Alice Munro's Dear Life - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads one of a Nobel Prize Winner's Books

Alice Munro's Dear Life, purportedly her last book, is the first of her works that I have read.  The prose is as stark and spare as the Canadian landscapes that have shaped the stories she tells.  The first 10 chapters are short stories, her preferred genre, and the last four are memoirs - in short story format.  Entering each story is bewildering.  It is not clear who the main characters are going to be and the stories themselves are told in a casual manner, as if being related to someone who already knows all the backstory necessary to understand the story.  The back story is revealed, but seemingly almost by accident as the arc of a person's life, or a very significant portion of it, is sketched in but a few pages and by referencing relatively few key events that shape that story.

On the surface, there could be nothing less psychoanalytic than these stories.  The richness, the detail, the nuance of the lives of the patients that I see in analysis is lost.  And yet these people are not reduced - they are not boiled down versions of people, but rich complex individuals whose essence we can guess at through knowing certain key, pivotal moments and, indeed, there are key pivotal moments in the lives of our patients and their analyses.  In her stories, the peripheral characters we know only peripherally - we wonder about what drives them to do the sometimes crazy things that they do.  The central characters - or more frequently character - once we figure out who he or she is - we get to know in deep and penetrating ways.  And we know them, as we do the characters about whom Elizabeth Strout writes, not from the outside in (even though the story is told from the point of view of the plot), but from the inside out - we don't laugh at their shortcomings, but accept them, as we would our own.

So the question that comes to mind, for this analyst, is where does this ability to read others and to portray them starkly, pimples and all, but sympathetically, come from?  How does the ability to appreciate another person in all their complexity without forming dismissive judgments about them, something that we as analysts aspire to, come from in the life of a writer?  This text, with its combinations of stories and autobiographical material becomes a rich mine to address the question - I only hope I do it some justice in the space I have allotted myself, though I fear that I will reduce Ms. Munro in the process.

To start with one of her stories - a man returns from the war - many of the stories revolve around the aftermath of World War II.  He stays on the train beyond the stop where his ticket took him and jumps off the train when it slows down.  He goes to a run down farm house and starts working for and with the woman who lives there.  They bring the farm back to life.  We learn that the woman's mother had a degenerative disease that made her unavailable - psychologically but also sexually - to the woman's father.  The father took in his nude adolescent daughter's body when she stepped out of the bath.  He then killed himself walking on the railroad tracks, apparently out of guilt.  The woman tells the man this story for the first time when she is in the city with the man so that she can be diagnosed with breast cancer.  He leaves her immediately after she tells him.

Now you might think, as I did, that this is a story about the woman.  But it is not.  It is the story of the man.  It turns out that he had a beau in that city that he never returned to.  But he was never able to be intimate with her.  Similarly, he never attempted to be intimate with the woman that he met up with.  The reason for this is explained in the part of the story that takes place after he leaves the woman he lived with.  In this second part of the story, he runs into, quite by chance, someone from his former life in the town he never returned to.  It is a tragic and sad story - somehow not surprising, but I don't want to ruin it for you.  What happens next to the man?  We don't know.  After the chance encounter, he takes off for parts unknown - unable to shake the experiences of his early life.

As we read these stories, we begin to wonder about the woman who wrote them.  We wonder about who she is and how she grew up and how she can be - in addition to empathic and truthful - detached from the people about whom she writes.  How can they be so stark - so unswervingly themselves?  It does not surprise us that she, from a small town, was somewhat precocious.  Her abilities marked her as special.  But it also doesn't surprise us that these abilities were swept up in her mother's sense of her self as someone special - someone who was different from the farmers and laborers that she and her husband came from and were.  Her mother stood out, in Alice's mind, from her other family members and from her father as pretending - though I think there probably was some truth to her sense of being cut from a different cloth - to being different from the plain folks around her.  This gave her a sense of "putting on airs", and alienated her from those around her.  It also kept her from seeing Alice for who she was - Alice was her special child - not the person that Alice was, in fact, becoming.

Alice's father was very different.  He was very comfortable in his own skin, and therefore was liked by those around him.  He connected with people on a genuine human level and Alice admired this.  He also connected with Alice.  When she had fears that kept her awake night after night - fears of strangling her sister - her father, mostly through patient listening, heard her fears.  His response, which Alice sees as being every bit as good as  psychiatric treatment would have been, was to acknowledge, matter of factly, that those were reasonable fears - the kind of fears that people have.  And they became the kind of fears that Alice would write about, with the kind of acknowledgement that her father had given her own fears.

When Alice's mother died, Alice lived on the other side of the continent.  She did not have much money, and she did not travel home for the funeral.  She feels deeply guilty about this, but also, I think, somewhat self righteous.  She did not want to acknowledge the passing of someone who never really understood who it was that she was.  So it is a kind of guilt for which there is no absolution - she just might do it again, even though today she would certainly have the means to get there.  She loved her mother, yes, but she also hated her - hated her for never really getting her.  And knowing both of these feelings - the feelings of empathy for who her mother was - where she came from - how she struggled to become what she could, the painful ways in which she tried to be better than others but was, in fact, an embarrassment, and her ultimate failure to be connected to her daughter - an unforgivable sin; this is a complicated and very human stew.

Alice Munro is a talented writer.  She is also a good story teller.  But more than that, I think she is a person who has looked deeply into her own life and has pulled no punches in telling it like it is - she has had to become her own mother (and has been helped in this by her father); to reflect on her life, on her desires and her failings and to come to accept them.  And this has led her to be able to dispassionately observe the experiences of others.  To realize that life happens to us, not as her mother would imagine because we are special and at the center of the universe, but quite the opposite, because we are cast into a particular place at a particular time and the meeting of that place with the stuff of ourselves is what makes us; good, bad and indifferent.

Alice quotes the poetry of a woman who lived in the house that she grew up in - a house that was on the margin between the town and the country - and a house that had a wonderful view of the world as if perched on the edge of something spectacular.  This poetry is very much like the long lost poetry she herself wrote when she lived in that house as an adolescent.  She never met the woman who wrote the poetry she quotes.  The woman had lived in the house in the 1890s and 1900s while Alice lived there in the 1930s and 40s.  But there is a sense that they both experienced similar things and expressed similar things about their experiences.  She, like her father, humbly accepts that she is in a particular place at a particular time, observing it, and assumes that others, given similar circumstances, would do the same.  This allows her, ironically, to achieve more notoriety that her mother would have dreamed possible to claim.

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The Big Lebowski - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Revisits a Cult Classic

  Movie night is becoming a political phenomenon in the home of the Reluctant Psychoanalyst.  The children, all teenagers, are watching increasingly complex, adult-themed material, though much of it is quite immaturely conceived and executed.  The (sometimes) Reluctant Parents are excited by the increasing ability of the teens to watch "mature" movies so that we can share some of our favorite films with them, while we are simultaneously appalled at the unbridled carnality they seem, at times, to prefer.  So it seemed like the time to try the Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers film, on them.  Once cool and somewhat hip, at least to our generation; what would it evoke in them?

