The View from Elsewhere

some thoughts about The Spare Room

I finished reading Helen Garner's The Spare Room a few days ago, and I read it pretty much in one sitting on a banana lounge in the sun. The Spare Room has all the hallmarks of a Garner read: it presents a finely wrought, almost deceptive 'still life' focus on the minutiae of the personal and domestic sphere underlaid with a strong sense of narrative propulsion. As in some of her previous fiction such as the novella Other People’s Children and Cosmo Cosmolino, The Spare Room explores the dynamics of a female friendship within an enclosed domestic space (thankfully not a shared household). It poses a question often at the heart of Garner’s writing, this time against a more foreboding backdrop. If nothing is more certain or resilient in a woman’s life than female friendships, how does she face the necessary mortality of those bonds, and, by implication, her own mortality?

I won't rehearse the basic story-line of The Spare Room, (others such as Dr Cat give a far more comprehensive coverage of this and other aspects of the book), other than to say that it concerns a woman seeking to deal with her friend’s denial of a terminal cancer diagnosis. Thematic and narrative elements such as facing mortality and dealing with someone seemingly in denial of their imminent mortality and doing so within your own living space have already featured in Cosmo Cosmolino. Here they are given a more stark and confrontational rendering, not least perhaps because of Garner’s use of a semi-autobiographical mode (if it was the eighties, I’d insert a slash between ‘auto’ and ‘biographical’).

(Warning: long, rambling post over the fold, full of blogger's own strange preoccupations)

Review of Balanda

Mary Ellen Jordan, Balanda: My Year in Arnhem Land, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2005.

Balanda is an account of the fourteen months Mary Ellen Jordan spent working in an arts centre in the remote community of Maningrida in Arnhem Land, one of the northernmost parts of Australia. As such, it presents a cross-cultural bildungsroman of sorts, chronicling the good intentions with which Jordan set out from inner-city Melbourne, the frustration of these intentions, and the more complex understanding of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal race relations in Australia she gained as a result.

Balanda also represents an example of the relatively recent developments in Australian creative non-fiction, specifically those projects in which an outsider, often a journalist, immerses him or herself in a context of which they have little prior knowledge. These include Helen Garner’s exploration of the legal system in The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation, Sarah MacDonald’s pilgrimage through different religious sects in India in Holy Cow, Anna Funder’s investigation of the remnants of the Stasi in post-Berlin Wall Germany in Stasiland and Malcolm Knox’s account of a trial in Secrets of the Jury Room. Balanda is, however, probably better placed as a work of memoir rather than immersion journalism. As Jordan emphasises in the title, the ‘Author’s note’ and elsewhere, Balanda is simply an account of her year in Arnhem Land:

… a subjective, personal account – the story of what it was like for me to live in that particular community, at that time. I have selected what to write about on the basis of how interesting it was for me, or how it made me think and changed my opinions, or how it fitted in to the rest of the story; this doesn’t necessarily make for an objective, even-handed account. (p. vii)

During her time in Maningrida, Jordan experienced a strong sense of otherness in community life, which is reflected in the use of the word ‘Balanda’ in the book’s title, a Macassan word corrupted from ‘Hollander’ to denote the Dutch colonists of Indonesia and now used by Yolngu to refer to European Australians. She found her connection with many of the book’s human subjects elusive, particularly the Aboriginal ones. Before coming to Maningrida, she notes:

I might have imagined that I’d make friends with Aboriginal people and we’d drink cups of tea and chat, as I did with Balanda friends. But they drank tea made on an open fire outside while sitting in the dust. I drank tea made in a pot with water boiled in an electric kettle, and I sat in a chair at a table to drink it. (p.53)

The contrast in modes of tea-making reflects the segregation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people which Jordan experiences in Maningrida. She observes: ‘It often didn’t feel like one community, but rather two different communities living in the same place’, and that this division isn’t so much ‘one of animosity, just of foreignness.’ (p.53)

Jordan’s sense of separation also extends to the community’s non-Indigenous members. She finds that the various white people in Maningrida have their own subcultures: ‘they belong to different tribes and rarely strayed out of them.’ (p.54) She recasts the old saw about those who come to the Territory being either mercenaries, missionaries or misfits as follows:

The mercenaries were the transient contractors….the misfits didn’t form a group; some assimilated into the Balanda community, others lived with an Aboriginal family or entirely on their own. The rest of us were left to the missionary category. Depending on your point of view, you might take this label as a joke – or you might read more into it, and be prompted to wonder what the similarities between you and a missionary really were. (p.91)

As a result of her relative isolation, Jordan explains that she became ‘tentative with everyone, with white people, trying not to sound too urban, too southern, too green, and with Aboriginal people like Tammy, Elroy and Jimmy, trying not to impose, or to take up too much space on their land.’ (p.54)

