Giuseppe di Lampedusa's "The Leopard"

(Fair warning: the only relation of the following 600-plus words to Lebanon is tangential. If that is not your cup of tea, feel free to move on)

We all began as something else. Lebanon, of course, was not always the Lebanon we know today. France was not always France. And Italy was only willed into existence in 1860, with the unification of the various kingdoms of the Italian peninsula. The Risorgimento was led by the state of Piedmont, ruled from the northern city of Turin by King Victor Emmanuel II and his Prime Minister Cavour.

It did not occur without bloodshed. In May 1860, the Piedmontese Garibaldi, without Cavour's blessing, sailed to Sicily to capture the southern island from the "Kingdom of the Two Sicilies," comprising Sicily and Naples. The Garibaldini routed the loyalists in Sicily and, gathering momentum and volunteers, swept north and marched into Naples. With the final military defeat of the Bourbon monarchies, the "liberated" kingdoms agreed to join the new Italian state. Italy was born. These are the people and events that Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard tackles.

But the book is broader than 19th century Italian political developments. The Leopard tells the story of the twilight years of the old Sicilian aristocracy, and their eventual replacement by a new liberal, merchant class. The protagonist is Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, who is forced to grapple with the gradual deterioration of his authority and his wealth -- despite losing long ago any ethical attachment to the ancien regime's cause. He is resolutely anti-heroic: "Poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his Jovelike frown," writes Lampedusa, "watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move toward saving it."

The book's great insight surrounds the constants in revolutionary situations. Lampedusa's Sicily is caught in a constant cycle of decay and regeneration: the old ruling class becomes decadent and anachronistic, and is superseded by a new class -- which is eventually domesticated and corrupted by creature comforts. Old rulers are pushed aside by younger, more vital upstarts. Passion cools into loveless marriages. At the end of all the grand events and lofty sentiments, As the rest of the world moves forward, Sicily remains essentially unaltered.

"In Sicily it doesn't matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of 'doing' at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We're as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we’ve been a colony. I don't say that in complaint; it's our fault. But even so we're worn out and exhausted.

...

"This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind."

The Leopard reads like an extended obituary -- but what a magnificent funeral. It is a description of a society frozen in place, as the world rushes ahead without it. Lampedusa is solely concerned with his small corner of southern Italy, but may I suggest that there are those in other societies -- perhaps other Mediterranean societies -- which his words could speak to. In a letter describing the characters and setting of his novel, Lampedusa writes, "Sicily is Sicily -- 1860, earlier, forever." For better or worse.

Khalil Gibran, Skewered

In Lebanon, Khalil Gibran is treated as something of a national poet. But outside of this country, Gibran's reputation is more -- controversial. One English professor recently felt moved to write an entire poem, in blank verse, to express his hatred of Gibran. It's pretty hilarious. To quote the first verse:

Expansive and yet vacuous is the prose of Kahlil Gibran,
And weary grows the mind doomed to read it.
The hours of my penance lengthen,
The penance established for me by the editor of this magazine,
And those hours may be numbered as the sands of the desert.
And for each of them Kahlil Gibran has prepared
Another ornamental phrase,
Another faux-Biblical cadence,
Another affirmation proverbial in its intent
But alas! lacking the moral substance,
The peasant shrewdness, of the true proverb.

Hemingway's Life and Fiction

For those who come here looking for a discussion of Lebanese politics (approximately all of you), I am sorry to disappoint you today. This is going to be a post about Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway experiences often mirrored those of his characters. He was an avid fan of bullfighting, he loved fishing off Key West, he was an ambulance driver in World War I, and he reported on the Spanish Civil War -- all material that would later be used to animate his many characters. But there was one thing that Hemingway did, which one of his characters would never consider. On July 2, 1961 he placed a double-barreled shotgun just above his eyes, and pulled the trigger.

