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- 主题发起人 往事如歌
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往事如歌
新手上路
- 注册
- 2012-02-02
- 消息
- 707
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- 13
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- 18
XIII.
It was a crowded night at Wallack's theatre.
The play was "The Shaughraun," with Dion Boucicault in the title role and Harry Montague and Ada Dyas as the lovers. The popularity of the admirable English company was at its height, and the Shaughraun always packed the house. In the galleries the enthusiasm was unreserved; in the stalls and boxes, people smiled a little at the hackneyed sentiments and clap-trap situations, and enjoyed the play as much as the galleries did.
There was one episode, in particular, that held the house from floor to ceiling. It was that in which Harry Montague, after a sad, almost monosyllabic scene of parting with Miss Dyas, bade her good-bye, and turned to go. The actress, who was standing near the mantelpiece and looking down into the fire, wore a gray cashmere dress without fashionable loopings or trimmings, moulded to her tall figure and flowing in long lines about her feet. Around her neck was a narrow black velvet ribbon with the ends falling down her back.
When her wooer turned from her she rested her arms against the mantel-shelf and bowed her face in her hands. On the threshold he paused to look at her; then he stole back, lifted one of the ends of velvet ribbon, kissed it, and left the room without her hearing him or changing her attitude. And on this silent parting the curtain fell.
It was always for the sake of that particular scene that Newland Archer went to see "The Shaughraun." He thought the adieux of Montague and Ada Dyas as fine as anything he had ever seen Croisette and Bressant do in Paris, or Madge Robertson and Kendal in London; in its reticence, its dumb sorrow, it moved him more than the most famous histrionic outpourings.
On the evening in question the little scene acquired an added poignancy by reminding him—he could not have said why—of his leave-taking from Madame Olenska after their confidential talk a week or ten days earlier.
It would have been as difficult to discover any resemblance between the two situations as between the appearance of the persons concerned. Newland Archer could not pretend to anything approaching the young English actor's romantic good looks, and Miss Dyas was a tall red-haired woman of monumental build whose pale and pleasantly ugly face was utterly unlike Ellen Olenska's vivid countenance. Nor were Archer and Madame Olenska two lovers parting in heart-broken silence; they were client and lawyer separating after a talk which had given the lawyer the worst possible impression of the client's case. Wherein, then, lay the resemblance that made the young man's heart beat with a kind of retrospective excitement? It seemed to be in Madame Olenska's mysterious faculty of suggesting tragic and moving possibilities outside the daily run of experience. She had hardly ever said a word to him to produce this impression, but it was a part of her, either a projection of her mysterious and outlandish background or of something inherently dramatic, passionate and unusual in herself. Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them. This tendency he had felt from the first in Madame Olenska. The quiet, almost passive young woman struck him as exactly the kind of person to whom things were bound to happen, no matter how much she shrank from them and went out of her way to avoid them. The exciting fact was her having lived in an atmosphere so thick with drama that her own tendency to provoke it had apparently passed unperceived. It was precisely the odd absence of surprise in her that gave him the sense of her having been plucked out of a very maelstrom: the things she took for granted gave the measure of those she had rebelled against.
Archer had left her with the conviction that Count Olenski's accusation was not unfounded. The mysterious person who figured in his wife's past as "the secretary" had probably not been unrewarded for his share in her escape. The conditions from which she had fled were intolerable, past speaking of, past believing: she was young, she was frightened, she was desperate—what more natural than that she should be grateful to her rescuer? The pity was that her gratitude put her, in the law's eyes and the world's, on a par with her abominable husband. Archer had made her understand this, as he was bound to do; he had also made her understand that simplehearted kindly New York, on whose larger charity she had apparently counted, was precisely the place where she could least hope for indulgence.
To have to make this fact plain to her—and to witness her resigned acceptance of it—had been intolerably painful to him. He felt himself drawn to her by obscure feelings of jealousy and pity, as if her dumbly-confessed error had put her at his mercy, humbling yet endearing her. He was glad it was to him she had revealed her secret, rather than to the cold scrutiny of Mr. Letterblair, or the embarrassed gaze of her family. He immediately took it upon himself to assure them both that she had given up her idea of seeking a divorce, basing her decision on the fact that she had understood the uselessness of the proceeding; and with infinite relief they had all turned their eyes from the "unpleasantness" she had spared them.
"I was sure Newland would manage it," Mrs. Welland had said proudly of her future son-in-law; and old Mrs. Mingott, who had summoned him for a confidential interview, had congratulated him on his cleverness, and added impatiently: "Silly goose! I told her myself what nonsense it was. Wanting to pass herself off as Ellen Mingott and an old maid, when she has the luck to be a married woman and a Countess!"
These incidents had made the memory of his last talk with Madame Olenska so vivid to the young man that as the curtain fell on the parting of the two actors his eyes filled with tears, and he stood up to leave the theatre.
In doing so, he turned to the side of the house behind him, and saw the lady of whom he was thinking seated in a box with the Beauforts, Lawrence Lefferts and one or two other men. He had not spoken with her alone since their evening together, and had tried to avoid being with her in company; but now their eyes met, and as Mrs. Beaufort recognised him at the same time, and made her languid little gesture of invitation, it was impossible not to go into the box.
Beaufort and Lefferts made way for him, and after a few words with Mrs. Beaufort, who always preferred to look beautiful and not have to talk, Archer seated himself behind Madame Olenska. There was no one else in the box but Mr. Sillerton Jackson, who was telling Mrs. Beaufort in a confidential undertone about Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's last Sunday reception (where some people reported that there had been dancing). Under cover of this circumstantial narrative, to which Mrs. Beaufort listened with her perfect smile, and her head at just the right angle to be seen in profile from the stalls, Madame Olenska turned and spoke in a low voice.
"Do you think," she asked, glancing toward the stage, "he will send her a bunch of yellow roses tomorrow morning?"
Archer reddened, and his heart gave a leap of surprise. He had called only twice on Madame Olenska, and each time he had sent her a box of yellow roses, and each time without a card. She had never before made any allusion to the flowers, and he supposed she had never thought of him as the sender. Now her sudden recognition of the gift, and her associating it with the tender leave-taking on the stage, filled him with an agitated pleasure.
"I was thinking of that too—I was going to leave the theatre in order to take the picture away with me," he said.
To his surprise her colour rose, reluctantly and duskily. She looked down at the mother-of-pearl opera-glass in her smoothly gloved hands, and said, after a pause: "What do you do while May is away?"
"I stick to my work," he answered, faintly annoyed by the question.
In obedience to a long-established habit, the Wellands had left the previous week for St. Augustine, where, out of regard for the supposed susceptibility of Mr. Welland's bronchial tubes, they always spent the latter part of the winter. Mr. Welland was a mild and silent man, with no opinions but with many habits. With these habits none might interfere; and one of them demanded that his wife and daughter should always go with him on his annual journey to the south. To preserve an unbroken domesticity was essential to his peace of mind; he would not have known where his hair-brushes were, or how to provide stamps for his letters, if Mrs. Welland had not been there to tell him.
As all the members of the family adored each other, and as Mr. Welland was the central object of their idolatry, it never occurred to his wife and May to let him go to St. Augustine alone; and his sons, who were both in the law, and could not leave New York during the winter, always joined him for Easter and travelled back with him.
It was impossible for Archer to discuss the necessity of May's accompanying her father. The reputation of the Mingotts' family physician was largely based on the attack of pneumonia which Mr. Welland had never had; and his insistence on St. Augustine was therefore inflexible. Originally, it had been intended that May's engagement should not be announced till her return from Florida, and the fact that it had been made known sooner could not be expected to alter Mr. Welland's plans. Archer would have liked to join the travellers and have a few weeks of sunshine and boating with his betrothed; but he too was bound by custom and conventions. Little arduous as his professional duties were, he would have been convicted of frivolity by the whole Mingott clan if he had suggested asking for a holiday in mid-winter; and he accepted May's departure with the resignation which he perceived would have to be one of the principal constituents of married life.
He was conscious that Madame Olenska was looking at him under lowered lids. "I have done what you wished—what you advised," she said abruptly.
"Ah—I'm glad," he returned, embarrassed by her broaching the subject at such a moment.
"I understand—that you were right," she went on a little breathlessly; "but sometimes life is difficult ... perplexing..."
"I know."
"And I wanted to tell you that I DO feel you were right; and that I'm grateful to you," she ended, lifting her opera-glass quickly to her eyes as the door of the box opened and Beaufort's resonant voice broke in on them.
Archer stood up, and left the box and the theatre.
Only the day before he had received a letter from May Welland in which, with characteristic candour, she had asked him to "be kind to Ellen" in their absence. "She likes you and admires you so much—and you know, though she doesn't show it, she's still very lonely and unhappy. I don't think Granny understands her, or uncle Lovell Mingott either; they really think she's much worldlier and fonder of society than she is. And I can quite see that New York must seem dull to her, though the family won't admit it. I think she's been used to lots of things we haven't got; wonderful music, and picture shows, and celebrities—artists and authors and all the clever people you admire. Granny can't understand her wanting anything but lots of dinners and clothes—but I can see that you're almost the only person in New York who can talk to her about what she really cares for."
His wise May—how he had loved her for that letter! But he had not meant to act on it; he was too busy, to begin with, and he did not care, as an engaged man, to play too conspicuously the part of Madame Olenska's champion. He had an idea that she knew how to take care of herself a good deal better than the ingenuous May imagined. She had Beaufort at her feet, Mr. van der Luyden hovering above her like a protecting deity, and any number of candidates (Lawrence Lefferts among them) waiting their opportunity in the middle distance. Yet he never saw her, or exchanged a word with her, without feeling that, after all, May's ingenuousness almost amounted to a gift of divination. Ellen Olenska was lonely and she was unhappy.
It was a crowded night at Wallack's theatre.
The play was "The Shaughraun," with Dion Boucicault in the title role and Harry Montague and Ada Dyas as the lovers. The popularity of the admirable English company was at its height, and the Shaughraun always packed the house. In the galleries the enthusiasm was unreserved; in the stalls and boxes, people smiled a little at the hackneyed sentiments and clap-trap situations, and enjoyed the play as much as the galleries did.
There was one episode, in particular, that held the house from floor to ceiling. It was that in which Harry Montague, after a sad, almost monosyllabic scene of parting with Miss Dyas, bade her good-bye, and turned to go. The actress, who was standing near the mantelpiece and looking down into the fire, wore a gray cashmere dress without fashionable loopings or trimmings, moulded to her tall figure and flowing in long lines about her feet. Around her neck was a narrow black velvet ribbon with the ends falling down her back.
When her wooer turned from her she rested her arms against the mantel-shelf and bowed her face in her hands. On the threshold he paused to look at her; then he stole back, lifted one of the ends of velvet ribbon, kissed it, and left the room without her hearing him or changing her attitude. And on this silent parting the curtain fell.
It was always for the sake of that particular scene that Newland Archer went to see "The Shaughraun." He thought the adieux of Montague and Ada Dyas as fine as anything he had ever seen Croisette and Bressant do in Paris, or Madge Robertson and Kendal in London; in its reticence, its dumb sorrow, it moved him more than the most famous histrionic outpourings.
On the evening in question the little scene acquired an added poignancy by reminding him—he could not have said why—of his leave-taking from Madame Olenska after their confidential talk a week or ten days earlier.
It would have been as difficult to discover any resemblance between the two situations as between the appearance of the persons concerned. Newland Archer could not pretend to anything approaching the young English actor's romantic good looks, and Miss Dyas was a tall red-haired woman of monumental build whose pale and pleasantly ugly face was utterly unlike Ellen Olenska's vivid countenance. Nor were Archer and Madame Olenska two lovers parting in heart-broken silence; they were client and lawyer separating after a talk which had given the lawyer the worst possible impression of the client's case. Wherein, then, lay the resemblance that made the young man's heart beat with a kind of retrospective excitement? It seemed to be in Madame Olenska's mysterious faculty of suggesting tragic and moving possibilities outside the daily run of experience. She had hardly ever said a word to him to produce this impression, but it was a part of her, either a projection of her mysterious and outlandish background or of something inherently dramatic, passionate and unusual in herself. Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them. This tendency he had felt from the first in Madame Olenska. The quiet, almost passive young woman struck him as exactly the kind of person to whom things were bound to happen, no matter how much she shrank from them and went out of her way to avoid them. The exciting fact was her having lived in an atmosphere so thick with drama that her own tendency to provoke it had apparently passed unperceived. It was precisely the odd absence of surprise in her that gave him the sense of her having been plucked out of a very maelstrom: the things she took for granted gave the measure of those she had rebelled against.
Archer had left her with the conviction that Count Olenski's accusation was not unfounded. The mysterious person who figured in his wife's past as "the secretary" had probably not been unrewarded for his share in her escape. The conditions from which she had fled were intolerable, past speaking of, past believing: she was young, she was frightened, she was desperate—what more natural than that she should be grateful to her rescuer? The pity was that her gratitude put her, in the law's eyes and the world's, on a par with her abominable husband. Archer had made her understand this, as he was bound to do; he had also made her understand that simplehearted kindly New York, on whose larger charity she had apparently counted, was precisely the place where she could least hope for indulgence.
To have to make this fact plain to her—and to witness her resigned acceptance of it—had been intolerably painful to him. He felt himself drawn to her by obscure feelings of jealousy and pity, as if her dumbly-confessed error had put her at his mercy, humbling yet endearing her. He was glad it was to him she had revealed her secret, rather than to the cold scrutiny of Mr. Letterblair, or the embarrassed gaze of her family. He immediately took it upon himself to assure them both that she had given up her idea of seeking a divorce, basing her decision on the fact that she had understood the uselessness of the proceeding; and with infinite relief they had all turned their eyes from the "unpleasantness" she had spared them.
"I was sure Newland would manage it," Mrs. Welland had said proudly of her future son-in-law; and old Mrs. Mingott, who had summoned him for a confidential interview, had congratulated him on his cleverness, and added impatiently: "Silly goose! I told her myself what nonsense it was. Wanting to pass herself off as Ellen Mingott and an old maid, when she has the luck to be a married woman and a Countess!"
These incidents had made the memory of his last talk with Madame Olenska so vivid to the young man that as the curtain fell on the parting of the two actors his eyes filled with tears, and he stood up to leave the theatre.
In doing so, he turned to the side of the house behind him, and saw the lady of whom he was thinking seated in a box with the Beauforts, Lawrence Lefferts and one or two other men. He had not spoken with her alone since their evening together, and had tried to avoid being with her in company; but now their eyes met, and as Mrs. Beaufort recognised him at the same time, and made her languid little gesture of invitation, it was impossible not to go into the box.
Beaufort and Lefferts made way for him, and after a few words with Mrs. Beaufort, who always preferred to look beautiful and not have to talk, Archer seated himself behind Madame Olenska. There was no one else in the box but Mr. Sillerton Jackson, who was telling Mrs. Beaufort in a confidential undertone about Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's last Sunday reception (where some people reported that there had been dancing). Under cover of this circumstantial narrative, to which Mrs. Beaufort listened with her perfect smile, and her head at just the right angle to be seen in profile from the stalls, Madame Olenska turned and spoke in a low voice.
"Do you think," she asked, glancing toward the stage, "he will send her a bunch of yellow roses tomorrow morning?"
Archer reddened, and his heart gave a leap of surprise. He had called only twice on Madame Olenska, and each time he had sent her a box of yellow roses, and each time without a card. She had never before made any allusion to the flowers, and he supposed she had never thought of him as the sender. Now her sudden recognition of the gift, and her associating it with the tender leave-taking on the stage, filled him with an agitated pleasure.
"I was thinking of that too—I was going to leave the theatre in order to take the picture away with me," he said.
To his surprise her colour rose, reluctantly and duskily. She looked down at the mother-of-pearl opera-glass in her smoothly gloved hands, and said, after a pause: "What do you do while May is away?"
"I stick to my work," he answered, faintly annoyed by the question.
In obedience to a long-established habit, the Wellands had left the previous week for St. Augustine, where, out of regard for the supposed susceptibility of Mr. Welland's bronchial tubes, they always spent the latter part of the winter. Mr. Welland was a mild and silent man, with no opinions but with many habits. With these habits none might interfere; and one of them demanded that his wife and daughter should always go with him on his annual journey to the south. To preserve an unbroken domesticity was essential to his peace of mind; he would not have known where his hair-brushes were, or how to provide stamps for his letters, if Mrs. Welland had not been there to tell him.
As all the members of the family adored each other, and as Mr. Welland was the central object of their idolatry, it never occurred to his wife and May to let him go to St. Augustine alone; and his sons, who were both in the law, and could not leave New York during the winter, always joined him for Easter and travelled back with him.
It was impossible for Archer to discuss the necessity of May's accompanying her father. The reputation of the Mingotts' family physician was largely based on the attack of pneumonia which Mr. Welland had never had; and his insistence on St. Augustine was therefore inflexible. Originally, it had been intended that May's engagement should not be announced till her return from Florida, and the fact that it had been made known sooner could not be expected to alter Mr. Welland's plans. Archer would have liked to join the travellers and have a few weeks of sunshine and boating with his betrothed; but he too was bound by custom and conventions. Little arduous as his professional duties were, he would have been convicted of frivolity by the whole Mingott clan if he had suggested asking for a holiday in mid-winter; and he accepted May's departure with the resignation which he perceived would have to be one of the principal constituents of married life.
He was conscious that Madame Olenska was looking at him under lowered lids. "I have done what you wished—what you advised," she said abruptly.
"Ah—I'm glad," he returned, embarrassed by her broaching the subject at such a moment.
"I understand—that you were right," she went on a little breathlessly; "but sometimes life is difficult ... perplexing..."
"I know."
"And I wanted to tell you that I DO feel you were right; and that I'm grateful to you," she ended, lifting her opera-glass quickly to her eyes as the door of the box opened and Beaufort's resonant voice broke in on them.
Archer stood up, and left the box and the theatre.
Only the day before he had received a letter from May Welland in which, with characteristic candour, she had asked him to "be kind to Ellen" in their absence. "She likes you and admires you so much—and you know, though she doesn't show it, she's still very lonely and unhappy. I don't think Granny understands her, or uncle Lovell Mingott either; they really think she's much worldlier and fonder of society than she is. And I can quite see that New York must seem dull to her, though the family won't admit it. I think she's been used to lots of things we haven't got; wonderful music, and picture shows, and celebrities—artists and authors and all the clever people you admire. Granny can't understand her wanting anything but lots of dinners and clothes—but I can see that you're almost the only person in New York who can talk to her about what she really cares for."
His wise May—how he had loved her for that letter! But he had not meant to act on it; he was too busy, to begin with, and he did not care, as an engaged man, to play too conspicuously the part of Madame Olenska's champion. He had an idea that she knew how to take care of herself a good deal better than the ingenuous May imagined. She had Beaufort at her feet, Mr. van der Luyden hovering above her like a protecting deity, and any number of candidates (Lawrence Lefferts among them) waiting their opportunity in the middle distance. Yet he never saw her, or exchanged a word with her, without feeling that, after all, May's ingenuousness almost amounted to a gift of divination. Ellen Olenska was lonely and she was unhappy.
往事如歌
新手上路
- 注册
- 2012-02-02
- 消息
- 707
- 荣誉分数
- 13
- 声望点数
- 18
XIV.
As he came out into the lobby Archer ran across his friend Ned Winsett, the only one among what Janey called his "clever people" with whom he cared to probe into things a little deeper than the average level of club and chop-house banter.
He had caught sight, across the house, of Winsett's shabby round-shouldered back, and had once noticed his eyes turned toward the Beaufort box. The two men shook hands, and Winsett proposed a bock at a little German restaurant around the corner. Archer, who was not in the mood for the kind of talk they were likely to get there, declined on the plea that he had work to do at home; and Winsett said: "Oh, well so have I for that matter, and I'll be the Industrious Apprentice too."
They strolled along together, and presently Winsett said: "Look here, what I'm really after is the name of the dark lady in that swell box of yours—with the Beauforts, wasn't she? The one your friend Lefferts seems so smitten by."
Archer, he could not have said why, was slightly annoyed. What the devil did Ned Winsett want with Ellen Olenska's name? And above all, why did he couple it with Lefferts's? It was unlike Winsett to manifest such curiosity; but after all, Archer remembered, he was a journalist.
"It's not for an interview, I hope?" he laughed.
