***THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR MULTIPLE TEXTS***
And yet, in the final dress rehearsal, their director notes '"You were all putting your hearts into your work for the first time"' ('allowing his moist lower lip to curl out in a grimace of triumph and pride', the noun 'grimace' conveying his reticence to concede this) and this simplest admission of success opens the floodgates for these actors to wallow in what they've done - a reader would be excused for thinking this am-dram success equal to the realisation of the American Dream itself, as the actors 'cheered and laughed and shook hands and kissed one another' - finally, their 'static, shapeless, inhumanly heavy weight' seems to have got off the ground. You could even consider the play itself allegorical of the American Dream, although likening the director, 'a funny little man', to the 5 ft 10" Eisenhower is a little far-fetched.
But when it comes to the crunch, the play malfunctions - and why shouldn't it? These actors only succeed when they 'had forgotten to be afraid', not through any confidence or even effort on their part, and so, despite Yates encouraging empathy for these people who had finally seen the successful culmination of their ambitions, a reader can only question why a 'virus of calamity, dormant and threatening all these weeks, had erupted'. If the early chapters of Revolutionary Road are allegorical of the changing society of America, then this represents how the speed of progression was prone to leaving people behind. Just as the lazy couldn't earn enough to keep up with rapidly developing consumer culture, these unsuitable and overambitious actors can't match their ambition in practice - and as readers, we feel their retribution as the tangible 'warmth of humiliation rising in [April Wheeler's] face and neck'. United until the end, the company's 'one thought now... was to put the whole sorry business behind them'. The curtain goes up, promising plaudits for its players, but when it goes down, after only an agonising hour or so, it's 'an act of mercy'. And we can't help but feel they deserve it.
This warning against people striving for the unattainable, a perfect metaphor for the American Dream and how it devolved from ideals of equality and sufficiency into bland mass-market consumerism, continues as we finally hone in on one individual - the leading lady, April, who initially excites 'hopeful nudges and whispers' and 'stately nods of pride' from an enthusiastic audience, but whose attempt at the big time crumbles around her as the whole charade wears on. Frank Wheeler 'looked more like her suitor than her husband' ('no photograph had ever quite achieved' the face he sees in the mirror), and his 'mental projection' of triumphant scenes dissolves into nothing when he comprehends the dichotomy between the dream and the reality - his wife is not 'a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing', but instead is 'the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny'. This is all sounding pretty allegorical, guys!
Revolutionary Road is alive with the feeling of this new emerging society. You can feel it banging on the doors of the theatre, demanding to be let in - savage, animal. But unwanted - the houses are 'weightless and impermanent, as foolishly misplaced as a great many bright new toys that had been left outdoors overnight', the automobiles are 'unnecessarily wide and gleaming in the colours of candy and ice cream, seeming to wince at each splatter of mud' until they get onto Route Twelve, 'a long bright valley of coloured plastic and plate glass and stainless steel - KING KONE, MOBILGAS, SHOPORAMA, EAT'. Yates illustrates the choking nature of the consumerist American Dream by recounting the perversion of the natural it has effected, throwing semantic fields of artifice and enterprise into the ring to suggest the decay of society into something devoid of personality or charm. Tissues are no longer tissues - the actors are 'blotting at their noses with Kleenex' - in this world of 'rumbling pink billows of exhaust' - and it affects the play's protagonists who seem to be on the receiving end: after the play, the audience spill out into the open, 'where the black sky went up and up forever and there were hundreds of thousands of stars'. Yates is encapsulating the idea that the American Dream has been realised in a shallow and self-obsessed way compared to the beautiful ignored world that was here before, but he's also depicting April's shocking realisation that she isn't going to achieve her dream - she is one of 'hundreds of thousands of stars', a starlet who is victim to this commercialised world, somebody who dared to dream too hard, and doesn't like the harsh outcome.
The action is jumpstarted when Barry feels 'pain such as he had never experienced' which '[slices] through his brain like a demolition ball... his skull was awash with fire and blood'. Succumbing to an aneurysm outside the restaurant, Barry, through dying, vacates a seat on the local council, which sparks the plot. Before any real events, however, Rowling rapidly and effectively populates Pagford with a cast whose multifarious natures are revealed by their reactions to the death.
