Last night I read The Cockroach a novella by Ian McEwan where a cockroach undergoes a purposeful, though Kafkaesque transformation into the British Prime Minister. It is a lot of light-hearted fun.
McEwan’s novel got me thinking about potential fictional representations of America’s president and those thoughts crashed into Josh Marshall’s observations about the behavior of post-impeachment Trump, a man who seems beyond all epiphany.
Which brought me to the moment of great change in the last part of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens:
“Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!”
How would that end, were his Scrooge our Trump? I see: “Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!”
“‘TOTAL EXONERATION!’ cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look about him.”
“The end of Candide is for me incontrovertible proof of genius of the first order; the stamp of the master is in that laconic conclusion, as stupid as life itself.” -Gustave Flaubert
I’ll never be able to sum that up as well as Flaubert. The famous ending is, after all of the calamities, misfortunes, tortures and pains endured by Candide and his friends Pangloss, Cunegonde, Cacambo, Martin, the Old Woman, Paquette and Girofleo, that the only solace is productive work and that excessive philosophizing is just a path to superfluous misery.
“We must cultivate our garden,” says Candide, dismissing another of Pangloss’ arguments that everything has turned out for the best in this best of all possible worlds. By this point in the story, Pangloss has renounced him optimism but has decided to keep arguing for it anyway, because that’s what philosophers do.
It’s nice to see the roots of literary and theatrical absurdism creep out from a satiric epic. Though Voltaire would likely skewer an observation like that.
Barnes & Noble pulled a “hold my beer” after the American Dirt fiasco and announced the Black History Month publications of some classic texts with the main characters featured as people of color on the cover. What I find most interesting about the story is at the end of this Slate wrap up, where it is revealed that: “The head diversity officer of TBWA\Chiat\Day [the agency behind the initiative] took inspiration from J.K. Rowling’s response to a black actress being cast as Hermione in the London staging of The Cursed Child.”‘
The inspiration made sense. In theatrical productions, especially small ones, casting actors from different races or genders than the source characters is common, sometimes to controversial effect and sometimes to no discernible effect.
One reason for this, particularly at the community theater level is that parts are cast based on who’s available. But even in big commercial productions, a decision might be made because a director wants to bring a specific talent into the show. Also, at all levels, directors and producers might make these decisions to make a statement. It should go without saying (but it doesn’t) that casting a role for a character described as white with an actor from another background, is generally okay but the reverse is not, given the art form’s history (and present) of exclusion, not to mention blackface.
This is extremely common with classic texts, like Shakespeare. Often, the director, producer or dramaturg will have to make adjustments around the casting, though. This just can’t be done with books, hence the very reasonable objection, highlighted in Slate, that “The project assumes that stories written by and about white people are somehow racially neutral and that you can just slap a black or brown face on them and declare them diverse. But just because a character isn’t described as having pale skin or golden hair doesn’t mean that their whiteness isn’t a part of their narrative.”
Unless you’re going to rewrite the books, making diverse covers just isn’t going to cut it. Seems like one of the reasons that the Barnes & Noble project was appealing is that, as with recasting and rewriting Shakespeare, you are operating in the lower-cost and rules-free realm of the public domain. Maybe a better alternative would have been to have published and highlighted a set of public domain classics from diverse authors. One would have to start planning now to execute this next February.
Very sad to read that George Steiner died at 90 years old. Perhaps more than any critic, Steiner was able to cover vast philosophical, literary and historic ground in concise and readable prose. His essays, particularly the four that make up In Bluebeard’s Castle simultaneously open up the world while filling the reader with lament about how little we know and how much there is to study in so little time.
Steiner approached the world with an artist’s sensibility in times increasingly dominated by the soft and hard sciences. He was a deep reader and a generous explicator. In a world adrift in the shallows, we needed George Steiner.
Gertrude Stein lived the very best of literary lives because she was both an artist and an appreciator. The writers, painters, sculptors and musicians that she nurtured made the world a better place, as did her own writing, particularly The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody’s Autobiography.
I do wonder what she’d make of our own lost literary generation.
Classic Stage Company has a fantastic and advanced Frankenstein on stage right now, playing in repertory with a fresh adaptation of Dracula. The new telling if Frankenstein by writer Tristan Bernays presents the story of Frankenstein and his abandoned creature with just two actors one playing mostly the Creature (and sometimes Frankenstein) and the other a musician who represents a chorus of the books other characters, including the Blind Man, the child, and Frankenstein’s bride, Elizabeth.
The Bernay’s adapation really captures the origin the Mary Shelley’s story — it’s like being told a macabre tale in a darkened room on a winter night. The adaptation is a triumph.
In a two person show, the cast obviously has to be strong and versatile. CSC has access to the best talent so it’s no surprise that Stephanie Berry impresses with her range and stamina in the lead roles and Rob Morrison keeps the rhythm and atmosphere of the show as the chorus. Director Timothy Douglas ably leads a cast tasked with inspiring our imaginations.
I grew up with and have long practiced a kind of first amendment absolutism that seems now to be out of step with our times. It’s not that people don’t believe in the first amendment — polls show that most do and pretty much everyone I know would say they do — it’s more that people will no longer rank it as the highest value as issues of safety and social equality have taken new precedence in our discourse.
I first encountered this impulse directly in the 1990s, as part of an Albuquerque-based theatre company producing Ntzozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf with a multiracial cast, a decision that ran afoul the sensibilities of a local bookstore and led to protests. It didn’t even matter to those offended that Shange had explicitly blessed the production and casting.
