Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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The Devil Made Me Enjoy it

Slaughter as sweet revenge, in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

November 2005             

Though I am aware that many readers of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian are dismayed by the extent of the violence in the novel, I am not surprised to learn that many readers actually find the novel to be an exhilarating read.  That is, I cannot pretend the pleasure readers take in the novel is a problem I would like to solve, for I too enjoyed the novel—and hold McCarthy accountable.  Since being victimized can lead us to enjoying becoming perpetrators, McCarthy actually encourages us to enjoy Glanton’s mercenaries’ merciless but efficacious slaughter by first having us ride along side the hapless Captain White.  When Glanton and his riders massacre the Delaware village, we may in fact not only understand it as an answer to the Apache’s slaughter but experience it as a satisfying response to previous abuse.  McCarthy thereby maneuvers us into agreeing with the judge that one lives best when one lives like Glanton and his riders do, by embracing one’s inner savagery.

Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe; Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathon Swift

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Splendid Isolation and Cruel Returns

Robinson Crusoe’s and Gulliver’s true desires, in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

November 2004

           

            Does Robinson Crusoe, in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, really believe he should have “settle[d] at home according to [his] Father’s Desire[s]” (7)?  Since the text shows he deemed living at home a life of captivity and that he found the island he was stranded on very fulfilling, it’s clear he’s suffering from considerable self-deception here.  Does Gulliver, in Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, really believe it was his misfortune that “Fortune, [his] [. . .] perpetual Enemy” prevented him from “pass[ing] the rest of his life among these admirable Houyhnhnms” (240)?  Since he occupies himself much more with the affairs of his enemies than he does the accomplishments of friends, he clearly does not.  For him as well, that is, the ostensible worst option is really the vastly preferred choice; for even if to gods, servitude is apparently only good if it empowers cruelty upon lesser mortals upon your return home.  Allow me to elaborate.

Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarrantino

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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“Mi Casa, Su Casa”

SCMs in search of friendship, in Quentin Tarrantino’s Pulp Fiction

August 2004

A suburban, collegiate young man (hereafter SCM) has a very good reason to find pulp fiction attractive.  Having spent the majority of his life under his parents’ rule, it must be a pleasure for him to engross himself within an imaginary world where people much different from his parents reign.  But however much he might admire his heroes, he must wonder from time to time what these natural denizens of the urban jungle, these professional killers, would think of him if they were somehow to meet.  I will be looking at Pulp Fiction as if it were an SCM’s daydream, a daydream in which such an encounter is staged as part of an attempt to conceive of a “space” wherein both he and his pulp-fiction heroes might respectfully, amiably—and most importantly—plausibly be imagined co-existing with one another.

The Republic, Plato

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Lie about everything under the sun

May 2004

Poets are supposed to shine light on the actions of heroes and gods, but since they work with “shadows” (i.e., images), they are ill-prepared to do so.  Because they “work far away from truth in doing [their] [. . .] work” (403), poets spread lies, not light, and they lie about everything under the sun.  About justice and men, they tell us “that many men are happy though unjust” (189), an assertion Plato spends most of The Republic trying to disprove.  About gods and heroes, they tell us these fundamentally good beings “beget evils,” a lie that ensures that “everyone will find an excuse for [themselves] [. . .] to be evil” (189).

The Apology, Aristotle

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Socrates and his God

May 2004

Given what we hear from him in The Apology, it is not clear why Socrates “follows” his God, Apollo.  There is evidence to support three explanations:  1) because he is compelled to; 2) because he wants to enable goodness; and 3) out of self-interest.

Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Securing Their Worth

March 2004

Though their small stature and inexperience is what may first come to mind when we think of children’s vulnerable nature, children are both physically and emotionally vulnerable.  They are not only unsure of how they might handle threats upon their lives but of the value of the life that might be taken from them.  Indeed, their need to feel special inspires its own fear—namely, that it might make them especially vulnerable to predators.  Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web well capture how much children hope to be thought worthy by discerning adults.  Their child protagonists, Jim Hawkins and Wilbur, are initially unsure of their worth, and therefore are also unsure of how much they deserve the high praise they first receive.  They both, however, do find ways to assure themselves that they matter to those whose respect they so highly prize.

