The Comps Reading Project part 14

And with this weeks' readings I finish every last novel on my reading list, just in time for Labor Day!  There are still plays, poems, and criticism, but somehow I feel (I hope!) that the worst is now behind me.  Sweet mercy, I might actually finish this insane list after all!

Room, Emma Donoghue.

Well this was something completely different.  After so many texts on political revolutions, dictators, international politics, and massive jungles that can eat you alive, this 2010 novel begins as about as small and intimate as you can get: just a boy and his Ma, locked for years inside of a small soundproofed shed by a crazed psychopath.  Ripped straight from the headlines in the aftermath of Josef Fritzl and Elizabeth Smart, the novel is narrated solely from the perspective of 5-year-old Jack, who is unaware that any possible world exists beyond the walls of "Room."  The first half is a sort of day-in-the-life of this mother-son duo, as she struggles to keep his mind and body healthy in these severe limitations.  But when it comes out that their imprisoner "Old Nick" has been laid off, the bank may foreclose, and therefore might murder them before they can be discovered, the novel's middle-portion becomes an (admittedly) thrilling escape sequence.  The second half details their hard reintegration back into society--especially for Jack, still reeling from the revelation of an "Outside."

I put "admittedly" in parentheses up above, because the Great Escape aside, a lot of this popular novel was frankly difficult to get through.  Part of that was just the horror of the subject matter; but closely connected to that is also just how...voyeuristic, even exploitative that subject matter felt, a peeping in on other people's real-life pain; real people lived through this, did we really need a fictionalized account?  Moreover, the fact that it's fictional somehow makes it feel worse, as though there's been no proper attribution.  That scopophiliac quality is doubly baffling, given how much of the second half is given over to an utterly-non-self-aware critique of media exploitation of other peoples' pain.

Likewise baffling is, well, just what is it doing on my historical list?  My Irish professor put it on--but aside from the fact that Donoghue was born in Dublin (though she currently lives in Canada), there's not much specifically Irish about it.  The action all takes place in the United States, no one is ID'd as Irish-American, and the few stray references to Catholicism don't really ground the text in any meaningful way to Irish-Catholicism.  Room feels less like an Irish novel than one that just happens to have been written by an Irish novelist.

Is the point of this novel's inclusion simply to remind me that Irish letters are still alive and kicking?  Or is the implication that though never explicitly Irish, this is still the sort of text that only an Irish author could write?  This is the literary tradition of Beckett, after all--who likewise wrote uncomfortably-claustrophobic texts of people trapped in shrunken spaces with only their own disembodied voice to keep them company.  Perhaps the insinuation here is that, while Becket extrapolated the Irish experience in terms of a more general existential dread, Donoghue has simply grounded these same Irish anxieties into concrete historicity, proving that Becket wasn't quite so abstract after all.

The Bray House, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.

How appropriate that one of the last novels I read for comps is post-apocalyptic.  The premise of this 1990 novel is that in the early 21st century, in a mad dash to stave off global warming, the world's major powers over-produced nuclear power plants.  An especially slip-shod one built in Ireland (recently re-impoverished thanks to famine, migration, and Thatcherite neo-liberalism) goes into full melt-down (an IRA attack is implied).  This Irish Chernobyl sets off a chain-reaction of reactor explosions that not only destroys Ireland, but all of the UK, much of Europe, and sets off a global nuclear winter that ends human civilization.  The lone exception is Sweden which, thanks to its geographic isolation and progressive Green policies, is now the only stable, prosperous country on earth.

The text is narrated by Robin, a Swedish academic who leads a 4-person archaeology team on an expedition to irradiated Ireland, ground zero of the global apocalypse.  The fact that this novel is authored by an Irish woman, with the implication that the violence intrinsic to her home country will not only wipe out Ireland but all of humanity, is a rather grim assessment indeed. 