To understand the signifigance of this, you have to understand Hemingway's protagonists. They are uniformly tough, macho men. They think in short, declarative sentences. They act according to a personal code. They never admit to weakness. It is one of Hemingway's great methods for giving the reader a heightened sense of his characters' sensations. When Frederic Henry winces in A Farewell to Arms, it has a greater impact than a more emotive character screaming out in agony. We know that Henry doesn't show his feelings easily.

Just as certainly as his characters are stoic, Hemingway's plots are almost inevitably tragic. Again, it is the great emotional payoff from the strength and stoicism of his characters; their final destruction is given a sense of grandeur because we know their strength. Hemingway's tragic worldview was not just a literary tool, it was his fundamental view of the world. The most famous passage from A Farewell to Arms reflects it best:

"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."

Despite Hemingway's many strengths, he oftens stretches this worldview to a point of absurdity. Everything inevitably ends badly; the world inevitably breaks the good and strong and everyone else too. Ether you are killed by Franco's troops, your true love dies in childbirth, impotency prevents you from having a relationship with your beloved, you ruin your marriage by being unable to resist your children's nanny, or sharks eat your prize fish on the way back to shore (the respective endings of For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises,A Moveable Feast, and The Old Man In the Sea). If his characters are just a little too macho to be believable, the pervasive tragedy of his plots sometimes borders on comical.

So what message can we take away from Hemingway's suicide, in light of his life's work? One possible lesson is that even the great writer himself could not live up to the characters in his novel: in the end, the great patriarch of realism was portraying characters that had never existed.

As for my pet theory, I have no evidence for it apart from the widely available facts of Hemingway's life. But, if his fiction is any guide, Hemingway expected and needed his life to end in tragedy. He gave fortune plenty of chances to comply -- he observed the D-Day landing in Normandy during World War II, and took plenty of other risks that could have cost him his life. But he kept on surviving: he was even awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He seemed destined to die at a ripe old age as a literary giant with millions of fans worldwide, not broken by the world. So, when the world failed to provide him with his tragic ending, he provided it himself. Whatever else it was, it was certainly an ending that no work of fiction could ever do justice.

The Grind

It's strange, when you think about it. The vast majority of most people's time is spent at their work. It is how they define themselves. "What do you do?" is a question about your career, not what type of person you are. But it is the rare work of fiction which describes the dramas and emotions of a normal day at work. Why?

"The workday proves dull," says the Guardian. People in the Western world simply don't have interesting jobs any more. We are not Hemingway's soldiers or Melville's sailors. Members of the Western middle class are increasingly paper pushers. We work in offices, tap away on computers, and produce increasingly intangible products. We do it, but have no illusions that it is worthy of high art. You're not going to find many passages in The Great Gatsby where Nick Carraway ducks out for a bathroom break, either.

But let's talk about Gatsby. As the article notes, the fact of work plays a major role in many great pieces of fiction. Nick Carraway meets Gatsby because he has moved East to try his hand in the bond business. Gatsby as a hard-working, driven man is a vital contrast to the independently wealthy Tom, who "drift[s] on forever...seeking the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game." The fact that the characters work, or do not work, is important. Their actual work, however, is kept from the page. Much better to focus on the exception to the everyday routine -- the grand parties, the romances, the murders.

Is there a way around this dilemma? Can a writer portray the hours between 9am and 5pm without straying into monotony and boredom? The Guardian article offers one possibility -- a return to the fantastic, such as in Kafka's The Fly. When all else fails, a story is always enlivened by turning the protagonist into a bug.

But Kafka's Gregor Samsa doesn't just experience the problems of a man turned into an insect; more importantly, he has the problems of an insect trying to turn into a man. He buzzes about frantically, full of worries and insecurities. What to do? How will he provide for his family? The problems are the same that people experience every day, as is the just-south-of-panic emotional state.

Kafka successfully explained the fears, desires, and perspective of the working man in Gregor -- but without describing hours of compiling Excel spreadsheets. He distilled the essence of a situation in such a way that allows the reader to understand its drama. And, in the end, that is what fiction is all about.

