My Time of Shakespeare: The Second Tetralogy – King Henry V

From the Painting by Sir J. Noel Paton, R.S.A.

As I finish the second tetralogy’s finale, King Henry V, I contemplate Shakespeare’s effect on the presentation of history. He devotes nearly half of his theatrical contributions to stories plotted in reality rather than born of his imagination. I have argued before that Shakespeare, blessed with a genius’ perspective, sees art not only in the creative arena but in reality. The presentation of the human condition happens among humans and not within the faculties of one’s mind. Yet in order to present these conditions to his audience, he carefully embellishes, contrasts and juxtaposes the characters and circumstances that best display them. If we want to know the events and scenarios in which these kings lived and acted, we can read school text books. If we want to know the people, the conditions of their lives, the reasons for their choices, we must turn to Shakespeare and decide if his character interpretations best suit history. Perhaps while in school as a boy in Stratford Upon Avon, he studied his textbooks and imagined the joys, sorrows, regrets, ambitions and malicious conceits in each of these kings which best helped him understand and learn the history of his native land.

In King Henry V, we see the clergy, sparked to cunning by a present bill which would strip much of their wealth, manipulate a king into a conquest of France in order to protect their assets. The king would depend on their funding and would never dream of undermining his own enterprise by passing a bill which would rob his benefactors. Yet Henry V transforms the bitterness of such purposes, born of deceipt and cunning, into a resulting eden of unity and equality, love and justice. If John Falstaff truly ascended to Arthur’s bosom, he must feel right at home, as if in Prince Henry’s good graces again.

Outside the royal court, Shakespeare presents microchosmic examples of this unity. Almost immediately after the nobles resolve for France, Bardolph mediates between Pistol and Nym and begs of their friendship with his sword. And, most apparently, he devotes Act V to the wooing of Princess Katharine, an effort equalled to that of conquering France on the battlefield. Yet the union of England and France comes with their marriage rather than with Henry’s sword. Such a union signifies love and peace rather than dictatorship and enslavement. A marriage of love and justice constitutes a unity and differs from a marriage of dominion enforced by a heavy hand – only the former resounds with true unity as both parties maintain a semblance of themselves whereas the marriage of the heavy hand leaves only one party truly alive. How can one unite with nothing?

Alas, with master craftsmanship, King Henry V guides the circumstances under which he administers his justice and promotes equality. He manipultes Cambridge, Scroop and Grey to pronounce the severity of their own sentence rather than condemn them as one higher and of more import. He allows justice to decide the matter and in so doing thinks himself below justice and equal in human value to the defendant. Consider also how he and Williams, under false pretense, exchange gloves to don in their caps as a mark of their violent bet. Then compare this to the feud between Bardolph and Fluellen over the cultural mark of the leek in Fluellen’s cap. Both scenarios pit two men, of social, economic and cultural differences, against each other only to resolve in a sense of equality. Whereas the king’s disguise, possibly more appropriate for his character, allows Williams to see him as a social equal, the king again allows mercy and justice to waylay the promised violence rather than crush him as a man with more power. And in this action, Williams feels worthy and of equal import himself. Then Fluellen, a Welshman like the king, not only revels in this common ground, but displays his cultural heritage proudly and feels empowered to squabble with Pistol who would rebuke it.

The king not only preaches lofty poetics to inspire his soldiers to war, but acts equally valiant and just which inspires his soldiers to a level of respect and brotherhood. By disgarding signs of distinction and leaving only their common bonds as men, they find their unity amongst themselves and their equality. On the eve of battle, Henry, once again, wallows among the likes of Bardolph, Poins and Falstaff. Even now the pomp of majesty has failed to intoxicate his spirit. He calls ceremony a pitiable reward for the strains of kingly duty when compared to the simple happiness enjoyed by peasants. He does not abandon that strain and revel in ceremony as Richard II had. He carries the soldier’s lives on his shoulders and his father’s guilt for Richard’s fall on his brow. And all the while he finds a way to disrobe himself of all such pomp and unite himself with his countrymen under common banners of honor, bloodshed and English spirit – inspiring in them a feeling of worth and in him a share in the peasant’s simple happiness.

We can call this war an imperial conquest, and surely the history books describe it thus. But like a parent reading a storybook aloud to their children, enacting the voices and characters from the page, Shakespeare resurrects a character, the man behind the historical events, and therefore lends meaning and empathy to those long dead. King Henry V may have inspired a renewed sense of worth in us and revived our sense of humanity within the monarchs.

