Chloe Zhao's (and our) Hamnet

 Hamnet, Movie, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Function of Art, Grief in Art, Universality of the Human Experienc

I have watched the movie Hamnet three times now.  First, we watched it as part of a marathon of watching almost all of the movies nominated for best picture of the year.  I had been curious, but was closed to the film.  Reviewers had raved about the emotional impact of the ending of the film.  When I read the book, I was impressed with the claustrophobic nature of the long struggles with the children’s illnesses, and I saw the film as similarly claustrophobic, spare, and therefore, on some level, cold.   Recently, I watched it again with our local “chapter” of the Association for Psychoanalytic Thought (Apt).  The discussant was a local English faculty member who really liked both the book and the movie.  She ended her brief presentation with four questions, one of which I will use to organize this post, though all were thought provoking and inspired a lively conversation about the film.

The third viewing of the film – a private one that the reluctant wife and I did after the public showings – in which we watched the film with the commentary of the director (and co-writer of the script), Chloe Zhao – opened an emotional space to welcome the experience of parental investment, loss and grief that I had not been able to access in my reading of the book or the previous viewings of the film.  Don’t get me wrong, I cried when I read the book and at each showing of the film.  The final scene in the film is, indeed, one of the most powerful (I think) in cinema, but I had a hard time feeling this wash over me in the way that I fully expected a book or a film with this theme that was clearly so excellently rendered to do.

The question that the English Professor asked was something along the lines of: "Shakespeare’s name is not used at all in the book and only once in the movie.  What’s with that?"  Chloe Zhao’s commentary on the film did not address that question at all.  It was mostly focused on the technical details, but focusing on those details helped me understand the choices that she was making - including the framing, especially of the interior shots, where she was making them into stage sets, with a stable camera and a full frontal view.  This was an homage to Shakespeare and the tradition of setting theatrical performances on a stage rather than using a more fluid medium. 

Zhao acknowledged that, as a Chinese woman, she does not know Shakespeare – neither the plays in depth, nor the oeuvre that is certainly part and parcel of every English speaker's vocabulary.  We may never have seen the plays but we have heard his words spoken and even spoken them ourselves without knowing who we are quoting.  He is, as it were, a kind of ghost himself – someone who has insinuated himself into who it is that we are.  One answer to the English prof’s question is, then, when we never utter his name when we use his words – why would we need to do that here?

Zhao let her actors, particularly Paul Mescal, who plays Shakespeare and is a trained Shakespearian actor, choose the lines that are quoted in the movie.  She also learned from someone that, to follow a Shakespearean play, you don’t need to listen closely to the language; words that can be dense and obtuse, but, she says, you should follow the emotion.  And she hopes that she is able to do that in her films as well.  It is not an academic exercise to engage in watching a movie, but an emotional one.  We should give ourselves over to our feelings.

A second answer to the prof’s question is that not naming Shakespeare allows Agnes (beautifully played by Jessie Buckley) to take center stage.  We see her first in the film and we see her as an organic being, someone who is deeply centered in the life of the woods, who is connected to the underground – the caves that are at her woodland home – but also the sky – the falcon that she tends – and the surface of the earth – the herbs that she mixes into potions that address the maladies that children and adults face.  If she is a witch, it is a good thing to be a witch.  She is carrying on the tradition that comes from her mother of opening her heart to the world, even when, or perhaps especially when, this is difficult to do.  How did the Shakespeare from Avon know about the vast variety of plants that he cites in his plays and that are planted in Shakespeare gardens outside places that honor him?  Clearly it was Agnes who was teaching him.

David Lindsay-Abare was at a talk back with a group of analysts in New York after his play Rabbit Hole was performed.  He reminisced that, when he was a student at Julliard, his teacher told the class to write about what terrifies them.  He remembers thinking, “I’ve got nothing.”  Then he had a child.  And he wrote Rabbit Hole, a play about the impact on a suburban couple when the unthinkable happens; their child is run over while playing in the neighborhood and dies.  I was not blogging when I saw that play, but it comes to mind in this play as these two parents, who clearly love each other and their children, are torn apart by their individual grief – a grief that, for a bit of relief, leads them – especially Agnes – to blame the other or to see the other's grief as not as deep or powerful.  As if they are in two separate hells rather than realizing that they are in one shared hell.  To not call out Shakespeare’s name is to see him, not as someone other – William Shakespeare, the Bard, but one of us.  We feel his (and her) pain as our own. 

