Jacob Riis

(Woman with a Plank for a Bed)

"Many of the people shown in Riis's work looked at the camera and the photographer at the moment of exposure. They did not realize that they were looking at you and me and all humanity for ages of time. Their postures and groupings are not contrived; the moment of exposure was selected more for the intention of truth than for the intention of effect." (Ansel Adams)

Jacob Riis, Danish photographer who made a name for himself in the late 1880s as the pioneer of flash-photography in America, used his new technology to penetrate the darkest alleyways of New York. He coined the term "mudracking" for journalism, and was renowned for using his artistic skills to reveal the slum conditions of the waves of immigrants (like himself) that flocked to America after the Civil War.



He was a man who had much personal experience in injustice against the poor. Before he achieved success with the New York Evening Sun, he had lived in a series of filthy tenement halls. His only companion was a stray dog, which a policeman - for fun - beat to death in front of him. Once he had achieved fame, he wrote a series of treaties lamenting on the treatment of the poor - although he remained a racist and a misogynist until he died.



The democratizing impulse of his depictions of the homeless, the poorest members of the city, was a larger aspect of the democratization of artistic subject that Modernism ushered in. Suddenly, it was not only the beautiful or the sublime that could create art - it could be the mundane, the grubbiness of the city, the people who lurked in the dark, not prepared to be seen.

Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar"

Okay, so in all honesty, although I have been denying it for years, I can't stand Wallace Stevens. I find him dry and uninteresting. His poems are like triple-processed cheese. But this one poem - a parody of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" makes me snigger everytime I read it.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Mischief and Morality: the play and seriousness of Philip Roth's doubles

“If all the intelligence agencies in the world were abolished overnight, there would still be Pipiks aplenty to complicate and wreck people’s orderly lives. Self-employed, nonessential nudniks whose purpose is simply balagan, meaningless mayhem, a mess, are probably rooted more deeply in reality than are those who are only dedicated, as you and I are, to coherent, essential, and lofty goals. Let’s not waste any more frenzied dreaming on the mystery of irrationality. It needs no explanation. There is something frighteningly absent from life. One gets from someone like your Moishe Pipik a faint idea of all that’s missing. This revelation one must learn to endure without venerating it with fantasy. Let us move on. Let us be serious.”[1]

Introduction

The Postmodern writer is a mischief-maker: he plays with all expectations of literary form, of the suspension of belief required by art, of the stability of morality and of the solidity of truth. In Operation Shylock, Roth[2]’s method of play to erase the unified narrative voice through creating doubles, and doubles of doubles, to construct a dialogue that destabilises all of the reader’s certainties. However, in a move that runs countercurrent to most Postmodern literature, Roth refuses to abandon himself to this relativism. This is expressed on page 393, when Philip asks Smilesburger, “Isn’t that the message? The unsureness of everything” to which Smilesburger replies, “The message of your book? I wouldn’t say so.”

Roth achieves his mischief-making largely through the character of Pipik, the self-identified double of Philip.

What is Pipik?

On page 389, Smilesburger claims that,

Pipik is the product of perhaps the most powerful of all the senseless influences on human affairs and that is Pipikism, the antitragic force that inconsequentializes everything – farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superfictializes everything – our sufferings as Jews not excluded.

Pipik is the troublemaker in the novel, he sets in motion the comedy of errors that makes the novel seem farcical. He is the single most absurd and unbelievable element of the story - and the most obvious literary construction (there could be no Pipik were there no Secret Sharer in Conrad, or Double in Dosteovsky and so on – the doppelganger is a typical and recognisable figure in literature). He seems to be a character that simply begs a psychoanalytic reading[3]: his penile implant (which is both the symbolic phallus and the fear of castration), the displacement of Philip’s anxieties onto him (Philip says that he sees the sick version of himself when he looks at Philip – the Halycon-induced neurotic), his “protean” nature (reminiscent of the id) and the fact that he is neutralised only when he is re-integrated into the self (when Philip sleeps with Jinx, and finally when Philip calls him “Philip Roth”, at which point he disappears from the narrative). Pipik is, in short, the main reason that the reader is inclined to reject the novel as fact and read it instead as fiction: since fiction supplies the means to interpret him. Pipik is therefore not a troublemaker only because of his activities in the plot, but because of his continual fictionalising of it, against which Philip continually struggles to reassert authenticity.

Not only Philip, but all of the “Philip Roth” personae actively argue for the novel to be read as non-fiction: Pipik becomes angry when Philip attempts to impose “readings” on him (“Is this the way [writers] all think? That out there everybody is playing? Man!” p. 199). The psychoanalytic reading is similarly one that the reader is compelled not to take seriously, firstly because Roth has expressed his distrust of essentialising paradigms[4], and secondly because of Pipik’s own rejection of being “read” and his insistence on his unique personhood (through, for instance, the narrating of his own biography[5]). Furthermore, the psychoanalytic dimension of Pipik becomes a source of comedy; his fake erection labeled “Aristophanic”[6]. The interactions between the two characters are always hysterical, alternating between horror and laughter, and become the most highly charged during the scenes when they alternatively inhabit the same hotel room, that is, when the two identities are forced into the same psychic space. When Philip laughs at Pipik (which he does more than once in the course of the novel) it is when his fear of him is neutralized and he sees Pipik as harmless.[7] As a general rule, Philip laughs at Pipik whenever Pipik reveals himself to be different to Philip – the laughter therefore arises from relief, and is expressive of Philip’s temporary realization that fiction is fiction, but that he is a real and whole person. A relief, of course, that is quickly destabilized yet again as the plot becomes increasingly absurd, increasingly fictive.

