How to Read Literature Like a Professor (20 page)

Are deformities and scars therefore always significant? Perhaps not. Perhaps sometimes a scar is simply a scar, a short leg or a hunchback merely that. But more often than not physical markings by their very nature call attention to themselves and signify some psychological or thematic point the writer wants to make. After all, it’s easier to introduce characters without imperfections. You give a guy a limp in Chapter 2, he can’t go sprinting after the train in Chapter 24. So if a writer brings up a physical problem or handicap or deficiency, he probably means something by it.

Now, go figure out Harry Potter’s scar.

H
ERE’S THE SETUP:
You have a man, a largely admirable man—capable, intelligent, strong, if slightly quick to anger—with a problem. Unbeknownst to him, he has committed the two most hideous crimes in the human catalog of evil. So unaware is he of his sins that he agrees to hunt down the criminal, promising all kinds of punishment. An information specialist, someone who can shed light on the search he has undertaken, who can show our hero the truth, is summoned. When the specialist arrives, he’s blind. Can’t see a thing in the world. As it turns out, though, he is able to see things in the spirit and divine world, can see the truth of what’s actually happened, truth to which our hero is utterly oblivious. The blind specialist gets into a heated argument with the protagonist, who
accuses the specialist of fraud, and is accused in turn of being the worst sort of malefactor, one who by the way is blind to what really matters.

What did this fellow do?

Nothing much. Just murder his father and marry his mother.

Two and a half millennia ago Sophocles wrote a little play called
Oedipus Rex
. Tiresias, the blind seer, does indeed know the whole truth about King Oedipus, sees everything, although that knowledge is so painful that he tries to hold it back, and when he does blurt it out, it is in a moment of such anger that no one believes him. Oedipus, meanwhile, who until the very end remains in the dark, makes constant reference to sight. He will “bring the matter to light,” will “look into things,” will “show everyone the truth.” Every time he says one of these things, the audience gasps and squirms in its seats, because we see what’s going on long before he does. When he finally sees the horror that is his life—children who are also siblings, a wife-mother driven to suicide, a curse like no other on him and his family—he exacts a terrible punishment indeed.

He blinds himself.

There are a lot of things that have to happen when a writer introduces a blind character into a story, and even more in a play. Every move, every statement by or about that character has to accommodate the lack of sight; every other character has to notice, to behave differently, if only in subtle ways. In other words, the author has created a minor constellation of difficulties for himself by introducing a blind character into the work, so something important must be at stake when blindness pops up in a story. Clearly the author wants to emphasize other levels of sight and blindness beyond the physical. Moreover,
such references are usually quite pervasive in a work where insight and blindness are at issue.

For example, first-time readers or viewers will observe that Tiresias is blind but sees the real story, and Oedipus is blind to the truth and eventually blinds himself. What they may miss, though, is the much more elaborate pattern running through the fabric of the play. Every scene, it seems, every ode by the chorus, contains references to seeing—who saw what, who failed to see, who is really blind—and images of light and darkness, which have everything to do with seeing or not seeing. More than any other work,
Oedipus Rex
taught me how to read literary blindness, taught me that as soon as we notice blindness and sight as thematic components of a work, more and more related images and phrases emerge in the text. The challenging thing about literature is finding answers, but equally important is recognizing what questions need to be asked, and if we pay attention, the text usually tells us.

