Literary Agendas

 

The folks over at the Blue Bookcase host this blog hop every now and then and I always seem to miss it! I'm posting this time anyway, even if I am a few hours late. This round's question is:

Should literature have a social, political, or any other type of agenda? Does having a clear agenda enhance or detract from its literary value?

To respond to the first part of the question, literature does not need a clear social, political or other agenda in order to be great. Sometimes telling a fantastic story is enough. Most great works have some sort of theme or message, but that doesn't necessarily mean the authors had an agenda obvious even to themselves while writing them. Well-crafted mysteries would be an excellent example of what I'm talking about, unless you consider revealing the edges of what humans are psychologically capable to be an agenda of some kind, or consider themes to be synonymous with agendas. All great works, of course, have some kind of theme or message - I don't consider those terms to be quite as strong as the word "agenda."

That said, having a strong social or political agenda can easily go either way - it can either detract or enhance a work's value. Though I have not yet read Jane Eyre, I'd say Connie's point illustrates how an agenda, when done poorly or too explicitly, can diminish one's enjoyment. We don't need to be hit over the head with an author's motives or political leanings - it can feel like the author doesn't trust the reader to "get it" and has to spell it out. I would disagree with her about Animal Farm though - I read it for the first time a month or so ago and found the obvious agenda to be a little too over the top for me. I did think that was the point, exposing the faults of a corrupt communism with a simplistic and thinly-veiled depiction of a "communist" farm, and despite that, I enjoyed the book to an extent, though not nearly as much as 1984. Ayn Rand is another example of an author whose political motivations completely overpowered the literary merit of her books, with her characters going off on 50 pages monologues of propaganda.

Authors, of course, can weave their agendas well into their stories. Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Kurt Vonnegut, Jose Saramago and even Tom Wolfe (I'm thinking Bonfire of the Vanities) are just a few examples. The Handmaid's Tale has clear message about the dangers of what our current society is so easily capable but the dystopian future is merely a carefully constructed backdrop of what might come if we don't attend to problems today. Atwood never explicitly announces what those societal problems are.

Overall, though, an agenda is just one factor in assessing a work's value, or in determining how much enjoyment a reader might experience. Much depends on an individual reader's purpose in reading and what they bring to the experience themselves. Perhaps some readers need things explicitly spelled out in order to get the message. Thoughts? 

Library time!

We are fortunate to live just a half mile from the closest library. The library is open past 6pm only 2 nights a week and I never seem to get which nights right... until tonight! It's built into the side of a hill and  looks more like a bunker or a bomb shelter than a libraryI managed to pick up some good books, including:

• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell for an informal Reading Buddies parallel read with Erin, Ellen and Anita. 
• Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane since Mystic River was very compelling (review forthcoming), and the library had this Lehane just waiting there on the shelf for me. 
• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami because it's probably time for another Murakami.
• Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris - it's summer and I need a easy, light read in here somewhere. 

I'm considering committing to Infinite Jest at some point this summer, but I think I'll need to get through Cloud Atlas first.

Some "real" posts should be coming up on here shortly! Free time has been at something of a minimum lately, in a good way, though things should be slowing down a bit soon. Well, as soon as we assemble our new Ikea shelves, go to the circus, climb, run, visit some friends across the river, and explore the City Museum by flashlight. After that I should have some time.

Shorter Reads: An Interlude

I have finished about 4 books over the past couple weeks that I haven't mentioned, mostly because they are short, popular or classic, and have been reviewed or discussed widely elsewhere.  They include:

The Stranger, by Albert Camus: In this short piece of absurdist fiction, Meursault is supposed to be an 'ordinary man,' but he is really anything but. He's fairly passive and bland, but also generally unfeeling and unaffected, even when he inadvertently kills a man, and is basically put on trial not for the murder, but for not caring enough about death. You never get the sense that he's a bad person, just completely indifferent and amoral. The entire story is absurd, which isn't to say it's not great, I believe that's the point. The most absurd aspect is how realistic the story turns out to be.