First there are Miles and Sam, the couple who were first on the scene. To them, as to a few others in the novel, the death is an opportunity for self-aggrandisement, attention, even the sadistic thrill of spreading the news. 'Feathery little ripples of excitement... [tickle] Miles' insides at the thought of delivering the news to his father' and, not wanting to have been beaten to it, he rings his father earlier than he'd planned to, relishing the reaction - because this couple is motivated by status, appearances and popularity. Sam's 'fading natural tan' can be topped up with Self-Sun, as she drinks 'instant coffee and synthetic coconut' - beyond this, Sam has been known, in the past, to draw attention to Miles' fake telephone voice and, whilst Miles pretended to laugh, 'there had been a row, last time, in the car going home'. This shallowness directs their reactions to the death of a friend: to them, it is a story to be elegantly constructed (indeed, Sam is portrayed as 'mentally refining the story she planned to tell her assistant'). Miles announces '"Fairbrother's dead"' as if in a punchy Hollywood blockbuster, drawing attention to details such as 'the ambulance', 'the hospital' and 'the body', bigging up his role as if he is an authority on the deceased, despite the couple only being mentioned as 'a husband and wife' in the previous chapter. When Howard doesn't seem as bothered as Miles would hope, there is 'a strange sense of anti-climax' in the kitchen - but where Miles' narrative falls down is in the actual details. He can only attribute the cause of Barry's death to '"something in his brain, they think"' - he hasn't made an effort to find out anything further than this about somebody who is ostensibly his friend, because what do fiddly little details matter in his great fiction?
Once the Price family's reactions to the death are divulged, it becomes clear that Rowling has established another of her themes - class. The deliberate repetitive structure (conveying the news to the family, hearing their reactions) allows the disparity between the reactions to be clearly observed - Ruth Price gives Barry's first and second names when announcing his death to her family and attributes his death to '"an aneurysm, they think"'. The loss of a family man encourages her motherly instinct to kick in, berating her son Paul for his hair being '"completely matted at the back"'. This family is much more genuine, based on real emotions rather than fakeness, no matter how visceral or unpleasant - and indeed, the Prices are the flipside to Miles and Sam, each fully succumbing to their emotions. There is Ruth, hopelessly devoted to her husband, desperate for 'a few more minutes' with him before he goes to work; the son Andrew's mind is a battlefield of 'furious contempt' for his 'self-satisfied fucker' father - Rowling overloads the prose with expletives to convey that common teenage sense of the fury that results from being unable to express your original fury for your parents. Continuing her perceptive connection with the teenage mind, Rowling creates one of the most vivid characters in Andrew, who 'dreamed of London and of a life that mattered', and is given his only hope in the world by the new arrival on the school bus - cratylically (aptly), her name is Gaia, because she is his entire world; when he enjoys 'indulging in a little fantasy in which his father dropped dead' and disparages Barry's daughter for her 'distasteful tendency to shadow his movements for a while' after they 'got off' at a school disco, Gaia is the one individual whom he passionately does want to be close to. Finally, there is the troglodytic father Simon, whose family relationships have clearly broken down in a more aggressive way than Barry and Mary's - he laments the way his 'lazy little shit' of a son 'fucked up his mocks', entreats 'you want fags, you buy 'em' and relishes 'the sight of Andrew's hanging head'. Very vividly, Rowling has created a father character who just stays within the bounds of credibility, whom the reader can imagine claiming that he only says what he says for his son's own good. Simon takes 'stamping steps' towards his petrified wife and bangs his chest like an ape - whilst this is an excessively primitive show of emotion, it's emotion nonetheless, drawing a dividing line between the animated domestic life of the Prices and the tedious artifice of Miles and Sam; their only shared factor is that they're both eating toast when they learn of the news.
Rowling continues the pattern, cycling through the personalities of the story and emphasising their different backgrounds - from Kay, with her 'cheap pine bed' and 'carpetless stairs' and to whom 'Barry Fairbrother was no more than a name' - to Howard, who shares his son Miles's sadistic pleasure in stringing out the telling of the news, to his wife Shirley, who sleeps in a single bed in the same room as Howard's double, yet they are nonetheless 'as one in all their friendships and enmities'; she exhibits possibly the most callous reaction to the shocking news, 'savouring' it with 'avid interest and feverish speculation'. Throughout this, two key themes emerge: appearances and class. 'The Fairbrothers had been the most devoted couple [Kay's boyfriend Gavin] knew' (yet Rowling's use of dramatic irony allows the reader to spot this as an intriguing false appearance) and although student Stuart Wall's 'trenchant humour, detachment and poise set him apart', it was his size that made him 'the most nicknamed boy in school', and he is embarrassed at having a 'frumpy, overweight guidance teacher as a mother'. The idea of appearances and perceptions being essential to human interaction dovetails into the theme of class; Rowling weaves a tapestry of working-class (Andrew 'stow[s] the rest [of his cigarette] back in the packet' for later) and upper-class characters, allowing for a delicious atmosphere of conflict waiting to explode - only a fool would assume that Barry's death (and the vacancy of his council seat) won't be the key that opens the door. Shirley seems out for blood from the off, satisifed that the 'arrogance' of 'the Fairbrothers of the world', with their 'university education', 'had received a nasty blow today'.