"Well—not for the press; just for myself," Winsett rejoined. "The fact is she's a neighbour of mine—queer quarter for such a beauty to settle in—and she's been awfully kind to my little boy, who fell down her area chasing his kitten, and gave himself a nasty cut. She rushed in bareheaded, carrying him in her arms, with his knee all beautifully bandaged, and was so sympathetic and beautiful that my wife was too dazzled to ask her name."
A pleasant glow dilated Archer's heart. There was nothing extraordinary in the tale: any woman would have done as much for a neighbour's child. But it was just like Ellen, he felt, to have rushed in bareheaded, carrying the boy in her arms, and to have dazzled poor Mrs. Winsett into forgetting to ask who she was.
"That is the Countess Olenska—a granddaughter of old Mrs. Mingott's."
"Whew—a Countess!" whistled Ned Winsett. "Well, I didn't know Countesses were so neighbourly. Mingotts ain't."
"They would be, if you'd let them."
"Ah, well—" It was their old interminable argument as to the obstinate unwillingness of the "clever people" to frequent the fashionable, and both men knew that there was no use in prolonging it.
"I wonder," Winsett broke off, "how a Countess happens to live in our slum?"
"Because she doesn't care a hang about where she lives—or about any of our little social sign-posts," said Archer, with a secret pride in his own picture of her.
"H'm—been in bigger places, I suppose," the other commented. "Well, here's my corner."
He slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood looking after him and musing on his last words.
Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they were the most interesting thing about him, and always made Archer wonder why they had allowed him to accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men are still struggling.
Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and child, but he had never seen them. The two men always met at the Century, or at some haunt of journalists and theatrical people, such as the restaurant where Winsett had proposed to go for a bock. He had given Archer to understand that his wife was an invalid; which might be true of the poor lady, or might merely mean that she was lacking in social gifts or in evening clothes, or in both. Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social observances: Archer, who dressed in the evening because he thought it cleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had never stopped to consider that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items in a modest budget, regarded Winsett's attitude as part of the boring "Bohemian" pose that always made fashionable people, who changed their clothes without talking about it, and were not forever harping on the number of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and less self-conscious than the others. Nevertheless, he was always stimulated by Winsett, and whenever he caught sight of the journalist's lean bearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout him out of his corner and carry him off for a long talk.
Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.
On the subject of "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.
"The fact is, life isn't much a fit for either of us," Winsett had once said. "I'm down and out; nothing to be done about it. I've got only one ware to produce, and there's no market for it here, and won't be in my time. But you're free and you're well-off. Why don't you get into touch? There's only one way to do it: to go into politics."
Archer threw his head back and laughed. There one saw at a flash the unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and the others—Archer's kind. Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." But, since he could hardly put it in that way to Winsett, he answered evasively: "Look at the career of the honest man in American politics! They don't want us."
"Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"
Archer's laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly condescending smile. It was useless to prolong the discussion: everybody knew the melancholy fate of the few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in municipal or state politics in New York. The day was past when that sort of thing was possible: the country was in possession of the bosses and the emigrant, and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture.
"Culture! Yes—if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of—well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. But you're in a pitiful little minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. You're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a Gentleman.' You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate ... God! If I could emigrate ..."
Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation back to books, where Winsett, if uncertain, was always interesting. Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One could no more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go down into the muck. A gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained. But you couldn't make a man like Winsett see that; and that was why the New York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be a smaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms of Fifth Avenue.
The next morning Archer scoured the town in vain for more yellow roses. In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life. Why should he not be, at that moment, on the sands of St. Augustine with May Welland? No one was deceived by his pretense of professional activity. In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr. Letterblair was the head, and which were mainly engaged in the management of large estates and "conservative" investments, there were always two or three young men, fairly well-off, and without professional ambition, who, for a certain number of hours of each day, sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading the newspapers. Though it was supposed to be proper for them to have an occupation, the crude fact of money-making was still regarded as derogatory, and the law, being a profession, was accounted a more gentlemanly pursuit than business. But none of these young men had much hope of really advancing in his profession, or any earnest desire to do so; and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was already perceptibly spreading.
It made Archer shiver to think that it might be spreading over him too. He had, to be sure, other tastes and interests; he spent his vacations in European travel, cultivated the "clever people" May spoke of, and generally tried to "keep up," as he had somewhat wistfully put it to Madame Olenska. But once he was married, what would become of this narrow margin of life in which his real experiences were lived? He had seen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream, though perhaps less ardently, and who had gradually sunk into the placid and luxurious routine of their elders.
From the office he sent a note by messenger to Madame Olenska, asking if he might call that afternoon, and begging her to let him find a reply at his club; but at the club he found nothing, nor did he receive any letter the following day. This unexpected silence mortified him beyond reason, and though the next morning he saw a glorious cluster of yellow roses behind a florist's window-pane, he left it there. It was only on the third morning that he received a line by post from the Countess Olenska. To his surprise it was dated from Skuytercliff, whither the van der Luydens had promptly retreated after putting the Duke on board his steamer.
"I ran away," the writer began abruptly (without the usual preliminaries), "the day after I saw you at the play, and these kind friends have taken me in. I wanted to be quiet, and think things over. You were right in telling me how kind they were; I feel myself so safe here. I wish that you were with us." She ended with a conventional "Yours sincerely," and without any allusion to the date of her return.
The tone of the note surprised the young man. What was Madame Olenska running away from, and why did she feel the need to be safe? His first thought was of some dark menace from abroad; then he reflected that he did not know her epistolary style, and that it might run to picturesque exaggeration. Women always exaggerated; and moreover she was not wholly at her ease in English, which she often spoke as if she were translating from the French. "Je me suis evadee—" put in that way, the opening sentence immediately suggested that she might merely have wanted to escape from a boring round of engagements; which was very likely true, for he judged her to be capricious, and easily wearied of the pleasure of the moment.
It amused him to think of the van der Luydens' having carried her off to Skuytercliff on a second visit, and this time for an indefinite period. The doors of Skuytercliff were rarely and grudgingly opened to visitors, and a chilly week-end was the most ever offered to the few thus privileged. But Archer had seen, on his last visit to Paris, the delicious play of Labiche, "Le Voyage de M. Perrichon," and he remembered M. Perrichon's dogged and undiscouraged attachment to the young man whom he had pulled out of the glacier. The van der Luydens had rescued Madame Olenska from a doom almost as icy; and though there were many other reasons for being attracted to her, Archer knew that beneath them all lay the gentle and obstinate determination to go on rescuing her.
He felt a distinct disappointment on learning that she was away; and almost immediately remembered that, only the day before, he had refused an invitation to spend the following Sunday with the Reggie Chiverses at their house on the Hudson, a few miles below Skuytercliff.
He had had his fill long ago of the noisy friendly parties at Highbank, with coasting, ice-boating, sleighing, long tramps in the snow, and a general flavour of mild flirting and milder practical jokes. He had just received a box of new books from his London book-seller, and had preferred the prospect of a quiet Sunday at home with his spoils. But he now went into the club writing-room, wrote a hurried telegram, and told the servant to send it immediately. He knew that Mrs. Reggie didn't object to her visitors' suddenly changing their minds, and that there was always a room to spare in her elastic house.
As he came out into the lobby Archer ran across his friend Ned Winsett, the only one among what Janey called his "clever people" with whom he cared to probe into things a little deeper than the average level of club and chop-house banter.
He had caught sight, across the house, of Winsett's shabby round-shouldered back, and had once noticed his eyes turned toward the Beaufort box. The two men shook hands, and Winsett proposed a bock at a little German restaurant around the corner. Archer, who was not in the mood for the kind of talk they were likely to get there, declined on the plea that he had work to do at home; and Winsett said: "Oh, well so have I for that matter, and I'll be the Industrious Apprentice too."
They strolled along together, and presently Winsett said: "Look here, what I'm really after is the name of the dark lady in that swell box of yours—with the Beauforts, wasn't she? The one your friend Lefferts seems so smitten by."
Archer, he could not have said why, was slightly annoyed. What the devil did Ned Winsett want with Ellen Olenska's name? And above all, why did he couple it with Lefferts's? It was unlike Winsett to manifest such curiosity; but after all, Archer remembered, he was a journalist.
"It's not for an interview, I hope?" he laughed.
"Well—not for the press; just for myself," Winsett rejoined. "The fact is she's a neighbour of mine—queer quarter for such a beauty to settle in—and she's been awfully kind to my little boy, who fell down her area chasing his kitten, and gave himself a nasty cut. She rushed in bareheaded, carrying him in her arms, with his knee all beautifully bandaged, and was so sympathetic and beautiful that my wife was too dazzled to ask her name."
A pleasant glow dilated Archer's heart. There was nothing extraordinary in the tale: any woman would have done as much for a neighbour's child. But it was just like Ellen, he felt, to have rushed in bareheaded, carrying the boy in her arms, and to have dazzled poor Mrs. Winsett into forgetting to ask who she was.
"That is the Countess Olenska—a granddaughter of old Mrs. Mingott's."
"Whew—a Countess!" whistled Ned Winsett. "Well, I didn't know Countesses were so neighbourly. Mingotts ain't."
"They would be, if you'd let them."
"Ah, well—" It was their old interminable argument as to the obstinate unwillingness of the "clever people" to frequent the fashionable, and both men knew that there was no use in prolonging it.
"I wonder," Winsett broke off, "how a Countess happens to live in our slum?"
"Because she doesn't care a hang about where she lives—or about any of our little social sign-posts," said Archer, with a secret pride in his own picture of her.
"H'm—been in bigger places, I suppose," the other commented. "Well, here's my corner."
He slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood looking after him and musing on his last words.
Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they were the most interesting thing about him, and always made Archer wonder why they had allowed him to accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men are still struggling.
Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and child, but he had never seen them. The two men always met at the Century, or at some haunt of journalists and theatrical people, such as the restaurant where Winsett had proposed to go for a bock. He had given Archer to understand that his wife was an invalid; which might be true of the poor lady, or might merely mean that she was lacking in social gifts or in evening clothes, or in both. Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social observances: Archer, who dressed in the evening because he thought it cleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had never stopped to consider that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items in a modest budget, regarded Winsett's attitude as part of the boring "Bohemian" pose that always made fashionable people, who changed their clothes without talking about it, and were not forever harping on the number of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and less self-conscious than the others. Nevertheless, he was always stimulated by Winsett, and whenever he caught sight of the journalist's lean bearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout him out of his corner and carry him off for a long talk.
Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.
On the subject of "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.
"The fact is, life isn't much a fit for either of us," Winsett had once said. "I'm down and out; nothing to be done about it. I've got only one ware to produce, and there's no market for it here, and won't be in my time. But you're free and you're well-off. Why don't you get into touch? There's only one way to do it: to go into politics."
Archer threw his head back and laughed. There one saw at a flash the unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and the others—Archer's kind. Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." But, since he could hardly put it in that way to Winsett, he answered evasively: "Look at the career of the honest man in American politics! They don't want us."
"Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"
Archer's laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly condescending smile. It was useless to prolong the discussion: everybody knew the melancholy fate of the few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in municipal or state politics in New York. The day was past when that sort of thing was possible: the country was in possession of the bosses and the emigrant, and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture.
"Culture! Yes—if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of—well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. But you're in a pitiful little minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. You're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a Gentleman.' You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate ... God! If I could emigrate ..."
Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation back to books, where Winsett, if uncertain, was always interesting. Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One could no more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go down into the muck. A gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained. But you couldn't make a man like Winsett see that; and that was why the New York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be a smaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms of Fifth Avenue.
The next morning Archer scoured the town in vain for more yellow roses. In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life. Why should he not be, at that moment, on the sands of St. Augustine with May Welland? No one was deceived by his pretense of professional activity. In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr. Letterblair was the head, and which were mainly engaged in the management of large estates and "conservative" investments, there were always two or three young men, fairly well-off, and without professional ambition, who, for a certain number of hours of each day, sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading the newspapers. Though it was supposed to be proper for them to have an occupation, the crude fact of money-making was still regarded as derogatory, and the law, being a profession, was accounted a more gentlemanly pursuit than business. But none of these young men had much hope of really advancing in his profession, or any earnest desire to do so; and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was already perceptibly spreading.
It made Archer shiver to think that it might be spreading over him too. He had, to be sure, other tastes and interests; he spent his vacations in European travel, cultivated the "clever people" May spoke of, and generally tried to "keep up," as he had somewhat wistfully put it to Madame Olenska. But once he was married, what would become of this narrow margin of life in which his real experiences were lived? He had seen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream, though perhaps less ardently, and who had gradually sunk into the placid and luxurious routine of their elders.
From the office he sent a note by messenger to Madame Olenska, asking if he might call that afternoon, and begging her to let him find a reply at his club; but at the club he found nothing, nor did he receive any letter the following day. This unexpected silence mortified him beyond reason, and though the next morning he saw a glorious cluster of yellow roses behind a florist's window-pane, he left it there. It was only on the third morning that he received a line by post from the Countess Olenska. To his surprise it was dated from Skuytercliff, whither the van der Luydens had promptly retreated after putting the Duke on board his steamer.
"I ran away," the writer began abruptly (without the usual preliminaries), "the day after I saw you at the play, and these kind friends have taken me in. I wanted to be quiet, and think things over. You were right in telling me how kind they were; I feel myself so safe here. I wish that you were with us." She ended with a conventional "Yours sincerely," and without any allusion to the date of her return.
The tone of the note surprised the young man. What was Madame Olenska running away from, and why did she feel the need to be safe? His first thought was of some dark menace from abroad; then he reflected that he did not know her epistolary style, and that it might run to picturesque exaggeration. Women always exaggerated; and moreover she was not wholly at her ease in English, which she often spoke as if she were translating from the French. "Je me suis evadee—" put in that way, the opening sentence immediately suggested that she might merely have wanted to escape from a boring round of engagements; which was very likely true, for he judged her to be capricious, and easily wearied of the pleasure of the moment.
It amused him to think of the van der Luydens' having carried her off to Skuytercliff on a second visit, and this time for an indefinite period. The doors of Skuytercliff were rarely and grudgingly opened to visitors, and a chilly week-end was the most ever offered to the few thus privileged. But Archer had seen, on his last visit to Paris, the delicious play of Labiche, "Le Voyage de M. Perrichon," and he remembered M. Perrichon's dogged and undiscouraged attachment to the young man whom he had pulled out of the glacier. The van der Luydens had rescued Madame Olenska from a doom almost as icy; and though there were many other reasons for being attracted to her, Archer knew that beneath them all lay the gentle and obstinate determination to go on rescuing her.
He felt a distinct disappointment on learning that she was away; and almost immediately remembered that, only the day before, he had refused an invitation to spend the following Sunday with the Reggie Chiverses at their house on the Hudson, a few miles below Skuytercliff.
He had had his fill long ago of the noisy friendly parties at Highbank, with coasting, ice-boating, sleighing, long tramps in the snow, and a general flavour of mild flirting and milder practical jokes. He had just received a box of new books from his London book-seller, and had preferred the prospect of a quiet Sunday at home with his spoils. But he now went into the club writing-room, wrote a hurried telegram, and told the servant to send it immediately. He knew that Mrs. Reggie didn't object to her visitors' suddenly changing their minds, and that there was always a room to spare in her elastic house.
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XV.
Newland Archer arrived at the Chiverses' on Friday evening, and on Saturday went conscientiously through all the rites appertaining to a week-end at Highbank.
In the morning he had a spin in the ice-boat with his hostess and a few of the hardier guests; in the afternoon he "went over the farm" with Reggie, and listened, in the elaborately appointed stables, to long and impressive disquisitions on the horse; after tea he talked in a corner of the firelit hall with a young lady who had professed herself broken-hearted when his engagement was announced, but was now eager to tell him of her own matrimonial hopes; and finally, about midnight, he assisted in putting a gold-fish in one visitor's bed, dressed up a burglar in the bath-room of a nervous aunt, and saw in the small hours by joining in a pillow-fight that ranged from the nurseries to the basement. But on Sunday after luncheon he borrowed a cutter, and drove over to Skuytercliff.
People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa. Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did some who had. The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his youth, on his return from the "grand tour," and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with Miss Louisa Dagonet. It was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows. From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by balustrades and urns descended in the steel-engraving style to a small irregular lake with an asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers. To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with "specimen" trees (each of a different variety) rolled away to long ranges of grass crested with elaborate cast-iron ornaments; and below, in a hollow, lay the four-roomed stone house which the first Patroon had built on the land granted him in 1612.
Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the Italian villa loomed up rather grimly; even in summer it kept its distance, and the boldest coleus bed had never ventured nearer than thirty feet from its awful front. Now, as Archer rang the bell, the long tinkle seemed to echo through a mausoleum; and the surprise of the butler who at length responded to the call was as great as though he had been summoned from his final sleep.
Happily Archer was of the family, and therefore, irregular though his arrival was, entitled to be informed that the Countess Olenska was out, having driven to afternoon service with Mrs. van der Luyden exactly three quarters of an hour earlier.
"Mr. van der Luyden," the butler continued, "is in, sir; but my impression is that he is either finishing his nap or else reading yesterday's Evening Post. I heard him say, sir, on his return from church this morning, that he intended to look through the Evening Post after luncheon; if you like, sir, I might go to the library door and listen—"
But Archer, thanking him, said that he would go and meet the ladies; and the butler, obviously relieved, closed the door on him majestically.
A groom took the cutter to the stables, and Archer struck through the park to the high-road. The village of Skuytercliff was only a mile and a half away, but he knew that Mrs. van der Luyden never walked, and that he must keep to the road to meet the carriage. Presently, however, coming down a foot-path that crossed the highway, he caught sight of a slight figure in a red cloak, with a big dog running ahead. He hurried forward, and Madame Olenska stopped short with a smile of welcome.
"Ah, you've come!" she said, and drew her hand from her muff.
The red cloak made her look gay and vivid, like the Ellen Mingott of old days; and he laughed as he took her hand, and answered: "I came to see what you were running away from."
Her face clouded over, but she answered: "Ah, well—you will see, presently."
The answer puzzled him. "Why—do you mean that you've been overtaken?"
She shrugged her shoulders, with a little movement like Nastasia's, and rejoined in a lighter tone: "Shall we walk on? I'm so cold after the sermon. And what does it matter, now you're here to protect me?"
The blood rose to his temples and he caught a fold of her cloak. "Ellen—what is it? You must tell me."
"Oh, presently—let's run a race first: my feet are freezing to the ground," she cried; and gathering up the cloak she fled away across the snow, the dog leaping about her with challenging barks. For a moment Archer stood watching, his gaze delighted by the flash of the red meteor against the snow; then he started after her, and they met, panting and laughing, at a wicket that led into the park.
She looked up at him and smiled. "I knew you'd come!"
"That shows you wanted me to," he returned, with a disproportionate joy in their nonsense. The white glitter of the trees filled the air with its own mysterious brightness, and as they walked on over the snow the ground seemed to sing under their feet.
"Where did you come from?" Madame Olenska asked.
He told her, and added: "It was because I got your note."
After a pause she said, with a just perceptible chill in her voice: "May asked you to take care of me."
"I didn't need any asking."
"You mean—I'm so evidently helpless and defenceless? What a poor thing you must all think me! But women here seem not—seem never to feel the need: any more than the blessed in heaven."
He lowered his voice to ask: "What sort of a need?"
"Ah, don't ask me! I don't speak your language," she retorted petulantly.
The answer smote him like a blow, and he stood still in the path, looking down at her.
"What did I come for, if I don't speak yours?"
"Oh, my friend—!" She laid her hand lightly on his arm, and he pleaded earnestly: "Ellen—why won't you tell me what's happened?"
She shrugged again. "Does anything ever happen in heaven?"
He was silent, and they walked on a few yards without exchanging a word. Finally she said: "I will tell you—but where, where, where? One can't be alone for a minute in that great seminary of a house, with all the doors wide open, and always a servant bringing tea, or a log for the fire, or the newspaper! Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self? You're so shy, and yet you're so public. I always feel as if I were in the convent again—or on the stage, before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds."
"Ah, you don't like us!" Archer exclaimed.
They were walking past the house of the old Patroon, with its squat walls and small square windows compactly grouped about a central chimney. The shutters stood wide, and through one of the newly-washed windows Archer caught the light of a fire.
"Why—the house is open!" he said.