“The Company of Wolves,” Angela Carter

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Not Meat

March 2004

            The thin muslin went flaring up the chimney like a magic bird and now off came her skirt, her woollen stockings, her shoes, and on to the fire they went, too, and were gone for good.  The firelight shone through the edges of her skin; now she was clothed only in her untouched integument of flesh.  This dazzling, naked she combed out her hair with her fingers; her hair looked white as the snow outside.  Then went directly to the man with red eyes i whose unkempt mane the lice moved; she stood up on tiptoe and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt.

            What big arms you have.

            All the better to hug you with.

            Every wolf in the world howled a prothalamion outside the window as she freely gave the kiss she owed him.

            What big teeth you have!

            She saw how his jaw began to slaver and the room was full of the clamour of the forest’s Liebestod but the wise child never flinched, even when he answered:

            All the better to eat you with.

            The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat.  She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing.  The flames danced like dead souls on Walpurgisnacht and the old bones under the bed set up a terrible clattering but she did not pay them any heed.

            Carnivore incarnate, only immaculate flesh appeases him.  (Angela Carter, “The Company of Wolves” 118)

         

            In this passage a little girl becomes a woman, a wife, and a savior.  When she calmly “combe[s] out her hair,” when she moves “directly to the man” before her, she for the first time acts with womanly composure and deliberation.  But she was always capable of developing.  Unlike other children, fear of the “teeming perils of the night and forest” (111) had not shriveled her capacity and desire for play and exploration.  Indeed, unlike Little Red Riding Hood (and Little Red Cap), she was the one who made the decision to venture out into the woods.  Yet though she had dreamed of having more, of being more, than the “rustic clowns” (114) of her native village, when she first sensed that the desirous courtly gentleman she encountered in the woods meant her harm, her first reaction was indistinguishable from that of other folk, from that of prey.  When she “pulled [her] scarlet shawl more closely round herself” (117) and temporarily allowed the wolf control over her fate, she was like the passive, pathetic young bride who “drew the coverlet up to her chin and waited and [. . .] waited and [. . .] waited” (112).  She was acting just like how Little Red Riding Hood, the dressed-up puppet of mothers and wolves would.  But she shows in this passage that she is not so foolish as to believe—as many “old wives” (113) did—that decorum might tame wolves as much as it might little girls.  Rather than “throw a hat [. . .] at [him]” (113), she disrobes him, and her “flesh” baits, and beats, the wolf.

Paradise Lost, John Milton

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Adam’s Presumptuous, Adventurous, Bold, and Righteous (Re)Quest

How to succeed where Satan failed, in John Milton’s Paradise Lost

December 2003

For the most part presumptuous, adventurous, and bold behavior is associated with fallen characters in John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Satan, for example, as he willfully journeys past every barrier in pursuit of his goal, is repeatedly described as bold.  And, after she eats the apple, Eve too is described (by Adam) as “bold,” “presumptuous,” and “adventurous” (IX 921).  There is however one character in the text who behaves this way yet is neither a fallen character nor shown to fall as a consequence of this behavior—that being, Adam, when he asks God for a companion.  Though it is typical of Adam to circumscribe his freedom—as he does, for example, after Raphael warns him his interest in the heavens is becoming lustful—and though we are most familiar with the willful act which dooms him, Adam relentlessly pursues his claim to a companion and does not stop until he achieves his “heart’s desire” (VIII 451).  And though this encounter, especially as it advances, has all the feel of a trial that is testing Adam’s disobedience rather than his obedience, it likely surprises by actually proving one where Adam demonstrates his righteous use of his God-given freedom.

