Category Archives: Fiction

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Heart of Darkness

The steamboat Conrad himself piloted in the upper Congo, courtesy of Wikipedia

This is one classic I was never assigned in my voyage through academia. Having recently read Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, I decided now would be a good time to continue the focus on the Belgian Congo with a plunge into Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

I found that it’s not really about the Belgian Congo so much as about the human heart. Where Kingsolver relates Congolese culture from an inside, local, personal perspective, Conrad gives literally “drive-by” impressions as his narrator pilots an English steamboat along an unnamed African river to find and bring back a legendary ivory trader named Kurtz. Drawing from his own experience as a visitor to the Belgian Congo in 1890, Conrad makes no attempt to offer an in-depth look at African life, but rather uses his impressions of brutal European colonization as a universal symbol of human fallenness. The actual Africans are only glimpsed from afar, en masse.

He plays with the motifs of light and darkness, using them to stand for (by turns) the light of European ideals of civilization and enlightenment vs. the darkness of African savagery, the light of our views of ourselves vs. the darkness of our true spiritual condition, the light of personal mythology (Kurtz is a figure about whom many myths flourish) vs. the darkness of real character, and the light of true insight vs. the darkness of everyday experience. We’re separated from the action by multiple frames: our initial narrator is a seaman who is a step removed from Marlowe, who tells the African tale;  Marlowe is further separated from the action by the myths about Kurtz. We’re also separated by space and time, as the events of the tale are far away and in the past — even moreso for the modern reader, who isn’t likely to share Marlowe’s stereotypes about savages and the like. Our voyage from our everyday perspective into the insight the story seeks to provide takes us through all these frames and is disorienting at times; the reading experience was a little confusing and dreamlike for me. Somehow I kept missing transitions from one scene to the next, and finding myself immersed in episodes without remembering how I got there. I’m not sure if this is a common experience of reading this novella, or if I was just inattentive or had too many interruptions.

The steamboat Conrad himself piloted in the upper Congo, courtesy of Wikipedia

The “heart of darkness” is a spatial phenomenon as well as a spiritual one. Marlowe finds Kurtz, renowned for his culture and ideals and who has been alleged to be suggestive of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame, at the innermost point of his trek upriver, immersed in a tribe he has convinced of his godlike status and lying in a hut surrounded by heads on stakes. “Who is the real savage here?” Conrad seems to ask. Though his jumping-off point is England, anyone who remembers the Puritan response to natives in America must have wondered the same thing. I couldn’t help but remember Miles Standish’s staking of the heads of particularly troublesome Indians around Puritan forts in Mayflower.

Ideals don’t count for much if your nature is too corrupt to achieve them. I can agree with Conrad on this point. Yet I also can see how ideals force a certain level of accountability; they help us to see the changes that need to be made. This is a staple of high school and college literature classes, and I can see how it would facilitate certain kinds of discussions. But it has nothing at all to offer as an examination of actual cultural differences. One wouldn’t expect this to be an enjoyable or easy read, and for me it wasn’t one. But I can see how at the time of its writing, it represented a daring exploration of the disconnect between theory and practice in the business of colonization and commerce.

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The Poisonwood Bible

congo-map

There are currently 1,545 reviews of this novel already listed at Amazon. What can I possibly add?

Nothing. Yet I’ve just had my own personal experience of the book nonetheless. I blog partly to come to terms with reading experiences, and after such a weighty, sprawling, powerful novel as this, I feel the need to come to terms — or to find the terms — to describe and remember it.

Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible centers on the family of missionary Nathan Price. In 1959, he takes his wife and four daughters to the Congo planning to impose his warped version of the gospel on the village of Kilanga. He has a knack for making enemies: we learn that his mission is not sanctioned by the mission society of his denomination, and his family has not gone through any of the necessary preparations for living in Africa. The challenges of nature and culture, the political instability of the Congo’s rebellion against Belgian rule, and above all Nathan’s graceless and bitter gospel lay the groundwork for trouble that comes to a head about halfway through the novel. The second half traces the ways the different members of the family react and live out their lives over the next several decades.

We never see inside Nathan Price’s mind, but the other characters — his wife Orleanna, and his daughters Rachel, Leah, Ada, and Ruth May — narrate their own stories. As we rotate from one character’s perspective to another’s, we quickly develop a feel for their personalities and experience their steep learning curve. I marvel at Kingsolver’s character creation; each is distinctive and convincingly realized.