But while Dhuibhne takes easy pot-shots at the IRA and Thatcher alike, those turn out to not be the central focus of the novel.  For as the narrative progresses, Robin gradually goes from being our dispassionate reporter to the bona fide villain.  Despite her constant self-justifications in the name of science, Robin can't help but reveal herself as megalomaniacal, hypocritical, selfish, and manipulative.  You find your sympathies inexorably drifting away from her to her long-suffering underlings.  When two of them disappear and suddenly reappear with an actual survivor, an old Irish woman named Maggie (trapped in a tiny shelter as long as Jack and Ma, I suppose), she snaps, becomes obsessed by this scoop, and finally kills one of her underlings to try and claim the find as her own.

She's cleared in a court of law, but still commits suicide in the end--not because of her guilt, unfortunately, but because public opinion turned against her during the trial, and besides her Irish findings were soon eclipsed by similar expeditions to southern Europe and the Swedish space program.  The larger insinuation, then, is that Robin is a microcosm for the same self-destructive arrogance, selfishness, and desperation that destroyed Ireland and the world.  The fact that the elderly Irish survivor outlives Robin is the sardonic punctuation point to this depressing tale.

The Valley of the Squinting Windows, Brinsley MacNamara [John Weldon].

And now for the grand finale I read...my goodness, what a thoroughly unpleasant novel!  Mainly due to the thoroughly unpleasant characters who inhabit it.  Gossipy, jealous, petty, vengeful, vicious, cruel, provincial villagers whose lives are as small as Jack and Ma's Room, or Maggie's tiny little bombshelter in Bray House (maybe that's the connecting thread?), finding no pleasure save in sabotaging other people's chances for happiness, even if it ruins their own, all the more pathetic as it is juxtaposed against the occasional references to the Great War and Easter Uprising in its background (the book was published in 1918), this pettiness a gross parody of the great acts happening all around them...if this is what small town Irish life was considered to be like in the early 20th century, then no wonder Joyce wanted to get outta there.

Yes, yes, this web (labyrinth?) of gossip and sabotage is all very poetic and symmetrical, what with bitter old Nan Byrne seeking revenge against the Shannon family that rejected her when their aspiring-Priest son knocked her up as a youth, which somehow results in her son, jealous of seeing his love-interest Rebecca Kerr seduced and disgraced by young Ulick Shannon (like his mother before him), murdering said Ulick in vengeance--only to then learn from some old Gossip that Ulick is actually his mother's long-lost presumed dead son who miraculously survived the miscarriage and was raised by the Ulicks after all--meaning John just killed his own half-brother--meaning they are all both figuratively and literally related, that is, they are all complicit in each others misery and entangled in the same web of history that conspires against their happiness as surely as they all conspire against each others. (No wonder Joyce wrote, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.") But that did not make it any more pleasant to visit this spiteful village of Garradrimna.

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So ends the novels!  Onward to the remainder of the plays.

La Carreta [The Oxcart], René Marqués.

1953 Puerto Rican play about a Boriqua family's exiles (a recurring theme in both Irish and Puerto Rican literature).  Act I features a poor family up in the mountains; Luis, the eldest son, has become the de facto head of the family after his father's death.  His mother obediently follows his plans, even though he is secretly the result of an affair between his Dad and another woman.  Tensions are high as they prepare to move down into San Juan as the bank threatens to foreclose on their home. Act II is in the slum of La Perla in San Juan (which I have distinct memories of passing by when I was a missionary down in San Juan; in fact, to this day it is considered so dangerous that it was the only place on the entire island that missionaries weren't allowed to visit).

Obviously things aren't panning out for the family; one son gets incarcerated for theft, while a daughter attempts suicide after a rape.  Luis especially is frustrated because, due to his gambling problem, he's been forced to take a job as a gardener for a wealthy family--the move from the mountains was supposed to free him from having to work the land.

So for Act III he moves the family to New York.  The Bronx is even worse, as they all experience their first real winter.  One daughter becomes a prostitute.  Luis gets a job on a boiler, at last freeing him from the land--at least until the boiler kills him, so the family returns to Puerto Rico to bury in the same soil he'd tried all his life to escape.  Poetic irony ensues.

