idea for a lit essay

Back when I was in college at UAB I took a Shakespeare course taught by my favorite professor, Dr. Stephen Glosecki. (I also, based on my experience in Shakespeare, ended up taking his Literature of the Vikings course.) During our discussions of Macbeth we talked about Lady Macbeth as an example of the femme fatale archetype. When we got to Hamlet we talked about how Ophelia is Lady Macbeth’s polar opposite. Lady Macbeth drives her husband to murder and madness while Ophelia assumes a proxy-type role for Hamlet and takes his madness on herself, eventually collapsing under the pressure and committing suicide. Ophelia goes insane with grief so that Hamlet doesn’t have to, allowing him to move forward soberly with his plans for revenge. Notice how Hamlet is able to pretty much hold it together until Ophelia’s death. Without his proxy he has no choice but to fall prey to the madness that he’s been feigning since deciding to get revenge on Claudius.

In an essay I wrote for the class I used the term “femme vitale” in describing Ophelia. Glosecki’s note in red was “great term – coin it!” When I wrote the paper I just assumed it was a real literary term. It sounded like it should be. Surely I wasn’t the first to use it. Since then, though, I’ve never come across it. So I figure I need to take Dr. Glosecki’s note to heart before somebody else has the idea.

It would be a fun essay to research and explore. I could pull in film noir and detective fiction and really just have a blast with it. My only is that it’s not exactly a feminist idea. I mean I’m talking about women who sacrifice themselves so that their men can acheive something. I’ll have to think about this…

Roger Ebert’s review of Last Year at Marienbad

Chicago theater The Music Box will be screening a new print of the sublime Last Year at Marienbad for a week starting today. In celebration of this Roger Ebert, film guy for the world in general and Chicago Sun-Times specifically, has reminded us of his May 30, 1999, Great Movie review of the French classic. As some or most of you know, Marienbad is one of my favorite movies and I never let pass a chance to sing its praises, even if by proxy. Having said that, here is the text of Ebert’s review.

How clearly I recall standing in the rain outside the Co-Ed Theater near the campus of the University of Illinois, waiting to see “Last Year at Marienbad.” On those lonely sidewalks, in that endless night, how long did we wait there? And was it the first time we waited in that line, to enter the old theater with its columns, its aisles, its rows of seats–or did we see the same film here last year?

Yes, it’s easy to smile at Alain Resnais‘ 1961 film, which inspired so much satire and yet made such a lasting impression. Incredible to think that students actually did stand in the rain to be baffled by it, and then to argue for hours about its meaning–even though the director claimed it had none. I hadn’t seen “Marienbad” in years, and when I saw the new digitized video disc edition in a video store, I reached out automatically: I wanted to see it again, to see if it was silly or profound, and perhaps even to recapture an earlier self–a 19-year-old who hoped Truth could be found in Art.

Viewing the film again, I expected to have a cerebral experience, to see a film more fun to talk about than to watch. What I was not prepared for was the voluptuous quality of “Marienbad,” its command of tone and mood, its hypnotic way of drawing us into its puzzle, its austere visual beauty. Yes, it involves a story that remains a mystery, even to the characters themselves. But one would not want to know the answer to this mystery. Storybooks with happy endings are for children. Adults know that stories keep on unfolding, repeating, turning back on themselves, on and on until that end that no story can evade.

The film takes place in an elegant chateau, one with ornate ceilings, vast drawing rooms, enormous mirrors and paintings, endless corridors and grounds in which shrubbery has been tortured into geometric shapes and patterns. In this chateau are many guests–elegant, expensively dressed, impassive. We are concerned with three of them: “A” (Delphine Seyrig), a beautiful woman. “X” (Giorgio Albertazzi), with movie-idol good looks, who insists they met last year and arranged to meet again this year. And “M” (Sascha Pitoeff), who may be A’s husband or lover, but certainly exercises authority over her. He has a striking appearance, with his sunken triangular face, high cheekbones, deep-set eyes and subtle vampirish overbite.

