Wednesday, October 10, 2007

MADAME BOVARY.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT ( 1821-1880): MADAME BOVARY.

Hindi film version of this story: MAYA MEMSAB by Kedal Metha.

Flaubert’s aim in writing this novel was to examine the principles and emotions of romanticism which he had once considered valid, and to show the ruin of an empty headed woman who takes them seriously.

Rigorous psychological development, authenticity of detail, an impersonal narrative method, and a precise and harmonious style are characteristic of this novel.

On charge of being offensive to public morals, the book was tried but acquitted. This earned the book immediate popularity.

Bovarisme: ‘ domination by a romantic conception of the self” (Webster). This is the habitual practice of regarding, not the self, but the world as other than it is. It is an attempt to find in the world what is not there.

Flaubert does not judge his characters.

He is a clear sighted observer of folly.

Of course he had strong opinions about his characters. He has no love for Emma. But his attitude is complicated because there was a good deal of her in his own personality.

Homais represents everything he detests in the French middle class society – self-seeking, vulgar, pretentious and stupid.

Rouault is sympathetically treated.

The dull-witted Charles wins our pity, even respect, because he never pretends to be more than what he is.

Irony and Bathos: at the agricultural exhibition, the love dialogue between Emma and Rodolph is interwoven with the speeches of the chairman awarding prizes for pigs and manure.

Justine, weeping on Emma’s grave, is mistaken by the sexton for someone stealing potatoes.

Realism: every detail is grounded in fact. There was actually a Norman country doctor who died of despair over his wife’s infidelity. Many minor characters in the novel are real.

Death scene of Emma: Flaubert threw himself so intensely into writing this scene that he could almost taste arsenic in his mouth and he actually became ill.

Style: his search for the ‘mot juste’, the exactly right word.

Many chapters end with short understated sentences. They sting like whips.

Flaubert is the father of realism. Madame Bovary is the classic novel of the realist movement.

He was a romanticist who forced himself into a realist. By ‘romantic’ we mean his melancholy temperament, a taste for irony, dislike of the bourgeoise, love of exotic places like Egypt and Carthage etc. But his native romanticism is disciplined by his studied objectivity, by the ease with which he excluded his own personality from his writings, by the meticulous realism with which he recorded the minutiae of ordinary life. Even though ‘Madame Bovary’ is anti-romantic, there is a tension between romanticism and realism throughout.

When Flaubert is asked about the original of Emma, he used to answer: ‘Madame Bovary! C’est moi’. ( Madame Bovary, that is me).

It was Henry James who first called Flaubert ‘a novelist’s novelist’.

An author, according to Flaubert, should be in his work as God is in the physical universe, ‘everywhere present and nowhere visible’.

‘Madame Bovary’ is the first published work of Flaubert (1857). It is an experimental novel, not in plot, subject matter or characterization, but in restricting himself to the petty details of everyday life, avoiding high drama and grand moral dilemmas. What he wanted was to make an almost eventless narrative interesting. Once he wrote in a letter: ‘I undertook this novel in hatred of realism’. This should be understood as a reaction against a local variant of realism. He saw his own task as the aesthetic transformation of mundane and vulgar reality. He used to say that he wanted to write a novel about nothing. He wanted to give prose the rhythm of verse, without being flowery, fusing the vulgar with the poetic.

One of his major contributions was the suppression of the author as the source of reflections and judgements external to the narrative. He defined style in 1852 as ‘an absolute manner of seeing things’. His style – the aesthetic point of view – guarantees the moral autonomy of the novel.

His ‘book about nothing’ – that is, without plot (exciting adventures), character (interesting, life-like) and even theme (love, adultery, art) – anticipated the French ‘new novels’ of the 1950s and 1960s.

In his use of irony, he learned the method of mixing comedy and pathos from Cervantes. It ranges from mere caricature to a truly tragic sense of the discrepancy between Emma’s dreams and the real world. A fine balance between the world as false and petty and also as extraordinarily beautiful is achieved through his use of irony.

Charles’s medical incompetence also reflects his incompetence as a husband.

He presents sex in an indirect way. Much is left to the reader’s imagination. The erotic pleasure of Emma and Rudolph is conveyed through other sensations ( the sound of melted snow dripping from her parasol, the falling of ripe fruit and the scuttling of nocturnal beasts in the garden where she makes love with Rudolph). Similarly, sexual implications are present in non-erotic situations. Her desire for Charles’s fame as a surgeon arouses in her a sexual response. His failure finishes him off as a husband and she turns to her lover.

This novel is an exercise in literary criticism. The novel is fabricated from materials which are figures of the writer’s problems. Charles’s botched surgery is at the opposite end of Flaubert’s stitching together of sentences into a seamless text. Here the incompetent doctor is a reverse image for the competent artist. The failure of the character is an essential condition for the artist’s success. Imagination is a disease which will cripple one or kill unless one learns to immunize oneself against it. Emma’s kind of applying the imaginative sensibility on the real world can be productive only in the realm of art. Emma’s error is her attempt to live her life as if it were a novel.

Further, she fails to recognize that she is a character in a novel. But the writer and the readers know that she is. This provides the ultimate grounding for the novel’s ironic perspective.

The characters speak in double quotation marks. The dialogues are not instances of communication but as examples of the kind of thins people conventionally say.

Language is doubly inauthentic in that it both exceeds and falls short of reality.

Emma attaches to an accidentally discovered cigar case an imaginary narrative which gives it value and interest to her. Leon and Emma re-read their pasts to make them conform to their present desires. Charles, at last, interprets the whole story as the working of fate. Rudolph also mentions fate as the cause for canceling their fate. When he meets Charles at last, Charles reproduces it. “ And then, for the first and last time in his life, he uttered a deep thought”. This is ironic, because he is doing the most commonplace thing.

Charles has never interpreted anything correctly. His medical dictionary remains untouched. He proves totally incapable of reading Emma and the all too patent story of her adultery. When he discovers her letters, he explains the story for himself – which is the most banal of all interpretations.

Emma’s reading at the convent determines her misreading of life. Her fantasies of elopement with Rudolph are episodes from an imaginary novel. At the opera where she renews her relationship with Leon, she becomes conscious of that essential confusion between the real and the fictional from which she suffers.

Emma sets out to discover what it was that people meant by ‘bliss’, ‘passion’ etc. – words which she had thought so fine when she read them in books. The outcome is that she discovers in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.

Emma is a bad reader. Though she reads first-rate writers like Scott and Hugo, she reads books in a shallow manner.

Madame Bovary, one of the great nineteenth century novels of adultery, is also a scrupulous examination of the detailed texture of northern French provincial life and its constraints. Thick with realist detail, the novel nonetheless played a key role in promoting a recognizably modern form of impersonal narration, and in raising the status of the genre to the highest level. The novel also raises the issue of female identity. The way in which Emma is constructed sheds light on both the the art of the novelist in the nineteenth century, and on the ways in which novels connect with prevailing beliefs, manners and social structures. The specific instability of female identity as revealed by this novel leads to further questions about the coherence of the self: the ways in which fiction represented a growing sense of the difficulty of imagining a unified and coherent subject.

There were several nineteenth century novels which concerned themselves with the construction of the female psyche. This concern was not only the preserve of the female writers like Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte or George Eliot. There were several novels by men where there was an element of self-identification with the central female figure, as Flaubert allegedly announced, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”. Why should these male writers try to inhabit women? Was there something about the predicament of women at the time that made this seem a worthwhile ambition? Or did they feel the pressure of demand from a female readership to explore the choices confronting women? Or were there darker motives for this perhaps surprising choice of perspective? Hovering behind these heroines’ struggles for fulfillment are death, madness and despair. Could no better end be imagined, in terms of the realities of the time? Recent feminist studies had examined the ways in which women had been represented by male writers in books. These studies often focus on the subversive impact of adultery and other forms of transgression.

One of the most distinctive features of what the Russian critic Bakhtin refers to as the ‘novelistic zone’ is the closeness between text and reader. As he says, ‘in place of our tedious lives’ many novels offer us ‘a surrogate’; true, but it is the surrogate of a fascinating and brilliant life. Such novels almost become a substitute for our own lives. Yet this special experience brings a special danger: we might substitute for our own life an obsessive reading of novels, or dreams based on novelistic models; in short, Bovaryism becomes possible.

Bovaryism is the ultimately fatal disease that overtakes Emma; she identifies closely with the characters and settings of what she obsessively reads and enjoys but she also tries to bring her own life into line with her novelistic models. It is not just that as a fifteen year old in a convent Emma makes a cult of Mary Stuart or has admiration for the ill fated women of Scott; but as a married woman, she prefers to stay in her room reading rather than attend to her domestic duties.

Flaubert has written a novel which takes novel reading itself as a central theme. It is not the first novel in which the nature of fiction is a key element – Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy were more concerned with questioning themselves. Nor is it new in the realist tradition of the nineteenth century to find a fiction raising issues to do with fictional conventions. But not only did this novel bring a new self consciousness about the art of fiction with it, it also brought a story which, unlike so many novels up until then, marriage did not conclude the narrative; rather, the disturbing results of marriage concluded it. Flaubert took the domestic life of the middle-classes – the main subject of nineteenth century fiction – and pursued it with a clinical thoroughness that undermined the whole enterprise, preparing the way for a kind of novel writing that was more interested in aesthetic pattern than in conveying ‘life’ in all its untidiness. Flaubert’s mould-breaking achievement had far reaching effects upon both the theory and practice of the novel in Europe.