She stood still. "No; only for today, at least. I wanted to see it, and Mr. van der Luyden had the fire lit and the windows opened, so that we might stop there on the way back from church this morning." She ran up the steps and tried the door. "It's still unlocked—what luck! Come in and we can have a quiet talk. Mrs. van der Luyden has driven over to see her old aunts at Rhinebeck and we shan't be missed at the house for another hour."
He followed her into the narrow passage. His spirits, which had dropped at her last words, rose with an irrational leap. The homely little house stood there, its panels and brasses shining in the firelight, as if magically created to receive them. A big bed of embers still gleamed in the kitchen chimney, under an iron pot hung from an ancient crane. Rush-bottomed arm-chairs faced each other across the tiled hearth, and rows of Delft plates stood on shelves against the walls. Archer stooped over and threw a log upon the embers.
Madame Olenska, dropping her cloak, sat down in one of the chairs. Archer leaned against the chimney and looked at her.
"You're laughing now; but when you wrote me you were unhappy," he said.
"Yes." She paused. "But I can't feel unhappy when you're here."
"I sha'n't be here long," he rejoined, his lips stiffening with the effort to say just so much and no more.
"No; I know. But I'm improvident: I live in the moment when I'm happy."
The words stole through him like a temptation, and to close his senses to it he moved away from the hearth and stood gazing out at the black tree-boles against the snow. But it was as if she too had shifted her place, and he still saw her, between himself and the trees, drooping over the fire with her indolent smile. Archer's heart was beating insubordinately. What if it were from him that she had been running away, and if she had waited to tell him so till they were here alone together in this secret room?
"Ellen, if I'm really a help to you—if you really wanted me to come—tell me what's wrong, tell me what it is you're running away from," he insisted.
He spoke without shifting his position, without even turning to look at her: if the thing was to happen, it was to happen in this way, with the whole width of the room between them, and his eyes still fixed on the outer snow.
For a long moment she was silent; and in that moment Archer imagined her, almost heard her, stealing up behind him to throw her light arms about his neck. While he waited, soul and body throbbing with the miracle to come, his eyes mechanically received the image of a heavily-coated man with his fur collar turned up who was advancing along the path to the house. The man was Julius Beaufort.
"Ah—!" Archer cried, bursting into a laugh.
Madame Olenska had sprung up and moved to his side, slipping her hand into his; but after a glance through the window her face paled and she shrank back.
"So that was it?" Archer said derisively.
"I didn't know he was here," Madame Olenska murmured. Her hand still clung to Archer's; but he drew away from her, and walking out into the passage threw open the door of the house.
"Hallo, Beaufort—this way! Madame Olenska was expecting you," he said.
During his journey back to New York the next morning, Archer relived with a fatiguing vividness his last moments at Skuytercliff.
Beaufort, though clearly annoyed at finding him with Madame Olenska, had, as usual, carried off the situation high-handedly. His way of ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually gave them, if they were sensitive to it, a feeling of invisibility, of nonexistence. Archer, as the three strolled back through the park, was aware of this odd sense of disembodiment; and humbling as it was to his vanity it gave him the ghostly advantage of observing unobserved.
Beaufort had entered the little house with his usual easy assurance; but he could not smile away the vertical line between his eyes. It was fairly clear that Madame Olenska had not known that he was coming, though her words to Archer had hinted at the possibility; at any rate, she had evidently not told him where she was going when she left New York, and her unexplained departure had exasperated him. The ostensible reason of his appearance was the discovery, the very night before, of a "perfect little house," not in the market, which was really just the thing for her, but would be snapped up instantly if she didn't take it; and he was loud in mock-reproaches for the dance she had led him in running away just as he had found it.
"If only this new dodge for talking along a wire had been a little bit nearer perfection I might have told you all this from town, and been toasting my toes before the club fire at this minute, instead of tramping after you through the snow," he grumbled, disguising a real irritation under the pretence of it; and at this opening Madame Olenska twisted the talk away to the fantastic possibility that they might one day actually converse with each other from street to street, or even—incredible dream!—from one town to another. This struck from all three allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne, and such platitudes as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are talking against time, and dealing with a new invention in which it would seem ingenuous to believe too soon; and the question of the telephone carried them safely back to the big house.
Mrs. van der Luyden had not yet returned; and Archer took his leave and walked off to fetch the cutter, while Beaufort followed the Countess Olenska indoors. It was probable that, little as the van der Luydens encouraged unannounced visits, he could count on being asked to dine, and sent back to the station to catch the nine o'clock train; but more than that he would certainly not get, for it would be inconceivable to his hosts that a gentleman travelling without luggage should wish to spend the night, and distasteful to them to propose it to a person with whom they were on terms of such limited cordiality as Beaufort.
Beaufort knew all this, and must have foreseen it; and his taking the long journey for so small a reward gave the measure of his impatience. He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska; and Beaufort had only one object in view in his pursuit of pretty women. His dull and childless home had long since palled on him; and in addition to more permanent consolations he was always in quest of amorous adventures in his own set. This was the man from whom Madame Olenska was avowedly flying: the question was whether she had fled because his importunities displeased her, or because she did not wholly trust herself to resist them; unless, indeed, all her talk of flight had been a blind, and her departure no more than a manoeuvre.
Archer did not really believe this. Little as he had actually seen of Madame Olenska, he was beginning to think that he could read her face, and if not her face, her voice; and both had betrayed annoyance, and even dismay, at Beaufort's sudden appearance. But, after all, if this were the case, was it not worse than if she had left New York for the express purpose of meeting him? If she had done that, she ceased to be an object of interest, she threw in her lot with the vulgarest of dissemblers: a woman engaged in a love affair with Beaufort "classed" herself irretrievably.
No, it was worse a thousand times if, judging Beaufort, and probably despising him, she was yet drawn to him by all that gave him an advantage over the other men about her: his habit of two continents and two societies, his familiar association with artists and actors and people generally in the world's eye, and his careless contempt for local prejudices. Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park. How should any one coming from a wider world not feel the difference and be attracted by it?
Madame Olenska, in a burst of irritation, had said to Archer that he and she did not talk the same language; and the young man knew that in some respects this was true. But Beaufort understood every turn of her dialect, and spoke it fluently: his view of life, his tone, his attitude, were merely a coarser reflection of those revealed in Count Olenski's letter. This might seem to be to his disadvantage with Count Olenski's wife; but Archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her, even though it were against her will.
Thus, with a painful impartiality, did the young man make out the case for Beaufort, and for Beaufort's victim. A longing to enlighten her was strong in him; and there were moments when he imagined that all she asked was to be enlightened.
That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently; a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet's brilliant tales, and a novel called "Middlemarch," as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews. He had declined three dinner invitations in favour of this feast; but though he turned the pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand. Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered because the name had attracted him: "The House of Life." He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions. All through the night he pursued through those enchanted pages the vision of a woman who had the face of Ellen Olenska; but when he woke the next morning, and looked out at the brownstone houses across the street, and thought of his desk in Mr. Letterblair's office, and the family pew in Grace Church, his hour in the park of Skuytercliff became as far outside the pale of probability as the visions of the night.
"Mercy, how pale you look, Newland!" Janey commented over the coffee-cups at breakfast; and his mother added: "Newland, dear, I've noticed lately that you've been coughing; I do hope you're not letting yourself be overworked?" For it was the conviction of both ladies that, under the iron despotism of his senior partners, the young man's life was spent in the most exhausting professional labours—and he had never thought it necessary to undeceive them.
The next two or three days dragged by heavily. The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future. He heard nothing of the Countess Olenska, or of the perfect little house, and though he met Beaufort at the club they merely nodded at each other across the whist-tables. It was not till the fourth evening that he found a note awaiting him on his return home. "Come late tomorrow: I must explain to you. Ellen." These were the only words it contained.
The young man, who was dining out, thrust the note into his pocket, smiling a little at the Frenchness of the "to you." After dinner he went to a play; and it was not until his return home, after midnight, that he drew Madame Olenska's missive out again and re-read it slowly a number of times. There were several ways of answering it, and he gave considerable thought to each one during the watches of an agitated night. That on which, when morning came, he finally decided was to pitch some clothes into a portmanteau and jump on board a boat that was leaving that very afternoon for St. Augustine.
Newland Archer arrived at the Chiverses' on Friday evening, and on Saturday went conscientiously through all the rites appertaining to a week-end at Highbank.
In the morning he had a spin in the ice-boat with his hostess and a few of the hardier guests; in the afternoon he "went over the farm" with Reggie, and listened, in the elaborately appointed stables, to long and impressive disquisitions on the horse; after tea he talked in a corner of the firelit hall with a young lady who had professed herself broken-hearted when his engagement was announced, but was now eager to tell him of her own matrimonial hopes; and finally, about midnight, he assisted in putting a gold-fish in one visitor's bed, dressed up a burglar in the bath-room of a nervous aunt, and saw in the small hours by joining in a pillow-fight that ranged from the nurseries to the basement. But on Sunday after luncheon he borrowed a cutter, and drove over to Skuytercliff.
People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa. Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did some who had. The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his youth, on his return from the "grand tour," and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with Miss Louisa Dagonet. It was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows. From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by balustrades and urns descended in the steel-engraving style to a small irregular lake with an asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers. To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with "specimen" trees (each of a different variety) rolled away to long ranges of grass crested with elaborate cast-iron ornaments; and below, in a hollow, lay the four-roomed stone house which the first Patroon had built on the land granted him in 1612.
Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the Italian villa loomed up rather grimly; even in summer it kept its distance, and the boldest coleus bed had never ventured nearer than thirty feet from its awful front. Now, as Archer rang the bell, the long tinkle seemed to echo through a mausoleum; and the surprise of the butler who at length responded to the call was as great as though he had been summoned from his final sleep.
Happily Archer was of the family, and therefore, irregular though his arrival was, entitled to be informed that the Countess Olenska was out, having driven to afternoon service with Mrs. van der Luyden exactly three quarters of an hour earlier.
"Mr. van der Luyden," the butler continued, "is in, sir; but my impression is that he is either finishing his nap or else reading yesterday's Evening Post. I heard him say, sir, on his return from church this morning, that he intended to look through the Evening Post after luncheon; if you like, sir, I might go to the library door and listen—"
But Archer, thanking him, said that he would go and meet the ladies; and the butler, obviously relieved, closed the door on him majestically.
A groom took the cutter to the stables, and Archer struck through the park to the high-road. The village of Skuytercliff was only a mile and a half away, but he knew that Mrs. van der Luyden never walked, and that he must keep to the road to meet the carriage. Presently, however, coming down a foot-path that crossed the highway, he caught sight of a slight figure in a red cloak, with a big dog running ahead. He hurried forward, and Madame Olenska stopped short with a smile of welcome.
"Ah, you've come!" she said, and drew her hand from her muff.
The red cloak made her look gay and vivid, like the Ellen Mingott of old days; and he laughed as he took her hand, and answered: "I came to see what you were running away from."
Her face clouded over, but she answered: "Ah, well—you will see, presently."
The answer puzzled him. "Why—do you mean that you've been overtaken?"
She shrugged her shoulders, with a little movement like Nastasia's, and rejoined in a lighter tone: "Shall we walk on? I'm so cold after the sermon. And what does it matter, now you're here to protect me?"
The blood rose to his temples and he caught a fold of her cloak. "Ellen—what is it? You must tell me."
"Oh, presently—let's run a race first: my feet are freezing to the ground," she cried; and gathering up the cloak she fled away across the snow, the dog leaping about her with challenging barks. For a moment Archer stood watching, his gaze delighted by the flash of the red meteor against the snow; then he started after her, and they met, panting and laughing, at a wicket that led into the park.
She looked up at him and smiled. "I knew you'd come!"
"That shows you wanted me to," he returned, with a disproportionate joy in their nonsense. The white glitter of the trees filled the air with its own mysterious brightness, and as they walked on over the snow the ground seemed to sing under their feet.
"Where did you come from?" Madame Olenska asked.
He told her, and added: "It was because I got your note."
After a pause she said, with a just perceptible chill in her voice: "May asked you to take care of me."
"I didn't need any asking."
"You mean—I'm so evidently helpless and defenceless? What a poor thing you must all think me! But women here seem not—seem never to feel the need: any more than the blessed in heaven."
He lowered his voice to ask: "What sort of a need?"
"Ah, don't ask me! I don't speak your language," she retorted petulantly.
The answer smote him like a blow, and he stood still in the path, looking down at her.
"What did I come for, if I don't speak yours?"
"Oh, my friend—!" She laid her hand lightly on his arm, and he pleaded earnestly: "Ellen—why won't you tell me what's happened?"
She shrugged again. "Does anything ever happen in heaven?"
He was silent, and they walked on a few yards without exchanging a word. Finally she said: "I will tell you—but where, where, where? One can't be alone for a minute in that great seminary of a house, with all the doors wide open, and always a servant bringing tea, or a log for the fire, or the newspaper! Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self? You're so shy, and yet you're so public. I always feel as if I were in the convent again—or on the stage, before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds."
"Ah, you don't like us!" Archer exclaimed.
They were walking past the house of the old Patroon, with its squat walls and small square windows compactly grouped about a central chimney. The shutters stood wide, and through one of the newly-washed windows Archer caught the light of a fire.
"Why—the house is open!" he said.
She stood still. "No; only for today, at least. I wanted to see it, and Mr. van der Luyden had the fire lit and the windows opened, so that we might stop there on the way back from church this morning." She ran up the steps and tried the door. "It's still unlocked—what luck! Come in and we can have a quiet talk. Mrs. van der Luyden has driven over to see her old aunts at Rhinebeck and we shan't be missed at the house for another hour."
He followed her into the narrow passage. His spirits, which had dropped at her last words, rose with an irrational leap. The homely little house stood there, its panels and brasses shining in the firelight, as if magically created to receive them. A big bed of embers still gleamed in the kitchen chimney, under an iron pot hung from an ancient crane. Rush-bottomed arm-chairs faced each other across the tiled hearth, and rows of Delft plates stood on shelves against the walls. Archer stooped over and threw a log upon the embers.
Madame Olenska, dropping her cloak, sat down in one of the chairs. Archer leaned against the chimney and looked at her.
"You're laughing now; but when you wrote me you were unhappy," he said.
"Yes." She paused. "But I can't feel unhappy when you're here."
"I sha'n't be here long," he rejoined, his lips stiffening with the effort to say just so much and no more.
"No; I know. But I'm improvident: I live in the moment when I'm happy."
The words stole through him like a temptation, and to close his senses to it he moved away from the hearth and stood gazing out at the black tree-boles against the snow. But it was as if she too had shifted her place, and he still saw her, between himself and the trees, drooping over the fire with her indolent smile. Archer's heart was beating insubordinately. What if it were from him that she had been running away, and if she had waited to tell him so till they were here alone together in this secret room?
"Ellen, if I'm really a help to you—if you really wanted me to come—tell me what's wrong, tell me what it is you're running away from," he insisted.
He spoke without shifting his position, without even turning to look at her: if the thing was to happen, it was to happen in this way, with the whole width of the room between them, and his eyes still fixed on the outer snow.
For a long moment she was silent; and in that moment Archer imagined her, almost heard her, stealing up behind him to throw her light arms about his neck. While he waited, soul and body throbbing with the miracle to come, his eyes mechanically received the image of a heavily-coated man with his fur collar turned up who was advancing along the path to the house. The man was Julius Beaufort.
"Ah—!" Archer cried, bursting into a laugh.
Madame Olenska had sprung up and moved to his side, slipping her hand into his; but after a glance through the window her face paled and she shrank back.
"So that was it?" Archer said derisively.
"I didn't know he was here," Madame Olenska murmured. Her hand still clung to Archer's; but he drew away from her, and walking out into the passage threw open the door of the house.
"Hallo, Beaufort—this way! Madame Olenska was expecting you," he said.
During his journey back to New York the next morning, Archer relived with a fatiguing vividness his last moments at Skuytercliff.
Beaufort, though clearly annoyed at finding him with Madame Olenska, had, as usual, carried off the situation high-handedly. His way of ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually gave them, if they were sensitive to it, a feeling of invisibility, of nonexistence. Archer, as the three strolled back through the park, was aware of this odd sense of disembodiment; and humbling as it was to his vanity it gave him the ghostly advantage of observing unobserved.
Beaufort had entered the little house with his usual easy assurance; but he could not smile away the vertical line between his eyes. It was fairly clear that Madame Olenska had not known that he was coming, though her words to Archer had hinted at the possibility; at any rate, she had evidently not told him where she was going when she left New York, and her unexplained departure had exasperated him. The ostensible reason of his appearance was the discovery, the very night before, of a "perfect little house," not in the market, which was really just the thing for her, but would be snapped up instantly if she didn't take it; and he was loud in mock-reproaches for the dance she had led him in running away just as he had found it.
"If only this new dodge for talking along a wire had been a little bit nearer perfection I might have told you all this from town, and been toasting my toes before the club fire at this minute, instead of tramping after you through the snow," he grumbled, disguising a real irritation under the pretence of it; and at this opening Madame Olenska twisted the talk away to the fantastic possibility that they might one day actually converse with each other from street to street, or even—incredible dream!—from one town to another. This struck from all three allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne, and such platitudes as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are talking against time, and dealing with a new invention in which it would seem ingenuous to believe too soon; and the question of the telephone carried them safely back to the big house.
Mrs. van der Luyden had not yet returned; and Archer took his leave and walked off to fetch the cutter, while Beaufort followed the Countess Olenska indoors. It was probable that, little as the van der Luydens encouraged unannounced visits, he could count on being asked to dine, and sent back to the station to catch the nine o'clock train; but more than that he would certainly not get, for it would be inconceivable to his hosts that a gentleman travelling without luggage should wish to spend the night, and distasteful to them to propose it to a person with whom they were on terms of such limited cordiality as Beaufort.
Beaufort knew all this, and must have foreseen it; and his taking the long journey for so small a reward gave the measure of his impatience. He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska; and Beaufort had only one object in view in his pursuit of pretty women. His dull and childless home had long since palled on him; and in addition to more permanent consolations he was always in quest of amorous adventures in his own set. This was the man from whom Madame Olenska was avowedly flying: the question was whether she had fled because his importunities displeased her, or because she did not wholly trust herself to resist them; unless, indeed, all her talk of flight had been a blind, and her departure no more than a manoeuvre.
Archer did not really believe this. Little as he had actually seen of Madame Olenska, he was beginning to think that he could read her face, and if not her face, her voice; and both had betrayed annoyance, and even dismay, at Beaufort's sudden appearance. But, after all, if this were the case, was it not worse than if she had left New York for the express purpose of meeting him? If she had done that, she ceased to be an object of interest, she threw in her lot with the vulgarest of dissemblers: a woman engaged in a love affair with Beaufort "classed" herself irretrievably.
No, it was worse a thousand times if, judging Beaufort, and probably despising him, she was yet drawn to him by all that gave him an advantage over the other men about her: his habit of two continents and two societies, his familiar association with artists and actors and people generally in the world's eye, and his careless contempt for local prejudices. Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park. How should any one coming from a wider world not feel the difference and be attracted by it?
Madame Olenska, in a burst of irritation, had said to Archer that he and she did not talk the same language; and the young man knew that in some respects this was true. But Beaufort understood every turn of her dialect, and spoke it fluently: his view of life, his tone, his attitude, were merely a coarser reflection of those revealed in Count Olenski's letter. This might seem to be to his disadvantage with Count Olenski's wife; but Archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her, even though it were against her will.
Thus, with a painful impartiality, did the young man make out the case for Beaufort, and for Beaufort's victim. A longing to enlighten her was strong in him; and there were moments when he imagined that all she asked was to be enlightened.
That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently; a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet's brilliant tales, and a novel called "Middlemarch," as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews. He had declined three dinner invitations in favour of this feast; but though he turned the pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand. Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered because the name had attracted him: "The House of Life." He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions. All through the night he pursued through those enchanted pages the vision of a woman who had the face of Ellen Olenska; but when he woke the next morning, and looked out at the brownstone houses across the street, and thought of his desk in Mr. Letterblair's office, and the family pew in Grace Church, his hour in the park of Skuytercliff became as far outside the pale of probability as the visions of the night.
"Mercy, how pale you look, Newland!" Janey commented over the coffee-cups at breakfast; and his mother added: "Newland, dear, I've noticed lately that you've been coughing; I do hope you're not letting yourself be overworked?" For it was the conviction of both ladies that, under the iron despotism of his senior partners, the young man's life was spent in the most exhausting professional labours—and he had never thought it necessary to undeceive them.
