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As this week seemed to be Wilde-orientated, I decided to read his story “The Sphinx without a Secret”. I had heard a lot about it and saw it reviewed recently (here and here), but had never got around to read it. Now, it’s done!
I enjoyed this story by Oscar Wilde. It is a story filled with suspense and mystery, yet, there seems to be nothing mysterious to it.
In a few words, the narrator meets his old friend, Lord Murchinson, who, he tells us, “would be the best of fellows, if he did not always speak the truth”. The narrator notices the anxious look of Murchinson and suspects that some woman is involved. He is right and soon Murchinson tells us the story of Lady Alroy, whose face on the photo is the one of “someone with a secret”.
As Murchinson recounts his encounter with Lady Alroy, he tells us that he was excited by her air of mystery. As he begins a relationship with her, he indeed believes that she is hiding a secret from him.
The whole story revolves around this idea of mystery and secret. The reader, like the narrator, gets worked up; we, too, want to know the secret. However, we never learn it and although our narrator thinks that Lady Alroy is “a sphinx without a secret”, we, like Lord Murchinson, wonder…
It is a short and enjoyable story. It is well crafted; Wilde builds the whole story around this idea of mystery and, if you pay attention, there are many clues that draw attention to secrecy, mystery and truth. He is successful in getting us to expect a big revelation and leaves our thirst for discovery unsatisfied. However, the story is satisfying as it is a pleasure to read. Enjoy!
Short Story Monday is hosted by John at The Book Mine Set.
This week, I decided to linger a little longer in Nova Scotia and read two stories set there at the beginning of the 20th century.
“My Grandfather’s House” is an extract from Charles Ritchie’s memoir with the same name. Although collected in The Faber Book of Contemporary Canadian Short Stories, which is edited by Michael Ondaatje, it is not a short story per se. The subtitle of Ritchie’s memoir is “Scenes of Childhood and Youth”. Indeed, except for its brevity, I did not find that this piece read as a short story. However, the conventions of the short story can be quite reductive and too exclusive and one should be able to step outside of these, especially when we consider the new forms contemporary short stories might adopt.
This “scene of childhood” is not actually a scene, but multiple scenes and memories. However, we can see how they all lead to the final scene and the narrator’s realisation of the impact is, now dead, grandfather had on his childhood.
The narrator recounts some of his visits to his grandfather’s house in Nova Scotia in the early 1910s. He gives us an evocative description of the street where the house stood, tells us about afternoons spent with his grandfather and about the absence left by the death of his grandmother. Each thought leads to another one and we are introduced to a few characters who populated his childhood, as well as what it meant to be a colonial at the turn of the century in Nova Scotia.
To be honest, this story did not do much for me. I cannot say I disliked it, but it left me indifferent. Maybe you need to read the whole book or be more familiar with the Nova Scotian context to appreciate it better? It could also be that I was not in the right frame of mind. There is one thing I keep noticing when reading stories or childhood accounts about Nova Scotia though: how often drinking and attitudes to drink are mentioned (the Gaelic heritage?).
Following this story in the collection is Hugh MacLennan’s recording of the Halifax explosion. Again, this is not a short story per se, but an extract of his book Barometer Rising (I then had a glance at Ondaatje’s introduction and he explains why he selected some pieces that were not really short story; because he deemed them relevant to give a more complete picture of the Canadian culture).
This piece takes the form of a literary documentary. MacLennan was actually in Halifax during the explosion in 1917 and would have thus been a first-hand witness. In this piece, he sets to explain how the explosion happened. The narrative is divided into three parts, each preceded by the time. The piece begins by focusing on the crew of the Mont Blanc before the collision; it then describes how the collision and explosion happened; finally, it reports the impact of the explosion: the earthquake, the air-concussion and the tidal wave created by the explosion.
I think this piece is informative, but also well-written. One can feel the tension growing as we get closer to the explosion and can judge the dramatic consequences it had. I was glad to read this documentary piece as it gave me some context for McKay’s The Birth House, as it is one of the historical backgrounds for her novel.
