All the World's a Page

Shakespeare, despite it's dated language, forgotten words, and belabored teaching in high school classrooms will seemingly never go out of fashion. I disagree whole-heartedly with Mr. Ramsy's assertion that "The very stone that one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare," in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and am renewed in my disagreement whenever one of the Bard's play gets a new celluloid makeover, as is the case with Much Ado About Nothing. This weekend I'm going to see the modernized film of this classic romantic comedy, which despite its update in era will apparently retain it's language - surely to comic effect. The story of Much Ado is a parallel love story, one between Claudio and Hero which is troubled by the sinister machinations of the bastard Don John which calls Hero's fidelity and purity into question, the other between the stubborn Beatrice and Benedick: tricked into professing their loves for each other, which they didn't realize they even felt (a sort of update and improvement on the comedic Petruchio/Katherine dynamic in the bard's earlier The Taming of the Shrew). While I found myself more endeared to the comedic reversals of affection, and the combative displays of wit of Beatrice and Benedick (particularly the Beatrice, a characteristically strong Shakespearean woman), the plays strength of plot, and particularly dark comedy, revolves around the reckless and aimless destruction of Don John, and the peril of Hero's reputation and happiness.

Unlike some of the Bard's other "high comedies" like Twelfth Night, wherein the comedy is largely in the plot and action of the play, much of the comedy in Much Ado About Nothing is found in wit. Confusion of identity, which is the trademark comedic element in Twelfth Night is adopted to me damaging and nearly destructive ends, which are counterbalanced by the lighthearted beguiling and Cupid-ing of Beatrice and Benedick. One can always count on the Bard to reverse his own tricks to opposite ends, and he does so here, making near-tragedy of what he has proved elsewhere sure-comedy.

What seems to me a rare achievement in Shakespearean comedy is a truly believable love. Too often, though it does not undo the comedy of the play, lovers are struck in love like lightening - love at first sight - but rarely is that so in life. What makes the love between Benedick and Beatrice such a delight is that it is the fruit of a long antagonism. They know each other quite well, they hate each other, but in their innermost affections, beyond even their own understandings, they love. It is this reversal of a lifetime's hate to a renewed lifetime's love that makes this play so light-hearted. The impetus of the play, the drama of Hero's virginity and the unwarranted questions thereabout, despite their centrality to the play, are quickly forgot when reviewing it in the memory's eye. For my memory, I am fondest of the wittier pair, and let them live long and prosper!

For a long time I preferred Shakespeare's tragedies to his comedies, and to an extent I still do; but I have found a new appreciation of his comedies, particularly in Twelfth Night. Economical yet unforced, hilarious yet humane, confined yet infinite, clever yet accessible: such is Twelfth Night or What You Will. The play follows the shipwrecked twins, Viola (disguised as the boy Cesario) and Sebastian, in Illyria, where the hilarity of mistaken identity and unwanted love and unrequited love are all turned up on the head and brought to a comedic reveal and reversal. Viola loves Orsino loves Olivia loves Viola, then marries Sebastian, mistaking him for Viola, upsetting Orsino, offending Antonio, etc. The tangled web of comedy in the final two acts is masterfully done, and the sideplot trick on the proud Malvolio is a misjustice sweetly served.

What strikes me in Shakespeare is the commonalities among his plays, even down to the very tautology: "I am what I am," which I suspect is uttered in some permutation in all, or nearly all, his plays, which drives at the truth of identity and what it means to be "what you are." I was particularly struck by Viola's final assertion in this comedic exchange:

OLIVIA
Stay:
I prithee, tell me what thou thinkest of me.
VIOLA
That you do think you are not what you are.
OLIVIA
If I think so, I think the same of you.
VIOLA
Then think you right: I am not what I am.

"I am not what I am" - the very line which is the key to the character of Iago in Othello quoted verbatim for the ends of comedy. In saying the same line, Iago means that he is a trickster, that he deceives and betrays those who hold stock in his outward appearance of honesty. When Viola exclaims the same words, she means that she is literally not as she appears, that her outward appearance of a boy is but a disguise.

Can anyone truly say "I am what I am," or conversely claim the opposite, without some irony or self-awareness that reverses the very claim? I am what I am, only insofar as I am aware of it myself, and only to myself can I be thus. To an acquaintance, I may be something utterly unfamiliar to my own perceptions of myself, which is shaped by his/her desires of me, expectations and prejudices of me, etc. So am I entirely what I am, or what I am not? The question of identity, what it means to be your true Self, is a common thread which traces its spool to the pre-Shakespearean dawn, and up through the consciousness of our own modern times. It is a question ever unresolved. And it can lead to both tragic, malicious ends, or result in comedic bemusement. Unlike in the literal masquerade of false identity in Much Ado About Nothing, the masks of Twelfth Night are true faces, disguised, but essentially true. In loving Viola and professing her love to her, Olivia reveals her masculinity and boldness, and also her Narcissism for liking what is literally closer to her self than any man. Though the play ends in a double marriage, and a conjoiner of Orsino and Olivia by the mutual relation of their spouses, one can't help but wonder of the happiness of Olivia with Sebastian, a man who she scarcely knows. Does she only love him for his appearance, which he shares with his sister's disguise? Or is there something more at the heart of it. While Viola truly loves Orsino as he is, even in his love for someone else, Olivia's love for Sebastian is never proven, only transferred. Despite the high comedy of the play, and the interplay of identities, doubles and disguises, there is a subtle question of the nature of the play which follows the play, the unwritten play, wherein the full effects of mistaken identity may play out to tragic or yet comedic ends.

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Additional thoughts on Twelfth Night:

If Denmark is a prison, Illyria is a madhouse. The distinct flavor of pure comedy is a direct result of the the zaniness of all characters, save the fool! Shakespeare's "most perfect comedy" achieves such a status though Shakespeare's parodies on his own devices: turning upside-down his own ploy of mistaken identity and criss-crossed loves explored in previous romantic comedies and taking them to hilarious extremes. Illyria is a dukedom haunted by strange phantoms, men and women of such peculiar extremes as to parody themselves.

Take the Duke, Orsino, who despite his surety of his infinite love for Olivia, seems more in love with himself, or rather in love with being in love. How quickly he can transfer his love for Olivia to Viola, as if it were a matter of rearranging the letters in her name. Olivia too is an oddity. Originally racked with grief, swearing off men completely, she is apparently fallen in love at first sight with the first boy she meets, and her boldness which may surpass some of Shakespeare's bolder heroines, though her bold pursuits are in favor of so ridiculous a prize.