The next two or three days dragged by heavily. The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future. He heard nothing of the Countess Olenska, or of the perfect little house, and though he met Beaufort at the club they merely nodded at each other across the whist-tables. It was not till the fourth evening that he found a note awaiting him on his return home. "Come late tomorrow: I must explain to you. Ellen." These were the only words it contained.
The young man, who was dining out, thrust the note into his pocket, smiling a little at the Frenchness of the "to you." After dinner he went to a play; and it was not until his return home, after midnight, that he drew Madame Olenska's missive out again and re-read it slowly a number of times. There were several ways of answering it, and he gave considerable thought to each one during the watches of an agitated night. That on which, when morning came, he finally decided was to pitch some clothes into a portmanteau and jump on board a boat that was leaving that very afternoon for St. Augustine.
往事如歌
新手上路
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贴几个book review， about the ones I mentioned earlier. 大家看看哪个更有兴趣，作为下一本书。也是为了挣工分。
Review of "The Road"
The Road Through Hell, Paved With Desperation
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By JANET MASLIN
Published: September 25, 2006
In “The Road” a boy and his father lurch across the cold, wretched, wet, corpse-strewn, ashen landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. The imagery is brutal even by Cormac McCarthy’s high standards for despair. This parable is also trenchant and terrifying, written with stripped-down urgency and fueled by the force of a universal nightmare. “The Road” would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty.
This is an exquisitely bleak incantation — pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes. Mr. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was never meant to see.
“There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who is not honored here today,” the father says, trying to make his son understand why they inhabit a gray moonscape. “Whatever form you spoke of you were right.” Thus “The Road” keeps pace with the most enterprising doomsayers as death and desperation manifest themselves on every page. And in a perverse miracle it yields one last calamity when it seems that things cannot possibly get worse.
Yet as the boy and man wander, encountering remnants of the lost world and providing the reader with more and more clues about what destroyed it, this narrative is also illuminated by extraordinary tenderness. “He knew only that the child was his warrant,” it says of the father and his mission. “He said: if he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
The father’s loving efforts to shepherd his son are made that much more wrenching by the unavailability of food, shelter, safety, companionship or hope in most places where they scavenge to subsist.
Keeping memory alive is difficult, since the past grows increasingly remote. It is as if these lonely characters are experiencing “the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” The past has become like a place inhabited by the newly blind, all of it slowly slipping away. As for looking toward the future, “there is no later,” the book says starkly. “This is later.”
The ruined setting of “The Road” is strewn with terrible, revealing artifacts. There are old newspapers. (“The curious news. The quaint concerns.”) There is one lone bottle of Coca-Cola, still absurdly fizzy when all else is dust. There are charred corpses frozen in their final postures, like the long-dead man who sits on a porch like “a straw man set out to announce some holiday.” Sometimes these prompt the father to recall “a dull rose glow in the windowglass” at 1:17 in the morning, the moment when the clocks stopped forever.
“The Road” is not concerned with explaining what caused this cataclysm. It is more abstract than that. Instead it becomes a relentless cautionary tale with “Lord of the Flies”-style symbolic impact, marked by a dark fascination with the primal laws of survival. Much of its impact comes from the absolute lawlessness of its backdrop as it undermines the father’s only remaining certitude: that he must keep his boy alive no matter what danger befalls them.
As they move down the metaphorical road of the title, father and son encounter all manner of perils. The weather is bitter, the landscape colorless, the threat of starvation imminent. There is also the occasional interloper or ominous relic, since the road is not entirely abandoned.
The sight of a scorched, shuffling man prompts the boy to ask what is wrong with him; the father simply replies that the man has been struck by lightning. Spear-carrying marchers on the road offer other hints about recent history. Groups of people are stowed away in hidden places as if they were other people’s food supply. In a book filled with virtual zombies and fixated on the living dead, it turns out that they are.
Since the cataclysm has presumably incinerated all dictionaries, Mr. McCarthy’s affinity for words like rachitic and crozzled has as much visceral, atmospheric power as precise meaning. His use of language is as exultant as his imaginings are hellish, a hint that “The Road” will ultimately be more radiant than it is punishing. Somehow Mr. McCarthy is able to hold firm to his pessimism while allowing the reader to see beyond it. This is art that both frightens and inspires.
Although “The Road” is entirely unsentimental, it gives father and son a memory to keep them moving, even if it is the memory of how and why the boy’s mother chose to die. She was pregnant when the world exploded, and the boy was born a few days after she and the man “watched distant cities burn.”
Ultimately she gave up and took a bullet: “She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.” In a book whose events are isolated and carefully chosen, the appearance of a flare gun late in the story is filled with echoes of her final decision.
The mother’s suicide is one more reason for astonishment at Mr. McCarthy’s final gesture here: an embrace of faith in the face of no hope whatsoever. Coming as it does after such intense moments of despondency, this faith is even more of a leap than it might be in a more forgiving story. It adds immeasurably to the staying power of a book that is simple yet mysterious, simultaneously cryptic and crystal clear.
“The Road” offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever be.
Review of "The Road"
The Road Through Hell, Paved With Desperation
SIGN IN TO E-MAIL THIS
By JANET MASLIN
Published: September 25, 2006
In “The Road” a boy and his father lurch across the cold, wretched, wet, corpse-strewn, ashen landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. The imagery is brutal even by Cormac McCarthy’s high standards for despair. This parable is also trenchant and terrifying, written with stripped-down urgency and fueled by the force of a universal nightmare. “The Road” would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty.
This is an exquisitely bleak incantation — pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes. Mr. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was never meant to see.
“There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who is not honored here today,” the father says, trying to make his son understand why they inhabit a gray moonscape. “Whatever form you spoke of you were right.” Thus “The Road” keeps pace with the most enterprising doomsayers as death and desperation manifest themselves on every page. And in a perverse miracle it yields one last calamity when it seems that things cannot possibly get worse.
Yet as the boy and man wander, encountering remnants of the lost world and providing the reader with more and more clues about what destroyed it, this narrative is also illuminated by extraordinary tenderness. “He knew only that the child was his warrant,” it says of the father and his mission. “He said: if he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
The father’s loving efforts to shepherd his son are made that much more wrenching by the unavailability of food, shelter, safety, companionship or hope in most places where they scavenge to subsist.
Keeping memory alive is difficult, since the past grows increasingly remote. It is as if these lonely characters are experiencing “the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” The past has become like a place inhabited by the newly blind, all of it slowly slipping away. As for looking toward the future, “there is no later,” the book says starkly. “This is later.”
The ruined setting of “The Road” is strewn with terrible, revealing artifacts. There are old newspapers. (“The curious news. The quaint concerns.”) There is one lone bottle of Coca-Cola, still absurdly fizzy when all else is dust. There are charred corpses frozen in their final postures, like the long-dead man who sits on a porch like “a straw man set out to announce some holiday.” Sometimes these prompt the father to recall “a dull rose glow in the windowglass” at 1:17 in the morning, the moment when the clocks stopped forever.
“The Road” is not concerned with explaining what caused this cataclysm. It is more abstract than that. Instead it becomes a relentless cautionary tale with “Lord of the Flies”-style symbolic impact, marked by a dark fascination with the primal laws of survival. Much of its impact comes from the absolute lawlessness of its backdrop as it undermines the father’s only remaining certitude: that he must keep his boy alive no matter what danger befalls them.
As they move down the metaphorical road of the title, father and son encounter all manner of perils. The weather is bitter, the landscape colorless, the threat of starvation imminent. There is also the occasional interloper or ominous relic, since the road is not entirely abandoned.
The sight of a scorched, shuffling man prompts the boy to ask what is wrong with him; the father simply replies that the man has been struck by lightning. Spear-carrying marchers on the road offer other hints about recent history. Groups of people are stowed away in hidden places as if they were other people’s food supply. In a book filled with virtual zombies and fixated on the living dead, it turns out that they are.
Since the cataclysm has presumably incinerated all dictionaries, Mr. McCarthy’s affinity for words like rachitic and crozzled has as much visceral, atmospheric power as precise meaning. His use of language is as exultant as his imaginings are hellish, a hint that “The Road” will ultimately be more radiant than it is punishing. Somehow Mr. McCarthy is able to hold firm to his pessimism while allowing the reader to see beyond it. This is art that both frightens and inspires.
Although “The Road” is entirely unsentimental, it gives father and son a memory to keep them moving, even if it is the memory of how and why the boy’s mother chose to die. She was pregnant when the world exploded, and the boy was born a few days after she and the man “watched distant cities burn.”
Ultimately she gave up and took a bullet: “She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.” In a book whose events are isolated and carefully chosen, the appearance of a flare gun late in the story is filled with echoes of her final decision.
The mother’s suicide is one more reason for astonishment at Mr. McCarthy’s final gesture here: an embrace of faith in the face of no hope whatsoever. Coming as it does after such intense moments of despondency, this faith is even more of a leap than it might be in a more forgiving story. It adds immeasurably to the staying power of a book that is simple yet mysterious, simultaneously cryptic and crystal clear.
“The Road” offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever be.
往事如歌
新手上路
- 注册
- 2012-02-02
- 消息
- 707
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- 18
More about "the road" on Wikipedia
The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed much of civilization and, in the intervening years, almost all life on Earth. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006.
The book was adapted to a film by the same name in 2009, directed by John Hillcoat, starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Contents [hide]
1 Plot summary
2 Development history
3 Literary significance and reception
3.1 Environmentalist response
3.2 Awards and nominations
4 Film adaptation
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links
[edit]Plot summary
A never named father and his young son journey across a grim post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after a major unexplained cataclysm has destroyed civilization and most life on Earth. The land is filled with ash and devoid of living animals and vegetation. Many of the remaining human survivors have resorted to cannibalism, scavenging the detritus of city and country alike for flesh. The boy's mother, pregnant with him at the time of the disaster, gave up hope and committed suicide some time before the story begins, despite the father's pleas. Much of the book is written in the third person, with references to "the father" and "the son" or to "the man" and "the boy".
Realizing that they would not survive the oncoming winter where they are, the father takes the boy south along empty roads towards the sea, carrying their meager possessions in their knapsacks and in a supermarket cart. The man coughs blood from time to time and eventually realizes he is dying, yet still struggles to protect his son from the constant threats of attack, exposure, and starvation.
They have a revolver, but only two rounds. The boy has been told to use the gun on himself if necessary to avoid falling into the hands of cannibals. During their trek, the father uses one bullet to kill a man who stumbles upon them and poses a grave threat. Fleeing from the man's companions, they have to abandon most of their possessions. As they are near death from starvation, the man finds an unlooted underground bunker filled with food and other necessities. However, it is too exposed, so they only stay a few days.
In the face of these obstacles, the man repeatedly reassures the boy that they are "the good guys" who are "carrying the fire". On their journey, the duo scrounge for food, evade roving bands, and contend with horrors such as a newborn infant roasted on a spit, and captives being gradually harvested as food.
Although the man and the boy eventually reach the sea, their situation does not improve much. They head back inland, but the man succumbs to an illness. Before he dies, the father tells the boy that he can continue to speak with him in his imagination after he is gone. The boy holds wake over the corpse for days, with no idea of what to do next.
On the third day, the grieving boy encounters a man who says he has been tracking the pair. This man, who has a woman and two children of his own, a boy and a girl, convinces the boy that he is one of the "good guys" and takes him under his protection.
[edit]Development history
The novel was released by publishing house Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. on September 26, 2006. In his interview by Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy indicated that the inspiration for The Road came during a 2003 visit to El Paso, Texas, with his young son. Imagining what the city might look like in the future, he pictured "fires on the hill" and thought about his son. He took some initial notes but did not return to the idea until a few years later, while in Ireland. Then, the novel came to him quickly, and he dedicated it to his son, John Francis McCarthy.[1]
[edit]Literary significance and reception
The Road has received numerous positive reviews and honors since its release. The review aggregator Metacritic reported the book had an average score of 90 out of 100, based on 31 reviews.[2] Critics have deemed it "heartbreaking", "haunting", and "emotionally shattering".[3][4][5] The Village Voice referred to it as "McCarthy's purest fable yet".[3] In a New York Review of Books article, author Michael Chabon heralded the novel. Discussing the novel's relation to established genres, Chabon insists The Road is not science fiction; although "the adventure story in both its modern and epic forms...structures the narrative," Chabon says, "ultimately it is as a lyrical epic of horror that The Road is best understood."[6] Entertainment Weekly in June 2008 named The Road the best book, fiction or non-fiction, of the past 25 years.[7]
On March 28, 2007, the selection of The Road as the next novel in Oprah Winfrey's Book Club was announced. A televised interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show was conducted on June 5, 2007 and it was McCarthy's first, though he had been interviewed for the printed media before.[1] The announcement of McCarthy's television appearance surprised those who follow him. "Wait a minute until I can pick my jaw up off the floor," said John Wegner, an English professor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal, when told of the interview.[8]
[edit]Environmentalist response
British environmental campaigner George Monbiot was so impressed by The Road that he declared McCarthy to be one of the "50 people who could save the planet" in an article published in January 2008. Monbiot wrote, "It could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem."[9] This nomination echoes the review Monbiot had written some months earlier for The Guardian in which he wrote, "A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world."[10] Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "With its spare prose, McCarthy's post-apocalyptic odyssey from 2006 managed to be both harrowing and heartbreaking."[11]
[edit]Awards and nominations
On April 16, 2007, the novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.[12] It also won the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, the 2006 Believer Book Award and was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.[13]
[edit]Film adaptation
Main article: The Road (2009 film)
A film adaptation of the novel, directed by John Hillcoat and written by Joe Penhall, opened in theatres on November 25, 2009. The film stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the man and the boy. Production took place in Louisiana, Oregon, and several locations in Pennsylvania.[14]
The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed much of civilization and, in the intervening years, almost all life on Earth. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006.
The book was adapted to a film by the same name in 2009, directed by John Hillcoat, starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Contents [hide]
1 Plot summary
2 Development history
3 Literary significance and reception
3.1 Environmentalist response
3.2 Awards and nominations
4 Film adaptation
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links
[edit]Plot summary
A never named father and his young son journey across a grim post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after a major unexplained cataclysm has destroyed civilization and most life on Earth. The land is filled with ash and devoid of living animals and vegetation. Many of the remaining human survivors have resorted to cannibalism, scavenging the detritus of city and country alike for flesh. The boy's mother, pregnant with him at the time of the disaster, gave up hope and committed suicide some time before the story begins, despite the father's pleas. Much of the book is written in the third person, with references to "the father" and "the son" or to "the man" and "the boy".
Realizing that they would not survive the oncoming winter where they are, the father takes the boy south along empty roads towards the sea, carrying their meager possessions in their knapsacks and in a supermarket cart. The man coughs blood from time to time and eventually realizes he is dying, yet still struggles to protect his son from the constant threats of attack, exposure, and starvation.
They have a revolver, but only two rounds. The boy has been told to use the gun on himself if necessary to avoid falling into the hands of cannibals. During their trek, the father uses one bullet to kill a man who stumbles upon them and poses a grave threat. Fleeing from the man's companions, they have to abandon most of their possessions. As they are near death from starvation, the man finds an unlooted underground bunker filled with food and other necessities. However, it is too exposed, so they only stay a few days.
In the face of these obstacles, the man repeatedly reassures the boy that they are "the good guys" who are "carrying the fire". On their journey, the duo scrounge for food, evade roving bands, and contend with horrors such as a newborn infant roasted on a spit, and captives being gradually harvested as food.
Although the man and the boy eventually reach the sea, their situation does not improve much. They head back inland, but the man succumbs to an illness. Before he dies, the father tells the boy that he can continue to speak with him in his imagination after he is gone. The boy holds wake over the corpse for days, with no idea of what to do next.
On the third day, the grieving boy encounters a man who says he has been tracking the pair. This man, who has a woman and two children of his own, a boy and a girl, convinces the boy that he is one of the "good guys" and takes him under his protection.
[edit]Development history
The novel was released by publishing house Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. on September 26, 2006. In his interview by Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy indicated that the inspiration for The Road came during a 2003 visit to El Paso, Texas, with his young son. Imagining what the city might look like in the future, he pictured "fires on the hill" and thought about his son. He took some initial notes but did not return to the idea until a few years later, while in Ireland. Then, the novel came to him quickly, and he dedicated it to his son, John Francis McCarthy.[1]
[edit]Literary significance and reception
The Road has received numerous positive reviews and honors since its release. The review aggregator Metacritic reported the book had an average score of 90 out of 100, based on 31 reviews.[2] Critics have deemed it "heartbreaking", "haunting", and "emotionally shattering".[3][4][5] The Village Voice referred to it as "McCarthy's purest fable yet".[3] In a New York Review of Books article, author Michael Chabon heralded the novel. Discussing the novel's relation to established genres, Chabon insists The Road is not science fiction; although "the adventure story in both its modern and epic forms...structures the narrative," Chabon says, "ultimately it is as a lyrical epic of horror that The Road is best understood."[6] Entertainment Weekly in June 2008 named The Road the best book, fiction or non-fiction, of the past 25 years.[7]
On March 28, 2007, the selection of The Road as the next novel in Oprah Winfrey's Book Club was announced. A televised interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show was conducted on June 5, 2007 and it was McCarthy's first, though he had been interviewed for the printed media before.[1] The announcement of McCarthy's television appearance surprised those who follow him. "Wait a minute until I can pick my jaw up off the floor," said John Wegner, an English professor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal, when told of the interview.[8]
[edit]Environmentalist response
British environmental campaigner George Monbiot was so impressed by The Road that he declared McCarthy to be one of the "50 people who could save the planet" in an article published in January 2008. Monbiot wrote, "It could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem."[9] This nomination echoes the review Monbiot had written some months earlier for The Guardian in which he wrote, "A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world."[10] Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "With its spare prose, McCarthy's post-apocalyptic odyssey from 2006 managed to be both harrowing and heartbreaking."[11]
[edit]Awards and nominations
On April 16, 2007, the novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.[12] It also won the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, the 2006 Believer Book Award and was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.[13]
[edit]Film adaptation
Main article: The Road (2009 film)
A film adaptation of the novel, directed by John Hillcoat and written by Joe Penhall, opened in theatres on November 25, 2009. The film stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the man and the boy. Production took place in Louisiana, Oregon, and several locations in Pennsylvania.[14]
往事如歌
新手上路
- 注册
- 2012-02-02
- 消息
- 707
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- 13
- 声望点数
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The book "Beloved" On Wikipedia
Beloved is a novel by the American writer Toni Morrison, published in 1987. Set in 1873 just after the American Civil War (1861–1865), it is based on the true story of the African-American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in 1856 in Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. A posse arrived to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave owners the right to pursue slaves across state borders. Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured.
Beloved's main character, Sethe, kills her daughter and tries to kill her other three children when a posse arrives in Ohio to return them to Sweet Home, the plantation in Kentucky from which Sethe had recently fled. The daughter, Beloved, returns years later to haunt the home of Sethe at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati. The story opens with an introduction to the ghost: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom."[1]
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. It was adapted in 1998 into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey. In 2006 a New York Times survey of writers and literary critics ranked it as the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years.[2]
The book's epigraph reads "Sixty Million and more," the number of slaves estimated to have died in the Atlantic slave trade.
Contents [hide]
1 Plot summary
2 Major Motifs
2.1 Mother-daughter relationships
2.2 Psychological impact of slavery
3 Film adaptation
4 Legacy
5 Awards
6 References
7 External links
[edit]Plot summary
The book follows the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver as they try to rebuild their lives after having escaped from slavery. Their home, 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, is haunted by a revenant, who turns out to be the ghost of Sethe's daughter. Because of the haunting—which often involves things being thrown around the room—Sethe's youngest daughter, Denver, is shy, friendless, and housebound, and her sons, Howard and Buglar, have run away from home by the time they are thirteen. Shortly afterward, Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's husband Halle, dies in her bed.
Paul D, one of the slaves from Sweet Home, the plantation where Baby Suggs, Sethe, Halle, he, and many other slaves had worked, arrives at 124. He tries to bring a sense of reality into the house. He also tries to make the family move forward and leave the past behind. In doing so, he forces out the ghost of Beloved. At first, he seems to be successful, because he leads the family to a carnival, out of the house for the first time in years. However, on their way back, they encounter a young woman sitting in front of the house. She has the distinct features of a baby and calls herself Beloved. Denver recognizes right away that she must be a reincarnation of her sister Beloved. Paul D, suspicious, warns Sethe, but charmed by the young woman, Sethe ignores him. Paul D is gradually forced out of Sethe's home by a supernatural presence.