Animal Farm by George Orwell: Leave it to Orwell to suck all the hope and optimism about humanity right out of you. If anyone can succinctly (and without subtlety) paint a bleak picture of human nature, it's Orwell.

Bossypants, by Tina Fey: I listened to the audio version of this and it was hilarious, since Fey herself was the reader. She discusses her life in a self-deprecating & humorous way, dancing over some of the obstacles she's come up against in her career, and her annoyance with the "How do you do it all?" question reserved solely for working women.

Of all the places I've worked that were supposedly boys clubs, The Second City was the only place where I experienced institutionalized gender nonsense. For example, a director of one of the companies once justified cutting a scene by saying, "The audience doesn't want to see a scene between 2 women." Whaaah? (More on that later.) 

In 1995 each cast of the Second City was made up of 4 men and 2 women. When it was suggested that they switch one of the companies to 3 men and 3 women, the producers and directors had the same panicked reaction: "You can't do that; there won't be enough parts to go around. There won't be enough for the girls." This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury. We weren't doing Death of a Salesman; we were making up the show ourselves. How could there not be enough parts? ... The insulting implication, of course, was that the women wouldn't have any ideas.  

... My dream for the future is that sketch comedy becomes a gender-blind meritocracy of whomever is really the funniest. You might see 4 women and 2 men. You might see 5 men and a you-tube video of a kitten sneezing. 

The Giver, by Lois Lowry: The coconspirator produced this book when cleaning out the car last weekend, so Monday morning I picked it up and read it. It's a YA book, about Jonah who lives in an eerily orderly society in which the Elders determine your job at age 11 or 12, and you train for that. At a certain age, after your societal worth is deemed exhausted, you are 'released' from the group. It's an interesting dystopia, even if some of it doesn't make sense-there's a bit of magical realism, you might say, which didn't always work for me. But, worth the couple hours it'll take you to read.

Now, off to enjoy some coffee and Mystic River.

The Wife, by Meg Wolitzer: Impressions

Disclaimer: I absolutely adored The Wife, by Meg Wolitzer.

First lines: "The moment I decided to leave him, the moment I thought, enough, we were thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean, hurtling forward but giving the illusion of stillness and tranquility. Just like our marriage, I could have said, but why ruin everything now?"

Background/sysnopsis: Joan is 64, married to literary sensation Joe Castlemen for over 40 years, and he's about to receive a prestigious literary award to mark his accomplishments over the years. The story wanders between past and present, from when they met back in the mid 1950s when she was a student in his writing class at Smith College. (He was only 5-7 years older, so it's not an entirely creepy student/professor affair.) This was, of course, before the 2nd wave of feminism swept the country, when (middle-upper class, white) women went to college and worked as assistants or secretaries to kill time until they managed to marry, and could then fulfill their purpose in life by gracefully, meekly, invisibly supporting and accenting the important lives of their husbands (and children).

Joe once told me he felt a little sorry for women, who only got husbands. Husbands tried to help by giving answers, being logical, stubbornly applying force as though it were a glue gun. Or else they didn't try to help at all, for they were somewhere else entirely, out walking in the world by themselves. But wives, oh wives, when they weren't being bitter or melancholy or counting the beads on the abacus of disappointment, they could take care of you with delicate and effortless ease.

Impressions: Wolitzer is exactly the kind of witty satirical writer I love. Joan tells her story with a wry world-weariness, highlighting her competing desires, desires she didn't realize had any right to compete at all, for women. She is told, early on, that she is a talented writer, but then, a woman author who writes boldly and 'masculinely' warns her:

"Don't think you can get their attention," she said.

"Whose?"

She looked at me sadly, impatiently, as if I were an idiot... "The men," she said. "The men who write the reviews, who run the publishing houses, who edit the papers, the magazines, who decide who gets to be taken seriously, who gets put up on a pedestal for the rest of their lives. Who gets to be King Shit."

"So you're saying it's a conspiracy?" I asked gently.