One of chief surprises for Jordan is the preponderance of middle-aged white men in Maningrida as custodians of Whitlam-ite self-determination policy. Jordan originally envisaged herself working with social-justice oriented people her own age -- ‘I had expected that an Aboriginal community would be full of well-meaning young people who, like me, had been brought here by their social conscience.’ (p.28) -- rather than the somewhat blokey old guard. Her encounter with these ‘white gatekeepers’ provides one of Balanda’s most fundamental insights: this petty bureaucracy has fostered a dependency mentality that perpetuates their position in Aboriginal communities. In particular, she notes that the white community members use ‘training’ as a mantra for justifying their presence on the grounds that they will become redundant once Aboriginal people will fill their jobs. In doing so, they shield the Aboriginal locals from the obligation to be employed and the responsibilities of bureaucracy. Reflecting on her own language project, Jordan observes that the participation of white linguists meant ‘it wasn’t Aboriginal self-determination.’ (p.109) An unhealthy mutual dependency has developed between both balandas and Aboriginal people:

Despite these intentions, there was very little crossover between the two cultures, although we lived side by side. It seemed unlikely that Aboriginal people would ever start behaving like Balandas; that they would become literate, acquire a forty-hour per week work ethic and take on responsibility for managing money the Balanda way in the face of family pressure to use that money the Aboriginal way. And why should they start acting like Balandas? To them, I imagined we were like pale imitations of humans, with no culture or religion or law or understanding of anything that was important. (pp.92-3)

Jordan also underlines how this dependency mentality has become embedded in Aboriginal people’s psyches: ‘The reality was that Aboriginal people were making us indispensable; they had no intention of taking on our jobs and worries when there was no earthly need to do so.’ (p.94)

In mounting this case, Jordan touches on issues such as overdependency on CDEP, alcohol abuse, the implications of Aboriginal people’s more relaxed approach to child-raising, and violence (albeit in rather a more personal context of sexual harassment). The narrative trajectory she uses to cover these is her year-long experience of life in Maningrida and the shift in her outlook on Indigenous issues that occurs as a result. Jordan’s mobilisation of this narrative strategy is both the book’s strength and its weakness. At one level, it enables her to take the reader along on her ‘down the rabbit hole’ experience in Arnhem Land, although it is possible to become a tad bored sometimes as she chronicles details of her everyday routine in Arts Centre, filling out forms in triplicate, and so forth. To some extent, this strategy also provides an opportunity for her as a relative outsider and newcomer to cast a ‘fresh eye’ over some of the issues she encounters, although there is sometimes a certain opacity and naiveté to her treatment of these. For example, her surprise on a field trip to Alice Springs at finding Aboriginal people employed in key positions in local organisations betrays her ignorance of the topography of Indigenous affairs.

One of the sore points of Jordan’s experience of community life is the lack of respect she is accorded for her views as an outsider, a southerner, and a younger white woman: ‘I was a young woman who had been there less than a year, and my opinion didn’t count.’ (p.206) She playfully observes the (frequently sexist) politics of seniority and one-upmanship that often exist in Aboriginal affairs, particularly in remote areas, about whether one has the right to express opinions or volunteer insights. On the other hand, her relative youth and naiveté is a relevant issue in some respects: how much can a young white woman have to say after fourteen months in a community, especially given some of the cultural and language barriers?

My first thought on hearing about Balanda was: ‘What does Jordan think she has to say about life in a remote community on the basis of a year’s experience?’ At a basic level, one of the main reasons for caution is simply the issue of language: a year in Maningrida is not long enough to absorb the language and the cultural underpinnings that accompany it. My other major reservation about Jordan’s project is the relational dimension involved in working with Aboriginal people: it generally takes time and commitment in order to build up the relationships try and address issues in Aboriginal communities. Towards the end of the book, she states that she left the community because of a sense of despondency about the intractability of problems such as substance abuse and family violence, and also the white community’s ‘inability to do anything that would actually make things better for Aboriginal people’ (p.201). She links her motivation for leaving to her critique of the capacity for the Balanda presence to perpetuate itself: ‘I knew that as soon as I left, someone else would step into my job. My presence had not changed anything and neither would my departure.’ (p.201) While her rationale suggests the culmination of the honest and insightful commentary on the community’s Balanda population, it nevertheless begs the question of how she or anyone else could expect to make much change to such difficult problems in the space of a year.

Jordan is ultimately careful simply to probe the existing status quo in community life, rather than providing solutions, displacing the climax of her quest into a space of postmodern interrogation: ‘There were many answers to every question I was interested in, and finally I had learnt to give up sorting through the answers to find or create a single, unified, consistent story.’ (p.214) Her achievement is to make some of the moral and political quagmires of issues in remote Aboriginal communities more accessible to readers from a similar background to herself. She is very careful in foregrounding her subjective processes not to either romanticise or denigrate the Aboriginal people she encounters; her honesty and caution in doing so is one of Balanda’s strong-points. There are also some vivid, often moving and lyrical passages of description of community life at the opening and conclusion of this book. Balanda’s main weakness, however, is Jordan’s lack of rapport with many of the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal inhabitants of Maningrida. For this reason, the book seemed to me to lack a whole depth of vision, which prevented it from making anything more than an introductory investigation of the issues at hand.