Short Story Monday is hosted by John at The Book Mine Set.
“Salomey was a dancer, she did the hootchie kootch, And when she did the hoochie kootch, she didn’t wear very mooch“ (skipping rhyme quoted in Negotiating with the Dead by Margaret Atwood).
Who is Salomé?
I am not well versed in biblical studies, but, from what I have gathered, Salomé was the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod. It seems that on the occasion of Herod’s birthday, she danced for him and asked, to her mother’s request, the head of John the Baptist. John the Baptist, who had announced Jesus’s coming, had been made prisoner by Herod because he had denounced his unlawful marriage to Herodias. She thus stands as a Christian warning against dancing and female seduction.
This weekend, I read Salomé by Oscar Wilde (you can easily find an online version). It is a short play, which was first written in French in 1891. His version seems faithful to the original story of Salomé but emphasises even more Salomé’s seductiveness.
Illustrations and photos for Wilde's Salomé (Tiger Books)
During the banquet given by Herod, the Young Syrian admires Salomé, while his friend is admiring the moon, which is compared to a woman. The Young Syrian keeps looking at Salomé despite the warnings of his friend: “You must not look at her… Something terrible may happen.” Both also notice how Herod is looking at Salomé. Salomé then leaves the banquet because she cannot stand her stepfather looking at her constantly and joins them. When she hears the voice of the prophet, Jokanaan, she asks to see him. The two friends refuse. However, Salomé, aware of her seductive power on the Young Syrian, convinces him. She immediately falls in love with Jokanaan. She is fickle in her tastes. She first admires his body, but ,after his rejection of her because she is the “daughter of adultery”, she admires his hair and finally his mouth, which she wants to kiss: “Let me kiss thy mouth.” This last remark brings the Young Syrian to kill himself.
Beardsley's illustration for Wilde's Salomé (Tiger Books)
When Herod and his wife come out, Herodias keeps asking him to stop looking at her daughter. Not paying attention, Herod begs Salomé to dance for him, offering her whatever she desires in exchange. Salomé asks for Jokanaan’s head to the satisfaction of her mother, who felt insulted by Jokanaan’s words. Salomé, still filled with desire for Jokanaan, kisses his head. The play ends as Herod orders to have Salomé killed.
The way I see this play is as a critique of women’s vanity, fickleness and power of seduction. However, there are some other meanings to it. One could see it as a comment on religion, Judaism in particular, as the Jews keep having ridiculous arguments and never seem to agree with each others.
I do not find this play as enjoyable as Wilde’s other works. I think it is not as entertaining and witty, although I smiled on a few occasions. Maybe more research on it could help me to appreciate it?
I find Margaret Atwood’s take on Salomé in The Tent much more sarcastic and entertaining. Atwood uses the story of Salomé and sets it up in our modern world. The tone is that of gossip and the story becomes a kind of tv drama.
Atwood's own illustration for "Salomé Was a Dancer" (The Tent, 50)
In this little story entitled “Salomé Was a Dancer”, the narrator tells us how Salomé seduced her Religious Studies teacher because he gave her a bad mark. According to the narrator, this is not surprising “with a mother like hers . . . Divorced, remarried, bracelets all up her arms and fake eyelashes out to here, and pushy as hell.” Salomé started to do beauty contests and dance shows at an early age, as in the school play, when “Seven layers of cheesecloth was all she wore.” Salomé also has a stepfather, a banker, who had “promised her a Porsche when she turned sixteen.”
Salomé got caught with her teacher, there was a scandal, but the narrator suggests that the banker pulled a few strings and now the teacher has “grown a beard, looks like Jesus, crazy as a bedbug. Lost his head completely.” Atwood then gives an ending descent of this modern version of the depraved woman and by doing so expands on Wilde’s own version.
Atwood says that “strong myths never die”. Indeed, in this modern version she revives the myth of Salomé and turns it into a satire of pop culture and our avidity for tv drama.
Although it seems that the story of Salomé occupies only a small part in the New Testament, she was not even named, the myth of the femme fatale she created has certainly taken bigger proportions.