“Political Meeting,” A.M. Klein

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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The Other Crowd  

August 2003

(Outside, in the dark, the street is body-tall,

flowered with faces intent on the scarecrow thing

that shouts to thousands the echoing

of their own wishes.)  The Orator has risen!  (15-18)

We might be inclined to interpret the dedication to Camillien Houde, in A.M. Klein’s “Political Meeting,” as a genuine gesture of Klein’s respect for Houde’s oratorical skills, but it may also be a gesture of sympathy for a man ensnared.  For within the bracketed lines is content which calls into question the orator’s belief that he “has them” (11), that he commands “the” “crowd” (9).  While the orator has “[an]other voice” (33), within these lines is another crowd, a very different crowd, seemingly, from the one “[with]in the hall” (14).  We meet a “street” crowd, not a kowed “country” (20) crowd.  We find this crowd not caught “in snares” (9), but “intent” on the speaker, intending to use him as a “thing,” as a tool, to service its own desires.

“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Sinister Advances and Sweet Returns

July 2003

            John Keats tells his readers the story, in “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” of a poet’s (and maybe his own) attempt to ravish an urn—that is, to demonstrate the superior status of the spoken word, of the poetic mind in action, and of the poet, to a beautiful, lasting, but static object of sculptural/visual art.  In the first three stanzas the poet conveys efficacy and superiority as he manipulates the “sweet” (4) urn and “its” images to service his own self-image.  However, in promoting himself through his self-reflexive involvement with the plight of those frozen on the urn’s surface, he is suddenly reminded of his own inescapable susceptibility to decay, and of his own inevitable demise.  Reminded of his own need of a “friend” (44), of reassurances from someone/thing alien and superior to himself he could be imagine having access to or as being linked to penultimate truths (to “eternity” [45]), in the closing stanza the poet changes his intentions toward the urn.  In the last stanza, that is, rather than ravish it, the poet attempts to restore to it the formidable powers of expression he had previously downplayed and undermined.

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Privileging Marlow

Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

June 2003           

           

            Johanna Smith, in “‘Too Beautiful Altogether’:  Ideologies of Gender and Empire in Heart of Darkness,” argues that Marlow is attempting to revitalize what had become an outdated conception of separate spheres.  According to Smith, Marlow is an ideologue who presents his listeners with a new Kurtzian imperialism, in hopes of challenging and helping replace a feminine one.  If Smith is correct in her suspicions, she certainly overemphasizes Marlow’s skill as a craftsman and his effectiveness as a spokesman; for his uneasiness with women is obvious in the text, and so too his ineptness in confining women away:  he creates separate spheres wherein the masculine one notably includes at least one woman!  But in his narrative imperialism never looses a taint of feminine acquisitiveness, just as influence never seems to lose its taint as a feminine power.  In fact, given his typical response to compromising situations, it is more accurate to assess Marlow as having far more used his privileged position as narrator to make himself seem more a skilled evader than an imperialistic “Darth Vader.”

“The Beast in the Jungle,” Henry James

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Marcher’s Merger

Avoiding Catastrophe in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle”

March 2003

At the end of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” John Marcher decides that he has done nothing with his life; but the truth is that he had once accomplished something noteworthy, namely, he acquired an autonomous identity for himself, only this acquisition did not come cheap.  The price Marcher pays for individuating is his suspicion, his fear, that he is fated for an encounter with a Beast, quite capable of destroying him.  He pretends to hunt the Beast, but since he likely feels he deserves to be struck down by its attack, fears of retribution have him thinking more of evasion and reparation than of combat.  So even though it will mean the loss of the considerable bounty individuation provided him with, Marcher ultimately decides to return to a symbiotic relationship with someone he felt he had once terribly wronged, in hopes that he might thereby forestall catastrophe.

Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro; Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau; Once in a House on Fire, Andrea Ashworth

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Greedy for Your Hurt

March 2003

            One of the hardest things we can ever admit to ourselves is that the source of our fears of death originates in our parents’ behavior towards us as children.  We depend on them so much for love and security that we often resist, even in adulthood, acknowledging the effect that either their own hostility towards us, or their failure to defend us against the hostile wishes of others, had upon us.  Though Del Jordan in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, the narrator of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, and Andrea Ashworth in her Once in a House on Fire all associate death with parental violence and/or betrayal, they each vary in their ability to acknowledge parental sadism, and thus the degree to which they conceal it in their narratives.