1 Yolngu – Aboriginal people living in the Top End of the Northern Territory.

2 Commonwealth Employment Development Projects -- a program in which participants receive welfare entitlements in exchange for performing certain tasks.

a serious game

I was re-reading Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, looking for the bit where he talks about the novel and the fugue structure.  I found it at last in the section titled 'Dialogue on the Art of the Novel', where I also came across this:

The great European novel started out as entertainment, and all real novelists are nostalgic for it!  And besides, entertainment doesn't preclude seriousness...To bring together the extreme gravity of the question and the extreme lightness of the form -- that has always been my ambition.  The union of a frivolous form and a serious subject lays bare our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those we play out on the great stage of History) in all their terrible insignificance.

Yes, that's it and a whole lot more -- in what I was trying to say about the noisy novel (and film).  The novel is a serious game. 

briefly noted

More of this holiday reading, viewing business...

The other day, I finished Kiran's Desai's The Inheritance of Loss.  I read this book as a local book club choice for December, and it's taken me till now to finish it.  Which is no reflection on the book itself, more on my end-of-year lifestyle.

I feel that just about anything I say about this book will sound as tho I'm damning it with faint praise, and indeed, it deserves more than a brief noting. (Desai did win the Booker Prize; surely she has to be happy with that -- Ed.)  Set in the foothills of the Himalayas and the shadow of the Nepalese insurgency, The Inheritance of Loss tells the story of two Indian families facing turmoil and decay. Neglected orphan Sai goes to live with her grandfather, a retired judge, and develops a doomed romance with Gyan, her Maths tutor, who's from the wrong side of the political tracks.  Interwoven with this narrative is that of Biju, the son of her grandfather's cook and now an illegal immigrant in New York.  Both narratives move slowly and subtly towards a climax of brutal pathos (involving a dog).

What I liked particularly about this book, as one interested in combining the personal and the political, was how Desai was able to segue so deftly between the interior narratives of the families to the extenuating social and political circumstances.  Her handling of this material has a rather filmic quality, as tho she's moving from long shots to close-ups.  I was all admiration, as I find many socio-political novel rather too didactic and heavy-handed.  (I think Shaw, with all the political grandstanding that goes on in his plays, has much to answer for in the tradition of political literature.  Some of this stuff would be better off in a blog or an essay than a novel.)

I was less impressed with the film of Elliott Perlman's Three Dollars, which I watched on DVD last night, having missed the cinema release out here in the sticks.  Not having read the book, I don't know how much the film reflects its content -- tho on second thoughts, that might be the film's problem, that it's overly wedded to a prose narrative.

I started watching this DVD at 9 pm and by 10 pm, I was clock-watching, waiting till when the bloody thing would finally be over.  Three Dollars is also about a dysfunctional family in the shadow of globalisation, in this case a pair of thirty-something professionals and their child, who find themselves with unrenewed contracts, a mortgage, a car without petrol, credit card bills, hospital bills, etc, the victims of restructuring, evil corporatisation, etc. 

<David Wenham, wondering if he really should have auditioned for Waiting for Godot instead, after meeting with madman with dog in park>

This is going to sound terribly harsh, but I felt like saying: oh for godsake, just do something clever with your credit cards for a while or sell some assets.  You'll both get jobs again, you're young urban professionals, you've got parents and degrees.  (We've all been there, haven't we?)  While professional people with families do end up on the streets due to interest rate rises etc (like one of the more plausible minor characters in the film), I wasn't quite convinced that this nice young couple were quite on the edge -- yet. In an excrucriating, scarcely plausible and try-hard Beckettian segment of the film, Eddie, the main character, starts consorting with down-and-outs on the streets, learning how to beg, on the very first afternoon after he's been sacked.  After he's had his lights knocked out protecting fellow, Waiting for Godot-style tramps, Eddie ends up back at home in the bosom of his good-looking family (no doubt musing, of course, about the abyss that's about to open before him).

To make matters worse, the film is interlaced with reminiscences (along with a heavy-handed narrative motif concerning three dollars) about a blonde, Hitchcockian phallic woman by the name of Amanda (Amandas are always trouble, if you ask me) with whom the hero is absolutely nashed on.  This was exactly the kind of woman to bore and rile me -- a male fantasy figure with no problems in her life except for managing to sleep with too many people at the one time. 'Amanda' obviously yearns to be a symbol of a bright, brash, class-adaptative future, the resilient face of the new corporatism etc but I found her utterly tiresome (perhaps appropriately so).

The other problem for me with this film was -- David Wenham.  I'm not a big fan of Wenham (sorry, blonds and sloping shoulders don't do it for me) but generally, I find him a commendable actor.  Here I found his laconic, deadpan delivery of his character's rather acidic lines totally misplaced -- they needed someone with a bit more bite for this part, a protagonist who was already rather flat and reactive (partly because he lives so much 'in his head' through first person narrative voice-overs).  Otherwise, Frances O'Connor gives a sterling woman-on-the-edge type performance as his wife -- in the way of Australian actresses -- and the child actor deals impressively with a difficult range of emotions and events.

Overall, I felt that while the film dealt with powerful themes, it chose the wrong subjects for its focus.  I dunno if this story was any better on the big screen or in the book, but I wouldn't rush to borrow it on DVD again.