I miss Falstaff. But in closing my reading of the second tetralogy, I credit him for this king. Their times together cultivated a benign monarch who never forgot his naturally common bonds with his base countrymen.

 

My Time of Shakespeare: The Second Tetralogy – King Henry IV Second Part

From the Painting by Eduard Grutzner

King Henry IV Part Two ends in transition, both for the English political atmosphere and for the central characters. Part of this transition takes place in the audiences’ perspective. We witness the rise of a young prince and the deterioration of an illegitimate king amidst the fog of civil war. And yet Shakespeare twists the end. The truly naive patron cannot predict precisely how these events will resolve. I did not imagine King Henry IV repenting the means of his ascension, nor did I imagine King Henry V severing his friends, nor did I imagine John Falstaff capable of so much sorrow. However, despite these twists, the resolution holds firm to the true nature of each character and one might argue that any other resolution would seem forced.

Through the first three acts, I labored through what seemed a time-abiding story. The rebellion continues with Northumberland and the Archbishop of York. As the story follows the same plot outlined in the first part, with leaders of the rebellion meeting under a banner of peace with the king’s spokesmen, the first twist pricked my ear. The rebels accept the same offer made previously to Percy from their royal opponent only to suffer a stab in the back as Prince John arrests them and sentences them to death for high treason. As opposed to Hotspur, York maintains a reasonable disposition and wisely condemns these rebellious actions as results of the time, not necessarily of Henry IV’s malice. It seems that York views these events through a transcendent mind, as a clergyman and not a soldier, and willfully plays his part in the cascading political revolution. As Shakespeare would instruct us through these two plays, Bolingbroke’s ascension revolutionized England’s political landscape and reformed the minds of nobility and royalty alike by presenting fallibility and cracking the invincibility of the throne. Henry IV’s party quells the rebels, not with honorable arms or merciful heart, but with trickery and by manipulating the integrity of an honest clergyman.

The play moves into the king’s counsel and finally his chamber where we meet him for the last time. And what a time! The audience witnesses both the sickening effect of paranoia within a king and the resurrection of a man, desperate for love and a connection with his boy as father and son rather than king and prince. As the king and Prince Henry counter over the crown, we hear the king repent the road which brought him to it, but also warn of its overwhelming power. The crown displaced his virtue with fear – fear of losing it despite its debilitating quality, like his “Precious”. The crown consumed his spirit and left him empty, caring only for its safety, like a vessel to an alien symbiont. Yet Prince Henry proves wise enough to respect the crown’s agency:

Thus, my most royal leige,
Accusing it, I put it on my head,
To try with it, as with an enemy
That had before my face murder’d my father, -
The quarrel of a true inheritor.
But if it did infect my blood with joy,
Or swell my thoughts to any strain of pride;
If any rebel or vain spirit of mine
Did with the least affection of a welcome
Give entertainment to the might of it,
Let God for ever keep it from my head,
And make me as a vassal is,
That doth with awe and terror kneel to it!

The prince, aware of the crown’s poisonous power, but unavoidably destined to wear it, may yet prove a worthy and just king, by understanding the true nature of it and prizing humanity above power.

When John Falstaff hears of Prince Henry’s coronation, he leaps from his chair, promises high positions to his friends and thanks God for presenting him with a winning lottery ticket! How like Falstaff – eeking through these plays as a rusting anchor on honor, nobility, integrity and all other virtues which righteous upbringing instills in us. But love. Falstaff never cheated love nor shamed loyalty. When King Henry V banishes him, I hear his spirit seep from his often lively mouth and envision all his putrid breath of charm flow from his nostrils. I feel the heat of his tears boiling in his eyes and his blood pause within his heart. Falstaff does not care for his lost position nor do I imagine he laments the suddenly collapsing thrill of his imagined future. But to lose Harry – to the crown – to him King Henry V’s royal procession appears as a funeral march.

But we cannot abhor the new king for this! On the contrary, we would likely do so if he abused his position and turned the court into a lavish party with Poins helping him roast Falstaff and Doll bouncing from one sack to the next. The new king enjoys the ability and privilege of washing away his past and renewing himself as a dedicated king while Falstaff must suffer alone the bed he has made for himself. As York said, these things result from the times, from the conditions of our lives and the longings of our vanity, our virtue and our hearts. All must play their role and suffer their fate.