In one of the earlier chapters' quieter moments, Miles remembers 'watching Mary emerge from the room where Barry lay, all futile aids to life removed' - whilst this more obviously refers to the unsuccessful attempts to resuscitate Barry, it also serves to describe Mary, uncertain of how to live her life post-husband - this marital devotion is shared by Shirley, to whom 'Howard's presence on earth was... a given, like sunlight and oxygen', and of course, Gaia is all Andrew has to enjoy about life at this point. So far, The Casual Vacancy is prioritising characterisation over action (after the initial big bang which begun the story), but in typical enchanting Rowling fashion, it's effective, largely subtle, clever character work which lays the foundations for conflict, establishes tension, designates outsiders and warriors and victims, and divulges further details about the world of this narrative - a world that I can't wait to explore further.
Sophocles focuses the first scene on the interplay between the two sisters, quickly constructing a rapport which allows the audience to examine the power relations between the characters. Ismene is confused by her sister's actions, proclaiming her 'mad', but denies herself agency (citing as reasons, among others, 'the danger' of what Creon will do, a necessity to 'give in to the law' and the fact that 'we are only women,/We cannot fight with men') and acts as merely a meek foil for the zealous Antigone. Antigone is about relationships; in a family where the reasoning that 'he is my brother' allows the titular character to excuse her crime, and where their mother Iocaste 'twisted the cords/That strangled her life' due to the despair of losing her husband, familial bonds are clearly of key importance to the sisters, yet Sophocles cleverly weaves this theme into the sparky and uncertain interactions between the characters, allowing plot and themes to develop as one. Antigone's proclamation that she would 'lie down/With [Polyneices] in death' evidences their close connection whilst characterising her as rebellious and strong-willed, creating a sharp contrast to her sister who 'must yield/To those in authority'.
Another aspect of relationships is power, and in this narrative, King Creon holds all the cards - he explains, at length, why he plans to treat Polyneices' memory in this way, attributing them to his 'principles' and 'wisdom' - sound enough logic, but evidence perhaps that his desire to maintain a powerful position precludes his understanding of true family connections, such as those that Antigone feels. Additionally, he challenges the choragos (the leader of the Greek chorus, because of course there is one in this play, as in most ancient Greek tragedies) by denying any suggestion that 'the gods favour this corpse' - that he dares to assume the gods' thoughts (and that he threatens to string one of his sentries up alive) earmarks him out as a villain. Yet, all of his grabs at control seem shallow and futile against the hypnotic, powerful force of Antigone's great monologue when, captured for her crime, she explains herself, reasoning 'Your edict, King, was strong,/But all your strength is weakness itself against/The immortal unrecorded laws of God.../Operative for ever, beyond man utterly.../can anyone/Living, as I live, with evil all about me,/Think Death less than a friend?'
Relatively unchallenging in its themes, its characters largely adhering to archetypes (the headstrong female, the cruel new king), you'd be forgiven for thinking Antigone deserves a spot at the bottom of the pile of ancient Greek drama - but it just feels sparky, vibrant and a little subversive, thanks to its independent and active female lead and the delicious conflict brought about by her exchanges with other characters. Antigone is a very short play (I read about half of it for this review), and I can imagine happily enjoying the rest of it.
It is made clear by the cultural landscape that Angelou paints into the autobiography that her dislike of her own race stems from the appalling levels of racism present in her society. When she and her brother, at the ages of three and four, are shipped to their grandmother's house to live there, the porter charged with their welfare 'got off the train the next day'; although 'softened by nature's blessing of grogginess [and] forgetfulness' in the mornings, the afternoons in the cotton fields of Arkansas 'revealed the harshness of Black Southern life'; the young Angelou finds the sheriff's confidence that 'every... Black man who heard of the Klan's coming ride would scurry under their houses to hide in chicken droppings' to be 'too humiliating to hear' (and you can understand why, as it seems a painful opportunity for the black population to reflect on their unpopularity, their inferiority and their helplessness to assert themselves); and, working on 'the remains of slavery's plantations', the workers end up dragging themselves along the ground 'in the dying sunlight', exhausted from backbreaking low-paid labour. Yet it is not just those of working age who experience the stifling climate of inequality - still a girl, Angelou knows enough about the KKK's activities to feel 'the sense of fear which filled [her] mouth with hot, dry air, and made [her] body light', and cowers from 'eyes of hate that burned the clothes off you if they happened to see you lounging on the main street downtown on Saturday'. Feeling so oppressed, and needing to cling onto something (anything), Angelou dreams 'of the days when I would be grown and able to buy a whole carton [of pineapple rings] for myself alone', exhibiting a bewildering devotion to something that she 'only tasted... during Christmas'.