The fictiveness/non-fictiveness of the novel is further confused in the bookend statements to the reader: the entity who authorizes the “Preface” is “P.R.”, and the “Note to the Reader” should traditionally also be the voice of Roth, even though they make opposite claims (the “Preface” claims that the book is fact, the “Note” claims that the book is fiction). However, even these become the sites of play: the “Note to the Reader” closes with the sentence, “This confession is false”, with the deliberate ambiguity that “confession” could refer to the entire novel (as designated in its subtitle; the novelistic genre) or to the “confession” (as in a religious confession after a sin, or after mischief) that is the “Note to the Reader” itself. What is labeled a confession of mischief therefore only creates more mischief and confusion, and it becomes unclear if these, too, are part of the fiction body of the text. This tension ultimately produces a comic effect – there is simply no other appropriate response to our confounding bafflement, as the plot becomes increasingly absurd, and is simultaneously increasingly authenticated[8]. The novel plays with the reader’s certainties through fiction-making, and the simultaneous “confession” of that fiction-making, followed by the reassertion that the fiction is true. Pipik is not the only “mischief maker”, Philip is one too. Roth is one too[9].

Roth, in an essay for the New York times entitled “A Bit of Jewish Mischief”[10], claims that the character of Pipik was inspired by a real-life impersonator: “In January 1989 … A man of my age, bearing an uncanny resemblance to me and calling himself Philip Roth, turned up in Jerusalem shortly before I did.[11]” Since Roth is a self-“confessed” mischief-maker, there is no guarantee that he is being more honest here than in the novel; he even warns us that the event “had the unmistakable signposts of the impossible”. Whether Pipik was a real person (not metaphorically real, or a real part of Roth’s psyche, but a real person with a birth certificate) is indeterminate, and therefore Roth forces us to read what is presented of him on its own terms, literary terms, because those are the only ones we can be sure of.

Pipik is not only one of Roth’s characters; he is also one of his readers[12]. He tells Philip that his theory, Diasporism, is based upon readings of Philip/Roth’s fiction. Philip is disturbed by being attributed with ideas that derive from readings of his books rather than ideas that he consciously wrote into them, but accepts the fact that his public persona is ultimately what he is, as much as any persona that he writes for himself[13]. Philip, too, is a reader of the book as much as its narrator; which is best illustrated in chapter 8, when Philip summarises the plot thus far and presents his criticism of it[14]. Philip comes to mimic Pipik, impersonating a different possible version of himself. The dialectics of self are a strong theme in all of Roth’s fiction – in writing himself into his books (in the form of his character Zuckerman, or as Philip) he is questioning the degree to which fiction can act as autobiography[15], and the corollary, that autobiography is the ultimate activity of fictionalising the self. By allowing a “misreader” to become a character in the novel (Pipik), Roth is engaging in a dialectic of his own identity: an identity that is equally determined by the writer and the readers[16].

Roth, in Reading Myself and Others[17] (1977), claims that he “set myself the goal of becoming the writer some Jewish critics had been telling me I was all along: irresponsible, conscienceless, unserious. Ah, if only they knew what that entailed!” (p. 80). Pipik accuses Philip of embodying all of these traits (see especially chapter 3); of refusing to engage politically. Even though the novel is set in a politically (and religiously) volatile setting, Israel, Philip refuses to make explicit his own stance. The other characters enact the dialogue for him, the extreme points of view articulated by characters such as Smilesburger (the Zionist), Zaid (the anti-Zionist); and different perspectives are taken by Pipik (the Diasporist), Anna (the pessimist), Gal (the Israeli soldier, disgusted at his own state), Shmuel (the Jewish lawyer for Palistinians, who scorns them) and so on. Almost all of the minor characters articulate some view on Israeli politics. Philip, however, is only negatively constructed by what he rejects in all of those views[18]. This phenomenon seems to have been enabled by post-Benveniste linguistic theory – in which semantic categories are constituted through differentiation, rather than through positive attributes[19]. It is never clarified whether it is the inherent multiplicity of Roth’s own persona which is expressed in such dialogism, or whether the nature of the political situation itself is so confused that it engineers the disintegration of Philip/Roth’s identity. It may be a bit of both.

This theme of competing narratives and impersonations constructing the self is articulated most openly not in Pipik, about whom Philip struggles to think clearly, but in the character of Ivan the Terrible. Ivan is a real historical character, and his trial is verifiably true. However, he also has existence as an artistic character in the 1958 Sergei Eisenstein film, Ivan the Terrible – a comic/horrific portrayal of Stalin. In real life as well as in art, the person of Demjanjuk is overlaid with emotive ideology, with artistic portrayals, and with the narratives about his history that may or may not be true. Demjanjuk, who may or may not be Ivan the Terrible, is therefore the perfect analogy to Roth, who may or may not be Philip, who may or may not be Pipik. The book is littered both with characters that turn their lives into stories (Aharon and Philip) and characters that turn stories into their lives (Pipik and Zaid), the juxtaposition suggesting that the true self is constructed through both activities. Overlaying and inhibiting all of this multiplicity and power of self-determination is the one great enemy, the one doppelganger of all Jews, Shylock[20].