I didn’t always know to look for the right questions—I grew into asking. Coming back to “blindness,” I distinctly remember the first time I read James Joyce’s little story “Araby.” The first line tells us that the street the young narrator lives on is “blind.” Hmm, I thought, that’s an odd expression. I promptly got hung up on what it meant in the literal sense (a blind alley in British/Irish English is a dead-end street, which has another set of connotations, some related and some not), and missed entirely what it “really” meant. I got most of the story, the boy watching the girl at every opportunity, even when the light is poor or he has the “blinds” (I’m not making this up) pulled almost all the way down; the boy blinded by love, then by vanity; the boy envisioning himself as a hero out of a romance; the boy going to the supposedly exotic bazaar, Araby, arriving late to find much of it already in darkness, registering it as the tawdry and antiromantic place that it is; and finally the boy,
nearly blinded by his own angry tears, seeing himself for the ridiculous creature he is. I think I had to read the story two more times before I got hooked into North Richmond Street being “blind.” The significance of that adjective isn’t immediately evident or relevant in itself. What it does, though, is set up a pattern of reference and suggestion as the young boy watches, hides, peeks, and gazes his way through a story that is alternately bathed in light and lost in shadow. Once we ask the right question—something like, “What does Joyce intend by calling the street blind?”—answers begin presenting themselves with considerable regularity. A truly great story or play, as “Araby” and
Oedipus Rex
are, makes demands on us as readers; in a sense it teaches us how to read it. We feel that there’s something more going on in the story—a richness, a resonance, a depth—than we picked up at first, so we return to it to find those elements that account for that sensation.

Periodically throughout this book, I have felt obliged to issue disclaimers. This is one of those times. What we have discussed is absolutely true: when literal blindness, sight, darkness, and light are introduced into a story, it is nearly always the case that figurative seeing and blindness are at work. Here’s the caveat: seeing and blindness are generally at issue in many works, even where there is no hint of blindness on the part of windows, alleys, horses, speculations, or persons.

If it’s there all the time, what’s the point of introducing it specifically into some stories?

Good question. I think it’s a matter of shading and subtlety—and their opposite. It’s a little like music, I suppose. Do you get all those musical jokes in Mozart and Haydn? Well, neither do I. The closest I came to classical music in my youth
was Procol Harum ripping off a Bach cantata for “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Eventually I learned a little, including the difference between Beethoven and “Roll Over Beethoven,” even if I prefer the latter, and between Miles Davis and John Coltrane at their peak, but I remain a musical numskull. Those subtle jokes for the musical initiates are lost on an ignoramus such as myself. So if you want me to get the point musically, you’d better be fairly obvious. I get Keith Emerson better than I get Bach. Any Bach. And some of the Bachs aren’t that subtle.

Same with literature. If writers want us—all of us—to notice something, they’d better put it out there where we’ll find it. Please observe that in most works where blindness is manifest, the writer brings it up pretty early. I call this “the Indiana Jones principle”:
if you want your audience to know something important about your character (or the work at large), introduce it early, before you need it.
Say we’re two-thirds of the way through
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and suddenly Indy, who has heretofore been afraid of absolutely nothing, is terrified of snakes. Do we buy that? Of course not. That’s why Steven Spielberg, the director, and Lawrence Kasdan, the writer, installed that snake in the airplane right in the first sequence, before the credits, so that when we get to the seven thousand snakes, we’ll know just how badly they frighten our hero.

The principle doesn’t always work, of course. In his absurdist dramatic masterpiece
Waiting for Godot
(1954) (about which, more later), Samuel Beckett waits until the second act to introduce a blind character. The first time Lucky and Pozzo show up to relieve the boredom of Didi and Gogo, the main characters, Pozzo is a cruel master who keeps Lucky on a leash. The second time, he’s blind and needs Lucky to escort him around, although he’s no less cruel for all that. Of course, what this
means is up for grabs, since Beckett is employing irony, and not very subtly. More commonly, though, the blind character will show up early. In Henry Green’s first novel,
Blindness
(1926), his schoolboy protagonist is blinded by a freak accident when a small boy throws a rock through a railway carriage window. John, the schoolboy, has just become aware of, has just begun to see, life’s possibilities, and at that moment in his life a rock and a thousand shards of glass come sailing in to rob him of that vision.

Back to Oedipus. Don’t feel too bad. When we meet him again, in
Oedipus at Colonus
, it’s many years later, and of course he’s suffered greatly, but that suffering has redeemed him in the eyes of the gods, and rather than being a blight on the human landscape, he becomes a favorite of the gods, who welcome him into the next world with a miraculous death. He has acquired a level of vision he never had when he was sighted. Blind as he is, he walks toward that death without assistance, as if guided by an unseen power.