You wave to his administrative assistant from within the elevator. The doors slide shut. You stand motionless for a time before finally pressing the button which will bring you to the lobby. When the bell rings and the doors open, you step out and the boy before you leaps out of your path just before you collide. The flicker of downtown bustle shimmers on the window panes. You tell yourself, with a grin no one can see, “Shakespeare made me sympathize with a fool before kings.”

 

My Time of Shakespeare: The Second Tetralogy – King Henry IV First Part

From the Painting at the Boydell Gallery, R. Westail, R.A.

You stiffly force the turn of the revolving door flanked by glass panels flashing the buzz of the downtown street. You traverse the shimmering lobby floor and sway with your shifting weight as you await the arrival of the elevator. When it arrives, you leap from the doors as a rush of people flood from the car. Then you enter, alone, light the button for the wrong floor, then the correct floor, and dance your hyper finger on the “Door Close” button. You relax, stare at the glowing numbers count closer to your goal. The doors open. Close. You shouldn’t have pushed that wrong button.

After subduing the receptionist with your charms and forged press badge, you enter his office and find him lying on a sofa tossing a ball in the air to himself. Papers laze about his desk like beastly cats on a hot day in the Savanah and you look for his absent computer, then quickly to the point at hand. He looks to you, your lips quiver and you hold out the bottle of wine which dried up your last paycheck.

You just want to ask one question. You will have no other opportunity to question Shakespeare. He bends his brow, sits up impatiently…What will you ask him?

“Why John Falstaff?”

Amidst more civil strife, spawned by an uncomfortable seat which provides only the opportunity to fight for its keeping, we witness two sides of a politically epic tale. One side, starring Henry Bolingbroke as King Henry IV, portrays the warring factions of Lords Northumberland, Worcester and Percy, the very men who aided Bolingbroke’s apprehension of King Richard II’s throne, against the new King, their one-time friend. Henry Percy, nicknamed Hotspur for his reckless and cavalier temprament, counters a paranoid King obsessed with protecting, washing and wringing his hands, as Jon Finch plays him, in order to parley the guilt of King Richard II’s deposition and murder. If only Richard could witness the accuracy of his prophecy when he said to Northumberland,

The love of wicked friends converts to fear;
That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both
To worthy danger and deserved death.

True to his form, Shakespeare urges sympathy to both sides of this historical conflict, since all angles bear the kink of humanity. I sympathize with Percy’s faction because the new King returns the courtesy of their previous aid with scorn and mistrust. Although, to a small degree, I blame Percy’s reckless thirst for action which likely exaggerates his intentions against the King. But I do not find his complaint against Bolingbroke without merit. In this, the new king learns how he opened the gate for equality amongst nobility and royalty by usurping a throne designed for the security of perfect succession. How can he assert his dominance when he owes so much to others? How can he expect others to live submissively when he whom they serve sits on the throne by their actions? Humanity has now tainted the divine sanctity of the English monarchy and bears conflict with her.

Shakespeare might have better entitled King Henry IV – The First Part as The Rise of Prince Henry. Beyond the perilous drought of political conflict, we meet Henry, Prince of Wales, who galavants through inns and taverns with baseborn commoners and insignificant, cowardly villains. Presumabely, he abandons the royal court for the court of paupers where he still maintains his title but enjoys a life a bit outside of the law, like a youth above it. But Shakespeare begs his audience to remember the prince’s own words:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyok’d humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish’d-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents,
So, when this loose behaviour I throw off,
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offence a skill;
Reckoning time when men think least I will.

He plays this part so successfully that the King, his father, preaches to him about his holiday behaviour, comparing it to that of King Richard II, and beckons him to behave as he did, humbly presenting himself to gain favour and support as king. Perhaps I prematurely sympathized with Bolingbroke during King Richard II’s time, imagining he only wanted his birthright from Richard. But it would seem, according to his advice, he had his eye on the throne all along, deposing Richard when his birthright would have done. Now in this conflict with Percy he knows his enemies have just grievance against him. So this meeting between father and son, King and Prince, full of advice, with a hint of regret and nostalgia in comparing the prince to King Richard II, and both indicative of the prince’s successful ploy and the King’s apparaent guilt, marks the prince’s return to the royal fold after a very different upbringing than Bolingbroke. After all, Bolingbroke came from Gaunt and nobility while Prince Henry, though of the same blood, wallowed with commoners and miscriants. He has a deeper potential for character and may avoid the shallowness of envy and animalistic paranoia of possession. I wonder if the prince’s humble actions with the likes of John Falstaff, conspiring to rob robber friends, mirrors the pompous political circumstances of the state. The king, then, shares this reunion with a purified and strengthened son who can better lead England.