You can also read Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Salomé”, another modern take on the story. There is also a short story by Flaubert called “Salomé”; I must try to dig it up.
This essay is my first introduction to Adrienne Rich, a writer I have wanted to read for a long time. It was written in 1971 for a conference and later published in College English 34.1 in 1972 (this is the version I am reviewing) and in Rich’s collection On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. There is also a revised version of this essay online.
What I know about Rich is very little. Margaret Atwood describes her as a proto-feminist and, from reading this essay, I can see why. Rich is one of these women who successfully managed to be both a writer and a woman in a society (the 50s) where the norm for a woman was still to change nappies and cook your husband’s meal.
In this essay, she discusses how she managed to find her female voice. She begins her essay by considering the exhilaration of living in a period of “awakening consciousness”. This, she believes, can only come out of knowledge of the male-dominated structure of society and of literature. She deplores the fact that too many women have adopted a masculine style of writing in order to be accepted as writers, men being the judging audience. She argues that in order to find their own voice, women need to be aware of the myth of the woman as represented in past literature and need to then subvert these representations, what she calls “re-vision”.
“Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.”
It is therefore through this act of revision that women can affirm their place in society, not as submissive wives and muses for the male writer, but as female human beings able to express their own feelings and passion. Women writers should not follow the tradition set by male writers, but should become aware of it, subvert it and create their own.
“We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us”
After discussing this need for re-vision, Rich takes as an example her own writing and explains the various steps she has taken toward finding her own voice. She describes her own situation as a wife and mother in the 1950s and how difficult it was to write at the beginning.
“But in those earlier years I always felt the conflict as a failure of love in myself. I had thought I was choosing a full life: the life available to most men, in which sexuality, work, and parenthood could coexist. But I felt, at 29, guilt toward the people closest to me, and guilty toward my own being.”
However, she explains that it was not until she decided to adopt her own style and be more experimental that she managed to find her voice. She quotes a few of her poems and mentions others, some of which are reproduced at the end of the essay and illustrate the evolution of her poetics, such as her move from using the pronoun “she” to “I”.
“You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.”
At the end of her essay, she also notes the effect this “awakening consciousness” might have on men. As women find their voices, men lose their muses.
“One thing I am sure of: just as woman is becoming her own midwife, creating herself anew, so man will have to learn to gestate and give birth to his own subjectivity – something he has often wanted woman to do for him.”
Indeed, time has shown that men have felt threatened by women’s affirmation of themselves as subjects rather than objects, as Robert Bly’s Iron John and the crisis of masculinity debate have highlighted.
I think Rich’s essay is an important text in the history of women writers. It clearly emphasises the conflict in which many women found themselves as they were writing in a patriarchal society. It also foregrounds the need for subversion of the masculine conventions of writing and the need to be experimental in order to find a voice of their own. A technique many women writers have since used.
“We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
This week, I went to see Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde, which was produced by the Everyman Theatre Company with Michael Twomey directing. It was an enjoyable play.
The only work by Wilde I am familiar with is The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Lady Windermere’s Fan is set in the same 19th-century London society and it was great to see it in action. Wilde’s play can be seen as a critique of this society who is highly concerned with class and keeping up the appearances and whose favourite pastime is gossip.
“although they never talk scandal, they – well, of course - they remark on it to everyone”
Everybody in London assumes that Lord Windermere is having an affair with Mrs Erlynne, except his own wife. On her birthday, the affair is revealed to her. Despite her disbelief, Lady Windermere is forced to face this fact when she discovers that her husband has given large sums of money to Mrs Erlynne. As Lord Windermere invites Mrs Erlynne to Lady Windermere’s birthday party, Lady Windermere decides to run away with Lord Darlington, her fervent admirer. However, she is stopped by Mrs Erlynne, whose past is a secret Lord Windermere wants to hide from his wife. Although Lady Windermere never learns this secret, she is convinced by Mrs Erlynne of her husband’s innocence. Most importantly, she discovers that the world is not divided between good and bad people.