But the oddest man, or rather perhaps the least odd (besides the fool, which remains the only sure-headed man of the chaos of Illyria), is Malvolio, who feels very much at odds with his surroundings and would likely be much happier in almost any other play. In the pace of the play, we find Malvolio a fun butt to the deft prankster Maria, but at second glance, his fate is undeserved and almost cruel. Like Orsino, he is a parody unto himself, but he has an almost infinite creative imagination of himself: "Count Malvolio!" Surely his pride and egoism boarder on solipsism, but he remains one of Twelfth Night's great tragicomedic masterpieces. He at once deserves out pity and our jibes, though he is a man "greater sinn'd against than sinning" - to quote Lear's self styled betrayal by fate. He is an involuntary fool, gulled into a role which he holds beneath his station even as steward, and is locked in the dark cellar as his punishment, a fitting end for a man locked otherwise in the blinding brightness of his own imagination.

Until I reached the fifth and final chapter, the rating on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was a pretty weak three-stars. And those were mostly for the deserving prose, and not for the underlying story. Boy did that last chapter pack a whollop! As with Dubliners, Joyce's emotional acuity and linguistic precision is amazing, not a single word feels to be excessive or out of place, and he is able to tap into Stephen's psyche with a knowing conviction. I relate to Stephen a lot, and he feels perhaps more real to me than any other character - or at least he ranks among Proust's narrator and Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway in psychological completeness.

As I say that Stephen is whole, I am reminded of Stephen's own discussion on what makes something beautiful: "Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance." He adopts Thomas Aquinas's definition of beauty here, in the original Latin of course (these Irish school-boys have the priggish habit of palavering in Latin...). Why Stephen's school-boy pals put up with his incessant Latin-quoting, highfalutin, theoretical chatter is beyond me; I think it has something to do with bummming smokes off of him, but it seems a bit of an unequal trade. Anyway, I think maybe the best format for me to review Joyce's first novel is to look at it under his own (and Thomas Aquinas's) metrics: (a) wholeness, (b) harmony, and (c) radiance. Since this is a portrait, or rather a portraiture, I will mostly defer to Stephen's character as a basis for measuring Joyce's work's beauty.

I have already touched a bit on Stephen's wholeness. His thoughts are presented in a sort of detached, omniscient, third-person breed of stream-of-consciousness, one which is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf. But rather than a faded socialite's consciousness, we are privy to the odd, allusive, aesthetic throbbings of a young artist. I loved especially the mental composing of poetry, the logophilic absurdities which slip from his mind like a sieve, for example:

The ivy whines upon the wall,
And whines and twines upon the wall,
The yellow ivy upon the wall,
Ivy, ivy up the wall.

Which is quickly followed up with his own self-condemnation of his foolishness:

Did anyone ever hear such drivel? Lord Almighty! Who ever heard of ivy whining on a wall? Yellow ivy; that was all right. Yellow ivory also. And what about ivory ivy? The word now shone in his brain, clearer and brighter than any ivory sawn from the mottled tusks of elephants. ivory, ivoire, avorio, ebur.

I for one have done this many a time, though I don't venture to boast of my aesthetic senses to any state rivaling Stephen's, a truly aesthetic brilliance. But it is Stephen's musings like these that remind us that he is an artist, or at least and aspiring artist - because we rarely see him doing anything artistic aside from occasionally scribbling some verses on the back of a cigarette box. I think it is often easy for us to imagine authors as Flaubertian monomaniacs, locking themselves in a garret, throwing tantrums and pounding the floorboards for three days searching for le mot juste; but that is unfair, inaccurate. Stephen is an artist, but first and foremost he is a young man, a human being. He goes to whorehouses, he takes walks around Dublin, around the college quadrangle, he has family squabbles, etc. We are perhaps guilty (or rather I am) in deflating my perception of artists to something which is not whole, which is at one and the same time something more than human, but something also less than human: an aesthetic sentiment which surpasses all boundaries on the ordinary and transcends into the sublime, but only that, nothing else. So thank you, Stephen, for liberating all the pretty poets and novelists and painters who I have locked away in a garret these twenty-three years.

Is Portrait of the Artist harmonic? Yes. Is Stephen? Only in the end. Like all great characters, there is a contradiction eating away at him from the inside-out. The church vs. life-as-a-work-of-art, or something like that. The religious portion of this book, while adding something to understanding Stephen's struggle, is heavy-handed and difficult to get through (l'ennui). Stephen's struggle is essentially the age-old young-man struggle of sex. He likes sex, he wants to have lots of sex, but he feels guilty for having it. But once he starts, he says to-hell-with-it, his soul is already damned, why not dip in a bit more? Worse than just that, he feeds his lascivious tastes at brothels rather than bonking the nice little Catholic girl he writes little villanelles about before bed. But for all the dirtiness it makes on his soul, his first sexual encounter seems to unfold an profound (and profane) aesthetic possibility for him:

He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.

All the talk of the evils of sex reminded me light-heartedly of our abstinence discussion in CCD class (I, like Stephen, was raised Roman Catholic). Basically we were all give an Oreo and a glass of milk, and told to dip the cookie into the milk, then to observe that the cookie had soiled the milk forever and that nothing could ever remove that sin from our soul. A bit of a harsh treatment on snack time, and I always suspected a coffee filter would do the trick, but alas, that is my experience with the Catholic church. Anyway, so Stephen's milk is soiled forever, and he withholds all of the senses' pleasures from himself in order to repent. But when he is offered a chance to enter the priesthood, he realizes that it isn't his calling, it was only a vague ideal which he sought to please someone else, his mother (shhh Freud, calm down).

But anyway, I've gotten a bit off the point. Harmony. The novel is thoroughly consistent. It is evident from the start that Stephen's piety has an expiration date, that something modern and beautiful will emerge from his experiences with the church, and it does. At the end we see the Stephen which suffered the burden of the church, of his family, of his country, we see that Stephen with the tethers removed and a reinvigorated attitude on life:

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

Lastly, the radiance of the novel. Like the filter on an instagram photo, radiance is that je ne sais quoi, I-don't-know-what, that bit of experience which transcends language and leaves you speechless. Portrait of the Artist had me oftentimes speechless. I do not need to explain why, because I have quoted enough snippets from this beautiful (provenly so) novel, and if you are left in doubt I can only encourage you to take the novel and open to any page at all (except maybe the copyright page) and read a sentence at random. Like some other reviewer said far more succinctly than I: "You had me at 'moo-cow.'"

You're so vain, you probably don't know this poem's about you!

I didn't expect to see such a varied portrayal of vanity in this epic poem; but vanity is everywhere! Everyone is vain! Shout it from Mount Sinai!