A novel about nothing:

On 16 January 1852, Flaubert wrote to his mistress, Louise Colet, describing his ambition to write a book ‘about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style . . . a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible’. Yet the almost invisible subject matter was so shocking that when the novel was serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1856, Flaubert was prosecuted for offense to public and religious morality.

Le mot juste: (the right word). Flaubert was obsessively concerned with the precision of language, with the choice of ‘le mot juste’. His legendary perfectionism meant that each piece took months, even years, to complete. The novel took five years to complete, and so much cutting, rewriting and yet more cutting took place that the novel has been called ‘an exercise in amputation’. His difficulties were particularly acute as a result of his deeply felt disgust for the pettiness of his characters and the banal world of provincial Tostes and Yonville they inhabited. How can one produce well written dialogue about trivialities, he asks. Flaubert none the less saw his novel as experimental because it set up a completely new relation between high literary style and low provincial life. He was trying to write a prose which would transform the novel as a genre from being simply a vehicle for conveying flatly moral notions into a vibrant and challenging self-referential aesthetic object that would have a far more profound moral effect.

His fierce concentration on the details of everyday life had marked him for his contemporaries as the High Priest of a new realism, heir to Balzac. Baudelaire held that the new realism was a combination of imaginary penetration and realistic precision. What the artist was aiming at was the aesthetic transfiguration of banal realities.

One way he turned the ordinary into the aesthetic was a characteristic passionate attentiveness to material reality, a reality composed of a delicate insistence upon the time of year, or on precise geographical detail, and most especially on the multifariousness of things. Another technique was the way he teased a narrative out of nothing very much happening, making an elaborate drama of slow and tiny changes in consciousness, represented through minute description of things, people or the commonplaces of conversation. The attempt to transmute the mundane into pure aesthetic object, pure style, together with Flaubert’s belief that the author should show rather than tell, leaving the readers to arbitrate for themselves between moral possibilities, mandated a novel of unusually elusive narratorial presence. As the critic Saint Beuve pointed out, Flaubert’s distinctive contribution to the development of the novel was a pervasive ‘styling’ of reality. Here style approximates to Flaubert’s own definition: ‘an absolute manner of seeing things’. The author, according to him, must be ‘like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere’.

Cliché:

Flaubert’s command of cliché is staggering. There is hardly a single oral utterance in the novel which is not banal or inauthentic. The novel is in part a stitching together of the various discourses of the bourgeoise, from the farmer to the gentry. Emma’s father’s letter mimics the writing of someone of his class: colloquial, slangy and full of spelling mistakes. Emma’s letters to Rodolphe are faked up from shreds of romantic novels. Other discourses include the political speechifying at the agricultural show by the visiting dignitaries, the threadbare religious dogma of the priest, the provincial journalism, and so on.

Emma is at first represented as inhabiting cliché naively. She is naïve because although she draws her protocols from her romantic reading, she has never rehearsed them in her own life before. Unlike the more experienced Rodolphe, she does not know that these protocols have a long-standing conventional status in real life adultery. Importing these clichés fresh, she embarrasses Rodolphe with her ignorance of the decorums of adultery. His dismay at her gifts is an example of where she breaches the rules of mistresshood as understood in the world. Later she no longer inhabits cliché but uses it in a thoroughly Flaubertian way to seduce the also corrupted Leon. The difference is that while Emma is reduced to a mass-produced automaton in Rodolphe’s eyes because she speaks in the same old linguistic cliché which devalues emotion, she now operates language like a machine to produce and then to amplify emotion.

Cliché is always second hand; it has always been circulated before. It is characteristic of bourgeois commodity culture. One of the problems the novel as a whole both struggles with and dramatizes is the discrepancy between lived, passionate subjectivity and the second hand, already read, already written, already spoken forms in which it is obliged to express itself. With a characteristic perversity, the novel tries to make language new by attending scrupulously to the very threadbareness of its resources.

Irony:

It is interesting to see how a style can achieve moral force without an overtly moralizing narrator. In ‘Madame Bovary’ this sort of moral styling can be located most pervasively in his extensive use of irony. Flauber’s irony is not like Jane Austen’s, which is located principally within the authorial voice; rather, it works, by and large, by juxtaposition and repetition. One example would be the little scene near the end of the novel when the apprentice Justin kneels weeping on Emma’s grave. The irony is made when this is juxtaposed with the sexton’s voice who thinks that he has found out the potato thief. Another would be the scene depicting the Bovarys in bed, in which Charles indulges a waking dream of the future that includes a happy marriage for his daughter, while Emma envisages escape into a heavily exoticised and romanticized with her lover Rodolphe. Here the language of domestic idyll is undone by that of romantic idyll. Another way irony works is when two situations or discourses may be interlocked so that they mutually ironize each other, as at Rodolphe’s flirtation with Emma at the agricultural show. One of the effects is to underscore the nature of seduction as rhetoric. More importantly, while the text seems to point up Emma’s hopeless folly and Rodolphe’s habits of predation, it also underlines all the time the intractably earthy and sheerly animal quality of local life, the existence she is trying to escape, ‘domestic service’. Another technique is the irony committed by things. Things comment secretly upon the action. They also have a disconcerting habit of multiplying – there are no fewer than three riding whips in this novel, all of them connected with seductions. Ironies breed out of the circulation of things, like Leon’s violets, which Charles takes up to cool his eyes swollen from weeping for his father, or Rodolphe’s farewell letter, which Charles comes across after Emma’s death. The ironies are none the less painful for going unnoticed by their victims – almost without exception. The exception is, increasingly, Emma, and that begins to mark her out as Flaubert’s double.

Ennui:

One way of describing Emma’s predicament after her marriage to Charles is to say that she is suffering from a complex and intractable boredom – in French, ennui. Emma feels her ennui as an elusive malaise. It seems to derive from her radical dissatisfaction with her provincial life, expressed in part as a fantasy about metropolitan Paris. In tandem with this fantasy, her ennui realizes itself as sexual revulsion. Unlike George Eliot’s Dorothea or Henry James’s Isabel, she is not successfully prescribed the sedative of high moral ideals; although she always retains a longing memory of a sense of devotional, orgasmic wholeness that pervaded her convent girlhood. She chooses instead the analgesics of sex, shopping and eventually, suicide.

As Tony Tanner puts it, ‘what would or could or might genuinely cure what Emma suffers from is the real problem posed by the book’. In fact, marriage was conventionally prescribed for ennui and other psychological complaints in young women, but marriage, the mainspring of the plot of women’s lives, the moment when a woman’s identity is successfully transferred from being determined by her father to being determined by her husband, is from Emma’s point of view, disappointing sexually, and constricting socially. It fails to cure a boredom that she is already experiencing well before marriage. And marriage as a solution goes up in flames with her wedding bouquet. So she tries out another conventional cure: motherhood. But neither motherhood nor a change of place, nor a romantic friendship with Leon, nor even a full blown adultery wth Rodolphe, provides the escape she longs for. Part 3 of the novel postulates the possibility that another lover, Leon, might provide a more artistic experience, discards this possibility, gives Emma up to the debts resulting from her mad voracity for material things to assuage the void, conducts her through an agonizing suicide and finally performs a series of post-mortems upon her body and belongings. Finally we return to the tragedy of Charles, the tragedy of betrayed romantic love, in which as the good bourgeoisie, we should have been interested, had we not been so seduced by the aspirational, glamorous Emma. The whole novel is a study of bourgeois desire, its modes, mechanisms, excitements and disappointments. But above all, it is a study of adultery.

In Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression, Tony Tanner (1979) discusses the role played by adultery in fiction. The major nineteenth century novels are concerned with the centrality of marriage and with establishing property rights. In the novels of Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte, the impetus of the novels seems to be inclined towards marriage and appropriate resolutions that promote the idea of the family, settlement, social cohesion, and so on. They represent that which threatens these formations as errant female desire. Consequently the plot of adultery becomes the basis for some of the most influential novels of the nineteenth century. According to Tanner, the unfaithful wife is, in social terms, a self-cancelling figure, one from whom society would prefer to withhold recognition so that it would be possible to say that socially and categorically the adulterous woman does not exist. It is this trajectory towards ‘non-existence’ that Emma will describe over the course of the novel.

The nausea of repetition poisons all bourgeois experience. If marriage downgrades love into habit – Charles’s sexual eagerness had turned into ‘a habit like any other, a favourite pudding after the monotony of dinner’ – the luscious transgressions of adultery eventually become just as monotonous. Adultery gives up its ability to ironize marriage; it becomes just the same. The despair Emma eventually suffers from stems not from remorse (as would have been conventional in the novel of the day) but, as Tanner remarks, from the discovery that there is finally no difference in these two regions of experience. Emma ‘discovers in adultery the platitudes of marriage’.