By turns, The Poisonwood Bible made me weep for the pain humans cause, marvel at the beauty of African culture, and wonder over the sometimes heavy-handed political and religious commentary Kingsolver puts into the mouths of her characters.

If I had to choose one overarching theme, it would be the unreliability of knowledge. The history of the Congo (now Zaire) testifies to the conquesting spirit, and the ignorance, of various European entities from Portugal to Belgium to the United States. I felt similar to the way I felt after reading The Kite Runner, a novel about another nation that has suffered under a chain of exploitive foreign rulers. The Prices (at the beginning) reflect the glib optimism of Americans who equate westernization with salvation, and they have no appreciation or understanding of the history of the region they are entering. In microcosm, they act like other nations that have imposed their foreign ideals on the Congo, the story seems to say.

Yet when Leah, who by the novel’s end has become an expert of sorts on Zaire, tours an ancient Congolese palace with crushed human bones worked into the mortar, she reasons that it might have been some kind of reasonable means of population control. Ada, too, reasons that the practice in Kilanga of taking twins into the forest and leaving them there at birth may be similarly motivated. Are we expected to take their speculations seriously? Are we expected to see these forms of murder as somehow reasonable or moral? I hope not. Human understanding, the novel seems to say, is always fatally limited — whether it’s that of exploitive national entities like the Portuguese, who felt it was justifiable to enslave Africans because of mistaken assumptions about race and non-European ways of doing things; or that of Ada and Leah, who are ready to justify an equally despicable chapter of Congolese history out of strong nationalistic feeling.

The politics are not easy to sort out. The novel suggests that the U.S. played a significant part in sabotaging the Congo’s attempt at democracy, supporting a corrupt regime instead. I have had only a superficial knowledge of this, and I ought to learn more. Ignorance may be bliss, but for the characters in this novel it quickly becomes impossible as they are swept into the sometimes unwelcome awareness “walking a mile in someone’s shoes” — or living a year in someone else’s country — can give. But their comprehension of the large events going on while they are in Kilanga — rebellion, democratic election, corruption — is shadowy at best. They arrive with an uncritical acceptance of the trumpeted American values, but eventually they become aware of all kinds of subterranean motives at work at the international level. Understanding of the world, we’re meant to see, is tentative at best.

I felt the tragic weight of this limitation most heavily in the tale’s religious storyline. Nathan Price is a caricature of the evangelist convinced he knows it all, and he has large tracts of the Bible memorized. But he has no idea at all of the Bible’s culminating themes of love, forgiveness, or mercy. He is fixated on the ritual of baptism, and he serves a vengeful, angry God who holds us all to an impossible standard of righteousness. His wake is littered with souls bludgeoned by his personal ideals, and there is no credible counterweight to this brand of Christianity in the novel. The only alternative offered is Brother Fowles, Price’s predecessor at Kilanga, who makes a brief appearance to question the translation and authority of the Bible. As Leah explains, Brother Fowles advises her to

trust in Creation, which is made fresh daily and doesn’t suffer in translation. This God does not work in especially mysterious ways. The sun here rises and sets at six exactly. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly, a bird raises its brood in the forest, and a greenheart tree will only grow from a greenheart seed. He brings drought sometimes, followed by torrential rains, and if these things aren’t always what I had in mind, they aren’t my punishment either…

This reminded me a little of sacred reading in Thomas Merton, which I posted on here. I have no problem with seeing Creation as a manifestation of the character of the God who made it. But I believe the Bible is a form of revelation too, one we needn’t despair of understanding with God’s help — no matter how many times it has been misused and misunderstood throughout history. No one in this novel really gives voice to that hope. But that’s probably just the natural outcome of the spiritual abuse Nathan Price dishes out — total disillusionment.

There are some really beautiful passages in the book, and the frustrations I felt in reading it have been constructive ones. It’s a book that asks searching, troubling questions and creates a sense of personal connection to a land and its people. I understand why there are 1,545 reviews already trying to put its impact into words.

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People of the Book

I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it. I wanted it to be a gripping narrative, even suspenseful. So I wrote and rewrote certain sections of historical background to use as seasoning between discussion of technical issues…

So explains Hanna Heath, the book conservator charged with examining the Sarajevo Haggadah when it is saved from bombing in 1996. Originating in Spain in the mid-14th century, this illuminated manuscript contains the text of the Passover Seder, but it is unusual in that it includes illustrations in an era when Jews considered them to be idolatrous.

