Douglas Stuart’s John of John

 Douglas Stuart, John of John, Booker Prize Short list, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, repression, love, homosexuality, fathers and sons

The reluctant son has a new enthusiastic girlfriend, and she is a voracious reader.  She suggested that the three of us read a new book by one of her favorite authors – Douglas Stuart, a Booker Prize winner.  John of John is the story of a father and son and their coming of age.  How better to introduce herself to this father of her boyfriend?  They sent it to me, via her mother’s bookstore (heart emojis here) for Father’s Day (more heart emoji’s)… 

When we first discussed the book (by telephone, I still have not met her in person), the enthusiast introduced the book  by outlining it as a work about fathers and sons and their contentious battles – and she wanted to reassure me that she was not weighing in on the relationship between her boyfriend and me.  I launched into a counter-reassurance that turned into a bit of an unasked for sermon about father-son relationships, stating that a son is necessarily experienced, through the father's love, as a narcissistic extension of the father – and that part of the coming of age process is the son’s assertion of who it is that he is discovering himself to be, separate from who the father imagines him, as a reflection of the father, to be. 

I apologized for pre-interpreting the book, and hoped that the ethusiast did not experience me as simply a narcissist, but could understand that we all have threads of more or less healthy narcissism in our character.  If we have solid self-esteem, in this context, we have healthy narcissism.  I was both reassured and somewhat concerned to find that the author was pretty explicitly in agreement with me about this basic tension.  John is the father, and his son is also named John, but goes by his middle name, Cal.  On page 67, the author explains, “John saw Cal as his property, or as an extension of himself, and his father was less inclined to listen to him simply because he would always be the child.”  OK, this is a bit more on the "unhealthy" side, but the idea is there.

That said, this father, like me, also cares deeply for his son based on who it is that he actually is – and, despite living in a puritanically repressive corner of the Outer Hebrides, he expresses that, as a single father, in physically and psychologically tender, but also explosive ways.  This book, like the book and movie Hamnet (in which I have also been recently immersed), explores the interior architecture of paternal love with achingly accurate sensitivity.  In discussing the book with the reluctant son, we agreed that these characters, as repressed and seemingly publicly inarticulate as they are in the book (and, at times, in our own lives), express aspects of our relationship in uncanny fashion.

As the reluctant son also pointed out, the characters in this novel; taciturn, isolated, and prejudiced, at first seem closed and inaccessible to the reader, but, as this master story teller fleshes out their characters, they become, if not always likeable, knowable and lovable because of their familiarity.  They are like the members of our family who have quirks and oddities, but are clearly connected to us – or, in the context of the book, each other, even when, or perhaps especially when they are at odds with each other.

These characters are not only at odds with each other, but with themselves.  Both John and Cal are closeted gay men.  Cal has left the island and pursued an education, demonstrating a gift for designing women’s clothing, something he abandons when he returns to the island, ostensibly because his maternal grandmother is dying.  When Cal arrives home and finds his grandmother in good health and is close to being ostracized from the tight religious community that overlaps with the social community, we wonder about his motivation to stay.  Especially after his father, the lay spiritual leader of the church that has a travelling priest join them every three weeks, beats him mercilessly, splitting open his face requiring his maternal grandmother to stitch him up using needle and thread without anesthetic. What kind of sado-masochistic world are we being introduced to, we might imagine...

Slowly, almost painfully, the author introduces us to not just John (the father) and Ella (the grandmother), but to the children Cal, the son, grew up with and to their parents, and we get to know the people in the village by fits and starts.  We also meet Cal’s mother, who lives across the island with his Uncle and their illegitimate children after she abandoned Cal and his father when Cal was nine or ten.  Again, we could judge and dismiss her, but the author doesn’t quite allow us to do that.  If anything, we feel somewhat puzzled that Cal doesn’t visit her more often.

Slowly, perhaps, it dawns on us, that Cal is his father’s son.  Like his father, he must hide who it is that he is, while also acting on it, but his identity is tied up not just in feeling his father’s and his grandmother’s love for him, but his place in this community that, if they fully knew him, would reject him, just as he fears his family would.  This quandary, of feeling both known and unknown, accepted and rejected, feels like a deeply familiar aspect of social life in a small community.  And, while it is perhaps most purely represented there, I think it generalizes even into our more complicated lives, where, at times, it seems like we have a relationship with a culture (whatever that is) rather than a community.

The reluctant son and I agree that the scene that is the high point of this book involves this close=knit community confronting Cal – not directly about his sexuality, but demanding of him that he put the needs of the community before his own needs in a way that they believe will be consistent with who they know him to be (without actually knowing either his actions or his inner life).  This meeting is a dreadful and beautiful thing as the men in this community navigate between what is known and not known and as they  gather enough information to be able to, somewhat surprisingly, profoundly respect Cal’s autonomy. 

We both found it deeply moving that deeply felt experiences could be contained in ways that allowed the community to stay together despite the imagined terrible consequences that would emerge from acting with integrity, and their choosing, both Cal and the community as a whole, to stick with their integrity: to protect the right of the individual to act on his own and to know himself.  We didn’t expect that, but, in retrospect, could see that this was the necessary and consistent outcome of this community’s modus operandi.

What was more confusing was how two closeted gay men could spend their entire lives together and not sus out each other’s sexuality.  The reluctant son and I agreed that Ella suspected Cal’s sexuality because of his effeminate qualities, and John, who was the hardest of hard men, would simply have been embarrassed by this aspect of Cal and expected and exhorted him to grow out of it.  Ella and John’s mother had caught John in the very act of adultery, leading John’s mother to leave (and Ella to stay – to raise Cal), but Cal only experienced his father as the stern, demanding man who was angry at his mother for betraying both of them by leaving – so, by the plot, they were protected from knowing about each other.  But still…

The reluctant son and I agreed that the intensity of the love of the father for the son, and the love of the son for the father would necessarily have an erotic charge.  And this charge needs to be repressed – all incestuous desires need to be.  So the act of denying the (could we call it) Oedipal love might blind them to the erotic life of the other.  What child does not cringe at the idea of their parent in the sexual act?  And what parent does not do the same when thinking of their child?  The answer to that is that those who don’t cringe have, at least momentarily, lost the repressive barrier that is so strongly represented in these individuals and in this community – and in our much faster paced culture, where we can imagine a whole range of things that would once have felt unimaginable.

This book, written by an openly gay man, clarifies that one’s sexuality, if one walls oneself completely off from it, has consequences that tie people up in knots.  At the same time, I think he also recognizes and supports the idea that unbridled sexuality is equally problematic.  We become lost – as various characters do pursuing sexual “liberation” and the liberation of libation – when we don’t retain our connections to each other, connections that require some measure of repression.  This challenging mix of knowing and not knowing, of freedom and restraint, leaves us in a world that is confusing, dangerous, but also potentially enriching.

We are left, at the end of this book, not with all of the loose ends tied up, but with questions.  How does one come of age, at any age?  What does it mean to (finally) own oneself?  How can we do that in the context of a community?  What should we do if the community cannot comprehend us, but we need to comprehend ourselves?  What damage does self-ownership cost – and is the value of that self-ownership worth the cost?  Can we express love from within a divided self?