When made to sleep outside in a shed, he is cornered by Beloved, who has put a spell on him. She burrows into his mind and heart, forcing him to have sex with her, while flooding his mind with horrific memories from his past. Overwhelmed with guilt, Paul D tries to tell Sethe about it but cannot and instead says he wants her pregnant. Sethe is elated, and Paul D resists Beloved and her influence over him. But, when he tells friends at work about his plans to start a new family, they react fearfully. Stamp Paid reveals the reason for the community's rejection of Sethe.
When Paul D asks Sethe about it, she tells him what happened. After escaping from Sweet Home and making it to her mother-in-law's home where her children were waiting, Sethe was found by her master, who attempted to reclaim Sethe and her children. Sethe grabbed her children, ran into the tool shed and tried to kill them all, succeeding only with her oldest daughter. Sethe explains to Paul D, saying she was "trying to put my babies where they would be safe." The revelation is too much for him, and he leaves for good. Without Paul D, the sense of reality and time moving forward disappears.
Sethe comes to believe that the girl, Beloved, is the daughter she murdered when the girl was only two years old; her tombstone reads only "Beloved". Sethe begins to spend carelessly and spoil Beloved out of guilt. Beloved becomes angry and more demanding, throwing hellish tantrums when she doesn't get her way. Beloved's presence consumes Sethe's life to the point where she becomes depleted and sacrifices her own need for eating, while Beloved grows bigger and bigger. In the climax of the novel, Denver, the youngest daughter, reaches out and searches for help from the black community. People arrive at 124 to exorcise Beloved, and it is revealed that Beloved was not getting fat, as previously alluded, but is in fact pregnant from her encounters with Paul D. While Sethe is confused and has a "rememory" of her master coming again, Beloved disappears.
At the outset, the reader is led to assume Beloved is a supernatural, incarnate form of Sethe's murdered daughter. Later, Stamp Paid reveals the story of "a girl locked up by a white man over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone. Maybe that's her". Both are supportable by the text. Beloved sings a song known only to Sethe and her children; elsewhere, she speaks of Sethe's earrings without having seen them.
[edit]Major Motifs
[edit]Mother-daughter relationships
The maternal bonds that connect Sethe to her children inhibit her own individuation and prevent the development of her self. Sethe develops a dangerous maternal passion that results in the murder of one daughter, her own “best self,” and the estrangement of the surviving daughter from the black community, both in an attempt to salvage her “fantasy of the future,” her children, from a life in slavery. However, Sethe fails to recognize her daughter Denver’s need for interaction with this community in order to enter into womanhood. Denver finally succeeds at the end of the novel in establishing her own self and embarking on her individuation with the help of Beloved. Contrary to Denver, Sethe only reaches individuation after Beloved’s exorcism, at which point Sethe can fully accept the first relationship that is completely “for her,” her relationship with Paul D. This relationship relieves Sethe from the ensuing destruction of herself that resulted from the maternal bonds controlling her life.[3] Beloved and Sethe are both very much emotionally impaired as a result of Sethe’s previous enslavement. Slavery creates a situation where a mother is separated from her child, which has devastating consequences for both parties. Often, mothers do not know themselves to be anything except a mother, so when they are unable to provide maternal care for their children, or their children are taken away from them, they feel a lost sense of self. Similarly, when a child is separated from his or her mother, he or she loses the familial identity associated with mother-child relationships. Sethe was never able to see her mother’s true face (because her smile was distorted from having spent too much time “with the bit”) so she wasn’t able to connect with her own mother, and therefore does not know how to connect to her own children, even though she longs to. Furthermore, the earliest need a child has is related to the mother: the baby needs milk from the mother. Sethe is traumatized by the experience of having her milk stolen because it means she cannot form the symbolic bond between herself and her daughter.[1]
[edit]Psychological impact of slavery
Because of the painful nature of the experiences of slavery, most slaves repressed these memories in an attempt to leave behind a horrific past. This repression and dissociation from the past causes a fragmentation of the self and a loss of true identity. Sethe, Paul D. and Denver all experience this loss of self, which could only be remedied by the acceptance of the past and the memory of their original identities. Beloved serves to open these characters up to their repressed memories, eventually causing the reintegration of their selves.[4]
Slavery splits a person into a fragmented figure.[5] The identity, consisting of painful memories and unspeakable past, denied and kept at bay, becomes a ‘self that is no self.’ To heal and humanise, one must constitute it in a language, reorganize the painful events and retell the painful memories. As a result of suffering, the ‘self’, subject to a violent practice of making and unmaking, once acknowledged by an audience becomes real. Sethe, Paul D, and Baby Suggs who all fall short of such realization, are unable to ‘remake’ their ‘selves’ by trying to keep their pasts at bay. The 'self' is located in a word, defined by others. The power lies in the audience, or more precisely, in the word - once the word changes, so does the identity. All of the characters in Beloved face the challenge of an unmade 'self', composed of their 'rememories' and defined by perceptions and language. The barrier that keeps them from 'remaking' of the 'self' is the desire for an 'uncomplicated past' and the fear that remembering will lead them to 'a place they couldn't get back from'.[6]
[edit]Film adaptation
In 1998, the novel was made into a film directed by Jonathan Demme and produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey.
[edit]Legacy
Beloved received the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award, which is named for an editor of Publishers Weekly. In accepting the award on October 12, 1988, Morrison observed that “there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby” honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States. “There’s no small bench by the road,” she continued. “And because such a place doesn’t exist (that I know of), the book had to.” Inspired by her remarks, the Toni Morrison Society has now begun to install benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America. The New York Times reported July 28, 2008, that the first “bench by the road” was dedicated July 26 on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, which served as the point of entry for approximately 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to the United States.
[edit]Awards
In 2011, the book was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 fiction books written in English since 1923.
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.
Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
[edit]
Beloved is a novel by the American writer Toni Morrison, published in 1987. Set in 1873 just after the American Civil War (1861–1865), it is based on the true story of the African-American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in 1856 in Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. A posse arrived to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave owners the right to pursue slaves across state borders. Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured.
Beloved's main character, Sethe, kills her daughter and tries to kill her other three children when a posse arrives in Ohio to return them to Sweet Home, the plantation in Kentucky from which Sethe had recently fled. The daughter, Beloved, returns years later to haunt the home of Sethe at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati. The story opens with an introduction to the ghost: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom."[1]
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. It was adapted in 1998 into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey. In 2006 a New York Times survey of writers and literary critics ranked it as the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years.[2]
The book's epigraph reads "Sixty Million and more," the number of slaves estimated to have died in the Atlantic slave trade.
Contents [hide]
1 Plot summary
2 Major Motifs
2.1 Mother-daughter relationships
2.2 Psychological impact of slavery
3 Film adaptation
4 Legacy
5 Awards
6 References
7 External links
[edit]Plot summary
The book follows the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver as they try to rebuild their lives after having escaped from slavery. Their home, 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, is haunted by a revenant, who turns out to be the ghost of Sethe's daughter. Because of the haunting—which often involves things being thrown around the room—Sethe's youngest daughter, Denver, is shy, friendless, and housebound, and her sons, Howard and Buglar, have run away from home by the time they are thirteen. Shortly afterward, Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's husband Halle, dies in her bed.
Paul D, one of the slaves from Sweet Home, the plantation where Baby Suggs, Sethe, Halle, he, and many other slaves had worked, arrives at 124. He tries to bring a sense of reality into the house. He also tries to make the family move forward and leave the past behind. In doing so, he forces out the ghost of Beloved. At first, he seems to be successful, because he leads the family to a carnival, out of the house for the first time in years. However, on their way back, they encounter a young woman sitting in front of the house. She has the distinct features of a baby and calls herself Beloved. Denver recognizes right away that she must be a reincarnation of her sister Beloved. Paul D, suspicious, warns Sethe, but charmed by the young woman, Sethe ignores him. Paul D is gradually forced out of Sethe's home by a supernatural presence.
When made to sleep outside in a shed, he is cornered by Beloved, who has put a spell on him. She burrows into his mind and heart, forcing him to have sex with her, while flooding his mind with horrific memories from his past. Overwhelmed with guilt, Paul D tries to tell Sethe about it but cannot and instead says he wants her pregnant. Sethe is elated, and Paul D resists Beloved and her influence over him. But, when he tells friends at work about his plans to start a new family, they react fearfully. Stamp Paid reveals the reason for the community's rejection of Sethe.
When Paul D asks Sethe about it, she tells him what happened. After escaping from Sweet Home and making it to her mother-in-law's home where her children were waiting, Sethe was found by her master, who attempted to reclaim Sethe and her children. Sethe grabbed her children, ran into the tool shed and tried to kill them all, succeeding only with her oldest daughter. Sethe explains to Paul D, saying she was "trying to put my babies where they would be safe." The revelation is too much for him, and he leaves for good. Without Paul D, the sense of reality and time moving forward disappears.
Sethe comes to believe that the girl, Beloved, is the daughter she murdered when the girl was only two years old; her tombstone reads only "Beloved". Sethe begins to spend carelessly and spoil Beloved out of guilt. Beloved becomes angry and more demanding, throwing hellish tantrums when she doesn't get her way. Beloved's presence consumes Sethe's life to the point where she becomes depleted and sacrifices her own need for eating, while Beloved grows bigger and bigger. In the climax of the novel, Denver, the youngest daughter, reaches out and searches for help from the black community. People arrive at 124 to exorcise Beloved, and it is revealed that Beloved was not getting fat, as previously alluded, but is in fact pregnant from her encounters with Paul D. While Sethe is confused and has a "rememory" of her master coming again, Beloved disappears.
At the outset, the reader is led to assume Beloved is a supernatural, incarnate form of Sethe's murdered daughter. Later, Stamp Paid reveals the story of "a girl locked up by a white man over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone. Maybe that's her". Both are supportable by the text. Beloved sings a song known only to Sethe and her children; elsewhere, she speaks of Sethe's earrings without having seen them.
[edit]Major Motifs
[edit]Mother-daughter relationships
The maternal bonds that connect Sethe to her children inhibit her own individuation and prevent the development of her self. Sethe develops a dangerous maternal passion that results in the murder of one daughter, her own “best self,” and the estrangement of the surviving daughter from the black community, both in an attempt to salvage her “fantasy of the future,” her children, from a life in slavery. However, Sethe fails to recognize her daughter Denver’s need for interaction with this community in order to enter into womanhood. Denver finally succeeds at the end of the novel in establishing her own self and embarking on her individuation with the help of Beloved. Contrary to Denver, Sethe only reaches individuation after Beloved’s exorcism, at which point Sethe can fully accept the first relationship that is completely “for her,” her relationship with Paul D. This relationship relieves Sethe from the ensuing destruction of herself that resulted from the maternal bonds controlling her life.[3] Beloved and Sethe are both very much emotionally impaired as a result of Sethe’s previous enslavement. Slavery creates a situation where a mother is separated from her child, which has devastating consequences for both parties. Often, mothers do not know themselves to be anything except a mother, so when they are unable to provide maternal care for their children, or their children are taken away from them, they feel a lost sense of self. Similarly, when a child is separated from his or her mother, he or she loses the familial identity associated with mother-child relationships. Sethe was never able to see her mother’s true face (because her smile was distorted from having spent too much time “with the bit”) so she wasn’t able to connect with her own mother, and therefore does not know how to connect to her own children, even though she longs to. Furthermore, the earliest need a child has is related to the mother: the baby needs milk from the mother. Sethe is traumatized by the experience of having her milk stolen because it means she cannot form the symbolic bond between herself and her daughter.[1]
[edit]Psychological impact of slavery
Because of the painful nature of the experiences of slavery, most slaves repressed these memories in an attempt to leave behind a horrific past. This repression and dissociation from the past causes a fragmentation of the self and a loss of true identity. Sethe, Paul D. and Denver all experience this loss of self, which could only be remedied by the acceptance of the past and the memory of their original identities. Beloved serves to open these characters up to their repressed memories, eventually causing the reintegration of their selves.[4]
Slavery splits a person into a fragmented figure.[5] The identity, consisting of painful memories and unspeakable past, denied and kept at bay, becomes a ‘self that is no self.’ To heal and humanise, one must constitute it in a language, reorganize the painful events and retell the painful memories. As a result of suffering, the ‘self’, subject to a violent practice of making and unmaking, once acknowledged by an audience becomes real. Sethe, Paul D, and Baby Suggs who all fall short of such realization, are unable to ‘remake’ their ‘selves’ by trying to keep their pasts at bay. The 'self' is located in a word, defined by others. The power lies in the audience, or more precisely, in the word - once the word changes, so does the identity. All of the characters in Beloved face the challenge of an unmade 'self', composed of their 'rememories' and defined by perceptions and language. The barrier that keeps them from 'remaking' of the 'self' is the desire for an 'uncomplicated past' and the fear that remembering will lead them to 'a place they couldn't get back from'.[6]
[edit]Film adaptation
In 1998, the novel was made into a film directed by Jonathan Demme and produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey.
[edit]Legacy
Beloved received the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award, which is named for an editor of Publishers Weekly. In accepting the award on October 12, 1988, Morrison observed that “there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby” honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States. “There’s no small bench by the road,” she continued. “And because such a place doesn’t exist (that I know of), the book had to.” Inspired by her remarks, the Toni Morrison Society has now begun to install benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America. The New York Times reported July 28, 2008, that the first “bench by the road” was dedicated July 26 on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, which served as the point of entry for approximately 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to the United States.
[edit]Awards
In 2011, the book was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 fiction books written in English since 1923.
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.
Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
[edit]
往事如歌
新手上路
- 注册
- 2012-02-02
- 消息
- 707
- 荣誉分数
- 13
- 声望点数
- 18
BOOK REVIEW: Beloved by Toni Morrison
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
No novel of recent years has been more honored than Toni
Morrison’s Beloved. The book received the Pulitzer Prize in 1988,
and was a major reason for Morrison winning the Nobel Prize in
literature five years later – a distinction all
the more striking when once considers that
only three other native-born US writers
earned this prestigious award during the
second half of the 20th Century. More
recently, Beloved trounced the competition
in The New York Times survey of authors
and critics to determine the best book of
American fiction during the last twenty-five
years.
But if the Nobel judges love Morrison,
college professors love her even more. The
Toni Morrison Society lists some 150 dissertations on the author,
and enough academic articles to keep a graduate student in the
library for years. I can’t imagine another novel of recent years
assigned by more teachers in more classrooms. Do a Google search
on “Beloved” and “syllabus,” and take a look yourself. Beloved is
that rarity among contemporary novels: it was selling by the
truckload even before Oprah gave it her stamp of approval.
Hence, one might assume that Beloved is the most canonical of
modern novels, if not the foundation of the New Canon. Yet there is
some heavy irony here, since Beloved might also be the first book
picked for The Anti-Canon, the novels that upset the applecart of
traditional literary canonization. As one commentator has noted,
Toni Morrison is the Living Black Female to counter the Dead White
Males who have long dominated literary studies.
Beloved also challenges the ‘old school’ standards by which novels
have been evaluated –- based on factors such as poetic writing,
creative use of language, metaphor, etc. Yes, you can find these
elements in Beloved, but they are a little beside the point. Morrison
herself has admitted to getting “annoyed at people who said there
were poetic things in my writing.” In short, this novel goes hand-in-
hand with post-colonial, post-patriarchal, post-Eurocentric
attempts to restructure not just the priorities of fiction, but also the
ways and means by which fiction is assessed and appreciated.
Of course, the language of Beloved is poetic. Sometimes it is
animated with the timeless force of myth and folklore; at other
points it stretches out in longer phrases that circle in on a subject
with Faulknerian indirection. Some of my favorite passages take on
a sweeping Biblical tone. This final comparison is an apt one. The
King James Bible is also poetic, but if you mentioned that to the
most devoted fans of the Good Book, they would say that the poetry
is a little beside the point.
For the most part -- as the dissertations and articles makes clear --
Morrison’s readers look to her fiction primarily for the many ways
in which it grapples with the issues of race, gender, sexuality and
power. Morrison infuses each of these factors, moreover, with
several layers of history, not just the antebellum and postbellum
time periods in which Beloved is set, but also the earlier history
raised in the book’s epigraph “Sixty Million and more,” referring to
the black Africans who died in the Middle Passage. This past haunts
the story, in a novel in which there are many hauntings, many ghosts
hovering on the margins or moving into center stage.
All of these factors are set in play through the character Sethe, the
protagonist of Beloved, a black woman of extraordinary power. She
is the “one who never looked away,” as her daughter Denver
describes her at one point in the book, and Sethe’s fierce
independence is the catalyst that sets off key elements in the
narrative. Sethe nearly dies in her attempt to escape to freedom
from the Kentucky plantation incongruously named Sweet Home,
and join other members of her family in Ohio. The plot hinges on
decisions she feels compelled to make, above all on how much she is
willing to sacrifice not only to gain her own emancipation, but also
to prevent her children from falling under the yoke of forced
servitude.
Morrison’s narrative is enriched by the roundabout way in which
she unfolds this tale. The novelist once described to an interviewer
her fascination with the “moments of withheld, partial or
disinformation” in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and to some
extent her storytelling here is similarly indirect. The central tragedy
of Beloved is hinted at almost from the novel’s start, but only in the
sketchiest manner. Gradually Morrison circles in on the key
elements of her plot, as a vulture circles on its prey, and with a
tension that is heightened by the non-linear structure of her account.
Morrison adds another twist by mixing magical and realistic
elements into her story. As a result, some readers have tried to link
her writing to the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yet
you could also look at Beloved as a post-colonial Turn of the Screw,
only here the “extra turn” of the screw is a much larger haunting that
echoes down the generations – so much so that, as Sethe sees it,
nothing ever dies, and the future is often “a matter of keeping the
past at bay.” In truth, echoes of many different strains of the
American literary tradition – Southern Gothic, slave narratives, the
macabre tales of the supernatural– can be traced in the pages of
Beloved.
Not everyone has bought into the canonical status of this work.
Stanley Crouch has argued that Morrison’s writing is too often
interrupted by “maudlin ideological commercials” and that Beloved
“reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of
the miniseries.” Crouch’s comments are (as so often with this critic)
thought-provoking, and deserve to be part of the on-going debate
and discussion surrounding this novel. On the other hand, trying to
purge melodramatic and ideological elements from a book of this
sort would be like trying to get the bloodshed out of a war novel, or
the fight scenes out of a Jackie Chan movie. One suspects that these
very elements have contributed in no small part to the success and
appeal of this author.
In the final analysis, the importance of this book is no longer a
matter of good or bad writing, and perhaps never was. For twenty-
somethings and thirty-somethings, this is the book that spurred
them into dialogues on race and gender and other thorny issues that
still haunt our national debate just as the ghost of Beloved haunts
Morrison’s novel. As such, this book will continue to loom large
over current day American fiction. And it is testimony to the
strength of the “canon” that it can (once again) make room for such
an anti-canonical work, and even give it a prized place at the head of
the table.
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
No novel of recent years has been more honored than Toni
Morrison’s Beloved. The book received the Pulitzer Prize in 1988,
and was a major reason for Morrison winning the Nobel Prize in
literature five years later – a distinction all
the more striking when once considers that
only three other native-born US writers
earned this prestigious award during the
second half of the 20th Century. More
recently, Beloved trounced the competition
in The New York Times survey of authors
and critics to determine the best book of
American fiction during the last twenty-five
years.
But if the Nobel judges love Morrison,
college professors love her even more. The
Toni Morrison Society lists some 150 dissertations on the author,
and enough academic articles to keep a graduate student in the
library for years. I can’t imagine another novel of recent years
assigned by more teachers in more classrooms. Do a Google search
on “Beloved” and “syllabus,” and take a look yourself. Beloved is
that rarity among contemporary novels: it was selling by the
truckload even before Oprah gave it her stamp of approval.
Hence, one might assume that Beloved is the most canonical of
modern novels, if not the foundation of the New Canon. Yet there is
some heavy irony here, since Beloved might also be the first book
picked for The Anti-Canon, the novels that upset the applecart of
traditional literary canonization. As one commentator has noted,
Toni Morrison is the Living Black Female to counter the Dead White
Males who have long dominated literary studies.