Besides the theme of exile, this play feels a kin with Irish playwrights, particularly Sean O'Casey, who likewise wrote his plays in transliterated dialect--you basically have to sound out the words to understand what they're saying.  Their is a primacy of orality in these plays, and Marqués especially was a trip down memory lane, reminding me of all those Puerto Rican accents delightfully free of "s".

The Steward of Christendom, Sebastian Barry.

Award-winning 1995 play by the same author as A Long, Long Way, and displaying that same obsession with WWI and the Irish wars of independence.  A bottle-play, of an elderly, former Dublin police officer in 1932, ranting and raving to his nurses as he relives scenes from his earlier life, including the death of his son in WWI.  On a side note, what is it with the Irish and their police?  The Rising of the Moon, A Goat's Song, now this--Ireland has an exceedingly fraught relationship with their police, identifying them as both tools of the oppressor, but also as their fellow countrymen as well.

Ourselves Alone, Anne Devlin.

1986 play set in then-contemporary Northern Ireland, in the throes of the Troubles.  Centered upon three women involved in Socialist and/or Republican movements in the '80s.  Their various seductions and heartbreaks.  Pregnancy and betrayal.  Rebellion both familial and governmental.  The conflation of the Personal and the Political.  Attractions to the very men and/or movements that most use and abuse them.  A study in the many complex and paradoxical ways the Troubles wore on women in particular; as the Guardian once put it, "Most Irish plays tell us it is the women who suffer; this one shows it."

The Crying Game, Neil Jordan.

Sleeper hit from 1992.  I couldn't find the film for free, so I checked out the screenplay from the library instead.  And what a truly strange script indeed!  One can scarcely imagine risk-averse modern Hollywood producing something like this today.  The lines between marginalized minorities become blurred in fascinating ways when a British soldier stationed in Belfast--a black Barbadian named Jody--is kidnapped by the IRA after being seduced by an Irish femme fetale.  In a riff on O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation," Jody befriends a IRA volunteer Fergus, who botches the execution (he accidentally lets Jody go, only for him to then be run over by a British tank on the way to the safehouse), and goes into hiding.  Fulfilling a promise to Jody, Fergus tracks down his girlfriend Dil.  They fall in love, and she also turns out to be transgender, because why the hell not, I suppose.  Meanwhile, the IRA's still tracking him down for his betrayal.  Needless to say, things get really complicated on at least one too many levels.

Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, Frank McGuinness.

An American, an Irishman, and an Englishman are locked in a Lebanese prison together...not the premise of a joke, but of this 1992 play named for an old Tin Pan Alley tune.  What is it with the Irish and prison narratives?  Wait, scratch that, I know exactly what it is about the Irish and prison narratives, sadly...  Somehow, the more Irish drama I read, the more Beckett makes perfect sense; this play in particular is Waiting for Godot in an actual cell--complete with the same dark humor, academic parody, lack of faith, waiting for nothing to happen, and paralyzing despair.

The Field, John B. Keane.

So who here in this play am I supposed to sympathize with in this 1965 play?  The local bully who feels his years-long toil entitle him to the land up for auction?  The foreign developer who is killed for daring outbid, which would also have happened to care for an old widow?  The cowardly town complicit in the cover-up?  Is the lesson to speak up against public opinion, damn the consequences?  Or is the larger take-away that there are far bigger historical (the Famine, the Partitions, etc), nay, cosmic injustices within which we are all entrapped?  How incredibly Irish.

Joyriders, Christina Reid.

1986 play set in troubled Belfast, among a group of impoverished juvenile delinquents at a work house, and the frazzled social workers who try but don't know how to truly help them.  Mix of humor and vulgarity, bitterness and songs, and the ever present question of how one best effects societal change: violent revolution and protest that just leaves the city a bloody and miserable warzone, or social programs that largely just put a band-aid on a gaping wound and still mostly just serve to reinforce the societal structure that produced the poverty in the first place?  How do you fight, and for how long can you fight?  Are these "delinquents" joyriding off us, or are we riding off them?

Conversations on a Homecoming, Tom Murphy.