The book does not provide the answers, but it better equips us to know the forces that will inform those answers – and the types of answers that different individuals will seek out, and the cost of doing that.  I think it is in a position to do that because the author was willing to have his hero engage deeply with the question of who he is – and to acknowledge that to do that, he needed to wrestle with that question in the context of the family and the community that had shaped the parts of him that were opposed to those parts he knew that he could not deny.

I hope that the reluctant son and his enthusiastic girlfriend are able to wrestle with similar questions, but hopefully without some of the culturally imposed restraints that were detrimental.  Of course, I also hope that some of the constraints allow for the retention of the familial bond through and beyond the process of coming of age.

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Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer

 A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Living in a cloud, Lack of Attachment

This book infuriated me.  When I articulate my fury, you will see that it stands on a very tippy base, but that doesn’t take anything away from the strength of that fury.  Perhaps it can be redirected.  Initially, I was furious with Joan Didion herself.  She went to a South American country in the 1970s, spent four weeks there, came down with a fever, went home and wrote, as if in a fever, about an imaginary South American country that was run by American Ex-Pats.  In this book, A Book of Common Prayer, she created layer upon layer of characters, all interacting in complicated ways and, despite it being set in a South American country, none of the characters that were focal, no one that we got to know and be disgusted by or care about, was indigenous to that country.  It was as if the natives mattered not a hoot.

OK, so I could be just indignant in a very general way about American exceptionalism and our assumption that when we take care of other countries that’s what we do, without ever getting to know those countries or the connecting with and valuing their native ways.  We believe that the American way of doing things is the right way and our self-righteousness blinds us to the virtues of those we interact with.  The irony here is that my self-righteousness is fueled by one week – one week – spent in the country of Nicaragua, something that I chronicled when I first started blogging over ten years ago.

I believed Joan Didion to be a careful writer and chronicler based on her being a journalist as well as a fiction writer and her having carefully chronicled her grief in The Year of Magical Thinking and, posthumously, her relationship with her husband and daughter in Letters to John.  I was puzzled, as I was reading the second book, by Didion’s comfort with being told what to do by her therapist.  

The character in this book that most closely resembles Didion is Grace, a woman whose family money was made in the mines of Colorado, but who was raised in California – as was Didion.  Grace married into the ruling family of the imaginary country, Boca Grande – the big mouth, so named for the bay that is on the coast of the capitol town.  She was trained as a social scientist and as a biologist, and she takes a position of reserve from the political intrigue between her two brothers-in-law who are vying for supremacy in the country, all while Grace, now a widow, controls the majority of land, wealth and power.

Grace, as narrator, defines her task in the first paragraph of the book as a chronicler of Charlotte’s life.  Charlotte is a beautiful and sexually evocative woman who lands in Boca Grande after her daughter, in a Patty Hurst like moment, has blown up an airplane and gone underground.  Charlotte has been married twice, and her daughter’s death has summoned Charlotte's first husband who takes her, with her second husband’s permission – indeed encouragement – on a cross country odyssey after their daughter’s disappearance, sleeping with Charlotte and whoever they pick up along the way, while Charlotte is pregnant with her second husband’s child – a child who is born premature and hydrocephalic, and to whom, after he is born, Charlotte becomes as attached to as any character in the book, holding him as he dies against the wishes of those at the hospital who would have disposed of him for her. 

Grace’s attempt to describe Charlotte’s life – with Grace demonstrating more interest if not attachment to her than to anyone else in the story – feels empty.  She is precise in her description – and, in an interview with Studs Terkel, Didion describes her characters as if they were not her product, but people who emerged on the page for her, in whom she takes interest and who reminds others (and perhaps herself) of people they have met in their lives.  For instance, when she talks about Charlotte’s first husband, who is brilliant, but an intrusive, self-absorbed, know-it-all who initially charms and eventually alienates everyone he comes in contact with, she notes that many people say, “Oh, he is just like my first husband.”  And when Turkel asks her if Charlotte is aware of her provocative sexiness, Didion responds that she doesn’t believe she is aware of that but would miss it if people didn’t respond to her sexuality when she was in a room.  And it is this emptiness - the sense of being defined by others react to her - that seems to lie like a blanket over the book as a whole.

And I found the interview even more infuriating.  Don’t get me wrong – it is a great interview.  Turkel has clearly closely read the book and clearly enjoyed it – they read sections of it together – the book came to life for me in different ways as a result of the interview – but they did not put the book into context.  They never once talked about the impact on a country of being ruled by people who had essentially no connection with or concern for the people over whom they ruled.  They accepted the emptiness of all of the characters, not just Charlotte, as a fact - as a feat - of good writing.  These people were all self-concerned – wrapped in their petty interpersonal squabbles and their lives lived in Paris, New Orleans and San Francisco, and their lives in Boca Grande were largely vacuous and disconnected from the people they were ruling.  It was as if the clear painting of the characters absolved them of talking about the implications of these people running the world - as if we all know that this is how the world runs...

The person who, in the book, connected most closely with the people of Boca Grande was Charlotte.  She was a tourist – a tourista – but Grace calls her, in reality, a sojourner.  She volunteered – first in the planned parenthood clinic, where she insisted that women use an American form of birth control – the diaphragm – even though the women would be unlikely to persist in using it and should be given an IUD, and then in the clinic that inoculated people against malaria, but she expressed no concern when a guerilla general destroyed box after box of sera just because he could.  She was interested in the concept of helping, but not really in helping.

As I have talked to people who know much more about Joan Didion that I do, it has become clear to me that she meant to be joining me in my judgmental attitude towards these individuals who were so casually living lives as if they didn’t impact others.  She wanted us – the US – to get upset about our trust that our government was doing good overseas – and that we always have the best interests of others on mind when we intervene. 

This book felt very much like a book of its time.  Though I was a teenager in the 1970s, and a pretty cloistered one living in the Midwest and largely unaware of the world stage, the hippie drop-out attitude, one that I was enamored of more because it was in style, and I was able to align my values – love of others, love of the land – with the ungrounded principles of the movement, is an attitude that Didion was vehemently opposed to, but clearly depicts.  She intended, I think, to be lampooning it in this set piece, that, to me, rings very true about the moment (but also speaks to the shallowness of our current concern about climate change that we espouse while driving around in SUVs).  But I think Didion puts too much trust in the reader to get that she is criticizing rather than simply reporting on the current state of affairs.

I know that this is inconsistent of me.  I frequently rail against directors who don’t trust their audience to think through the material and to have their own emotional reactions to it.  I hate it when I am manipulated into feeling something.  But in this case, I think that Grace’s comfort with her own role – and her inability to see that something may be going on that is beyond her ken – is too subtly portrayed.  I think we may need to be hit a bit over the head in order to get the message.

My friend who knows much more about Didion than I do maintains that part of her preparation as a writer was to write out by hand copies of Hemingway books.  She was sudying his spare still.  She is imitating it here, perhaps, and she, like the good analysts of old, is being intentionally removed - letting us react to her as we choose.  Perhaps I have been manipulted into being furious, but subtly, without her ever acknowledging her own fury, simply, by pretending to be neutral, she has evoked in me the partisanship she wants me to feel.  Or I am giving her too much credit.  I don't know.