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Alexander the Large

Passage analysis of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange

March 2003

There were four of us to six of them[.] [. . .] So there we were dratsing away in the dark, [. . .] the stars stabbing away as it might be knives anxious to join in the dratsing. [. . .] Of the four of us Dim, as usual, came out the worst in point of looks, that is to say his litso was all bloodied and his platties a dirty mess, but the others of us were still cool and whole.  It was stinking fatty Billyboy I wanted now, and there I was dancing about with my britva like I might be a barber on board a ship of a very rough sea, trying to get in at him with a few fair slashes on his unclean oily litso.  Billyboy had a nozh, a long flick-type, but he was a malenky bit too slow and heavy in his movements to vred anyone really bad.  And, my brothers, it was real satisfaction to me to waltz—left two three, right two three—and carve left cheeky and right cheeky, so that like two curtains of blood seemed to pour out at the same time, one on either side of his fat filthy oily snout in the winter starlight.  (Burgess, A Clockwork Orange 14-15)

            When Alex begins his nighttime adventure, he tells us that “[y]ou were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God” (5).  In this passage, Alex shows just the sort of activity he believes constitutes living life to its fullest.  He delights in recounting how he used his physical fitness and artistic finesse to ensure his own gang—outnumbered, as he twice tells us, six to four—masters Billyboy’s.  He thinks his mastery of the dangerous but eventful world of the night qualifies him as a man-god, as an “Alexander the Large” (36), and, given how often others single him out, the evident pleasure he has in recounting his exploits, and our own possible admiration for those who would rather live than not-live, he may well be right.

“This Lime-Tree Bower,” “Frost at Midnight,” “France:  An Ode,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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From Humble(d) Beginnings

November 2003

           

            As a boy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was badly bullied.  His brother Frank bullied him because he thought Samuel was their mother’s favorite son.  Samuel became “fretful” and “timorous” (Weissman 110).  Shunned by other boys for being a sissy, Samuel read books about adventures and playfully acted out the tales.  But his father, believing Samuel to be overwhelmed by the books’ scary parts, burnt the books.  This Coleridge was understandably pleased after writing “This Lime-Tree Bower,” because “Lime-Tree” was an imaginative attempt to shape his boyhood miseries into a boon.  However, Coleridge had once both turned the tables on his brother and successfully braved an evening alone outside his home.  And this Coleridge, the person he might have been had he not been bullied, the one who thought of himself as wild and free, is the person he tried to recover in subsequent poetry.  Through first rejecting (in the re-write of “Lime-Tree” and in “Frost at Midnight”) the accommodating tone and the self-deceptive stance of “Lime-Tree,” Coleridge regains the will in “France:  an Ode” to once again brave placing himself before a threatening night sky.  And out there, outside, Coleridge claims liberty from all “prisons,” self-imposed or otherwise.

“Children of wealth in your warm nursery,” Elizabeth Baryush

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Leaving Home

November 2002

            The speaker of Elizabeth Daryush’s “Children of wealth in your warm nursery” enters our “home[s]” (13) to warn us.  S/he tells us we are prisoners, that our current home is a prison, and that our guardians cannot be trusted.  S/he wants us to leave, to “go out” (9), but getting us to leave is a difficult task:  s/he must provoke us to consider uncomfortable truths and to leave comfortable settings.  The speaker must first gain our attention, then earn our trust, before we could consider no longer being “[c]hildren of wealth” (1).

“Healing,” Daphne Marlatt

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Poet as Physician

Healing from a Wound and a Word in Daphne Marlatt’s “Healing”

August 2002

Words are loaded with possibilities for those who well attend to them.  We may choose to limit our response to them to creating our best simulation of the meaning we intuit its speaker (or writer) wants for them to depart; or we can play off the visual sounds and oral properties of the word—which so often want to take us places their speaker never intended—and use them to travel elsewhere.  Words, though, do not always invite active play.  If a word impacts upon us as a blow, if it almost literally has punch, our reaction can be limited to recoil and recuperation.  Daphne Marlatt’s “Healing,” with its appropriate one word title, explores how we can use language to respond to the power a single word can have on us to curtail play.