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

I've always been a firm believer that there are not seven deadly sins, but rather one, with (at least) seven (but probably infinite) permutations. That said, I'm not a religious man, so this has always been sort of theoretical/aesthetic musing which I have done between sins (like intellectual "Hail Mary"s - thinking about sin sometimes to mentally atone for it). And that sin is PRIDE, or VANITY. It's everywhere, and I'm tempted to think even the humblest people are just better than most of us at window-dressing their vanities (OK, maybe I'm a bit cynical). So the relevance of this diatribe against vanity and Paradise Lost? It's so central to the story, to each character, that its as inescapable as the blatant misogyny (which is probably equal parts Christianity and Milton). Paradise Lost reminded me of a line from the same speach as previously quoted from Ecclesiastes: "Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us." Paradise Lost affirms my belief that vanity is older than time, older than man.

So "All is vain" is a rather high statement, I think Milton's portrayals of Gabriel, Michael, God, and Messiah are somewhat beyond reproach of vanity, but as a result I found them extremely bland. Cut-paper puppets posing as angels (hand-in-hand like those cut-outs you learn in kindergarten). It's no wonder that we readers relate so well to Milton's satan - he seems more human than anyone else (moreso even than Adam and Eve, which at best are each only a half of the Human). He seemed to me a kind of bastard-child of Hamlet and Iago (a frightening thought!), both very self-aware and introspective, and also a trickster and fraud. Maybe the most poignant moment in the poem for the reader's perception of Satan is when he comes to Earth, and is taken away with it's beauty, that he doubts his own convictions to his yet-to-be committed crimes on humanity:

And like a devilish engine back recoils
Upon himself; horror and doubt distract
His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir
The Hell within him; for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step, no more than from himself, can fly
By change of place: Now conscience wakes despair,
That slumbered; wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.

Satan feels some remorse at his break with Heaven - he sees even in the terrestrial Paradise of Eden the perfect bliss that he gave up. But he can't escape Hell, it is his punishment. While earlier in the epic he contends that "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven" it is evident that that is not the case, that no matter what he pushes his mind to believe of his condition, he is burdened forever with the Hell within. As a modern reader, and maybe I have this in common with Milton's contemporaries, I feel very much a contention between optimism and cynicism, which I saw personified in Satan. In Book I especially, his optimism and enthusiasm seem unrestrained, he hasn't resigned himself to his tartaric suffering, but rather optimistic that it is a matter of perspective: "better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven" - his motto. But by Book IV, he is pained by what he has lost and knows that he can never regain - Heaven is unattainable, and his mind's rationalized illusion of heaven can never be anything but a pale ghost of Paradise.

We can also relate to Satan's vanity, or what is his jealousy of being passed over by God's nepotism. When God creates his Son, and holds him in favor over the other angels, Satan feels slighted, he feels that he has earned through merit the highest rank, but is forever denied it (note that Milton refers to him as the "prince of darkness" - even in Hell he is denied kingship). The parallels with Othello are obvious, though it would be dangerous to take them too far. Cassio is not a Jesus, even less so is Othello a God (Othello being perhaps the most vainglorious of Shakespeare's creations, obsessed with his own mythos as war-god). However, it gets at the root of evil, as offered by Milton, which is that even the best of us (angels) can be affected by pride, and pride leads us to do monstrous things.

Our "original Father and Mother," Adam and Eve are the center of the latter half of the epic. They feel very incomplete, which is perhaps the result of Eve's literal half-ness (being the product of Adam's "rib" or "side" - which as a result leaves only one full half to Adam as well). We see vanity first in Eve, when she describes her first day on Earth. She awakes in the shade, and seeing a river follows it to its source (searching perhaps for her own origins, as she wakes up in confusion); when she reaches a pool she sees her reflection and is enamored with it. God tells her that she is looking at her own image, and to seek Adam - but when she finds him, her vanity for an instant remains:

yet methought less fair,
Less winning soft, less amiably mild,
Than that smooth watery image: Back I turned

Eve is certainly vain upon creation, though her growing adoration for Adam seems sincere. Even so, Satan immediately notices her vanity as weakness, and targets her alone, believing her easier to seduce (perhaps because she is easily seduced by her own image). Adam is farther removed from vanity, though he lacks the perfect completeness attributable to God. I believe, and maybe I am alone, that there is something vain in love. One loves to be loved. When Adam discovers Eve's transgression, he is not convinced by her that to eat the knowing fruit is a good idea, he doesn't put value in the story of the serpent. But, he puts value in his love of Eve, over his devotion to God. He thinks to himself that he would rather die and be punished with Eve than to outlive her, and thus outlive her love.

While The Two Gentlemen of Verona is likely the Bard at his consummate worst, it is also one of his early plays, and is not without enjoyment in its own right. Herein is the early development of some of his major themes in comedy: disguise, homosocial relations, friendship, betrayal, misguided love. The play, which centers on two Veronese men, Proteus and Valentine, and their respective loves Julia and Silvia. The drama emerges from the two men's simultaneous pursuit for Silvia, and the resolution comes from a strange reversal of Proteus's affections. Overall the play feels quite sloppily composed, and naturally concluded, for example, the sudden and complete reversal of Valentine's feelings of betrayal by his friend:

VALENTINE
...The private wound is deepest: O time most accurst,
'Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!
PROTEUS
My shame and guilt confounds me.
Forgive me, Valentine: if hearty sorrow
Be a sufficient ransom for offence,
I tender 't here; I do as truly suffer
As e'er I did commit.
VALENTINE
Then I am paid;
And once again I do receive thee honest.

This, among some of the other scenes, particularly toward the end of the play, when the Bard's interest in his own play seems to dwindle, feel more fated and rushed than natural or human. The perhaps saving grace of this play is the character of Launce and his dog, Crab. I read this play in anticipation of watching it performed by the "Shakespeare on the Common" troupe in Boston, which staged a modernized telling of the play set in the singing sixties. While the production felt a bit self-indulgent and perhaps over-committed to its updated era, I found that the character of Launce and the unpredictable character of an untrained dog gave the play a comedic element which is untranslatable in the text. The dog is no actor, has no lines, but in refusing to obey our expectations of a smooth performance, jibes us with an unexpected, though wholly appreciated humor.

As a closing note, I feel that some time, somewhere, in the 1990's, a high-school staging of this play has to have been turned into a movie, alongside Twelfth Night's "She's the Man," Midsummer Night's Dream's "Get Over It," etc. This play, despite it's short comings, would lend itself quite perfectly to the immaturity, and flighty whims and changes in temper of high school students, early in the bloom of life and love.

Dubliners is so short, yet so vast. I didn't love every story equally, but I plan to at least write here my thoughts on every one of the stories, but I plan to do so over time, and some maybe I will have to re-read. I read this collection as part of my Ulysses book-club preparation, and it definitely got me geared up to devour more of James Joyce. His prose and insights are beautiful, even though his Dublin is sort of beautifully ugly and malignantly beloved. After my first reading, the story which stays with me most resolutely is Araby which had such aesthetic and emotional impact on me I couldn't read a second story the whole day, and kept turning over in my head the story's denouement.

