Lord Jim and Robert Jordan resist the lure of blood diamonds, each in his own way

In my apparently unread probably because uninspired review of Blood Diamond last week, I described a key scene in the movie as Hemingway-esque. But thinking it over I think I may have been wrong to bring Hemingway into it. I was fooled by the scene's being a conscious visual quote from the movie version of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Blood Diamond's protagonist, Leonardo DiCaprio's character, the soldier of fortune Danny Archer, is more of a Conradian tragic hero than a Hemingwayesque anti-one.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Hemingway knew his Conrad as well as he knew his Crane and his Turgenev. The difference between them, though, is in their approaches to the question of guilt.

Hemingway's characters are innoncents. Conrad's characters are guilty. They are complicit in the events that sweep them up and desorty them.

World War I happened to Jake Barnes, Nick Adams, and Frederick Henry. The fact that all three of them volunteered to fight carries no guilt because they were in a way society's dupes. They were tricked into it by a phony idealism and when their stories get underway they are in the process of figuring out how to live decently now that those ideals have been shown up as lies.

But Lord Jim invites the pirates in. Martin Decoud allows himself to be enlisted in a fight he doesn't believe in on the side he more than suspects is wrong. And, of course, Kurtz himself brought about the horror that kills him.

Conrad's heroes are and want to be pillars of the society events force them to live or die for. A lot more than their own survival depends on their success or failure.

Hemingway's heroes are anti-heroes in that they don't want any part of the society that has brought trouble and disaster down upon itself. Their main job is to escape the aftermath of the catcaclysm. A Farewell to Arms is literally an account of running away. The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time, in which the two parts of Big Two-Hearted River provide the denoument and climax, are about young men finding a separate peace outside the society that sent them off to war.

Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls is a transitional figure for Hemingway. He's the first of Hemingway's heroes to die and he dies sacrificing himself for others. But although he's on the right side in the Spanish Civil War, he isn't ever committed to it. He dies understanding that that there is no separate peace. Every man's death diminishes him for he is a part of mankind, and so on. But his death is more a personal matter to him than a political one. He doesn't see himself as giving up much of anything and he's reclaiming himself more than he is saving anyone else.

Hemingway's stories, when they aren't about escape, are about recovery or succumbing to wounds, physical and psychic, while Conrad's are tales of redemption or, more often, damnation. This is why Conrad's vision is essentially tragic, while Hemingway's isn't quite.

There was an element of absurdity in Conrad's tragedy, but that only makes his tragic vision different from Shakespeare's and the Greeks'.

I'm not disparaging Hemingway here. I think Conrad was the greater writer, but in Hemingway's defense it has to be said that he was pretty much done as a writer at about the same age as Conrad was when he began.

I don't understand why Hemingway wrote so much that was second-rate, self-parody, and out and out crap after For Whom the Bell Tolls. But the fact is that he did. Except for a few short stories, he might as well have stopped writing in 1940. Yeah. I wouldn't miss The Old Man and the Sea if it disappeared from the canon and our collective memory. Everything fine and true we have from him, all the good words, are the work of a young man.

Hemingway turned 41 the year he published For Whom the Bell Tolls. Conrad was 38 when he published Almayer's Folly, 39 when An Outcast of the Islands came out. There's nothing in this except that it emphasizes what I said, that Hemingway's best work is the work of a young man while Conrad's best is that of a man well into middle age, and maybe that partly accounts for the difference in their visions, helps explain why Hemingway's stories, despite their characters' expressions of existential despair, are the more hopeful and the more naive.

It also makes me think that an interesting college lit course might be made out of pairing the two. It's a nice reading list, don't you think? In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Men Without Women, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Victory.

Back to Blood Diamond.

In the movie, it's Solomon Vandey, the father searching for his lost son, who has the tragic grandeur, but that's mainly because he's played by Djimon Housou, who was born to play every one of Shakespeare's great tragic heroes, except maybe Hamlet---he's too robust---and Lear---no audience would believe he could be that big a fool.

I take that back. Maybe there's a way to play Lear as an arrogant fool instead of a senescent one, a great man carried away by his pride rather than a silly one self-deceived by his own vanity.

At any rate, Vandy is tragic in that he represents the tragedy of Africa. In himself, he is a pretty straight-forward hero, a seemingly ordinary man who rises to to occasion. He isn't the protagonist, though, because he doesn't change. He is the catalyst for change in Danny Archer.

Archer is like a Hemingway-esque hero in that he is psychically wounded. But he isn't alienated. He is a happy player in the corrupt economic order that runs things and that he thinks of as a much a part of the real Africa as the jungles and savannas. He learns, from Vandy, from Maddy Bowen, the journalist, played by Jennifer Connelly, who would be his love interest if he was a better, more deserving man, and from helping Vandy and Bowen, that Africa is a separate place from the "place" where he lives and works, his work being theft and murder, and it's a place he would like to live in. Unfortunately, that place can't exist unless he is willing to die for it.

