All the World's a Page

Emma tragique (so it goes),
Schmaltz and fancies: head-to-toes
Married, love-jolted,
Husband: cuckolded,
Then off into cyanide throes.

The Good Soldier is so heartbreakingly beautiful. I wonder if I have ever felt so conflicted when a book came to an end, on the one hand I didn't want the experience to end - I unearthed gems on every page, gems of solemnity, disappointment, angst, and insight; on the other, each page filled me with renewed heartbreak. The "saddest story" is about two couples, the upright up-class English Ashburnhams (Edward (the eponymous, ironic "good soldier") and Leonora) and the American Dowells (John (our tragically naive or self-deceptive narrator), and Florence). Th Good Soldier is "about" two couple's disintegration, poisoned by infidelity and deception; but more deeply than that it is about the impotence of the human condition (represented in the specific and literal impotence of John Dowell). This book finishes where it begins, and the whole distillation of it can be summed up best as by John Dowell:

It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has got the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me. Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?

Why can't people have what they want? That's really the pivotal question of all literature, of everything it means to be human. Everyone wants something, someone, but can't have everything they want - and if they get everything they want, it lacks novelty and then they want novelty above all else. Because we're human, we want what we don't have, and oftenest what we can't have. Dowell's allusion to the "terrestrial paradise" - to Adam and Eve's paradise - is perfect, poignant. We give up perfection for something that is flawed but forbidden. Since it is unknown to us we cannot know it's flaws, know it's true consequences, until we break with what we have and try it. But what if to try it is to lose everything? This struggle, this self-burning passion for "something other than what we have" is elucidated by Proust, who compares our longing to "an idle harp, [which] wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it." And this tactile desire, to be touched - even if it is by a rough hand, a worse hand - is central to the dilemma of infidelity. So many eternal novels revolve on the axis of infidelity, and we read them, and we love them, we feel that we relate to them even when we are models of fidelity.

As a society we relate to these marital transgressions because we know what it's like to feel both content and dissatisfied with what we have. We don't really want to be satisfied, we want to be surfeit, and we feel that we can never know if that over-fullness of joy is possible unless we take impossible chances, risk losing everything. But few of us are really willing to risk everything if we don't have to. We feel that by discretion or mock devotion we can keep what we have while we seek what we want - and this is the Janus-faced desire at the heart of The Good Soldier. The character of Edward Ashburnam is the complete essence of this desire (though it is apparent in the four main characters), his transgressions are not about sex, nor necessarily about "love" - but about a romantic vision of what love should be, which is often defined by what he doesn't have with Leonora. Whether it is with Nancy or Florence, or any of his other mistresses, he is endlessly looking for something, but never knows what it is. But despite his errant heart, it never is willing to stray completely from Leonora. Even though she is cold to him, and grows colder, some part of him loves her to the state of devotion, of, ultimately, sacrifice of that desire and of his life.

Leonora wants nothing more than her husband's love, but she will never let herself have it. As a result at first of stifling convention of her upbringing, and her own insecurities, she cannot bring herself to give herself up to Edward. As they grow older and he strays from her, her love for him become a love only of possession and control - she controls him by forgiving him, but by inwardly hating her own forgiveness. Edward knows that he has harmed his wife, that he has made her cold to him, and his own compunction keeps him from breaking with her completely. Leonora, who has almost perfect knowledge of the melodrama happenings in the novel, perhaps wishes most, unconsciously, to have the naivete of John Dowell. Her diligent, but mirthless, hunt for knowledge, is self-immolating. She convinces herself of Edwards guilt and persecutes him with her coldness, but in doing so makes attainment of his love impossible. Her problem parallel's John's, though her knowledge makes her marriage impossible to enjoy: "If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?" Unlike Dowell, Leonora assumes from the start that Edward is rotten at the core, and so she forgoes even a honeymoon happiness.

Florence is, perhaps, the most difficult character to understand. At turns she is portrayed by her husband-cuckold-narrator in terms of pre-disillusionment idealism, and post-disillusionment vitriol; paragon of demur innocence, and reviled harlot. In some ways I think she risks everything when she marries Dowell, and then regrets it, and her's is the story of trying to escape her own choices. On the surface, she may be literally seeking sexual satisfaction, which her impotent husband cannot offer her, but I suspect her problem is not so simple. I don't think I believe that she ever really loved Dowell, but I also don't believe that she ever loved Edward either - I think that she doesn't know what love is, and perhaps equates it with some amalgam of sex and romance - two things which the painter and Edward both fulfill her with. But love has to have some element of spiritual, passionate devotion, something that is adds value to the Self and adds value to the Other - something like looking though a window at the one you love, but seeing also your reflection in the glass. Florence can only see through the medium, she can only picture the value of the other, as something which has a set price, and which she can shop for, she never receives anything in her extra-marital exchanges, at least nothing like what Dowell is willing to offer her - everything he has, everything he can be. And she throws it away, and sometimes we all do that. We throw away something either because we see something better, or maybe we throw it away by accident, by forgetfulness.

Despite the difficulties, the heartbreak, despite the cruel ironies and bitter inconsistencies of the Ashburnams (primarily) and the Dowells (secondarily), this is a truly beautiful novel - a testament that all human emotion, even pain, has beauty. What struck me most was John Dowell as the narrator, his constant back-and-forth dance in time, the strange significance on coincidence and the date of August 2, when many of the novel's events take place, though years apart, made me question his mental faculties. Health is so recurring a motif in the novel, the weak "hearts" of Florence and Edward, the sanatorium in Nauheim where they meet, the confused illness of Florence's family, etc. and the claim that Nancy has become an invalid at the end. But we never hear about how the psyche of Dowell survived the self-styled saddest story, at least not directly. This novel, which I love, which is perhaps one of my favorites for ever, owes its complete brilliance of emotion, splendor of style, and so forth, to it's narrator - the wonderfully crafted and contradicted and confused John Dowell. I was lulled and enchanted by his solemn insightfulness, his somber story-telling, his impotent view of the human condition. I love Dowell. He is naive, he is imperfect and flawed, he self-deceives and is too-quick to trust those who deceive him - but that's so human, and I sympathize with him at the same time as I criticize his human foolishness.