"The Sisters" is a strange story, but a very fitting start to the collection. Nothing is fully explained, though her is a mysterious redolence which pervades the story. Father Flynn has died, or is dying, of paralysis and strokes, and his effect on the narrator, a young boy, is something which remains vague - though many of the adults consider it to have been a corrupting force. The boy and his mother visit the sisters of Father Flynn to pay their condolences, and the sisters describe the strange descent of the Father into his fatal illness, and perhaps his insanity. I could not shake the feeling that this was a ghost story. The air of the story felt haunted by Father Flynn's presence: physically absent but somehow ever present. The story's ambiguity, its unspoken violence, the corrosive mist of corruption, and the lost innocence of children set the tone for the remaining stories; though despite it's consistence of tone and theme, I felt it one of the less memorable, and less lovable of the stories chronicled in Dubliners, perhaps for its almost chilly detachment of the narrator.

"An Encounter" is an unsettling confrontation between the innocence and gaiety of youth, and the pernicious influences of the real world. Two youths play hooky from school in order to go on an adventure across Dublin. Though the restraints of time leave their journey unfulfilled, they are abruptly confronted with a strange man. The man is a hauntingly spectral figure, with an apparently lascivious taste in the young boys. He asks them increasingly inappropriate questions about how many girlfriends they have, etc. and the tension reaches a climax when he walks away and exposes himself to them. There is something unsettling to me, always, about children in literature. Perhaps it is that I am not some years removed from my own childhood, and so it is a period which has become so ensconced in nostalgia, that I cannot make heads nor tails of it anymore. It is a fond period of innocence, but innocence that is ever fleeting, as if every moment children corrode a bit more under the harsh winds and rains of the real world. The children in this story do not start out wholly innocent, but what they are exposed to is a kind of corruption which exceeds the normally encountered dangers of childhood. The abrupt shift in tone, from the jollity of childhood trickery to the forlorn and disturbing "encounter" is startling, unsettling, and moving.

"Araby" is a hymn to mistaken desire, to fruitless journeys in search of hollow ideals. The unnamed narrator pursues an unnamed woman, the sister of a friend on his street. The neighborhood is poor. The lack of names makes the story feel universal, outside of time, but irremediably within Joyce's bleakly poetic Dublin. A coming of age story, “Araby” feels like a first love story – a kind of vain obsession with an amorous ideal. He idealizes her appearance, her gestures, her interest in the titular Arabian craft fair, etc. When he arrives at the fair, after much argumentation with his father to allow him to go, after having to pay a more expensive fare than he intended out of desperation against time, he arrives when the fair is closing for the night.

I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

His affections for the woman, his interest in the bazaar, fades in a flash like the lights going out of the fair. In his epiphany, he realizes how little he actually feels, he is removed from the illusion of his desire – but this disillusionment is accompanied by anger, it is a fire which burns in him, a passion. Nothing pains us more than to lose our precious illusions. I forget where I read it, but someone said, or maybe I have made it up entirely, that we are happy to live and lose our innocence a million times, but to lose even the smallest of our illusions feels like a million deaths. Our illusions are the only idols we actually worship because we really love them – religious idols, societal ideals, etc. we love distantly, with reverence but without passion. We feel that those ideals are good for us, but out idols, our hidden internal loves, we feel that we are good for them and yet at the same time that we can never deserve them. And to discover that what we felt was perfect is something less, something we might not even want, devalues instantly everything which was once below that ideal in our estimation – and that is devastating.

Poor "Eveline" - I hope she finds happiness, though I suspect she will not. The story encompasses her circuitous mental journey, her moral ping-pong, back-and-forth, her petal-picking dalliance "I love him, I love him not, I'll go with him, I'll go with him not!, ..." Eveline is a young woman, the daughter of a violent and abusive father who she wishes desperately to escape, and she has the opportunity to go with a man to Buenos Aires and live as his wife. At first glimmer, this opportunity is immeasurably valued by her, she so desperately wants escape, liberation from her physical and emotional abuse, and from the shackling convention of her environment. On the other hand, she is bound by her mother's dying wish that she will care for her father and brother. While on first blush this decision seems straight forward, a perhaps easy way toward self-preservation, she is concerned about what might await her in Buenos Aires, and whether she really loves the man with whom she would tie herself to for ever. She is a part of Dublin, and it has become a part of her, it permeates her, much like it permeated James Joyce (and can we imagine him abandoning it, really?). Her story is a sad one, and it seems she has no options - and we are left with only the hope that perhaps her father with drink himself to his death.

"After the Race"
"Two Gallants"
"The Boarding House"
"A Little Cloud"
"Counterparts"
"Clay"
"A Painful Case"
"Ivy Day in the Committee Room"
"A Mother"
"Grace"
"The Dead"

(I will update this with more of the stories soon, when I have the time!)

Now I have already mentioned that there was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it got even stronger. It said only one thing, I want, I want! And I would ask, 'What do you want?' But this was all it would ever tell me.

I've never been to Africa. I'd love to though - if anyone wants to float me a one-way ticket to Ouagadougou, maybe a layover in Zürich to pick up some luxury essentials, I'd be mighty grateful. But I digress, I've never been, and what I know of it I basically know from "Out of Africa" starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, or from Things Fall Apart or Heart of Darkness - so essentially I know nothing of it whatsoever. But in any case, it has had, and still has, a sort of mystical quality of the unknown, of spots which we believe have eluded cartographers and adventurers alike. There's a romance in the unknown, the untrammeled, and that romance is the central figure of Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow's novel about a rich but dissatisfied man who seeks the meaning of life in the African plains.

Saul Bellow admonished readers not to look for symbolism, in what is a preposterously allegorical work. It is almost impossible not to see symbolism everywhere in this book, in fact it would take a deliberate skepticism to avoid it. So why the warning? Maybe it is because the overflowing symbolism reminds us of another novel, taking place in Africa, also brimming with symbols? Maybe one by an author that Bellow admired, like, say, Joseph Conrad? Of course! I saw much of the symbolism of Henderson the Rain King to be a parodic point-counterpoint for Conrad's controversial depictions of Africa in Heart of Darkness, particularly his representation of the natives. In Bellow's reversal on themes, instead of trying to bring order to the African chaos, he seeks in Africa a stability of meaning in his own internal chaos. While Henderson's expectations of the African experience are clearly influenced by a Conradian view of the continent and its aboriginals, the novel as a whole evades the stereotypical trap by refusing to characterize "Africa" but instead keep it firmly in the backdrop. Henderson's views are quickly overturned, churned, and reversed as he meets African tribesmen who speak English and are trained in medicine.