So, here’s the real spoiler – I am about to talk about the end of the book.  If you haven’t read the book and intend to, you might want to stop here.  In either case, here we go:

The petty squabble, played out as a war, between Grace’s two brother-in-laws, one of whom is sleeping with Charlotte (under the nose of his wife), and the other of whom uses the worst sort of disdainful language to dismiss her as a human being, is not spooling out according to the usual plan where the guerillas come into town, are used as a screen to allow for a transition of power that isn’t really a transition but a shift, and then killed or chased back into the jungle.  Instead, the guerillas are better armed, they are more focused on their own aims, and they aren’t about to be quelled.  The armed dispute goes on much longer than it is scripted to.

Grace gets that this is unusual and prepares to leave the country until everything is sorted out.  (After all, as the chief landowner, wealthiest citizen, and de facto leader of a country she has nothing to do with, she must needs find safety rather than manage a situation that is spinning out of control).  Grace is concerned about Charlotte, but it is clear that space-cadet Charlotte, who has a Tennessee Williams like confidence in the good nature of strangers, actually does see what is going on, and decides to stay on, effectively committing suicide.

Some suicides can be understood as the execution that follows a judgment of a guilt in a capital crime.  What crime did Charlotte commit?  Was it failing to connect with her daughter so that she became so lost that she killed people based on a hazy sense of right and wrong?  Was it that she never asserted herself and ran her own life but simply bounced from experience to experience trusting that her good looks would lead men to “care” for her?  Charlotte trusted Grace to deliver family heirlooms to her daughter, and the question at the end of the book was whether Charlotte was the one who knew all along…  And Grace wonders if she is more like Charlotte than she knew.  

The weird thing is that, in letters to John, it was clear that Didion’s relationship with her daughter would end of being not entirely unlike Charlotte’s relationship with hers.  There was a seemingly unbridgeable gap between the life that Didion led and the life that her daughter could lead – and her daughter seemed to fill that gap with drugs and alcohol. 

In so far as Didion is setting Grace up to be us - hoping that we, like Grace, recognize our complicity in a corrupt system, she does this - based on my understanding of my friend's depiction of her - from a high horse.  You hippies should learn from us Beatniks, that we really need to have an intellectual basis to the movements that we engage in.  We need to be disciplined.  If we do it right, everything will be alright.

Perhaps the question that his book ultimately asks is whether any of us can wake from our dream, quit floating through life, and engage in a way that is substantial.  And the question after the book is, that even if we do this, life is going to be hard - and much more complicated than even the best observers observations will allow us to be free from.

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Wuthering Heights (2026): Nellie’s fifth business steals the show.

 

Wuthering Heights, Movie, Emily Bronte, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Nellie, Catherine, Heathcliffe, Edgar, Isabella, Fifth Business

I first read Wuthering Heights many many years ago – when I lived in a middle class culture in middle America where class was not determined by birth or by income, but by physical and emotional attributes – we had pretty privilege, and jock privilege and some of us had the ability to be cool – and these were what determined our social standing in our apparently homogenous suburban world.  So I don’t think I could have then understand the central tension in Bronte’s melodramatic story of love across a class divide. 

Emily Bronte could subtly signal the class divide to her readers because they grew up with it.  They knew the boundaries and the third rail that resulted from crossing those boundaries.  I also imagine, not having read the book in many decades, that the sado-masochistic elements in the story were similarly subtly portrayed – perhaps because of official or unofficial censorship – the kind of details that decorum precludes, but because decorum is necessary, readers knew how to read between the lines to access the brutality,both subtle and blatant, that was part and parcel of a rigid class system.

In 2026, with the patriarchy struggling to reassert itself and when decorum has been thrown to the wind, the director, Emerald Fennell, hits us over the head with both the class distinctions, the rot of the upper class spending down their inheritances, the nouveau riche overspending, and the transcendent allure of pretty privilege.  At the same time that these contemporary issues are articulated, by emphasizing the brutality of the public hangings that both shock and titillate, combined with the filth of living among livestock on the heath and the hot and cold running servants of the Victorian era British system, we are able to find the distance to imagine that this is not about us.

The framing of the drama is the traditional frame of four lovers caught in a web of intrigue and a fifth – someone apparently outside of the drama but essential to making it move forward.  The person of this fifth business – Nellie – is, I think, the most subtly acted and convincing element in this particular rendition of the classic melodrama.  The romantic leads are Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie and Charlotte Mellington as young Cathy) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi and Owen Cooper as young Heathcliff), a street urchin “rescued” by Catherine’s  besotted father (Martin Clunes) from his own abusive father, to live at Wuthering Heights as a servant – and who is adopted by Catherine as her pet.  Heathcliff quickly falls in love with the young Catherine and offers himself up to be beaten by her father when she has  kept them out in the rain on the father’s birthday, cementing Heathcliff’splace in Catherine’s heart.

Nellie (Hong Chau with Vy Nguyen as young Nelly), our   person of interest, had previously been taken in by the father.  The bastard child of a nobleman, she is Catherine’s girl in waiting – her maidservant and friend, though she is replaced when Heathcliff arrives as it is Heathcliff now that is Catherine’s favorite and Nellie, aware of Catherine’s fickle nature from her own experience of it, starts to look out for Catherine’s best interests as Catherine, beautiful but unprincipled, lures but then repulses people with her capriciousness.

We then move forward in time, and Catherine is now of marrying age, beautiful, but her father has wasted his fortune on gambling and Wuthering Heights is falling into disrepair around them.  At this point, Edgar Linton moves into town with his vacuous ward Isabella.  Nellie knows that Catherine’s only hope is marrying Edgar, and we quickly see that Isabella is no match for Catherine when Catherine manages to sprain her ankle trying to climb into the garden where Isabella is talking with and trying desperately to engage Edgar who is bored by her.  Six weeks of recuperation at Edgar’s house leads Edgar to visit Wuthering Heights to propose marriage, which Catherine must needs accept.  Indeed, that has been hers (and Nellie’s) goal all along.

The critical scene here is a conversation between Nellie and Catherine where Catherine tells Nellie of the proposal and her acceptance of it, and Nellie sees Heathcliff approaching the room where they are talking and knows that he is listening to their conversation, including when Catherine says that it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff, after which Nellie sees Heathcliff leaving before Catherine protests that, despite his station, Heathcliff is her true love.

Nellie’s pivotal position is one in which she implicitly makes the decision for Catherine about Catherine’s future.  She knows that Catherine loves Heathcliff.  She also knows that what is “best” for Catherine is to accept the offer of marriage from Edgar.  Heathcliff, not surprisingly, based on what he has heard, decides to leave without so much as a fair-thee-well for Catherine, which she takes as a desertion.  She puts off the marriage for a year, hoping Heathcliff will return, but when he doesn’t she marries and moves into a world of untold riches – with a guy who appears to be decent, but who has no chance because her heart belongs to Heathcliff.