Master of the Universe

If you liked Bonfire of the Vanities, check out Tom Wolfe's look at New York's hedge fund managers, twenty years after.

"What's happened? What's happened is, I just spent $200,000 on a state-of-the-art positive-pressure HVAC system in our apartment, and I've gotta put in new windows to make it work right, and I gotta put four vents, four lousy little vents, through the walls of this building, which nobody's ever gonna notice--and I've gotta do it now--AND THE BOARD IN ALL ITS AUGUST WISDOM IS BREAKING MY--OBSTRUCTING ME EVERY INCH OF THE WAY!"

And to think, these are the people Wolfe chooses to live amongst. As a side note, Wolfe lives every American writer's dream. Bash the rich Wall St. people's, bash the racial demagogues and the politicians -- all the while living in midtown Manhattan and making truckloads of money.

The Weak Will Probably Not Inherit the Earth

I was flipping through my big book of George Orwell's collected essays today, and came across his description of Herman Melville. "Whoever is not queasy in the presence of strength will always love Melville," writes Orwell:

"Melville was, it is clear, a man as proud as Lucifer, raging against the gods like his own Ahab...More important than his strength, he had -- what is implied in real strength -- passionate sensitiveness; to him seas were deeper and skies vaster than to other men, and similarly beauty was more actual and pain and humiliation more agonizing."

And then, a little earlier today, I came across this passage from a letter by D.H. Lawrence. It caught my eye for, well, obvious reasons. Lawrence is explaining how he would annihilate society's outcasts:

"If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I'd go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the 'Hallelujah Chorus'."

Now, this is obviously very sick and demented and awful and pretty much every other adjective you can think of. But that's not what I want to write about. Owell's description of Melville and the Lawrence quote share a similar perspective. It is essentially elitist, contemptuous of weakness and glorifying strength and action. This is a fundamentally better attitude for a writer than today's sentimental hacks, who spend their time agonizing about minutia and finding excuses for every weakness. And it is why writers like Toni Morrison or David Sadaris will never be worthy to do so much as clean Melville's shoes.

Time and Ebb

Strangely, Nabokov wrote the short story "Time and Ebb" in 1945, when he was 46 years old. The story is an old man's reminisces of his long-lost childhood in the World War II period, and contains not a line of dialogue. This seems an odd topic for a middle-aged writer at the peak of his talents to traffic in, but we forgive him. And the reason we forgive him are passages like this:

"And so I shall tiptoe away, taking leave of my childhood at its most typical point, in its most plastic posture: arrested by a deep drone that vibrates and gathers in volume overhead, stock-still, oblivious of the meek bicycle it straddles, one foot on the pedal, the toe of the other touching the asphalted earth, eyes, chin, and ribs lifted to the naked sky where a warplane comes with unearthly speed which only the expanse of its medium renders unhurried as ventral view changes to rear view, and wings and hum dissolve in the distance. Admirable monsters, great flying machines, they have gone, they have vanished like that flock of swans which passed with a mighty swish of multitudinous wings one spring night above Knights Lake in Maine, from the unknown into the unknown: swans of a species never determined by science, never seen before, never seen since -- and then nothing but a lone star remained in the sky, like an asterisk to an undiscovered footnote."

Hizbullah's Dangerous Game

Al-Hayat is a Saudi-owned paper, so I have some questions about this story which purports to show growing discontent at Hizbullah among Southern Lebanese. Nevertheless, the storyline goes like this: those Lebanese most affected by the war with Israel are getting impatient with Hizbullah's political battles in Beirut, and want them to come home and help them rebuild. Here's a translated segment of the article:

"Last July, Um Qasim was putting the food on the table when a young man from the resistance came in to tell the family that they had to leave the town. The news about Hezbollah kidnapping two Israeli soldiers had just rocked Israel and Lebanon. The preliminary reports pointed to a heavy Israeli response. Um Qasim didn't pay any heed to the young man's talk. The family didn't leave their house in Bin Jbeil. In a single day in the aggression, she lost two sons and a house. Back then she said that her two children died 'for the sake of the Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah.' But seven months later after this personal loss, new questions entered Um Qasim's and other southerners' dictionaries: was it necessary for Hezbollah to capture two Israeli soldiers?