Although the beginning was a bit slow, everything contributed to a plot that was intriguing. There were many twists and not a minute of boredom. Many moments in the play were hilarious, such as when the Duchess (Ronnie O’Shaughnessy) reveals the affair to Lady Windermere (Rose Donovan) and begins rambling about men:
“And they never grow any better. Men become old, but they never become good.”
One of my favourite moments was in act three, when the five men wittingly discuss women and their society. It was full of repartee and humour and was particularly well acted.
“Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now, I never moralise. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain. There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience. And most women know it, I’m glad to say.”
The play reflects on issues such as love and marriage, good and bad, vanity and pleasure. Lady Windermere, who is the epitome of innocence at the beginning of the play, discovers that you cannot divide the world between good and bad people, that there is a bit of both in each of us.
I thought the acting was good. Vanessa Hyde was particularly impressive in the role of Mrs Erlynne. I also enjoyed the performance of Caroline Murphy. She plays a minor role as Lady Agatha and does not speak many lines, but her attitude as the Duchess’ docile daughter was well enacted.
Overall, it was an entertaining evening.
For this second week of my tour of Canada through short stories, I was in Nova Scotia reading “The Closing Down of the Summer” by Alistair MacLeod.
The first thing I notice about reading ”The Closing Down of Summer” is the pace. I always read short stories quite slowly, trying to pay attention to the words. With this story, I found that even if I had wanted to read it fast, I could not have. It was a bit like reading poetry; the prose had rhythm.
Secondly, I find that it is a story in the tradition of Frank O’Connor. I am not saying that MacLeod deliberately follows O’Connor, but O’Connor’s description of the short story as the expression of submerged populations, as the lonely voice, is an appropriate description for this story.
The story is told in the first-person by a miner. The summer is coming to its end; he and his fellow workers are enjoying the last bit of the sun before going back shaft mining. This is the occasion for the narrator to reminisce on past events, to consider his life and to ponder the mining tradition.
I find the title quite significant: it is the “closing down” and not “the end” of summer. I think it brings our attention to this particular trade that is shaft mining, a trade that has been followed generation after generation. However, the narrator makes us aware of the changes brought by modernity and the fact that none of his children will follow his steps. It is the end of a tradition. For these miners, the end of the summer means going back to work, but also facing death; each summer could be their last summer and the narrator remembers that October day when he buried his brother. Like the fish in the sea taken by those “huge factory fleets from Russia, Spain and Portugal”, their number is diminishing.
“And we have gathered our working clothes, which when worn continents hence will make us loom even larger than we are in actual life. As if we are Greek actors or mastodons of an earlier time. Soon to be replaced or else perhaps to be extinct.”
There is a feeling of loneliness in this story. Those miners are alienated. They live in tradition, cut off from their families, who represent modernity. However, there is still hope that traditions do not become radically erased as they remember those gaelic songs, “so constant and unchanging”, from their youth and the narrator can still remember those verses from the 15th century he read when he was a student.
A few weeks ago, when the five contenders were announced, I was telling about my good intentions to read the four books I had not already read. I fail! When I went online to buy them, I realised quickly that I would not be able to buy them all. They are not particularly expensive books, but my budget is tight, very tight. Then, I also realised that there were other books I would rather buy with this money. I thus had to be selective.
I had already read Unless by Carol Shields and still have it on my shelves, so no problem there.
I looked forward to reading Essex County by Jeff Lemire, but, although the story is appealing, I had a look at the graphics and did not find them appealing. I decided not to get it.
I was curious about The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis and bought this one. I’ll start reading it tonight.
I was not drawn to The Birth House by Amy McKay, but was told I would enjoy it and I did! I finished it late last night and will review it during the week.
I was not drawn to The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou either and could not get myself to buy it.
I was determined to read each of the five contenders so I could follow the debate, but this is simply not to happen. Still, three out of five is better than nothing. There are so many other Canadian books I want to read that I thought it would be a bit silly to follow this list just because it is Canada Reads. I will still have an idea of what is going on during the debate, won’t I?