Henderson the Rain King is about a modern transcendental quest, à la Thoreau's sojourn on Walden Pond. Following in the philosophical tradition of Emerson and Whitman, Bellow through Henderson argues in favor of the human capacity to transcend state inertia of the Self, to metamorphose to a state unimaginably changed from one's original. Henderson elucidates this change as from a "pig state" to a "lion state," or perhaps he falls short of the leonine ideal, but a fully changed man he is, nonetheless. This change is brought about masterfully in the sub-Saharan chrysalis of the novel. The change is great, but incomplete, Henderson becomes man qua man: he remains imperfect, but changed for the better - the same man with a violent imagination and a youthful impetus but with a changed perspective, a human optimism which abandons his erstwhile melancholy to the realm of the past.

Without Africa, I feel transcended beyond previous Selves. From the solipsistic and ill-behaved child to the melancholic perturbations of my high school spirit to the Self I have become today, I am a fully different individual, and all has been the result of changes in perspective. Unlike Henderson, these permutations of the spirit are naturally occurring transitions of youth: Henderson is a middle-aged man, and perhaps it takes so stark a change in venue to spark so vital a change in spiritual vitality. This book is a book of continuous conflict, on the surface it is a conflict between the impetus of the Self and the desire of change (ultimately a clash of desires), but deeper questions surface, combative questions of the physical versus spiritual selves, reason versus emotion, death and immortality, body and soul, and Self versus Society. Is it possible to make a drastic change to the Self in the midst of the the fierce tributary of modern society's desires and temptations? That question isn't wholly answered, because Henderson is always in a state of escape from Society. He lives outside Danbury on a pig farm before his journey to the African continent, far reclusive from the mainstream of society. When you feel out of sorts, escape feels a necessity for life, no solitude is solitude enough. But Henderson relents, Henderson finds solace in the masculine companionship he finds in his African guide, Romilayu, and in his spirit guide, King Dahfu of the tribe Wariri. While solitude and remoteness seems an ideal, it seems that change is impossible in a vacuum, we need people to catalyze our changes. Africa doesn't change Henderson, rather the men he meets there help to reveal to him his true capacity of heart, his true capacity for good, his veritable capacity to change.

But there remains in the background a beauty of experience, which commingles a beauty of the natural and a beauty of the human. I love nature, and I find no better escape into myself than to get out into the forest, to go for a run in the glaucous shade along the Charles River esplanade. But that natural beauty is remote in its purest form, it is a beauty which transcends our complete appreciation and the essence of what it gives to us lies just beyond the ability of our natural language of praise and awe. Natural beauty needs the human element, imperfect analogues and the unnatural beauty of language, to pin it it down, anesthetize it for us to appreciate, like a butterfly on cardstock; Bellow does that for us with a moving ability, but rather than sedating it, he breathes a life into it. Bellow elucidates our human short-comings to appreciate natural beauty:

We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects but endless fire.

All beauty: natural, humanistic, aesthetic - all beauty is alive. Our materialist society has an unnatural desire for that which is eternal, but we find those pleasures empty, they don't fulfill us - they are unnatural, they are dead pleasures. Wallace Stevens in "Sunday Morning," another tribute to the mystical power of a natural spiritualism, ponders:
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? and answers:

Death is the mother of beauty

Death, mortality, is what makes the world beautiful. The eternal is not beautiful and can never fulfill us. Money, material goods, is immutable, fungible, of an exact value - it lasts forever, so long as we hoard it. Nature cannot be hoarded or safeguarded in our purses and wallets, it slips ever through our fingers if we do not take it into our selves. We must ever grasp for it, appreciate it, love it and preserve it. All that is beautiful must die, life must end, but I wouldn't trade in life and I wouldn't trade in the beauty of endless fire (an allusion to Prometheus's gift) for the material glister of "small gold objects."

Othello has all the ingredients of comedy:

1 jealous husband, whisked
1 virtuous wife
2 tbsp marine-warfare
1 e'gg' [E-(a)-gg-(o)]
3 dashes of redwine
1 handkerchief, to taste

That spoilt Iago just musses the whole comedy of it, really; but makes for a more interesting play anyway (and without him, I'd feel I already read this recipe in Chaucer). Othello really stands out for me, from the great tragedies (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear), it doesn't have the same mood to it, a different air. Othello's world is not the forlorn moors of Macbeth's or Lear's kingdoms, nor in the rotten prison of Elsinore, the scenery is quite sunny in Mediterranean setting of Othello, though the mercenary's tragedy is no less poignant.

Othello is less remote from the reader or viewer of the play than the royal tragedians of many of Shakespeare's other tragedies (which isn't to say their emotions are remote to us, but their stations are). While I can sympathize with the tragic King Lear, understand his pain and search for love and discovery of betrayal, his situation is distant. Othello is a more-or-less normal man: a naval general, a smart tactician, but a mercenary. Also, his tragedy is the tragedy of Envy, something usually native to the realm of comedy in Shakespeare's plays, though Othello is an salient song to its tragic power.

The magic of Othello, like in all of Shakespeare's plays, is the power of his characters, and in this play it seems that the play is almost too small for the three pillars of Othello, Desdemona, and most-of-all Iago. There is maybe too much to say on Iago: his cunning, his negative infinitude of improvisational imagination - he steals the play from his titular victim. But the characters of Othello and Desdemona are oft overlooked when Othello is looked back on, which I think is a bit of an injustice (though I certainly agree with the power of Iago's reverberations through the play). Othello is the war-god of his own imagination, and imagination which lacks cleverness like Iagos and lacks prolepsis like Macbeth's, but one which consumes him and surfeits his worldview. However, Othello's solipsistic worldview is oddly enough shared by his wife, Desdemona. She is not devoid of a consciousness, but she is devoid of pride, and her sterile self-conception is quickly usurped by the vibrancy of Othello's. Her swooning-maindenly "love" for Othello's own bravado is even acknowledged by the man himself:

OTHELLO
...I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her tears,
When I did speak of some distressful stroke
That my youth suffer'd. My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
She swore, in faith, twas strange, 'twas passing strange,
'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful

But their love is a sham! Surely he doesn't hate her, which is Iago's doing, but he doesn't love her. I'm not even sure he loves to be loved, though he does like her adoration. What Othello loves is himself, his own mythos which he has created about himself, which has supplanted the real Self in his own imagination. And Desdemona does not really love Othello either, she too is only enamored with the castle-in-the-sky which Othello enchants her with.

The Venice of Othello is a strange, strange place, and the tragedy is a poignant one. But what Othello feels is not betrayal to himself, but rather betrayal to his imagined self, the self we wants to be which is brilliant and dazzling, which is impervious to jealousy. His pride is wounded by Iago's suggestions, even though the possibility of Desdemona's infidelity is a chronological impossibility. Even to suppose her infidelity possible is to plant the cuckold's horns on Othello's glittering eidolon of Self.