O
NE OF MY VERY FAVORITE NOVELS
is a gem of narrative misdirection by Ford Madox Ford called
The Good Soldier
(1915). Its narrator is more fallible, more consistently clueless, than any narrator you’re ever likely to meet in all of fiction; at the same time he’s completely believable and therefore pathetic. He is part of a pair of couples who meet every year at a European spa. During all these years, and quite unbeknownst to him, his wife, Florence, and the husband of the other couple, Edward Ashburnham, carry on a passionate affair. It gets better: Edward’s wife, Leonora, knows all about it, and in fact may have stage-managed its beginning to keep the chronically straying Edward out of a more disastrous relationship. The suc
cess of this strategy must be questioned, since the relationship eventually manages to destroy, by my count, six lives. Only poor cuckolded old John Dowell remains ignorant. Consider the possibilities for irony. For an English professor, and for any avid reader, having a blithely ignorant (and only recently clued-in) husband narrate the saga of his wife’s longtime infidelity is about as good as it gets.

But I digress. Why, you ask, are they habitués of the spa? Florence and Edward are ill, of course.

Heart trouble. What else?

In literature there is no better, no more lyrical, no more perfectly metaphorical illness than heart disease. In real life, heart disease is none of the above; it’s frightening, sudden, shattering, exhausting, but not lyrical or metaphorical. When the novelist or playwright employs it, however, we don’t complain that he’s being unrealistic or insensitive.

Why? It’s fairly straightforward.

Aside from being the pump that keeps us alive, the heart is also, and has been since ancient times, the symbolic repository of emotion. In both
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
Homer has characters say of other characters that they have “a heart of iron,” iron being the newest and hardest metal known to men of the late Bronze Age. The meaning, if we allow for some slight variations of context, is tough-minded, resolute even to the point of hard-heartedness—in other words, just what we might mean by the same statements today. Sophocles uses the heart to mean the center of emotion within the body, as do Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Hallmark…all the great writers. Despite this nearly constant use over at least twenty-eight hundred years, the figure of the heart never overstays its welcome, because it always is welcome. Writers use it because we feel it. What shapes were your Valentine’s cards in when you were a kid? Or last year, for that matter? When we fall in love, we feel it in our hearts. When we lose a love, we feel
heartbroken. When overwhelmed by strong emotion, we feel our hearts are full to bursting.

Everybody knows this, everybody intuitively senses this. What, then, can the writer do with this knowledge? The writer can use heart ailments as a kind of shorthand for the character, which is probably what happens most often, or he can use it as a social metaphor. The afflicted character can have any number of problems for which heart disease provides a suitable emblem: bad love, loneliness, cruelty, pederasty, disloyalty, cowardice, lack of determination. Socially, it may stand for these matters on a larger scale, or for something seriously amiss at the heart of things.

We’re not just talking classic literature here. When Colin Dexter decides to kill off his recurrent detective Morse in
The Remorseful Day
(1999), he has a number of options. The chief inspector is a genius at solving crimes and crossword puzzles, but like all geniuses, he has flaws. Specifically, he drinks too much and remains a complete stranger to physical fitness, so much so that in novel after novel his Thames Valley Police superiors mention his excessive fondness for “the beer.” His liver and digestive system are seriously compromised, to the point where he is hospitalized for these problems in a previous Morse novel. In fact, he solves a century-old murder from his hospital bed in
The Wench Is Dead
(1989). His major problem, though, is loneliness. Morse has spectacularly bad luck with his women; several wind up as either corpses or culprits in his various adventures, while others just don’t work out. Sometimes he’s too needy, other times too unbending, but time after time he loses out. So when the time comes for him to collapse amid the spires of his beloved Oxford University, Dexter gives him a heart attack.

Why?

We’re into the realm of speculation here, but this is how it strikes me. To have Morse succumb to cirrhosis of the liver
turns the whole thing into a straightforward piece of moralizing: see, we told you drinking too much is bad for you. Morse’s drinking would go from being a quaint idiosyncrasy to something from one of those old school-guidance films, and that is not what Dexter wants. Of course excessive drinking is bad for you—excessive anything, including irony, is bad for you—but that’s not the point. But with a heart attack, the connection to an overfondness for drink is still there if that’s what some readers want to see, but now the ailment points not toward his behavior but toward the pain and suffering, the loneliness and regret, of his sad-sack love life, that may well be causing the behavior. The emphasis is on his humanity, not his misdeeds. And authors, as a rule, are chiefly interested in their characters’ humanity.