Hanna might just as well be Geraldine Brooks, author of People of the Book — a title that echoes the term for adherents to faith in the God of Abraham: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. Brooks uses the Sarajevo Haggadah as a jumping-off point for an imaginative exploration of history that speculates in fiction about the lives of those who created and preserved this manuscript.

The novel has been lauded for its historical detail and factual depiction of the science of book conservation. Hanna serves as the novel’s unifying consciousness, and we learn a lot about her troubled relationship with her mother, her “love” relationship with a Muslim museum director from Sarajevo, and her detective work as she investigates the prime pieces of physical evidence the Haggadah offers as clues to its history: a white hair, a grain of salt, a wine stain, an insect wing, and missing clasps.

This is my third novel by Geraldine Brooks, after Year of Wonders and March. People of the Book will probably be my last read by this author. Though the factual detail is interesting, I was mostly bothered by the severely limited imaginative vision with which Brooks speculates about the past.

One limit is the relentlessly secular mindset brought to bear on this inescapably religious work. The actual Haggadah is not simply a physical artifact, but a book with content and context grounded in the Jewish faith. Yet everyone who plays a part in its preservation is deeply flawed, driven by obsession or lust, or harboring some secret sin. Their belief in the righteousness or truth of God is not transforming; it seems more like wishful thinking. It’s a sordid history in which the fallenness of humanity is trumpeted without any comprehension of faith as something meaningful apart from the status quo cultural practice.

Further, religion is depicted as a divisive, destructive force. The preservation of the Haggadah is used thematically to show Islam, Judaism and Christianity playing nicely together amid the carnage, because those who play a role in its survival come from diverse traditions. It comes to a head in a scene near the end, where Hanna describes the Haggadah in the museum among

the related exhibits — Orthodox icons, Islamic calligraphy, Catholic psalter pages… Each piece has something in common with the haggadah — similar materials or a related artistic style. The point — that diverse cultures influence and enrich one another — was made with silent eloquence.

It’s clear that this exhibit of religious artifacts unplugged from any meaningful context is supposed to serve as a corrective to the historic horror stories of faith in conflict. But the exhibit simply ignores the competing truth claims of the three Abrahamic faiths — the “people of the book.” Faith is simply another artifact here, one with no relevance or meaning in the modern era where Hanna lives.

Another imaginative limit that has become predictable in Brooks’ writing is a preoccupation with the erotic. In Year of Wonders, this didn’t become apparent to me till near the end, but in March it appeared much sooner, and in People of the Book it’s ubiquitous. The story of the Haggadah, we’re asked to believe, is the story of the sex lives of its stewards throughout history — an Austrian bookbinder with venereal disease, a Jewish bookbinder carrying on an affair, an artist who is raped and develops lesbian tendencies. Then there’s Hanna, who drops casually into the bed of the librarian who rescued the book from the flames. For a novel built so confidently on the progressive view of history, it’s striking to compare the vision depicted here and that of the most primitive ancient cultures organized around fertility goddesses and eroticism. I object to this view, not from a Puritannical impulse to erase the erotic, but from an expansive desire to acknowledge it as one (important) thread in the varied and complex tapestry of Creation.

Looking back over all three books, it’s plain that in every case principle and ideal are discredited by animal impulses. No one who is high-minded or who professes faith actually succeeds in living consistently with their beliefs. There are no heroes.

So why did I even finish People of the Book, you ask? Good question. One reason is that I have an unreasoning belief that it’s a good thing to finish a book once you’ve invested a certain amount of time in reading it. The other reason is simpler and probably more obvious: I’m a little slow sometimes. There’s lots to admire in Geraldine Brooks’ writing, but on the whole I rather wish I’d set this one aside early on.

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March

march-geraldine-brooks

Last year, I was dazzled by Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague. “How do people write books like this?” I wondered. “How can someone research such a seemingly unpromising subject so thoroughly — and then make it sing in a work of fiction?”

March is a book I had mixed feelings about at different points in the reading, but in the final analysis I found it quite thought-provoking and satisfying. Like Year of Wonders, March is well-researched as a historical work. Set during the Civil War, it offers a glimpse into the gritty reality of the Union army in both its principle and practice. But it takes as its subject the rather hallowed March family of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women — specifically, Mr. March, who is absent from the domestic scene for most of Alcott’s novel, “away down south where the fighting is.”