The film is narrated by X. The others have a few lines of dialogue here and there. On the soundtrack is disturbing music by Francis Seyrig, mostly performed on an organ–Gothic, liturgical, like a requiem. X tells A they met last year. He reminds her of the moments they shared. Their conversations. Their plans to meet in her bedroom while M was at the gaming tables. Her plea that he delay his demands for one year. Her promise to meet him again next summer.

A does not remember. She entreats X, unconvincingly, to leave her alone. He presses on with his memories. He speaks mostly in the second person: “You told me … you said … you begged me … .” It is a narrative he is constructing for her, a story he is telling her about herself. It may be true. We cannot tell. Resnais said that as the co-writer of the story he did not believe it, but as the director, he did. The narrative presses on. The insistent, persuasive X recalls a shooting, a death. No–he corrects himself. It did not happen that way. It must have happened this way, instead … .

We see her in white, in black. Dead, alive. The film, photographed in black and white by Sacha Vierny, is in widescreen. The extreme width allows Resnais to create compositions in which X, A and M seem to occupy different planes, even different states of being. (The DVD is letterboxed; to see this film panned-and-scanned would be pointless.) The camera travels sinuously; the characters usually move in a slow and formal way, so that any sudden movement is a shock (when A stumbles on a gravel walk and X steadies her, it is like a sudden breath of reality).

The men play a game. It has been proposed by M. It involves setting out several rows of matchsticks (or cards, or anything). Two players take turns removing matchsticks, as many as they want, but only from one row at a time. The player who is left with the last matchstick loses. M always wins. On the soundtrack, we hear theories: “The one who starts first wins … the one who goes second wins … you must take only one stick at a time … you must know when to … .” The theories are not helpful, because M always wins anyway. The characters analyzing the stick game are like viewers analyzing the movie: You can say anything you want about it, and it makes no difference.

“I’ll explain it all for you,” promised Gunther Marx, a professor of German at the U. of I. We were sitting over coffee in the student union, late on that rainy night in Urbana. (He would die young; his son Frederick would be one of the makers of “Hoop Dreams.”) “It is a working out of the anthropological archetypes of Claude Levi-Strauss. You have the lover, the loved one and the authority figure. The movie proposes that the lovers had an affair, that they didn’t, that they met before, that they didn’t, that the authority figure knew it, that he didn’t, that he killed her, that he didn’t. Any questions?”

I sipped my coffee and nodded thoughtfully. This was deep. I never subsequently read a single word by Levi-Strauss, but you see I have not forgotten the name. I have no idea if Marx was right. The idea, I think, is that life is like this movie: No matter how many theories you apply to it, life presses on indifferently toward its own inscrutable ends. The fun is in asking questions. Answers are a form of defeat.

It is possible, I realize, to grow impatient with “Last Year at Marienbad.” To find it affected and insufferable. It doesn’t hurtle through its story like today’s hits–it’s not a narrative pinball machine. It is a deliberate, artificial artistic construction. I watched it with a pleasure so intense I was surprised. I knew to begin with there would be no solution. That the three characters would move forever through their dance of desire and denial, and that their clothing and the elegant architecture of the chateau was as real as the bedroom at the end of “2001”–in other words, simply a setting in which human behavior could be observed.

There is one other way to regard the movie. Consider the narration. X tells A this, and then he tells her that. M behaves as X says he does–discovering them together, not discovering them, firing a pistol, not firing it. A remembers nothing, but acts as if she cares. She thinks she hasn’t met X before, and yet in some scenes they appear to be lovers.

Can it be that X is the artist–the author, the director? That when he speaks in the second person (“You asked me to come to your room … ”) he is speaking to his characters, creating their story? That first he has M fire a pistol, but that when he doesn’t like that and changes his mind, M obediently reflects his desires? Isn’t this how writers work? Creating characters out of thin air and then ordering them around? Of course even if X is the artist, he seems quite involved in the story. He desperately wants to believe he met A last year at Marienbad, and that she gave him hope–asked him to meet her again this year. That is why writers create characters: to be able to order them around, and to be loved by them. Of course, sometimes characters have wills of their own. And there is always the problem of M.