Conclusion: Towards Ethical Fiction

As we have seen, the subtitle of the book, “A Confession”, ambiguously sets up a literary expectation (by placing the book into the genre of “Confessions”, we begin to read it like a “Confession” – and assume that it is autobiography) and then plays with this expectation (by refusing to be real, by becoming a “confession” of mischief-making). But there is more to this title. A “Confession” resonates with notions of ethical responsibility[21]; a connotation that seems entirely at odds with the Postmodern-play aspect of the book. The book is ultimately an Operation Shylock, which, we are told in the text, is a concrete mission on behalf of all Jews. The mission is to displace the über-doppelganger, with numerous doppelgangers; to shatter an outdated, homogeneous model of The Jew into a multiplicity. By conflating the political mission he attempts in the missing last chapter of the book with the book itself, Roth suggests that what his book achieves is not merely literary fun, but that it is a non-literary (just as the mission in the plot is never narrated[22]), active attempt to be responsible in fiction.

The question as to whether or not there is a responsibility in fiction is one that plays itself out over the course of the novel[23]. Originally the dialogue plays out between Philip and Pipik. Pipik embodies a desire towards action and political involvement. His whole life has been a fight for justice – from his actions as a PI to his political actions (which are eventually realised by Philip, not by himself[24]). Whereas Philip imagines kidnapping Demjanjuk’s son, Pipik plans to do it[25]. It is only once Pipik is re-integrated into Philip (as discussed above) that Philip accepts Smilesburger’s political mission. Operation Shylock, in the end, is a product both of “Pipikism” and “Philipism” - it is both action and literature; it is a mission for the Jewish people in the form of a novel. After, in the narrative, Philip returns from his mission, Smilesburger says to him, “I knew you could write. I knew you could do things in your head. I didn’t know you could do something as large in reality. I don’t imagine that you knew it, either” (p. 381).

In finally playing a role that transcends fiction, that surpasses the comedy and play of Postmodern literature, Roth resurrects his writing from moral relativism. Philip, in the end, does come to a conclusion about his own political/moral stance on the Israeli crisis, and he acts it out. Of course, he never quite tells us what either that stance or action is[26] – but this is perhaps an admonition to the reader to determine for ourselves where in the competing points of view we find truth.

References
Kauvar, E. M. (1995). “This Doubly Reflected Communication: Philip Roth’s ‘Autobiographies’” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 36, No. 3: pp. 412-446.
Parrish, Timothy L. (1999). “Imagining Jews in Philip Roth’s ‘Operation Shylock’” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 40, No. 4: pp. 575-602.
Roth, Philip (1977). Reading Myself and Others. Corgi Books, Great Britain.
Roth, Philip (1993). Operation Shylock. Vintage, London.
Safer, Elaine B. (1996). “The Double, Comic Irony, and Postmodernism in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock” in MELUS, Vol. 21, No. 4: pp. 157-172.
Shostak, Debra (1997). “The Diaspora Jew and the ‘Instinct for Impersonation’: Philip Roth’s ‘Operation Shylock’” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 38, No. 4: pp. 726-754.
Skinner, Quentin (…). “Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter” …