It's the willingness to die for it that makes him, while a cousin to Robert Jordan, a brother to Lord Jim.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

__________________________

Depressing fact about my book-buying addiction: I've been re-reading my Oxford World's Classics edition of Conrad's The Secret Agent. Winnie Verloc is Conrad's only female protagonist. He created many heroines, plenty of ingenues, but Winnie's the only woman he let carry a whole book. Like Conrad's men she is complicit in her own tragedy, but in her case her guilt is the result of her having done the right thing by her family. At any rate, I wrote most of this post at Barnes and Noble where I started reading Steven Marcus' introduction to the B and N edition of The Secret Agent.

I didn't finish either the post or the intro before it was time to go home.

So I bought the book.

What kind of person buys a second copy of a book he already owns for the introduction?

Saturday, March 31, 2007 in Now Playing at Cine 1-1000, Ruining my eyes | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Lord Jim and Robert Jordan resist the lure of blood diamonds, each in his own way

In my apparently unread probably because uninspired review of Blood Diamond last week, I described a key scene in the movie as Hemingway-esque. But thinking it over I think I may have been wrong to bring Hemingway into it. I was fooled by the scene's being a conscious visual quote from the movie version of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Blood Diamond's protagonist, Leonardo DiCaprio's character, the soldier of fortune Danny Archer, is more of a Conradian tragic hero than a Hemingwayesque anti-one.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Hemingway knew his Conrad as well as he knew his Crane and his Turgenev. The difference between them, though, is in their approaches to the question of guilt.

Hemingway's characters are innoncents. Conrad's characters are guilty. They are complicit in the events that sweep them up and desorty them.

World War I happened to Jake Barnes, Nick Adams, and Frederick Henry. The fact that all three of them volunteered to fight carries no guilt because they were in a way society's dupes. They were tricked into it by a phony idealism and when their stories get underway they are in the process of figuring out how to live decently now that those ideals have been shown up as lies.

But Lord Jim invites the pirates in. Martin Decoud allows himself to be enlisted in a fight he doesn't believe in on the side he more than suspects is wrong. And, of course, Kurtz himself brought about the horror that kills him.

Conrad's heroes are and want to be pillars of the society events force them to live or die for. A lot more than their own survival depends on their success or failure.

Hemingway's heroes are anti-heroes in that they don't want any part of the society that has brought trouble and disaster down upon itself. Their main job is to escape the aftermath of the catcaclysm. A Farewell to Arms is literally an account of running away. The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time, in which the two parts of Big Two-Hearted River provide the denoument and climax, are about young men finding a separate peace outside the society that sent them off to war.

Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls is a transitional figure for Hemingway. He's the first of Hemingway's heroes to die and he dies sacrificing himself for others. But although he's on the right side in the Spanish Civil War, he isn't ever committed to it. He dies understanding that that there is no separate peace. Every man's death diminishes him for he is a part of mankind, and so on. But his death is more a personal matter to him than a political one. He doesn't see himself as giving up much of anything and he's reclaiming himself more than he is saving anyone else.

Hemingway's stories, when they aren't about escape, are about recovery or succumbing to wounds, physical and psychic, while Conrad's are tales of redemption or, more often, damnation. This is why Conrad's vision is essentially tragic, while Hemingway's isn't quite.

There was an element of absurdity in Conrad's tragedy, but that only makes his tragic vision different from Shakespeare's and the Greeks'.

I'm not disparaging Hemingway here. I think Conrad was the greater writer, but in Hemingway's defense it has to be said that he was pretty much done as a writer at about the same age as Conrad was when he began.

I don't understand why Hemingway wrote so much that was second-rate, self-parody, and out and out crap after For Whom the Bell Tolls. But the fact is that he did. Except for a few short stories, he might as well have stopped writing in 1940. Yeah. I wouldn't miss The Old Man and the Sea if it disappeared from the canon and our collective memory. Everything fine and true we have from him, all the good words, are the work of a young man.

Hemingway turned 41 the year he published For Whom the Bell Tolls. Conrad was 38 when he published Almayer's Folly, 39 when An Outcast of the Islands came out. There's nothing in this except that it emphasizes what I said, that Hemingway's best work is the work of a young man while Conrad's best is that of a man well into middle age, and maybe that partly accounts for the difference in their visions, helps explain why Hemingway's stories, despite their characters' expressions of existential despair, are the more hopeful and the more naive.

It also makes me think that an interesting college lit course might be made out of pairing the two. It's a nice reading list, don't you think? In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Men Without Women, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Victory.