Ok, this is pretty stock stuff, What the director has loaded into it are frank depictions of sado-masochism.   The opening scene is a public hanging.  We are introduced to it by hearing the sounds of the dying man before seeing it, and we think we are hearing sex, but we are hearing death.  We then see the onlookers delighting in the death – pointing out the man’s erection and, presumably, ejaculation as he dies.  Heathcliff “catches” Catherine observing a male servant having sado-masochistic sex with a female servant and covers her eyes so that she doesn’t see the consummation of the clearly consensual interaction between the two.

So, when Heathcliff returns five years into the marriage, now a wealthy man, even buying Wuthering Heights, Catherine invites him to her new house, Egar's house, and she plays coy with him, taunting him sadistically with her lack of interest in who he has become.  Pushed to the brink in this interaction, they each hide behind the hurt that they feel, ultimately confessing the love that they continue to feel for each other.  Heathcliff clarifies Nellie’s role in the earlier conversation, and Catherine fires Nellie.  Nellie, not to be outdone, goes to Edgar and hints that Catherine is being loose with Heathcliff, and Edgar bans Catherine from seeing him and from firing Nellie.  Catherine, a prisoner of her position and pregnant with Edgar’s child, withdraws from Heathcliff.

Enraged, Heathcliff seduces Isabella, clarifying the terms of his relationship to her as they enter into it.  He will be having a relationship with her only to hurt Catherine.  Isabella,  who has an enormous crush on Catherine, succumbs to the seduction, perhaps in part to exact her own kind of revenge/love for Catherine.  Heathcliff marries Isabella and spirits her away to Wuthering Heights, which is still in a state of disrepair, and treats Isabella as, quite literally, a dog.  He leashes her and commands her to sit and come and rewards her with bits of food but also sex.

A word about sado-masochism in general here.  There are multiple intersections of S-M in this movie.  On is the current S-M community, about which I know only a little.  A critical aspect of that community is consent.  As noted above, consent is clearly spelled out in many of these S-M interactions.  This is certainly an anachronistic nod to the S-M community.  The idea here is that consenting adults can be brutal towards each other in a kind of play – one where the experience, whether of physical pain, or psychological degradation – enhances the sensory and relational pleasure of the romantic interaction.

The non-consensual Sado-masochistic relationships depicted in the film include the relations between the young Catherine and Heathcliff and Heathcliff’s father, and before that, the sadistic relationship of Heathcliff’s own father with him.  Similarly, Nellie is in a masochistic relationship with Catherine’s family as they “care” for her by making her a servant – a lady in waiting – in a dreary house at the edge of nowhere.  Another is Nellie’s interactions with Catherine, but more about that later. 

The non-consensual sado-masochistic relationships involve differences in power that lead to trauma.  Heathcliff bears the physical scars of the Catherine’s father’s beating into adulthood, but he also bears the scars of Catherine’s taunting him about his inability to learn to read – which is at least partially the result of her inability to empathically teach him a skill that is now second nature to her, having learned it at an age when it was relatively easy to learn.  The problem with this trauma is that it is preferable to the trauma of being ignored.  It is a psychoanalytic truth that the opposite of love is not hate, but disregard.  Being hurt by someone indicates a relationship with them.  Being in that relationship, as painful as it may be, is preferable to not being in a relationship at all.

The danger of this kind of trauma is that it becomes a template for interactions later in life.   We seek out a connection with someone else that includes the kind of harm that we received by those who loved us.  Catherine’s love for her father is just such a love.  She desperately wants his affection – and if she can’t have that, because he is drunk or just plain mean, she will create a scene so that he has to acknowledge her, even if only out of anger at her apparent thoughtlessness towards him – even though that behavior may actually be carefully calculated as a means of enraging him to elicit the very reaction he begrudgingly, but then wholeheartedly wreaks.

In the contemporary consensual S-M relationship, paying very close attention to the exact amount of pain that the other can tolerate enacts the caring and concern that the pain itself conveys in traumatic masochistic relationships.  He or she cares enough to hurt me in just the way that I need to be hurt.  When Catherine’s father dies, she is overcome with grief and rushes to his side torn by the feelings of loss, but then she draws back and kicks his carcass lying on the floor in his own filth twice.  When she confesses her guilt about having kicked him to Heathcliff, who witnessed the kicking, Heathcliff responds that he was amazed at her restraint.  This kind of love is deeply entwined with hate.

So, when Heathcliff has married and abducted Isabella, he repeatedly demands that Isabella write to Catherine (he is still illiterate) with various news that will necessitate her coming to see them – to rescue Isabella, to connect with Heathcliff, whatever it will take to get a rise out of her.  Each of these letters is thrown into the fire by Nellie – who “knows” that Heathcliff is no good for Catherine.  She is looking out for Catherine’s well-being. 

At the same time, Catherine tells Isabella that the child she is carrying is dead.  Nellie classifies this as more manipulative hysterics on Catherine’s part and does nothing to address it, even as Catherine goes on a hunger strike protesting living in a loveless marriage.  Nellie manages all this by instructing Edgar to ignore Catherine’s childish behavior and by chastising Catherine for being such a child.

When it becomes apparent that Catherine is dying from the dead child within, Nellie confesses to Catherine that she has mishandled everything and Catherine dismisses this confession, reassuring Nellie that she has had the best intentions, and Nellie reflectively answers that she does not believe this to be the case.  Suddenly, Fifth Business bursts into the headlines – she is not just propelling the action forward, she is enacting it.  Rather than having been the cool calm collected one, protecting her mistress from self-destructive acts, she glimpses the very real possibility that she has been the chief architect of her misery and that she may have done this for unconscious and but not hard to imagine motives.  Having been severed from her own family at a very early age - her father experienced her as a reminder of his infidelity, she was attached to Cstherine, but then was thrown over as her favorite, and she has enacted sadistic revenge on Catherine directly, if unconsciously– with the cruelest consequence of all, death.  

Elsewhere I have opined, following the lead of James Cone, that using death as a terror device – e.g. the hanging at the beginning of this movie, but, by extension, S-M behavior generally, has the added value of giving the sadist the illusion of having control over life and death.  Nellie is alone in the world.  Her father had an adulterous affair.  In this film, this is marked by her Asian features.  She is not a pure bred Briton.  She must depend on her wits to survive.  She is dependent on Catherine for her survival, but she turns the tables – it is Catherine who is dependent on her.  This reassures her in addition to giving her the pleasure of revenge. She has also then, I believe, enacted her anger against her family - represented by the Earnshaw family as a whole, despoiling them as she was despoiled, making them the hated object of Edgar.

I think the director is also counting on our prejudices about Asian characters – people who, like Nellie, keep their emotions under tight control – to emphasize that Sado Masochistic behavioral dynamics are not just the province of conscious control – nor are we rational in the sense of intentional.  There are reasons for what we do – I have just articulated what I believe to be the rationale for Nellie’s behavior – but this is not volitional on this character’s part, it is something that she only ralizes is the case after the fact.

It is just this sort of component of our character that analysts try to help their patients see.  The challenge in doing this, of course, is that we are often in the position of Nellie.  We are trying to help our patients recognize their own dynamics and, at our worst – or most human – we do not see how our own dynamics play into the situation.  When we play into our patient’s dynamics, we call that an enactment. 