“To Friends Who Have Also Considered Suicide,” Phyllis Webb

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Introductions and Initiations

Our experience with the master, in Phyllis Webb’s “To Friends Who Have Also Considered Suicide.”

August 2002

            Phyllis Webb’s “To Friends Who Have Also Considered Suicide” is a deceptive poem.  Rather than a dedication to those who have already considered suicide, it is instead a rite of passage, an initiation ritual conducted by an experienced master, who would have us share her enlightened state.  The process is painful, and the rewards, mixed.  We ascend at the expense of others.  Our western heritage, our leaders, our institutions, are made to seem banal, tired.  But she herself conveys so much urgency, so passionate a desire to show us the way, and displays an imagination so formidable it not only knocks down old worlds but conjures up colorful new vistas, that, in the end, we finish the poem excited, even grateful, despite her trickery.

Silas Marner, George Eliot

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Haunting Raveloe

June 2002   

In George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861), the men at the Rainbow debate over whether or not there is a ghost at the Warren stables.  Further, they weigh in on whether a ghost, even if it did exist, would want “ignorant folk” to believe in it.  With Silas’s unnoticed entrance into the bar, and with his apparition-like countenance, Eliot suggests that ghosts aren’t actually all that discriminating as to who they want to believe in them—they just want to be remembered.  Silas, of course, is not a ghost, but “ghosts,” or presences associated with the past, do haunt many characters in the text.  And these ghosts, if ignored, give every reason for people such as those at the Rainbow to be wary of them.  Raveloe is also inhabited by an apparition from the future:  Eliot herself, as a narrative presence.  But Eliot would rather embrace Raveloe than haunt it.  In fact, her visit is evidence of the continuing influence of old ways of thinking—of ghosts—on her own life.  Knowing intimately the increasing prospects for happiness moderns like her have in an age where seemingly anyone can rise to success, and knowing how different her situation and beliefs that sustain it are from those of the past, she is not be able to shake off the feeling that she has earned punishment for being unfaithful to her heritage.  In her unfaithfulness, she is like her character Godrey Cass.  But perhaps—her vicious attack on him notwithstanding—Eliot is more like the diabolically cunning and daring Dunstan, in imagining though her creation Silas Marner a stratagem for appeasing the ancestral ghosts.  By showing both that she has not forgotten them and that she believes they must be remembered—lest the present prove degenerate—Eliot placates internal persecutors—but only so as to buy time until she is ready to banish them from her mind altogether!  We look first to signs of agitation in the narrator in a text otherwise crafted by a sympathetic but judicious mind, for evidence that Eliot fears she is blameworthy for being an egoistic, willful modern.

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

Reviewed by Patrick McEvoy-Halston

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Jo’s March

Becoming Mother Bhaer, in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women 

March 2002

According to object-relations theorists, even after leaving the maternal matrix and achieving autonomy, the desire to revisit home and merge with the mother never leaves us.  The mother and her home ever-promises “the immediate and effortless gratification of one’s desires” (Koenigsberg 35).  However, after childhood “home” has ambivalent and conflicting associations because it is also associated with the “loss of one’s power, the loss of one’s capacity to grow and develop.  The idealized drama of oneness is, in actuality, a manifestation of a dependent, infantile attachment [. . .] which oppresses the self as it reaches toward its own powers” (38).  The desire to revisit her own past, to recall memories of her own closeness to her mother and also shore up her independence from her, likely motivated Alcott to create Little Women; for the text is a revisitation to the long gestational period with the mother in the home, and recapitulates a strategy that enabled a “little woman”—Jo Marsh—to individuate and become an adult.   As females begin life with an initial estimation of the mother as someone similar to them, Jo individuates from her mother through successive internalizations of alien—of male—“objects,” which culminate with her imagining herself as distinct and separate from her.