Trouble at Willow Gables

When I was in about Year 9, my friend Roxanne introduced me to the Dimsie schoolgirl books by Dorita Fairlie Bruce. The books in this series had riveting titles such as Dimsie Moves Up and Dimsie Moves Up Again.

Dimsie, like many a good schoolgirl heroine, was always ‘barging in’ on things and ‘getting into scrapes’. And there also was Mabs, who was bound to become a journalist with her ear for gossip, Angela whom could never be trusted on the hockey field with her hot Spanish blood, and so forth.

Around about this time, we used to play ‘Brooke and Terri’, which was based on extensive background reading of Dolly, Woman’s Day, et al, in which Roxanne was Brooke Shields (on account of her long toffee-coloured hair) and I was her pushy stage-mother, Terri. (R is now the stage manager for a theatre company.)

This was all done with lashings of irony, I hasten to add.

My mother, somehow remembering this schoolgirl craze, gave me a copy of Philip Larkin’s Trouble at Willow Gables for Christmas.* Yes, that’s right: Philip Larkin. It seemed he shared our fascination with adolescent schoolgirl literature, including the fortunes of Dimsie.

I’m not sure why I expect you, dear reader/fellow blogger/lurker to share our fascination with both Mr Larkin and the schoolgirl genre, but never mind. As it is, other readers, lurkers, etc, may know more about the foibles of the youthful Mr Larkin. I am, however, dependent on the notes provided by James Booth to the Faber and Faber edition.

that book meme

Ok, now both Kate and the Fayre Morgayne have tagged me with this book meme thing. *Sighs.  Thinks to self: this might be a way back into the world of blogging.*  But as Kate rightly pointed out, reading is something that you think about, once you sally forth to far-flung and exotic locales.

1. One book you have read more than once

Oh, this could be embarrassing.  I mean, what if I said, The Enchanted Wood by Enid Blyton?  Or Prince Caspian (I had some marathon going with that book at one time, to see how many times I could read it, possibly because I thought Mr Caspian looked spunky on the cover).  Or maybe I should say Jane Eyre, because I used to reserve that for my sickbed reading (for some reason, I used to find Jane Eyre oddly comforting on a sickbed).

2. One book you would want on a desert island

I tried to read the second volume of Proust's epic thingie (title escapes me cos I'm pissed) in hospital, because I thought I would have the time to do it.  (That's right: In Search of Lost Time.) But hospital is far too noisy for Proust.  However, it did make the Surgical Fellow nervous ('is that any good?', he said), which was all part of the desired effect.

Would I take the complete six volumes of Proust to a desert island?  Not sure. It would be quieter than a hospital, I guess. How about a subscription to the New Yorker or a wireless broadband (so I could read your blogs)?

3. One book that made you laugh

Just the one...? Actually, a lot of those Spike Milligan books used to make me laugh.  When I was in Year 8.  Most recently, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, which I read on the flight from SF to Sydney.  Especially the cat bits.

4. One book that made you cry

I did cry at the end of a book recently but I'm not sure with one it was.  It was definitely something involving Truman Capote -- either Gerard Clarke's biography or Other Voices, Other Rooms.  And it was the ending.  Both were suitably melancholy.  In fact, it was probably the bit at the end of the Capote biography, when Clarke quotes Little T C's final words and brings them back full circle to his childhood.  It made me sad because it reminded me of how people become more like themselves as they get older, rather than less, often at their peril.

Yes, I did do the corny thing of reading Truman Capote as I travelled to the Deep South and The Golden Gate when I went to SF.   But I read Shantaram when I went to New York -- a book that fascinated me in many ways (tho not its prose style).  I'd like write a blog post about it some time.

5. One book you wish you had written

Where to start...something funny.  I'm pathetic; I just want to make people laugh.  So maybe Spike Milligan or the Golden Gate ...yes, to make people laugh in sonnet form would be marvellous.

6. One book you wish had never been written

I don't know...my memoirs?  The Satanic Verses, so no one would take a fatweh out against me?

I always thought the Trixie Belden books were pretty poor when I was a kid, compared to Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, I mean. And the Secret Seven and the Donna Parker books were likewise crap.

Seriously, that's a hard question because there are more godawful books than good books in the world.  How about a question asking 'one book you wish you had written better'?

7. One book you are currently reading

O*t *f Pl*ce by J* D*tt*n.  I've blanked most of the vowels because it's by a local writer whom I know, and one doesn't want to contribute to the snipey-ness of the local writing scene any more than one already does.  I'm reading this book because (a) it's in the pile beside my bed I'm gradually working my way through, and (b) I was trying to be nice to a local writer (a largely thankless task).  I'm about a third of the way through.  I'm interested enough in the characters to keep on going, tho things just seem to happen to them, without much development or explanation why.  E.g. a guy becomes an Orange person and his 12 yo daughter is allowed to go and live with him for a couple of pages at the end of one chapter.  Although the book concerns the lives of three different generations of women, the periodisation of the story is quite unclear; took me ages to work out when the different narratives were set (one of the characters finally said something about it being the eighties). 

This book got a good rap in Who Weekly, actually.  It's good beach reading, the kind of book you'd give to a female relative who likes to read, but not literature.