All analyses, at one point or another, have enactments – they needs must if they are to be real relationships between two people deeply engaged in the work that they are doing.  When enactments occur, it is incumbent on the analyst to recognize them, and to acknowledge his or her own part in them as part and parcel of helping the patient become conscious of their own part in the interaction both in the treatment, but, more generally, in life.  Particularly when working with people who have been traumatized, sado-masochistic enactments are liable to occur. 

An early supervisor clarified to me that we are most helpful to our patients when they re-enact their relations with those who were most problematic.  That is, when we are able to interpret the negative transference in the relationship so that the patient can experience us as if we were their tormentors and recognize that they are, on some level, seeking that out, and we can offer an alternative – so they can have the kind of “ah hah” moment that Nellie has before the tragic moment rather than after it, as is the case in this movie.  Of course the danger is that we become Nellie and don’t see our part at all or see it only too late.  Freud thought that our own analysis would inoculate us from this, but he also cautioned that the work is perilous, and I think the latter guide is what we should be bearing in mind.

The Reluctant Wife and I watched the film while crossing the Atlantic when we did not have access to our usual broad array of entertainment options.  It was the film being shown and we both had moderate interest in watching what we had seen advertised as basically a bodice ripping romance.  It was not the most engaging film in terms of the leads – the kids were more convincingly in love than the adults – but the role of Nellie was, indeed, deeply satisfying.  Sometimes by trying to stay above the fray, we actually make it worse and we can hide our own sadism in pity, empathy, superior knowledge, but perhaps also by just standing by and letting things happen on their own.  There is no easy way out of the dramas that take place between humans, including between she and I, nor is there an easy way to be aware of the drama’s that emerge in our own souls.

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Yesteryear - The Novel That Promotes The Very Thing it is Railing against.

 Yesteryear, Novel, Art, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Don't Read This Book, Current Culture, Tradwife, human striving

IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY, I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND READING THIS BOOK.  You are welcome to read the review and decide for yourself, and this is a book that it makes sense to be aware of – it will soon be a motion picture from Amazon starring Ann Hathaway and it is being pushed in all sorts of venues, but the book reading pleasure is limited and you will likely get as much (or more) from the film as from the book.

One of the advantages of belonging to book clubs like the one I belong to, a neighborhood club where the hosts rotate and choose the book when it is their turn to host, is that you get to read a variety of books that you might otherwise not run across.  This book, as referenced above, is likely to be hard to avoid running into, but would not have fallen into my hands of my own accord.  The club was certainly surprised (and many said very pleasantly surprised) to read about prosthetic (glass) eyes when it was last my turn.  It was a book my friend wrote – and a very good book, indeed.

I am glad to have been exposed to the ideas in this book – it helps me get a better sense of current popular visions of our aberrant America that seems to be becoming mainstream, but is – I think and hope – largely performative.  Of course, when it is being performed in the Oval Office, that is a very big stage, but I don’t think our country, as we approach our 250^th anniversary, is currently functioning as itself and I anticipate that this perturbation will resolve into a novel culture – that will be informed by, but not primarily determined by, the current performative, virtual and unreal/surreal culture that this book purports to reflect.

This is not a novel – in the usual sense.  It is a script for a movie.  We are not in the hands of a craftsperson who is writing this – nor in the hands of an editorial team that is concerned about the craft of writing.  This is advertised on the first page.  After a two dimensional introduction of the character who will be our narrator and hero, says "...the radiator was puffing hot air”. 

This is not a person who has lived with radiant heat.  She does not understand HVAC – or perhaps more accurately, she is used to living with modern HVAC and has never been cognizant of what it is like to have a radiator heat a room.  And she is about to tell us what it is like to live in house that is heated by a fireplace? 

The craft of writing springs from a visceral understanding of the human experience.  I became an analyst because of a hunger to understand that visceral experience.  In this, I think I emulated Freud who, as a bench scientist, wanted to scientifically understand people.  Of course, people are not the kinds of relatively simple systems that scientists study.  They are complex and gushy, not neat and clean.

Neal DeGrasse Tyson, in his latest book about extraterrestrial life, suggests that if we want to demonstrate our own perhaps puny understanding of the universe to E.T.s, we should communicate in the universal language of the universe – math and physics.  Even if another species can’t decode the symbols for the elements, they will understand the shape of the periodic table as something that is familiar to them.  The elements are universal and any other civilization will have had to figure them out and arrange them - in just the way we have done.  

DeGrasse Tyson goes on to explain that while physics and math are the basic building blocks, human life is just one form that life might take.  There is no evidence that our DNA produces the ultimate living creature; indeed, other biological worlds might create creatures that don’t even have DNA!  And DNA creates a wide range of creatures who then create cultures who then create an infinite array of individual subjectivities, and it is the writer’s responsibility to capture something about the particulars of a few of those subjectivities and illustrate how they interact. 

I am not a writer because my understanding of the human condition is clunky and, as Freud said about every one of his discoveries about the human condition, the artists had beaten him to that discovery.  Frued (and I) are just able, when we are lucky, to articulate some aspect of the human condition in clunky terms.

Well, this author is clunky, and I don’t think I would have minded reading this book if she was, as it were, a good engineer – but she doesn’t understand HVAC, much less the human condition.  That said, there is a nugget buried in the middle of this mess that I think is worth thinking about, so a quick rendition of the plot, as it were, and then on to the meat:

A woman goes off from Idaho and being poorly understood by her family to Harvard where she is poorly understood by the people that are assumed to be her peers, but, in fact, have no kinship with her.  For a masterful first person telling of this kind of experience by someone who lived it, please read Educated, by Tara Westover.  In the current, Yesteryear, rendition, the shy, smart Christian girl, upset by the vacuous ways of the cultural elite girls she is thrown in with, becomes smitten with a stupid, rich, vacuous son of a Senator.

Realizing that she has made a huge mistake, she gets his father to invest in a ranch for them in Idaho where she can hide this embarrassing idiot away from the world, and then decides to advertise her presence in this remote wasteland by streaming her experience as a tradwife to the world – pretending that her family and ranch life is ideal when, in fact, she and it are a fiction – one that she is creating almost in spite of herself.

Not surprisingly this flimsy construction crashes.  What seems promising about the novel is that the heroine is telling her tradwife story in the past tense – as recollections – then in alternate chapters is moving forward in time in an alternate universe where she is actually living in a frontier home – not one that she has created – and she (and we) see how grim that existence actually was.

OK, that is an interesting vehicle – and I won’t reveal the twist that we as readers are trying to figure out through the book.  If you’ve read it, you know, and if I haven’t convinced you not to read it yet, I don’t want to spoil it for you, except to say that I didn’t see it coming because it didn’t actually make any more sense than a radiator puffing heat.  I’m just saying.

So, the meat?  Or perhaps, rather, the morsel?  The central thing that author promises is that we are all experiencing ourselves as living in a maze with no way out.  We feel trapped in a world that is controlled by billionaires who have no understanding that it is our labor that allows them to have the wealthy perks that make their lives seem so enviable.  Having a tradwife be constructed as having the perfect life on social media helps us whether we have “traditional values” which conflict with our actual, miserable existence; or, we have more elite, snobbish values that allow us to look down on the traditional world so that we can believe that our vacuous existences are worth living – even though the pleasures they provide are thin and we are headed towards the grave without having found any meaning in our lives.