Deepening this sense of repetition and sameness, Flaubert introduces metaphors of ‘circling’ and ‘turning’ to emphasize Emma’s entrapment within the daily round. Emma’s adulterous cab ride with Leon goes round and round as it circles Rouen, continually passing the same scenes, mimicking the repetition of the sexual act, predicting satiation. Even these adulterous and adventurous turnings, repeated, sooner or later give up their exciting novelty and subside again under the tides of Emma’s ennui.

The heroine as novelist:

Emma eventually begins to fill the place of real ‘authentic’ experience with aesthetics, with ‘art’. She becomes in the process the most important and troubling surrogate for Flaubert himself in the novel. Engaged, like him, in crafting a ‘novel’ centred upon a romantic subjectivity out of the unpromising materials she has to hand, she occasionally manages to overcome the perpetual inadequacy of the object of desire by an act of the imagination. If the heroine is another in the long tradition of representing woman as a reader of letters, she also stages herself as a writer of letters. She will find two lovers to write letters to. But even these two lovers would be more satisfactory written to and dreamt about rather than dealt with in the flesh. In her imaginings about the Viscount and his cigar case, she breeds an imaginary narrative about his mistress, about his social life in Paris and about the metropolis as the site of pleasure. The cigar case enables her to support her imaginary existence on material evidence. In the same way, her lovers are more satisfactory and more desirable in their absence, because their absence allows for the transforming operation of the imagination. And Emma reverses the real and the imaginary and finds reality to be inferior. She enacts this predicament by attempting to apply to the real world an imaginative sensibility which can only be productive, according to Flaubert’s logic, in the realm of art. Hence her second adventure with Leon also dwindles in actuality into all the platitudes of marriage; yet, by continuing to play by the rules of illicit love – ‘a woman should always write to her lover’ – she manages to maintain a state of pleasurable desire.

In a sense, the bundles of letters she leaves behind for the unhappy Charles to read are her ‘novel’, that other novel in a debased novelistic language that shadows Flaubert’s own. He identifies himself with his heroine. Flaubert threw himself so intensely into writing this scene that he could almost taste arsenic in his mouth and he actually became ill. In the novel, the taste of arsenic is described as ‘inky’, suggesting that somehow his writing and his heroine’s arsenic eating were similar enterprises.

Construction of identity by Emma:

Emma starts her fictional life as a daughter and then moves through a bewildering variety of incarnations after her marriage. As a mother, she adopts the role in public but repudiates in private. Emma plays a pretty wife, warming her husband’s slippers, sewing buttons on his shirts, and so on, but only when she has the script of Hugo’s Notre Dame of Paris to play to, and a besotted Leon in addition to her husband as appreciative audience. She is also capable of acting the pious matron, dedicating herself to works of charity. All these roles are modeled after her reading. Her most persistent construction of herself in the beginning is as a heroine waiting for something to happen., a heroine in need of a story.

Emma’s efforts to invent herself as a romantic heroine realize themselves eventually in adultery. The exaltation of her illicit love making transports her back to the feelings aroused by her similarly illicit novel reading. Crossing the bourgeois boundary of conformity is like entering a world of romance she had read about. Rachel M. Brownstein suggests that Emma’s transports in Rodolph’s arms are attempts to replicate those feelings of being lifted outside ‘real’ life that came to her when she secretly read the romances forbidden in the convent. She is no longer Emma, but a member of a genre of adulteresses. Joined in the company of the unchaste, she becomes a generalization.

The ways in which Emma’s identities are generated and played out could be said to be the subject of Flaubert’s novel. Tony Tanner has argued that the price of Emma’s experimentation is the slow disintegration of what he calls the heroine’s ‘Emma-ness’.

The most striking thing about Emma is perhaps her conspicuous uselessness. She is a luxury item. Her father is glad enough to be rid of her, because she is no good at housework or work around the farm. With her marriage to Charles, she moves out of a land-based economy, in which women were expected to provide and breed manual labour, and enters a consumer economy, in which her principal function seems to be class display – a display of refinement in her body, her clothes, her accomplishments. Her uselessness is refined into bouts of nervous illness, and at the last into suicide. After all, she could have saved herself and her household by prostituting herself. Her refusal to earn in this way is interesting. Is it a last whisper of her virtue? Is it her last self indulgence as romantic heroine? Or is it a final Flaubertian refusal to be ‘useful’ in any way at all? She chooses in the end to ‘spend’ herself in suicide. In Emma Bovary, we have an analysis of a new type, the nineteenth century middle class woman with no occupation but love and shopping.

Suicide:

In the nineteenth century, suicide had two contradictory images. In the first place, it was seen as a terrible and shameful act. In Catholic France, it was held to lead to damnation. Homais’ hastily concocted story, that she had mistaken arsenic for sugar, was devised in part to shield himself from blame, in part to maintain a veil of respectability over the incident. Yet suicide had also its romantic aspects, even a fashionable side. Goethe’s bestseller, The Sorrows of Young Werther, sponsored a fashion for suicide. Flaubert himself had confessed that as a youth he dreamed of suicide. The 1830s even boasted Suicide Clubs in France. The romantic suicide was a repudiation of the inadequacies of modern life by a sensitive soul. So many modern critics have found the suicide of Emma as celebratory. At first, death seems a romantic consummation. She runs to the pharmacy ‘in a rapture of heroism’. It is her last effort to transform her life by using her reading as a model and a last effort to live romance by dying a romantic death. Her death is doubled in the novel: the first death corresponds to her imagined romantic notion of death. Soon after taking arsenic, she exclaims: oh, death is really nothing very much! I am going to fall asleep and it will all be over. The actual non-romantic death soon follows. Flaubert chooses one of the most distressing ways for his heroine to die. He depicts it with unsparing physical detail. Her grotesque death may be seen as an ironic comment on her idea of romantic suicide.

THE TIN DRUM – GUNTER GRASS.

THE TIN DRUM – GUNTER GRASS.

The novel, and the film by Schlondorff:

  1. Change in narrative perspective: in the novel, Oskar writes his memoirs in the years from 1952 to 1954, covers his life from 24 to 54. Oskar pretends to view the world through the eyes of a three year old child. The perspective acquires a further complication by the fact that he writes his story as an inmate of a lunatic asylum. In the film, the situation of the narrator does not exist. Here everything is viewed through the eyes of the child, as though he were experiencing the events at the time. In the novel, an apparent madman recapitulates the past from the perspective of a child. The alienation effect thus produced makes it impossible for the reader to identify himself with Oskar or any of the characters. In the film, orientation is much easier: the viewer can identify himself with Oskar. This is made easier by the fact that Oskar is portrayed as a child, not as a gnome. Further, David Bennent, the child chosen by Schlondorff to act the role of Oskar, is an attractive-looking person, in no way to be considered as a repulsive individual. Hence his credibility is not in doubt in the film, unlike the unreliable narrator of the novel.
  2. child: Oskar is a person through whose eyes we view a period of German history. By his very childishness, he cannot sit in judgment on that period. He perceives an amoral world in the amoral and egocentric terms of a child. In the film, we share his grief at the destruction and loss of his native city – Danzig. The film covers only the first two books and ends with the train departing for the West with its load of refugees. The child who yearns to remain a child loses the place in which his childhood was spent. Many critics ignore the historical fact which forms the core of the novel – and of the film – the expulsion of the Germans from Danzig. The film emerges as a lament – it ends with a painful sense of loss and deprivation – partly because we share his sorrow.
  3. the nature of the German guilt: Why was Oskar forced to leave his place of birth? The film shows how the community of Danzig was systematically destroyed from within by the Germans. Eg. Evicting Markus at the funeral of Agnes, attacking the Polish post office, setting fire to the Jewish shops and synagogues leading to the suicide of Markus. The Germans shatter the community of Danzig. What happens here happens elsewhere in Europe and Germany. The Germans burden themselves with guilt. Oskar feels the need to be guilty, so he indulges in these fantasies of having murdered mother, uncle, girl friend and father. The cinema audiences cannot take these extravaganzas seriously. The episodes in the film achieve a greater visual impact than those in the novel, but the film cannot attain the subtlety and complexity which only the medium of language can reach. The film appears more realistic while the novel draws on elements of fantasy. The novel achieves a greater degree of stimulation by the intermingling of fantasy and reality. The film is also forced to dispense with the imagery which makes such a major contribution to the total impact of the novel. Above all, the sacrifice of the narrator’s position produces a simplified view point, less ambivalence and ambiguity, and allows some identification between Oskar and the viewer.

The narrative perspective:

The narrator views human affairs from an unusual angle; events are described in a way in which adults would not perceive them. Oskar stops growing at the age of three; from his birth he had the intelligence of an adult; he is always treated by others, not as an adult but as a childish dwarf, the urchin who cannot belong to the adult world. From his eccentric point of view, he plays the role of observer and narrator. He is described as ‘seeing’ the world – never judging or criticizing, something not expected of a child.

The narrative perspective is further complicated by the fact that what we are reading is not actually happening but is being recalled and put together for our benefit by a sentient human being. Here the past is being conjured up, structured and restructured. Here it is being recalled by a much flawed person, by one who admits that he is the inmate of a mental asylum. This indicates that an unreliable narrator is at work. We never know whether a given statement is valid, for Oskar might be a mad man, though he never describes himself as being insane.