"If you use that word it makes me appear envious and insane," Elaine Mozell went on. "Which I'm not. Yet. But yes, I guess you could call it a conspiracy to keep women's voices hushed and tiny and the men's voices loud."*

Joan seems to take this advice to heart, and doesn't allow herself to want things beyond what the world tells her she should want. She loves her children, and her husband, although she allows him more unattended faults and betrayals than I could ever abide in anyone. (I say that, but I live now, not then.) The gender politics of both marriage and the literary world are the main themes of the novel, and the negotiation that women had to make just to get through their lives. It sounds like it could be a bitter tale, but it's not, not really. It's tender, insightful; Joan is resigned to her fate with a touch of bitterness and regret occasionally drifting to the surface, but she seems to know it useless to dwell on past mistakes and shortcomings. She's a woman who's sacrificed more of herself than an individual should ever have to give up for the happiness of another, and yet she is strong in the quiet, non-boastful way women were allowed to show their strength.

Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. WIves tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. 

I will say the 'shocking' ending the book cover boasts was not shocking to me at all. I thought it was supposed to be subtly obvious, but since apparently it's not supposed to be obvious, I can't discuss it (though I'm dying to). This novel would make an excellent choice for book clubs, especially any with desire to explore gender stereotypes and inequality, as well as the inevitable inequities that develop in a marriage (because no matter how hard you try, it is impossible to make any partnership exactly equal at all times). I would rate it just shy of 5/5, only because at times the gender inequalities seemed slightly too over the top, but then again, I live now, not then. Overall I loved this book. It was a reading flavor explosion, and one for savoring.

Note: Those sticky tabs (and the invisible post-its inside) represent my method of 'marginalia' in library books!

*This is the subject of a post on men & women's assigned differences in subject matter interest that's been percolating in my brain for some time, and is long overdue. I must get to it soon.

Mid-Night Update

Well, I've certainly been remiss about posting here, and, apparently feeling so guilty about it, I was compelled to wake up in the middle of the night and write something. After finishing The Wife, by Meg Wolitzer, of course, which I absolutely loved. However, it's 3:30 a.m. and I've only just finished it and would do the novel a disservice if I took on the task of trying to organize my night-mushy whimsical admirations just now, so I'll save that for a day or two. But right now I can thank the Nomad Reader for introducing me to Meg Wolitzer, who is now to be added to my list of favorite authors, and I happened to pick this book up first because it was what the library had available at the moment (the flap description also encouraged me to give it a try). 

Does anyone else do this? Wake up in the middle of the night, joyfully discover you have hours to go before you have to get up and begin your day, and, upon finding that you have no current desire to return to sleep, pick up whatever book you happen to be reading and immerse yourself? It's also how I finished Goon Squad, although I awoke closer to dawn there and didn't have time to get a few extra minutes of actual sleep in, as I will tonight, in just a few extra minutes. 

I am woefully behind on my book blog reading as well as writing, but I'm going to try to remedy that this weekend. I'm also wishing I knew anything about whatever this BEA business is while I was actually living in NYC, because that could've been loads of fun. Alas. It's off to sleep I go. 

Apparently Aging makes me Morbid, or Morose, or Melancholy, or Mindful. Sure. Let's go with Mindful.

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable — if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.

David Foster Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

Startlingly similar to the fig quote in The Bell Jar, no? 

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

I guess the feeling never goes away. Wait. The similarity doesn't end there. Wait. Um. Huh. Well that's terrifically uncomfortable. Moving along...

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman: Impressions

American Gods, as a novel, is like a good scotch. Slightly offensive in its unfamiliarity to the palate at first, and then the complexity rolls out on the tongue in waves. The finish is long, smooth and satisfying, evaporating into the formless shape dreams take when you awake. Okay, so obviously I have no idea how to describe scotch, or this novel, but that description seemed as good as any.

Shadow, the protagonist, is a man you never actually get to know, but that's not the point. He's the every-man (and woman) character, the one that represents the best and the worst and the numbest in us. The book opens as Shadow is about to be released from prison after a 3-year stint for assault, although the details of the event don't come out for some time. A mysterious stranger, Wednesday, seems to keep appearing in his life at impossible places, persistently insisting Shadow work for him on some ambiguous task that he refuses to explain. They go on several trips about the country, visiting places such as the House on the Rock, which I visited on a family vacation way back in 1994 and, as I remember it, is exactly as it's described in the book. Minus the carousel experience, and Rock City, which I'm now determined to see sometime soon.