I think this is a trope, but a powerful one, used by the media and politicians alike to inform us that we are not what I believe us to be: humans living human lives.  Until 200 years ago, most of us lived not so differently from the domesticated animals that were likely sharing our living quarters.  And we were, if not happy, deeply invested in our lives and the continuation of the species.  Unlike the spoiled protagonist in this book, who whined and whimpered about her previous superior life when confronted with a lack of creature comforts, we strove to improve our lot – we were deeply engaged in our lives; nasty and brutish and short though they may have been.

Similarly, I think that, as much as we complain about not having enough time, money, or pleasure, we are currently living lives that kings and queens would have envied.  We can travel in ways that were unimaginable until recently, and we have more information in our pockets than were contained in the greatest libraries of all time.  Are we happy?  Not necessarily.  Happiness is a feeling state that comes and goes.  But are we invested in our lives?  I think we are every bit as invested as our ancestors were – and we are every bit as ambivalently as they were.

Sometimes this means that we are invested in our online lives - as if those were our real lives, rather than pale imitations, and distortions, of the lives we are actually leading.  Am I concerned that the opinions I present in these posts are two dimensional or don't reflect all that I feel about any subject?  Am I too pollyannaish, including in this current evaluation of our condition?  I think all of those criticisms are accurate.  The truth of the human condition is complicated, and our minds do much better with manipulating simple things, like how pure chemicals interact in pristine environments.  Hydrogen and oxygen makes water.  Simple and clean.

Human life, on the other hand, continues to be messy – and I anticipate that it will be as long as it continues.  Living viscerally in that life, as complicated and challenging as that is – is our fate.  Art’s role is to help us in that struggle.  This book articulates a vision – the maze and then later the labyrinth – that is certainly a way of reducing a very complex relationship of our lives to our culture, and creating a simple equation to describe out engagement with a new and very complicated future – but it neither provides a way out, nor does it accurately describe our current halting complicated trek through it.  Instead, it celebrates, reifies, and simplifies the complexity of living, reducing it to a kind of periodic table of the human elements that is the very thing it appears to be railing against.  We deserve better from our artists and the empires that billionaires are exploiting to expand their influence, which might, with a certain amount of irony, actually be the point of this book…

I am curious if a movie version will actually enhance it.  Will Ann Hathaway bring something to the character - as an actual human being enacting an imaginary one and thereby infusing the imaginary character with life - unlike the conceptualist - which I think this author is - creating a cartoon and putting it through its paces, an actress will have to confront, as she engages in the role, the complexities that it exposes in herself.

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Amistad and the importance of an independent judiciary...

 

Amistad, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Judiciary, Independence, Social Contract, Independence

I have long wanted to see this film, and when it popped up on our queue, the reluctant wife and I agreed to take a look.  It is a Steven Spielberg film that, along with Schindler’s List, is one of those films that you ought to see, but, that said, do you really want to?  It is showing, in this case, in living color, how corrupt and brutal we can be.  I also “ought” to see it because one of my high school buddies was one of the film editors.  When Spielberg said cut here, he did.

Much to our surprise, this film packs a powerful contemporary message in Trump II’s America.  Yes, it is about slavery and the slave trade, yes, it is about a boat full of Africans illegally enslaved and illegally transported.  But mostly it is about the need for an independent judiciary.  Again and again, the eleven year old Queen Isabella of Spain (Played by a very young Anna Paquin in a minor role) is held up as being a more powerful ruler than our President, Martin Van Buren, because Queen Isabella controls her courts while Van Buren does not, try as he might.

At the time of this film, the transatlantic slave trade was illegal, but slavery was alive and well in the United States.  Slavery here would not be outlawed until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and then, after the civil war, the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 banned slavery entirely.  Kentucky, near me, outlawed selling slaves relatively early in the 1800s, but most of the legislative action up until the civil war was granting exceptions to the law so that particular transactions could take place.

The Amistad was a ship carrying Africans that had been transferred from the illegal transatlantic ship Tecora to a local ship in Havana, Cuba, a Spanish Colony.  The Africans commandeered the Amistad, sparing two crew members who agreed to take them back to Africa, but those crew members instead steered them into American Waters, where the ship was commandeered by the US Navy and taken to Boston, where a series of Judicial proceedings took place.  The first trial was a criminal trial to determine if the Africans were guilty of murdering most of the crew.  As the killings of the crew members took place in international waters, the court decided it did not have jurisdiction.  But that left the matter of what to do with the Africans.

Queen Isabella supported the claim of the remaining crew that the Africans were indeed slaves and belonged to the crew members and that they were being ferried between Spanish colonies and should be returned.  Martin Van Buren, both to support his relationship with Spain, and to curry favor with Southern Voters, supported this claim.  But an abolitionist group became concerned about the Africans.  They approached the retired president John Quincy Adams to defend them, but he demurred, preferring to stay away from the issue of slavery and wanting to remain in retirement.  So, they hired a local attorney, played by a young Matthew McConaughey (who did a credible job, losing his Texas accent by the end of the movie); an expert in property law which, much to the chagrin of the abolitionists, was exactly what they needed when the court was considering the Africans to be slaves.

The complicating factor here, is that the Africans did not speak English.  The attorney was able to find an ex-slave who spoke the language of some of the slaves – the Africans had broken into tribal groups in the group prison cell and Cinqué (Djimon Hounsou) became their spokesman (at least as portrayed in the film).  The attorney found a sympathetic ear in the judge, so Van Buren changed judges, but that judge, too, was swayed by the discovered documentation of the Africans having been illegally transported from Africa, and released the Africans.  Van Buren, again trying to hang onto the South, appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

At this point, John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) finally agreed to get involved.  He argued the case before the Supreme Court.  Historically, he had 4 and ½ hours of opening arguments, and 4 hours in his closing arguments.  The filmed version was more concise.  It was also what I would like to focus on in thinking about the film.  In doing this, I am not addressing the brutal (but also historically accurate) depiction of the middle passage from Africa to the Americas.  I am also not addressing the issue of people as property - for that, see a discussion of James Cone’s the Cross as the Lynching Tree.

The issue of an independent judiciary is both political and, I will argue in a moment, intrapsychic.  Trump had the judiciary in his pocket when he arrived for his first term.  As the New York Times recently revealed, Chief Justice Roberts ushered in the era of the shadow docket when he put the kibosh on Obama’s use of the EPA to reduce the use of coal in electricity production and thereby blocked the transition to renewable energy sources by 2030.  After that, Mitch McConnell oversaw the revamping of the federal judiciary including the Supreme Court during Trump I, and the court has become a rubber stamp of the more and more outlandish executive orders of Trump II.  The No Kings marches are partly an objection to Trump’s having achieved the position that Queen Isabella enjoyed – the court that matters does not disagree with him, and will disagree with itself to support him.