Beyond racism, Arkansas is a generally intolerant society to anybody not fitting the Aryan profile - Angelou's crippled uncle faces threats of death and lynching as well, culminating in a touching and deeply revealing moment where, serving customers at the family's general store, he deliberately discards his stick and attempts to appear fully able-bodied throughout the whole conversation - Angelou believes 'the looks he suffered of either contempt or pity had simply worn him out, and for one afternoon... he wanted no part of them', revealing Uncle Willie to be akin to Maya in their mutual need to escape who they are. She likens his actions to what happens when 'prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame' - Willie, like Maya, knows that he can never be the person he wants to be, and must live the most subhuman of all lives, 'the tragedy of lameness' which is 'so unfair to children that they are embarrassed in its presence'. Even to the children, Willie is one of nature's jokes, evincing the toxic and unwelcoming nature of the Arkansas society and how this influences Angelou's development.
The solace which just about counterbalances the racism is a sense of community. The writer opens with a memory of herself singing in the 'children's section of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church', which seems welcoming enough; however, after messing up her solo, 'the giggles hung in the air' and Angelou eventually feels joy at 'being liberated from the silly church'. Stung once, she later becomes part of several more accepting communities which constitute the bedrock of her identity - whereas, when she and her brother Bailey 'had arrived in the musty little town', the only clue to her identity was a tag on her wrist confirming 'to whom it may concern' her name and origin (again indirectly insinuating that black people were valued less, as these black children are presented as property to be shipped to their receivers), she soon becomes more than that - she recognises herself one of thousands of 'frightened black children travelling alone to their newly affluent parents', is 'warmly, but not too familiarly' embraced by the town, and 'became familiar enough to belong to the Store and it to us'. The Store (the general store owned by Angelou's grandmother which 'was always spoken of with a capital s', presumably for the prosperity it brought to the family, which in turn helped elevate them above their poorer neighbours) is the hub where Angelou grows and develops; she feels close to it, contented - she alone 'could hear the slow pulse of its job half done' in the afternoon, whereas in the morning 'it looked like an unopened present from a stranger'. Whilst connected to the black community through the cotton-pickers who pick up supplies there, constantly grumbling 'about cheating houses, weighted scales, snakes, skimpy cotton and dusty rows', she possibly can forget the fact of blacks' inferior status in society when caught in the Store's 'soft make-believe feeling'.
Angelou recounts her view that 'the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect'; the tricolon which equalises the status of these three groups encapsulates the inferiority and paranoia of Angelou's troubled childhood, neatly linking some of the book's themes. Within a relatively short number of pages she accurately molds her experiences into an engagingly-written narrative bursting with character, action and poignancy. A stunning beginning.
Its first appearance was in a play Auden co-wrote entitled The Ascent of F6, the culmination of a mountaineering tragedy that has unfolded. It appears to commemorate the death of the civil servant Sir James, who has died after co-opting his brother Michael into climbing the titular mountain with him. Funeral Blues, therefore, was written specifically (albeit in a nascent form) to satirically memorialise this play's characters - it has been viewed as 'a ragged, satirically pantomimic version of the ostentatious trumpery involved in a state funeral'.
In its revised form, however, it was a cabaret song set to music by the great composer Benjamin Britten, the solemn music allowing the fairly knockabout, fairytale lyrics (due to their simple ABAB rhyme scheme repeating throughout) to appear more earnestly as the embodiment of a heartbreakingly sad message. Therein lies my problem with the poem: divorced from the 'unifying agency' of the sombre incidental music, all that remains are the words, with the rhyme scheme giving them a jarringly jaunty tone, the melding of the solemn and the celebratory never quite fully achieved. Partly this unfinished sense is delivered by the awkwardly constructed phrases; whilst mimicking the fragmented speech of the bereaved and mourning, lines such as 'Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone/Prevent the dog from barking with the juicy bone' seem to lack any consistent metre when read (as opposed to being sung), and this harms the poignancy of the speaker's impossible, exigent demands to the universe (although these do undeniably allow for some outstanding imagery, as the speaker entreats 'the stars are not wanted now; put out every one./Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun'). Similarly, the poem is brimming with caesural pauses, seen where Auden urges 'silence the pianos and, with muffled drum,/Bring out the coffin. Let the mourners come' - again, whilst the influx of mid-line punctuation mimics a mourner's breathy, incoherent speech, it disturbs the coherence of the poem and hinders the conveyance of its message. If Auden was really recreating mourners' talk, there would be patchy enjambment, frantic false starts and 'and's linking trains of clauses. But no - Funeral Blues is a set of lyrics, not a poem, designed as a disposable cabaret song to pass a minute or two. That's my problem with trying to view it through the prism of literary analysis - it simply wasn't designed for that.
