endless recaps, really, and statements of the obvious. Maybe necessary if you’re thirteen, and it’s churlish to complain, really, since that’s who this is aimed at.

All I’m saying is that at first this looked like it might transcend. It doesn’t.

*

Mrs. Sgt. T basically concurred - she gave up on them quicker than I did. We ended up watching the movies because one of our students was thinking about writing a paper about them, so we figured we'd better familiarize ourselves.

All in all, the movies did a fairly good job of condensing 12 volumes of manga into two films (both released in 2006 in Japan - it was enough of a franchise already that they greenlighted a two-part film). They got rid of the whole bit with Near and let it end on the showdown between Light and L (which is how the manga should have ended too - that it didn't was a classic case of trying to milk the franchise). They condense the timeline so that Light starts out as a college students (which robs the story of some of its adolescent-psychosis subtext, but oh well).

In other ways they're faithful to a, and I mean this, fault. The first movie is reasonably okay, some decent suspense, and at least a half-hearted effort to think about the conceit's Issues. The second movie does just what the manga did: it devolves into endless mind-games between Light and L. In fact, that's all the second movie is. In the very beginning Light walks into the investigation's HQ and literally starts playing chess with L. "AUGGHHH! They're NOT going to do this!" I screamed. They did it.

Boring.

Taliesin West

The last art-related thing on our trip to Arizona that I haven't blogged about is the first one we did, which was our visit to Taliesin West. This is the home/school Frank Lloyd Wright designed and built in the desert outside of Scottsdale, his winter home.

I've been putting off blogging about it because I feel I should really have something fine to say about it. Something worthy of it. I don't. I mean, it was awesome. We took the three-hour tour, and I'd recommend it. It really was worth the $60.

It was worth it because it was really nice to be able to see the whole place, or at least as much as is open to the public: the living areas, the working areas, the gardens, the guest house. It's still functioning as a school, the docents made clear; and those docents - what a trip. We were guided around by this elderly German woman who knew Mr. Wright, and spoke of him in very reverent tones. At break time we were seated at a table with this even older woman in a wheelchair who had spent most of her youth with Wright at the two Taliesins, and from her wheelchair she regaled us with tales of life at the school. Both of these women, as well as the way everybody stressed the self-contained nature of life at Taliesin (Wright really seems to have controlled all aspects of his students' lives) reminded me a lot of some of the religious colonies I've visited - Amana, for example. A totally secular modernist cult? Not so far-fetched, I guess...

But that's a little paranoid. Mostly it was just three hours of looking at beautiful, even noble modernist architecture that really does live up to its promise. Interacting respectfully with the landscape, while at the same time feeling extremely mod and aesthetically well-thought-out. In fact it almost felt comfortable - Wright's stuff, if taken to its logical conclusion, can lead to unhappy hipsters, but I don't think I'd be too unhappy living there.

Mitsuki Dazai and James Nyoraku Schlefer at U of Oregon, 2/19/10

A koto and shakuhachi concert. I'll admit that I probably enjoyed the encore most, the chestnut "Haru no Umi." One of the first Japanese melodies I ever learned to recognize, I used to love it, then I heard it so many times at New Year's in Japan that I realized what a cliché it's become, but tonight I finally heard it fresh again, and noticed, a) what a pretty melody it is, and b) what an interesting and oh-so-early-Shôwa negotiation of Japanese traditions and Western ideas it is. I think I only started to realize it because they played it as an encore, after a couple of hours of the real traditional stuff and the later more fully modern stuff. The hard stuff, in other words. It allowed me both to appreciate the simplicity of "Haru no Umi," and hear it in context.

All my years of concert-going and it never even occurred to me that an encore could have a purpose beyond just, you know, getting you to pull out your cigarette lighter.

Roman Polanski's The Tenant (Le locataire), 1976

Wikipedia will tell you that The Tenant is the last in Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy," with Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. And it's true that all three movies use the particular combination of atomization and collectivity that apartment living provides as a jumping-off point for psychological horror.

They're quite sneaky. Living in an apartment building can be like living in the proverbial village, where every aspect of your life is up for public display, and you feel like you're never alone. And yet it's precisely that feeling of communal existence that makes it possible to feel so isolated once you close the door of your apartment. There is a mass of humanity right outside; inside there's just you; it's the mass that makes the you-ness of you so real, and your isolation that makes the mass-ness of the mass so real. The individual and society: it's all right there in a third-floor walk-up.

And these films take that utterly quotidian feeling and make it the subtext for some superb genre films - horror of a quite lurid nature. Repulsion was about a growing inability to deal with the world - a consciousness disappearing into the rabbit-hole of its own obsessions and, yes, repulsions. We, the onlookers, are left baffled. In Rosemary's Baby, by contrast, the evil came from outside, from a place beyond any that a rational modern could have suspected, tapping into deeper forces than even the heroine can hope to resist. In The Tenant, it's the protagonist's very self that is threatened - "when does a man stop being himself?" he asks, and we watch Trelkowsky gradually start to think he's someone else, and by the end we're not sure which "he" is. (At first it appears this is the only installment in the trilogy not to have a female protagonist, but at the end we're not so sure.)

But I don't think it's just urban anomie that these films are exploring. I don't think it's a coincidence that in all three films the central character, the one whose psyche is embattled, is a foreigner. In Repulsion, Carol is French (or Belgian) living in London; in The Tenant, Trelkowski is Polish living in Paris. It's a little more subtle in Rosemary's Baby, but I think the fact that Rosemary is supposed to be a naive Midwesterner in the big city fits this analysis. In all three cases what we have, overlaying the general anxiety of the apartment dweller, is the particular isolation felt by the exile (to use a recently-fashionable romantic term for the expatriate). It's a heightened sense of being a stranger (or is that etranger?), someone bound not to fit in, someone whose expectations of others are bound not to match up with others' expectations of them. But it's more than that. Just as the apartment is a space of solitude in a crowded building, the linguistic and cultural barriers thrown up around the exile mean that his or her innermost self remains impenetrable to the masses that surround the exile. There's a space of irremediable solitude in the mind of the exile (I speak from many years of experience living as a foreigner in Japan). These three films tap into that.

The Tenant is by far the most explicit about it. We get a number of characters (the landlord, the policeman) treating Trelkowski doubtfully because he's not French - even though he is, as he insists, a French citizen. He's robbed, and the landlord suggests it wouldn't do him any good to go to the cops, since he's not French. And when he does talk to the cops, they answer him by examining his identity card a little too carefully - anybody who's had to carry a green card or its equivalent knows how scary a moment this is, even if you're completely innocent. I don't think it's any coincidence that when Trelkowski starts to lose his identity and assume that of the previous tenant, it's not just a woman he becomes, but a French woman (and one interested in Egyptology - deciphering things insuperably foreign).

But the language/psychological divisions in this film go deeper, although I'm not sure this was intended to emphasize the movie's themes. When you pop the DVD into your machine you have to choose to watch it in English or French. Half the cast is French and half not. Each half seems to have delivered their lines in their own language. Which means no matter which language you watch the film in, you'll be hearing some overdubbing: half the actors' lips aren't going to match their dialogue. As near as I can tell, there's no right way to watch this movie. No matter how you watch it you're going to feel you're missing something. The decisive factor would seem to be the lead - you'd want to hear the leading actor speaking in his/her native language, right? But the lead here is Polanski himself, and he handles both the English and French versions of his dialogue himself. And what's his native language?