I'm going to get this started while it's fresh in my head, realizing that people may not weigh in for a few days.
My first thought upon finishing "Seize the Day" is that we have now completed the Triple Crown of Depressing Literature, with "Florida" and "Miss Lonelyhearts" being the Kentucky Derby and Preakness.
Roses all around.
Good grief.
I'm all for truth and suffering in literature, and I certainly don't require a happy ending, but I do have an expectation of a hint, a smattering, a soupçon of joy in the human condition somewhere in the book. Somewhere. Anywhere. In a nook or cranny, in an odd paragraph. Anything to forestall the feeling that a cheese grater is methodically shredding my soul as I read.
Is that too harsh?
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Yes! I'm with you on the doom-gloom front.
ReplyDeleteI took a creative fiction writing class once, and the teacher said authors should try to avoid letting the characters pity themselves. He said it makes the reader lose interest or despise the characters. Wilhelm, however, didn't avoid this trap - at least, that's how it seemed to me.
Interesting that you mention pity, Shanxi. Something that really stood out to me near the end of the book is when Wilhelm and Tamkin are lunching at the cafeteria, and Wilhelm is thinking about his dad. "Why," he asks himself, "should he or anybody else pity me; or why should I be pitied sooner than another fellow? It is my childish mind that thinks people are ready to give it just because you need it."
ReplyDeleteI guess you could argue it's just another example of self-pity, but I found it poignant, too, because it's the first time, I think, that he realizes the nature of his aloneness in the world. He truly realizes that people don't love you and help you and feel sorry for you just because you need them to. Their emotions and reactions are driven by their own needs and agendas, not yours, and it's really pretty rare that two people have needs that line up and complement each other and allow them to deeply connect.
So maybe Wilhelm's self-pity makes him unattractive to us, but it could also be the thing — the merciless rebuffing of it — that enables him to acquire some knowledge about the human condition. I mean, maybe knowing once and for all that his "loved" ones aren't fallback positions is what he needs to start anew.
Hmm - very good points. I agree that pity can be a lovely thing, and certainly as humans we all want pity when suffering falls our way - but I didn't feel much pity for Wilhelm because he didn't seem to pity others. Yet he always wants it for himself. Take Mr. Perls, for example (Ch. 2). "He did not welcome this stranger; he began at once to find fault with him." He criticizes his hair, "fish teeth" and "drippy mustache." After a while, though, it says he does relent toward Mr. Perls - and this made him slightly more sympathetic to me. I think he's also made more sympathetic because the rest of his acquaintances are so much worse - Tamkin, for example, exploiting him so ruthlessly.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the most pitiable characters in literature is Thomas Hardy's Tess Durbeyfield. Not because she asks the reader for pity, but because she's so full of life and naivety even though that naivety destroys her. You also get the feeling that everything is conspiring to bring her down, and she truly has no chances even though she's trying so hard to "fight her fate." With Wilhelm, though, he did have several people advising him against Tamkin - his father, for instance, who for all his callousness does have a certain common sense. Wilhelm's track record of believing unsavory characters (Maurice Venice, the "talent scout") also should have made him more cautious.
Yes, you're right. Wilhelm was pretty self-centered. He didn't seem to stop and consider other people very much.
ReplyDeleteI like your Tess example as a counter — someone whose life truly is awful through no fault of her own. We can see Tess as an individual abused by fate, but we can also see her as a member of a class — the 19th century woman who has almost no legal rights and no support system. She not only has terrible things happen to her, like rape, but she gets BLAMED for those things, as has been the fate of so many women. I kind of think Bellow is showing us Wilhelm as an individual with flaws, but also as a member of a class — the middle-class American man in the 1950s coping with the demands of capitalism and "success" and all that, but certainly it doesn't have the same poignancy as Tess' existence.
I love that you mentioned Maurice Venice and Wilhelm's "track record of believing unsavory characters." It's true. But why does he do it? He seems to have inklings that these people are not what they seem, but he's drawn to them anyway and holds out hope that they're legit. Is it vanity? (Oh sure, I could be a movie star!) Self-destruction? Is he so bent on finding an "easy" way in life — movie stardom, getting rich on the stock market — that he's made himself completely incapable of the necessary tedium of working for a living?
Oh, Tess! Did I not protest and yell at my college classmates that nobody found it wrong that she hangs and the husband marries Tess 2.0, the virginial younger sister? I HATE THAT BOOK!
ReplyDelete(As a rule, I'll avoid all-caps. But what a great example of cheese-grater literature!)
Please, Christy, don't be timid. Hehe
ReplyDeleteI'm with you, hon, on the virginal younger sister crap. Totally. Hardy was progressive in his way, but apparently not enough to see how freakin' creepy that ending was. Part of him evidently still believed all the claptrap about woman's purity.