Autobiography/memoir is a strange genre in the literary universe. It is at once a piece of fiction and non-fiction, a chronicle of one's memories, and a perversion of history in favor of art. In Proust, who blends the lines of autobiography, fiction, and essay in his À la recherche du temps perdu, admonishes his readers: "Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were." This is certainly true, our memories are not perfect accounts. We have only one perspective by which we can really view our personal histories, and with time those perspectives are corrupted by what we come to know of the "future" which follows, by the warm glow of nostalgia, by the distance of interceding time and the blurry faculties of our memory. An admirer of Proust, and perhaps the closest true successor of him stylistically who I have read, Barthes is expertly aware of the relative "truths" of history and art. Though Roland Barthes is ostensibly an autobiography, it is at the same time against autobiography, combative and resistant to it: What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What "grace" might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?Pursuant to his own philosophy on semiology, Roland Barthes is both doxa, the status-quo, the obvious, and the paradoxa, or the nuance sign which opposes it.

Though Roland Barthes is presumably about its author, you will limn from its pages very little about him. This is not his story, not a "portrait of the artist as a young man" - no, it is Barthes' very essence. You are not informed of his youth's scraped knees, failed entanglements of first love, nor even much of friends or family, but rather you become immersed in the fishbowl of his memory, a slideshow purveyance of his image-repertoire: Coming home in the evening, a frequent detour along the Adour, the Allées marines: tall trees, abandoned boats, unspecified strollers, boredom's drift: here floated the sexuality of public gardens, of parks.As in all of Barthes' works, there is an apotheosis of language as both sacrosanct ritual and also a profane, sensual pleasure. As in Proust, there is an intermingling of the present Self and the childhood Self, which instead of complementing into a blend, become a layered portrait - one of innocence and one of adulthood: sexualized, self-awareness, bias, disillusion. But Barthes' approaches his memory with both a longing for closeness and a respect for distance: he views his childhood self, his young-adult self, his yesterday self, more liek a series of divergent individuals, like many ancestors' portraits hung on the enfilade of his life - ancestors which inform him, but withhold something from him. He feels a warm nostalgia and affinity with his former selves, but also a remoteness, something which is both impossible to regain and also impossible to fully grasp. From the past, it is my childhood which fascinates me most; thee images alone, upon inspection, fail to make me regret the time which has vanished. For it is not the irreversible I discover in my childhood, it is the irreducible: everything which is still in me, by fits and starts; in the child, I read quite openly the dark underside of myself - boredom, vulnerability, disposition to despairs (in the plural, fortunately), inward excitement, cut off (unfortunately) from all expression.The ceaseless evasion of the past, revealing itself only in fits and starts like an atavistic quirk, a borrowed gesture, a facial tick. The memory is both a removal from the present, but it is also alive in us. And it is alive in the fullest sense: it is changing, it is waxing and waning, corrupting and ameliorating ever. And to anesthetize memory, to pin it down, to write it out, is to ultimately let it escape.

To write the body.
Neither the skin, nor the muscles, nor the bones, nor the nerves, but the rest: an awkward, fibrous, shaggy, reveled thing, a clown's coat

God, Giovanni's Room is heart-breaking. I've been avoiding reviewing it, a bit, because it boils so much to the surface. No summary or review could do this book total justice. What Baldwin achieves is a desperate account of two gay-or-bisexual men struggling with their sexuality, their society, and most importantly their identities: identities which are at once masculine and yet deprived of that masculinity by their complicity with a society that doesn't understand them. Baldwin's artistry is formulating a novel about same-sex love that isn't an absurdly supportive utopia nor a bland coming-out story (see: all LGBT literature, most of which is aimed at young adults, and is stylistically reflective of that audience). Giovanni's Room is the dusk to E.M. Forster's dawn in Maurice.

Baldwin's real achievement is to make his story universal. The love between Giovanni and David is not a "homosexual love" or "same sex love" - it's just love, and Baldwin tells us that is all love needs to be to be real. Perhaps it is the effect of reading Barthes that I find myself disdainful towards the self-bulwarking of gay "otherness" - newspaper stories which send the overt message of "gays can do it too!" actually serve to reinforce that gays are something other than normal. Those stories do not change the perception that "gays cannot" but rather reinforce it by providing the exception to the rule. "A little 'confessed' evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil'" By admitting the small prejudice, you allow the larger prejudices to grow disproportionately. Baldwin refuses to let his novel be about gay men in love, and instead makes it about two people in love. The closest comparison I can find in my literary repertory is The Age of Innocence, which I think is an apt sister novel to Baldwin's. Restrained by a rigged society and his engagement to the fair Hella, David must give up his true passion for Giovanni. But it is so much the worse ending for Giovanni than Ellen Olenska: while Ellen lives a supposedly fulfilling life in Paris, Giovanni rapidly descends to corruption, self-loathing, and death: "If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody."David's role in Giovanni's life is not that of a passive lover, he and Giovanni share something real, a true kinship which David cannot feel for Hella and which Giovanni cannot bear to lose.

I find significance in the names of the three lovers, David, Hella, and Giovanni. David is from the Hebrew for beloved, and he is mutually beloved by Hella and Giovanni, though he largely resents those loves, first Hella's then Giovanni's. He feels as burdened by their loves as he does by the constraints of appearances and by society, and so he can never be truly happy, he can never truly relish in the love of another, because he cannot bear to the the object of affection, only the subject. David is profoundly selfish, and profoundly evasive to the attention he receives. He paradoxically wants love but cannot bear the responsibilities that go with it. In the Bible, David is much loved by God, but his sexual transgressions with Bathsheba bring hate and misfortune to him. Baldwin's David likewise betrays Hella, and the war between his compunction and his survival instinct ruin what life remains for him: Giovanni is gone, Hella is gone, what remains of his life is a homelessness (if, in fact, home is where the heart is) and an emptiness. He is inconsolably lost: he is haunted by the past that remains inside him, but also by the past which has escaped him: People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.David manages to be doubly the madman.