A second qualification: As Oskar is describing his own life after the passage of a considerable amount of time, as his narration is not a recounting of the immediate past as in a diary, the passage of time may have blurred some of the details, and even have allowed imagination to reconstruct the past. We have to be satisfied with Oskar’s pious hope that he has an accurate memory.

In the novel, ambiguity and ambivalence and disorientation reign supreme. An apparent or real mad man recounts the events of his life through the eyes of a child. Again, Oskar does not grant us any insight into his personality or his motivation. He refuses to assume responsibility and opts out of any moral obligation towards others. His unreliability as a purveyor of information shows that he is estranged from himself. His craving to return to the prenatal state is a sign of his alienation from the present; it is also a comment on the state of the world and his attitude to it. His attachment to his drum indicates his fractured relationship to reality. The division within him, the Oskar who acts and the Oskar who observes, shows his schizophrenia. His attachment to the mask of a child, his assumed pose of innocence, his delight in prevarication, all suggest that he has not broken away from the world of childish inwardness. He fails to emerge from infantile subjectivism, in moving from childhood to adulthood; at the same time, he exploits the possibilities of feigned innocence in order to prevent his transition from inwardness to maturity. So fragmented is his personality that he does not emerge as a character. He is a ‘persona’ and not a personality.

As a ‘persona’, he is inscrutable. Often he acts solely as an observer without participating in the events, as he often does from under the table or hidden corners, and brings an unprejudiced eye to the scenes he describes. His descriptive powers are not inhibited by any form of censorship. The religious or sexual taboos of the adult are totally absent. He is thus able to enjoy a freedom of expression which the adult observer could not enjoy at all.

Much of the humour, often black and grotesque, arises from this. He is not afraid to survey the totality of human experience, including obnoxious smells, disagreeable sexual practices, blasphemy etc. As a child, or a madman assuming the guise of a child, he takes up a completely neutral attitude. He is absolved of the requirement which is automatically imposed upon a thirty year old, that of assessing the past in terms of an adult. Such assessment involves a moral evaluation. He dispenses with such encrumbances.

Oskar’s pronouncements may be interpreted on three levels: 1. they stem from the naturalness and simplicity of the child who is baffled by the nominally adult affairs; 2. from the deranged mind of an adult who has successfully projected himself into the mentality of a child; or 3. they may be based on the playfulness and tongue-in-cheek attitude of the person who is acting the role of the child, often stating the opposite of what he believes. Such an ironical view allows the author to describe the events in a detached manner.

The reader scarcely knows when to take Oskar seriously. The narrator’s humour, irony and impishness form a barrier behind which Oskar conceals himself. The superficially humorous tone conceals an underlying bitterness and despair, which is more the expression of the mind of an adult than that of a child. Even in scenes in which Oskar actively participates, he preserves his role as the ironic observer. ‘Madonna 49’ says as much about the guilt ridden complexes of the students and their teacher as it does about Oskar. In the ‘Onion Cellar’ and his later tours of West Germany where he plays an active role, it is the tearful breast beating of the guests which claims our attention and which is exposed to ridicule. And we are further told that they are meant to represent West German society. The figure of Oskar is the device which enables West German society to be held up to our gaze.

Oskar is a thoroughly untrustworthy observer. He emphasizes that he indulges in telling lies in the process of his narration. He delights in falsehood. The desire to pretend, the child’s inclination to lose itself in the inner world of imagination and to ignore the dividing line between the real and the fictional, or the momentary wish to pull someone’s leg – Bruno’s or the reader’s – all this manifests in his life. Even on the day of his birth, he would have us believe that he plays at being a baby. Playing a role becomes a permanent feature of his behaviour. He has a constant need to maintain a façade of pretence and deceit between himself and grown ups. A person who has elevated make-believe into an essential principle of his life cannot be considered as a reliable narrator. He is to be regarded rather as a narrative device rather than as a person whose character can be understood in psychological terms.

A fundamental element of irony is that it is meant to be seen through. Grass allows Oskar to be only partly successful in his attempts to disguise. The reader is permitted to see through the narrator’s camouflage. We learn that Oskar intermingles fact and fiction, but we are not made aware of those objective criteria by which we could gain an insight into the nature of the reality which Oskar is attempting to conceal. Admittedly the framework of historical and political references constitutes a stabilizing factor within the novel, provides, along with the reader’s knowledge of the period of history concerned, a set of verifiable external relationships and hence forms a link with the reality of the time. As would be expected, the irony is meant to be detected. As D.C. Muecke asserts, “ the half concealment is part of the ironist’s artistic purpose and the detection and appreciation of the camouflage is a large part of the reader’s pleasure”.

In approaching the novel the reader is thrust back upon himself, is dependent on his own resources, must provide his own criteria, for there are no guide lines within the novel, so he must formulate his own response and come to his own conclusions. Still one can mention four elements which serve as counterweight to the ambivalence and ambiguity created by the unreliability of Oskar as a narrator. They are the narrative zest of the author, his attachment to the world of sensual detail, the imagery, and the framework of historical and political events.

The drum as a symbol:

The novel is called ‘ Die Blechtrommel’ and not ‘Die Blechtrommler’. The cover shows a drum along with the drummer. The drummer is drawn in black and white apart from his eyes which are bright blue. The drum is coloured red and white. Black is a sign of mourning and of evil, it has a menacing quality. Blue recalls the fact that the typical German during the Nazi period was supposed to be blue-eyed and blond-haired; it is the favourite colour of the romantics and is suggestive of physical and spiritual intoxication. Red and white are the national colours of Poland. In isolation, red is reminiscent of blood and rebelliousness; white is traditionally the colour of innocence.

The drum has at least two associations: it is emblematic of war, for it can produce the rhythm which, as Oskar says, all men had to obey in 1914. Yet it also conjures up the atmosphere of lamentation and mourning. For example, at the funeral of his mother, Oskar wants to express his grief by drumming on her coffin. The student of history will recall that Hitler was proud to be referred to as a drummer and regarded this activity as his highest aspiration, though no link of this kind is established in the novel between Oskar and Hitler.

Oskar uses his drum as a means by which he can preserve his status as a three year old. The drum enables him to erect a barrier between himself and the adults who surround him, prevent their intrusion into his own world of childish fantasy and in this way he can evade any responsibility. By means of the drum he can beat the retreat from reality. The drum epitomizes Oskar’s fundamental attitude of withdrawal from the world of reality and is employed at the same time as a narrative device by means of which a period of history may be surveyed.

Oskar would have us believe that the drum is his mode of expression, and that it is, as it were, part of his flesh and blood. The drum is his constant companion, and apart from a brief respite during the post war period, it witnesses all the major events of his life. The drum is indicative of an attitude of mind, serves, according to Oskar, as a narrative device and draws the strands of the narrative together: in this sense it fulfils a recapitulatory function.

A symbol such as the drum achieves a cohesive effect within the novel and in conjunction with Grass’s narrative skill act as a counterweight to the ambivalence and ambiguity which are characteristic of Oskar’s narrative perspective.

Other major symbols are Rasputin and Goethe, the eels and horse’s head, the unicorn, the roundabout, etc. The imagery of head and tail conjures up the idea that the values of western civilization and those of Christianity have been corrupted and perverted: Goethe has been undermined by Rasputin.

Oskar mirrors in his relations with women the tendency to indulge in emotional and by implication political escapism and in so doing to evade responsibility for one’s actions.

‘kopf’ (head) is developed as an allusive pointer to the values of reason and moderation which have been undermined by lustful passion and physical and political intoxication, as represented by the word, ‘schwanz’ (tail), with its sexual suggestiveness. Agnes, Matzerath and Jan observe eels devouring a horse’s head – an objectivisation of the affair between Jan and Agnes. The picture of the eels eating the horse’s head is a re-enactment of Agnes’s personal predicament. The imagery of head and tail adumbrates the triumph of passion and lust over reason and moderation which has implications on the personal and the political level. The same confrontation between reason and unreason can be found in the juxtaposition of Goethe and Rasputin.

The ‘unicorn’ is a fabulous animal with a horse’s body and a single horn. All the women with whom Oskar comes into contact are allusively linked with the Virgin Mary. They are all ‘ladies on carpets who educate unicorns’. In a perverted fashion, Oskar fulfils all the conditions demanded of a unicorn. He takes flight into the womb of a succession of virgins and is trapped. Oskar embodies his needs in the image of a woman. She flatters his irresponsibility and gratifies his desire for retreat, support and centre. She serves as a symbol of his evasion of responsibility and of his attempt to rid himself of feelings of guilt. In this sense Oskar may be mirroring a basic attitude of his own time.

Roundabout: In a dream Oskar imagines himself seated as a child upon a roundabout which is kept in dizzy, perpetual motion by the figures of Goethe and Rasputin. Goethe and Rasputin suggest the idea of a malevolent God who has made possible the inversion of all Christian principles. Oskar as the mirror of his times is subject to the perverted values of Goethe and Rasputin. The fantasies of Oskar have the quality of a nightmare, of a merry-go-round from which no escape seems possible.

KAFKA, THE TRIAL

THE TRIAL

The German title, Der Prozess, means ‘the law-suit’ or ‘the leagal procedure’. It is also the German medical term for tuberculosis.

The Arrest: The actuality of the arrest is undermined by the fact that he can follow the normal routine. His warders do not know whether he is charged with any offense at all. Is K guilty?

A particular human predicament inviting the interference of some impersonal powers is evoked by the term ‘guilt’.

Frau Gruback’s comment on the arrest: ‘it gives me the feeling of something very learned, it gives me the feeling of something abstract which I don’t understand, but which I don’t need to understand either.’

There will be no other arrests, merely the consequences of the first. The event is something of a miraculous spectacle, attracting the attention of an elderly couple in a window opposite his room. They are hoping for a redemptive effect on their own life.

By being arrested, K has met not with disaster, but with the possibility of ‘happiness’, being granted the special privilege of establishing communication with powers transcending the sphere of ordinary life.

K’s response: When the warder enters his room, he assumes the pose – ‘half raising himself in bed’ – snake-like movement showing threat and fear – which shows unconscious guilt and the knowledge that he has the right to defend himself. First he pretends that it is a practical joke. Then he produces his legal papers. A sadness befalls the warders when K shows signs of incomprehension – the kind of sadness Christ is said to have suffered in the face of uncomprehending crowds.

Thus the novel is a partial (if not systematic) revaluation of the doctrines of salvation offered by the Old and New Testaments. When the warders deprive him of his breakfast, he eats an apple for breakfast. Having eaten from ‘the tree of knowledge’, he comes to realize that he is not securely anchored in the established normality of his life.

The special privilege granted to K is that the Law puts in an appearance on his 30th birthday, the significant watershed in his life. Is he prepared to take up the challenge?

The problem is: Can we reach those powers which so authoritatively stretch out a helping hand towards us, and, can these powers themselves ever quite reach us? Do the powers have any real existence?

The Trial testifies to the reality of a natural and a supernatural world. But the two are unable to meet. K discovers, in the course of his encounter with the Law, a level of consciousness different from the one he is normally accustomed to.

The two levels of consciousness:

When K is talking to the warders, Frau Grubach almost enters the room, but he is unable to ask her in. He cannot bring someone from his normal life into contact with officials from the court. Again, during his interview with the Inspector, he unaware of the three employees from the bank. When they are brought to his notice by the Inspector, he forgets all about the officials. That is, the incompatibility of these characters results from his inability to incorporate them both into his consciousness at the same time. That manifests his double consciousness. The world of the court is prevented from taking hold of us by our normal routine. Further, it must be remembered that the Law does not seek out its victims but is attracted by their own sense of guilt. What K finds in the other world is determined by his own attitude towards it.

Why was he arrested and tried and killed? The reason for his arrest is a totally subjective guilt. If he didn’t feel guilty, he would not be arrested.

( ‘Someone’ telling lies about him is perhaps K himself, who in feeling guilty, has wrongfully accused himself.

Sex: erotic feelings as temporary substitute for more spiritual concerns.

The first investigation is not in K’s room, but in Fraulein Burstner’s room. She has already been an object of his erotic fantasies. The Magistrate calls him ‘Zimmermaler’ – ie. ‘room painter’—he has decorated her room with erotic fantasies.

Fraulein Burstner wants to learn Law. She wants to incorporate successfully the other world into her consciousness. But K will rebel and fall back on his narrow bourgeois way of life and thinking. Shortly before the end, he realizes that he could have done better by following Fraulein Burstner, or a woman like her.

First Interrogation:

The practices, even the locality of Law, are far removed from anything he is used to. In deciding to go at 9, he is sticking to his routine life. NOT ONLY K, BUT A WHOLE MODE OF LIFE IS ON TRIAL. The people he meets on the way know nothing about punctuality, cleanliness etc., but they do what is needed, like washing, cooking etc. and they are doing all these things at the same time; an integrated life. They leave their doors wide open: thus what he encounters here is a life uncontaminated by rational structures.

When K is about to score final victory by distorting the events of the morning, he is distracted by the incident of the washer woman. Here is a clear contrast to K’s sex life. While sex has become routine in his life, the sexual involvements of the Law-Court staff are based on genuine attraction. His dizziness at the time of leaving is a reflection of the crumbling edifice of his ‘unarrested’ life.

BEFORE THE LAW: the parable

Could the man have done anything at all to secure his entry into the Law? No. The parable does not allow any moralizing; it confirms the incompatibility between the Law and human consciousness.

It is impossible to reason with the Law in the open. ‘The Trial’ is the trial of language and human consciousness, not of anything K has or has not done.

THE ENDING: Kafka wrote in his diary that his creative efforts were ‘not’ made ‘in order to live quietly, but rather in order to be able to die quietly’. This is how K dies.

They kill him because he has not enough strength to seize the knife himself. To the very end, the Law will not do what K does not want to do himself.

K’s end is both one of the most violent and one of the most peaceful deaths in literature. It is peaceful, because it gives him an insight into the Law’s nature; it is violent, because of the frustration at the Law’s and K’s attempts at communication. Here, Kafka’s attitude is nihilistic. The death, however peaceful, is without meaning.

But against this background of the collapse of all higher meaning, the image of man shines the more brightly. Eg. The last scene where the human figure at the open window stretches out both hands. This is the modern gesture of spiritual hope – like the medieval man kneeling before the altar.

SECTION –I-

I. the opening sentence – matter of fact, yet curiously resonant – thus a huge, exhausting and tragic parable of the human condition is introduced.

  1. gnawing away of a fatal disease?
  2. neurosis worsening into self-destructive psychosis?
  3. struggle with original sin?

The whole novel is a detailed realistic description of a nightmarish unreality.

Joseph K, a bank clerk, is arrested on the morning of his thirtieth birthday. The two warders cannot or will not tell him why he has been arrested. They simply stand guard over him until the Inspector calls for him. Their job is to make him doubt his innocence, his security, his assurance. They have arrested him in more ways than one. The nevous collapse is under way. Paralysis of the will has set in. A healthy man would have beeen able to free himself. Joseph K was healthy until this began to happen to him. Perhaps he was preconditioned for the persecution to operate.

K is interviewed by the Inspector in the room of Fraulein Burstner. Later he is allowed to go to his bank. He is merely under arrest, not to be taken into custody. That evening he waits up for Fraulein Burstner to apologize for having disturbed her room. For reasons he does not himself understand, he kisses her. Is this an attempt to establish his innocence by this futile sexual attack? Is he arrested in his sexual development? ( ie. not grown up sexually even at 30!). May be, he is trying to prove that he is sexually adult, that the charge is groundless. If it is so, he does not succeed. He is powerless to stop the process of self-condemnation.

SECTION 2

The following weekend, K is summoned to a preliminary enquiry. He has great difficulty in finding the court room. He pretends that he is looking for ‘a joiner called Lanz’. Enventually, a young woman in a fifth floor room washing children’s clothes in a tub gestures him through to an inner room.

He has located the court by accident or by instinct. The court itself is part of the instinctive process and has no independent existence. He had been addressed by them as a house painter, but the fact that he was not a house painter seemed irrelevant to the court. Their indifference goads him into a long and sarcastic speech. But it has no effect on them. On one level, he is enjoying the trial, he is a figure of some importance to these proceedings, whereas at his bank he is a somewhat insignificant clerk.

His speech is interrupted by loud squeals from the back of the court room. One of the officials has grabbed the woman who had earlier directed him. This sensual outburst pricks the vanity of his speech as though it were a toy balloon.

SECTION 3: by now, K is deeply involved in the legal process. Although he receives no summons for the following Sunday, he goes to the court and finds no one but the washerwoman there. Her husband is the Law-Court attendant. She allows K to look at the ‘law books’ in the empty court. The first two turn out to be pornography and cheap fiction. She offers to help him, as the Examining Magistrate is attracted to her. Their talk is interrupted by a law student who carries her off to the Magistrate. Her husband (the attendant) appears and takes K on a tour of the court’s offices. In a waiting room, he meets several other accused men.

When he is shown round the court K finds the atmosphere so stifling that he faints, and has to be helped outside. In the outside world of the bank and of daily business, he feels well. But his values are overthrown by the court. Even the Clerk of Enquiries who helps him to leave the premises is a disturbing figure in that he is unable to acknowledge the seriousness of speech. He is said to mean well, but in truth he means nothing. He is caught in the court as in a dream. He cannot wake up without the help of the clerk. Even within this dream world, K behaves as if he were neurotically in the grip of a dream within the dream. He is beginning to lose his grip even on the outer reality. His gaze is increasingly an introspective one.

If only he could, with sufficient vehemence or love, see something in the external world, something, something outside his condition, it is possible that he would be saved. But the chances of his looking meaningfully at the world are lessening day by day. Already he is guiltier, or less innocent, than when he was arrested.

SECTION 4

K finds a crippled gril, Fraulein Montag, moving in to share Fraulein Burstner’s room. She conveys a message to K from Fraulein Burstner refusing him an interview he had apparently asked for. The landlady’s nephew, Captain Lanz, is also involved with Fraulein Montag in some way.

What K expected from her is not clear. Not sexual comfort, not confirmation of his lack of guilt. Simply some kind of help towards recognizing a reality other than his own. His behaviour, in the comparative security of his own lodgings, is much firmer than it is elsewhere. By asserting himself in his domestic surroundings, he was somehow building up a wall of resistance to the shadowy world of the law court which seemed only to exist, but then very forcibly, at weekends.

SECTION 5: The whipper.

K is about to leave the bank one evening when he hears groans from a store room. He is appalled to see the two warders about to be beaten by a third man. He tries to bribe the Whipper to let them off. As the strokes and screams begin, K rushes out to the corridor, afraid that the bank staff will hear. He looks into the store room the following evening, and to his horror the scene is as it was before. This time he shuts the door in great haste, and orders his junior clerks to clear the store room.

When K tells the Whipper that he would never have complained about the warders had he known they would be punished, he is told that that makes no difference. They would have been punished in any case.

But really it is K himself who wants to punish the warders, who is ready to experience the same sadistic fantasy over and over again.

Hitherto, the world of the law court had not infringed upon K’s day-to-day world of the bank. They remain two separate layers of consciousness. But now, behind a harmless store room door in the bank, the court has set up its punishment chamber. The threat of the court is eating into his ordered daily world. Simply by opening a door, he finds his safe and solid reality to be nothing more than a thin veneer. The remaining shreds of his innocence are being stripped from him.

K’s bribe fails, just as good works in the daytime would fail, because they are motivated by guilt or fear. The human condition cannot be improved, it can only be suffered. Man has no choice. Whatever is, is just.

SECTION 6

K’s uncle who lives in the country has heard about the case and comes to town to assist his nephew. He takes K to an old friend, an Advocate who might be able to help. The Advocate already knows something of the affairs. He has another visitor with him, the Chief Clerk of the Court. But K disgraces himself by leaving the room to search out the Advocate’s nurse, Leni, and flirts with her.

The uncle’s concern is only with the possibility of family scandal. The Advocate’s interest is purely professional. K, on the other hand, widens his areas of guilt by becoming involved with Leni. He runs the risk of forfeiting the goodwill of the three old men. But he is incapable of acting differently.

Leni’s attempts to make K renounce his fiancée Elsa. He carries a photo of Elsa, but shows no great concern for her. None of his relationships with women last very long. Leni gives him her key so he can come whenever he wants to. When he leaves the house his uncle scolds him for his open flirting. He is so immersed in his psychosis that he does not even reply. He is by now riddled with guilt. Nevertheless, he has not abandoned the idea of innocence. The Advocate’s advice is meaningless. K learns that there is no way of finding out the exact nature of the charge.

SECTION 7

His work at the bank suffers. Faced with interviewing a client, he finds himself neurotically unable to concentrate. When the Deputy Manager takes him off his hands, he can only stare out of the window in agonized indecision. On his way out, noticing the distraction of K, the client confides that he knows something of K’s case. He advises K to meet a disreputable man, a painter named TITORELLI, who knows several judges. Abandoning all his bank work, K rushes to meet him. Titorelli, who has painted several portraits of the judges, feels he can get K acquitted – not by pleading a case, but by using his influence. He mentions three kinds of acquittal:

1. Definite acquittal: it has never been known to happen. ie. No man is completely innocent.

2. Ostensible acquittal: this allows the defendant to continue to live his life under the constant threat of new arrests.

3. Postponement: this allows one to defer payment of punishment in the temporal world.

SECTION 8

K decides to take the case out of the hands of the Advocate, after meeting a fellow client of the Advocate, a commercial traveler named Block, whose life is ruined by his slavish dependence upon the Advocate. His trial has become the one thing he lives for. Existence is centered around the problem of his guilt. He is becoming a religious fanatic. K fears the same fate for himself.

SECTION 9

K has been given the job of showing one of the bank’s clients the art treasure in the cathedral. The Italian fails to turn up. In the empty cathedral K finds a priest about to ascend into the pulpit. He is about to leave when the priest calls him. The priest is also the prison chaplain. He informs K that he has been found guilty. He tells a parable about a door keeper who stands guard before the Law. His concern is with God; his view point is even more remote from K’s than is that of the court.

Nothing more is to be said. One awaits the end.

SECTION 10

On the evening before his 31st birthday exactly one year after his initial arrest, two men arrive at K’s lodgings. He is sitting quietly in an arm chair, dressed in black. Taking K out into the street, they grip his arms forcibly and march him off. K thinks they pass Fraulein Burstner, or at least a woman who resembles her.

When they reach a deserted quarry outside the town, the two men remove K’s coat and shirt. They lay him on the ground, his head on a rock, and producing a double-edged butcher’s knife, they make it clear that K himself is to guide the knife into his breast. But this responsibility he silently insists on leaving to them. At the last moment, a window somewhere is flung up. It is the last proud flicker of hope, and the knife is already turning in his heart. ‘Like a dog’, murmurs K, as he dies.

K had spent a year searching for a guiltless life, a meaningful life. He has found only a meaningless death. It is a tale told by an idiot.

Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Slave

Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Slave. Penguin, 1962.

Translated from the Yiddish by the author and Cecil Hemley.

Part 1. Wanda.

Jacob, a tall, straight man with blue eyes, long brown hair and a brown beard, was born in Josefov. The village was marauded by Cossacks who raped the women and murdered the men and children. He fled Josefov, but robbers caught him, dragged him to the mountains and sold him as a slave to Jan Bzik. He had been there for four years. He was a pious Jew but he was living now without his prayer shawl and phylacteries. Circumcision was the only mark on his body to show that he was a Jew. He knew his prayers and prayed regularly. The peasants in the village, though Christians, lived like pagans. He could not escape: the mountains were unfamiliar to him; further, he would be killed if he was seen on the other side of the stream. There were many people who wanted to kill the Jew, but the bailiff wouldn’t permit it, for he was a good worker and took good care of the cattle.

Every evening, Wanda, the daughter of Jan Bzik, brought him food and carried the milk back to the village. She was a widow and loved Jacob. When he was asked by her father to do some work on the Sabbath, she would wake up early and do it for him. Once he was bitten by a snake and she sucked out the venom. When he sprained his ankle she snapped it back into the socket and applied lotions. He too longed for her but he knew that the feeling was contrived by Satan. He did his best to resist the temptation and prayed to the Lord to redeem him from captivity. Wanda thought that he was very wise and knew all the answers. She had proposed marriage but he would not be a Christian. Nor would he fornicate. Her father had been ill for some time and she knew that he was going to die soon. She always knew such things. She had foreseen her husband’s death. Similarly she knew that she and Jacob were meant for each other. She was willing to run away with him and become a jew, but he knew that it was a sin to allow a gentile to be a jew except for reasons of faith. She wanted to be a jew for his sake and he couldn’t permit it. Further, if the Christians knew about it, she would be burnt at the stake.

In the beginning of the novel, Jacob was constantly praying to the Lord to grant him death so that he could escape from slavery. He knew that his desire for Wanda was a sin. But then the devil came in with lots of arguments in favour of it: Had not Moses married a woman from Ethiopia? Didn’t King Solomon take as his wife Pharaoh’s daughter? He thought that he should study the Torah to ward off evil. Since he could not remember all the commandments, he decided to carve them on a stone as and when they came into his memory.

Usually he was alone in the mountains but during harvest season he would be taken to the village. Reaping was tough work, still he would not eat the food of the gentiles and others ridiculed him for his foolishness. One such time, a circus visited the village. Jacob talked to the proprietor who agreed to inform the Jews of Josefov about his situation as a slave there. Then they would come there and ransom him, for to free a captive is a holy act for the Jews.

His father was a wealthy contractor. His mother was a rabbi’s daughter. When he was twelve, he was engaged to Zelda Leah, the ten-year-old daughter of the town’s elder. Jacob was a good student and he was more interested in the library of his father in law than in the ten-year-old girl. Zelda had the odd habits of an only child. She suffered from heart burns, headaches, backaches and so on. He scarcely knew how she bore him three children. It was a loveless marriage. So he turned his attention to finding out the meaning of existence, trying to comprehend the ways of God. He knew that Judaism was based on faith and not on knowledge, yet he sought to understand wherever it was possible. He started lecturing to the boys in the village. Then, when he was twenty-five, the Cossacks attacked Josefov and he had to flee. Now he is twenty-nine.

Once he was forcibly taken by the cowherds to join the autumn celebrations. He was forced to drink Vodka; someone tried to push a sausage into his mouth. People were dribbling and vomiting and copulating all around. He used to wonder what sins had been committed by the small children of those nations Moses had been told to annihilate, but now he understood that certain forms of corruption could be annihilated only by fire.

One day there was a storm and heavy rains. He knew that Wanda could not come. But she came as usual though she couldn’t return. At night she moved into his bed and he felt that he could not resist the temptation of the flesh anymore, still he took her into the cold river and made her immerse herself in the water before making love with her. She loved him so much that she went through it for his sake. The next morning brought no repentance. He was no longer ashamed before God.

When winter came he was asked to move into the hut of Jan Bzik. He slept in the granary. She visited him regularly at night and they made passionate love. All his waking hours were now occupied with thoughts of Wanda. Then Jan Bzik died and now he was in greater danger, for there were many people who would have killed the Jew but for the old man. And then one day, while Wanda was away with her brother to a nearby village to buy a cow, he was summoned by Zagayek the bailiff and he thought that his end had come. He steeled himself to face the inevitable. But when he reached there he was greeted by some Jews from his village who had come there to ransom him back. They took him back to Josefov. He was unable to bid farewell to Wanda. Back in the village, he heard about the atrocious cruelties committed by the Cossacks. He could not stop asking why God permits such things to happen. His body had returned home but his spirit was restless. To keep himself from thinking, he kept himself busy. One day, seated in his study, he said to God: “ I have no doubt that you are the Almighty and that whatever you do is for the best, but it is impossible for me to obey the commandment, Thou Shalt Love Thy God. No, I cannot, Father, not in this life”.

He tried his best not to think of Wanda. He devised several ways of torturing himself whenever he thought of her: fasting, pebbles in his shoes, a stone beneath the pillow, and so on. But the Evil One was persistent. Wanda was always in his dreams. A match was proposed for him with a widow who was a few years older than him and had a grown up daughter. “The Jew does not tempt Evil by denying the body but harnesses it in the service of God”. He could never love her; perhaps he might be able to find forgetfulness with her. They met and she liked him. The wedding contract was completed, the date set. Then Wanda appeared in his dream begging him to return. She was pregnant in the dream. All was clear to him now. The law obliged him to rescue Wanda and his child from the idolaters. He returned the ransom money and left Josefov for the mountains. He had learnt that he was different from the jews around him. They obeyed the rules mechanically but did not keep the spirit in human relationships. They cursed and cheated. He saw only suffering around: “Where was God? How could he look down on such want and keep silent? Unless, heaven forbid, there was no God”. So he left for the mountains. He was like his Biblical namesake who had left Beersheba and journeyed to Haran for love of Rachel and had toiled seven years to win her, who was the daughter of a pagan. He was a slave returning to bondage, a Jew again putting on Egypt’s yoke.

He reached the mountains at midnight, went to the granary and took her away with him. She was not pregnant. She knew that he would be coming. She had consulted a witch, made a clay image of his, wrapped it in her hair, bought an egg laid by a black hen and buried it at the crossroads with a piece of glass from a broken mirror. She saw him in the glass. So she knew he would come; it was she who made him come. But Jacob would not permit her to believe in witchcraft and asked her not to talk like that. Thus the two lovers were finally united, though their future appeared fraught with problems.

Part 2 – Sarah

Once more the Cossacks attacked Poland and slaughtered the jews. Muscovites and Swedes followed suit. Some jews settled in Pilitz with the consent of the overlord. Adam Pilitzky was a poor manager. He and his wife encouraged each other to take lovers. They were an odd couple. Slowly there emerged a jewish community in Pilitz.

Jacob and Wanda, now renamed as Sarah, came there. He became a teacher there. She had to pretend to be a mute because Yiddish would take too long for her to learn and people called her Dumb-Sarah. At night, he taught her. She believed in the Torah and obeyed all the laws. She had become pregnant by that time. Jacob worried that she would not be able to control her screams during labour and then people would know the truth. If Christians knew that she was seduced into Judaism, there would be trouble. If the Jews knew the actual reason for the conversion, Jacob would be excommunicated. His five years of slavery was now succeeded by a life long slavery. Yet he had saved a soul from idolatry though he himself had stumbled into transgression.

One day Pilitzky drove into town. He was drunk and wanted to kill Gershon. Gershon was a shady dealer and he managed the leased lands as if they were his own. When Pilitzky ordered him to be hanged in public, there was a huge outcry. Though Gershon was his enemy and hated him, Jacob rushed in to help him. At that time, Sarah came there. She saw Jacob standing before Pilitzky. She thought that he was going to be killed. She ran to them, fell at the feet of Pilitzky, and begged him to spare her man. The mute had spoken! It was a miracle. Pilitzky was overwhelmed. He made Jacob his new manager in the place of Gershon. If he didn’t accept it Pilitzky would throw out the jews. So he had to accept it in order to save the community. And he did his work well.

Now women sought Sarah out and begged her to bless them. Jacob was worried about deceiving the community. One day the truth would be known and he would be punished. She might scream and talk in labour. He was getting ready to face the punishment. Meanwhile he was becoming famous in Pilitz. He was the husband of a holy woman. He was received in the house of Pilitzky. Mrs Pilitzky had sensed that Sarah was really not a mute but offered to help them. She once asked him to kiss her but he would not.

When Sarah went into labour, and it was a difficult one, she screamed but said nothing. Feeling sure that she would die, the women around her were talking of burying her, and some of them were even loudly planning to make a new match for Jacob. She lost her control and started talking in Polish. People immediately concluded that there was a dybbuk in her and it was the dybbuk who was speaking through her, and it should be exorcised. Sarah knew that she was dying because the witch had predicted that she would die in childbirth. When Pilitzky learned the truth he advised Jacob to leave the town before the priests arrived to burn him.

A meeting of the community decided that the woman should not be buried in the cemetery and that the child should not be circumcised. After the delivery, the women refused to visit her. And after her death, Jacob was called to a meeting. He told everything. Later that night, two dragoons arrested him and were taking him to be killed. He knew that he was going to certain death. Suddenly he broke free and ran away. He crossed the forest and reached the Vistula. The ferryman was a decent man and he offered Jacob food and shelter. There he met a Jew from the Holy Land; he told him his whole story. After listening to Jacob, he said: the community is right; that is the law. But behind the law there is mercy. Without mercy, there would be no law. Jacob was asked to save the child and bring it to the Holy Land.

Jacob went back to Pilitz. Sarah’s body was already buried. All his money had been stolen. After visiting her grave, he went to the peasant where his son was and took it with him. The woman gave her own breast milk in a bottle to feed the baby on the way. Jacob left with his son for Israel.

He named his son Benjamin – like the first Benjamin, this child was a Ben-oni, a child born of sorrow.

Like his namesake, he too had lost a beloved wife, the daughter of an idolater, among strangers; Sarah too was buried by the way and had left him a son. Like the Biblical Jacob, he was crossing the river, bearing only a staff, pursued by another Esau. Everything remained the same: the ancient love, the ancient grief. Perhaps four thousand years would again pass; somewhere, at another river, another Jacob would walk mourning another Rachel. Perhaps it was always the same Jacob and the same Rachel.

Now the redemption had to come.

Part 3 – The Return.

Twenty years had passed. Adam Pilitzky had hanged himself. His wife Theresa had also died. The city had grown. And Jacob returned to Pilitz to take his wife’s bones back to the Holy Land. His son Benjamin was a lecturer in Jerusalem. He couldn’t locate the grave of his wife. So he spent the night in a poorhouse. When he woke up the next morning, he saw Sarah calling him. His time had come.

And he died. Now he was no more the slave of his body. He was freed at last. When the people tried to bury him in the new cemetery, they found Sarah’s body, and he was buried with her.

The community had buried Sarah outside the cemetery but the dead had gathered to take her in. The cemetery itself had ordained it; Sarah was a jewish daughter and a sanctified corpse. It was yet another miracle that her body had lain for twenty years in the earth and yet it was still recognizable. The town was in an uproar at this miracle. After so many years, they were now together. There must be a design behind everything.

notes on THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK Doris Lessing. (1962)

Division, fragmentation and how they are overcome – this is the major theme of Doris Lessing’s novel, The Golden Notebook. The novel gives us an idea of the intellectual and moral climate of Britain in the mid twentieth century. Critics suggest that it was ‘written before its time’ – that is, it anticipated cultural trends such as feminism and attitudes towards madness which were not generally accepted until some years later. Politics, madness and the roles of women – these are the familiar Lessing themes.

Form and theme reflect each other in this novel. Form echoes the content in its fragmentation. Doris Lessing takes the novel form apart to see how far, if at all, fiction is capable of truth-telling.

One problem considered here is the writer’s block, the cessation of artistic creativity. Both the psychological and technical features of this condition are considered here. Can the form of the conventional novel act as a block to the writer who wishes to express the irrational and unconventional? Doris Lessing sets out to free Anna’s creativity through her exploration of the novel form.

Dissatisfied with the techniques of realism (that is, a rational and causal delineation of experience), she was searching for a variety of methods to convey the many layers of consciousness of her characters and their states of breakdown and madness. She began to question the veracity of the novel – whether the novel can say something true.

In the Preface, Doris Lessing explains the function of ‘Free Women’ in ‘The Golden Note Book’: “To put the short novel ‘Free Women’ as a summary and condensation of all the mass of material, was to say something about the conventional novel, another way of describing the dissatisfaction of a writer when something is finished: ‘How little I have managed to say of the truth, how little I have caught of all that complexity; how can this small neat thing be true when what I experienced was so rough and apparently formless and unshaped’”.

Anna writes part of her diary as factually as possible in order to see if the plain facts are nearer to the truth than the carefully shaped material that goes into a novel. By examining the novel form so thoroughly, Doris Lessing made an important contribution to the post-modernist debate about the nature of fiction. Many post-modern novels are reflexive, their content being their own methodology. Doris Lessing’s novels are never purely formal. ‘The Golden Note Book’ combines both: the realist story and the examination of realism.

Form.

The form of this novel is complicated and very carefully worked out. It contains a short realistic novel called ‘Free Women’ divided into five parts. Interspersed between the sections of this novel are four extracts from four different coloured notebooks, kept by Anna, the heroine of ‘Free Women’: -- a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red one concerned with politics, a yellow one in which she makes stories out of her experiences; and a blue one which tries to be a diary. The four notebooks emphasize the divisions in Anna’s personality, as if she were four people. By using the device of the notebooks, she is able to convey the variety of moods, memories, thoughts, motives and habits that make her the individual Anna Wulf. Time, place, memory intercept so that the reader sees not a coherent past that fully explains the present Anna. Finally there is also a Golden coloured notebook, in which Anna and her lover give each other sentences to begin a new novel. Anna’s is the first sentence of ‘Free Women’, thus linking the end of the notebooks to the beginning of the novel ‘The Golden Note Book.’ The fragmentary structure of the novel is thereby unified, and turned into a circular, coherent whole.

By showing us various aspects of Anna, her past in Africa, her political involvements, her writers’ block, her psychotherapy, it makes us realize the inadequacy of traditional realism. In addition, through Anna’s attempts to organize such disparate material into her fiction (the novel she is writing in the yellow note book), we are shown the steps involved in such a process: selection, omission, shaping and falsifying.

For example, one of the central episodes in ‘The Golden Note Book’, a woman being rejected by a man after a long relationship, is treated in several different ways.

In ‘Free Women’ we learn of the event after it has happened, and that three years later Anna has not really recovered from it. In the blue note book, (Anna’s diary) she writes in great detail of the day in 1954 when Michael leaves her. Dissatisfied with that account, she rewrites in laconic and factual sentences, so that all the pain is reduced to: “I realized that Michael had finally decided to break it off. I must pull myself together.” In the yellow note book (her novel) the episode is rewritten in fictional form, so that Anna becomes Ella, and Michael becomes Paul. There are also synopses of short stories, reworking the same thing. These different perspectives on the same event allow the reader to see the many ways the raw material can be represented.

Doris Lessing reveals to us both the events of Anna’s life and the various ways of recording them, all of which are shown to be only partially true, even the most factual and unvarnished. But all these attempts bring us up against a central artistic problem: the inability of realism to convey reality. There is always a gap between experience and its representation.

Free Women – is an account of two women friends living in London in the 1950s. Anna is divorced and has a small daughter, Janet. She has also been rejected by her lover after a five-year relationship. Molly is divorced and has a son of twenty called Tommy. Both women have been members of the communist party, and both have had psychotherapy from the same analyst. Anna keeps four note books of different colours to record different aspects of her experience. One day, Tommy reads these note books, and accuses Anna of dishonesty, of pretending things are not chaotic when in reality they are. Tommy tries to commit suicide and succeeds in blinding himself instead. Anna quarrels with a homosexual couple living in a part of her flat, and asks them to leave. Her daughter, at her own request, goes to a girls’ boarding school. Left alone, Anna begins to have a break down. She has an affair with an American, recovers, and begins to do welfare work and marriage guidance. Molly remarries. It is only at the end of The Golden Note Book that we learn that Anna has written ‘Free Women’ out of the raw material of her life, collected in her diary.

‘Free Women’ is written in the third person; the tone is objective. The emotional and non-rational elements associated with the events are separated from them, and are written about in the blue note book, leaving ‘Free Women’ as an ironic version of the truth. ‘Free Women’ is, to some extent, a parody of the conventional realist novel. Its flatness shows how the chaos and vitality of the note books has been structured, but in the process, diminished.

The Notebooks (except the golden coloured one) each finish in various kinds of frustration, whereas ‘Free Women’ achieves an ending. But by its sensible, chronological narrative, and its refusal to incorporate frustration, it is finally dissatisfying. Without the juxtaposition of the note books to flesh it out, ‘Free Women’ would be dry and skeletal. Yet it plays an integral part as a whole, elaborately echoing and prefiguring essential themes.

During the reading of ‘The Golden Note Book’, we involuntarily supplement the text of ‘Free Women’ with our knowledge of events and moods from the note books, so that as readers we rebuild the process of fictionalization that Doris Lessing painstakingly breaks down.

The black note book is originally divided into two columns, headed ‘Source’ and ‘Money’. In it, Anna deals with the material she used to write a best-selling novel, ‘Frontiers of War’, and with her consequent literary success. We see the insistent world of agents, television adaptation and film rights, and several funny parodies. As Anna loses her ability to write, the black note book becomes a cuttings file for new items about violence in Africa.

The red note book is about Anna’s experiences with the British Communist Party from 1950 to 1957, her growing unease with it, and her final extrication from it. This too becomes full of newspaper cuttings, again about violence.

The yellow note book begins with a novel Anna is writing, called ‘The Shadow of the Third’, and her comments on the process of writing it. This is a fictionalized version of her own life and the juxtaposition of it with ‘Free Women’ enables the reader to see how Anna selects and shapes and reconstructs the material for the purposes of fiction. Ella, the heroine of Anna’s novel, is herself writing a novel about suicide, thus adding to the reflexiveness of the novel. There are ideas for short stories, parodies and pastiche, the last being symptomatic of Anna’s writers’ block.

The blue note book functions as Anna’s diary, a deliberate attempt not to turn everything into fiction, but to try to keep a factual account of what happens in her life. She records her writers’ block, her sessions with her psychotherapist, the ending of her love affair with Michael, her work for the Party, her relationship with Molly and with her daughter. It describes in detail her break-down, and also her affair with an American, Saul Green.

‘Free Women’ and ‘The Shadow of the Third’ are fictionalized version of Anna’s life, and the blue note book, with its status of diary, gives it a veracity the other versions lack.

Finally, in the golden-coloured note book, Anna synthesizes the various experiences kept separate in the other books, so that they approximate to a kind of wholeness of vision. And attaining this integration enables her to begin to write again.

By separating the various aspects of her life, Anna hopes to impose a pattern on chaos. In all the note books, at some time, she is unable to continue writing. They become a record of her blocked creativity. It is impossible to keep events coherent and separate. When she is able to abandon her separate notebooks, the golden notebook becomes all that is needed to record her perceptions. Because she has allowed herself to break down and allow the chaos in, she is able to achieve a final integration.

As a feminist text: In 1962 it was an important statement about women’s roles. Far from being a celebration of women’s independence from men, the novel explores relations between men and women, and the seemingly inescapable female need for the opposite sex.

The relationships described are usually troubled but running throughout the novel as a kind of unmentioned subtext is the idea of a woman, living happily with her husband, sexually and emotionally fulfilled by him, cooking for him and bearing his children. Anna and Ella often express very unfeminist needs. What they want is not to be liberated from marriage, but to enhance the quality of marriage.

The Golden Notebook broke new ground in its open discussion of female sexuality from the point of view of a woman writer. Ella compares the vaginal and clitoral orgasms. There is a great deal about men’s sexual inadequacies in this book, from technically efficient but emotionally detached lovers to those who are simply inept.

Along with women’s dependence on men in this novel is shown the devastating effect of being rejected by them. Fear of breakdown is always very close to Anna or Ella. The Golden Notebook is not a treatise advocating autonomy for women; rather, it is a lament for its seeming impossibility.

Splitting and fragmentation are recurring themes. Anna joins the Communist Party because of a need for wholeness, for an end to the split. But the split is only intensified, since the theory and objectives of the party are so at odds with the real world. She leaves the Party at the same time as Michael leaves her.

Anna’s devices to protect herself against breaking down are her notebooks, her roles as a conscientious party worker, a good mother, a compliant mistress. In the blue book, she writes a very detailed account of a day in her life, 15 September 1954. She does this to counter Michael’s criticism that because she is a writer she does not know what is true and what is fiction. We see Anna giving attention to her child and to her lover, planning and preparing meals, coping with menstruation, having long discussions at the office. Anna Wulf is swamped by the roles of mistress, mother, colleague and friend. She herself ceases to exist.

During the account of 15 September we realise that the juggling act involved in keeping everyone happy cannot continue indefinitely. Anna resigns from her job, her lover leaves, and her daughter goes to boarding school. Her roles suddenly disappear and she is left to be Anna Wulf. She lets a room in her flat to an American, Saul Green, who is unbalanced, and she falls in love with him. Influenced by him, she allows herself to break down. They break down into each other, into other people, break through the false patterns they have made of the pasts.

The golden notebook acts as a symbol of Anna’s psychic integration, just as the four books symbolised her feelings of disunity. They give each other sentences for a new novel.

The last section of Free Women is deliberately banal. Anna tells Saul, they are ‘boulder-pushers’, Sisyphus like. This image of perpetual effort with the prospect of very little achievement replaces Anna’s idealistic communist dreams. Towards the end, great theories are abandoned, and small hopeful images remain.