John Adams, in his closing statement, argued persuasively that we need to remember the founding fathers.  The power of this statement was amplified in that one of those founding fathers was his own Dad.  These men, many of them slaveholders, argued for the freedom of men.  He was reminding the justices of the principles that are the cornerstone for a free country and the importance of following the law.  In this case, even in a country that continued to own and trade slaves internally, it was internationally illegal to enslave and trans-oceanically transport slaves.  The rule of law supercedes the will of the majority – at least it used to.  Everyone, including the President, was required to live within the confines of laws that were determined by Congress, a body that was representing the people.  The only exceptions are when Congress enacts laws that violates the constitution and rights that are spelled out in that document.  The People’s will, therefore, is at the heart of the law.  We have a social contract not with a king who commands us, but with ourselves – or more closely – with each other and with our better angels, as spelled out in the constitution, and especially the amendments to it.

When we enter into a social contract, we agree to tame our instincts.  Freud famously argued that this was the source of our discontent.  Yes, we are less happy in the moment when our internal judge rules that this or that action is out of bounds because it simply is not allowed as part of being a member of society.  Hopefully, we are also connected enough with the members of our society that we would not want to harm them.  This higher form of moral functioning, one that is based in basic attachment, is not one that Freud had conceptual access to, but it should be something that we are evolving towards, individually, and as a state.

This week, the reluctant wife, who used to be a member of the deep state, cohosted a meeting in our house of a group of people meeting to discuss the ideals – the principles (not the policies) that make us America.  A central component of that, in my mind, is that he, as citizens, enter into a social contract and, as an essential element of that contract, no person is above the law.  The question to the group was whether we have outlived the ideals that were influential in founding the country.  We may have done that in some areas, but this movie helped me realize that the rule of law – and the independence of the judiciary is not something that we can afford to give up.  This is still, in my mind, an essential part of being an American.

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What We Can Know: Ian McEwan ponders deeply psychoanalytic questions.

 

What We Can Know, Ian McEwan, Psychoanalysis, What Can We Know?, Philosophy of Science, Psychology, limits of knowledge

Ian McEwan titles this book with a statement, but it is implicitly a question, and the cover representation, with the font clear on the outside but fuzzy inside the mirror/window, clarifies that this is a meditation on what is, to my mind, a very central question to psychoanalysis, to science, and, especially given that the book takes place in various liberal arts institutions, the human condition.  What can we know and how can we know it?  In particular, what can we know of others – what is their character, but ultimately, also, what can we know of ourselves.

I have recently started working with a patient whose hope is that psychoanalysis will help him with this very question.  He is hoping that it will help him make contact with the sensory world, which currently feels blurry or inaccessible to him.  Even more centrally he wants to have more direct contact with his feelings – to know, with much more certainty than he currently does, what he feels.  We could see his, and the characters in McEwan’s book, uncertainty about what they know as symptomatic of a depressive personality style – of being repeatedly disappointed by a world that does not line up with what we expect to be, indeed feel entitled to be, knowable. 

Seeking help, my patient is looking to break through the miasma that separates him from the world and from himself.  The characters in the first half of this book seek this clarity through scholarship, something their students have little faith in, and their efforts to engage their students in understanding the value of what they are trying to do only adds to their sense of ennui.

In order to tread a line between enticing those who have not read the book and engaging in a conversation with those who have, I will be intentionally vague in this post.  This book is filled with delightful twists that feel more like reveals of what we already knew than surprise turns.  There is a sense of opening a Russian Doll to find another version, smaller but still the same, inside the first.  Or perhaps, to follow the analogy, it feels like moving towards the heart of the matter and gaining more and more clarity about what sits at that heart; and feeling more and more satisfied that what we are coming to know (which will still contain mystery) is what we have been in search of.

To reiterate, then: This book does not so much lead us into new spaces (though it does do that) as it unfolds, opening up the spaces that were hidden by the folds, letting light into them, helping us move closer to something that feels deeply true – but also something that is deeply human, and thus more mysterious the more we know about it.

Part of the power of this book is that the movement towards clarity occurs on multiple levels simultaneously.  Just getting oriented at the beginning of the book is tough.  Where are we?  What is the time frame?  Even though the years are there in black and white, we are both in more or less current times and we are one hundred years in the future, in a world that feels familiar, but also very different from the one we live in.  The dystopian world of the near future feels organic.  Yes, there were catastrophes, but we have, more or less, recovered from them.  If the world is not what it once was, it is not uninhabitable, by any means, nor is it unrecognizable, even if it is vastly different.  And it is recovering, slowly.  And one of the exercises of that recovery is the study of what the world was before it became what it is now, just as has always been the case.

So, we join a world of scholars who are interested in a prior world of scholars.  Just as Woody Allen imagined a world of artists that he would have liked to live with (in Midnight in Paris), the focus of the central scholar is on a particular evening – when the coolest of the cool in the world of poetry and scholarship gathered for the (second) immortal dinner.  What took place there?

When I was in college in the late 1970s, the cool places were CBGBs and Studio 54.  Especially during my year in Maryland, kids would go up to New York to one or the other of these places.  One friend, who was particularly thin, would buy very skinny jeans then sit in a bathtub with the hottest water he could stand so that the jeans would shrink to fit hoping that this would lead to his being picked out of the line of wannabes to be admitted to Studio 54.

The world of scholarship creates similarly exclusive clubs that people want to belong to.  The original version of this club cited in the book was the first immortal dinner of 1817.  John Keats, William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb attended it.  The second immortal dinner, imagined in this book, was Vivien Blundy’s 54 birthday party in 2020 at which her husband, Francis Blundy read his Corona poem – a gift to her memorializing his love for her.  He had written the poem on a piece of vellum – and had destroyed all drafts and other copies of it and, after reading it, he presented it to her.  It has not been seen since. 

The immortal dinner at which the poem was read has become legendary.  The dinner itself, and speculation about the poem is the focus of Robert Metcalfe’s scholarship in 2119.  We learn about Metcalfe in part through his understanding of the dinner – an understanding culled from the preserved email records between all of the attendees.  The details clarify that the dinner was not quite as exciting as it appeared from a distance.

Metcalfe is driven to understand both the dinner, but also to try to discover the poem.  If he were able to do that, it would clearly make his career – a career that is, at best, dreary as he tries to engage the interest of halfhearted students in their studies while simultaneously maintaining the interest of his halfhearted lover Rose Church, in himself.

Thomas and Rose are like the youtubers who have posted videos of Studio 54 in its heyday, remembering a decadence that they never had a chance to live in.  Frances and Vivien are, then, like Andy Warhol and the other glitterati, including Liza Minnelli, who populated Studio 54 – or the Ramones and Debbie Harry at CBGB.  Theirs was a world that we pine for – enhanced, in this case, by Thomas and Rose’s life in a post-apocalyptic world that has less biodiversity, land mass, and economic and political stability.  Those were the days, my friends…

But were they?  What are the qualities of a lived life?  Are they what they seem?  When I have taught the history of psychology, I show Hamilton at the beginning of class – to illustrate that Lin Manuel Miranda uses the current hip hop vernacular to lend emotional life to the actions of the founding fathers.  They (and the folks who founded and shaped our science) were passionate people.  As were Vivien and Francis Blundy, and the others who attended that immortal birthday party.