Brooks explains that since many of the other characters in Little Women are based on real people, she took Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father, as a model to expand imaginatively on Mr. March’s character. Alcott was a noted Concord Transcendentalist, a friend to Emerson and Thoreau as well as a vegetarian and primary vision-caster in the Utopian experiment “Fruitlands.” He was born on a Connecticut farm and traveled south as a peddler as a young man. Mr. March resembles him in this detail, as well as in his qualities as an intellectual, vegetarian, radical, and dreamer. But Alcott was not a minister, and it’s as a Unitarian chaplain and fervent Abolitionist that March enlists with the Union army.

Brooks explains in the afterword that when her mother recommended Little Women to her at age 10, she warned her that “Nobody in real life is such a goody-goody as that Marmee.” Indeed, one of the foundational principles of March seems to be the demythologizing of the Marches, particularly Marmee and Captain March. She is depicted as an angry woman, he as an outwardly proper but inwardly undisciplined man with all kinds of inconsistencies and blind spots as well as a talent for alienating people. Yet somehow, by the end, the pain and horror of war have forged a character that I cared about and admired in some ways. The novel offers a poignant insight into the Marches’ marriage, too, shifting the point of view between March and Marmee and revealing how the two have misunderstood each other at some crucial points, yet still they don’t give up.

What kept me reading, I think, is that the novel is a study of what happens to principle when it’s plunged into what one of the heroic black characters calls “the river of fire.” What happens to March’s grand ideals? What nugget lies at the core of marriage and survives disillusionment? What happens to the Abolitionist cause when fought for by a Union army that includes racists? Though I didn’t buy all the answers Brooks suggests through the action of the novel, I found the questions intriguing and worth asking.

It’s been years since I read Little Women, but of course I have to reread it now — and it’s a free download on the Kindle. Looks like I’ll be hanging out at the Marches’ Concord hearth for awhile!

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A Girl of the Limberlost

limberlost swamp

A Girl of the Limberlost is sort of an early twentieth-century Cinderella story. Published in 1909, the novel is written by noted Indiana naturalist Gene Stratton Porter.

The book tells the story of Elnora Comstock, a neglected country girl whose mother has been embittered by the loss of her husband quite early in their marriage. She has never shown any love to Elnora, whose hardships refine and develop her character and send her escaping into the nearby swamp enough to cause her to accumulate a wealth of naturalistic knowledge. Over the course of the story she enters high school in the city against the odds and excels, financing her wardrobe and books through the sale of her extensive moth collection. The second half of the story traces her mother’s change of heart and Elnora’s courtship.

I enjoyed reading Limberlost, though several things about it bothered me. It’s quite sentimental, and the idealized characterizations seemed a little silly to me at times. The narrator casts Elnora as an intelligent, determined, mature young woman, but the description of her high school years consists almost entirely of wardrobe descriptions and social hurdles she crosses effortlessly.

Golden Emperor Moth, courtesy of Wikipedia

The story’s naturalistic focus is interesting as far as it goes. Today nature study is almost always framed in a conservationist perspective, but Elnora hunts moths to kill, basically — even the rare ones — and to make them into collections and sets to finance her education.  The golden emperor moth figures prominently in the story at several points, and it along with several others were specimens I looked up online in curiosity. In one plot development, Elnora takes a job as a nature study teacher for grade school students — a position created for her because of her expertise, so I thought of another Comstock (Elnora’s name is a little too coincidental), Anna Botsford Comstock, whose nature study handbook for the purpose of equipping elementary school teachers to do just what Elnora does was in the works at the time Limberlost was published.

There’s kind of a debate over the exploitation of Limberlost swamp that delineates two ways of seeing the land. Elnora’s mother has refused to allow her old growth forest to be logged, and has refused any oil wells on her property, though other neighbors have done both of these things to their great financial benefit. The swamp is also being drained in the course of the novel, greatly shrinking the habitat for various wild creatures, and the ecological cost of this is something Stratton-Porter makes clear. The ethical terms of that debate have been sharpened over the years, something folks in my neck of the woods are particularly aware of as we’re in the midst of debate over drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale.

Perhaps it’s not great literature, but I enjoy reading novels of this era. If we read to be transported to another place and time, this is one of those books that creates a very appealing “elsewhere” in the general civility of the culture, a beautiful natural setting, and the capability and honor of many of the people.