We tend to view new attitudes about speech and whats constitutes offensive speech as a highly contemporary development, but this has been with us since the social awakenings of the 60s and was huge in the 90s. Along the way, the right of anybody to say whatever they want has eroded and the simple dismissal “you’re just complaining about the social consequences of speech,” doesn’t really suffice as an answer. Not if those social consequences are shutting people out of global conversations.
In an online literary forum where the topic of American Dirt was raised, I wrote: “We all have an absolute right to tell any story we want.”
The first response: “Hard disagree.”
This isn’t exactly an attack on the Constitution is how the argument tends to proceed. The Constitution only guarantees that the government will not stop something like American Dirt from being written and published. It makes no promises about people buying the book, agreeing to sell the book or not protesting the book’s existence. That’s all true. The right to write a book is equal to the right for somebody to protest the book’s existence. That’s the deal.
But I sill believe that the conviction that certain people shouldn’t even attempt to tell certain stories represents the beginning of an erosion of free speech. “A white woman shouldn’t have written American Dirt,” is just not an argument I can get behind even as “A white woman shouldn’t have written American Dirt badly,” is one I’m fine with.
We should argue about the quality of speech, not the existence of speech. The Freedom Forum Institute, which conducts an annual poll about first amendment attitudes shows that absolute support for free speech is slipping. In 2018, 23% of the poll respondents said that first amendment protections “go too far.” That number climbed to 29% in 2019. Can nearly a third of Americans really believe such nonsense?
35% of respondents believe that student journalists in public schools should need school administrator approval to write about controversial topics in student run publications. 27% believe that teachers should be allowed to punish students for the contents of their social media posts.
We allow and accept, by the way, that employers can fire people for what they post on social media or for having political bumper stickers on their cars. We also allow and accept that the massive corporate gatekeepers of the internet and the wider culture, like Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Twitter can promote or ban whatever speech they want and we say that this is proper because they are private even though corporate censorship may be a bigger threat than government censorship in contemporary America.
A decade ago, I remember the excitement around the impending publication of Hapworth, 16, 1924, a lost Glass-family novella that had been published in The New Yorker but never released as a book. The publisher was Orchises Press, a boutique outfit that had scrappily approached Salinger and obtained the author’s permission. This created some anxiety for avid readers as it would not be a large release and there would not be stacks of the new Salinger at the front tables of big box booksellers, or even at The Strand, where they could be easily obtained. I pre-ordered, I think, from Amazon and Powells and Tattered Cover.
Well, the book never happened. Our friend at Electric Literature report today that Salinger had wanted a limited, small press release which was thwarted by the concurrent ages of celebrity and Amazon.
In the meantime, those of us who cared were able to read the story in The New Yorker‘s digital archive. Nothing is truly lost anymore, except for the chance to own a beautifully designed and published physical Hapworth.
Meanwhile, reminds Electric Literature, we’ve been promised far more than this novella since Salinger’s death. Salinger’s later life biographers and contemporaries all say he continued to write long after he stopped publishing and went into seclusion.
J.D.’s son Matthew confirms a trove of unpublished materials, but not some of the specific novels that others have promised. He says we’ll get to see it, but he’s not promising anything soon.
Yesterday, Flatiron cancelled the remaining 35 appearances of a 40 city book tour for American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins. Cummins will return to the road later to conduct a series of town halls. What I find worrisome is that Flatiron cites threats made against the author and booksellers for motivating its decision. Publishers Weekly also reports that critics of the novel have received threats and been harassed as well.
It seems there are thugs and extremists on all sides of the issue and while I will not give them moral equivalence, I think that any threat of violence around the publication or sale of a book is just a short step away from the fanaticism that motivated the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015.
We should be having heated, passionate and sometimes even impolite fights over fiction, but violence should never enter into it.
I remember reading The Seagull in college, around the time when I’d delved head first into Sartre, Camus and Nietzsche and began nibbling around the edges of Dostoevsky. This is also when I’d begun studying playwriting and new professors exposed me to unfamiliar ideas. I entered the dramatic writing program at the University of New Mexico with Stephen Sondheim in my head as the master experimental writer. Soon, I was surrounded by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, David Mamet and Tom Stoppard and then Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch and Heiner Müller — just giving you a sense of where my head was at when I first cracked The Seagull. This was a huge period of awakening for a guy who really loved his Neil Simon and A.R. Gurney (and I still do!)
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/REX/Shutterstock (3827651a)
Portrait of anton chekhov, Russian author and playwright, 1900.
VARIOUS
I was so enamored of Konstantin’s passionate attempts to create new forms of theatre and storytelling and very much identified with his disappointment and despair at being ignored by the literary establishment, personified Boris Trigorin, who doesn’t even bother to cut the pages of the journals that publish Konstantin’s work. Also, I found Masha’s lovesick nihilism to be… quite profound.
So then I called a friend of mine, who was performing in a production of The Seagull at a college in the pacific northwest and talked about my take on the play and she had been cast as Masha in a production that, as was fashionable in the 90s, presented Konstantin as a sort of Kurt Cobain figure and she said to me, after listening patiently to my explication — “Don’t you think all of that is meant to be funny?”
Of course, she was right and I had to reread and reconsider The Seagull in that light and I also had to reread and reconsider everything that had led me to read so much earnest intent into the script in the first place.
It was a valuable lesson about how where I am in life so greatly affects my reading.