8. One book you have been meaning to read

Vikram Seth's Two Lives.  It's pretty well the last book left in what was the pile beside my bed.

9. One book that changed your life

Sorry folks, I wish I could be saying Buddha, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Allah, The Witch and the Wardrobe or The Lion, Wicca and the Wardrobe here, because that would be marginally cooler, n'est-ce pas, or even better still, Genealogy of the Wardrobe, but unfortunately, it has to be The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, as this got me interested in the world of books when my mother read it to me at the age of four (I was four, of course, not her).

10. Now tag five people: Could I have an extension on that?  Or perhaps some volunteers?  Everyone in the Australian blogosphere has probably been tagged already (maybe I should look further afield...to America...Steph, Uccellina?  And what about Danny Yee and Whitebait?  Mr Shaw?)

Sorry I haven't read all your blogs for a while *lash, lash*.  Now there's more reading to catch up on...

book gobbling

I've set myself the Doctorow challenge, which is to read his latest book, The March, in six evenings.  Not so very difficult, you might think, but the fact is, I've realised that although once an avid reader, I never read books any more. The thing is, when I come home in the evening, I tend to potter, spend time on my other hobbies or watch telly or DVDs.  I read just before I turn the light off, but it tends to be mags, like the New Yorker or the Monthly (the others I read in the supermarket check-out).  Even then, a 10,000 word article can seem a bit taxing.  I do read whole books on holidays or while in transit for work, but I tend to think I just won't have time to fit them in my daily life otherwise (I don't catch public transport, you see).

When I was a child, I read, read, read in the evenings, under the desk at school, on the bus, under the covers at night, etc.  I prided myself on being able to read at a rate of four pages a minute.  I read several books a week.  My father called me a 'book-gobbler' and said I wouldn't enjoy things properly.  When I did my PhD, I read Australian novels for an hour every morning when I got up (those the days!) to become fully conversant with its canons.  Thanks to the existence of the Rowden White Library at Melb Uni, I rarely bought any of these.  Overall, I suspect I read -- and bought -- more theory than fiction in the process of thesis-doing.

At the moment, I have a bedside table full of unread books -- mainly fiction, some non-fiction, most of them bought with book vouchers on interstate trips -- book vouchers now being the perfect gift for someone who lives in Alice.  (I should add that one of these includes a Patrick White, an Xmas present from two years ago; you others are welcome to your White challenge.) I realised that when I was reading fiction, it tended to be the books for our local book club, and then I was reading them under pressure at the last moment. I thought, if I'm able to read books other people want me to read under pressure, then I should be able to read the books I want to read under pressure. 

So I set myself the Doctorow challenge of reading 60 pages of his 364 page tome a night.  So far, it's taken only thirty minutes out of each evening.  Did I feel like a pressured book-gobbler?  Yes, it took me a little while to settle down the first night and not to feel as though the stop-watch was ticking. But I have enjoyed it and found The March surprisingly easy to read (and oddly reminiscent in tone and content to The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers.  So I feel like I'm in a familiar world -- not that I'm suggesting either are derivative of the other).

I note that Jude, of long-toothed hinterlander fame, recently took time out from the blogosphere to catch up on her reading.  I suspect that blogging is one of those pursuits (there are others) that has eroded the amount of time I spend with the printed page.  I may just be revealing my bad habits and other, oddly swotty moments here.  But if someone like me isn't reading books, then I wonder who, if anyone, is?

notes on In Cold Blood

I’ve been reading Capote’s In Cold Blood this week, generally late at night, which is perhaps not the best time for it, but I never sleep well once the weather starts changing (even if only slightly: to eggnish or not, etc). 

I’m struck by how different it is to the film Capote, which is essentially about the writing of the novel, the main difference being that Capote is not directly present in the novel and the ‘case’ (i.e. as a character).  The film also dramatizes various aspects of the case quite differently to the novel, not so much in detail as in tone and mood.  I’m also struck by the similarities and differences to Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation, which stands in the tradition of the ‘non-fiction novel’ which Capote and others pioneered.  And I’m fascinated by the way in which Indigeneity* is a theme of this novel (I’m saying novel in distinction to film and rather than ‘text’ … I know, but text is so ugly, don’t you think?)

If you’ve seen the film (which I’m presuming has some degree of accuracy), Capote makes a serious identification with one of the killers (Perry Smith) which becomes the impetus for his ‘creative non-fiction’ exploration of how someone comes to commit an inhuman, seemingly irrational crime (the murder of four members of the Clutter family in Kansas in 1959).  Capote uses elements of fictional writing to get under the skin of his characters (not just Smith), discarding a factual, reportage-style approach to his subject material.  He does via a third person, shifting point of view, which is effective on the whole, especially given the subject matter, though occasionally I thought some ‘clunks’ of gear shift were rather obvious, especially when he seems to be drawing from transcript material rather than personal interviews.  The novel begins with perspectives of the Clutter family before they die and those of the killers (Smith and Hickok), on their road trip towards the Clutter’s farm, and others involved in the investigation of the crime.  However, it ultimately gravitates towards identification with Smith’s perspective. (Joe Cinque having the opposite movement – away from the killer, to whom Garner didn’t have access, and towards the family members, as victims of the crime.)  The novel arouses your sympathy and horror at all sides of the story, tho the overarching narrative in concerned with understanding the psyche of the killer.  In any case, the Clutter family couldn’t speak after their own deaths, and presumably Capote wouldn’t have wanted to bother the surviving family members (not present at the crime scene), especially given his connections with Smith.  If the film is to be believed, Capote quite knowingly exploited his power as a member of the NY literati and his knowledge that Smith would almost certainly be put to death for his crime, and therefore, would not be able to retaliate or attempt any response to Capote’s telling of his story.  The central problematic of creative non-fiction is after all identification with its subject, and the ethical issues it raises: what better subject than a poor, ‘half-breed’ con who’s about to be knocked off (and who’s unlikely to appear on LNL with Philip Adams)?