[1] Spoken by Smilesburger in Operation Shylock, page 386. My emphasis.
[2] In order to clearly differentiate between the overlapping personae presented by the novel, the label “Roth” shall designate the author of the book, “Philip” its narrator, and “Pipik” the personage referred to in the first sentence of the novel, “… the other Philip Roth …”. Of course, these labels may become unstable during the course of the interrogation of authorship and authority attempted by the essay.
[3] Indeed, Pipik mentions both Jung and Freud the first time he meets Philip.
[4] See Reading Myself and Others (1977), and Kauvar (1995).
[5] In which it becomes apparent that not only is Pipik’s biography as fully realized as Philip’s, but Pipik as a character is more physical, a PI, more engaged in the real world than Philip, who is accused of being a man who retreats from action into writing.
[6] Referring to the enormous wooden penises sported by actors in Ancient Greek theatre, in the farcical comedy that would precede the performance of a tragedy.
[7] Classical philosophers, from Aristotle to Hobbes, recognized the element of fear or feelings of inferiority that underpin laughter. In the words of Hobbes, “The passion of Laughter is nothyng [sic] else but a suddaine Glory arising from suddaine Conception of some Eminency in our selves by Comparison with the Infirmityes of others, or with our owne formerly” (cited in Skinner, 2007)
[8] It is helpful to remember that Roth taught for many years a course on Kafka, who similarly presents impossible situations as real. See Reading Myself and Others (1977).
[9] On page 106, Philip asks Aharon to “Define ‘mischief’ please?”, to which Aharon replies “To a mischief-maker like you? Mischief is how some Jews get involved in living.” This exchange introduces an idea which is resurrected in chapter 6, “His Story”, where Pipik accuses Philip of succumbing to a typically Jewish flight from physicality by becoming a writer.
[10] The title, in typical Roth style, can be read either as a description of Operation Shylock or of itself.
[11] Cited in Safer, 1996.
[12] In Chapter 8, Philip is presented with yet more “readers”: Supposnik (who accuses Philip of writing anti-Semitic novels) and the schoolchildren Deborah and Tal (who apply his early short stories to their own experiences of religious/political confusion). This reader-writer dialectic is therefore not confined to the exchanges between Philip and Pipik.
[13] Philip admits that the ideas of Diasporism, which have been authorized with his name, “are mine now” (p. 35).
[14] Page 245: “he himself slips silently out of the plot on the grounds of its general implausibility, a total lack of gravity, reliance at too many key points on unlikely coincidence, an absence of inner coherence, and not even the most tenuous evidence of anything resembling a serious meaning or purpose. The story so far is frivolous plotted, overplotted, for his taste altogether too freakishly plotted … as if the look-alike at the story’s storm center isn’t farfetched enough …”
[15] Shostak, 1997, points out that Roth often expresses frustration at being mistaken for his characters by critics; similarly, in Reading Myself and Others (Roth, 1977) he speaks exasperatedly of critics who assumed that Alexander Portnoy was a self-portrait. In his novel Deception, the narrator says, “I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography. I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction … let them decide what it is or isn’t.” (Cited in Safer, 1996)
[16] It could be suggested that this shifting of authority is the product of modern technological society, especially the phenomenon of the internet, where text abounds and authorship becomes impossible to ascertain. However, literary theorists had already proclaimed the “death of the author” by the mid 20th century, most notably Roland Barthes.
[17] The title itself resonates with the idea of self being both a product of the writer and of the reader, Roth in the title proposes to “read himself” rather than to presume authority in interpretation.
[18] The taxi driver (who may or may not work for the PLO), for instance, repeatedly asks Philip if he is a Zionist, to which he refuses to respond. Similarly, he refuses to reply to Smilesburger’s question, “did you approve of Israel and the existence of Israel” on page 351.
[19] Discussed in Shostak (1997), who mentions a passage in The Counterlife when Zuckerman says, “If there even is a natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may even be the root of all impersonation – the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate … in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates best the self that best gets one through”. Analogously, Pipik cures his students of their anti-Semitism by forcing them to listen to a tape of anti-Semitic monologue.
[20] On page 334, Smilesburger argues that the kaleidoscopic self is a phenomenon particular to the Jews. This is belied, however, by the biography Jinx narrates for herself, whose endless reinventions are religious as well as transformations of her personality. However, even she comes to be dominated by the Shylock doppelganger, which obsesses her, and makes her an anti-Semite.
[21] Both because of the use of the word in Catholicism, and the fact that the early writers of the genre, for instance Saint Augustine, were religious men. In more modern times, of course, the word belongs to the realm of Law, and therefore ethical punishment.
[22] The chapter following the deleted one is called “Words Generally Only Spoil Things”.
[23] This occurs implicitly through the narrating of real violence in the novel, and the narrator’s disgust towards real violence. These are the points at which the narrator finds that comedy and literary play are insufficient, for instance when he says of Pipik, “it disgusted me that he should insinuate this crazy stunt into the midst of such a grim and tragic affair [the Demjanjuk trial]”, page 52. On page 374 Philip talks about Céline, the anti-Semitic French novelist whom he “tries hard to despise”, and yet teaches the books to his students.
[24] For instance, Pipik originally plans to meet Arial Sharon. Eventually it is Philip who does. Of course, Philip does not realize all of Pipik’s plans.
[25] And Pipik, it is revealed in the Epilogue (in Jinx’s letter), could not write a word.
[26] This is because the final point of view is Roth’s; there are no more doppelgangers left: Page 377 “Nothing need hide itself in fiction but are there no limits where there’s no disguise?”

Rite (a short story)

Susanne’s mother wielded an enormous cleaver at her. “Honestly! Do something useful or get out of the kitchen. And stop nicking the cheese.”

Sue smiled mischievously and lifted another handful of the creamy cheddar to her mouth as her mother turned back to the chopping board.

She loved being in the kitchen with her mother, while the menfolk sat in the lounge drinking watered-down whiskey, making loud jokes she didn’t understand.

She began to peel potatoes. They felt comfortingly solid in her hands. She peeled away the skin to expose the powdery flesh, and then peeled off bits of the flesh just for the joy of the slicing. She dug out the dark eyes with her fingernails.

“Sies, Sue,” her mother chided her. “Wash your fingers before you do that.” She grabbed the potatoes from her, and began to scrub them roughly over the sink. Sue watched her enormous buttocks jiggling beneath her flowery skirt. She sidled up to them, and rested her head against the rough fabric.

Her mother smiled at her over her shoulder. “If you’re not going to be useful in here, go and ask Uncle Tommy to get more ice. And see if you can find the bottle opener.”

Sue padded into the lounge. Uncle Tommy was conducting a sermon from next to the heater.
“It’s like I said to him, boys, I said to him, you’ve got to give employees boundaries, otherwise they feel they’ve got to test you. They’re uneducated, you know, I said to him, they like to know the rules. Lets them know where they stand.” He took a swig from his glass, and smacked his lips.

Her dad, a planet of a man, to Sue’s eyes, stretched his arms out over his fat belly and crossed his hands together, like he always did when he was about to say something funny.
“Ja, Tom, applies to us husbands too, doesn’t it. Got be disciplined.” He winked over at Auntie Rosemary, who giggled and blushed.

Uncle Tommy laughed. “Ja, Rosie knows how to keep me in my place. She’s got the key to the dogbox hanging on her belt.”

Everyone laughed in a happy chorus. Finally her dad noticed Sue. “What is it, little poppit?”
“Mommy said to tell Uncle Tommy to get more ice and to find the bottle opener.”

Uncle Reggie looked at her from the couch, his nose red and his eyes bloodshot. “I think I saw it in the back room, Susie-Lou.”

Sue ran off at once to get it. She loved any excuse to go into the back room. She’d been forbidden from going in there when Grandma was lying on the bed, and it had acquired the mystical aura of a church, or of her mother’s dressing room.

The room was dark and quiet as she pushed open the door. Even the air seemed perfectly immobile. She stared at the bed. It had been stripped. Sue idly ran her fingers into the grooves of the mattress.