Perhaps the depth of the pain is part of why it took me so long to come on board with this film.  When my son was born, I found it hard to watch TV for more than a year.  I had never noticed before how often someone dies on TV shows and in movies.  And, during that year or more, I felt the grief of the parent for every NPC who bit the dust.  The child who dies in this film is far from an NPC.  He is a beloved character who is cute and alive and heart warming and who gives himself up to save his sister.  How can you not feel for him?  But how can you open your heart to this much pain?

The book and film ask you to do some gymnastics.  They ask you to think that Hamlet is not about a boy losing his father, who is now a ghost and wants retribution, but about a father losing his boy.  Chloe points out that a happy accident allowed the movie to underscore this important bit.  The young Hamnet is, in this retelling, brought back to life by his father in the role of Hamlet – and he gets to strut upon the stage the way that the young Hamnet dreamed that he would do.  The actor who plays the young Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe)  has an older brother (Noah Jupe) who stepped into the role of Hamlet when the actor cast in that role became unavailable at the last minute.  The resemblance between the two closely related actors makes the uncanniness of Hamnet’s reappearance vivid.

It also helped to be walked through the complications of the this narrative and the complications of bringing it to life, but most importantly, it helped to hear one of the artists involved in the project talk about the ways in which the narrative was consistent with and underscored deeply held personal beliefs and perspectives.  One of those beliefs is that chance is not random, but an opportunity to allow the world around us to participate in the work that we are doing.  The availability of the older Jupe brother is just one example of this, the invitation to the actors to choose the Shakespearean lines another, but the openness to improvisation, to letting the story grow, to seeing how embodying the roles allows the actors to feel their way into the organic truth of the story, all of this made this film feel less like a construction of a master who would instruct me in how to feel about the world, and more like the product of a confederate feeling her way into a world that we both inhabit together.

Perhaps the discussion of the creation of the final scene, that tremendous moment of contact between audience and actor, playwright and wife, mother and son; the shared experience of a grief that we cannot bear alone and that is both amplified and softened by the connection with others feeling it, each in their own way – this moment was not scripted, but developed.  Agnes barges into a place that is foreign to her.  She has no interest in sharing her experience with others and she is not conscious of their presence.  She acts without pretense – she acts intuitively, instinctively, feeling her way onto the stage with her son.  Her action draws others in.  Those in the moment, and we who are spectating the spectators.  We feel the pull, and all it - the movie as a whole and this very moment - is is pulling us in.

So my final answer to why the name William Shakespeare shows up only once in these two articulations of this narrative is that it is not the soul of the author that we go to the theater to explore, but our own soul.  The author, the actors, our fellow viewers – they are all instruments – coconspirators, in helping us better know what lies just beneath the surface of that veneer that we have created for this event, and for our lives in general.  We are, beneath it all, vital, alive, and intact subjects, who are deeply engaged in the process of living.  The play is a conduit to that experience, helping us reconnect more deeply with ourselves and, in the process of doing that, with each other.

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

  

 

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey for Our Times

 Odyssey, Movie, Christopher Nolan, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Modernity, 

I read the Odyssey forty-five years ago as a very naïve 17-year-old preparing to go off to college – not knowing that college would be my own Odyssey.  I also had a basic misunderstanding of the text that Christopher Nolan’s new movie (Wow!) helped correct.  Odysseus  (Matt Damon) was not just lollygagging on the way home – he was confronting and dealing with obstacles to his return from a war that, at least according to Nolan, he hadn’t wanted to engage in to begin with.

The movie version of the Odyssey differs from the text in numerous ways – and I have this on authority of many reviewers, but also of the classics scholars at my University (I am clarifying here that I am not solely relying on my decaying memory of a misreading of a text here).  While I rely on others for the context and, to some extent, the original text, it is I, myself, who disagree with the critics that Nolan shouldn’t refresh the Odyssey.  I think that, just as Shakespeare refreshed others’ texts to address the political realities of the England he lived in, Nolan should do the same.  I also think that Nolan, intentionally or not, made his refreshes both in the spirit of and in alliance to the original purpose of the text, at least as I understand what the classicists told me.  Further, as my reluctant brother-in-saw proposed, this is a myth to begin with; we are not alterring history!