Although Capote doesn’t put himself directly into the novel as a character, it seems (from the film) that he entered very deeply into identification with Smith, an identification that might well be full of strange projections of his own.  Smith, as Capote renders him, is small, fey, even effeminate, much like himself, with ‘weeping woman’s eyes’.  (A lot of Smith’s more feminine features seem to be attributed to his maternal, Native American ‘half’: his mother was Cherokee.)  There is almost a sense of twinship imagined between him and Smith, which is may also be perceived from Smith’s ‘half-breed’ status (in the language of the time), with himself being the white part and Smith the ‘native’ part (‘Smith’ = any man, every man?).  In the film, Capote says, ‘it was if we were born in the same house, but I went out the front door, he went out the back door.’  What they share, for Capote, is their impoverished Southern backgrounds and outsider status.

Smith, indeed, came from a history of violence, trauma and poverty. 

His mother took her children away from their father when Perry was six and moved to San Francisco. His mother, an alcoholic, "strangled to death on her own vomit" (In Cold Blood, page 110). Two of his three siblings had died by suicide. He had frequent nightmares of beatings at the hands of nuns and caregivers while in the various orphanages in which he was raised. He suffered constant rejection since childhood, although he never exhibited cruelty toward others. He did, however, blame others for his difficulties in life, and he was prone to outbursts of rage. 

The interesting thing for me in reading Smith’s back-story was its similarity to many Indigenous back-stories, particularly those of the stolen generation.  One hallmark feature is the sense of uncontrollable violence from childhood trauma seeking an outlet. Capote discusses Smith’s assessment by a psychiatrist, who tentatively suggested a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and the possibility that Smith was criminally insane (in a ‘dissociative trance’) at the time of the crime and therefore had diminished responsibility.  Capote quotes a description of the psycho-pathology of such criminals that seems rather apt to his portrayal of Smith and his crime:

In general, these individuals are predisposed to severe lapses in ego-control which makes possible the open expression of primitive violence, born out of previous, and now unconscious, traumatic experiences. (ICB, p291)

Capote makes the nexus between crime and poverty/background very clear in the novel (in the film, he makes some statement to the effect that the novel will expose the divide between the two sides of America, presumably, the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’).  Unconsciously, at least, there seems to be links with race as well, with the suggestion that Smith is acting out his aggression on Mr Clutter, the prosperous farmer, as the thin-lipped, apparently benign face of successful American WASP prosperity – and colonization.  Smith’s inability to give a rational explanation as to why he committed such a horrific and senseless crime (four people shot in cold blood for $40) is framed as follows:

…it wasn’t because of anything the Clutters did.  They never hurt me.  Like other people.  Like people have all my life.  Maybe it’s just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it. (ICB, p282)

The connections between race and the psychology of the crime are, for me, all the more powerful for being understatedly rather than consciously performed.  (Smith seems to have had an ambivalent relationship to his own racial identity: he asserts that he killed a ‘nigger’ to impress Hickok, partly of his own violent capacity but also of his superiority to other, non-white racial groups).

I’m not quite at the end of In Cold Blood, but the inappropriateness of capital punishment, particularly in the case of the ‘diminished responsibility’ of the criminally insane, seems to be the hook on which Capote wishes to hang some of his other socio-economic and racial threads.  While Capote hardly stints on the horror of the crime, the telling of it (drawn from Smith’s account, it seems) is factual, cool rather than cold, appalling in its blandness of tone.  In using this mode of telling, he manages to convey the idea of a dissociative trance state quite effectively.  By contrast Garner gives a riveting and highly dramatized account of the crime in Cinque, appropriate perhaps to the histrionic nature of her subject, Anu Singh (Garner can also be said to have entered into an identification with her killer-subject, tho to a much lesser degree –- e.g. the suggestion that Singh’s personal problems were on a par with hers from the Carlton days, & Singh was not psychologically disturbed, merely youthful).  Something that fascinated me about both accounts was the way that both Smith and Singh felt impelled to commit their crimes: once the script was rolling, they felt they couldn’t stop, they couldn’t not bring things to their imagined conclusion.  Or almost.  Singh balks at her own suicide, and Smith balks at killing Hickok, a further stage he seems to have ‘imagined’.  Reading both these novels, I found it hard to believe that any of these people, Singh, Smith or Smith had a normal psychology (despite the latter’s protests that he’s ‘a normal’, unlike Smith).