This book puts the road-trip wanderlust in you, I must warn you, especially if you're into weird roadside attraction-esque places, which, apparently, I am. It's hard not to just hop in the car and try to find some of these eerie places, and disconcerting to be halfway familiar with many of them, having grown up in the Midwest. I also must warn that it might take a little while to get into - I'd say it started to pick up for me when the characters made it to House on the Rock.

Shadow encounters all sorts of gods from all sorts of countries, myths, and religions. They are a dying breed, here in America, where we are always on the look out for the next best thing, which will then be quickly discarded for the best thing after that, and so on.

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end. 

These gods are flawed and human-like, grifters and chauffeurs and funeral home directors. All ordinary places and events seem suddenly eerie and extraordinary. This is not a novel for those without the ability to suspend disbelief. The dead don't always stay dead, and the living aren't always fully alive.

"This isn't about what is," said Mr. Nancy. "It's about what people think is. It's all imaginary anyway. That's why it's important. People only fight over imaginary things."

The old gods are battling with the new gods, but no one is entirely sure why. They are all, essentially, afraid of being forgotten, for that is the death of them. And remember:

None of this is actually happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as a metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you--even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over the opposition. 

American Gods is clever and insightful and well worth the read, possibly one of my favorite reads this year, although, I've been fortunate enough to be on quite a roll with the book choices thus far.  How this escaped my eyes for so long is beyond me. It should be one of the next 5 books you read.

Top Ten Lit Jerks

Top Ten Tuesday hosted by The Broke and the Bookish

Disclaimer: Many of these are going to be from books I've read more recently and that are fresher in my memory.

1. Odysseus - The Odyssey. So dude 'gets lost' sailing for 10 years, during 7 of which he has a torrid affair with Calypso (don't give me any nonsense about her 'captivating' him with her 'spell,' men are 'weak,' etc etc), all the while his poor wife Penelope is fending off moochy suitors and refusing to remarry she claims in the hopes her loving husband is still alive and will return, but really, none of the moochy suitors are worth committing a conversation to, let alone a lifetime. Cheating dude comes back and decides his wife is still worthy of him because of her steadfast fidelity? Screw off, hypocritical, judgmental Odysseus. She's managed just fine without you. (Yes, I realize that 'times were different' then, but that's a tired excuse for a double standard, is it not?)
2. Wickham - Pride and Prejudice. A user and a poser.
3. L. Bob Rife - Snowcrash. He wants to unleash a virus into the world population's brain so that he might control them all. I'd say he should be fairly high up the list in literary jerkitude. Villain, sure, but villains are mostly world-class jerks, no?
4. Sherman McCoy - Bonfire of the Vanities. He thinks he's the Master of the Universe. Without irony (the character, not the author). Need I say more? 
5. Crake - Oryx and Crake. He's a little like L. Bob Rife, only with biological instead of computer viruses. 
6. Jonathan - The Cookbook Collector. I really don't think he was meant to be a world-class canker sore, but indeed he was, with his hypocrisy, idea-stealing and just general egomania.
7. Lou - A Visit From the Goon Squad. Just read 'Ask Me if I Care' and 'Safari'. Lou provides near step-by-step instructions on how to cause women the most harm, not that they don't somewhat knowingly allow themselves to fall for his cheap charms. 
8. Old Nick - Room. A kidnapper rapist abuser. 
9. Howard Roark - The Fountainhead. Selfish taker. Everyone else is too, though. 
10. Romeo - Romeo & Juliet. Ok, not a novel; a play. And not a jerk, exactly, but definitely a lovesick dumbass. Or more eloquently 'light of brain' and an 'anointed sovereign of sighs and groans' perhaps. (Source: Mug of Shakespearean insults from The Strand, pictured above)