Before I get to that - a little background.  The Big Lebowski is one of those movies that, when we were dating, the future Reluctant Wife could not believe that I had not seen.  I have endured this before.  Patients could not believe I had not seen Gone with the Wind; students could not believe I had not seen the Godfather series.  And each time I have watched a "must see", I have appreciated being able, finally, to share in something that helped me feel more a part of the greater culture.  In this case, a subculture.  But I have to admit that, as much as I liked The Big Lebowski, I didn't really get it.  Besides being at moments surreal, it was also confusing.  The various strands of the movie did not fit neatly together for me, and instead it felt funny but dissatisfying - almost empty or hollow.

So, when we decided to screen it with the kids, I decided to offer some "helpful" narrative.  In particular, I pointed out the opening narrator as a character that would show up later in the film, as well as trying to point out important people who appeared and trying to help the kids (and myself) keep the various strands straight by tracking the relationships among the various characters.  Of course, this is dicey territory.  A little commentary goes a long way and I tried to keep the comments to a minimum; but actually a conversation broke out during, but more importantly after the film.

Jeff Bridges plays Jeff Lebowski, or, as he prefers,The Dude.  The Dude is an LA slacker with no apparent means of financial support and relatively few other social supports (he has two friends with whom he bowls and his landlord whose art dance escapades he watches - perhaps in lieu of rent), or psychologically supports (except for the consistent use of marijuana).  He is just a dude, but refers to himself solely as The Dude.  But he becomes the focus of the movie, which the narrator, known only as the Stranger, deems interesting, because he shares a name with Jeffrey Lebowski - the Big Lebowski, whose wife bunny owes money to a porn movie director (whom she used to - or maybe still does - work for) who, in turn, sends thugs to mess up the wrong Lebowski, the Dude, and in addition to dunking his head in a toilet, they pee on his rug.  When the Dude asks them to look around to see if he is a millionaire, they take in his hovel and acknowledge their mistake - and this could have been the end of the whole thing.

The Dude is not one to make a mountain out of a molehill, but he is upset by having thugs break into his home.  As he talks about it with his buddies at the bowling alley; his buddy Walter (played by John Goodman), is not just incensed, but urges the Dude to action.  Their third friend, Donny (Steve Buschemi) is clueless, annoying, and bullied by Walter, but an integral part of the threesome.  His presence, I think, helps us realize the virtues of The Dude.  The Dude is not annoying, nor is he as passive as he appears.  He engages in a series of escapades, fueled by Walter's unrelenting aggression and groundless desire to be potent (something that is oddly mirrored by the Big Lebowski when we get to know what lies behind his bluster).  The Stranger comments that he likes The Dude's style, and joins him at the bowling alley bar for a drink of Sasparilla.  The Stranger also ties the movie up - so far as it gets tied up - by reappearing at the bar at the end of the movie and offering a narrative summary.

And it was about the Stranger that my post movie conversation began with the older Reluctant Stepdaughter.  We discussed the movie as we drove the Enthusiastic Boyfriend home and it continued as we drove back.  We began as she attacked the Stranger as unnecessary and the ending as dissatisfying because the narrator acted as if things were tied up when they were not.  I, as much to engage in the conversation as because I believed it, took the position that the Stranger was essential.  Together we puzzled over this and concluded that one reason the Stranger is essential is that the movie could, without the Stranger, who introduces it as a Western and who is dressed in Western regalia, be misperceived as an Eastern Philosophy/Zen/Taoist movie.

The Dude - who famously, at the end of the movie, abides - is, the Stranger would have us believe, not Eastern in his essence, but Western - and not just Western philosophy, but Wild Western - rugged Reagan individualism Western.  And, as the reluctant Stepdaughter pointed out, he is the only character in the movie with integrity - with centeredness.  He takes what comes very matter of factly.  He observes it and thinks about it - he addresses it and mulls it over.  He presents it to his friends, who encourage him to act - and he acts with them.  But he is not concerned by all that goes on.  He - in the stoic tradition - is relatively unmoved by all that happens.  He seeks justice - what he believes to be fair compensation for what has befallen him - but he does not desire more than to be able to keep ambling on - living life as it occurs to him.  And this is, perhaps, the essence of our heroes from Western Films - Shane or the characters that Clint Eastwood portrays; Bruce Carradine in Kung Fu, to mix the Western with the Eastern.

So this becomes, we decided, a movie not about plot but about character.  It is the story of everyman - or an idealized everyman.  Someone who is able to take what life casts his way - not as the Big Lebowski would have us believe; achieving as the result of setting a goal and shooting for it - but instead doing something much more human and real, taking what is in front of him and making the best of it while retaining a sense of integrity.  On an entirely different level - to think of the Dude as being a character that includes not just Jeff Lebowski, but Walter and Donnie as well - to think about the human task being one of listening to, but retaining mastery over our inner desire to run full on into the teeth of whatever is out there (a la Walter), while also keeping ourselves from running away from what ever threat may present itself (a la Donny).  And the Dude does this.

The most important moment in the movie, I think, is when the Dude unravels the mystery of what happened to the million dollar ransom and the reason that we was hired to be the drop man for it.  OK, I realize I haven't given you any context for this.  I'll let the movie do that, if you choose to watch it, but you should know that this viewer, at least, even on a second viewing, didn't get it.  The Dude did.  It turns out that he can actually be pretty smart when he gets all the needed information and when he has been knocked around enough that he becomes actively engaged in not just following the next piece of bait set out for him but interested in understanding the whole picture.

In psychoanalysis, our patients are pretty smart to begin with, but they get smarter as things move along.  They begin to see patterns and they also begin to lose inhibitions.  So rather than deferring to others, they start becoming more assertive.  This is a good thing.  One common observation, especially of low fee analyses - the kind of analysis that many in training provide as they start to practice as analysts - is that as patients engage in their analyses they start to earn more money - sometimes significantly more money - and they can afford higher fees.  This is a good thing in many cases.  But sometimes it is given too much weight - in this analyst's opinion.  Not the income, per se, but the association of uninhibited or assertive, but even aggressive action with being "well analyzed" or psychologically healthy.

The goal of psychoanalysis is to freely associate (it is what the analysand is told to do - but also must learn to do in the process of treatment).  When that is achieved, and when that occurs not just in the analytic hour - meaning that the person's thought is no longer constrained by neurotic conflicts - the person can think more clearly, as The Dude does when he solves the problem.  But the Dude does not go on to solve the problem of world peace, he plays in the semifinals of the bowling tournament.  The cowboy rides off into the sunset - in search of other adventures, perhaps not enriched by all that has happened except in so far as he has the satisfaction of knowing that he has and can survive whatever he has been confronted by.  While in the analytic world, this may lead to riches - the analysand is less conflicted and thus better able to solve problems and to appropriately value his or her contribution to the solution, that is a byproduct, in my opinion, rather than the end result.  The analytic community might benefit from observing that neither The Big Lebowsky nor Walter are the true heroes of this story, the Dude, who abides, is.

Another way of saying this, then, may be that the goal of the Dude (and analysis) is neither Western nor Eastern, but an interesting amalgam - a shifting of the lens so that both are in sight but neither is the goal.  If Walter is a cartoon version of the western ideal- Donnie, who ends up as ashes, might be a cartoon version of the eastern one.  Our task is to use foundations that are human, incompatible with each other, and ultimately incompatible with, though informative to a third direction - one that is, or can be, our own.  As we move beyond being the puppet of our desires, as we move from doing what we have to what we want to do, we move into the range of being The Dude.

The Reluctant Stepdaughter and I benefited from our conversation about the film.  We agreed that we both understood the movie and liked it better for having talked about it.  It was still, at least for me, somewhat disappointing because the plot did not neatly resolve, though it was better resolved than I thought (the Reluctant Stepdaughter brilliantly tied many plot elements together) and I think we got it, in part as a result of doing it, that this was not the point.  At the very beginning of the film, the Dude is in a convenience store.  He samples a half gallon of milk before writing a 69 cent check for it.  He is willing to pay for something, but he wants to make sure he won't get gypped.  We got our money's worth from the movie as a result of having talked about it.

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Shakespeare in Love - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Ponders Our Attachment to Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon

The reluctant son is once again reading Romeo and Juliet.  He read it in sixth grade and really liked it.  I, woefully inadequate parent that I am, delighted by his interest, shared a related drama of mine, Shakespeare in Love.  Oops.  I remembered the explicit sex scenes too late, and what was to have been a nice father son shared adventure turned into a developmentally inappropriate moment to be muddled through.  Muddle through it we did, and now that the reluctant son is in High School, has been bombarded by sex on broadcast and other TV, and is reading Romeo and Juliet again, I thought it worth repeating the experiment.  And the results were much better this time around.

But I was watching the film with another context in mind as well.  I have just finished reading (actually re-reading) and posting about the hypothesis that the plays of Shakespeare are not written by the man from Stratford, a tradesman and sometime actor Will Shakspeare, but instead by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a nobleman whose life and perspective eerily parallels the plays of Shakespeare, but whose identity would have had to be kept secret, hidden behind the witty nom de plume "Shake - Spear", because it would be unseemly and politically unwise to have the words of the poet tied to a peer of the realm.

I remembered that Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman's imagined, anachronistic, delightful movie was written from the perspective that Shakespeare was from Stratford and I watched it to better understand our attachment to that hypothesis - one that is apparently endemic among scholars.  A fellow analyst, who read the blog on de Vere, Rick Waugaman, kindly sent me a preprint of his book review about to appear in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and in the article he cites a study noting that 82% of academics believe the Stratfordian hypothesis.  Why is there such allegiance to it when so many good thinkers; Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Sigmund Freud among them, have long questioned it?   Why are we so attached to it when emerging scholarship is tying it to new figures, particularly de Vere?

Shakespeare in Love features Joseph Fiennes as a young Shakespeare, in love with Viola de Lessups (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), a beautiful woman in love with poetry and the theater, whose rich father has bought her a noble but penniless husband, Lord Wessex (played by Colin Firth) who will make her offspring royal.  Actually, in very Shakespearean manner, Shakespeare confides his love for Viola to her as she pretends to be Richard Kent, a pretense that she has taken on to play the part of Romeo in Shakespeare's Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, which is to contain much comedy and a bit with a dog.

The power of this film, though, resides in the development of Shakespeare's play.  He lives and writes about what he is living, and the drama of his life becomes the text of the play.  He is not the Great Playwright, Shakespeare, but Will, who drinks and plays the owner of one playhouse off against the other, promising them both the same play and hustling to stay one step ahead of their wish to get words from him.  He is in awe of Christopher Marlowe, gratefully accepts advice from him, and is mortified when he fears that he has, though impersonation, caused his death.  We identify with his quick wit and with his joie de vivre.  We feel, as commoners, the constraint and unfairness that divides him from the woman that he loves - as Romeo is divided - not from Ethel, thank God (and Christopher Marlowe, who suggests the name change), but from Juliet, by the war between their families and his own part in it.

At some point, and I don't have the reference, a writer proposed that one reason the Stratfordian hypothesis has retained its strength is that it was used by the British to support the position that public schooling should be offered to all.  Shakespeare, a commoner from Stratford, after all, had written the greatest plays in history.  Who among us could not be the next Shakespeare?  And I think this is a very powerful argument.  An argument that allows us to identify with Shakespeare.  To imagine ourselves Shakespeare, to share in his glory, indeed to be Shakespeare...  For who among us is not?

Every night we dream complicated dreams with characters who are familiar but unknown.  They engage in activity that can seem chaotic but, especially if we listen to our dreams, if we analyze them, they are not just sensible, but useful, and sometimes delightful, even brilliant narratives emerge.  We are complex people filled with ingenuity, humor, deep and powerful feelings, and ideas that are unique.  Nelson Mandela, whose passing this week is a great loss, rightly pointed out that we fear (but I would add hope to achieve) our potential.  And Shakespeare did it.  He articulated the complicated thing that it is to be human.  He did this within characters - in their soliloquies, and between them - in the drama that plays out when our lives are on the line, but also in the comedy that ensues when we play with each other.  He tapped into what it is to be human and makes that come alive in us - our own sense of humanity - when we participate in his plays by watching them.

So, the greatest moment, the moment of most tension in the movie is when Romeo and Juliet has finally been written and has just been performed.  It has had its world premiere. The play has come to life as the result of a series of accidents, false starts, changes in character that are truly Shakespearean in their madcap happenstance - and the stuttering announcer has pronounced the last words in flawless English - and the birth of this great tragedy is received - with silence.  A silence that stretches to the point of breaking. And then a single clap brings forth applause and then rapturous sounds of joy.  We, with Shakespeare, with the entire troupe of actors, have wondered: Did they get it?  We knew they would, but feared they wouldn't... And, they did.  We have put it out there and they have received it.  We have communicated - one to another.  We to them.  And it is grand and glorious.

And we don't want to give up our ownership of that moment.  We don't want to believe that we couldn't have written, we couldn't have performed that play.  We believe that we could have.  We who come from boroughs and from hamlets and from common origins.  We don't want to hear that some well born, privileged man wrote this.  The idea that de Vere, a nobleman, crafted these plays goes against our democratic zeal, our sense of a meritocracy where our value will be recognized and rewarded regardless of rank. While we acknowledge the Stratford fellow's debt to a public school classical education, we want that to be all that we need.  In fact, to realize our ambitions, to let the world know the wonders that lie within us, we need to know many languages that will excite others - we need to know how to communicate emotionally, but also cognitively.  To weave a spell (as Stoppard and Norman, our everymen, have done in this movie), the tapestry must be as close to flawless as possible.  A failed detail may wake the dreamer from his or her sleep.  To have the privilege of expressing ourselves well - clearly and coherently - we need to have been afforded many prerequisite privileges.

The de Vere scholars make the case that the references in Shakespeare could have been accessed, in that age, only by those from the most privileged classes.  The knowledge of the law could not have been included but by a legal scholar.  The understanding of the nautical scenes comes from a sailor, and the idiosyncratic knowledge of Venice comes from the pen of a man who has sailed her streets.

Our romantic connection to Shakespeare of Stratford comes, I believe, from an anachronistic attachment to what we believe to be everyman - the everyman of a post industrial society.  But I think this identification may be misguided.  In fact, I think that it takes a great deal of privilege to produce Shakespeare's works- the privilege of education, travel, and, if it is de Vere, the privilege of being privy to the world of nobility and having multiple well schooled secretaries to read and perhaps co-write your work.  And I think we have built a society that affords similar privilege to many more people than had it in Shakespeare's day.  In fact, I think that the 'everyman' of today - the many privileged citizens of our industrialized and post-industrial nations, have privileges, Shakespeare, whoever he was - even if he was de Vere, could not have imagined.

It is ironic then that the myth of Shakespeare of Stratford has been used to support the importance of education.  Ironic because I fear that our clinging to it now may cause us to argue that everyman can do it; just provide him or her a tablet and an internet connection.  When in fact we need to communicate, many of us in many ways, with someone who is a potential Shakespeare.  To provide him or her not just information, but to teach him or her how to think, how to understand and articulate systems, and how to be in touch with his or her emotional world - we need to help him or her interpret, not just be moved by, the plays of Shakespeare.  And it is expensive to provide the kind of education that helps people to explore, engage, and then articulate what they discover.

The modern world seems allied against the expense of education - and it asks educators to justify the expense.  I'm not saying we shouldn't do that - we should.  But the value of education is much greater than the income of the educated. I am reminded of a Reader's Digest joke from many years ago.  The immigrant father, working in his small store, welcomes his son home from college where his son has learned accounting.  The son says, "Dad, you've got to come up with an accounting system to keep track of your profits and losses."  The father reaches under the counter and pulls out a cigar box.  He says "Son, what's in this cigar box is everything that I arrived with in this country.  Look around you.  Everything else is profit."

Our modern world with all of its wonders is all profit - the profit of learning and teaching each other and going out to explore more.  We need to keep doing that.  Including trying to figure out who Shakespeare really was, because knowing that, as Rick Waugaman maintains, will enrich our reading of our greatest author.  It may even help us clarify the value of providing the expensive education that we need in order to maintain our ascent as a civilization.  And we need to keep teaching our children, even if that sometimes leads us to blunder, because, sometimes, as in the case of the reluctant son and me, we get to witness the birth of a new world together.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

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Jack Black's Bernie- The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Fears He's Slumming, But He Ain't

In a weird case of art imitating life, the reluctant family gathered for movie night and, much to this analyst's concern, the consensus was to watch a Jack Black (and Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughy) film, Bernie.  Oh, boy, I thought, two hours of watching a buffoon clown around.  I pulled out some papers that I needed to grade and settled in for what I thought would be torture.  Of course, as you must realize by now, I was pleasantly surprised - and not just that the movie was good but that it spoke directly to the dilemma that we had been discussing in a psychoanalytic class earlier in the day.

In class, we have been reading Jane Hall's book Deepening the Treatment.  This book is intended to help therapists help their clients talk more fully about their psychological lives - to engage with their own material, with the goal of working towards deepening the psychotherapy treatment, one where patient and therapist meet once or twice a week, into an analysis, where the meetings are more frequent and the patient frequently lies on a couch to more deeply immerse themselves in their inner world.

Traditionally, psychoanalysts have worked with patients who are reasonably psychologically healthy.  Part of the rationale for that was that such deep immersion could be disruptive to those who, for instance, didn't trust that the out-of-sight analyst had their best interests in mind.  However, in the 1950s, psychoanalysts started working with what they termed wider scope patients.  Psychoanalysis can and actually should stir powerful emotions in all patients; however, as those patients who are less emotionally stable engage more deeply with their inner lives, a great deal of upsetting material gets stirred both in themselves and in their analysts.

The Class debated the role of setting limits in such a treatment. On the one hand, it felt potentially harmful to, in the context of a caring relationship, set limits. It was feared that our patients might experience us as being too much like the harsh and critical others who may have contributed to their difficulties in the first place. On the other hand, it felt dangerous not to end sessions on time and not to encourage patients to talk about their experience rather than to act on them. I didn't frame it exactly this way, but Glenn Gabbard has talked about the analytic process involving both love; actively listening carefully to our patients, and hate; the act of charging fees and starting and stopping the session on time. Bernie, it turns out, is about the very question of whether love alone can overcome hate.

Bernie is a delightful individual who truly enjoys being with and, indeed, serving others. He works as an assistant funeral director in Carthage, Texas and makes certain that the services that the funeral home offers are as lovely as they can be.  He is the choirmaster in the local Methodist Church and is an exemplary church member. He starts a local theater group and stars in their musical productions. Bernie is a 39-year-old man who is likely gay and living in the middle of the Bible Belt so, if he is gay, he certainly does not feel comfortable expressing that publicly and, in Jack Black's wonderful characterization, he may be quite conflicted about his own sexuality and may even feel ashamed of being gay.  In fact, it is reasonable to conjecture that he needs to repress his sexuality and deny that he has sexual feelings. Instead of seeking the love he desires (perhaps), Bernie dotes on the widows that he serves through the funeral home. They are generally quite appreciative of his concern.

Bernie attempts to dote on the widow of the richest man in town - Marjorie Nugent (played by Shirley MacLaine), who turns out to be the meanest as well as the richest person in town. She initially rejects his concern, but then something about his demeanor warms her to him. Initially, his presence in her life appears to transform her. She, at least in his presence, smiles. They go on trips together, which she pays for, but which they both clearly enjoy. These are not trips around the corner, but to the corners of the globe. Further, Bernie learns to fly her airplane and enjoys recreational flying. They also end up eating out together a lot, usually in the best restaurants in town, when Bernie isn't cooking her delicious meals in her home.

At this point we might begin to wonder if Bernie is really a Golddigger. He has demonstrated both charm, but also some ability to convince people to buy shinier caskets than they initially want to buy. Is he really wolf in sheep's clothing, that is, to use a diagnostic term, a sociopath? Or, is he someone who is very insecure and trying hard to get people to love him? This is further complicated by the fact that this is not just a story, but an artistic enactment of an actual set of events. The real-life Bernie is currently living in the Texas State penitentiary.

Marjorie becomes more and more possessive of Bernie. She also begins to become abusive towards him - yelling at him and then locking him into her property when he threatens to leave. His response is to work harder and harder to be the lovely person who will meet all of her needs and thus keep her from going ballistic. He sands the calluses on the bottoms of her feet. He makes sure that her medication is ready for her on a regular basis. And he gives up more and more of his own life, having to drop out of many of his beloved activities.

Not surprisingly he becomes angrier and angrier. His sexuality may or may not be bottled up, but his anger clearly is. We see it play across Jack Black's face for an instant and then disappear to be replaced by a loving, though slightly bitter, smile. We empathize with his sense of feeling imprisoned; trapped; caught in the snare of a mean bitter woman. And we are not surprised when he picks up a 22 caliber rifle that Marjorie has taunted him for being unable to use to kill an armadillo, and shoots her in the back. Nor are we surprised that he feels tremendously guilty about having done this thing.  We're not surprised for two reasons. First, because of our empathic understanding of the character that is being portrayed. Second, because there is a Greek chorus of townspeople who in, in this mocumentary style movie, have been commenting on their perceptions of what took place between them. We have seen the murder coming from miles away and we are sympathetic to the circumstances that bring it about.

The local DA, Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey), is not so sympathetic. He firmly believes that Bernie is a coldhearted murderer, and/or he is hot to be reelected and wants to get into the headlines of the local paper. In any case, it is his intent to prosecute Bernie for premeditated murder. He quickly realizes that he can't win the case in this town where Bernie is widely loved and Marjorie reviled.  So he moves the trial venue to a town 50 miles away where the inhabitants are significantly less well-off, know neither Bernie nor Marjory, and will much more quickly see Bernie as interested solely in financial gain.

The townspeople, who are memorably referred to as having "more tattoos than teeth", not surprisingly quickly judge Bernie guilty of first-degree murder. But we, the jury that has been assembled by the director, Art Linklater, are not convinced. We see a very different Bernie, one who was highly conflicted. He has learned to sit on powerful emotions, but they come pouring out of him, against his will. This seems not heinous, but human.

It is also a cautionary tale to analysts, therapists, nurses, indeed helping professionals of every stripe, and perhaps those who would love in any context - that selfless love is not truly possible.  If the other, whom we love selflessly, does not have our interests in mind, and we don't either, it will end badly.  As a corollary, if we don't access and use our emotions, including unpleasant ones that we may have been trained by society or believe by the nature of our role in a relationship (caregiver, lover, parent) not to acknowledge, this, too, will end badly.

Bernie, classified as a dark comedy is, then, actually a tragedy.  He is imprisoned, not because of pre-meditation but because of failure to meditate, or, more precisely, because of a failure to repress.  Or, psychoanalytically, because he is afraid of acknowledging aspects of himself - aspects that we believe would have been helpful to him.  That his anger was not something that could not co-exist with his love, but that it is something that may even have been essential to it, especially when he loved a complicated person.  Figuring out how to express that anger while still loving?  Aye, there's a rub.  Books have been written about that...




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Edward de Vere as Shakespeare: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Rereads The Life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man who was Shakespeare by Mark Anderson

A few years ago I read a wonderful book, Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt, and I was astounded by it.  The author used William Shakespeare's plays to demonstrate that Will Shakespeare of Stratford - on - Avon could have penned the works that we see as belonging to the Shakespearean Canon.  It has been a while, so please forgive errors in detail, but Greenblatt's essential process was to imagine the life of Shakespeare from the very few known fragments of the actor William Shakespeare's life and then to construct him from the plays he wrote - thus demonstrating that what he is purported to produce could, in fact, have been produced by him.  I found the writing in the book compelling on many levels.  It was just plain a good read.  The author is a good story teller.  He was able to tell the stories of the plays of Shakespeare, put them together in chronological order and to construct the story of a man, Shakespeare, that fit the plays.  Masterful.  It was also particularly compelling to me because it felt like it was psychoanalytically based psychohistory.  The plays were essentially being read as dreams and the dreamer's life was being constructed from them in a plausible way.  I was sold.

But the reluctant wife was not so convinced.  Despite my fervor, she recommended that I read a very different book, "Shakespeare" by another name: The Life of Edward de Vere: Earl of Oxford, the Man Who was Shakespeare by Mark Anderson.  This book, unlike the first, was thick and slow and filled with footnotes - almost half the pages are footnotes.  It is written in the style of Historians, who can, when they are very good writers, write page-turners, but this did not quite measure up to the works of David McCullough as a piece of literature.  But it had an interesting premise:  That Edward de Vere, an English lord and, as a youth playboy who vied for the hand of Elizabeth, was supported by her to write plays - which he likely wrote with various secretaries who were very much men of letters - in first draft as light fare for the court, then as propaganda for her government and, in their final versions, as masterpieces of literature.  Anderson's position is that de Vere could not take credit for his work because, as a lord, he could not engage in a lowly profession like playwright (even though he was being paid a hefty sum annually by Queen Elizabeth for no apparent reason, which Anderson interprets to mean he was being paid to write - to be the Queen's chief propagandist and artist).

I am writing this blog for two separate but related reasons.  First, I want to relate the experience of re-reading and second to report one little fruit of that effort.  Tom Ogden, a psychoanalyst who does a lot of reading and writing, talks about two kinds of reading in his book Creative Readings.  One he calls transitive reading - this is an active reading, one where we are interacting with the author and the text as we read the text - actively re-writing the text as we make our way through it and make it our own.  The second kind of reading he calls intransitive - and this involves becoming lost in the text, and we take on the author's perspective and see the world through his or her eyes.  Both kinds of reading are important (as are both kinds of listening in clinical settings).

My first reading of the Anderson book was transitive.  Violently so.  I was still enamored of the vision of the untutored kid from Stratford becoming the Bard.  I also missed the free flowing language (partially because it was unhampered by being tied to historical facts) and intertwining of the stories of the plays with the creature who was imagined almost exclusively from those stories.  So I was reading the book critically.  I was questioning the data.  I was arguing.  By the end of it, I had grudging respect for the author, for his scholarship and the effort that he made to tie Edward de Vere to Shakespeare, and was willing to grant the reluctant wife that her position might have some validity - that his argument felt, ultimately, stronger than the argument from Will of the World.  But I wasn't convinced.  Partly because I do not know the wider arguments and concerns, but more importantly, I think, because my contentious engagement with the book led me to be uncertain of what it was that the author had actually said.  And I don't think I realized that until my current rereading of the book.

This time through, I have taken a more intransitive position.  I am less concerned with the veracity of Anderson's thesis and more interested in finding out more about this de Vere character, but also about Shakespeare.  What do his plays mean?  And this reading lead to a very different set of experiences.  I found out delightful things about both de Vere and Shakespeare that I had missed the first time.  Some of this supports the thesis.  The facts of de Vere's life, the bare bones of it, resonate so deeply and powerfully with Hamlet that - whether de Vere was the author or not, each helps understand the other better.  Hamlet comes to life in the story of a royal born child whose father died early, who was raised by a powerful and benevolent figure who also took his inheritance from him, and the struggles that he engaged in throughout his life to regain what he felt to be rightfully his.  As I write this, it is apparent the tale of Hamlet has particulars - and Anderson works to connect those to de Vere's life in various more oblique ways - that are not present in the life that de Vere leads.  Yet it is quite compelling that the psychological structures that Hamlet exemplifies could well have grown within a parallel but distinctly different biography - de Vere did not have an Uncle marry his mother whom he kills after having players play out the death of his father on stage, but the symbolism of those acts grow out of the wishes of a man who feels stifled by the person he believes stole his true inheritance.

The experience of reading intransitively lead to several gems.  One was that Shakespeare, whether de Vere or not, is a compelling author because, according to both authors, so I think they agree on this regardless of whether he is a player from Stratford or a noble to the manor born, he is writing autobiographically.  I think that he is able to sympathetically portray even heinous characters in part because they represent a part of himself - or some aspect that he could imagine having.  I think he shares this gift with Elizabeth Strout who writes about troubled characters in compassionate ways - we connect with them - we know them intransitively - even though they are portrayed from the outside - where we could encounter them transitively - as if we know them - and could dismiss them as being, for instance, evil or banal or lazy or whatever.  Instead, they are human: good, bad and indifferent.  Conflicted.  Complicated.  Too virtuous to stand and too evil to imagine.

And one play, not delved into, but mentioned, really stood out for me as being one that I came to understand better by putting a story around it.  MacBeth, the tale of the Dane whose wife would have him king, the man who - pushed by a woman - kills and kills and kills some more.  Anderson ties this to Elizabeth and de Vere - and specifically to Elizabeth's appointing a council of Lords to try Mary, Queen of Scots, her cousin, for treason.  Mary, the Catholic cousin, fell into a trap.  She was discovered to be communicating with a Catholic who was supposedly planning Elizabeth's assassination so that Mary could assume the throne of England.  De Vere and other royals were convened to hear the evidence and come to a foregone conclusion - one that Elizabeth then enacted and repudiated.

Anderson maintains that Shakespeare, and therefore by implication de Vere, fervently believed in the divine succession of royalty.  De Vere was, in Anderson's mind, deeply troubled by putting a royal to death.  Lady MacBeth's cries to eradicate that damn spot seem somehow more poignant when they come from the lips of a person who has actually committed the deed.  Shakespeare is imagining lady MacBeth as Elizabeth, the Queen who ordered the botched execution - where her cousin was first struck in the arm and then had her head severed - the head that was then held up only to fall out of the executioners hands because it had a wig on it that did not hold.  Something about the physicality of this ending - something about the bloody butchery - combined with the upsetting of the divine order - killing someone who, like Elizabeth herself, sat on the throne at God's command - and so, by killing her made it clear that she herself could also be killed - that God's orders could be circumvented by human design, something about the concreteness of it makes it chilling.  Lady Macbeth's guilt - the spot that won't go away - is not just her feeling responsible for an innocent death, but the sense that the blood, once shed, could go on being shed indefinitely.  De Vere's shared sense of guilt - and horror that he could overturn something he needed to believe upheld his own position, all of this creates a work of art that is not simply a means of telling a story - but of channeling very real, personal and immediate feelings into a vessel - a holder, not just for the author - not just for his queen, but for all of us - to know some very real aspect of what it means to be human - to act, and to feel the consequences of our actions.  To know that we can do and have done great and terrible things.  Art - and, I believe, analysis - allow us to know this viscerally, immediately, and irrevocably.


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Lorde's Royals - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Listens to Pop

           I moved to Brooklyn in the summer of 1982 with the intent of learning if I could make it there - thinking that if I could, I could make it anywhere...  The New York that I entered was hot and felt very dangerous and inhospitable.  It was a challenge to find a place to live and a job.  And there was a song that was blaring out of every boom box on every subway and stoop - or so it seemed.  It had a new beat and seemed to capture something of the urban scene that was essential.  It was Grandmaster Flash's "The Message", a rap/hip-hop song that captured both the pride and the desperation of life in the ghetto - a life far more difficult than the one that I was struggling to establish with a college degree and backing of friends and family.  It was a song that promised a new way of articulating the experience of those on the margins.  As desperate as it was, there was a certain hopefulness that if this experience could be articulated - if we could know and communicate what people were experiencing, that message could be harnessed.  Moreover, if people were able to resonate with this music that had an inherent message of a need for change, there was a chance that a genre of music could be developed that would lead to the kinds of changes that could make the message of the music unnecessary.

            This was certainly neither the first nor the last time time that a clarion call would come from popular music - a clarion call that promised that art could lead us to a different kind of living.  I imagine that people must have heard a similar ache in the songs of Woody Guthrie and then, a generation later, from Bob Dylan.  The rock and roll songs of the sixties - perhaps epitomized by the Woodstock gathering, promised a new way of being - although the message of this group was less focused than previous movements and was supported by the musical industries in ways that were not always clear to those who were consuming the message in the music. Of course this is probably true of each of the movements.  And one of the questions is whether the message can "survive" being put in the market place for people to have access to it.  As one of my cynical professors put it, the summer of love went off the rails when the guys who just wanted sex showed up.

            I am currently pretty inured to popular music.  I am "forced" to listen to it by my teenage daughters, who are seemingly able to memorize lyrics to a myriad of songs that are about love - and the mechanics of love - that sometimes embarrass me to listen to (a later post, also relevant to the themes here, charts a rapprochement around Hozier).  OK, as an analyst I shouldn't be embarrassed - but as I listen to them crooning unselfconsciously about actions that I don't think they would, in fact, actually engage in, I wonder about the power of music - is it to get us to do something we ordinarily wouldn't?  To articulate something we consciously believe?  To articulate something we believe but haven't yet articulated to ourselves or to anyone else?  To convince us that we believe something we don't?  I suppose it is all of these and more, but I think the power of the artist is actually to interpret their own experience in a way that we can resonate with - to know that we are not alone.  And isn't it ironic how frequently those songs are about the experience of being in love?  As if we need permission to say the thing that is most human - as if we need - which of course we do - support to say the most terrifying thing there is to say.

            Just sixteen when she wrote and performed this song, including all the vocal tracks, Ella Yelich-O'Connor whose stage name is Lorde, has taken a hip hop idiomatic beat and layered an ironic response to the material worshipping popular culture; noting her own more simple background, noting that she has never seen a diamond in the flesh, she's not proud of her address, and that, in response to a culture that is advertising luxury items like Grey Goose and Jet Planes, she is seeking a different kind of buzz - the one that comes from being not royal by blood, but an appointed ruler - becoming another's queen bee.  This deliciously ambiguous title - is she a lover?  The leader of a colony?  - is a fantasy that is somehow based in relationships with people - real people - in her life, not with the images and tokens that would be foisted on her.  And yet it is a fantasy - just as the world of Maybach's and Tigers on a gold leash - is a world of fantasy.  It is a creation engaged in by two or more people that creates something literally and figuratively fantastic - the feeling, captured by the swelling vocals, of being royal.

            I am curious to find how this voice finds itself, and how the artist carries herself as she is exposed to the very world that she decries - as she becomes one of the heralds of the pop culture that she is (or was) trying to remain an outsider to.  So far she seems to be saying the right things, but I suppose the machine that would promote her would not let her say things that weren't consistent with the voice that she has brought to the task...

            When I started this post a few weeks ago, this was a new song on the pop charts.  Since then, the song has gone to number one on the alt rock charts – the first female artist to achieve this position in some time, apparently, but it is still being played on the pop stations.  It will be interesting to see what kind of cross over this song, and, over time, this artist’s vision will be able to create – who will she connect with and what will she articulate.  Will she continue to be able to articulate the experience of living on the margins as she is brought more and more into the mainstream?  How well can we hang onto our former lived experience to inform our current production as we move forward in our lives?  The psychoanalytic position and experience is that this is the bedrock of who we are and that, in spite of new influences, considerable portions of that original experience will remain.  We’ll see how the two combine to create whatever she will from here.  And see how it influences those who listen to her – other artists and her public.  Will we all come to recognize our wish to be royal?  Or will her new found royalty wall her off from us?  Will she be a Grandmaster Flash in the pan, or will her queenship prove to long lived, Lordeing it over us for some time. 


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The Queen of Versailles - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst watches a reality based documentary

The Queen of Versailles is a documentary about a wealthy couple's intent to build the largest dwelling under one roof in the United States.  The house - named Versailles - is being built in a suburb of Orlando on a lake where a number of other luxurious homes have been built.  At the beginning of the movie, in 2008, the economy is humming along, and so is Jackie and David Siegal's business, Westgate resorts, a business that involves selling timeshares to people.  Money is readily available, and their clientele, who appear to be lower middle class folks, are given a hard sell after a free meal - David affectionately refers to them as moochers - and they use credit to buy a week or two a year to vacation at one of the Westgate resorts - the crown jewel of which is in Las Vegas.  Rather than staying in a cramped hotel room on the strip, a family of four can have a suite that allows for separate bedrooms, dining area, and a place to prepare food.  David says that we all want to live like we are rich, and he allows people to do that for two weeks out of the year.

In the beginning of the film, David and Jackie live like they are rich all the time because they are very wealthy.  He is a self made billionaire.  Jackie is his third wife, David is Jackie's second husband.  They met when they were both recently divorced and Jackie was Mrs. Florida.  David was smitten by her, and Jackie enjoyed his adoration.  Thirty years older than she, and buried in his work, he seems initially simply benignly disinterested in his six children and the extra kid, a niece, who is part of the family.  Jackie said that she only intended to have two children, but that was before she knew about live-in Nannies who would provide care for children.  Once she discovered this, there was no end to the number of children she could have.  And with a staff of eighteen at the house, there is also no end to the amount of stuff they can buy, pets they can have, and the number of parties they can throw, without really being on top of much of anything.  The stuff has piled up all over the place, so they need a bigger place.  The dogs, which get stuffed when they die, aren't housebroken - the staff cleans up after them.  And David is mildly surprised when all fifty of the Miss America candidates (one of the charities he supports) show up at his house, when last year only 35 of them did - he just thought his staircase, where they are always photographed, had gotten smaller.

The Siegel's have hired the father of one their kid's little league teammates to be their chauffeur.  Some of the other little league parents are intimidated by their money and power - David comments that his contributions may have made George W. Bush president so he notes with just a hint of concern that the Iraq war may be in part his responsibility before moving on to other topics - but the chauffeur is really attached to them and happy to take them in the stretch limo to McDonald's to pick up chicken McNuggets when they get a hankering for a snack.

All of this conspicuous consumption is a bit off-putting - slightly sickening even - but it becomes more problematic when the wheels fall off the economy.  The family fortune is suddenly in peril as the time share owners start to default on their loans.  They fly a commercial flight for the first time and one of the children asks what all the other people are doing on their plane.  Jackie rents a car from Hertz, and is surprised when it doesn't come with a driver.  This is mildly amusing.  But it becomes more disturbing when the children's pets start dying because their staff is not there to care for them - and some of the kids don't even know that particular pets existed.  Most disturbing to me is a conversation about education.  As their fortunes decline, Jackie bemoans the fact that the kids may have to earn a living and therefore will have to go to college, a fate that she thought they could be spared by virtue of their fortune.

The robber barons of the 19th century lived opulent life styles.  But the Vanderbilt's built a University, one that became one of our truly fine institutions.  It was built in Tennessee as part of reconstruction - it was money that came from the north and money that supported not just physical reconstruction, but moral and intellectual reconstruction.  They also built a number of large homes, including the Biltmore - a home that features a world class library.  Thomas Jefferson, a wealthy man of the previous century, almost bankrupted himself buying books, a habit he had trouble breaking.  The point is not even that earlier generations were intellectuals or had intellectual pursuits, though they did and I obviously value that.  The deeper concern is that this family is less interested in how they can put their tremendous resources to work to make the world a better place, that is, how they can utilize themselves - they are more interested in what can be done for them - how much they can be coddled - as if being cared for - as if being passive recipients of good stuff - were the road to happiness.

Warren Buffet, a wealthy man from our era who appears to have different values, asserts that, "I want to leave my children enough money that they feel they can do anything, and not so much money that they will do nothing."  David and Jackie, or perhaps more accurately, Jackie, seem to worship the idea of doing nothing - they see it as a goal state that they can offer their children.  David's older son, from his first marriage, works for David.  They have a business relationship, but not a personal one.  David is driven by work and wants to accomplish things, but as the economy dives, his inner rage becomes more and more apparent.  He is resentful that the easy money that has built his empire is being taken away from him, and he pouts and threatens to destroy the whole thing to get back at his creditors.  In the aftermath of the movie, he sues his son for giving the film crew access to the business after the economy has gone south.

The most disturbing part of the movie, then, is not what it has to say about a particular family, but what it has to say about us as a society.  As we have become bloated by our wealth, by our easy access to money, a class of Americans has emerged who have made money (and there are many of us who have not) that has allowed us to accumulate stuff, stuff that we may well be addicted to.  One of the kids in the movie comments after a particularly stuff laden Christmas (the stuff is purchased at Wal-Mart - it is after the downturn), that the stuff just creates a hole - a desire for more stuff.  It doesn't really satisfy the desire that it is intended to address.  And yet, we continue to pursue it.  We believe that happiness will come as the result of being cared for, not caring.  We believe that more stuff will make us happy.  One psychoanalytic perspective on this is that it is a regressive experience.  And David calls Jackie another one of his children, not a true partner or companion.  And yet he has chosen her and groomed her dependence.  He does not give her information that would allow her to be a partner.  Instead he, too, is in a regressed state - king of all he surveys - the kid who does well and is cared for in return - he is the king of the castle - the infante terrible cared for by the queen who is really just a baby herself.

So, what about Versailles?  What about the house?  90,000 square feet that will contain a banquet kitchen and 10 additional satellite kitchens.  A floor plan built around a central ballroom - someday it will look like a sumptuous hotel and will host the kind of events that would be at a hotel - with swimming pools and spas and all the comforts of luxury.  Well, the construction on the house grinds to a halt as the economy does.  The Siegal's put it up for sale in its half constructed state only because the creditors insist that they do.  It is, frankly, ugly.  It looms, waiting for a marble coat and for an interior that will, you just know, look tacky as only the opulent wealth of a Vegas casino can look tacky - but in its current state it looks decayed - without ever having been complete.  The pool, just a big cement space, is filled with rainwater.  It looms as large and empty as the stomaches of the children on Christmas morning after they have opened the umpteenth game intended to amuse - with parents who don't know how to play them.  The house comes to symbolize the unrealized dreams that mindless consumption affords.

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Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads about Trauma

Kurt Vonnegut begins this book with an autobiographical story, one that he told in more detail in the novel Slaughterhouse 5.  It is the story of his imprisonment as a captured US private in Dresden during the allied firebombing of this formerly untouched city during WWII - an act of retribution and atrocity that he, who had to help clean up the aftermath, found incomprehensible, reprehensible, and that created, in many ways, I think, the mindset that became the voice of his novels.  And the voice of his novels is a cynical one.

Colum McCann, a contemporary writer who has written about such things as the 9/11 bombings, is cited in a recent New York Times Sunday Magazine article (6/2/13) as predicting about the kids and teachers who survived the Sandy Hook shootings that their struggle against cynicism would be a struggle they would carry on for the rest of their lives.

Vonnegut enters into this struggle armed with two things - things that he names in another book, Cat's Cradle, a Grand Falloon and a dupras.  He said something like "To understand the nature of a Grand Falloon (and here I am quoting from 40 something year old memory so please forgive errors) take the skin off a toy balloon."  That is, that all groupings of people - he used the example of Hoosiers in Cat's Cradle though here and elsewhere he is talking about Nazis and Allies - are essentially arbitrary.  We are not different - but alike - including in our being fallible and even evil, especially when we create arbitrary distinctions and act on them to harm others.  The antidote that he proposes, somewhat feebly, is the dupras - a romantic love that is so intense that the two people become fused - the lines between them fall away and they function as one person.

So the novel Mother Night is about a writer - a kind of hack, sappy romantic writer - certainly someone who could be a cynical version of the author - who has American citizenship but is born and raised in Germany, writes some plays, and chooses to stay there during the war.  Recruited to be a spy, he sends messages that he does not understand by coughing at prescribed times during hate filled vindictive racist rants that he concocts and transmits on short wave radio in English as part of the German attempt to indoctrinate the English and Americans to join the Nazi world view.  The premise of the novel is that he has been captured as a war criminal (for the second time - his functioning as a spy led him to be able to escape the first capture and move to New York), and he is writing his memoirs in Israel immediately before his trial.

What intrigues me about the novel is Vonnegut's simultaneous acknowledgement and disavowal of the power of the writer.  He, in the voice of the playwright/spy/propagandist dismisses his rants as lies - and disavows the pain they may have caused others because he, the author, creator and deliverer, did not believe them.  And yet he also castigates himself and believes that he should be punished for what he has done.  He makes fun of those who would trade in hatred - lampooning them as internally inconsistent laughable dimwits who come to the aid of the writer because he is their hero.  This masterful and very funny playing, however, does not ring true.  What Vonnegut would have us join him in cynically laughing at is someone - or something - that is much more powerful than he is comfortable with - the power of words to destroy lives - even entire cities of people - because they are different, or because they held responsible for our ills, even if they, in fact, have nothing to do with them.

Vonnegut sees - I think painfully - how he is not different than Hitler - or the Allied high command who ordered the Dresden bombings, bombings of a  city untouched by war because it had no tactical value and bombed purely as retribution - in that he offers ideas - and these ideas may have consequences that he cannot foresee.  So he emasculates his ideas, blunts them, making them laughable, and his characters laughable, because to appreciate their evilness - his own evilness - directly would be unbearable.

To make matters worse, the hero's dupras turns out to have unforeseen complications that undermine the premise of romantic love as a safe haven.  The hero is left with no haven, and really feels no compelling reason to live.  He, like the existentialists, does not apparently see meaning in living.  I think, however, it is the cynicism that gives the author away.  I think that he is, in fact, deeply and terribly in love with living.  He is as sensually gratified by life as by the beautiful woman who is his enthusiastic duprastic partner.  And he turns away from it because he is angry at how disappointing it has turned out to be.  Instead of discovering Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, Vonnegut found thousands of charred bodies that need to be disposed of.  The terrible destruction - the very real consequence of wielding power, has left him to turn out a series of books that capture the imaginations of teenage boys - or at least the teenage boy that this man used to be.

My own disappointments with authority, writ much smaller on a stage much less traumatic, found a sympathetic ear in Vonnegut's stories.  Somehow I never read Night Mother until now.  And at this stage in my life I find myself resonating with Colum McCann, acknowledging that it is a hard struggle to avoid cynicism, and, while I do not fault Vonnegut - he faced more horror than I can imagine - I am saddened that he lost the fight against cynicism.  I think his powerful voice - one that is filled with wit, precision, and that can be poignant, was blunted by his fear of identifying with those who had wreaked havoc in so many ways with their power.  He cautions us not to believe in anything - neither the power of the herd, nor the power of intimacy - to protect us from disappointment and despair.

While his position helped me build a useful teenage armor against the vagaries of the world (OK, truth be told, I did not get the cautions against the dupras and continued to imagine that romantic love could, if not conquering all, at least save my soul), it did not lead me forward towards an engagement that would have to be complex because it was with a complex, but also deeply interesting, enriching and rewarding world.  I suppose I end up being as disappointed in Vonnegut as he was in Hitler, Eisenhower, and the rest of the powers that be because he, like they, did not use his powers for as much good as he might have.  He cautions us against living because it is futile to try to escape an existence that harms others - in this book he notes that all the insight in the world does not prevent the hero from tragically wreaking havoc - but he does not leave much room for hope that even in our necessarily blinded state we might, through plumbing and harnessing our power and directing it as best we are able, do good.  Instead he urges us to turn away from the world; to join him in his distancing disdain, something that will doom us to live in a world that we will not make better.

Post Script:  After thinking about this post for a few days, I am aware of my own cynicism towards Mr. Vonnegut - something that surprises me given my earlier reverence for him.  I read the on line commencement address attributed to him, and found an actual address that he had given.  It was not as concise or witty or even in his style as the one that had, through urban legend, become his.  Instead, he seemed a little uptight, overly tied to his script and even clumsy in his delivery (he did reference the "wear sunscreen"  address at the beginning of his own address).  That said, the message he was delivering was a very positive, supportive one and he was encouraging the graduates to make use of what they had learned while they went forth and engaged with the world.  I think the tone I took in the blog above is related to at least two factors - I think that my cynicism towards the author mirrored his cynicism towards the world.  I think I also wanted to distance myself from the disappointment I felt as I discovered some of the mud on the shoes on one of my early heroes - and channelled his means of managing such a disappointment, using his own weapon aganst him.

So it goes...


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