Anyway, impressions, impressions.  In Cold Blood’s themes were no doubt highly apposite at its time of writing, during the burgeoning of the civil rights movement.  By contrast, Joe Cinque presents an intriguing inversion of the ‘diminished responsibility’ argument that Capote runs, questioning the psychologisation of crime and punishment that has since occurred through the judicial system (has the pendulum swung too far?, etc, etc). I think these novels can be read quite interestingly in relation to each other, and I do wonder if Garner wrote Cinque with In Cold Blood consciously in mind.  For my money, Garner's Cinque and The First Stone offer a much more pacey read than In Cold Blood -- they're both rattling good yarns -- but Capote draws the different threads of his problematic together more skilfully.  On reflection, I'm not sure which raises more questions -- Garner's use of a first person narrator (honest partiality) or Capote's roving third person narrator (chameleonic dissimulation)or if it's possible to compare, given the very different circumstances of the stories they tell -- e.g. Capote had access to his killer, Garner didn't).  In some ways, having a strong first person narratorial presence, while contributing to the momentum of the narrative, can seem to taint it with its partiality.  On the other hand, it seems there was so much more to telling of In Cold Blood that Capote didn't tell.  (It also seems that Capote and Garner were more sympathetic to the person in the killer-victim bind they found more sexually attractive.) Perhaps Capote went out the front door of the non-fiction novel and Garner went out the back door, (or should that be the other way round)?

* Spellcheck wanted me to change ‘Indigeneity’ to ‘Indignity’.

snake-trapped

Ok, a lull in the week, a blank in the blogosphere.  No one’s sent me a meme for several days, so what to post about?  Maybe a book review.

I've just finished reading Fay Weldon's Mantrapped, which my mother gave me for Christmas.  On receiving this gift, I suspected she had given it to me for any or all of the following reasons:

(a) It seemed like an interesting book and she thought I'd like it.

(b) It seemed like a feminist book and she thought I'd like it.

(c) It seemed like a book with a message about my generation's feminism that she thought it would be good for me to take heed of.

(d) It was remaindered on a bargain book table.

(Actually, I've put these reasons in increasing order of likelihood -- i.e. (d) is the most likely reason.)

I enjoyed this book for a while, then became increasingly tired and maybe a little irritated with it.  The book opens with Trisha, who seems like what we would have called a 'slack tart' at school' -- slovenly, not particularly nice, not particularly attractive, wandering from thing to thing in life ('she had been rich, she had been poor'), invariably 'mantrapped' (I don't think that needs any explanation in this day and age), and aged forty-four (fuck; is that what it's going to be like?)  This character accidentally brushes past Peter, the preppy partner of journalist Doralee, on the stairs one day and some kind of transgendered transmigration of souls occurs. Handsome 32 yo Peter becomes inhabited by the essence of slapper Trisha and slapper Trisha becomes inhabited by the soul of preppy Peter, much to the consternation of Doralee.  This leads to all sorts of interesting personal and ethical questions, like should Doralee fuck the Peter body and thus the soul of slapper Trisha or the unappealing Trisha slapper body with the soul of the increasingly estranged Peter?  None of these characters are particularly appealing (more on that later), so it honestly becomes rather difficult to care what happens to anyone.

Running parallel to all of this is the far more interesting narrative of Weldon's own life and 'mantrapped-ness': her early marriage to an asexual yet voyeuristic headmaster, her milk-and-honey days as a BBC scriptwriter, and her later marriage to an artist who sacrificed his 'art' to become a breadwinner (an antique dealer) to a family of five kids plus hangers-on, all the while deriding Weldon's success as trivial because she was a scriptwriter.  The 'artist' later left Weldon for a floozie when he found most of her (i.e. W's) planets were in the bottom of her birth chart and she was supposedly thus not destined to be a success, tho she had been already, just not in high art terms.

I found Weldon's life fascinating.  In fact, I could have read a whole book on Weldon's life, her lovers, the days at the Beeb, etc, and I think she could have made all the points she wanted to about feminism's impacts on women's lives without resorting to a counternarrative.  The counternarrative provides a rather clever, but wearing, commentary on the way feminism has changed things.  Women these days such as the 32 yo Doralee exert much greater control over their fertility, partners and destinies, whereas in Fay's day, things just happened.  Women were prisoners of their biology and a certain outlook on the implications of their biology.  They did things for 'lerv' and went from one messy relationship to another messy pregnancy to another messy relationship to another messy pregnancy etc etc.  They bled, in all senses of the word.  Clearly, 'women bleed' this kind of lifestyle in many parts of world these days, and Weldon is careful to weave in a class analysis: 'Doralee' is so-called because she comes from a white-trash background.  She's gotten where she has because of being educated into feminism, etc.

Weldon pokes fun (rightly) at the overanalysis of relationships that now occurs in comparison to the days when things just happened (tho she herself became part of the therapy juggernaut), how people used to have relationships (er sorry, marriages or lovers) without having to 'talk' and to sort out issues, etc.  This has led to a kind of perfectionism in the younger generation (i.e. Doralee and Peter) -- they want it all -- house, career, and partner (but not always kids) -- and are almost paralysed by their own desire. 