Hella, derived from "Helga," though with the unavoidable echo of "Hell," means, ironically, "blessed." What is she blessed with? She is naive and insecure, she is alternatively too timid and too bold to find love with David. She chooses a long engagement and spends that time alone in Spain rather than in Paris with David. Hella reminds me very much of James' "innocents abroad" - and for that reason I find her being blessed only by way of her avoiding the ultimate corruption of David's black heart. Her blessing seems to her like a curse, but ultimately we feel she is far better off alone than she would be had she tied the know with our narrator, a man so confused and self-loathing he is incapable of loving anyone. For David, he knows that life with Hella would be a "Hell" to him, it would be to chain him to something less than love, something like friendship, but which would block him forever from his true passion. His love for Giovanni has made love for Hella impossible, and marriage to her would be a constant reminder of what he has lost.

Giovanni is a derivative from the Hebrew for "God's Gift" - and he is a blessing to David. Giovanni shows David what love is capable of being, what it means to find love and solace in another human on this Earth. But David cannot accept this gift. He grows hateful of it. It is not love or deference for Hella which makes David give up Giovanni, but his own blindness and self-hatred. He is not deserving of Giovanni's love, and it makes us hateful to ourselves, even the most selfish of us, to receive something in the name of our merits when we have not lived up to those merits. Those undeserved gifts are a constant reminder of our inadequacies and instead of raising us up they tear us asunder from the inside-out. Giovanni is the gift of real freedom, the freedom of choice - the gift that God bestowed on man. "For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom." David cannot bear the responsibility of choice: particularly the choice between a precarious bliss with Giovanni and an assured unhappiness with Hella.

"I went to bed but found no rest; and as I lay there between sleeping and waking, memories of my childhood thronged about me. In this state, where the mind still resists the fantastic combinations of dreams, the important happenings of a long period of one’s life often crowd themselves into a few moments."

Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie seems to me a woefully overlook French nouvelle. It was first published in 1853, meaning that it is far out of copyright - and so anyone intrigued by this review, I recommend to read the English translation here. The story was a favorite of Marcel Proust, and the parallel themes of memory, time, love and jealousy are poignant in Sylvie, though in much smaller doses than in Proust's epic. A review this now, in the midst of "2013 - the Year in Reading Proust" in the hope that someone will discover this opalescent curio of literature, and that it will add even a small light to their experience of Proust.

Nerval's Sylvie is a brief tale of love lost, lost given-up, love forgone, but ultimately, unrequited love - and significantly self-delusion. Our lover turned narrator is a man with ideals, not moral ideals - no, he is a bit of a rake, though a passionate and romantic one, but rather aesthetic ideals, particularly as they pertain to love and romance. His memories are honeyed with these ideals, and are presented to use under the honeyed patina of nostalgia. If "distance makes the heart grow fonder," then distance in time captures the heart completely, the loves of his past are vouchsafed and solipsized so deep in the narrator's heart and memory that they are diminished to tiny gold phantoms of his self-styled illusions. His blending of dream, reality, and memory is something of which he warns us often: "As I set down these words I cannot help wondering whether the events they describe actually took place or whether I have dreamed them." And isn't memory something like a dream? Something like rêverie? In memory, in a moment, we are transported somewhere else in time, in place; sights, smells, emotions, and sensations return to us slightly altered - we are dually aware in memory, we have two "selves" - the minor self, the actor of our memory, and the major self, our current self who is the critic watching intently from behind the proscenium. So at one and the same time, it is reality, as it was or appeared to be at the time to our minor self, and dream or reality as a performance (as it seems in retrospect) to our major self. This is a central obfuscation of the nouvelle's narration - dream, delusion, or reality? The remembrance of things as they were, or the appearance of things then as they appear now?

The drama of the story is the narrator's return to Loisy, where his childhood visions were borne. He is newly rich by an inheritance, and has been pursuing with ardor a pretty young Parisian actress named Aurelia. However, when sleep is withheld from him by a "half-dreamed memory," he resolves to return to the sanctuary of his childhood loves, Syvlie (and also Adrienne, a young girl he loved but who was sent to a convent). We find in Sylvie the class-founded ideal of the "peasant girl," and idyllic kind of romantic ideal which is completely divorced from the reality of the person. When the narrator returns to her, he finds her engaged and also, more painful to him, that she has risen in class. Sylvie makes gloves for a living, and as a result has risen in social status beyond the precipice of peasanthood, into something like the working class (the sandwich filling between petit bourgeoisie and serfdom). He is heartbroken to find her so much changed (though for herself, she has changed for the better) - any change to his ossified ideal image of the past is a blemish to the immutable perfection of the past. When he asks her to sing a peasant song from their shared memory, she responds that "one doesn't sing that song anymore." he is heartbroken, and when asked why so, he responds "Because I love those old melodies and because you will forget how to sing them." This is the height of the narrator's disillusionment, she refuses to sing the little melody and thus shatters the memorialized ideal of his rural love. There is a tangible sense of regret, not for loving her, but for returning to her. As Flaubert warns in Madame Bovary: "Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers." He sets off in his return to Paris, gilding on his fingers and a smudged idol, fallen from its erstwhile tabernacle.

The true beauty of this work, is not simply the confusion of memory, not simply the treatment of loves and ideals, but the blending of the two into a sort of self-delusion for the narrator. While Sylvie remains unattainable, and so far changed, undesired as her present self, and Aurelia remains coyly distant, Adrienne approaches apotheosis as the ideal which the narrator feels unites his loves, surpasses his loves. His love turned nun remains the unattainable ideal of his youth and increasingly his present, as other ideals fall by the way. The narrator even insists on Aurelia's likeness to Adrienne, and brings Sylvie to the Parisian theatre in order to confirm this likeness (does he doubt his own eyes? Does he fear they delude him?). He brings Aurelia to the place where he had previously fallen in love with Adrienne, but is dismayed that she is not struck by her surroundings as he is:

These places, full of precious memories for me, awakened only a mild interest in Aurelia, and even when I took her to the green lawn in front of the château near Orry, where I had first seen Adrienne, she was unmoved. So I told her how my love had been awakened by that slender figure bathed in mist and moonlight, and how, since then, that love had lived only in my dreams, now to be realized in her. She was gravely attentive, and when I had finished speaking she said, ‘You don’t love me at all! You’re only waiting for me to tell you that the actress and the nun are the same person. All you want is a drama, and the climax evades you. I’ve lost my faith in you completely!’