Beloved also challenges the ‘old school’ standards by which novels
have been evaluated –- based on factors such as poetic writing,
creative use of language, metaphor, etc. Yes, you can find these
elements in Beloved, but they are a little beside the point. Morrison
herself has admitted to getting “annoyed at people who said there
were poetic things in my writing.” In short, this novel goes hand-in-
hand with post-colonial, post-patriarchal, post-Eurocentric
attempts to restructure not just the priorities of fiction, but also the
ways and means by which fiction is assessed and appreciated.
Of course, the language of Beloved is poetic. Sometimes it is
animated with the timeless force of myth and folklore; at other
points it stretches out in longer phrases that circle in on a subject
with Faulknerian indirection. Some of my favorite passages take on
a sweeping Biblical tone. This final comparison is an apt one. The
King James Bible is also poetic, but if you mentioned that to the
most devoted fans of the Good Book, they would say that the poetry
is a little beside the point.
For the most part -- as the dissertations and articles makes clear --
Morrison’s readers look to her fiction primarily for the many ways
in which it grapples with the issues of race, gender, sexuality and
power. Morrison infuses each of these factors, moreover, with
several layers of history, not just the antebellum and postbellum
time periods in which Beloved is set, but also the earlier history
raised in the book’s epigraph “Sixty Million and more,” referring to
the black Africans who died in the Middle Passage. This past haunts
the story, in a novel in which there are many hauntings, many ghosts
hovering on the margins or moving into center stage.
All of these factors are set in play through the character Sethe, the
protagonist of Beloved, a black woman of extraordinary power. She
is the “one who never looked away,” as her daughter Denver
describes her at one point in the book, and Sethe’s fierce
independence is the catalyst that sets off key elements in the
narrative. Sethe nearly dies in her attempt to escape to freedom
from the Kentucky plantation incongruously named Sweet Home,
and join other members of her family in Ohio. The plot hinges on
decisions she feels compelled to make, above all on how much she is
willing to sacrifice not only to gain her own emancipation, but also
to prevent her children from falling under the yoke of forced
servitude.
Morrison’s narrative is enriched by the roundabout way in which
she unfolds this tale. The novelist once described to an interviewer
her fascination with the “moments of withheld, partial or
disinformation” in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and to some
extent her storytelling here is similarly indirect. The central tragedy
of Beloved is hinted at almost from the novel’s start, but only in the
sketchiest manner. Gradually Morrison circles in on the key
elements of her plot, as a vulture circles on its prey, and with a
tension that is heightened by the non-linear structure of her account.
Morrison adds another twist by mixing magical and realistic
elements into her story. As a result, some readers have tried to link
her writing to the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yet
you could also look at Beloved as a post-colonial Turn of the Screw,
only here the “extra turn” of the screw is a much larger haunting that
echoes down the generations – so much so that, as Sethe sees it,
nothing ever dies, and the future is often “a matter of keeping the
past at bay.” In truth, echoes of many different strains of the
American literary tradition – Southern Gothic, slave narratives, the
macabre tales of the supernatural– can be traced in the pages of
Beloved.
Not everyone has bought into the canonical status of this work.
Stanley Crouch has argued that Morrison’s writing is too often
interrupted by “maudlin ideological commercials” and that Beloved
“reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of
the miniseries.” Crouch’s comments are (as so often with this critic)
thought-provoking, and deserve to be part of the on-going debate
and discussion surrounding this novel. On the other hand, trying to
purge melodramatic and ideological elements from a book of this
sort would be like trying to get the bloodshed out of a war novel, or
the fight scenes out of a Jackie Chan movie. One suspects that these
very elements have contributed in no small part to the success and
appeal of this author.
In the final analysis, the importance of this book is no longer a
matter of good or bad writing, and perhaps never was. For twenty-
somethings and thirty-somethings, this is the book that spurred
them into dialogues on race and gender and other thorny issues that
still haunt our national debate just as the ghost of Beloved haunts
Morrison’s novel. As such, this book will continue to loom large
over current day American fiction. And it is testimony to the
strength of the “canon” that it can (once again) make room for such
an anti-canonical work, and even give it a prized place at the head of
the table.
往事如歌
新手上路
- 注册
- 2012-02-02
- 消息
- 707
- 荣誉分数
- 13
- 声望点数
- 18
"Infinite Jest" on wikipedia
Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace. The lengthy and complex work takes place in a semi-parodic future version of North America, and touches on tennis, substance addiction and recovery programs, depression, child abuse, family relationships, advertising and popular entertainment, film theory, and Quebec separatism, among other topics. Wallace was 33 when the novel was published.
The novel includes 388 numbered endnotes (some of which have footnotes of their own) that explain or expound on points in the story. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Wallace characterized their use as a method of disrupting the linearity of the text while maintaining some sense of narrative cohesion.[1]
In 2005, Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.[2]
Contents [hide]
1 Title
2 Setting
3 Characters
3.1 The Incandenza family
3.2 The Enfield Tennis Academy
3.3 The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (redundancy sic)
3.4 Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
3.5 Other characters
4 Plot
5 Subsidized Time
6 Location
7 Sources
7.1 Surveys
7.2 In-depth studies
7.3 Interviews
8 See also
9 Translations
10 References
11 External links
[edit]Title
The novel's title is from Hamlet. Hamlet holds the skull of the court jester, Yorick, and says "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!"
Wallace's working title for Infinite Jest was A Failed Entertainment.[3]
[edit]Setting
In the novel's future world, North America is one state comprising the United States, Canada, and Mexico, known as the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.). Corporations purchase naming rights to each calendar year, eliminating traditional numerical designations, with most of the book's action taking place in The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U.). Much of what used to be the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada has become a hazardous waste dump known as the "Great Concavity" to Americans and as the "Great Convexity" to Canadians.
The novel's primary locations are the Enfield Tennis Academy ("ETA") and Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (separated by a hillside in suburban Boston, Massachusetts), and a mountainside outside of Tucson, Arizona. Many characters are students or faculty at the school or patients and staff at the halfway house; a conversation between a quadruple agent and his government contact occurs at the Arizona location.
[edit]Characters
[edit]The Incandenza family
James Orin Incandenza, Jr., an optics expert and filmmaker (see "Filmography" entries below in "External Links"), is the founder of the Enfield Tennis Academy. The son of small-time actor James O. Incandenza, Sr. (who played "The Man from Glad" in the 1960s in the world of the novel), he is the creator of the Entertainment (also known as Infinite Jest or "the samizdat"), an enigmatic and fatally seductive film that was his final and most cherished creation. He used Joelle Van Dyne, his son Orin's strikingly beautiful girlfriend, in many of his films, including the fatal Entertainment. He appears in the book mainly either in flashbacks or as a "wraith", having committed suicide by placing his head in a microwave oven. He is an alcoholic who drinks Wild Turkey whiskey. His nickname in the family is Himself. Orin also calls him "the Mad Stork" or (once) "the Sad Stork".
Avril Incandenza, née Mondragon, is the domineering mother of the Incandenza children and wife of James. A tall (197 cm), beautiful francophone Quebecer, she becomes a major figure at the Enfield Tennis Academy after the death of her husband and begins, or perhaps continues, a relationship with Charles Tavis, the new head of the academy and her either half- or adoptive brother. Her sexual relationships are a matter of some speculation/discussion; one with John "No Relation" Wayne is depicted. In one scene, James, speaking to Hal, refers to his "mother's cavortings with not one not two but over thirty Near Eastern medical attachés." She has a phobia of uncleanliness and disease, and is also described as agoraphobic. She has an obsessive-compulsive need to watch over ETA and her two youngest sons, Hal and Mario, who live at the school. Avril and Orin are no longer in contact with each other. Her nickname in the family is "the Moms".
Hal Incandenza is the youngest of the Incandenza children and arguably the protagonist of the novel, the events of which revolve around his time at ETA. Hal is as prodigiously intelligent and talented as the other members of his family, but insecure about his abilities (and eventually his mental state). He has a difficult relationship with both his parents. He has an eidetic memory and has memorized the Oxford English Dictionary and like his mother often corrects the grammar of his friends and family. Hal's mental degradation and alienation from those around him culminate in his chronologically last appearance in the novel, in which all of his attempts at speech are incomprehensible to others. The origin of Hal's final condition is unclear, though there are hints it is induced by either a drug obtained by Michael Pemulis or a piece of mold Hal ate in childhood.
Mario Incandenza is the Incandenzas' second son, although his biological father may be Charles Tavis. Severely deformed since birth – he is macrocephalic, homodontic, and stands or walks at a 45 degree angle – he is nonetheless perennially cheerful. He is also a budding auteur, having served as camera and directorial assistant to James, and later inheriting the prodigious studio equipment and film lab built by his father on the grounds of the Academy. Hal, although younger, acts like a supportive older brother to Mario, whom Hal calls by the nickname "Booboo".
Orin Incandenza is the eldest son of the Incandenzas. He is a punter for the Phoenix Cardinals and a serial womanizer, and is estranged from everyone in his family except Hal. It is suggested that Orin lost his attraction to Joelle after she became deformed when her mother threw acid in her face during a Thanksgiving dinner, but Orin cites Joelle's questionable relationship with his father as the reason for the breakup. After Joelle, Orin focuses his womanizing on young mothers; Hal suggests that this is because he blames his father's death on his mother.
[edit]The Enfield Tennis Academy
Students
Michael Pemulis, a working-class child from an Allston, Massachusetts family, and Hal's best friend. Wallace got the name from the folk-rock singer Dr. Michael Pemulis, who debuted in 1987.[4] A prankster and the school's resident drug dealer, Pemulis is also very proficient in mathematics. This, combined with his limited but ultraprecise lobbing, made him the school's first master of Eschaton, a computer-aided turn-based nuclear wargame that requires players to be adept both at game theory and at lobbing tennis balls to targets. Although the novel takes place long after Pemulis's Eschaton days (the game is played by 12- to 14-year-olds), Pemulis is still regarded as the game's all-time great, and a final court of appeal in game matters. His brother Matt is a gay hustler who as a child was sexually abused by their father.
Ortho "The Darkness" Stice, another of Hal's close friends. His name consists of the Greek root ortho ("straight") and the anglicized suffix -stice ("a space") from the noun interstice, which originally derived from the Latin verb sistere ("to stand"). He only endorses brands that have black-colored products, and is at all times clothed entirely in black. In a three-setter, he nearly defeats Hal late in the book, and becomes a more significant character as his ability to deny selfhood is realized. It is likely that Ortho is being visited by the ghost of Himself.
John "No Relation" Wayne, the top-ranked player at ETA. Wayne was discovered by James Incandenza during interviews of men named John Wayne for a film. He is frighteningly efficient, controlled, and machine-like on the court. Wayne is almost never directly quoted in the narrative; his statements are either summarized by the narrator or repeated by other characters. His Canadian and Québécois citizenship has been revoked since he came to ETA. His father is a sick asbestos miner in Quebec who hopes that John will soon start earning "serious $" in the Show to "take him away from all this" (see "6 November YDAU, the meet with Port Washington"). Pemulis discovers that Wayne is having a sexual relationship with Avril Incandenza, and it is later revealed that Hal is also aware of that. Wayne may be sympathetic to, if not actively supporting, the AFR.
Jim Troeltsch, a low-ranked player who is obsessed with becoming a sportscaster; he practices announcing tennis matches while watching them.
James Albrecht Lockley "Jim" Struck Jr of Orinda CA, a friend of Hal's and a Big Buddy. He plagiarizes a term paper on Les Assassins des Fauteuils Roulants (found in footnote 304), which features the details of the deadly Jeu du Prochain Train.
Ted Schacht, a sufferer of Crohn's Disease with a chronic knee problem. One of the less motivated players, anticipating a "dental career", he is also less dependent on substances than many of his fellow students.
LaMont Chu, one of the 14- to 15-year-old students at ETA. Chu consults "sweat guru" Lyle for counsel after he becomes obsessed with attaining the more superficial rewards of success in professional tennis and finds that his performance suffers from this obsession. His quixotic pursuit of fame has led some to suggest his name as a take-off of 'La Mancha'.
Ann Kittenplan, an apparent abuser of anabolic steroids. One of the many players who becomes violently unhinged during the annual resident Eschaton tournament.
Prorectors
Mary Esther Thode, a rabidly militant feminist who teaches a Saturday course on Psychopathological Double Binds. Her students believe that she is probably clinically insane.
Thierry Poutrincourt, who teaches a class in which Hal is enrolled on separatism and Quebecois history in Quebecois French.
[edit]The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (redundancy sic)
Don Gately, a former thief and Demerol addict, and current counselor in residence at the Ennet House. One of the novel's primary characters, Gately is physically enormous, a reluctant but dedicated Alcoholics Anonymous member, and intricately (though not obviously) connected to both the Enfield Tennis Academy and the international struggle to seize the master copy of the Entertainment. During his middle-school and high-school years, Gately's size made him a formidable football talent, both offensively and defensively. During his period as an addict and burglar, he accidentally kills M. DuPlessis, a leader of one of the many separatist Québécois organizations featured in the novel. Gately, like Ortho Stice, is visited by the ghost of James O. Incandenza.
Joelle Van Dyne (also known as "Madame Psychosis" (c.f. metempsychosis), a stage name given to her by J.O. Incandenza which she later uses as an on-air name for her radio show "60 min +/-") and "The Prettiest Girl of All Time (or P.G.O.A.T.)"), the primary figure in the deadly Entertainment. In the work, which is filmed through a wobbly "neonatal" lens, she is seen reaching down to the camera, as if it were in a bassinet, and apologizing profusely. This is said to trigger an addictive pleasure complex in the viewer, which makes even partial viewing of the Entertainment suicidal. She wears a veil to hide her face. She is a member of the "Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (U.H.I.D.)", and is disfigured according to an account by the unreliable Molly Notkin. It is not made clear in the novel whether she is in fact disfigured; she herself states that she wears the veil because every man who sees her flawless face falls in love with her. She tries to "eliminate her own map" (that is, commit suicide) in Molly Notkin's bathroom via massive ingestion of freebase cocaine, which lands her in the Ennet House as a resident. Gately develops a strong attraction to Joelle.
Kate Gompert - A cannabis addict who suffers from extreme unipolar depression.
Pat Montesian - The Ennet House executive director. She is a recovering addict, a stroke victim with partial facial paralysis, and the wife of Mars Montesian, a Boston billionaire.
Ken Erdedy - A cannabis addict introduced early in the novel.
Hester Thrale - A nail-biter with borderline personality disorder.
Charlotte Treat - A former prostitute.
Randy Lenz - Cocaine addict and obsessive compulsive, residing at Ennet House not to recover but to hide from both the police and a group of drug dealers involved in a tremendous simultaneous con. The stress of hiding, combined with partial withdrawal from cocaine, leads him to torture animals, which in turn leads to the novel's climactic fight scene. Lenz feels compulsive needs to be north of everyone around him and to know the time of day (but refuses to wear a watch).
Bruce Green - The ex-husband of Mildred Bonk Green, he once lived with Tommy Doocey, a harelipped pot dealer for Erdedy et al. He is quiet. Later in the book, he accompanies Lenz on post-AA meeting walks back to Ennet House.
Tiny Ewell - A lawyer of short stature.
Geoffrey Day - A pompously verbose Ennet House resident and professor at a junior college. He enters rehabilitation after crashing his Saab into a department store. Previously, he wrote an article on the Wheelchair Assassins and their pre-adolescent train-jumping game.
Calvin Thrust - A former porn star who was featured in several of James Incandenza's films.
Emil Minty - A hardcore smack-addict punk with palsy and a tattoo of a swastika with the caption "FUCK NIGERS" on his left biceps, which he is encouraged by Ennet House staff to keep covered.
Burt F. Smith - A drunk who lost his hands and feet after muggers (P.T. Krause among them) beat him savagely and left him for dead during a snowstorm one Christmas Eve. He is 45 but looks 70. Once a Roman Catholic, he lost his faith in the church after it allowed his wife to annul their 15-year marriage.
[edit]Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (A.F.R.), known in English as the Wheelchair Assassins, are a Québécois separatist group. (In keeping with other French words and phrases in the novel, "rollent" is incorrect.) They are one of many such groups that developed after the United States coerced Canada and Mexico into joining the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.), but the A.F.R. is the most deadly and extremist. While other separatist groups are willing to settle for nationhood, the A.F.R. wants Canada to secede from O.N.A.N. and to reject America's forced gift of its polluted "Great Concavity" (or, Hal and Orin speculate, is pretending that those are its goals to put pressure on Canada to let Quebec secede). The A.F.R. seeks the master copy of Infinite Jest as a terrorist weapon to achieve its goals. The A.F.R. has its roots in a childhood game in which miners' sons line up alongside a train track and compete to be the last to jump across the path of an oncoming train, an activity in which many were killed or rendered legless (hence the wheelchairs).
Only one miner's son has (disgracefully) failed to jump – Bernard Wayne, who may be related to ETA's John Wayne. Québécoise Avril's liaisons with Wayne and with the half-Canadian attaché accidentally killed by Don Gately suggest that she may have ties to the A.F.R. as well. There is also evidence linking ETA prorector Thierry Poutrincourt to the group.
Remy Marathe is a member of the Wheelchair Assassins who secretly talks to Hugh/Helen Steeply. Marathe is a quadruple agent: the AFR thinks that he is a triple agent, only pretending to betray the AFR, while Marathe and Steeply know that he only pretends to pretend to betray them. He does this in order to secure medical support for his wife (who was born without a skull) from the Office of Unspecified Services. Late in the novel, Marathe is sent to infiltrate Ennet House in the guise of a Swiss drug addict.
[edit]Other characters
Poor Tony Krause (P.T. Krause), a drag queen formerly associated with Michael Pemulis's older brother, Matty, as well as Randy Lenz. Poor Tony is on a harrowing downward spiral of drug use and seizures. In August of YDAU Tony snatches a fashionable handbag containing a built-in (and connected) heart from a strolling heart patient. He smashes the artificial organ to get the battery.
A medical attaché in the service of a Saudi prince who eats only Toblerone. He goes home to his wife and sits in his chair to escape reality. He is the first character in the novel rendered insane by viewing The Entertainment.
Hugh/Helen Steeply, an agent who assumes a transsexual identity for an operative role, with whom Orin Incandenza becomes obsessed. He works for the government Office of Unspecified Services, but is doing undercover work trying to get information out of Orin to find out more about the Entertainment. He talks to Marathe secretly.
Gene Fackelmann (also known as "Fax"), a member of Gately's former bookmaking debt collection crew. Fackelmann was a Dilaudid addict whose behavior (particularly his involvement in a scheme involving Whitey Sorkin, Sixties Bob, Eighties Bill and about $250,000 U.S.D.) brings the pathetic nature of drug addiction to Gately's attention for the first time. The conclusion of the book focuses on his murder by Sorkin's hired muscle, Bobby C.
[edit]Plot
The plot partially revolves around the missing master copy of a film cartridge, titled Infinite Jest and referred to in the novel as "the Entertainment" or "the samizdat". The film is so entertaining to its viewers that they become lifeless, losing all interest in anything other than viewing the film. The video cartridge was the final work of film by James O. Incandenza before his microwave suicide, completed during a stint of sobriety that was requested by the lead actress, Joelle. Quebec separatists are interested in acquiring a master, redistributable copy of the work to aid in acts of terrorism against the United States. The United States Office of Unspecified Services (USOUS) is seeking to intercept the master copy of the film in order to prevent mass dissemination and the destabilization of the Organization of North American Nations. Joelle and later Hal seek treatment for substance abuse problems at The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, and Marathe visits the rehabilitation center to pursue a lead on the master copy of the Entertainment, tying the characters and plots together.
[edit]Subsidized Time
In the novel's world, each year is subsidized by a specific corporate sponsor, for reasons not entirely explained. The years of Subsidized Time are listed here, in order:[5]
Year of the Whopper
Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile [sic]
Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
Year of Glad
Most of the events in the novel take place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (YDAU), and critics have debated which year this coincides with in the Gregorian Calendar.
Critic Stephen Burn, in his book on Infinite Jest, argues that YDAU corresponds to 2009: the MIT Language Riots took place in 1997 (n. 24) and those riots occurred 12 years before YDAU (n. 60). Also, if the "2007" in "Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile" refers to the pre-subsidization-style numerical date convention, then YDAU (which comes two years later) is 2009.