I am too in love to live,
I've too much heart to give,
Goodbye Lotte, please forgive
me, this heart's a sieve.

I hope you won't think me pert
Loving your dear wife, Albert.
It was foolish of me to flirt
with fate: which now, I desert!

Dear Wilhelm, dearest mother
I hope I haven't been a bother.
Real life has been a smother,
But I assure, we loved each other!

This epic mockery, Byron writ
With excellent recourse to wit,
passion, war, and sharp satires:
Though by the end it tires.

We follow our hero, quite Byronic,
on adventures soaked ironic,
If you thought you knew Don Juan
For Byron's hero is a now one.

In Seville, with Julia love
Alight'd on his heart: a dove
(A dove? why that is just a pigeon!
alas-- rhyming is a fool's religion).
Anyhow, a dove alighted on heart,
And gave his innocence a start.
And by-and-by his Julia deary
Had a husband old and weary,
Who spoiled Juan's fun, 'tis true,
When discovered 'neath bed: his shoe.
And so his mother sent him to sea,
to see the World, not touch but see.

At see a storm quite fixed his fate!
A lack of food made them all irrate
And 'came mad with hunger none could sate
And poor Pedrillo the crew ate,
(Cannibalism is quite serious,
And to men's mind: quite deleterious!)
And so alone, Greek isle stranded
On shores of Haidee's heart he landed.
And Haidee showed him love true,
Capable with just love's two.
Until her dear, thought-dead father,
Preferred Juan for a slave, rather.

Then to the land of Turkey, went
Juan, where money on him spent
Made him a slave to Gulbeyez,
and also fit him in a dress.
She loved him dear, but he could not
Forget Haidee, not yet forgot.
And then abruptly Russia fought
the Turks and home with them brought
Juan for Catherine, queen of queans
Who gave him ample means.
But the weather wrought his health undone
And so was sent off to London.

At this point all became digression
and much slowed down the tale's progression.
A ghost and a fair lady pass,
And distract Juan from recherché lass.
But all with metaphysics clogged
And thus the story's bogged.
And then, alas, abruptly stopped,
Because poor Byron dropped.

There's a tangible futility in reviewing Shakespeare's plays, particularly his great tragedies. Is there anything that hasn't yet been said? And even a unique thought, what can that add to the infinite edifice of Shakespeare's four-centuries of fame and praise? Thankfully, that isn't the point of reviews, at least not for this humble reviewer on GoodReads. Reviewing, for me, is about unlocking what I think and what I believe, by rummaging around in my feeble brain for things to say about great (and not-so-great) literature which has affected me in some way - and Shakespeare always manages to unearth something in me. Macbeth has so much to say of the ugly, but natural, side of human nature. Surely it is Shakespeare's most terrifying work. While it doesn't reach the sublimely horrible bleakness of King Lear, or the existential infinitude of Hamlet, nor even the terrible evil of Othello. What makes Macbeth so chilling is the humanity of Macbeth - he is not the larger-than-life Othello or Lear, nor the plotting genius Iago, nor the haunted genius Hamlet, he is distinctly human in his minor flaws, modest grandeur, and an all-to-human impetuosity. What raises Macbeth to the memorable murderer which he is, which surpasses him even to his brilliant wife, is his terrible, and amazing, creative capacity.

Like Twelfth Night's Malvolio, Macbeth has an incredible imagination of his own potential greatness, and also of the horrible conditions which stand in his way. What makes Macbeth so human is his struggle with his own actions. What high school students remember of Macbeth is his "ambition" - but his ambition for what? That is unclear. While he ostensibly seeks the thrown, his dedication to that cause is unconvincing. Lady Macbeth, a wonderfully conceived woman and complement to the initially timid Macbeth, is far more ambitious. Failed as a mother, she is so ambitious in supportive wifehood that she nearly usurps husbandhood from Macbeth. I hear often Lady Macbeth branded as the play's villain. But do we sympathize with Macduff and the other fungible Scottish lords? I think we mostly are unmoved by their plight, in fact we are not moved, really, by any of the dead, only by the murderers. We watch with morbid fascination as the couple of Macbeths are drawn deeper and deeper into their descent of iniquity: murder begetting murder.

Guilt is the mainstay of Macbeth, and it is the great undoing of both Lady and Lord Macbeth. While Macbeth's guilt, like Hamlet's, is manifest in the visitation of a ghost, Banquo's, his wife suffers a more secret guilt, leading her to cry "Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One, two; why, then ‘tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my lord, fie!" before giving up the stage. Macbeth's decline after his wife's death is rapid, his deep love and admiration for his wife (which is perhaps the most sincere in all of Shakespeare's married couples, despite their horrible fate) dissolves his passions leaving him to a pervasive nihilism, bringing from him, in unusual poesy and insight from the King: She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.His love for his wife is so deep that his life without her remains only a procession of days, of shadows, signifying nothing, leading nowhere.

The question of guilt, as previously mentioned and lost in digression, is central. But it is not only a moral guilt, it is an observable guilt. It is not only the guilt of having wronged, but the fear of being caught which spurs Macbeth into hastier and hastier action. As with Macbeth's literary heirs, among them the memorable Ahab from Moby Dick, the pressure to of crime-begetting-crime, the over investment and descent, the gambling with morality, ultimately leads to insanity and death. But we observe in Macbeth both genuine remorse and a calamitous fear of being caught: Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.I am baffled to hear people who cannot relate to Macbeth - for me, he is, with Hamlet, the most relatable of Shakespeare's tragedians. Who hasn't been so overwhelmed with paranoia from a singular crime, that you are forced to lie, steal, trick and deceive, to cover it up? Something which begins minor, stealing a candy-bar in your youth, or cheating on an exam, which explodes into an vast plot of iniquity! The guilt plagues you day and night, drives you against your own nature - anything to calm your mind, to regain your composure. That is the struggle of Macbeth, a man with an almost unnatural drive for self-preservation, not a power-hungry man, but most definitely a man, and so human a man he is.