The room had a faint smell that she could not name. Something bodily, and warm, and dry.
Sue walked over to the dark wooden bureau. On it was a collection of delicate porcelain figures. A shepherdess. A boy with a large head and watery eyes. A couple dancing in old-fashioned clothes. A naked woman playing a harp. They were all covered with a film of grey dust. Sue wiped her finger over the naked woman’s breasts, making them white and smooth again. Then, she cleaned off the rest of her, so that no-one would know she’d wanted to touch the statue where it was naked.

The bottle opener was perched on the end of the bureau. Sue grabbed it and left the dark room. She wondered why nobody had thought to open the curtains.

Sue returned to the pleasant noises and smells of the living room. She curled up in the corner, next to the couch, and pretended to be invisible, so that she could drink in the chattering voices and the affectionate laughter without being sent on any more errands.

The men spoke about women, and banking policies, and her daddy told them about the new car he was going to buy, and they all turned miserable when they started speaking about the rugby team that wasn’t doing well, and then cheered up again by making rude jokes about the other teams, and then they spoke about Uncle Reggie’s new business, and then about women again.

Auntie Rosemary wasn’t saying anything, but stroked Susanne’s head gently. Sue felt her body relaxed and weightless, and wondered if she could still be Sue without having any body at all. Although, the delicious smells from the kitchen reminded her that having a body was nice, too.

The sun set as the conversation marinated the room, becoming increasingly hearty with every round of whiskey that went around. Her uncles began so sing a song they remembered from when Grandma still made them go to mass.

Eventually she was called to help bring supper to the table. Everyone was so hungry that they began eating the first course without even saying grace. Sue’s hands were soon sticky, and her mother fussed over her with a napkin.

Very soon the first course was cleared away, and the conversation became suddenly muted. Her Uncle Reggie, sitting across the table, was staring at her again, his eyes even redder than before.

Her mother came from the kitchen, carrying a heavily-laden platter. Everyone watched her lay it on the table. It made a thumping sound like somebody falling.

Her mother brought through a steaming jug. “I hope no-one minds, but I made gravy. I didn’t know if it would be appropriate, but the meat is so dry…”

Everyone loaded up their plate. There were not the usual squabblings over who got the most; Sue thought it must be because there was so much meat, and everyone like meat better than potatoes or vegetables.

Starving, Sue began to eat. She had taken four forkfuls before she realised that everyone else was looking at their food without touching it.

Uncle Tommy cleared his throat. “I feel … we should say something.” Her daddy, always the man to fill a silence, rose ponderously to his feet.

“She was a good mother.”

“The best,” Aunt Rosemary added, dabbing her eye with a soiled napkin.

“Yes, the best. And I know we’re all going to miss her … particular ways of doing things. I know that some of you weren’t in favour of this,” his eyes singled out Uncle Reggie. “Reg, it was what Mom wanted.”

He raised his glass, the broken glass that had a chip out of the rim, half filled with thin whiskey. “To Shirley. May she live on in all of us.”

They all lifted their glasses off the table and murmered, “To Shirley.” Susanne had already resumed eating. The flesh felt grainy in her mouth, and it was already getting cold. She wanted to tell her daddy about something she’d learnt at school about hippos, but he was eating with the look on his face that meant he was concentrating, and didn’t want to be disturbed.

The Desert Music

The minimalist composers in general, and Steve Reich in particular, were all quite enamoured of Williams's poetry. Steve Reich set pieces out of Pictures from Brueghel to a choir and orchestra. He chose extracts that directly mention music:

"take your song / which drives all things out of mind, / with you to the other world"

"Well, shall we / think or listen? Is there a sound addressed / not wholly to the ear? / We half close / our eyes. We do not / hear it through our eyes. / It is not / a flute note either, it is the relation / of a flute note / to a drum"

"It is a principle of music / to repeat the theme. Repeat / and repeat again, / as the pace mounts. The / theme is difficult / but no more difficult / than the facts to be / resolved"

And finally, less obviously related:

"Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant / to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize / them, he must either change or perish"

The extracts all reveal WCW's interest in uniting the arts. He often takes as his subject artistic criticism, or rather what it is to experience a work of art. He most often talks about paintings, of course, being himself an amateur painter; but occassionaly talks about the experience of music, or of the sensations of mundane life.

The last quote is the most interesting. Although a man of deep-felt social conscience, he was critical of the notion that poetry should be used as a tool of political rhetoric. He once said, though, that poetry awakened man from non-awareness, by drawing his attention to the intensity of living experience, which becomes at once a thing utterly squalid and wholly divine. When he says that man knows now "how to realize his wishes" he is speaking not only about the changes that technology, economy and democracy had brought to modern life (although it includes these things) but specifically the ability to become aware of oneself as a truly living, feeling being. This sense of possibility opens man up to becoming divine, or of perishing, because mere animal survival is no longer an option. Once a man has hopes - then those hopes must either be fulfilled or dissapointed.

Reich himself was particularly interested in how he saw these lines as relating to nuclear testing (in the White Sands and Alamagordo deserts). "Realize his wishes" in this sheme refers to man's technological capacities. He has said in interviews that the desert is a place that makes men mad. He cites the biblical passage where Jacob wrestles an angel in the desert - and explains that for him the passage talks about the conflict between man's technological power and his spiritual powerlessness, and the madness (desert) that brings the two into conflict.

On Love and Lolita

the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die
(Extract from Quilty’s death sentence, p. 298)

This is an essay I wrote on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. It analyses chapter 35 - the death of Clare Quilty - in close detail, and talks about the "aesthetic morality" that Nabokov expounds therein.

