Saturday, May 29, 2010

brief view of Caryl Phillips, The Nature of Blood

Enter not, ye who read for fun. The strands of this transhistorical story include the Holocaust; the ignorant and savage European persecution of Jews that predates Hittler by four hundred years; and racism as well as anti-Semitism. As a cover blurb says, "He finds humanity everywhere," but the humanity is not always or even mostly redemptive. 'What can be done on the earth to cleanse it after this?' Hell of a question. It's a tremendously ambitious book and yet also one that is informed by humility: it's not about him.
The final scenes are set in fledgling Israel. They too are unsentimental and unromantic, but they do honor the new country for its commitment to survival. Yet the sense I got was of Act VI of a tragedy, one more like the comprehensive desolation of The Trojan Women than like Othello (a version of which is part of the novel), where some semblance of justice has been re-established.(Though I suppose one could say that just as Iago is exposed and captured, so Hitler has been defeated.) In the novel life does endure, but Phillips doesn't make great claims for where it is headed. He only shows us what his somber vision sees.

Monday, May 10, 2010

short journal entry on The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien's claim in "On the Rainy River" (the fourth chapter of The Things They Carried)that going to the war was an act of cowardice is paradoxical, but it's also his claim to make. Physical courage is not the only species of courage; moral courage is often less concrete but may be as fundamental, as essential, to the survival of the self as physical courage is. How many memoirists 'go there'? Of course The Things They Carried isn't a memoir. But then why is Tim O'Brien such a major character in it, both as platoon member and, much more, as self-conscious narrator? Suppose one took "Tim O'Brien" out of the book. Then it could no longer be the story of his keeping Timmy alive; and it would miss the particular kind of authenticity (as well as the particular kind of story-telling) that it now "performs," as some of my younger college-schooled friends say. Every time I read this book, I want to write about it, much more than this post implies.