"Meanwhile, Ali spends his time moving along the roads after he lost his sound equipment and was not compensated by anyone. He said: 'the government doesn't know that there is a town called Bint Jbeil that suffered more than any other place during the war.' He adds expressing his anger towards the opposition and the loyalists: 'Not one of them visited us. We don't trust them. Some of the MPs of the opposition visited us then disappeared. Not one of them heeds our demands. The opposition and the loyalists are worse than each other.' Ali received 400$ as 'compensation for the shop' but he doesn't know who will rebuild the shops that were destroyed but he knows that 'even Hezbollah now has other concerns than the south. It is now busy with Beirut.'"

As the article is right to point out, the government missed (or couldn't take advantage of) an opportunity to subvert Hizbullah's patron-client relationship by helping Southern Lebanese rebuild after the war. Though the people in South Lebanon might not be enamored of Hizbullah any longer, the government hasn't exactly welcomed them with open arms. In the absence of another option, the support of the people in Southern Lebanon will probably, grudgingly, remain with Hizbullah.

Nabokov's "Spring in Fialta"

A lot of people consider "Spring in Fialta" the best of Nabokov's short stories; I'd be hard pressed to disagree. He is working in a difficult structure, where large portions of the narration are in the past. In between digressions to the past, barely anything happens in the present. It could be a recipe for tedium, and it is a great credit to Nabokov's skill that he keeps the reader interested.

Victor runs into Nina by chance in Fialta, a gray, dream-like scene caught between "moist air and warm rain." Both Russian emigres, both married, they have run into each other by chance throughout many cities in Europe, and have had intermittent flings when they came across each other.
Some critics have commented that Nina is a stand-in for Nabokov's native Russia -- something he was enamored with, but, due to the Soviet takeover, could never possess. Re-reading the story, that sounds plausible -- but it wasn't the theme that first struck me.

Victor portrays Nadine as a sort of society woman. She is married to a famous writer and has various muse-like qualities, sleeps (to his apathy) with his circle of admirers, and flits glamorously around Europe. She possesses "a wonderful sunburst of kindness, a cheerful, compassionate attitude with all possible cooperation, as if woman's love were springwater...which at the least notice she ever so willingly gave anyone to drink." And yet -- she is close to nobody. What is glamorous to outsiders is superficiality to those who (should) know her.

At the climax of the story, Victor "grew apprehensive because something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable was being wasted: something which I abused by snapping off poor bright bits in gross haste while neglecting the modest but true core..." He professes his love to her and she, in return, acts embarassed and horrified.

Victor leaves Nina and her husband, Ferdinand (a write who Victor despises), by their car. The timeline, forever shifting backwards, moves forward a few days at the conclusion:

I stood...with a freshly bought newspaper, which told me that the yellow car I had seen under the plane trees had suffered a crash beyond Fialta...a crash from which Ferdinand and his friend, those invulnerable rogues, those salamanders of fate, those basilisks of good fortune, had escaped with local and temporary injury to their scales, while Nina, in spite of her long-standing, faithful imitation of them, had turned out to be mortal."

There's a sort of grim irony at work here: by dying while the other, evil men lived, Nina proved that she was different. Still, I prefer another interpretation. Nina, for Victor, was always something not quite human -- an ephemeral beauty that flickered across his life, always going somewhere better, always with the glamor of life at the tips of her fingers. In the end, she was proven mortal. She could not commit to loving anything too deeply; she died as she lived, in perpetual transit from one place to another. At the beginning, we had been conditioned to think of Nina as a marvelous (literally, a marvel) person. Nabokov slowly shades her personality to something darker, completing the transformation with the last lines.

