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…

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?

The 2 Questions and “Puss in Boots”

Much of this post is cut and pasted from an old myspace blog. Some of you (Magggie) may recall it.

My creative writing teacher Dennis Covington once told me that there are two important questions that all good stories ask. Those two questions are Who is the Father? and Who owns the land? “Puss in Boots” (PiB) fits into this mold quite nicely.

If you’ve never heard me wax deconstructively re: the 2 questions here’s the idea in a nutshell:

We can always know who our mother is. It’s always possible to know with 100% certainty which woman birth to you. However, you can never know with the same kind of certainty who your father is. All you have to go by is the word of your mother. This brings up all sorts of neat little existential questions that literature (at least good literature) can try to answer.

And land is the only thing that we can really own. Having a place to make a home is the only thing of real substance that one generation can pass on the next. Everything else is temporary.

So we come to PiB. The father is dead. He has dispersed his land among all of his children. Except you. What you get is seemingly worthless. One way of looking at PiB (at least the first part) is as a quest to find out what your father really thought about you. Of course since he’s dead no answer is going to go beyond speculation. Or is it? What if the man had a hidden plan to give you everything – all you had to do was prove to everybody else what he had an inkling of – namely that you’re worth the whole kit and kaboodle. The plan would have to be hidden because he knew that your other siblings would tamper with the will anyway and see to it that you received nothing (or effectively so in any case). Now you have to use your intelligence, guile, faith in humanity, compassion, and keen sense of what a person is really worth (oh, and the cat) in a quest to win back what is rightfully yours.

At least that’s where I’d like to take the idea.