It is also possible that YDAU is 2008, as Matty Pemulis turns 23 in YDAU (p. 682). Matty and Mike Pemulis's father immigrated from Ireland in 1989 when Matty was "three or four" (p. 683). If Matty had been three and four in 1989, he was born in 1985, which means he turns 23 in 2008. Also, James Incandenza was ten years old in 1960 (p. 157), which puts his suicide at age 54 in 2004, four years before YDAU (p. 142). And on page 63 the Enfield Tennis Academy is said to have been open as of YDAU for "three pre-Subsidized years and then eight Subsidized years," while on page 949 the character Hal recalls the March 1998 blizzard that came "a few months" after ETA opened. This means the Academy opened at the end of 1997 or very early in 1998 and Subsidized Time began three years later on 1/1/2001.
Another theory holds that YDAU is 2011. The most compelling evidence for this is Don Gately's age in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland (27).[6] Gately was 9 during the 1992 Los Angeles riots,[7] placing his birth around 1983. This identifies the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland as 2010 and YDAU as 2011, meaning that Subsidized Time began in 2004.
But November 4, YDAU, falls on a Wednesday (176) and November 8 on a Sunday (325). If Subsidized Time is parallel to real-world time, this means that YDAU would be either 2009 or 2015.[8]
[edit]Location
The fictional Enfield Tennis Academy is a series of buildings laid out as a cardioid on top of a hill on Commonwealth Avenue. This detail has certain thematic resonance, as ETA is in many ways the heart of the novel's setting, and a permutation of the American myth of a city upon a hill. Ennet House lies directly downhill from ETA, facilitating many of the interactions between characters residing in both locations.
Orin lives in Arizona, the state where much of the dialogue between Helen Steeply and Remy Marathe takes place, and the student union of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—in the novel the structure is built in the shape of the human brain—is both the broadcasting site of Madame Psychosis's radio show and the location of a potentially devastating tennis tournament between ETA and Canadian youths.
Enfield is largely a stand-in for Brighton, Massachusetts. Wallace's description of life in Enfield and neighboring Allston contrasts with the largely idyllic life of students at ETA. The real town of Enfield is now submerged under the Quabbin Reservoir.
Wallace wrote the book while living in Syracuse, New York.[9]
[edit]Sources
[edit]Surveys
Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. ISBN 1-57003-517-2
Iannis Goerlandt and Luc Herman, "David Foster Wallace". Post-war Literatures in English: A Lexicon of Contemporary Authors 56 (2004), 1-16; A1-2, B1-2.
[edit]In-depth studies
Burn, Stephen. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide. New York, London: Continuum, 2003 (= Continuum Contemporaries) ISBN 0-8264-1477-X
Bresnan, Mark. "The Work of Play in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50:1 (2008), 51-68.
Carlisle, Greg. "Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest'". Hollywood: SSMG Press, 2007.
Cioffi, Frank Louis. "An Anguish Becomes Thing: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest". Narrative 8.2 (2000), 161-181.
Dowling, William; Bell, Robert. "A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest".
Goerlandt, Iannis. "'Put the book down and slowly walk away': Irony and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47.3 (2006), 309-328.
Holland, Mary K. "'The Art's Heart's Purpose': Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47.3 (2006), 218-242.
Jacobs, Timothy. “The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49.3 (2007): 265-292.
Jacobs, Timothy. “The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 271. Ed. Jeffrey Hunter. New York: Gale, 2009. 313-327.
Jacobs, Timothy. “American Touchstone: The Idea of Order in Gerard Manley Hopkins and David Foster Wallace.” Comparative Literature Studies 38.3 (2001): 215-231.
Jacobs, Timothy. “David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” The Explicator 58.3 (2000): 172-175.
Jacobs, Timothy. “David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System.” Ed. Alan Hedblad. Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction. Vol 15. New York: Thomson-Gale, 2001. 41-50.
LeClair, Tom. "The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38.1 (1996), 12-37.
Nichols, Catherine "Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43.1 (2001), 3-16.
Pennacchio, Filippo. "What Fun Life Was. Saggio su Infinite Jest di David Foster Wallace". Milano: Arcipelago Edizioni, 2009.
[edit]Interviews
Lipsky, David, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway, 2010.
Laura Miller, "The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace". Salon 9 (1996). [1]
Michael Goldfarb, "David Foster Wallace". Radio interview for The Connection (25 June 2004). (full audio interview)
[edit]See also
Novels portal
Infinite Summer
[edit]Translations
Infinite Jest has been translated into
German, by Ulrich Blumenbach: Unendlicher Spaß (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009, ISBN 978-3-462-04112-5).
Italian, by Edoardo Nesi and Annalisa Villoresi (Fandango libri, 2000, ISBN 88-87517-10-X).
Spanish, by Marcelo Covián and Javier Calvo: La broma infinita (Mondadori, 2002).
Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace. The lengthy and complex work takes place in a semi-parodic future version of North America, and touches on tennis, substance addiction and recovery programs, depression, child abuse, family relationships, advertising and popular entertainment, film theory, and Quebec separatism, among other topics. Wallace was 33 when the novel was published.
The novel includes 388 numbered endnotes (some of which have footnotes of their own) that explain or expound on points in the story. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Wallace characterized their use as a method of disrupting the linearity of the text while maintaining some sense of narrative cohesion.[1]
In 2005, Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.[2]
Contents [hide]
1 Title
2 Setting
3 Characters
3.1 The Incandenza family
3.2 The Enfield Tennis Academy
3.3 The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (redundancy sic)
3.4 Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
3.5 Other characters
4 Plot
5 Subsidized Time
6 Location
7 Sources
7.1 Surveys
7.2 In-depth studies
7.3 Interviews
8 See also
9 Translations
10 References
11 External links
[edit]Title
The novel's title is from Hamlet. Hamlet holds the skull of the court jester, Yorick, and says "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!"
Wallace's working title for Infinite Jest was A Failed Entertainment.[3]
[edit]Setting
In the novel's future world, North America is one state comprising the United States, Canada, and Mexico, known as the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.). Corporations purchase naming rights to each calendar year, eliminating traditional numerical designations, with most of the book's action taking place in The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U.). Much of what used to be the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada has become a hazardous waste dump known as the "Great Concavity" to Americans and as the "Great Convexity" to Canadians.
The novel's primary locations are the Enfield Tennis Academy ("ETA") and Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (separated by a hillside in suburban Boston, Massachusetts), and a mountainside outside of Tucson, Arizona. Many characters are students or faculty at the school or patients and staff at the halfway house; a conversation between a quadruple agent and his government contact occurs at the Arizona location.
[edit]Characters
[edit]The Incandenza family
James Orin Incandenza, Jr., an optics expert and filmmaker (see "Filmography" entries below in "External Links"), is the founder of the Enfield Tennis Academy. The son of small-time actor James O. Incandenza, Sr. (who played "The Man from Glad" in the 1960s in the world of the novel), he is the creator of the Entertainment (also known as Infinite Jest or "the samizdat"), an enigmatic and fatally seductive film that was his final and most cherished creation. He used Joelle Van Dyne, his son Orin's strikingly beautiful girlfriend, in many of his films, including the fatal Entertainment. He appears in the book mainly either in flashbacks or as a "wraith", having committed suicide by placing his head in a microwave oven. He is an alcoholic who drinks Wild Turkey whiskey. His nickname in the family is Himself. Orin also calls him "the Mad Stork" or (once) "the Sad Stork".
Avril Incandenza, née Mondragon, is the domineering mother of the Incandenza children and wife of James. A tall (197 cm), beautiful francophone Quebecer, she becomes a major figure at the Enfield Tennis Academy after the death of her husband and begins, or perhaps continues, a relationship with Charles Tavis, the new head of the academy and her either half- or adoptive brother. Her sexual relationships are a matter of some speculation/discussion; one with John "No Relation" Wayne is depicted. In one scene, James, speaking to Hal, refers to his "mother's cavortings with not one not two but over thirty Near Eastern medical attachés." She has a phobia of uncleanliness and disease, and is also described as agoraphobic. She has an obsessive-compulsive need to watch over ETA and her two youngest sons, Hal and Mario, who live at the school. Avril and Orin are no longer in contact with each other. Her nickname in the family is "the Moms".
Hal Incandenza is the youngest of the Incandenza children and arguably the protagonist of the novel, the events of which revolve around his time at ETA. Hal is as prodigiously intelligent and talented as the other members of his family, but insecure about his abilities (and eventually his mental state). He has a difficult relationship with both his parents. He has an eidetic memory and has memorized the Oxford English Dictionary and like his mother often corrects the grammar of his friends and family. Hal's mental degradation and alienation from those around him culminate in his chronologically last appearance in the novel, in which all of his attempts at speech are incomprehensible to others. The origin of Hal's final condition is unclear, though there are hints it is induced by either a drug obtained by Michael Pemulis or a piece of mold Hal ate in childhood.
Mario Incandenza is the Incandenzas' second son, although his biological father may be Charles Tavis. Severely deformed since birth – he is macrocephalic, homodontic, and stands or walks at a 45 degree angle – he is nonetheless perennially cheerful. He is also a budding auteur, having served as camera and directorial assistant to James, and later inheriting the prodigious studio equipment and film lab built by his father on the grounds of the Academy. Hal, although younger, acts like a supportive older brother to Mario, whom Hal calls by the nickname "Booboo".
Orin Incandenza is the eldest son of the Incandenzas. He is a punter for the Phoenix Cardinals and a serial womanizer, and is estranged from everyone in his family except Hal. It is suggested that Orin lost his attraction to Joelle after she became deformed when her mother threw acid in her face during a Thanksgiving dinner, but Orin cites Joelle's questionable relationship with his father as the reason for the breakup. After Joelle, Orin focuses his womanizing on young mothers; Hal suggests that this is because he blames his father's death on his mother.
[edit]The Enfield Tennis Academy
Students
Michael Pemulis, a working-class child from an Allston, Massachusetts family, and Hal's best friend. Wallace got the name from the folk-rock singer Dr. Michael Pemulis, who debuted in 1987.[4] A prankster and the school's resident drug dealer, Pemulis is also very proficient in mathematics. This, combined with his limited but ultraprecise lobbing, made him the school's first master of Eschaton, a computer-aided turn-based nuclear wargame that requires players to be adept both at game theory and at lobbing tennis balls to targets. Although the novel takes place long after Pemulis's Eschaton days (the game is played by 12- to 14-year-olds), Pemulis is still regarded as the game's all-time great, and a final court of appeal in game matters. His brother Matt is a gay hustler who as a child was sexually abused by their father.
Ortho "The Darkness" Stice, another of Hal's close friends. His name consists of the Greek root ortho ("straight") and the anglicized suffix -stice ("a space") from the noun interstice, which originally derived from the Latin verb sistere ("to stand"). He only endorses brands that have black-colored products, and is at all times clothed entirely in black. In a three-setter, he nearly defeats Hal late in the book, and becomes a more significant character as his ability to deny selfhood is realized. It is likely that Ortho is being visited by the ghost of Himself.
John "No Relation" Wayne, the top-ranked player at ETA. Wayne was discovered by James Incandenza during interviews of men named John Wayne for a film. He is frighteningly efficient, controlled, and machine-like on the court. Wayne is almost never directly quoted in the narrative; his statements are either summarized by the narrator or repeated by other characters. His Canadian and Québécois citizenship has been revoked since he came to ETA. His father is a sick asbestos miner in Quebec who hopes that John will soon start earning "serious $" in the Show to "take him away from all this" (see "6 November YDAU, the meet with Port Washington"). Pemulis discovers that Wayne is having a sexual relationship with Avril Incandenza, and it is later revealed that Hal is also aware of that. Wayne may be sympathetic to, if not actively supporting, the AFR.
Jim Troeltsch, a low-ranked player who is obsessed with becoming a sportscaster; he practices announcing tennis matches while watching them.
James Albrecht Lockley "Jim" Struck Jr of Orinda CA, a friend of Hal's and a Big Buddy. He plagiarizes a term paper on Les Assassins des Fauteuils Roulants (found in footnote 304), which features the details of the deadly Jeu du Prochain Train.
Ted Schacht, a sufferer of Crohn's Disease with a chronic knee problem. One of the less motivated players, anticipating a "dental career", he is also less dependent on substances than many of his fellow students.
LaMont Chu, one of the 14- to 15-year-old students at ETA. Chu consults "sweat guru" Lyle for counsel after he becomes obsessed with attaining the more superficial rewards of success in professional tennis and finds that his performance suffers from this obsession. His quixotic pursuit of fame has led some to suggest his name as a take-off of 'La Mancha'.
Ann Kittenplan, an apparent abuser of anabolic steroids. One of the many players who becomes violently unhinged during the annual resident Eschaton tournament.
Prorectors
Mary Esther Thode, a rabidly militant feminist who teaches a Saturday course on Psychopathological Double Binds. Her students believe that she is probably clinically insane.
Thierry Poutrincourt, who teaches a class in which Hal is enrolled on separatism and Quebecois history in Quebecois French.
[edit]The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (redundancy sic)
Don Gately, a former thief and Demerol addict, and current counselor in residence at the Ennet House. One of the novel's primary characters, Gately is physically enormous, a reluctant but dedicated Alcoholics Anonymous member, and intricately (though not obviously) connected to both the Enfield Tennis Academy and the international struggle to seize the master copy of the Entertainment. During his middle-school and high-school years, Gately's size made him a formidable football talent, both offensively and defensively. During his period as an addict and burglar, he accidentally kills M. DuPlessis, a leader of one of the many separatist Québécois organizations featured in the novel. Gately, like Ortho Stice, is visited by the ghost of James O. Incandenza.
Joelle Van Dyne (also known as "Madame Psychosis" (c.f. metempsychosis), a stage name given to her by J.O. Incandenza which she later uses as an on-air name for her radio show "60 min +/-") and "The Prettiest Girl of All Time (or P.G.O.A.T.)"), the primary figure in the deadly Entertainment. In the work, which is filmed through a wobbly "neonatal" lens, she is seen reaching down to the camera, as if it were in a bassinet, and apologizing profusely. This is said to trigger an addictive pleasure complex in the viewer, which makes even partial viewing of the Entertainment suicidal. She wears a veil to hide her face. She is a member of the "Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (U.H.I.D.)", and is disfigured according to an account by the unreliable Molly Notkin. It is not made clear in the novel whether she is in fact disfigured; she herself states that she wears the veil because every man who sees her flawless face falls in love with her. She tries to "eliminate her own map" (that is, commit suicide) in Molly Notkin's bathroom via massive ingestion of freebase cocaine, which lands her in the Ennet House as a resident. Gately develops a strong attraction to Joelle.
Kate Gompert - A cannabis addict who suffers from extreme unipolar depression.
Pat Montesian - The Ennet House executive director. She is a recovering addict, a stroke victim with partial facial paralysis, and the wife of Mars Montesian, a Boston billionaire.
Ken Erdedy - A cannabis addict introduced early in the novel.
Hester Thrale - A nail-biter with borderline personality disorder.
Charlotte Treat - A former prostitute.
Randy Lenz - Cocaine addict and obsessive compulsive, residing at Ennet House not to recover but to hide from both the police and a group of drug dealers involved in a tremendous simultaneous con. The stress of hiding, combined with partial withdrawal from cocaine, leads him to torture animals, which in turn leads to the novel's climactic fight scene. Lenz feels compulsive needs to be north of everyone around him and to know the time of day (but refuses to wear a watch).
Bruce Green - The ex-husband of Mildred Bonk Green, he once lived with Tommy Doocey, a harelipped pot dealer for Erdedy et al. He is quiet. Later in the book, he accompanies Lenz on post-AA meeting walks back to Ennet House.
Tiny Ewell - A lawyer of short stature.
Geoffrey Day - A pompously verbose Ennet House resident and professor at a junior college. He enters rehabilitation after crashing his Saab into a department store. Previously, he wrote an article on the Wheelchair Assassins and their pre-adolescent train-jumping game.
Calvin Thrust - A former porn star who was featured in several of James Incandenza's films.
Emil Minty - A hardcore smack-addict punk with palsy and a tattoo of a swastika with the caption "FUCK NIGERS" on his left biceps, which he is encouraged by Ennet House staff to keep covered.
Burt F. Smith - A drunk who lost his hands and feet after muggers (P.T. Krause among them) beat him savagely and left him for dead during a snowstorm one Christmas Eve. He is 45 but looks 70. Once a Roman Catholic, he lost his faith in the church after it allowed his wife to annul their 15-year marriage.
[edit]Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents
Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (A.F.R.), known in English as the Wheelchair Assassins, are a Québécois separatist group. (In keeping with other French words and phrases in the novel, "rollent" is incorrect.) They are one of many such groups that developed after the United States coerced Canada and Mexico into joining the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.), but the A.F.R. is the most deadly and extremist. While other separatist groups are willing to settle for nationhood, the A.F.R. wants Canada to secede from O.N.A.N. and to reject America's forced gift of its polluted "Great Concavity" (or, Hal and Orin speculate, is pretending that those are its goals to put pressure on Canada to let Quebec secede). The A.F.R. seeks the master copy of Infinite Jest as a terrorist weapon to achieve its goals. The A.F.R. has its roots in a childhood game in which miners' sons line up alongside a train track and compete to be the last to jump across the path of an oncoming train, an activity in which many were killed or rendered legless (hence the wheelchairs).
Only one miner's son has (disgracefully) failed to jump – Bernard Wayne, who may be related to ETA's John Wayne. Québécoise Avril's liaisons with Wayne and with the half-Canadian attaché accidentally killed by Don Gately suggest that she may have ties to the A.F.R. as well. There is also evidence linking ETA prorector Thierry Poutrincourt to the group.
Remy Marathe is a member of the Wheelchair Assassins who secretly talks to Hugh/Helen Steeply. Marathe is a quadruple agent: the AFR thinks that he is a triple agent, only pretending to betray the AFR, while Marathe and Steeply know that he only pretends to pretend to betray them. He does this in order to secure medical support for his wife (who was born without a skull) from the Office of Unspecified Services. Late in the novel, Marathe is sent to infiltrate Ennet House in the guise of a Swiss drug addict.
[edit]Other characters
Poor Tony Krause (P.T. Krause), a drag queen formerly associated with Michael Pemulis's older brother, Matty, as well as Randy Lenz. Poor Tony is on a harrowing downward spiral of drug use and seizures. In August of YDAU Tony snatches a fashionable handbag containing a built-in (and connected) heart from a strolling heart patient. He smashes the artificial organ to get the battery.
A medical attaché in the service of a Saudi prince who eats only Toblerone. He goes home to his wife and sits in his chair to escape reality. He is the first character in the novel rendered insane by viewing The Entertainment.
Hugh/Helen Steeply, an agent who assumes a transsexual identity for an operative role, with whom Orin Incandenza becomes obsessed. He works for the government Office of Unspecified Services, but is doing undercover work trying to get information out of Orin to find out more about the Entertainment. He talks to Marathe secretly.
Gene Fackelmann (also known as "Fax"), a member of Gately's former bookmaking debt collection crew. Fackelmann was a Dilaudid addict whose behavior (particularly his involvement in a scheme involving Whitey Sorkin, Sixties Bob, Eighties Bill and about $250,000 U.S.D.) brings the pathetic nature of drug addiction to Gately's attention for the first time. The conclusion of the book focuses on his murder by Sorkin's hired muscle, Bobby C.
[edit]Plot
The plot partially revolves around the missing master copy of a film cartridge, titled Infinite Jest and referred to in the novel as "the Entertainment" or "the samizdat". The film is so entertaining to its viewers that they become lifeless, losing all interest in anything other than viewing the film. The video cartridge was the final work of film by James O. Incandenza before his microwave suicide, completed during a stint of sobriety that was requested by the lead actress, Joelle. Quebec separatists are interested in acquiring a master, redistributable copy of the work to aid in acts of terrorism against the United States. The United States Office of Unspecified Services (USOUS) is seeking to intercept the master copy of the film in order to prevent mass dissemination and the destabilization of the Organization of North American Nations. Joelle and later Hal seek treatment for substance abuse problems at The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, and Marathe visits the rehabilitation center to pursue a lead on the master copy of the Entertainment, tying the characters and plots together.
[edit]Subsidized Time
In the novel's world, each year is subsidized by a specific corporate sponsor, for reasons not entirely explained. The years of Subsidized Time are listed here, in order:[5]
Year of the Whopper
Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile [sic]
Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
Year of Glad
Most of the events in the novel take place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (YDAU), and critics have debated which year this coincides with in the Gregorian Calendar.