The debates will start on the 7th of February an you can follow them on Canada Reads site, where you can also get plenty of information about the five contenders, their authors and their defenders.
Oh! and if you want to read a good argument for Canadian Literature, go to see what Steph @Bella’s Bookshelves has to say on the subject.
First of all, yay! I have figured out how to have italics in a title!
Now, the book. Escaping from the Prison-House of Language and Digging for Meanings in Texts among Texts: Metafiction and Intertextuality in Margaret Atwood’s Novels Lady Oracle and The Blind Assassin by Andrea Strolz does what it says in the title: it looks at metafiction and intertextuality in these two novels. If the jargon scares you, do not worry: Strolz takes you step by step into the theory of metafiction and intertextuality. The first two chapters introduce the reader to these theories, the third and fourth chapters look at metafiction and intertextuality in Atwood’s work in general and the last two chapter focus on how they work in each novel.
It is an interesting book, which, for those familiar with these theories, will refresh the concepts and show how they apply to Atwood’s work. However, I did not find Strolz’s thesis revolutionary. For me, it was like revising some notes. Strolz has some good insights, but I think the structure of her book does not enhance her ideas. It is too fragmented, like a series of bullet points.
Will I use this book again? Yes, as some kind of catalogue of ideas and references, particularly regarding intertexts in Atwood’s work. Strolz has done her research: she has compiled nice summaries about each idea and her references are informative.
Who would I recommend this book to? People who enjoy Atwood but are not particularly familiar with the concepts of intertextuality and metafiction. Strolz’s theoretical explanations are clear and she then shows you how they work in the two novels. I think it would make a perfect textbook for undergraduate students.
Just to let you know that I am still posting about my trip to Canada and you can view those posts in the archives from June 2010.
It’s great, each time I write a post, it brings me back there!
New post on Wards Island.
The Literary Blog Hop is a fortnightly event held at The Blue Bookcase prompting book bloggers to answer a question.
Discuss a work of literary merit that you hated when you were made to read it in school or university? Why did you dislike it?
This question brought me a bit of a surprise: I can’t remember most of the books I studied in school!
I remember very clearly the three books I studied one year and that is because the teacher was the best I ever had. The three books we studied that year were: Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, Le Pigeon by Patrick Suskind and La Fée Carabine by Daniel Pennac. I loved La Fée Carabine. I liked Notre-Dame de Paris; it was a difficult read, but worth it, and our teacher was intelligent enough to beg us to skip the third chapter, which is a detailed description of the cathedral. I did not like Le Pigeon, simply because I found it boring; however, I remember it created a good discussion in the classroom. Those books are different and I remember our teacher made us think about them and discuss them, rather than just providing us with her analysis. If all my teachers had been like her, I would have had a much better experience of literary studies at school.
As for the other years, my memories have faded. Is it because I did not like the books and blocked them out? I have a vague memory of reading Manon Lescaut by l’Abbé Prévost and Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal. If I remember well, my feelings were mixed about both. I also remember studying Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire. I like reading it, but was never really good at analysing poems. Unfortunately, the text I had to present at my French oral for the baccalauréat was one of them: “A une passante”. It was a disaster and I left the room in tears.
My memories of university reads (in France) are much more vivid and generally good. I loved discovering all those new books and I guess the way of teaching was really different. This is how I discovered Austen’s Emma, Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Plath’s The Bell Jar (what a revelation it was!). Of course, these were a bit difficult to read at first as English was not my first language, but I easily got into the stories.
Now, Shakespeare was a different matter altogether! The first year I read two of his plays (Macbeth and ?), I did not like them at all. In fact, I hated them. The language was difficult and I could not connect with the stories. These plays meant nothing to me. I failed the module. Second year, I had a different lecturer and she put a whole new perspective onto Shakespeare. She explained the context and helped us to read and analyse the plays. That year, we studied Macbeth and Richard III, and I really enjoyed them. I will always be thankful to this lecturer. I have actually had the occasion to talk to her again lately and told her the impact she had on my literary studies.