So I suppose this should have been obvious upon reflection, but apparently that Irish-American Catholic John F. Kennedy was a big deal to the Irish? For this 1985 play is ostensibly about a group of old Irish friends meeting up at an old pub to catch up (the occasion is an actor friend returning home from America), only for them each to reveal over the course of the evening that none of fulfilled their dreams and ambitions; so far, a pretty standard set-up, not to mention a pretty typical conversation to hold at a pub (sadly).  But given all the JFK quotes that permeate their conversations, it becomes clear that they are mourning not just the failure of their own dreams, but of the general dream of 60s idealism that Kennedy represented for the Irish in particular.

Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel.

1990 play when an old man on stage recounts nostalgically the summer of 1936 (the year before the Republic of Ireland finally achieved full independence). Features the clash between traditionalism and modernity at this crucial historical moment: between hand-created economy and factory based industrialism; between an austere Irish catholicism concerned with appearances and propriety vs natime and pagan religiouse experimentation both at home and abroad; between the respectability (and impossibility) of the traditional family unit and the (likewise impossible) new formulations of romantic love; a post-colonial tension between a free Ireland, the neo-colonialism of Irish missionaries in Uganda going "native", and Irish volunteers in the Spanish civil war; finishing with a sort of poetic post-structural rejection of the primacy of fixed language for a more primal priveleging of the fluidity of music, one which is nonetheless rooted paradoxically in the modernity and nostalgia of the radio.

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I'm still waiting upon 3 more plays from interlibrary loan--and good thing too, frankly, because I was getting burned out on plays!  Actually I've been burned out for awhile now--save I haven't had the luxury to feel burnt out.  No matter.  Here's some poetry:

Poemas (1935-1975), Octavio Paz.

Nobel-prize winner Octavio Paz is best known in the English-speaking world for his 1950 essay collection The Labyrinth of Solitude (also on my list).  But, like Victor Hugo in France and Boris Pasternak in Russia, Paz is best known in his native Mexico as a poet.   Typically classified as a Surrealist, Paz's overwhelming preoccupations are with silence, death, and above all else water--whether that water is in the ocean, the rivers, or analogy for the immensity of the night and/or the silence.  These obsessions make sense, given how Labyrinth of Solitude is similarly focused upon the silence of the masks and of death, not to mention the fluidity of un-pinnable identities.

Outside History, Eavan Boland.

The title poem of this 1990 collection specifically identifies the stars as "outside history," since their light took thousands of years to reach us.  This is stated with a certain sense of wistfulness and envy; again, Joyce famously wrote in Ulysses that "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake", and his fellow Irish national Eavan Boland likewise seeks to escape its pull.  In vain do these poems seek to focus upon the quotidian and mundane; history can't help but creep its way in, from the frost threatening the Fall harvest that recalls the Famine, to the German refugees who can't help but recall the World Wars, to the settings in New England and Iowa that can't help but recall the long Irish history of exile and emigration. 


Los heraldos negros [The Black Heralds], César Vallejo.

Strangely, the most immediate manner I have to engage with the Peruvian poet's 1918 collection is by contrasting it with the Chilean poet Vincente Huidobro's 1931 masterwork Altazor (which is also on my list but that I haven't had time to re-read this time around).  The former is all passionate sincerity; the latter is all cheeky humor.  The former is touted as Modernist, despite its rather Romantic elements (though, to be fair, its not Anglo-Modernism, despite its numerous protests to the contrary, isn't just a re-inscription of Romanticism either), particularly in its engagement with a sublime nature bigger than us; the latter is genuinely experimental, with a clear rejection of Nature ("I hang my clothes upon the clothesline of the horizon") in favor of the poet's own creations.  The former is part of a movement, "La bohemia trujillana" (later the "Grupo Norte"); the latter was produced by a one-man movement, "Creacionismo," manned solely by Huidobro.  The former seeks to articulate a feeling, to make an emotional connection; the latter seeks to deconstruct all articulation, as the titular parachutist touches down to earth in a string of functional gibberish, that isolates altogether.

Yet they are both landmark, important works of modern Latin-American poetry.