Critic Stephen Burn, in his book on Infinite Jest, argues that YDAU corresponds to 2009: the MIT Language Riots took place in 1997 (n. 24) and those riots occurred 12 years before YDAU (n. 60). Also, if the "2007" in "Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile" refers to the pre-subsidization-style numerical date convention, then YDAU (which comes two years later) is 2009.
It is also possible that YDAU is 2008, as Matty Pemulis turns 23 in YDAU (p. 682). Matty and Mike Pemulis's father immigrated from Ireland in 1989 when Matty was "three or four" (p. 683). If Matty had been three and four in 1989, he was born in 1985, which means he turns 23 in 2008. Also, James Incandenza was ten years old in 1960 (p. 157), which puts his suicide at age 54 in 2004, four years before YDAU (p. 142). And on page 63 the Enfield Tennis Academy is said to have been open as of YDAU for "three pre-Subsidized years and then eight Subsidized years," while on page 949 the character Hal recalls the March 1998 blizzard that came "a few months" after ETA opened. This means the Academy opened at the end of 1997 or very early in 1998 and Subsidized Time began three years later on 1/1/2001.
Another theory holds that YDAU is 2011. The most compelling evidence for this is Don Gately's age in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland (27).[6] Gately was 9 during the 1992 Los Angeles riots,[7] placing his birth around 1983. This identifies the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland as 2010 and YDAU as 2011, meaning that Subsidized Time began in 2004.
But November 4, YDAU, falls on a Wednesday (176) and November 8 on a Sunday (325). If Subsidized Time is parallel to real-world time, this means that YDAU would be either 2009 or 2015.[8]
[edit]Location
The fictional Enfield Tennis Academy is a series of buildings laid out as a cardioid on top of a hill on Commonwealth Avenue. This detail has certain thematic resonance, as ETA is in many ways the heart of the novel's setting, and a permutation of the American myth of a city upon a hill. Ennet House lies directly downhill from ETA, facilitating many of the interactions between characters residing in both locations.
Orin lives in Arizona, the state where much of the dialogue between Helen Steeply and Remy Marathe takes place, and the student union of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—in the novel the structure is built in the shape of the human brain—is both the broadcasting site of Madame Psychosis's radio show and the location of a potentially devastating tennis tournament between ETA and Canadian youths.
Enfield is largely a stand-in for Brighton, Massachusetts. Wallace's description of life in Enfield and neighboring Allston contrasts with the largely idyllic life of students at ETA. The real town of Enfield is now submerged under the Quabbin Reservoir.
Wallace wrote the book while living in Syracuse, New York.[9]
[edit]Sources
[edit]Surveys
Marshall Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. ISBN 1-57003-517-2
Iannis Goerlandt and Luc Herman, "David Foster Wallace". Post-war Literatures in English: A Lexicon of Contemporary Authors 56 (2004), 1-16; A1-2, B1-2.
[edit]In-depth studies
Burn, Stephen. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide. New York, London: Continuum, 2003 (= Continuum Contemporaries) ISBN 0-8264-1477-X
Bresnan, Mark. "The Work of Play in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50:1 (2008), 51-68.
Carlisle, Greg. "Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest'". Hollywood: SSMG Press, 2007.
Cioffi, Frank Louis. "An Anguish Becomes Thing: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest". Narrative 8.2 (2000), 161-181.
Dowling, William; Bell, Robert. "A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest".
Goerlandt, Iannis. "'Put the book down and slowly walk away': Irony and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47.3 (2006), 309-328.
Holland, Mary K. "'The Art's Heart's Purpose': Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47.3 (2006), 218-242.
Jacobs, Timothy. “The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49.3 (2007): 265-292.
Jacobs, Timothy. “The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 271. Ed. Jeffrey Hunter. New York: Gale, 2009. 313-327.
Jacobs, Timothy. “American Touchstone: The Idea of Order in Gerard Manley Hopkins and David Foster Wallace.” Comparative Literature Studies 38.3 (2001): 215-231.
Jacobs, Timothy. “David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” The Explicator 58.3 (2000): 172-175.
Jacobs, Timothy. “David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System.” Ed. Alan Hedblad. Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction. Vol 15. New York: Thomson-Gale, 2001. 41-50.
LeClair, Tom. "The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38.1 (1996), 12-37.
Nichols, Catherine "Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43.1 (2001), 3-16.
Pennacchio, Filippo. "What Fun Life Was. Saggio su Infinite Jest di David Foster Wallace". Milano: Arcipelago Edizioni, 2009.
[edit]Interviews
Lipsky, David, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway, 2010.
Laura Miller, "The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace". Salon 9 (1996). [1]
Michael Goldfarb, "David Foster Wallace". Radio interview for The Connection (25 June 2004). (full audio interview)
[edit]See also
Novels portal
Infinite Summer
[edit]Translations
Infinite Jest has been translated into
German, by Ulrich Blumenbach: Unendlicher Spaß (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009, ISBN 978-3-462-04112-5).
Italian, by Edoardo Nesi and Annalisa Villoresi (Fandango libri, 2000, ISBN 88-87517-10-X).
Spanish, by Marcelo Covián and Javier Calvo: La broma infinita (Mondadori, 2002).
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考古一下， 这一节还真是读得有点没头没脑，又去说一个戏剧了，可能当年很轰动的，俺反正没听说过。坑爹的毛姆呀。
The Shaughraun is a melodramatic play written by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault. It was first performed at Wallack's Theatre, New York, on 14 November 1874.[1] Boucicault played Con in the original production. The play was a huge success, making half a million dollars for Boucicault, which he squandered.
[edit] Plot
The play is about Robert Ffolliott, fiance of Arte O'Neil, who has returned to Ireland after escaping from transportation in Australia. At the play's onset, we are informed that Robert is a a Fenian fugitive, but it soon becomes clear that he is no such thing; rather, he is an innocent local gentleman who was tricked into pledging himself to a criminal disguised as a Fenian whose intent was to then betray him to the police. A country squire who arranged the betrayal, Kinchela, who also conspires to force Arte into marriage, tries to hunt Robert down and arrest him, with the help of a police informer, Harvey Duff. Robert escapes various melodramatic cliffhanger situations with the help of Con the Shaughraun (Irish seachránaí = wanderer, errant person), a roguish stage Irish poacher who provides a great deal of comic relief.
Robert's sister, Claire Ffolliot, is in love with an English soldier, Captain Molineaux, who is tracking down Fenians in the area. She cannot decide whether or not to protect her brother or betray the Captain. However, Molineaux's fish out of water attitudes to rural Ireland provide comic relief, and all ends well. The Fenians receive a general amnesty, the couples marry, Kinchela is arrested, and Harvey Duff falls off a cliff.
The Shaughraun is a melodramatic play written by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault. It was first performed at Wallack's Theatre, New York, on 14 November 1874.[1] Boucicault played Con in the original production. The play was a huge success, making half a million dollars for Boucicault, which he squandered.
[edit] Plot
The play is about Robert Ffolliott, fiance of Arte O'Neil, who has returned to Ireland after escaping from transportation in Australia. At the play's onset, we are informed that Robert is a a Fenian fugitive, but it soon becomes clear that he is no such thing; rather, he is an innocent local gentleman who was tricked into pledging himself to a criminal disguised as a Fenian whose intent was to then betray him to the police. A country squire who arranged the betrayal, Kinchela, who also conspires to force Arte into marriage, tries to hunt Robert down and arrest him, with the help of a police informer, Harvey Duff. Robert escapes various melodramatic cliffhanger situations with the help of Con the Shaughraun (Irish seachránaí = wanderer, errant person), a roguish stage Irish poacher who provides a great deal of comic relief.
Robert's sister, Claire Ffolliot, is in love with an English soldier, Captain Molineaux, who is tracking down Fenians in the area. She cannot decide whether or not to protect her brother or betray the Captain. However, Molineaux's fish out of water attitudes to rural Ireland provide comic relief, and all ends well. The Fenians receive a general amnesty, the couples marry, Kinchela is arrested, and Harvey Duff falls off a cliff.
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Book REVIEW 'Infinite Jest'
Review by JAY McINERNEY
Published: March 03, 1996
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Reading David Foster Wallace's latest novel, ''Infinite Jest,'' I couldn't help thinking at times about 7-year-old Seymour Glass's book-length ''letter'' home from camp, published in The New Yorker in 1965 as ''Hapworth 16, 1924.'' I felt a similar feeling of admiration alloyed with impatience veering toward strained credulity. (Do you suppose Seymour's parents actually read the whole thing?) I had previously been a great admirer of Mr. Wallace's collection of stories, ''Girl With Curious Hair,'' and, to a lesser extent, of the loose, baggy monster that was his debut novel, ''The Broom of the System,'' which I confess to not finishing. If Mr. Wallace were less talented, you would be inclined to shoot him -- or possibly yourself -- somewhere right around page 480 of ''Infinite Jest.'' In fact, you might anyway.
Alternately tedious and effulgent, ''Infinite Jest'' is set in the near future, specifically in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, which would seem to be about 18 years from now. The United States has become part of the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN), federated with Canada and Mexico; most of northern New England has been transformed into a huge toxic waste dump and palmed off on the Canadians. Qubcois separatists, many of them in wheelchairs (les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents), prowl the lower, nontoxic states, performing terrorist acts, understandably more bilious than ever now that giant fans along the border blow Northeastern American waste products in their direction. President Limbaugh has been fairly recently assassinated, and the calendar has been sold to the highest corporate bidder, giving us the Year of the Whopper, the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad and so on.
ADS BY GOOGLE
All of this might -- and sometimes does -- feel cartoonish in the extreme. But this skeleton of satire is fleshed out with several domestically scaled narratives and masses of hyperrealistic quotidian detail. The overall effect is something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola. Mr. Wallace's earlier fiction revealed him as a student of literary post-modernists like John Barth and Robert Coover, flirting with metafictional tropes and self-referential narratives. Here, despite the ''Gravity's Rainbow''-plus length and haute science flourishes, Mr. Wallace plays it straight -- that is, almost realistically -- and seems to want to convince us of the authenticity of his vision by sheer weight of accumulated detail. The weight almost crushes the narrative at times -- as when, for example, we are treated to 10 dense pages about the disassembly of a bed, complete with diagrams.
The two overlapping microcosms of this nonlinear narrative are the Enfield Tennis Academy, a Boston-area institution founded by the mad genius James O. Incandenza, whose clan of athletic and academic prodigies still resides there, and Ennet House, a residence for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics just down the hill. James O., a former tennis prodigy, physicist specializing in optics and avant-garde film maker, has by the time the story opens killed himself by sticking his head in a microwave oven. Surviving him are his sons: Orin, a pro football kicker; Hal, a 17-year-old student at the academy who is as gifted mentally as he is physically; and Mario, who is severely deformed and mildly retarded.
The details of day-to-day life at the academy are rendered in something very close to real time, as are several matches between the junior athletes; Mr. Wallace knows his serve and volley from his baseline game: readers may feel qualified toward the end to march down to the court and challenge the club pro to a match.
The mechanics and rituals of the recovering addicts are also represented with mind-numbing fidelity. Central to this narrative is one Don Gately, a recovering burglar and Demerol man, the slogging Leopold Bloom to Hal Incandenza's Stephen Dedalus. Mr. Wallace's knowledge of pharmaceuticals and the psychology of addiction is encyclopedic; if not for the copious footnotes, which among other functions annotate the dozens of narcotics and psychedelics mentioned in the book, all but the most hard-core drug enthusiasts would need a copy of the Physician's Desk Reference just to keep track of who was up or down at any given moment.
Recovering at Ennet House from a serious freebase habit is one Joelle van Dyne, who was supposedly featured in a cartridge (i.e., film) made by James Incandenza before he died. This film is said to be so mesmerizing that anyone viewing it -- like the famous lab rat with the cocaine dispenser -- is rendered helpless and insensible to everything except the desire to keep watching it.
These plot lines eventually converge, although as a narrator Mr. Wallace reminds me of his character Lateral Alice: his momentum tends to be sideways rather than forward, with chapters often seeming interchangeable with the almost 400 footnotes, some a dozen pages long. As the title -- a nod to Hamlet's Yorick -- indicates, the emergent theme is that we as a nation are amusing ourselves to death. A legless Canadian terrorist tells his American counterpart: ''You all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible.'' The terrorist is trying to find Joelle van Dyne in the hope of locating the master copy of the cartridge, code-named ''the Entertainment.'' This would constitute the ultimate terrorist weapon, a device to facilitate the American penchant for entertaining ourselves senseless.
What makes all this almost plausible, and often pleasurable, is Mr. Wallace's talent -- as a stylist, a satirist and a mimic -- as well as his erudition, which ranges from the world of street crime to higher mathematics. While there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there are not many uninteresting sentences. And there are dozens of set pieces that double as dazzling mini-entertainments -- like an essay on the etiquette of videophones and a street brawl between drunken Canadian separatists and a houseful of recovering addicts. Equally lively is Mr. Wallace's rendition of a New Age 12-step men's group in which bearded hulks sit in a circle clutching teddy bears that represent their inner infants. ''Can you share what you're feeling, Kevin?'' asks the group leader. ''I'm feeling my Inner Infant's abandonment and deep-deprivation issues, Harv,'' answers a weeping, bearded bear-clutcher.
In this ONAN-ite world, everybody's in a 12-step group of some kind, like Phob-Comp-Anon, a ''12-step splinter from Al-Anon, for co-dependency issues surrounding loved ones who were cripplingly phobic or compulsive, or both.'' The satirical narrative distance evident in both these passages collapses, however, in the long sections about Ennet House and Boston A.A. (the only institution treated with a certain earnestness and even reverence), which seem somewhat out of tune with the book's overall omniscient-hipster narrative stance.
These two strains are never quite synthesized. It's as if Mr. Wallace started with the Glass family whiz-kid plot and then got more interested in the gritty church-basement world of A.A. But, in the end, it is the dogged attempt of the recovering addict Don Gately to reclaim the simple pleasures of everyday life that overshadows the athletic, intellectual and onanistic pyrotechnics of the Incandenzas -- and makes this novel something more than an interminable joke.
Review by JAY McINERNEY
Published: March 03, 1996
SIGN IN TO E-MAIL
Reading David Foster Wallace's latest novel, ''Infinite Jest,'' I couldn't help thinking at times about 7-year-old Seymour Glass's book-length ''letter'' home from camp, published in The New Yorker in 1965 as ''Hapworth 16, 1924.'' I felt a similar feeling of admiration alloyed with impatience veering toward strained credulity. (Do you suppose Seymour's parents actually read the whole thing?) I had previously been a great admirer of Mr. Wallace's collection of stories, ''Girl With Curious Hair,'' and, to a lesser extent, of the loose, baggy monster that was his debut novel, ''The Broom of the System,'' which I confess to not finishing. If Mr. Wallace were less talented, you would be inclined to shoot him -- or possibly yourself -- somewhere right around page 480 of ''Infinite Jest.'' In fact, you might anyway.
Alternately tedious and effulgent, ''Infinite Jest'' is set in the near future, specifically in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, which would seem to be about 18 years from now. The United States has become part of the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN), federated with Canada and Mexico; most of northern New England has been transformed into a huge toxic waste dump and palmed off on the Canadians. Qubcois separatists, many of them in wheelchairs (les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents), prowl the lower, nontoxic states, performing terrorist acts, understandably more bilious than ever now that giant fans along the border blow Northeastern American waste products in their direction. President Limbaugh has been fairly recently assassinated, and the calendar has been sold to the highest corporate bidder, giving us the Year of the Whopper, the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad and so on.
ADS BY GOOGLE
All of this might -- and sometimes does -- feel cartoonish in the extreme. But this skeleton of satire is fleshed out with several domestically scaled narratives and masses of hyperrealistic quotidian detail. The overall effect is something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola. Mr. Wallace's earlier fiction revealed him as a student of literary post-modernists like John Barth and Robert Coover, flirting with metafictional tropes and self-referential narratives. Here, despite the ''Gravity's Rainbow''-plus length and haute science flourishes, Mr. Wallace plays it straight -- that is, almost realistically -- and seems to want to convince us of the authenticity of his vision by sheer weight of accumulated detail. The weight almost crushes the narrative at times -- as when, for example, we are treated to 10 dense pages about the disassembly of a bed, complete with diagrams.
The two overlapping microcosms of this nonlinear narrative are the Enfield Tennis Academy, a Boston-area institution founded by the mad genius James O. Incandenza, whose clan of athletic and academic prodigies still resides there, and Ennet House, a residence for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics just down the hill. James O., a former tennis prodigy, physicist specializing in optics and avant-garde film maker, has by the time the story opens killed himself by sticking his head in a microwave oven. Surviving him are his sons: Orin, a pro football kicker; Hal, a 17-year-old student at the academy who is as gifted mentally as he is physically; and Mario, who is severely deformed and mildly retarded.
The details of day-to-day life at the academy are rendered in something very close to real time, as are several matches between the junior athletes; Mr. Wallace knows his serve and volley from his baseline game: readers may feel qualified toward the end to march down to the court and challenge the club pro to a match.
The mechanics and rituals of the recovering addicts are also represented with mind-numbing fidelity. Central to this narrative is one Don Gately, a recovering burglar and Demerol man, the slogging Leopold Bloom to Hal Incandenza's Stephen Dedalus. Mr. Wallace's knowledge of pharmaceuticals and the psychology of addiction is encyclopedic; if not for the copious footnotes, which among other functions annotate the dozens of narcotics and psychedelics mentioned in the book, all but the most hard-core drug enthusiasts would need a copy of the Physician's Desk Reference just to keep track of who was up or down at any given moment.
Recovering at Ennet House from a serious freebase habit is one Joelle van Dyne, who was supposedly featured in a cartridge (i.e., film) made by James Incandenza before he died. This film is said to be so mesmerizing that anyone viewing it -- like the famous lab rat with the cocaine dispenser -- is rendered helpless and insensible to everything except the desire to keep watching it.
These plot lines eventually converge, although as a narrator Mr. Wallace reminds me of his character Lateral Alice: his momentum tends to be sideways rather than forward, with chapters often seeming interchangeable with the almost 400 footnotes, some a dozen pages long. As the title -- a nod to Hamlet's Yorick -- indicates, the emergent theme is that we as a nation are amusing ourselves to death. A legless Canadian terrorist tells his American counterpart: ''You all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions. The without-end pursuit of a happiness of which someone let you forget the old things which made happiness possible.'' The terrorist is trying to find Joelle van Dyne in the hope of locating the master copy of the cartridge, code-named ''the Entertainment.'' This would constitute the ultimate terrorist weapon, a device to facilitate the American penchant for entertaining ourselves senseless.
What makes all this almost plausible, and often pleasurable, is Mr. Wallace's talent -- as a stylist, a satirist and a mimic -- as well as his erudition, which ranges from the world of street crime to higher mathematics. While there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there are not many uninteresting sentences. And there are dozens of set pieces that double as dazzling mini-entertainments -- like an essay on the etiquette of videophones and a street brawl between drunken Canadian separatists and a houseful of recovering addicts. Equally lively is Mr. Wallace's rendition of a New Age 12-step men's group in which bearded hulks sit in a circle clutching teddy bears that represent their inner infants. ''Can you share what you're feeling, Kevin?'' asks the group leader. ''I'm feeling my Inner Infant's abandonment and deep-deprivation issues, Harv,'' answers a weeping, bearded bear-clutcher.
In this ONAN-ite world, everybody's in a 12-step group of some kind, like Phob-Comp-Anon, a ''12-step splinter from Al-Anon, for co-dependency issues surrounding loved ones who were cripplingly phobic or compulsive, or both.'' The satirical narrative distance evident in both these passages collapses, however, in the long sections about Ennet House and Boston A.A. (the only institution treated with a certain earnestness and even reverence), which seem somewhat out of tune with the book's overall omniscient-hipster narrative stance.
These two strains are never quite synthesized. It's as if Mr. Wallace started with the Glass family whiz-kid plot and then got more interested in the gritty church-basement world of A.A. But, in the end, it is the dogged attempt of the recovering addict Don Gately to reclaim the simple pleasures of everyday life that overshadows the athletic, intellectual and onanistic pyrotechnics of the Incandenzas -- and makes this novel something more than an interminable joke.