After the battle, the prince describes the nobility of his heart with mournful praises of fallen Percy and mercy for Douglas in return for his valor. But his true grace lies in his love for men like John Falstaff, jolly cowards who provide good company and unshakeable loyalty despite distastes for war, rebukes of honor and shameful behavior.

Yet who is John Falstaff? Like many other characters in your plays, he beckons so many different interpretations. Why did you write him? What purpose does he serve? You spend so much time on this obvious fiction juxtaposed to the historical plot…why? What sort of past does Falstaff carry with him? Who is he?

While away from court, perhaps the prince embraced Falstaff as a kind of father figure. Falstaff brought him up in all his vulgar practices and they enjoyed an intimate familiarity of loving speech and knee-buckling slurs. Falstaff outweighs the prince in years and pounds and they even perform the part of father and son opposite one another, taking turns imitating the prince and the king. Perhaps Falstaff willingly accepts the prince’s projections of feelings for his father, perhaps he foreshadows the prince’s fate should he choose to hide himself behind the base contagious clouds too long. If Falstaff does serve as a father figure, it would indicate a dual parentage for the prince which serves to strengthen his character for the commons and the nobility – and needless to say, in love, for I do not doubt that Falstaff loves the prince. And all these things combine to create a character that Vernon described:

He made a blushing cital of himself;
And chid his truant youth with such a grace,
As if he master’d there a double spirit,
Of teaching and of learning instantly.
There did he pause: but let me tell the world, -
If he outlive the envy of this day,
England did never owe so sweet a hope,
So much misconstru’d in his wantonness.

 

My Time of Shakespeare: The Second Tetralogy – The Life and Death of King Richard II

From the Painting by G.H. Boughton

Thus play I, in one person, many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treason makes me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king’d again: and by and by
Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: – but whate’er I am,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleas’d till he be eas’d
With being nothing.

I read an act, then watched the act performed by the company supporting Derek Jacobi as King Richard II. I saw the words. Then I heard them. I imagined the words. Then I lived them. Shakespeare wrote The Life and Death of King Richard II completely in verse. He only gifted one other play with such diligent artistry. Because of this rare decision, I must imagine that Shakespeare saw something in Richard’s story which wanted poetry’s aesthetic purity, its demand for perfect word choices and allowance for multidimensional meaning. Using this form, Shakespeare both plays with language and gracefully crafts it into the clearest and most prodigious form of expression. He masters every angle of a word, frolicking with puns and ruthlessly wringing the word wet towel for every meaning and application to an idea, a feeling. He displays a simple duality, stripped naked and vulnerable, of compared and contrasted characters and situations, opposing viewpoints flipped at the turn of circumstance, which construct the very personage of this English king!

The play seems to divide itself in two. Before he embarks for Ireland, King Richard II plays the dunce with the carefree zest of an adolescent child unchecked by the guidance of responsibility or ethics’ urgency. His counselors offer their opinions freely in his presence and those on trial rebuke his entreaties to abandon their griefs at their honor’s cost or soul’s compromise. Yet he does not rage, or flash his merciless power. He listens but to no consequence. Not because he fears them, but because, like an ornery child facing the chastisement of his elders, he does not care. He cares about his will, the coffers, and the luxuries of power. John of Gaunt eloquently argues against Richard’s lease on England and York bitterly pleads against his seizure of Bolingbroke’s inheritance. Yet when he returns from Ireland, he endures a harsh reckoning with the world and the pain of invincibility vanished. He must now pay for these stolen eyes with his own.

I wholly embraced this new Richard, this deposed and woeful Richard, who finds himself within the belly of nothingness after the long fall of the blessed. He contemplates his own dual nature as man and rightful king. When facing the insecurity of his position, Richard’s convictions swing like a manic pendulum. He wrestles internally with a king’s mortally uncomfortable burden and the high spiritual calling and civil duty of his office, owned by him as anointed to the task. Suddenly, Richard, once an immature cliche of a carefree, flattered and corrupt king, transforms into a person contemplating his newly divided nature, a nameless identity. And while Richard splits, so does the world. Men must now speed familiarity with a world newly starred with common royalty, “base glory”, enslaved sovereignty, and kingly vulnerability – a world in which fathers prosecute sons and ill-succeeded kings open gates to civil strife as the delicate vale between subject and king weakens and faith in the king’s incontestable grace shatters. As Richard must understand his new identity, so must humanity, like newborn babes, understand a world reshaped.