In the first telling of that party, pieced together by his scholarship, Thomas Metcalfe paints a picture of those around Blundy and their experience of the party – and we discover Blundy’s passion to be directed primarily towards himself.  He is a generational poet, able to use his words to entrance multitudes and to describe the human condition.  This gift sets him apart – he belongs in the pantheon. 

Vivien, his wife, gave up her own promising academic career to tend to his needs.  And she appears to have become subservient to him, and to feel, on some level, that the poem does not really capture her or their love together, but is, instead, a testament to his poetic genius, and it is.  A corona is a poem that is made up of stanzas – a long corona would be seven stanzas long – with each last line being the beginning line of the next stanza, and the last stanza being a simply a reiteration of first/last lines, now in a stand-alone stanza that has integrity.  Francis’s corona for Vivien is 15 stanzas long.  It is an heroic poem.

This book is about a lot of things.  It is about the period we are living in – and it is a cry for us to preserve it because it is a tremendous period but also one that is threatened by, among other things, climate change.  I regularly thank my stars that I have lived during this period.  Could the world be a better place?  Has it been?  Will it be?  It is pretty darn great right now and, as I tell my students, we have more information in our pockets than emperors, kings, and presidents have ever had, we have more personal mobility than they ever did and (relevant to this story) we haven’t yet destroyed the environment.   Wow.

But the question the book asks – What can we know? – is not really about the kind of knowledge in our pockets, but the kind of knowledge that is in our heads.  It is the knowledge of who we are and who the people around us are – the people that we care about and rely on.  And that question gets honed here to what can we know about ourselves and what can we know about each other in terms of our fidelity.  There is a lot of unfaithfulness in this novel.  Rose is unfaithful to Thomas, the members of the supporting cast of the second immortal dinner have been unfaithful and faithful to themselves and to each other in a whole variety of ways.

As an example of faith, one of the guests at the dinner is an unlikely member of the group – he sticks out, in fact, like a sore thumb.  He is a carpenter and general handy man.  We think at first he is there because his wife belongs in this circle, but later we learn that he was not initially welcomed at the Blundy’s – Francis almost banished him for his use of the word hopefully.  At his next visit, he used it again, and Francis went into high dudgeon mode about what an unlearned fellow this carpenter was, and the carpenter started talking about adverbs and Blundy said he didn’t need a lesson on adverb’s from him – a carpenter – but the carpenter insisted that he did, gave him the lesson, and from that point forward was welcome at the table.  He had, in fact, through personal fidelity - showing himself to be equal to the bully - earned his place at that table, even if we did not know that initially.

I was impressed, in my reading of this novel, with the variety of infidelities and fidelities that emerged across the course of it.  Some interpersonal disloyalties were forgiven – some did not seem to matter at all, even if my sensibility was disturbed.  The central infidelity seemed to be the corona.  It seemed not to be a record of Francis’s love for Vivien at all – though it was presented as a present to her – and I was fully committed to the belief that she was offended by its failure to acknowledge her as a person independent of who Francis was.

As we later came to understand the poem, it was offensive – sort of in the way that imagined it – but, at least to my read, Blundy turns out to have been, in Vivien’s view, a romantic who yearned for something from her that he could not have, not because she did not have it to give and would have given of it freely, but she did not give it because he could not adequately receive it, the poem articulated that.  It was, in a weird way, a testament to Vivien's autonomy and Blundy's inability to match it.  In addition to it being about a Vivien, who was not the Vivien of the relationship with Blundy, it was so much about the true kernel of their relationship that Vivien rejected it because it spoke all too directly to what bound them together.

Across the life of a couple, what binds us together, what helps us maintain what fidelity we can, is complicated.  In Vivien’s mind, and, I think, in most of our minds, there are ties that are not to be spoken of, even in they are known.  The ties may be shameful in and of themselves, but I think also, once those ties are verbalized, there are a host of other ties that become visible – ties that we don’t want to know.

One of the many levels of knowledge and self-knowledge that this book touches on includes the self-knowledge of the author.  This book could easily be dismissed as a thinly disguised roman a clef with Francis Blundy as the author’s alter ego.  After all, McEwan is as accomplished as Blundy if in a parallel field.  As much as he admires the corona as a poetic device, McEwan’s vehicle (and I’m guessing his more highly valued art form) is the novel – prose.  He can get just enough distance writing about a poet to indulge in some pretty serious, and self-congratulatory navel gazing.

McEwan has previously written an intentional roman a clef – the book Sweet Tooth – in which he wrote about the 1970s, which he thought of as the best time in his life, but embroidered the story in a variety of ways that weren’t consistent with his life.  In so far as this is a roman a clef, the second half of the book goes a long way towards rehabilitating the author’s perceived narcissism – a perception shared by the reader.

If you grant the roman a clef premise for a moment, the second half of the novel both redeems the author, but it also clarifies the depth of his guilt.  This man has committed (or thought about committing – which, in order to write this book he mast have done) some heinous acts.  He is a bully who feels that the ends justify the means, and he values his profession over personal relationships, something that is ironic because much of what he is writing about is the value of relationships.  Frankly I think many psychoanalysts and therapists of many stripes could identify with aspects of this man’s character, myself included.

So, how does the second half redeem him?  His self-knowledge and the knowledge of the impact of what he does on others allows him to come across as warm, concerned, and caring; again, therapists would be able to identify with this, again, myself included.  We are complicated critters.  As self-knowledgeable as Blundy and Vivien are – and for that matter, Thomas and Rose – the historian and his lover who go off in search of the corona – their self-knowledge does not protect them from living complicated and, in many ways, dreary lives.

My next thought, you may be anticipating, is to apply this summary statement to the lives of those lucky few who made it through the ropes at Studio 54 or were hip enough to be in the mosh pit of CBGB’s.  And you would be detecting a note of schadenfreude; joy or pleasure at other’s displeasure.  You wouldn’t be wrong, but I think most importantly, that opens the door to the realization that we all; Rock Star Poet, glitterati of the non-nerdy variety, or lowly blogger, are vulnerable to both moments of incredible hubris – where we miss those around us (as Vivien was missed, but then moved to center stage in the second part of the book (though Blundy still loomed large)), but also that, despite our hubris - our narcissism, we are decent blokes, at least at heart.

To state that differently.  McEwan is a proud climate change activist.  This book can (and has been) read as a climate sensitive book.  Yet he casts Blundy as a climate change denier.  In so far as Blundy reflects McEwan, he reflects the things about McEwan (and me) that he (and I) would most like to deny and distance ourselves from.  I am a climate change activist who booked around trip flight to New York just to see a play that I wanted to see… ye Gods!  And we, famous or not, have to wrestle with how to integrate – how to know – those parts of ourselves that we least want to acknowledge.

Post Script:  I thought about this overnight and, if this is a kind of reman a clef, it is a corona, and the sensitive treatment of Vivien - something I haven't talked much about above - his careful attention to her and to the feminine perspective on life with men, life with famous men, and women who are living with a man after having lived with the love of their life, are all meditations on the life of another - a loved other and a demonstration of his love and care for her.  

On the other hand, McEwan claims, in the last note in the book, that there is nothing buried in this book - a reference to it being nothing like the content of the novel.  He, and other readers, might say I am digging where there is nothing to find...

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