At least, that's the story I enjoy. Maybe it isn't the story Nabokov wrote. What can I say -- it's the one I choose to read.

Literary Creation

What is the purpose of all the pretty stories that authors have created for most of human history? Obviously, there are multiple reasons to read fiction: one gets something different out of Michael Crichton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Vladimir Nabokov. But I don't think the difference between those authors is merely their choice of topics. They are all writing for different reasons, trying to impart a different message to their readers.

With Crichton, the purpose is entertainment. Establish a few characters that the reader cares about, conjure an elaborate plot involving (preferably) dinosaurs or something equally unlikely, write in an accessible style...and presto, one has an entertaining way to spend a few hours of an airplane ride. Fitzgerald's purpose is more complicated, and more serious. He wants to describe a certain class of Americans in a certain time period. He wants to describe their glamor, their weaknesses, and how they think. At the broadest level, he is engaging in social commentary disguised as fiction.

Nabokov sometimes comments on political affairs -- specifically the Soviet takeover of Russia -- but that's not his primary concern. Essentially, he's concerned with recording beauty. Preserving images in everyday life is an end in itself for him. I'll let him have the last word. This is from "A Guide to Berlin":

"The horse-drawn tram has vanished, and so will the trolley, and some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the twenty-first century, wishing to portray out time, will go to a museum of technological history and locate a hundred-year-old streetcar, yellow, uncouth, with old-fashioned curved seats, and in a museum of old custumes dig up a black, shiny-buttoned conductor's uniform. Then he will go home and compile a description of Berlin streets in bygone days. Everything, every trifle, will be valuable and meaningful: the conductor's purse, the advertisement over the window, that peculiar jolting motion which our great-grandchildren will perhaps imagine -- every thing will be ennobled and justified by age.

I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirror of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade."

Nabokov's "Christmas"

Below is the ending to Nabokov's short story, "Christmas." It is one of my favorite passages in what has been a book full, so far, of wonderful images. Here's the scene: the father is wandering around the room of his dead son, who collected bugs, agonized by grief and planning to kill himself.

This is actually a typical Nabokovian theme -- a horrible tragedy overshadowed by the beauty of life. It works beautifully here, though it can be frustrating. Characters tend to walk around speaking about the beauty of the pavement, the trees, the birds, and then Nabokov will slip in one line like, "oh, and what a horrible tragedy that my baby was stillborn!" Those Russians. Anyway, the writing here speaks for itself. No more from me.

"It had emerged from the chrysalid because a man overcome with grief had transferred a tin box to his warm room, and the warmth had penetrated its taut leaf-and-silk envelope; it had awaited this moment so long, had collected its strength so tensely, and now, having broken out, it was slowly and miraculously expanding. Gradually the wrinkled tissues, the velvety fringes, unfurled; the fan-pleated veins grew firmer as they filled with air. It became a winged thing imperceptibly, as a maturing face imperceptibly becomes beautiful. And its wings -- still feeble, still moist -- kept growing and unfolding, and now they were developed to the limit set for them by God...

And then those thick black wings, with a glazy eyespot on each and a purplish bloom dusting their hooked foretips, took a full breath under the impulse of tender, ravishing, almost human happiness."

Details of a Sunset

I'm working my way, very slowly, through Vladimir Nabokov's short stories. It's very dense, description-heavy reading, and I don't normally make it through more than 15 pages at a time. The man simply sees pages and pages of unique metaphors and adjectives and old memories in basic images. It's like he can't resist shooting off in a wild tangent with each new description. Case in point, a beautiful description from the short story Details of a Sunset.

"[T]he flush of a fiery sunset filled the vista of the canal, and a rain-streaked bridge in the distance was margined by a narrow rim of gold along which passed tiny black figures."

Every story seems to have three or four lines like that, and you must read very carefully to catch them. I read with a pen in my hand. If I don't, I'll breeze by that passage, thinking, "Afternoon. Bridge. Check." But with Nabokov, the point is the journey, not so much the destination.