Even when the humanity isn’t very humane, or the heart ailment a disease. Nathaniel Hawthorne has a great short story called “The Man of Adamant” (1837). As with a number of his characters, the man of the title is a committed misanthrope, absolutely convinced that everyone else is a sinner. So he moves into a cave to avoid all human contact. Does it sound like a “heart” problem to you? Of course it does. Now the limestone cave he chooses has water, a little drip of water, that’s just stiff with calcium. And moment by moment, year by year, the water in that cave seeps its way into his body, so that at the end of the story he turns to stone, or not him entirely, just his heart. The man whose heart was figurative stone at the outset has his heart turn to literal stone at the end. It’s perfect.

Or take the case of Joseph Conrad’s
Lord Jim
. Early in the novel, Jim’s courage has failed him at a crucial moment. His strength of heart, both in terms of bravery and of forming serious attachments, is in question throughout the narrative, at least in his own mind, and at the end he misjudges an enemy and his miscalculation causes the death of his best friend, who happens to be the son of the local chieftain. Jim has promised
this leader, Doramin, that if his plan results in the death of any of his people, Jim will forfeit his own life. When it does, he walks with great calm to Doramin, who shoots him through the chest; Jim glances proudly at the assembled crowd—See, I am both brave and true to my word—and falls dead. Conrad doesn’t perform a postmortem, but there is one and only one place in the chest where a shot results in instantaneous death, and we know where that place is. The very next comment by Marlow, the narrator, is that Jim was “inscrutable at heart.” The novel’s all about heart, really, heart in all its senses. Jim’s end, then, like the Adamantine Man’s, is perfectly apt. A man who in life has put so much stock in “heart”—in loyalty and trust, in courage and fidelity, in having a true heart—can only die by a blow to the heart. Unlike Hawthorne’s character’s demise, though, Jim’s is also heartbreaking—to the woman who is his de facto wife, to old Stein, the trader who sent him in-country, and to readers, who come to hope for something heroic and uplifting, something suitably romantic, for the incorrigibly romantic Jim. Conrad knows better, though: it’s tragedy, not epic, as he proves by that shot in the heart.

More commonly, though, heart trouble takes the form of heart disease. Vladimir Nabokov created one of the nastiest villains in modern literature in
Lolita
’s Humbert Humbert. His self-absorption and obsession lead him to cruelty, statutory rape, murder, and the destruction of several lives. His darling Dolores, the Lolita of the title, can never lead a psychologically or spiritually whole adult life. Of her two seducers, Clare Quilty is dead and Humbert is in jail, where he dies, somewhat unexpectedly, of heart failure. Throughout the whole novel he’s had a defective heart in the figurative sense, so how else could he die? He may or may not need to die, but if he does buy the farm, there’s only one death symbolically appropriate to his situation. Nobody had to tell that to Nabokov.

As a practical matter, then, we readers can play this two ways. If heart trouble shows up in a novel or play, we start looking for its signification, and we usually don’t have to hunt too hard. The other way around: if we see that characters have difficulties of the heart, we won’t be too surprised when emotional trouble becomes the physical ailment and the cardiac episode appears.

Now, about that irony. Remember Florence and Edward, the wayward spouses with heart trouble? Just what, you ask, is wrong with their hearts? Not a thing in the world. Physically, that is. Faithlessness, selfishness, cruelty—those things are wrong, and ultimately those things kill them. But physically, their hearts are completely sound. So why did I say earlier they suffer from heart disease? Haven’t I just violated the principle of this chapter? Not really. Their
choice
of illness is quite telling: each of them elects to employ a fragile heart as a device to deceive the respective spouse, to be able to construct an elaborate personal fiction based on heart disease, to announce to the world that he or she suffers from a “bad heart.” And in each case the lie is, on another level, absolutely true. As I said earlier, it doesn’t get better than that.