Lolita’s narrative is framed within a court case. This is most apparent when Humbert opens his story with “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one …” (p. 9), and is reinforced by similar allusions throughout the novel. It could easily be assumed that this court case concerns the character of the title, Lolita herself, and this assumption indeed seems supported by the structure of the narrative, which focuses upon her, and attempts to justify Humbert’s rape of her. However, Humbert’s first description of himself is not as a paedophile, but as a murderer, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (p. 9). The Kubrick film version, additionally, for which Nabokov himself wrote the screenplay, closes with an epilogue that explicates that Humbert dies in prison awaiting trial for the murder of Clare Quilty. And yet, somehow, the reader comes away from the book feeling that the murder is the most moral act that Humbert in fact performs. This essay seeks to examine this tension within the book, through a close-reading of the murder scene.

There are many deaths in Lolita; Valeria, Annabel, Humbert’s mother, Charlotte Haze come to mind immediately. Their deaths are humorously absent from the text – Valeria’s expressed in a sentence (“A man from Pasadena told me one day that Mrs.Maximovitch née Zborovski had died in childbirth around 1945”), Annabel’s in a phrase (“… and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.”), the mother’s described in a mere two words (“picnic, lightning”). Even the crucial death of Charlotte Haze occurs outside of the narrator’s sight, and he spends a mere half-page describing the scene. But the death of Quilty is described in vivid detail; detail matched only in the early descriptions of rapturous moments with Lolita. Humbert the murderer therefore acts in the same mode as Humbert the lover – and as we shall see, it is his characterisation as a lover that justifies him to be the judge and executioner of Quilty the non-lover.

There are explicit similarities between Humbert and Quilty. On p. 293 Humbert even notes that Quilty’s purple bathrobe is much like the one he himself owns. Quilty shares Humbert’s sense of word-play, for instance, “Phil calls Philadelphia. Pat calls Patagonia” (p. 294), and “… as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow” (p. 300). He, too, spatters even prosaic English sentences with French, suggesting an education comparable to Humbert’s. In some ways, Quilty treats Humbert as a social equal, playing a game of niceties with him, as in “She met some remarkable people. Do you happen to know –” (p. 297) and “I said I had said I thought he had said he had never …”, parodying polite upper-class (for want of a better-defined term) social interactions. Quilty himself defines these similarities as, “We are men of the world, in everything – sex, free verse, marksmanship.” By “men of the world”, Quilty seems to imply that both characters believe that they are exempt, by a privilege of birth or intelligence, from the social rules that govern a society that they both seem to disdain.

However, undercutting their multiple similarities, there is a subtle awareness of class-consciousness that divides the men. Quilty, for instance, proclaims “You are either Australian, or a German refugee. Must you talk to me? This is a Gentile’s house, you know. Maybe you’d better run along” (p. 296). Humbert earlier debates with himself whether “master was still asleep in the master bedroom (p. 292).

The opening of the chapter reads like a bad horror story, littered with clichés:
A thunderstorm accompanied me most of the way back to Grimm Road … the birds screamed in the drenched and steaming trees. The elaborate and decrepit house … (p. 292)
Coupled with the general sense of unreality of the passage, and the fact that both characters are drunk (“I had overdone the alcoholic stimulation business,” p. 292), the scene is almost a burlesque. Such passages as

I see myself following him through the hall, with a kind of double, triple, kangaroo jump, remaining quite straight on straight legs while bouncing up twice in his wake, and then bouncing between him and the front door in a ballet-like stiff bounce … (p. 301)

are numerous (many times, characters simply trip over things), and the high level of physical comedy in the scene operate in terms of a theatrical, rather than a literary, genre. Indeed, the chapter closes with the line “This … was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty”. There is a dialogue between theatrical and literary arts that runs throughout the novel, and Quilty, famed playwright, is obviously the ideal interlocutor for the literary purist Humbert. Humbert, on page 198 claims that he “detest[s] the theatre as being a primitive and putrid form”. Indeed, Humbert’s loss of Lolita begins when he loses her to the theatre, to Quilty’s play, in fact, which is the device he constructs to entrap her. It is of significance, therefore, that Humbert forces Quilty to read a poetic death sentence.

The death of Quilty is a dialogue and action laden scene which reads more like a play than like a novel. Humbert’s authorial voice, which dominates the rest of the novel with its ironically mediated descriptions, gives way here to long passages of direct dialogue, a theatrical device. Quilty’s dying monologue in fact lasts a full uninterrupted page-and-a-half (pp. 299-300). The general mode of the chapter, in fact, is overwhelmingly theatrical or filmic – largely resembling an Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward play (the party characters, and the lack of emotional response that characterises that particular social group). The sense of bizarreness which Humbert describes is therefore the product of him finding himself in a world that conforms to different artistic conventions than his own literary one. Humbert’s sense of acting out a role written for him by someone else is interesting in light of the fact that Quilty’s is the only murder that Humbert successfully manages to perform in the novel, though he seriously considers performing others. It is in this scene, moreover, that Humbert finally emerges as a moral agent in the novel. It is therefore interesting that he is stripped of his artistic agency in the face of the theatrical form in the crucial scene.