As a result in part of it's history, going many years without publication outside of the U.S.S.R., Andrei Bely's Petersburg (first written in 1913, and not translated to English until 1959) is woefully under-read. It is, perhaps, most often read nowadays for the praise it received of Vladimir Nabokov, who ranked it among Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, Joyce's Ulysses, and Kafka's Metamorphosis as the twentieth century's greatest novels. It is deserving of significant praise, though it's ranking of top-four for the century bears it tough competition from Woolf, James, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Nabokov's own Lolita. Despite this considerable competition, it belongs on far more "Top 100" lists than I have seen it on (none), and for that reason, I feel compelled to review it on here, to perhaps win over some unbeknownst-to-themselves Bely fans. Perambulatory fiction, a tradition which symmetrically begins with Homer's Odyssey and comes to fruition in Joyce's Ulysses (and Dubliners) and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, has become almost a characteristic of "modernist" literature, though of course it is quite timeless. Through literary walks, cities unfold: Joyce's Dublin, Dickins's London, Balzac's Paris and Proust's Combray (though partially fictional), but among these literary vistas ranks the superb portrayal of Bely's Petersburg.
Petersburg, Petersburg!
Sediment of mist, you have pursued me too with idle cerebral play: you are a cruel-hearted tormenter; you are a restless ghost; for years you used to assail me; I would run along your terrible Prospects and my impetus would carry me up on to that cast-iron bridge which starts from the edge of the world and leads to the limitless distance; beyond the Neva, in the green distance of the other world—the ghosts of islands and houses rose, seducing me with the vain hope that that land was real and not—a howling endlessness that drives the pale smoke of clouds out on to the Petersburg streets.
Hearkening back to epic poets, Bely often invokes his muse, the very Petersburg of which he writes - but she is a shadowy muse, the penumbral underside of Enlightenment, the sinister apparition of revolution and dischord. Also like The Odyssey, and other Greek and Roman epics, Petersburg utilizes repetitions and distinguishing personal epithets to both set the recursive staging of daily routine in the city, and also to establish the unconcern of the city, Petersburg, with the goings-on of its characters and drama. Through even the greatest of human follies, the city remains immutably remote while also disturbingly human, chillingly reactive. In addition to the literal characterization of Petersburg, there is another remote actor upon the proscenium of Petersburg, which is Bely himself, or an authorial fiction unto himself. Often the story is interjected with an almost post-modern self-awareness as a novel, one which follows the tradition of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which both assures us of the veracity of the story, but also draws our attention to its existence as an artifice or work of art.

What might surprise many a reader of modernist fiction is that the story is quite plotted, the pace is quite quick. We follow the guilt-tormented revolutionary Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukov, a senator's son, in his mad walks along the Neva, in his masquerading as a red domino to terrorize his abandoned love, Sofya, in his sub rosa dealings with shadowy spectors, Dudkin and Lippanchenko. The tick-tock-tick of the sardine can bomb, which he has agreed to set in his father's room, a patricide-promise which he is loath to keep, but feels he cannot escape. But throughout this political intrigue and near-parody of Crime and Punishment, we are gifted with the little cerebral plays of, particularly, the father and son Ableukovs: the father ever musing on the limits of his mental geometry, and the son ever thinking about his hero, Kant. The novel reads as a intermingling of the creative consciousnesses of father, son, and authorial ghost:This shadow arose by chance in Senator Ableukhov’s consciousness, receiving there its ephemeral existence; but Apollon Apollonovisch’s consciousness is a shadow consciousness, because he too is possessed of ephemeral existence, being the product of the author’s imagination: needless, idle cerebral play.And Petersburg is no too-serious text, the parallels between Bely and Dostoyevsky's respective novels are done so to parodic effect. While Raskolnikov is a thinker, his crime is only vaguely planned, and the the murder of Lizaveta surprises even himself; Nikolai's crime is yet to be committed, he has killed no one, but is burdened with an almost absurd guilt, a guilt for uncommitted crime which remains avoidable by simple inaction. Further parody is drawn from the too-obvious parody on Freud's Oedipus Complex. Frued, a contemporary of Bely, published his Three Essays on Sexuality, wherein he laid down much of the foundation for his Oedipal theory, in 1905 - curiously the same year which begins Petersburg. The geographically-distant mother whom Nikolai seems to worship, the emotionally-distant father whom Nikolai seems to hate, and Nikolai's apparent love-aversion and coy-distancing tactics in his relationship with Sofya are laughable, and make our guilt-racked protagonist the very red domino (clown) as which he disguises himself.

The language in Petersburg is painted with a Joycean ardor, a mélange of the unrestrained logophilia and wordplay of Ulysses and the aesthetic precision and accessibility of Dubliners. There is a rhythmic cadence to Bely's novel which is pleasant to the ear and has a distinctly auricular pleasure to it, of which I draw no comparison but to poetry - a sound distinctly of it's own. The novel strikes the perfect tempo, both fast paced but also solemn in its comedy and insightful in its absurdity. Despite the wordplay, and the punning-jokes of Senator Apollon Apollonovich, we are warned early on that "cerebral play is only a mask; beneath this mask proceeds the invasion of the brain by forces unknown to us" - what on the surface may appear to be farce, is a mask for something deeper, something serious, something worth read: truth, which is a "force unknown" which covertly invades our brains when we participate in literature.

It was easy to get lost in Petersburg - not confused, but lost in the very prospects and alley ways, diffused into the very city, into the very text. Bely's is a powerful text, which utilizes the over-said or obvious as a medium of almost extreme subtlety. What does it mean to be included? Included in a group, in a family, in one's own thoughts or in the thoughts of another? Nikolai is torn between the desperate need for inclusion, but his methods, his feverish acceptance of a revolutionary patricide, could only achieve him one tenuous inclusion while exiling him from the possibility of many others. His relationship with his father is distant, and though it manifests itself in apparent disdain there is an element of suppressed tenderness, of a desire for love which Nikolai and Apollon cannot verbalize, and instead retreat into their "idle cerebral play." That love which reconciles them is the mutual love for Nikolai's absent mother, Anna Petrovna, who returns and with her return an unnatural staging of familial happiness. Though this contentment remains only a semblance, it serves as a final straw for Nikolai, who feverishly relents his acceptance of the bomb, but no matter the extent of his rummaging search for it, he cannot find it. Does "love conquer all"? That is neither here nor there in the novel, as love is noted mostly by its absence. What can be said is that the lack thereof disrupts all, denatures the mind, and brings reality tumbling through the chaotic abyss of the absurd.

Barthes' most famous contribution to the semiotics school of structuralism, post-structuralism: though not his most-read according to GoodReads (an accolade reserved for Camera Lucida). While I love all of the Barthes that I have read, I think this should be required reading somewhere (the first part, anyway). Barthes is brilliant; his eyes seem always turned to the world as it is, and yet remain mindful of the world as it seems: that is the premise of Mythologies. Intentionally or unintentionally, everything we observe has a meaning and a counter-meaning, which change and reverse roles based on the society which views them. The actor's casual headshot: symbolic of his 'everyman'-ness, or rather his apotheosis above every man? The Tour de France: a meritorious battle of bikes, or rather the stock-puppet sitcom-drama of bikers' personalities? Toys: innocuous playthings, or instruments of class-shackling and occupational pre-fitting? Drinking wine: a symbol of French national, equalizing pride, or an instrument of expropriation from French capitalists over the Algerian farmers? These are the kinds of dualities which Barthes discusses in his Mythologies (so well written and well argued you may not even remember you bought it hoping for a sultry summation of Leda and her cygnus-seducer. No grey-eyed goddesses or illustrious Joves here, save the moonfaced Greta Garbo or the Romanesque Marlon Brando)