Back to Blood Diamond.

In the movie, it's Solomon Vandey, the father searching for his lost son, who has the tragic grandeur, but that's mainly because he's played by Djimon Housou, who was born to play every one of Shakespeare's great tragic heroes, except maybe Hamlet---he's too robust---and Lear---no audience would believe he could be that big a fool.

I take that back. Maybe there's a way to play Lear as an arrogant fool instead of a senescent one, a great man carried away by his pride rather than a silly one self-deceived by his own vanity.

At any rate, Vandy is tragic in that he represents the tragedy of Africa. In himself, he is a pretty straight-forward hero, a seemingly ordinary man who rises to to occasion. He isn't the protagonist, though, because he doesn't change. He is the catalyst for change in Danny Archer.

Archer is like a Hemingway-esque hero in that he is psychically wounded. But he isn't alienated. He is a happy player in the corrupt economic order that runs things and that he thinks of as a much a part of the real Africa as the jungles and savannas. He learns, from Vandy, from Maddy Bowen, the journalist, played by Jennifer Connelly, who would be his love interest if he was a better, more deserving man, and from helping Vandy and Bowen, that Africa is a separate place from the "place" where he lives and works, his work being theft and murder, and it's a place he would like to live in. Unfortunately, that place can't exist unless he is willing to die for it.

It's the willingness to die for it that makes him, while a cousin to Robert Jordan, a brother to Lord Jim.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

__________________________

Depressing fact about my book-buying addiction: I've been re-reading my Oxford World's Classics edition of Conrad's The Secret Agent. Winnie Verloc is Conrad's only female protagonist. He created many heroines, plenty of ingenues, but Winnie's the only woman he let carry a whole book. Like Conrad's men she is complicit in her own tragedy, but in her case her guilt is the result of her having done the right thing by her family. At any rate, I wrote most of this post at Barnes and Noble where I started reading Steven Marcus' introduction to the B and N edition of The Secret Agent.

I didn't finish either the post or the intro before it was time to go home.

So I bought the book.

What kind of person buys a second copy of a book he already owns for the introduction?

Saturday, March 31, 2007 in Now Playing at Cine 1-1000, Ruining my eyes | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Missed it by that much

Pointed in that direction by Mary of View from the Corner, I came across this interview with Barbara Feldon, who played Agent 99 on Get Smart.

Number of things in the interview made me sit up and take notice.

Would you believe that Get Smart is finally coming out on DVD?

Would you believe that Barbara Feldon is 74 years old? Feldon was the second-sexiest woman on television when she was doing Get Smart, despite the black and white horizontally striped turtleneck minidresses and the bizarre hairstyle that was not quite a bob and not quite a beehive, but she was sexier at 54 than she was at 34, so imagine what she's like now that she's 74!

Would you believe that Feldon can make casual references to the songs of Tom Lehrer, which is just a reminder that a great deal of her sexiness has always been due to her intelligence and sense of humor?

Would you believe that her co-star on Get Smart, Don Adams, Maxwell Smart, Agent 86 himself, served in the Marines in World War II, fought at Guadalcanal, was the only member of his unit to survive, almost died there of fever, and Feldon was apparently unaware of any of this back when she was working with him on the show.

She only found out when late in life they renewed their friendship and he showed her some chapters from the autobiography he was working on and, sadly, didn't get to finish before he died.

I don't know what to make of the fact that during the course of five years Adams never talked about his time in the war. I don't know if it was modesty, stoicism, or simply a sense of proportion---just about every man his age had served, so he might not have thought it was worth mentioning because he assumed everybody around him had the same stories to tell.

But a lot of WWII vets made a point of not talking about what happened to them in the war and in the process of learning to keep quiet about their experiences they learned to keep quiet about a lot of things and wound up not talking to anybody about anything that had to do with what they were feeling.

And would you believe that I have only one story to tell about Don Adams?

I got it from Bob Newhart's book, I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This.

Newhart credits Adams with convincing him to become a stand-up comic and perform his own material on stage.

But he doesn't mean that in a way entirely complimentary to Adams.

When Newhart was starting out in show business, he first tried to make his name as a writer for other comedians. He wrote a routine for Adams about a submarine commander talking to his crew at the end of a two year tour at sea. It's a famous routine now, Newhart himself made it famous. "The Voyage of the USS Codfish." But if you read it you can hear Adams doing it too and imagine how funny it would have been in his voice.

But Adams didn't think it was funny.

At least he said he didn't.

He claimed to hate the routine. Said it stunk. He refused to pay Newhart for it.

Oh well, thought Newhart. Them's the breaks.

Then one night he saw Adams on The Tonight Show----doing the routine!