Nevertheless, to conclude: Funeral Blues is about grief, but it's also about the impact of love on a person's life. Perhaps it's love they didn't even realise they felt until the loss of the loved one; now, the speaker wishes aeroplanes to 'circle moaning overhead' - I doubt anybody would consider an aeroplane's noise to constitute 'moaning'. They desperately desire to honour the deceased with grand pomp and ceremony, because they have just realised how much that person meant to them, how 'nothing now can ever come to any good'. The lines are truly heartbreaking in places, but I worry that, left bare and exposed on the page, they're lacking a little.
Finally, I ended the week reading something French - as I'm not a masochist, I sampled Arthur Rimbaud's surreal drug-powered masterpiece Une saison en enfer ('A season in hell') in a translated English version of the text (although I did try the prologue in French, but I was on the bus and I was tired and so the escape route of the translation seemed suddenly very appealing!). I'll just admit from the off that I didn't have the time to read as much of this as I'd have liked, but I sampled enough to give me a feel for this introspective, dark and almost mournful work.Believing himself dying, the narrator, a self-confessed 'damned soul' (surely more than a little inspired by Rimbaud's own experiences) recalls how 'once... my life was a feast where all hearts opened, and all wines flowed' before sharply contrasting this description of enjoyment and joviality with the recollection of how he 'found [Beauty] bitter - And I reviled her'. Without sharing the cause of his actions, he gives the reader an overview of his maladjusted actions, such as how he 'made the wild beast's silent leap to strangle every joy', before concluding the sequence lamenting how 'spring brought me the dreadful laugh of the idiot'. I admire how particularly effective Rimbaud is here in painting broad brush strokes to rapidly convey a sequence of emotions. The prologue to Une saison en enfer combines a sense of intrigue with a beautiful writing style (although bear in mind that I'm reading a translation) - Rimbaud's glorious metaphors include him recounting how he 'armed [himself] against Justice' and 'dried [himself] in the breezes of crime'. Instantly, I want to know more about the stages of the narrator's life that have been oh-so-briefly touched upon here. I want to know more about the narrator himself - he seems caught in an intriguing conflict with Satan, who tries to tempt him to 'win death with all your appetites; your egoism, all the deadly sins', seemingly to no avail, although I'll be interested to find out some of the details behind this conflict. Were Satan and the speaker in some kind of pact beforehand? Is Satan merely a metaphor for the darker, more harmful sides of the speaker's nature? What has prompted this conflict? And will our narrator triumph over the temptation to return to his former sinful life? With Chapter 2 (of 9), "Mauvais sang" ('Bad blood') looking set to begin the explanation of how Rimbaud's protagonist got themself into this mess, I'll definitely give this a fuller, longer read - Rimbaud may have been heavily smoking opium when he wrote these pages, but they've resulted in a captivating introduction which opens up myriad questions to be answered later.
All in all, Week 5 of the Banquet of Books Reading Challenge has been a relatively good one: not soaring to the heights of Week 4, where every single one of the six texts was instantly captivating, well-written and a pleasure to read - but enjoyable nonetheless. It's introduced me to several key aspects of our literary history, including French works, the 1950s American consumer culture, and the beautifully-written works of Maya Angelou. To be completely honest, whilst I'm very keen to read more of most of this week's texts (certainly I'll be giving the Rimbaud a proper read), there have only been two that have really stood out to me as something special, those being J. K. Rowling's fabulous local council thriller (is that now a genre?) The Casual Vacancy and Maya Angelou's gorgeous autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, so I'll be adding those to my growing 'to read' list, and hopefully be making return journeys to Sophocles and Rimbaud along the way.
I'll be back on Sunday (or, regrettably, possibly even Monday - sorry!) with next week's menu, which will tackle a range of historical and thematic texts spanning a good half-century - it'll kick off with a bang, a hard-to-analyse-and-tricky-to-read bang, but stick with it because there's some stuff that sounds really interesting coming up! Until then, you can follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for updates and notifications, and I'll see you soon - happy reading!
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