Weldon also seems to want to say rather nastily that men (like the metrosexual Peter) have been cuckolded by feminism, tho goodness knows why she would want to go back to pre-feminist men, given that her lovers/husbands all seemed to have been rather dire.  When the great body-swap occurs, Peter and Trisha descend into a strange twin-like world in which they explore and compare their experiences of each other's bodies, and go on to discover all sorts of things like the impact of the moon on women's lives...(um, I've always been rather lost on the impact of the moon on my life, which probably goes to show that I am one of those hyper-rational, over-educated, out-of-touch-with-their-body feminists she's talking about.  I used to have a flatmate who claimed to follow her menstrual calendar by the phases of the moon, but I thought she was just being pretentious.  She also had a fascination with eggs.)  Having had this transgendered experience, Peter is able to get more 'in touch' with his own biology, and is 'more forceful' when he returns to his body.

As I said, after the initial jokes wear off, this all becomes rather tiresome (well, it did for me) as none of these characters (except Weldon herself) is drawn in a very sympathetic light so there's little to 'empathise with' (to invoke a voguish contemporary counselling term that W would no doubt scoff at). Talking to my inner confused animi, I said, let a be a larning to you and anyone else who likes OD-ing on sardonic wit and caricatures of other people's shortcomings: too much snakey-ness is too much snakey-ness.

Weldon hit on something that I've often pondered about in thinking about my generation: its sense of perfectionism and feeling of 'trappedness' if it can't get what Kelly in SLOUS calls the 'great triffecta' right: house, family, career.  Mind you, some of these (like real estate) may be more difficult these days to come by, but as Weldon points out, it is a relatively new set of expectations for women.  Fortunately, I can't invoke the spectre of the Gen-X/babyboomer divide here, as Weldon is pre-babyboomer (in fact, almost my mother's age -- a string-saver).  While I think Weldon is right about the perfectionism, I suspect our era is also a more insecure and fearful one than the period of the 50s-70s she describes, and that these insecurities have contributed to this sense of paralysis. On the other hand, I have observed (she says tentatively, moving into the territory of gross generalisations), a strange, almost youthful sense of 'event-prone-ness' in some, er, older babyboomers (the real post-war babies, mid-to-late 50 yos), as tho they're still living in the era of free love when anything goes, (whereas my own generation often seems more calculated and cautious).   As if Monkey Grip wasn't written such a long time ago after all...which is a good analogy to Mantrapped, as Garner ponders similar themes to Weldon about the tension between wanting to follow her newfound feminist principles and the urge to play the role of the traditional girlfriend.

So, yes, I'd recommend reading Mantrapped for the Weldon stuff and to skip through the smart-arsed counternarrative bits. Some blurbs from a book review site (if you're struggling to get a feel for this book from my review):

"This won't do. There are plenty of ways of dealing with unbearable personal sadness other than writing carelessly about it, and what is rather shocking about this unsavoury mixed salad of fact and fiction is the sense that in her heart, Weldon knows it, but has decided not to care." - Jane Shilling, Daily Telegraph

"Popular novels today are full of semi-disguised authorial presence, so why not be upfront about it ? It is a clever device. But it is a good deal more than that: in Mantrapped, the structure is also the subject matter, for Weldon is engaged in a profound debate with this modern urge towards "autobiography"." - Laura Thompson, Independent on Sunday

"I was enjoying the book until the point of the soul-swapping metaphor became clear: it's a half-comical, half-Calvinist jeremiad against an entire generation -- mine. (...) Mantrapped is half a very good novel.

'No consensus', the site observes.

(In between writing these two posts today, I locked myself out of my house [the back door slammed shut in the locked position while I was out at the clothesline] and went to a friend's, tracked down my cat minder and got the spare key.  I guess that took at least ninety minutes.  I was locked out barefoot on a hot day, too -- sniff!)

divinity in our times

Someone raised the Da Vinci Code in a staff meeting today, in relation to colonialist vs ‘black armband’ history, saying it was an example of how there were always other versions of history. I could see the medical director trying not to laugh. I'm yet to read the Da Vinci Code; I suspect I never will and that it will become one of those books that I know by the discourse surrounding it rather than the actual book itself.

I watched something on Sunday night about the real Da Vinci code, hosted incongruously (or maybe not) by Baldrick from Black Adder, and got some glimmerings of what the Da Vinci code might be about…I knew Mary Magdalene was involved, but that was it. Watching this program, I thought, ok, Mary Magdalene having a longstanding attachment with a 33 yo in a culture where people married as teenagers –- I can go there. But as for grails hidden beneath chapels, secret societies in the south of France, Da Vinci involved in concealing the descendents of Jesus…really, I can’t.

Also, before the doco even got to this point, I found myself going back to my medieval English lit studies…the holy grail myth, wasn’t that made up by Chretien de Troyes, circa the 12 century? Isn’t there something of a credulity gap for people wanting to think this tradition dates back to the first century? Oh well, nothing like a best-selling conspiracy theory!