Big chunk of it at any rate.

That's it! Newhart decided then and there, I'm through writing for other comics! From now on he wasn't going to let anything he wrote out of his hands. If he wasn't going to get paid for writing the stuff, then at least he'd get paid for performing it.

If you listen closely to Newhart doing the routine on one of his old albums you might pick up on it. You can feel something's missing. There's a jump, a gap in the captain's monologue. Newhart left out the parts of the routine Adams had stolen because he didn't want anybody to think he had stolen it from Adams.

But Newhart liked and admired Adams anyway. They were friends. Newhart never told the story in public, while Adams was alive. When Adams died, his widow called Newhart and asked him to speak at the funeral. She asked him to tell the story. Don's friends will love it, she said, it was so typical of him, the cheapness and the nerve.

Newhart was glad to oblige.

Friday, March 30, 2007 in Too Much TV | Permalink | Comments (28) | TrackBack (0)

Weirdos, neurotics, lunatics, poets, and dreamers

A note to my fellow bloggers, right and left:

When we get the urge to project our feelings about politics or politicians onto the American people, we need to remember one thing.

We're a pack of weirdos.

I don't mean that we're weird in the blogging in our pajamas while the cats play about our slippered feet way that used to be our image among people whose lives were entirely confined to the analog world, although, frankly, some of us are still a little too enamored of our cats.

Most of us are intelligent, talented, accomplished people with successful or at least marginally fullfilling lives offline.

And I don't mean that we're weirdos in the ranting, foaming at the mouth, blinded by ideological rage way that various members of the traditional media elite would like to dismiss us as, although there are more than a few of us, more on one end of the bandwidth than the other, who have to wipe the spittle off their monitors after typing every post.

I mean we are weirdos in the sense that most normal people do not have the urge to share their every passing thought with a world of strangers.

We're weirdos because we're writers.

Most normal people when they're mad about something, moved by something, provoked into thought or sunk into deep brooding by something they''ve read, heard, seen, remembered, or dreamed don't deal with it by sitting down at a keyboard to write about it.

And if they did it would never occur to them to hit the publish button because they would never assume that what they wrote about what they're mad about, moved by, provoked into thought or sunk into brooding upon would matter to anyone besides themselves.

Now I happen to think that writing is a positive, active, life-affirming way to engage with the world. But that's not how most normal people see it.

Most normal people see writing as a withdrawl, even an escape. Writers, just in order to write, have to detach themselves from the world. Most normal people understand that part of the job. But they think that writers like that detachment. And they're right.

Too many of us, if we're honest, would have to admit that the happiest times of our lives when we were young were the times we holed up somewhere far from the madding crowd with our notebooks, sketchpads, guitars, computers, or our thoughts.

There have been periods in human history when it was more common for people to react to something that occured to them or around them by picking up a pen, or a hammer and chisel, or a brush and a pot of paint, and the rise of the internet, the ease and ubiquity of email, and the emergence of blogs has revealed that more people have the talent and the urge to write stuff down than anybody would have thought when the ability to publish depended on access to a printing press.

With this the act of writing might be seen as less eccentric than it was in the past and that might lead to more, and more normal, people taking to their keyboards.

I think this would be a good thing.

But it won't ever be a usual thing.

It will always be a little bit of weird thing to do.

I'd like to believe that being a writer is just a result of having a particular talent and the normal human urge to use a talent.

But the whole history of writers and writing, including those periods when it was more usual for people to write down their feelings and thoughts in their diaries, in letters, or in poems and songs, shows that the people who write out of sense of vocation tend to be weirdos, neurotics, lunatics, freaks, and geeks.

We can flatter ourselves that in our crazy way we are wiser and more attuned to the world than the poor, stifled souls who can't express their thoughts and feelings in as felicitous, even poetic ways as we do.

That still makes us weirdos.

I'm not trying to insult us or put us down. I just think it's important for our own sanity's sake to remember this.

It's also important in helping us to reach conclusions and judgments that aren't simply projections of our own feelings, fears, and wishful fantasies.

The way we think is not the way most people think.

Add to this the fact that we are way more interested in politics than is probably healthy.

So, whenever we're responding to something in the news, something a candidate for President or Congress said, something a pundit spouted on the Sunday bobblehead fests, and we get the urge to speak for regular people and tell our readers how they're feeling or thinking or likely to feel and think, we'd better have some specific facts to back it up, poll numbers for instance.

Because...

While we're writing about an issue or a candidate or an event, putting all our passion, intelligence, insight, and talent into it, most normal people are reacting to the issue or candidate or event by saying to themselves, "Damn! I forgot to pick up the bread."

Saturday, March 31, 2007 in Blogs About Town, Writer's Workshop | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)