Aurelia pinpoints the internal conflict of the narrator, and I turn to Proust for his explanation of the phenomenon, which far surpasses my own ability:

Forgetting that beauty and happiness are only ever incarnated in an individual person, we replace them in our minds by a conventional pattern, a sort of average of all the different faces we have ever admired, ... and thus carry about with us abstract images, which are lifeless and uninspiring...

The narrator has imbued all of his love's value on the three women of his past and present, and as their ideals begin to show signs of fatigue, their individual values, their individual perfections and beauties, rather than diminishing in number, they are grafted upon the loves which the narrator feels remain to him: simply Aurelia. And we can see this double-grafting of Sylvie and Adrienne in his description of her on the day of the preciously mentioned confrontation: "Dressed in her riding-habit, and with her hair streaming out in the wind, Aurelia rode through the wood like a queen of bygone days, to the great bewilderment of the peasantry." The remaining "queen of bygone days" is Adrienne, as she rides through the sacred ground of the narrator's and Adrienne's tryst, and the reference to peasantry is an allusion to his idealized love for Sylvie. None of his loves can ever come to fruition because he does not love any of them wholly, but loves small aspects of them, even small illusions or romantic stereotypes of them, and never gets at them completely, never digs deep into himself to discover what he loves, he loves only on the surface. But in the end it is inconsequential whether he remembers these women exactly, whether he conflates them, or makes them up, because they are not real and he does not really love any of them, but rather loves a phantasmic ideal which glows blindingly behind them: making them mere shadows, silhouettes on the edifice of his passionate desires.

Oh boy. 2666 was so good. 2666 was also so awful. I liked some of it very, very much, but I also kind of hated it. I'm very conflicted about it. Even as I write this I'm thinking about my (currently) four-star rating: "should I drop it to three? no, should I raise it to five? ...not that either, but four? maybe I should remove the rating completely!" etc. This novel/tome/unwieldy paperweight/projectile weapon/scalar counterweight/etc. defies the rating system because it's really something like three-to-five separate novels that are maybe linked but maybe not, and they're very different in terms of enjoyability.

Book the first is about a little coterie of professors across Europe who have dedicated their professional careers to studying Archimboldi (the authorial nexus of the 2666 cosmos). Honestly, one of the best parts, along with the final part.

Book the second is about Amalfitano, an unstable professor who we meet briefly in the first part. This part focuses mainly on his fear that his daughter will be corrupted by the gang life in Mexico. He like to hang mathematics books out to dry on the clothesline next to his dirty underwear - a man after my own heart.

Book the third concerns the allergorically (fatally?) named Oscar Fate, an afro-American journalist from Detroit whose assignment to cover a Mexican boxing match is upstaged by his interest in he series of murders and brutal rapes in Santa Theresa.

Book the fourth ruined this book for me completely. I hated it. It was a ceaseless, excruciating account of rapes and murders in Santa Theresa which were kind of related and kind of unrelated, and had a very tenuous thread holding them together by the few detectives which covered the serial killings. Don't get me wrong, I love "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit." Rape and murder are ugly, but I can appreciate them in a larger context. The detectives of 2666 are decidedly not Olivia Benson or Eliot Stabler. They are mostly passionless, vaguely Machiavellian; they don't inspire any genuine interest for the reader, and they pass in and out of the narrative. I almost abandoned the book entirely for this section, which was so brutal, senseless, and meaningless that I believe it should have been completely removed or very heavily edited. I can't confirm this, but it felt like the longest section and also the most plotless (none have any sort of resolution). I am a firm believer in reading for pleasure. I find pleasure in classic literature, and genre fiction, and nonfiction which interests me, but I am loath to read as a task. This felt like a chore. I can vaguely see the adumbration of an argument that the endless rape vignettes has some large significance about desensitized violence or gender roles or social class concerns, etc. but when it comes down to the wire for me, message has to come with some sort of aesthetic pleasure, some sort of narrative pleasure, or else it is not very good to me; it's not something I can love or scarcely appreciate. Maybe I am just a philistine, but I have a difficulty loving most contemporary literature: where has all the subtlety gone from literature? Where are the modern Prousts, the modern Jameses? I hate to read heavy-handed social commentary and ugliness for ugliness's sake. I think the world I live in has a tremendous capacity for beauty and I think it is too often ignored for cheap shots at socio-eco-political agendas and poor social satire, bad sex scenes, and made-for-movies dramatics. One redemption of 2666 is that I will probably never see a movie version of it, or if I do it will skirt past the grotesquity of the "part about the crimes."

Book the fifth, the final portion, is about Archimboldi, the elusive novelist studied in the first part. This was the strongest part of the novel, I felt. We follow the young Hans Reiter through his Prussian life, through the Nazi regime, and his eclectically appreciated novels. The dynamics of war, family, art, and experience were poignant and moving, and frankly redeemed this novel for me.

None of these stories are brought to fruition, and that's just how life is sometimes. Stories continue on without you, mysteries remain unsolved. All you can do is take what life offers you and draw your own conclusions, make some speculations and remain skeptical. What do we make of all the false starts in Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller? Many of those false-starts are books I would like to read, but they're stories which died with Calvino, or maybe died stillborn in his mind before ever coming to anything, ever. Sometimes that happens. Not every story ends in death or a wedding like the Shakespearean tragedies and comedies of old, sometimes life's stories just fizzle out, dissipate, evaporate, end before they start.

Significantly, this novel was never finished. At 900 pages, I can only imagine how much of the remaining work to be done was paring it down. Maybe refining some of the metaphors (why is everything compared to a "whore" of some kind or other?). Overall I think there is something here, something, maybe a small something, buried a bit in excess pulp, but something real and radiant. It certainly raises questions, many questions, and answers none of them. It is perhaps an excellent jumping off point for the imagination: what happens to Oscar Fate? who is the murder, or murderers, of the women in Santa Theresa? and so forth. Did I love this book? No I can't say that I did, though I see a lot of friends on here that really loved it. Will I return to it again? No, I don't think I will do that, at least not in its entirety; I could perhaps see myself re-reading certain parts of it, particularly the first and last parts, which far surpassed the rest of it.

I did not really enjoy Saramago's The Double. To begin with, it's a sloppy handling of a theme which has been done over-and-over, and better done at that: Dickin's The Tale of Two Cities, Poe's "William Wilson," Nabokov's Despair and Dostoyevsky's The Double were all better handlings of the doppelgänger theme than this, I felt. This felt kind of like a more sinister "The Parent Trap" or dropped episode of The Twilight Zone (dropped for being too long maybe). It wasn't bad, I won't say that. Everything was there: identity, doubles, blunt bludgeoning of routine, life and death, ideals and jealousies, etc. But at the end of the book I just felt that it was marginal: vain attempts at humor, tedious longeurs, unidimensional supporting characters. This might have made a fun, quirky novella, but as a full novel it hits a flat note.

The issue of identity is brought into the twenty-first century, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso feels depressed and useless, and so decides to watch some movies to cure his ennui. He has a girlfriend, Maria da Paz, who he kind of likes, and a job which he kind of cares about. While watching the movies he notices that one of the extras in the movie is his exact double! His life suddenly takes on meaning to solve the mystery of his exact look-alike, he finds his name and ultimately confronts him. They briefly switch lives, and tell each other a bit about themselves. They have the same birthday, but the double (claims he) was born before Tertuliano, which Tertuliano takes to mean that he is the copy, the supernumerary.

It was said that one of them, either the actor or the history teacher, was superfluous in this world, but you weren't, you weren't superfluous, there is no duplicate of you to come and replace you at your mother's side, you were unique, just as every ordinary person is unique, truly unique.

Until the confrontation, the book feels a but lifeless: only Tertuliano has any interest for the reader, even Maria seems to be only a silhouette populating the stage of shadows which is The Double. But the climax cannot hold, it falls away fast after their initial inspection to confirm their identicalness (same height: check, same build: check, same dick: check, etc.). The Double read like a story which came to Saramago as a scene (Faulkner notoriously envisioned all his books as one scene, and the book grew around that scene/image), the scene of confrontation, but the rest, the sprawl, feels sloppily done. The prose is well done in many sections, though awkward in others, but the story feels like a dwarf trying to fill a giant's suit: there is too much excess, not enough substance. The characters are too small for the world they populate, and the story is too narrow for the binding.

"Love" seems to me something which is impossible to define, to grasp. Centuries of authors, of philosophers, have tried to do so in vain. There is always something left to be said. As in death, love is a topic of infinite discourse. As Tolstoy echoes in the mouth of Anna Karenina's titular heroine: "'I think... if there are as many minds as there are men, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.'" Love is infinite in it's permutations, and therefore cannot be defined. What Barthes offers is not a definition of Love, but what it is to be a Lover. Barthes, like his predecessors Proust, Shakespeare, Ovid, Baudelaire, Goethe, Stendhal, etc., is a troubadour of the pains of jealousy disguised as the joys of love. A Lover's Discourse is a masterful fugue of personal experience, literary precedence, and theoretical musing, which evokes emotion in the same pitch as a novel, but elicits introspection with the intellectual skepticism of Hamlet.

As a piece representative of the Barthesian oeuvre, A Lover's Discourse straddles the duality of speech and meaning, of what it means to be a lover, but also the very discourse of love. The book itself is divided pell-mell into short fragments related to the amorous phraseology: "s'abîmer...," "cœur," "casés..." etc. It is the layered language of love which interests Barthes: what do we say when we are in love? - is what we intend what we say? - what does what we say really mean, what does it signify? Though the semiotic approach to love seems distant and cold, it is the inverse which we feel when reading Barthes, whose very language moves the reader to a shudder of feeling: Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.Perhaps this book, novelistic essay or essayistic novel, must be read in one's prime, when one is in the throes of passion, to feel the full emotional impact - I do not know if this is the case. As a young man I am always on the precipice of romantic disaster, only in utter solitude, removed from all passionate enterprises, do I feel free from the pharmacopoeia (half-poison, half-remedy) of love. Bliss and misery are the Janus faces of life, in love, in solitude, we cannot have one without the other, even if they only look at us in turns.The world subjects every enterprise to an alternative; that of success or failure, of victory or defeat... Flouted in my enterprise (as it happens), I emerge from it neither victor nor vanquished: I am tragic.Love, life, and death, are infinite, they are the lands of contradictions, beyond the capacity of language. What is both bliss and misery? What is the concatenation of victory and failure? How does die and yet endure? At these interstices of language lies the fundamental truths of Love.

What does it mean to be in love? It is a notion idealized and raised on high by all men, it is the apparent culmination of our lives. But with Love comes pain. For Barthes Love is inseparable from Jealousy: if we are not jealous, it diminishes our love, it negates it. We can never be happy in love, never truly happy, never complaisant. The lover is always waiting, he must ever have his love validated, requited, and won. Every win in love is a Pyrrhic victory, every favor won is hours, days, of agony paid for. This is the view which Barthes takes, but it is not his argument. His view of love is a flavor of A Lover's Discourse, but it is not the entire course. What do we mean when we declare the object of our love "adorable"? What do we mean when we affirm our love? These are the concerns of Barthes. "What do we mean when we are in love?" no "what do we mean when we say 'I am in love'?"

The question of A Lover's Discourse is not "how does one define love?" but rather, more fundamentally, how does one even begin to discuss it? When we read the Romantics, Byron, Keats, Shelley, we are presented with a view of Love that seems too large, too incompatible with feeble man: something more withheld from man for his imperfections, something which is manifest as a remote deity. Contrarily, when we discuss it in the quotidian tongue, it seems to us too pale a light: it lacks the allure of passion, something is missing. Despite his apotheosis of Language, even Barthes feels its inadequacy in front of the edifice of Love: To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).In front of Love, language is reduced to muck, it is inadequate. Barthes is torn between the deities of Eros and Logos - Love and Language. As a humbled votary genuflecting to the altar of Language, he is prostrate before the temple of Love.

We find in The Luzhin Defense many of Nabokov's playful tropes: madness (monomania, solipsism), resistance to meaning (particular jabs at the "Viennese delegation"), genius outcast from society. It is apparent that his is an early work of the master, though a masterful work still. Luzhin is a remote but somehow lovable obsessive. Our affection for him has true potential, perhaps a potential unusual for the typical Nabokovian protagonist. But that affection is abated by our narrative distance from Luzhin: while the first person brings us closer to the monsters of Humbert and Kinbote, the third person alienates us from the more awkwardly lovable Pnin and Luzhin. This alienation is not unique to the reader, but a feeling felt by all who meet Luzhin: he is remote, inaccessible, too odd and too genius for the world in which he lives.

Ultimately, like all of Nabokov's memorable puppets, Luzhin's sanity is the vicitm of his own illusions: a victimhood manifest even in his characteristic conception, as Nabokov informs us in the Foreward: "The Russian title of this novel is Zashchita Luzhina, which means 'the Luzhin defense' and refers to a chess defense supposedly invented by my creature, Grandmaster Luzhin: the name rhymes with “illusion” if pronounced thickly enough to deepen the 'u' into 'oo.'" Luzhin is at once a man totally blinded by illusion, and also a man of preternaturally clear vision. His acuity and understanding in the realm of chess blinds him to the reality of his larger environment. As in Despair, Nabokov parodies his own focus on detail to comedic effect: focus on detail becomes dangerous myopia. Luzhin feels that attachment to the real world is a source of endless fatigue, even the chessboard is a burden to him. His consciousness, all of his senses, are focused so microscopically that he becomes a solemn object of ridicule:Luzhin was indeed tired. Lately he had been playing too frequently and too unsystematically; he was particularly fatigued by playing blind, a rather well-paid performance that he willingly gave. He found therein deep enjoyment: one did not have to deal with visible, audible, palpable pieces whose quaint shape and wooden materiality always disturbed him and always seemed to him but the crude, mortal shell of exquisite, invisible chess forces.Chess is perhaps the perfect metaphor for Nabokov's style of art: precise, calculating, pure-play and pure-skill removed from chance. Nabokov's works are ruled by his aptly named (in Lolita) "McFate" - man-made, authored, Fate: fate which is removed from fortune. When interviewed for the Paris Review, he was asked if E.M. Forster's claim that [Forster's] character's had lives of their own, and wrote their fortunes for themselves, resonated with him, Nabokov answered (characteristically): My knowledge of Mr. Forster's works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.Pot-shot at Passage to India aside, the closing seal on his answer is significant to understanding Nabokov's approach to art. "My characters are galley slaves." Slaves, like chess pieces beneath the hands of their master, ever part of a greater artwork: the game. Nabokov's artistry is a game, he is a parodist and a trickster. That stills our emotional reaction, but invokes our appreciate for his aesthetic achievements. Luzhin does not move us, and The Luzhin Defense is as much a chess defense as it is a defense against interpretation, against emotion. The Luzhin Defense is a case in the particular of the Nabokov Defense - a defense against meaning which he artfully employs to distance the heart, while drawing in the mind.

Despite the parallels between Luzhin Defense and Zweig's Chess Story, it would be in poor taste to imagine it a parody of Zweig's post-Nazi novella - however the comparison is unavoidable. There is a notable exchange in values when one moves from Zweig to Nabokov's takes on Chess obsessives. In Zweig we encounter a man literally tortured, and chess being a mental manifestation of both escape and continued imprisonment. Chess Story is a poignant, post-WWII tale, with heavy-laden messages against human cruelty, the double-edged sword of escapism, and the pervasive loss of innocence and beauty following the Nazi rule. In Luzhin Defense we are withheld meaning and given farce. While Nabokov plays with us, manipulates our affections and our perceptions, his art is a cold and distant art. The genius of Zweig's novella is to make chess warm to us, familiar, an obsession-affliction which is at the very border of our admiration and fear. The genius of Nabokov's novel is the inverse: it instills on the sympathetic narrative of a man gone mad by his own monomania with the cold aloofness of a chess match.

'Chess Story' or 'Royal Game'
Matters not, it is the same
Of monomanic Czech champ
And survivor of death camp
Playing a simple game o' chess
To discover who's best.
But much deeper than that
(I've made 't sound flat).
It's richest psychology
Of cryptic Doktor B--:
The price of isolation
And resulting chess fixation.
What cruelty brought, sees
Long 'ffects of th' Nazis.

For Barthes, every photograph, rather than being a representation, is an expression of loss. The photograph, like all art which precedes it, attempts to eternalize its subject, to imbue it with life-forever, to blend the beautiful with the infinite; but it fails, it reminds us only of mortality (death is the mother of beauty). Try though it may, and despite its resemblance to life, the photo can never extend a life which is lost, or a life which is passing.

I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.

I think of the vain art of aesthetic preservation at the end of Lolita: "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." Humbert has failed to give his Lolita immortality, she is dead and gone from him forever, even when her life remains throbbing in her veins, Humbert's Lolita is dead to him, passed, and that is the effect of photography: a vain snatch at passing beauty. For Barthes, the photograph is irrevocably the servant of Time, the momentary click of the photographic instrument is the shuddering tick of time, as the photograph-frozen object dies away - the object that-has-been (ça-a-été) dies away every indivisible moment and is born over in what-is-now. Barthesian Time, for the photograph, is instant death. What has been photographed can never occur exactly the same way, for that momentary coincidence is past, but in the photograph it is falsely repeated infinitely. Every photograph is an epitaph.

For Walter Benjamin too, as with his successor Barthes, the clicking-photo and the ticking-time are inseparable melodies of the same fugue. He tells us: "...image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical..." The image exists extemporally, but it is helplessly pinioned to the edifice of time. Every momentary photo has a following moment which is unphotographed, and another and another through infinite moments until Now. From the singular snap of the camera, there is an infinity of moments, a constant constellation across time, bridging the distance between what-is and what-was. And as Barthes notes, that distance is immeasurable, it is infinite: you can never retrieve, never relive, that which has passed, that which is gone, that which is dead. The shock, the punctum of a photo, is a "posthumous shock" as indentified by Benjamin:

Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing and the like, the 'snapping' of the photographer has had the greatest consequences. A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were.

Throughout, Barthes provides us with a number of photographs which touch, or fail to touch, him. No matter the photographic subject: political, journalistic, personal, professional or amateur: Barthes approaches each with a reverence and solemnity, like a man walking through a cemetery: head downcast, hands intertwined, heart in his throat. Despite the many provided photographic examples, the photo which moves Barthes, and which most moves the reader, is not included, and it exists to us only in Barthes' words: the photo of his mother as a child. This photograph belongs to a history which excludes him, which is totally unfamiliar to his image-repertoire because it is outside of Time as he knows it. This image is a private history, but a privacy which is removed from his own, irremediably by time and space. And he sees in her image that-which-was and simultaneously that which has died and that which is going to die. The girl in the photo is gone, but the woman she has become has a limited mortality of her own, and the photo is a death-knell calling her to the grave, calling her back to the history which she has left behind her.

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

Every photo is a commingling of love and death, a realm of life lost and life left for losing. There is a beauty in life which is lost when it pinned down in art, art of any kind, but especially Photography. While literature, painting, drawing, music, all take life and attempt to pin it down, they also add something that life hadn't had before. In photography, nothing is added, it is frozen life, it is death, there is nothing which supports it, nothing which adorn it, we see nothing added, we are only reminded of what has been removed.

When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.

Calvino warns us that "memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased" and that is the operation of photography: to erase memory, to anesthetize it, kill it. The photograph is a conscious attempt to remember, but it cozens us, it tricks us, and it makes us forget. I defer again to Benjamin, in his essay on memory in Proust:

When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.

Our purposive remembering, our memories which we force-fit into words, into images, die - they are no longer what they were, they have been forced to change mediums, and something is lost: the beauty of life. The photograph only appears a representation of reality, it is only, rather, an expression of loss, of what can never be again. It is often in art that the afflatus of creation is to exorcise, to kill away, that which burns inside the artist, to cleanse the spirit of the past. But there is a danger in this, in the abundance of photography, that our memories will become extinct.

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’ Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Photographs, unlike other arts, are too immediate, seem too real (though they are unreal): the kill memory forever. Photographs do not shut the eyes, but gouge them out: we become Oedipus fleeing reality as it is, in a vain blindness which forces us to remember only what we hoped to lose, and lose only what we hoped to remember.

Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except by intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no on in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand “it is not there,” on the other “but it has indeed been”): a mad image, chafed by reality.

If on a winter's night
a traveller picks this book,
prepare for a bit of sleight,
for this book's a hook.

A series of just starts,
and no ends in sight,
Divid'd in many parts,
But no parts-whole, not quite.

This, advent'rous reader
is a book compendium,
of oulipo muse, ('ll need her)
and threatens of novels to end 'em.

Why are you still here?
Get going! Go read it!
It's so sure to endear
and addict, you'll re-read it.

Poor Okada, his cat's run away!
Whate'er shall he do to find it?
Poor Okada, his wife's gone astray!
(And the wind-up bird, someone unwind it!)

Murakami, this book is so long; why?
And the women are so very strange!
Phone sex, facial marks, and wells? Sigh.
I think you have quite gone off range.

Okada, I sympathize, really,
You've lost control of life's reins!
But maybe you'd live more ideally,
If you didn't have tofu for brains!

I couldn't get past the melancholy
of the poor mid-aged fellow,
At every turn, a violent folly,
And then to the well to mellow.

Ah, but my Computations, People say,
Have squared the Year to human compass, eh?
If so, by striking from the Calendar
Unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday.

The origin of YOLO.

Vladimir Nabokov is a genius. In Lolita his genius is manifest in the perversion of human sympathies, the seduction of language, the durability of art (yet also the mortality of beauty). In Despair, one of Nabokov's first forays into English prose, there is an early adumbration of what will become the enchanting monster, Humbert Humbert, found in the narrator-murderer Hermann. But aside from the faint outline of what is to come, Despair is a brilliant novel in itself, removed from the nympholeptic successors which follow in the Nabokovian oeuvre. The narrative is a simple one, Hermann happens upon a man whom he believes is his perfect double, and resolves to commit the "perfect murder" - killing his double and cashing in on his own life insurance. But like Humbert, and their mutual progenitor, Hermann is an aesthete: Despair is not merely a novel of mistaken identity, of false doubles, of murder-plot high-jinx, but a novel about art - the reach of art beyond medium into life. Is not the "perfect murder" as much a work of art, of deliberate purpose and imagination, as the "perfect novel" or the "perfect painting"?

To anyone with a passing interest in the masterful Nabokov, his extreme views on literature should be no mystery. He was a combative proponent of "art for art's sake," he believed that the purpose of fiction is to enchant and not to evoke empathy. In his lectures on literature at Wellesley and at Cornell he examined literature as he examined his lepidopteran specimens: with a microscope. Art in fiction, for Nabokov, is the successive accumulation of detail, of a fractal perfection which pervaded through all layers of the narrative and opened a world before the reader which has an almost tactile realism, but which also enchanted, which was fantastic, which was beyond reality, which was art. Hermann represents a perversion of this view on art, for though he seeks the perfection down to the detail, he fails to view with honesty the overall picture. His art is never perfection because while he is a devil for details, he is lost in the greater art of life, which he fails to appreciate.

Throughout Nabokov, we see the butterfly, his passion, as a symbol for the complete cycle of artistic creation. When Lolita is playing tennis, her fleeting poses are beautiful but manifestly useless in the pursuit of victory - a sportsman's manifestation of art for art's sake - and while she plays "an inquisitive butterfly passed, dipping, between us." (This scene parallels the interloping butterfly in the ultimate episode of Pale Fire) The butterfly as a symbol for the ideal art - life imitating art, imitating life, so to speak - coincides with the belief that art is mortality. "Death is the mother of beauty," as Wallace Stevens said, a claim with which Nabokov was sure to agree (note the fateful end of Lolita's titular character). To pervert this belief, to parody his own views on art, Nabokov brings forth Hermann, who sees a beauty in death, in destruction of life (much like Humbert's destruction of Lolita's innocence and life): ...what is death, if not a face at peace – its artistic perfection? Life only marred my double; thus a breeze dims the bliss of Narcissus; thus, in the painter’s absence, there comes his pupil and by the superfluous flush of unbidden tints disfigures the portrait painted by the master.This is a telling insight into the creation of Hermann - the pleasure he sees in death, the reference to Narcissus and to "artistic perfection," are all relevant to the character of Hermann, and significant to the novel's thematic development.

The great irony of Hermann as an artist is his poor consistency with his own dogma. Despite his search for artistic perfection, despite his attention to detail, it is precisely the details which he overlooks, and in doing so gives himself away completely. Rather than devising the perfect murder, he devises the perfect blunder. Not only does he fail to achieve his financial goals, but he ensures his identification as the murderer. He is not a poor bluff, but rather plays cards with his cards face up on the table. The pivotal element, the crux of his entire plan, is the similarity of himself with his victim. He is convinced he has found is perfect Doppelgänger, only to discover that he is the only one who sees any similarity at all. Isn't this the great crisis of artists? The fear that no one will appreciate their art but themselves? For many artists, this is not a hindrance, they create art for themselves - it is a release - it is for it's own sake. Hermann, while having a seemingly genuine appreciation for artistic perfection, prostitutes his artistic efforts for financial gain, and as a result of doing so is doubly foiled.

Despair is not Nabokov's greatest, I cannot argue that. It pales next to florid perfection of Lolita, next to the experimental risks of Pale Fire, and next to the playful game of history and nostalgia, fiction and biography, in Speak, Memory - but it is a great novel, it is worthy of the Nabokovian credit. It is immensely enjoyable to read, as a parodic game on the Crime and Punishment legacy, and also as a mock-treatise on the failures and purposes of art.

I love bad bitches, that's my fuckin' problem
- Prosper Mérimé-... er, A$AP Rocky

Mérimée loves bad bitches. Namely Carmen, Colomba, and the statuesque Venus d'Ille - the heroine-antagonist-exotics of his best stories in this collection. More generally, Mérimée is fascinated in his fiction by the clash between the civil and the savage. A champion of the ruffian hero, Mérimée's stories notably take place outside of his native France, in Spain, Italy, the sea: places which to him are still imbued with mystery and mysticism. Mérimée was an early exponent of the short-story as a true literary form, and though some of his stories are a bit uneven (notably, his most famous "Carmen"), they are exemplary of the form which has become almost universal to literary authors, and went began the tradition later perfected by Guy de Maupassant.

While I would argue that "Colomba" is the better-crafted story, albeit much longer, Mérimée's "Carmen" has lasted the test of time, notably immortalized by Bizet into an opera by the same name. "Carmen" nonetheless is a captivating illustration of love, crime, violence, and the Mériméan clash between civility and savagery. As a strong influence on Lolita, notably in the strange blur between love and Machiavellian seduction-deceit, and also in the tale-told-from-prison frame, "Carmen" is both provocative and unreliable in narration. The story follows a traveller from France, a sort of literary stand-in for Mérimée on his travels in Spain, when he happens upon a ruffian, Don José, and helps him escape the authorities. He later finds him again, as the lover of a beautiful gypsy, Carmen. They separate again, and the next time they meet, Don José is in prison, having murdered his love.

Though the story is quite good, Carmen is more famous and more memorable than her titular tale. The story serves more to romanticize and immortalize the exotic allure of the gypsies than it does to make a memorable story. Carmen has become symbolic of jealous love, an early adumbration of Tolstoy's "Kreuntzer Sonata." Don José's love for Carmen seems tenuous, we wonder how real the love can be, being one-sided as it is. It is not clear how Carmen feels about the Don, we hear about her mostly from his perspective, though it seems that her affection for him is largely sexual pragmatism. But that may be from a difference in view of love: while love is typically perceived in the Western-civilized tradition of love-of-my-life devotion, Carmen's love is like a bird, alighting only for odd moments on the men in her life, a love which is passionate and full, free of jealousy, pure, but which is short-lived.

'Yes, I have loved him—as I loved you—for an instant—less than I loved you, perhaps. But now I don't love anything, and I hate myself for ever having loved you.'
I cast myself at her feet, I seized her hands, I watered them with my tears, I reminded her of all the happy moments we had spent together, I offered to continue my brigand’s life, if that would please her. Everything, sir, everything—I offered her everything if she would only love me again.
She said: 'Love you again? That's not possible! Live with you? I will not do it!'

Carmen is a free spirit, but traditionally defined love is a shackle, a cage, which she feels suffocated by. She loves in the moment, but José demands eternity from her. Despite Carmen's deceptions and tricks, her crimes and abandonments, we sympathize with her, much moreso than with the Don. Carmen has a freedom which we all envy, but which we consciously let elude us. We are afraid of the kind of freedom and detachment which Carmen needs to live. Despite his rough exterior, José is far more civilized and chained to tradition than Carmen, and we see him at the end not as a hidalgo, but as a modern man, given up to his passions, but afraid to follow them to their fruition. While he represented as an early symbol of freedom, to the narrator on his travels, a kind of idealized and Romantic figure, he is reduced at the end to a prisoner. The prison is symbolic of his own imprisonment, he self-styled cage of his conventions and expectations, which withhold him from true happiness in the moment with Carmen. Though Carmen is murdered, it feels to us like a freer and more appropriate fate for her than marriage, which seems to us impossible.