Icelander by Dustin Long (2006)

When I saw the description of this book in the McSweeney’s store I knew I was going to buy it. It had all the right words - as if it were waiting on Dave Eggers’ site just for me, sending out secret messages: ”Nabokov… Agatha Christie… The Crying of Lot 49… The Third Policeman… Nordic lore and pulpy intrigue.” It called to me.

It’s a cool little faux detective romp regarding the attempts of Our Heroine to mourn the mysterious death of her friend Shirley MacGuffin and not get caught up in trying to solve the case. If you can’t tell by the names, be assured we’re in postmodern territory here. Imagine if Paul Auster’s debut trilogy was a comedy set in upstate New Uruk and Iceland instead of titular New York City. And just like that author’s trio of deconstructed detective stories, Dustin Long’s book is absolutely full of thematic jumping-off-points.

Which brings me to a point I want to make. To wit: One of the traps of these postmodern deconstructionist send-ups is that they can easily turn into something less like a story with characters and more like a doctoral dissertation with grand themes. Even the above-referenced Auster trilogy is sometimes guilty of being too didactic at the expense of fully-realized characters. (To be fair, I’m not sure character is always at the top of Auster’s to-do list. I’m sure he accomplished everything he set out to accomplish with The New York Trilogy.) I always use Nabokov’s Pale Fire as the shining example of a postmodern deconstruction puzzle-book that also has realistic characters. (And here I’m using the term “realistic” in a purely literary sense. Obviously there are arguments as to who or what is “real’ in the confines of Pale Fire qua story.) With Icelander Dustin Long has also managed that feat. Our Heroine, despite her cookie-cutter name, is anything but a mere model of the typical detective as created by the likes of Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler or their ilk. With her anti-quest to avoid becoming involved in the case of her murdered friend and her disheveled mental state as a result of her recent divorce we have a fully fleshed-out character and not just some stand-in for the role of “Detective.”

It’s things like the intense characterization of Our Heroine and Blaise Duplain along with the intense pace of the narrative that set it apart from its postmodern brethren. I could go on and on about this book. And one day I hope to do just that. I have barely scratched the surface of this incredible debut novel; it deserves a very close reading. But for now let me just give it my highest possible recommendation and leave it at that. Even if you don’t usually read weird experimental stuff, read this.

Arkansas by John Brandon (2008)

The Coen Brothers have made a nice career out of crafting stories about guys who are not nearly as smart as they think they are. Folks whose plans are not nearly as airtight as they need should be. Folks who don’t have nearly the power they think they do. In his debut novel Arkansas, John Brandon creates some characters who would fit perfectly in a Coen Brothers movie. Brandon’s tight story also reminds me of the whole Southern Gothic thing (Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy) and the fine crime novel style of Elmore Leonard. He also manages to throw in a few experimental flourishes that don’t seem to bog the narrative down but rather elucidate it.

Here we have Swin and Kyle, two men who back into jobs in the drug trade in the rural South. Their improbable rise to the lower echelons of narcotics distribution finds them working for a fake Ranger in an Arkansas State Park. They drive for a man named Bright who in turn gets packages from a mysterious woman who goes by the name of “Her.” The ultimate power in the small backwoods drug ring is held by Frog, yet another foolhardy type. We learn of Frog’s rise to the top of his game (which really isn’t all that far up, to tell the truth) in some interstitial chapters written in second person.