The theatre/literature dialogue supports more crucial differences between the two men. Humbert’s descriptions of Pavor Manor are as distanced as his descriptions of the Haze home. The passage that reads

There were still other rooms. A happy thought struck me. If and when master returned from his constitutional in the woods, or emerged from some secret lair, it might be wise for an unsteady gunman with a long job before him to prevent his playmate from locking himself up in a room … The house, being an old one, had more planned privacy than have modern glamour-boxes, where the bathroom, the only lock-able locus, has to be used for the furtive needs of planned parenthood.(p. 293)

shows this distance from both the middle class and the American aristocracy in conjunction. Such socially particular phrases as “constitutional in the woods” and “furtive needs of planned parenthood” demonstrate Humbert’s familiarity, and exclusion, from both. The loaded word “furtive” expresses his disdain for the middle class, but his descriptions of Quilty as “fleshy” and “pudgy” demonstrate that Humbert is equally repulsed by Quilty. Dupee (1982) suggests that the confrontation between the two characters is allegorical of the differences between European (restrained, well-bred) and American (opulent, infantile) aristocracy. However, keeping in mind the fact that Nabokov loathes obvious allegory, polemics and Marxist class-consciousness[1] (Nabokov, 1973), we cannot interpret these distinctions as mere class dialectics in themselves. The issue, rather, is one of aesthetics.

Quilty’s lifestyle is characterised by a grandiose, chaotic hedonism repulsive to Humbert. The opulence of the grand house (“a library full of flowers … a rather bare room with ample and deep mirrors and a polar bear skin … there were still other rooms”) is undercut by its unkemptness (Humbert notices “a number of used glasses growing out of the carpet”). Humbert’s aesthetics are curiously ascetic, he refers to “his usual meticulous way” even when cleaning his gun, and fastidiously washes his hands immediately after the murder. He obsessively describes Quilty in phrases of gross physicality: “fleshy”, “pudgy hands” and “hirsute chest”; he evens mentions a play he has written called Proud Flesh (p. 295). The extension of this is Quilty’s attitude to sex, which is obscene and fundamentally opposed to Humbert’s romanticism. Quilty offers Humbert “a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts” as “house pet”, as well as a photographic book of male genetalia, and the opportunity to enjoy both the daughters and granddaughters of “reliable and bribable” Mrs Vibrissa (p. 300) – he is attracted to deviance merely for its own sake, lacking a real standard of aesthetics to inform his sexual tastes. How different is this orgiastic sexual indulgence from Humbert’s rapture for the Nymphet, whose beauty is a product of its rarity, and its transience. By comparison, Quilty is an undiscerning consumer. This quality is the true distinction between Humbert and his Doppelganger, although it is expressed through a theatrical/literary distinction, and it is this quality that causes the reader to condone Humbert as the judge and executor of his foil.

The reason that the reader bestows his moral blessings upon Humbert, is because his aesthetic selectivity approximates something that has been represented to the modern world as “love”. The uniformity of the reader-response to Humbert in this regard is enormously indicative of the degree to which literature has formed our own moral consciousness. Trilling (1982) argues the eloquent point that Humbert, master of Romance languages and the poetic tradition, is a character that expresses the ideals of Romance stories, which exist in the modern world only in misrepresented forms that deal with sex rather than with unfulfilable, courtly love. It seems possible to argue, however, that Romance ideals pervade modern popular culture, even if in a compromised form (I am thinking here, of magazines like those Charlotte Haze devotes herself to, as just one example). We seem, as readers, to be predisposed to respond to the aesthetics of Romantic/romantic love, even if it overrides our normal moral sensibilities. Quilty’s crime, therefore, and the one that he ultimately dies for, is simply that he is worse than obscene, he is vulgar.


At last, we can make sense of the fact that was visited early in this essay: that the death scene is described in a vividness that equates with the vividness of the romantic descriptions of Lolita. Humbert is allowed to murder Quilty because it is the fulfilment of his role as lover. Shockingly, this implies that Quilty is demonised as a paedophile, while Humbert escapes this label, simply because Quilty’s art-form is not sufficiently seductive to convince the reader of its (political, class-conscious) moral paradigm.


Quilty’s insensitivity to the ideals of romantic love is not only expressed in the references to his sexual perversions, but also in his insensitivity to his own death. Explicitly Humbert must tell him,

Quilty … I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you. (p. 296)

because Quilty, right until the moment of his death, cannot seem to take the matter seriously. As Humbert begins to shoot him, Quilty reverts to a “phoney British accent … talking in a curiously detached and even amiable manner” (p. 302), and then climbs into bed and wraps himself in blankets as he is shot to death. The burlesque quality of this death conveys more than a theatrical mode, however. The comedy is not arbitrary, but rather reinforces the fact that Quilty is a “semi-animated, sub-human trickster” (p. 294); lacking a human soul (anima) and therefore the ability to love[2]. Quilty is unable to express an emotion as basic as horror; there is a gorgeous juxtaposition on page 294 where Humbert’s impassioned internal monologue (“To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage … oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss!”) is set in the midst of Quilty’s most inane polite babble (“Somebody told me he had a brother with the same telephone company”).


Humbert’s fastidiousness and his abhorrence of flesh are not only aspects of his aesthetics, but are generally repulsions to the idea of death. By chapter 35, Humbert has learned that he can love even the overweight, pregnant, adult, hopelessly poor Dolly Schiller – and the overcoming of the intensity of his fear of transience is perhaps what allows him to finally empathise with Lolita, to call her “a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze” and to finally take on the father role in protective action (“She was my child, Quilty” p. 295). In the face of this, Quilty is indeed impotent, sexually and morally, aesthetically and empathetically (“Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Paradise, Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?”[3]) Humbert repeatedly calls him “feminine” to express his loss of sexual/romantic agency. Quilty’s impotence, really, is the loss of intensity of feeling.