I have not viewed the world with the same naive glaze since reading Barthes' Mythologies, and whether it has caused me to overthink is debatable, but it has forced me to think more critically about the world of messages around me. Not just the message-laden world of advertisements, of which I was already dubious, but also of objects, cult-classics movie posters, favorite-books, cover-art, newspaper articles from The Wall Street Journal to The New Yorker to Home & Garden and Men's Fitness, Food Network Magazine and so forth. For example, from Los Angeles Times, today:

A city's unrealized ambitions in 'Never Built Los Angeles'
The article describes a new, permanent exhibition of the passed-over projects of Los Angeles: the phantom freeways, the might-have-been monorails and suggested subways, the sky-scrapers of could-have-been and the plush potential parks. While the the exhibition and the article offer this alternative-history on display as a wistful reminder of the many potential Los Angeles-es that could have existed, there is a more sinister criticism of the mayoral governance that the city has had, which aborted the many better projects. The exhibition comes in stride with a new mayor, Eric Garcetti, and makes the political statement that the unhappy denizens of Los Angeles want more of these projects to be brought to fruition, not left unrealized on scraps of stock-paper.

The exhibition is a sign. The signifier is the "never built Los Angeles" though the intended message is "should have been Los Angeles" - perhaps not wholly should have been, but at least in part. This signified message is in turn the signifier to the latent message of a sort of Marxist equalizer: that capitalism in cahoots with bureaucracy has bastardized the Los Angeles skyline, stunted its greatness, handicapped its potential. The signal is not of a great city, but of a Lost Paradise. While the message is that the past should educate the future, the ultimate message is that Los Angeles is a future foregone. Tossed tramways and abbreviated bikeways overshadow the ill-concieved and rightfully miscarried monstrosities averted. The remote past, and more significantly the unchosen past has simultaneously the luring life of the future and the death of the past. Instead of being a pivot for the city's projection, the exhibition serves instead as a tombstone.

Now, I'm not as brilliant as Barthes, and I am not well-informed in the culture of Los Angeles, but that is the kind of though-process which Barthes utilizes in dissecting French culture. Mythologies is about digging in to every sign, asking what is this supposed to signify to me? what does it actually signify? It is a thought process which does not require genius, for as Barthes proclaims: "myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear. There is no latency of concept in relation to the form: there is no need of an unconscious in order to explain myth." The world is populated with distorted messages, it is our responsibility as readers, thinkers, participants in our cultures to reconstitute the messages which reach us in distortion, not to let it lead us into complacency.

tautology dispenses us from having ideas, but at the same time prides itself on making this license into a stern morality; whence its success: laziness is promoted to the rank of rigor.

We must not be slaves to our own laziness, but rather discover the truth about us: we must uncover with a vigor. For myth is a sly mischief-maker, it masquerades as truth, as the obvious and the assumed. Myths are like puns: they have different meanings to the casual auditory observer and the close reader:

No, syntax, vocabulary, most of the elementary, analytical materials of language blindly seek one another without ever meeting, but no one pays the slightest attention: Etes-vous allé au pont? --Allée? Il n'y a pas d'allée, je le sais, j'y suis été.

Dear Herzog, Dear Bellow,
This book 'bout the fellow
Down-trodden, seems awfully bleak.
His life's done to Hell, lo
His skin's turned all yellow,
So what is there for him to seek?

Dear Moses, Dear Saul,
Where's gone your wherewithal?
It would seem that you've gone quite astray.
Lost two wives in all,
And your child: a lost doll,
Is it true "every dog has his day"?

Dear lover, Dear debtor,
Forgive me this letter,
I think I have quite lost my marbles!
I swear I'll get better,
Perhaps its the weather
That's making my life all fits and garbles?

Dear reader, Dear friend,
When you've reached the dear end
of youth, take my word you will wonder!
About what you misspend
On a once lady friend,
And you'll say to yourself "what a blunder!"

So much to say on King Lear! Even ignoring the tragedy of Gloucester (and redemption of Edgar), the Tragedy of Lear is almost a tragedy too tragic. We look on Macbeth and see his murder-begetting-murder downward spiral, begot by a misguided ambition to regain the favor of his wife; we see Othello and see a man living in his own illusion of himself as war-god, beguiled easily from his lack of practical cleverness; but we look on Lear and see a man of true greatness raised above the esteem of man by all worthy comrades, only to be brought down to a sub-human madness for his feelings of love-lacked, for giving all to the undeserving and for disowning the only one worthy. The tragedy of Lear begins with a competition for his affection, which he sets on his three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. While the first two beguile him, lie in appeals to his vanity, Cordelia, his favorite, offers true appraisal of her love for him: which, though it far exceeds the filial love of her sisters, fails to appease the infinite expectations and demands of love from her father - and for this she is cast out, her share of his legacy divided between her deceitful sisters.

What ensues for Lear is a madness which does not escape him, even in death. Running about the desolate landscape, amid a tempest, crowned with flowers and stripped bare, the madness of Lear is manifest, and he is dethrowned doubly from his rightful station as loved king and father and also dethrowned of his sanity. But the great sadness, which seems too much for the reader or viewer of King Lear is the undeserved death of the innocent Cordelia. She is killed offstage at the command of the evil, likely sociopathic, Edmund, who relents his maiden-murder too late, in his own death. She is brought in, and Lear collapses at the sight of her, his only loving daughter whom he outcast and disowned, who feels now that he can never live up to her worth, rather than that she herself is unworthy of him:

KING LEAR
And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!

Lear, in his continued madness imagines Cordelia still alive, which allows at least some solace to him in his dying breath: a solace in self-delusion.

The world of King Lear is desolate beyond description, in fact it seems that it is desolate beyond love of any kind: romantic, of which there is none manifest in the play, or filial, which dies almost at the same time with Cordelia and with Gloucester (Edgar's love of his father is genuine). This world of Lear's is not our own, but his search for love, his need of love, is a feeling too human for his surroundings. What are we if we are not loved? That is the question of the play, which answers that we are mad and halfway dead if we feel ourselves unloved (even if we are inaccurate in our estimation). What are we without love? "Nothing!" - and "Nothing will come of nothing." - a sad and bleak condemnation on the future of Edgar, who unwillingly inherits the throned seat of the Nothingness which remains after Lear's, Gloucester's and everyone else's deaths.

Time's left Marcel an écrivain manqué,
Nought but pectinate cakes and tea steeping:
But Then! Ways 'round Combray, and temps passé,
Phantasmic dukes, loves, ladies: creeping
into present mind. Love's loss receding
and, fading: the gild of royal breeding.