Brandon makes all of these characters seem real and you find yourself rooting for Swin and Kyle even though you get the feeling from pretty early on that their story will not end nicely. Then the bodies start piling up and what little center there is obviously cannot hold. The sympathy is ratcheted up when Swin gets his girlfriend pregnant and the three try to make a semblance of a normal life. Brandon makes Swin an intelligent (if not too clever) wannabe family man who is more than a little self-centered. He fears that the sisters he left in Kentucky will miss him so much that they will become strippers for lack of a decent male role model. The truth is they are doing just fine without Swin. His partner Kyle is the real criminal of the two. Kyle doesn’t pretend to be smart but he thinks he knows how to live outside the law. The two bring out the best and the worst in the each other. Mostly the worst.

Brandon does a fine job detailing the land of Razorback football and shady trailer parks. With a debut as strong as this, I expect great things from John Brandon. I highly recommend Arkansas. Read it now so you can impress your friends when the Coen Brothers version wins Best Picture.

Arkansas is published by McSweeney’s Books and can be bought here.

A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher (2001)

I wish I had written it. I could give a story higher praise but not much. A Trip to the Stars is an extremely engaging, well-researched story with a lively cast of unforgettable characters.

The plot spans the 15 years from 1965 to 1980 and travels from NewYork City to Las Vegas to Vietnam to a series of islands scattered all over the globe.The two main characters are Enzo Samax and his adopted aunt Mala Revell. (Who begin the book with the names Loren and Alma Revell, respectively.) Their story begins in a planetarium in New York City and will end in a Hawaiian planetarium – which should give a clue as to the importance of symmetry, coincidence, and all things stellar in this novel. While at the observatory 10 year old Loren is kidnapped, completely devastating his 20 year old aunt and sending her on a search that will end up changing her in surprising and fantastic ways.

In alternating chapters we are given first-person accounts of Loren and Alma and what happens to them over the next decade and a half. Alma of course searches frantically for Loren but the trail is stone cold. She barely knows Loren herself but found herself the boy’s only guardian after his adopted parents and then grandmother died. After coming to terms with the fruitlessness of her search and with a deep sense of guilt, she changes her name to Mala Revell, enlists in the Army as an x-ray technician and goes to Vietnam even though she has moral misgivings about the war itself. It is there that she meets and then loses the love of her life. She then dives deep into despair and tries to assuage her guilt and depression over losing two loved ones.She spirals into a life of alcohol and drugs while island-hopping around the South Pacific and even serves some time as a mind reader’s assistant.

Loren meanwhile finds out that his “kidnapper” is actually his uncle – his real uncle, a man by the name of Junius Samax. Samax tells the boy that his real name is Enzo and offers him a chance live in his uncle’s austere Hotel Canopus outside Las Vegas. Loren is told that a letter explaining what happened will be sent to his aunt – a letter which never gets delivered. Since Loren is precocious enough to realize that his young aunt cannot really afford to make a life for both of them he figures that living with his uncle would be the best idea for all concerned. Living in the Hotel Canopus Loren begins going by the name on his birth certificate, Enzo, and finds himself in a truly magical place peopled with exotic characters. Over the years he learns about his mother but of his father little or nothing is known.

The main theme of the novel is the search for lost people, places, or things. Enzo searches for his father, Mala searches first for Enzo then for her lover Geza Cassiel, and other characters search for such far-flung things as Atlantis, a lost moon pendant, vampires, and even the dark side of the moon. The novel’s symbology is primarily concerned with, as I mentioned earlier, astronomy and even delves into astrology and other supernatural things. Christopher has no qualms in making the numinous real. After separate spider bites both Enzo and Mala present with supernaturally heightened senses for a while. And Mala goes through a phase where she can share a person’s memories as that person is having them. Not to mention that coincidences occur with a precision that makes one think that the invisible hand of fate is directing events.

In fact the frequency of coincidences is my only real gripe with the novel. One or two occurrences at the end of the story stretched my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point in a deus ex machina kind of way. But honestly, these characters are so believable that I can almost assume they really do have some sort of latent supernatural power so that events seem to bend around them.

Even with that caveat I would definitely recommend this novel to anyone looking for a good read. I got emotionally involved with these people, even the ancillary characters and never once got tired of reading about them. And really, what more could you ask for in a novel?