The entrance of Quilty’s bizarre guests onto the scene (the “florid fellow”, the “faded blonde”, the “fat person” and the two girls on the davenport “so young, so lewd”, p. 303) demonstrates that Quilty’s disease (“Quilty was a very sick man” p. 302) extends to the entire social system that supported him, proclaimed him a genius and made him rich. Death means as little to these house guests as it did to Quilty himself – they are drunk and dulled. The “art” that they produce (it is implied that these are mainly pornographic films) is a perpetuation of their “florid”, “fat”, “faded” aesthetics – their art the source of social disease. Humbert is condoned to murder them, since he is the only character not tainted by their aesthetics; he is the only character, in the play, who is revolted by Quilty and his art-form the theatre.

The murder of Clare Quilty is more than the neat solution to make the narrative balance. By constructing Quilty as Humbert’s doppelganger, and by showing the fundamental ways in which they differ from each other, “Nabokov aims to give his narrator complete moral purgation” (Fowler, 1974). Humbert emerges from the murder with clean hands, literally and figuratively. In the concluding chapter, he goes on to state

had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least 35 years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges … and do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations … and this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (p. 305)

The irony, of course, is that the law sees fit to punish Humbert for his murder, not for his rape, aiming its punitive powers at the wrong end of the lover-murderer spectrum. This ending should disquiet the reader, and force him to reconsider the depths of his own aesthetic prejudices that favour romantic love to the point where the murder of the non-romantic is entirely ethically justified. Humbert has developed in ethical sensibility over the course of the novel, making him realise (in the closing chapter) that Lolita’s absence from the group of laughing, innocent children that he watches playing is his real crime – but he ends the novel in even more of a socially rejected position than he was when he first desired Lolita. This is the curious puzzle that Nabokov invites us to resolve in our own prejudices.





References
Dupee, F. W. (1982). “F. W. Dupee in ‘Anchor Review’” in Page, N. (ed.) Nabokov: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, London: pp. 84-91.
Foweler, Douglas (1974). Reading Nabokov. Cornell University Press, London.
Frye, Northrop (1957). ”The Mythos of Summer: Romance”. In Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press: pp. 186-201.
Nabokov, Vladimir (1959). Lolita. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
(although I cite page numbers from the 1982 Penguin Edition)
Nabokov, Vladimir (1973). Strong Opinions. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
Trilling, Lionel (1982). “Lionel Trilling in ‘Encounter’” in Page, N. (ed.) Nabokov: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, London: pp. 92-102.

[1] Nabokov’s own eloquent phrase is “I loathe such things as jazz, the white-hosed moron torturing a black bull, rayed with red, abstractist bric-a-brac, primitivist folk masks, progressive schools, music in supermarkets, swimming pools, brutes, bores, class-conscious philistines, Freud, Marx, fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks” (Nabokov, 1973).
[2] I do not mean this to be as sentimental as it sounds – I am referring to the motifs of the Romance mode itself, where ethical and generative/sexual abilities are interlinked (Frye, 1957). Humbert even alludes to the generative concept of Romance in his poem (pp. 298-299), mentioning “a marriage in a mountain state/aye a litter of Lolitas …”
[3] Quilty’s wordplay equates to that Lolita may have been in Paradise, Hell or Purgatory, it is all one to him. Note that this technique of expressing emotion through place names is one used commonly by Humbert throughout the novel, for instance the chapter in fact opens with the phrase “I left insomnia lodge next morning around eight”.

A Length of Chain for Paul Muldoon

This silly exercise was inspired by the following poem by Paul Muldoon:

Something Else

When your lobster was lifted out of the tank
to be weighed
I thought of woad,
of madders, of fugitive, indigo inks,

of how Nerval
was given to promenade
a lobster on a gossamer thread,
how, when a decent interval

had passed
(son front rouge encor du baiser de la reine)
and his hope of Adreinne

proved false,
he hanged himself from a lamp-post
with a length of chain, which made me think

of something else, then something else again.


This little piece is made up of the first lines of various novels I was reading at the time, and is just a bit of postmodern fun.

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a den; and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept I dreamed a dream of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day; I had just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. Midway through the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Here we have reached the remotest region of the earth: a few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green, a wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen; on that first Monday of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, birthplace of the author of the Roman de la Rose, seemed to be in as great a turmoil as if the Hugenots had come to turn it into a second La Rochelle. The sun had not yet risen.

This is a tale of arms and of a man. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap. My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing more explicit than Pip, but call me Ishmael. My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons (happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way). I’ve studied now Philosophy and Jurisprudence, Medicine, and even, alas! Theology. I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. I am living at the Villa Borghese. Except for the Marabar Caves – and they are twenty miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. The rustic’s proverb says that many a thing is despised that is worth much more than is supposed.

I learned about the other Philip Roth in January 1988, a few days after the New Year, when my cousin Apter telephoned me in New York to say that Israeli radio had reported that I was in Jerusalem attending the trial of John Demjanjuk, the man alleged to be Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. It was Apollo, Son of Zeus and Leto, who started the feud, when he punished the King for his discourtesy to Cryses, his priest, by inflicting a deadly plague on his army and destroying his men. The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well, although it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses – and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak – there might be seen in the districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. Indeed, as Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. “O gods! grant me release from this long weary watch!” he cried.
“Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow, but you’ll have to be up with the lark,” Alice replied. Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading. She was about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller.