Man is a Desiring Machine.

I am sitting here on hold with the state of California and I am going over some of my notes from last week’s Critical Theories of Literature class. The notes themselves are not terribly interesting unless you’re super into Psychoanalytic Criticism. However the bits scrawled in the margins are kind of fun (not all of the lecture is actually useful for studying later, but I like to keep ahold of the tangential bits that are interesting):

- A German saying I learned:

“Love is home-sickness”

- Something that Edgar Allan Poe apparently said:

“Man is a desiring machine.”

- Something my professor said:

“If I had had that experience than I would have an even stranger sense of myself that I do now …”

- You would not believe how much Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism deals with the notion of castration (male children are afraid their fathers with castrate them, female children believe they have already been castrated, fear of castration is sublimated into the unconscious, “The Uncanny” is just the return in disguise of the repressed “Castration Complex”, etc. etc. etc.) and so in the margin of my notes I apparently wrote: Do I really need shorthand for Castration?! And below that are a few attempts at inventing shorthand symbols.

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Atonement.

Those of you who enjoy dry academic criticism are about to have a good night! Below is a paper I wrote about Ian McEwan’s fantastic novel Atonement. If you saw the movie several years ago then you will remember that it is about a little girl who tells a lie that destroys the lives of the people around her. I don’t want to spoil it all (because it was a very good movie made by the talented Joe Wright who is a grown-up and who makes movies for grown-ups), so if you haven’t seen the movie then skip the next post.

If you’re brave enough to press on though, then you should know that the subject of this paper was defining the character of ‘the girl’ in McEwan’s novel.

Oh, and for those of you who enjoy novel adaptations, you will be happy to know that the movie is shockingly true to the book (insofar as it can be given that most of the beauty of the book takes place in the narrative). This green dress is in both:

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Contradiction and Complicity.

Contradiction and Complicity: The Nature of the Girl and her Atonement
By James Bezerra


Down below the epic historical sweep of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, below the tragedy of lovers separated and of dreams forever deferred, there lies a dark question of character and of human nature. Both
stereotypically and then - ultimately - with great humanity, McEwen explores, condemns, and finally forgives the flaws of human frailty through the exploration of the character of the Girl.

There is no one girl in the novel. In fact all of the characters play their girlish roles at some point (including
the men). However it is primarily through the lens of Briony that the Girl is explored in all of her strange, self-
justifying, contradictory glory. Though the narrative moves freely through time, Briony is a girl of thirteen for half the novel and she is both more and less than the typical girl. “She was one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so” (4). Her sense of order and of nearly narcissistic knowingness manifests itself in her early prolific writings. It is not until decades later – far removed from girlhood – that Briony herself understands that her writing was a manifestation of the malevolence of her own character. Of the writer she says, “There is nothing outside of her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms” (350). Even in the atonement for her crime, there is still a hint of the self-servingly superior in her voice. Yet Briony’s Girl-ness is not the only way in which McEwen reflects on the contradictory nature of the human soul. Girlhood is often conflated with childhood and shown in contrast to adulthood. Specifically the Girl is
used here as the subject to create a more supple understanding and because within the plot (as in society when viewed by a girl) maleness is often paired with sexual aggressiveness. Therefore the subject of the Girl is one that is additionally under threat more so than that of the Boy. Boyhood, in fact, is largely mocked as a state of idle helplessness, as in the case of the twin boy cousins, “Jackson and Pierrot seemed typical eager little boys who would probably do as they were told” (10). The state of the Girl however, is much addressed and from many directions; “It was an awkward age in a girl” (88) reflects the tragically doomed Robbie as he watches Briony recede away from him into the night. The contradiction here being that even as he is completely unthreatened by the girl, she is about to be his undoing. Even Briony is aware of something changing in her own Girl nature as she witnesses what she believes to be some sort of sexually abusive game play out between Robbie and her sister Cecilia, “Briony had her first, weak intimation that for her now it could no longer be fairy-tale castles and princesses, but the strangeness of the here and now” (37). Is the Girl so delicate and mysterious, so mythically pixie-esque a thing that even she mourns the death of her own girlhood?

Not as such.

McEwan does not so much seek to define what a girl is, as use the Girl as a device. This lens offers the richness and vividness and fundamentally elusive indefiniteness of the Girl to explore his characters in all of their rage and sadness, their hypocrisy and folly without having to pass final judgment on them; after all, who would presume judge a girl? What is a girl if not one who is as yet incomplete and therefore not prepared for judgment?

Ultimately it is Briony’s lie about Robbie that shatters the lives of those around her and even alters the tone of the novel itself. The complex and damning nature of Atonement is not so much borne out of that lie, but out of the irreconcilable dilemma of whether or not a girl can be blamed for a foolish lie told out of a girlishly simplistic misunderstanding of the adult world.

Patriarchal society often seems to flirt with the notion of the Girl as innocence embodied and therefore beyond the scope of serious judgment by virtue of being so far beneath it. McEwan turns that concept on its head by imbuing girlhood with subtle power and using that power to prop up Briony’s lie. If we know girls to be innocence embodied, the thinking seems to be, then we know them to be incapable of telling such an adult lie. Here again is the contradiction of the Girl that reaches beyond simply duality: idealized by society for goodness and simplicity (because those must always exist in unison, apparently) yet capable – by virtue of that supposed innocence – of changing the course of adult lives irrevocably. Here one must reflect on the contradiction of the character of cousin Lola; “who saved herself from humiliation by falling in love, or persuading herself she had” (306). Attacked and raped, Lola had been victimized, but in eventually marrying her attacker she becomes complicit in her own victimization. To reflect on sister Cecilia is to find a haughty young woman who forges her own independence not for the sake of it, but out of a loving and bottomless devotion to Robbie, which could be seen as simply a different kind of dependence. Here one must reflect again on Briony, so certain and so headstrong even though her thirteen year old self already lamented that her “life had ceased to be simple” (114). This wavering between simplicity and complexity, this oh-so pious mourning of something not even completely lost, represents a sacrosanct sort of self-absorption. “Briony inhabited an ill-defined transitional space between the nursery and adult worlds which she crossed and recrossed unpredictably” (132). It was in that ill-defined transitional space where her lie was conceived and her crime committed.

Again though there is more contradiction because it was to that same space that she would return some
fifty-nine years later in order to atone for her lie. Without that girlishly contradictory and interstitial place within herself she would not have been able to both recognize what she had done – “she would never undo the damage. She was unforgivable.” (269) – and yet still seek a way to undo that unforgivable damage. Briony herself explains, “I like to think it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end” (351).

In this way the subject of the Girl is complicit in both the problem and the solution. She is both the alpha and the omega of Atonement, which is why McEwan’s narrative ultimately rescues even its own author, instead in favor of the aged dying Briony. She finds no problem being both character and writer. She finds no dilemma in herself, saying, “I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I’ve always been” (336). In this way it is only the Girl who is capable of committing the sin and atoning for it all on her own terms.



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Works Cited

McEwan, Ian. Atonement. New York: Random House, 2002. Print

Killing My Idols: A Rant.

As someone who is currently being forced to read some exceedingly boring, self-involved literary criticism, I thought: why the hell not write some!

This is not so much criticism of the academic sort, but rather the sort of criticism that one receives from one’s mother.

I don’t mean to bemoan the state of modern American fiction so much as I would like to openly and actively bitch about it.

If we met at a very fancy party and you asked me who I read or who my influences are (this does actually happen BTW, and not just at parties in my own head) then I would say what I have been saying my entire life: I read Steve Erickson, I read Jonathan Lethem, I read Aimee Bender, I read Mark Danielewski, Don DeLillo, Junot Diaz, and on and on and on and I would hit all of the proper g-spots.

For those of you who do not go to these sorts of parties; imagine showing up to a new job where everyone watches Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Mad Men. And you say, “I watch all of those too!” but for effect you throw in Downton Abbey or Dexter or House of Cards, because you want to broaden the field. Or - if you really want to open it up - “I have been watching The State Within” or “I just started Skins on Netflix.”

Anyway. Point being, yes these are all good shows. Even if you don’t watch them, you probably have - at some point - seen them. And they are usually undeniably good. But are they satisfying you in a deeper way? Maybe they are. I don’t know that much about what satisfies you in a deeper way because you never comment on this blog and tell me!

Well imagine that you felt a personal investment in whether or not these shows are both good and deeply satisfying. Imagine that, while these shows are good and beyond reproach, you feel that they are missing something that there is an essential vitality and soul that just isn’t present in them anymore. That is how I have been feeling lately about the state of modern American literary fiction (what the rest of the world just calls: novels.)

I feel that there is a vitality missing, that some essential element of fear and of anger and of joy has gone out of that world.

Since we aren’t at a fancy party I feel okay admitting to you that while Steve Erickson has probably been for me the most formative novelist I have ever encountered in my life, his last two novels were almost impossible for me to get through. And Jonathan Lethem - though I love him so - seems to have been writing exclusively for the Pulitzer committee with everything he’s done since Motherless Brooklyn. Danielewski owes all of his counter-culture-hero status to House of Leaves and his work since then - I say this with all dues respect - would not have elevated him to literary luminary status. I’m fairly certain that Only Revolutions was written with the expressed (kinda D-bag-y) intent of creating an impenetrable masterwork on the assumed level of Ulysses or The Waste Land or Gravity’s Rainbow. So YAY for pedantic obfuscation! I guess.

I guess I’m in the mood to kill my idols tonight.

This is why I am terrible at academic literary criticism BTW, I have difficulty concealing my displeasure. Also, I don’t actually try to be a backbiter - I like to think that I have angels on my shoulder when I write this stuff -  and lets face it, backbiting is really all that academic literary criticism is …

Well, that may not be fair. To be fair, most academic literary criticism is about coming up with a largely backbiting idea and then turning it into an abstract to submit to a conference and then if you get accept to the conference you write the paper and then present it at the conference and that goes on your CV and one day that CV will help you get a professorship somewhere and once you have a professorship you can get tenor and then that is basically WINNING! (Somebody tell the balloon-drop guys!)

But that is not my complaint here today. Every industry and profession has its own self-serving, self-justifying feedback loops.

My complaint today is the lack of verve, of energy, of zest in modern American literary fiction. I don’t specifically blame this on Junot Diaz or any of the others I’ve specifically mentioned (Although that dude got himself a MacArthur genius grant which pissed me off because he was already in the position to do nothing but write his name on cocktail napkins and he’d have been a bestseller for the rest of his life.) I blame it on all of us. I blame it on our entire culture. I blame this on a society that tells Joss Whedon that Avengers was a good movie. It was not. The first half was pretty good, the second half was for fifteen-year-old boys, which is what most of us are now. I blame it on a culture that melts the internet when Miley Cyrus goes on television and does exactly what our culture tells her to do. I blame it on adults making cultural phenomenons out of books that are written specifically for teenages.

I have no problem with escapism. I have a problem with the fact that I have nothing to choose between except escapism and the myth of meritocracy. I have a problem with the fact that oh so many years ago Jonathan Franzen had to give a fuck what Oprah thought, but I also have a problem with the fact that Jonathan Frazen’s book was stultifyingly boring, and I also have a problem with the fact that Jonathan Frazen was a dick to Oprah. How the fuck hard is it to be nice to Oprah?

By this point I have written a blog post that seems (to you) a little rant-y but to me could actually be a little career-kill-y should I ever end up in a room with the people who control America’s literary fiction world. But let’s face it, with every day that passses there is less and less chance that I am ever going to end up in that room. But, of course, there is always a chance. But I’m risking it anyway. Because that is the kind of risk - the kind of zest and verve and vitality - that I think there is too little of lately.


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