In the wake of the movie, I have learned a ton of Greek history that I had not previously known.  The Iliad and the Odyssey tell the story of the fall of Troy – one of the leading Mediterranean centers during the first golden age of Greece – the bronze age.  During this period of time, the Greeks had their first written language – crude, but useful for tracking trade, and they had a kind of civilization that we can guess at based on the archeological evidence.  Historians have surmised that it was a palace culture, with the palace of the epicenter of all trade.  If you produced beans or shoes or wool, you delivered them to the palace.  Anything you needed was then supplied by the palace.

This culture, if indeed this is the way it was organized, relied on a benevolent, if autocratic leader and its limitations were that there were no connections between people except through the center -so if the palace fell or the leader was corrupt, the system would fall apart, and, apparently, the entire system did fall apart – perhaps hastened by the fall of Troy, a critical and problematic trade hub, but also serving as a communication and trade center between hundreds of city states like Ithaca.

As Homer and Nolan tell it, Representative leaders and men of many of the affected city states were gathered under Agamemnon’s ( Benny Safdie) leadership to attack Troy, apparently in retribution for the theft of Agamemnon’s little brother Menelaus’s (Jon Bernthal) bride Helen (Lupita Nyong'o) (who, according to Shakespeare, anachronistically quoted in the movie, launched those thousand ships or, as Nolan adds, at least 500 of them).  The war was mostly a bloody siege and multiple battles on the plains outside the city as described in the Iliad.  It lasted for ten years and ended only when the wily Odysseus devised a plan to leave a parting gift of a gigantic horse when the Greeks apparently left the battlefield.  Of course, the hollow horse contained men who emerged after being taken inside the walls of Troy.  They emerged at night from the horse at night to open the gates and let the Greeks in to slaughter the Trojans.

After this, in the dark ages that followed the bronze age, when the proto-alphabet was lost, before the second golden age, when Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and then Alexander the Great would help create, benefit from and forward the Greek foundation for Western Culture that came to be known as Western Civililization, reciting the epics was a way of keeping alive a vision of an idealized world – one in which heroes, born of Gods and watched over by them, led states that could work together to achieve greatness.  And one of the critical elements in those two poems was that the leadership of the heroes was dependent on the will of the people, of the polis, to govern.  That is, the democratic principles that would flower in the second golden age were preserved in nascent form from the first golden age in the amber of Homeric poetry.

Troy was strategically located near a narrow strip of water that was essential to trade in the ancient world, much like the strait of Hormuz in our current world.  One of Nolan’s theses is that the heroes’ moral compromises, including the malicious use of a gift filled with the seeds of destruction and Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice his own child Iphigenia (the closer to the heart, the greater the sacrifice) to get favorable winds to sail to Troy, along with the destruction of a critical trade center and, presumably, seat of civilization, led to the dark ages.  The failure of the heroes to function heroically, then, pre-dates a dark age.

The Odyssey is also an anti-war movie.  The book was not.  It is also an anti-religious movie.  The book was not.  When Odysseus disavows the Gods, one of my classics friends stated that the hair on her arms stood up.  And her point is well taken – Odysseus is the only character in the film to converse with a God (Athena (Zendaya)) and the Dead.  Nolan is telling a modern tale, and it is a godless Odysseus who leads us from the ancient to the modern world, and we are led to wonder if Athena is actually a goddess or merely an hallucination – a kind of Post Traumatic ghost haunting Odysseus through the rest of the movie – trying to help him get back on morally solid ground after losing his way in precipitating a battle where women were raped and civil society destroyed.   

We are moving from an objectively defined world, one where our accomplishments are honored, and these, in turn, are driven by striving to be virtuous by living up to an externally imposed moral code, to a subjectively determined one, where people are driven by internally felt drives such as love and attachment; in Odysseus’ case feelings towards his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland).  This transition was one that Shakespeare first imagined, but Freud put into motion by listening to the ideas of his patients rather than simply diagnosing them based on objectively determined criteria.

In creating a modern movie, one that predicts our own coming dark ages, Nolan creates a hero that looks like Homer’s and one who, like Homer’s, is fighting like mad to get home (not lollygagging as I mistakenly thought – though both Nolan’s and Homer’s heroes taking up with multiple women along the way home offended my modern suburban sensibilities, if not my psychoanalytically informed ones).  Odysseus is not returning home to regain and retain what is rightfully his, but to assuage the guilt that he feels for having abandoned those he loved for so long.  And when he returns home, he sees his task as restoring the order that was disturbed by his violation of the laws regarding civility, generosity, and honoring the dead.  Further, he chooses to engage in the peaceful (by Greek standards) transfer of power – recognizing that a legacy is one that extends into the next generations – we do not simply take all that we can in any span of time.

OK, I said I wasn’t going to rely on my memory, but I don’t think either the Iliad or the Odyssey depict the actual fall of Troy.  But the movie does.  It is at the center of the film and the formation of Odysseus’ moral quandary.  He develops the Trojan horse, he lies to the person who would have held his confidence about his presence in it, and he feels the moral responsibility of the rape of the Trojan women and the destruction of their Temples.  He feels, the reviewers point out, PTSD – something that will not be invented for 4,000 years.

More importantly, Nolan is trying to induce PTSD in us.  We are meant to feel the waste, the loss of a moral center, the trials of warfare.  In the wake of World War II, one of the elements that prevented nuclear warfare was rumored to be the Russians’ experience of the brutality of the war with Germany.  The leaders of Russia knew what a post-apocalyptic world looked like and they did not want to create it (again).  The question was whether subsequent generations would feel similar concerns.  And that question is very much alive today.  Nolan's answer is to deputize us all through the narrative of the film - we will realize that the destruction of war is a dangerous thing to unleash.  

So, one of the factors leading Odysseus to become woke is that he has survived the trauma of war – but in order to do that, and to survive the trauma of losing his men as he worked to get them home (I will skip that part of the story – though some of the most interesting scenes are here, including Cerce (Samantha Morton) exposing the men’s true gluttonous selves – removing their “costumes” of being human to reveal them as the pigs they are).

After the war and losing all of his men, Odysseus can’t face his memories, and Calypso (Charlize Theron) helps him forget by feeding him lotus flowers (this helped me realize why so many boats are named Calypso – I assume they were named by divorced men fantasizing about a woman feeding them lotus leaves to help them forget their first marriages).  Ready to acknowledge his part in bringing about the devastation on multiple levels, including the chaos at his home (palace) that has gone unmanaged and been filled by indolent and incompetent suitors who have not had a mentor (OK, his sone Telemachus does get a little bit of time with the original Mentor – Mentor himself – but not enough to figure out how to succeed his father and govern in his stead),  Odysseus returns, disguises himself so that he can check out the situation (and his return is also a return to the opening scene in the film, with the suitors maltreating a beggar who, it turns out, is Odysseus himself), and devises a succession plan.

Odysseus’ succession plan is different in the film than in the book.  In the book, the hero reinstates himself in his right and entitled place – he becomes again the King of Ithaca and order is restored.  In the modern version, Odysseus cedes his place to his son.  He does the heavy lifting to get him there – he is the one who continues to violate the law of Zeus by killing the houseguests/parasites/suitors.  He then sails off with Penelope to the West, as she had proposed they do when he was called up for the Trojan war. 

If Odysseus had just followed Penelope’s advice to begin with, all of this mayhem could have been avoided.  Without their best general, and the one that finally came up with the plan that led to Troy’s downfall, the Trojan war would never have been won by the Greeks.  The old system could have stayed in effect – which would have prevented (in my reading) the renaissance following the dark ages that allowed Greece to become our moral and philosophical cornerstone. 

Sometimes things need to come to a head, despite the turmoil that will ensue, so that we can pursue a new course. Nolan’s hero is invested in creating a better world for the generations that will follow – generations that will spring from the loins of his son.  Nolan has rewritten ancient history, so we know he is talking about our history.  Is he hoping that our current leader will let go of power so that the sons of liberty can move our country and with it, the world, forward?  Are we to learn that we should take care of our own mess, steer our children clear of our work, and cede the business of governing to them as we head into exile (we could just call it retirement) without burning the place down?

Nolan is notoriously cagey about interpreting his work, leaving that to the viewer (a very modern, or even post-modern, approach).  If I were to take this down to the micro level, I think that my retirement(s) from professional life might also include a retirement from my paternal role in the family; or, at an even more micro level, I need to get over myself and my aspirations and to turn towards enjoying and living more fully in the moment, living in the pleasure of appreciating the setting sun pulling me forward into those remaining days that I have, each more precious than the last, less for what I might do and more for what I might experience.

 

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

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.

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

 

 

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.

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.