Richard, who embodies this split, this duality of humanity’s longing and the dogmatic infliction of position – while we contemplate new worlds pioneered as if into uncharted wildernesses never before seen – reaches out to the patron and begs them to project their own struggle onto the himself. Let him wail for you! Let him contemplate himself for you! Let him grow into a sympathetically tragic martyr on your behalf as he calls his counselors Judas’, washing their hands with Pilate, and himself Christ led to his crucifixion. Let him ascend the steps of consciousness and unity between self and identity, leading into the depths of death and social deposition. And listen to the master playwright’s language represent the beautiful complexity of our birthright, our guaranteed struggle, our condition.

 

Thoughts: To Have and Have Not

To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.

Don’t stare at it too long. Hemingway can write a little better than this crude assembly of improper grammar, this frayed string of incomprehensible nonsense. I know this, despite certain times of doubt while reading his works. But in To Have and Have Not, all the contemptible characteristics of Hemingway’s style work together seamlessly and, more importantly, with profound effect. I nearly glimpsed the genius which the literary world ascribes to Hemingway. But instead I feel like I shook hands with a man, a unique man, who knows something which no one else cares to know, and would rather hold secretly and serenely within his soul than save the world by preaching it. And this shared moment comes during one of the most violent books in his catalog!

Hemingway begins immediately by writing to his audience in the first-person perspective as if we have all grown up between Cuba and the Keys and know the guys who loiter around Freddy’s place. He does not write to us. He speaks to us, as best as Harry Morgan can. Then in the following chapters, he shifts into the third-person, describing Harry’s episodes without any idea that we just listened to Harry himself out in the black waters of the Gulf, bobbing lazily between lighthouses casting lines of yellow light through the shimmering white luminescence of the moon. And we know Harry as Some Harry, just like they do. I admit, towards the end, it seems as though Hemingway lost control a bit and fell back into his stream of redundancy and run-on sentences. But I have to believe that he intentionally drops the chains which had kept his pen proper. We read to know people, and the experiences of these characters, expressed often by these characters, cannot hide behind the rules of the craft. Hemingway, as the writer, becomes an absent tour guide but still guides the tour somehow.

As the title would suggest, Hemingway portrays images of those who have and those who have not. Near the end, those who have not might realize the riches they possess in family and friends while the trust-fund junky blows a hole in his head because he might have to live on just over $200 a month. Those who have might realize the joys of family time on a luxurious yacht drifting in the moonlit heat while those who have not face off at gun point for a bag of money stowed away below deck. All in all, the pursuit of wealth pits one caged animal against another, clawing at the cash green bars while their fellow man does the same in his cage, warning the other to stay away.

Honest work drives honest men to make dangerous deals because it cannot support a family. Revolutionaries compromise their decency in order to collapse the cage which imprisons the common class. Soldiers wail on each other because they have no place else to go. All these animals rage against their cages and only serve to hurt themselves. Those who have not must either decompose within their cage or rage with the full might of the human spirit. And yet the more they rage the more their spirit seeps from their hearts and minds. They relent to immoral demands and sacrifice their integrity in order to support their families or free a land they love. And as their spirit dwindles, they find no solace in each other, no rekindling of their humanity in another’s embrace. These cages isolate people. The bars bring focus to their own plight and implant an alarming apathy for the lives of other animals. Alone in these cages, they degenerate and cannot survive because of the harm they inflict on themselves through weaponized relations. They rage uncontrollably, yearning for a life outside of the cage only to realize that they can never escape. And if they could, they would only bleed to death in freedom. When each person views the world as their opponent, they set out alone and meet a worthy adversary equally intent on a fight.

And now, Oh Marie…what now? Does the cycle of collapse begin again in you? Do you resign yourself to the cage, dumbstruck by the clicking lock, waiting for the flames in your eyes to char your skin and singe your hair? Though the world vacuums the life from your soul, the charm from your smile and the bounce from your body, you will go on. You have truly lost your riches but you will go on…somehow.

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Thoughts: The Love of The Last Tycoon

The Love of the Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have now read all of Fitzgerald’s major published works. After finishing The Love of The Last Tycoon, the incomplete manuscript on his desk when he died, I ask immediately wonder how this novel differs from his other works. Did he know he had this one last chance to voice his ideas? Did he compile the breadth of his lifelong learning into his final literary hero? Unfortunately, we can only speculate on these questions. But I find comfort in the idea that we would not have these questions had not Fitzgerald left The Love of The Last Tycoon as his final stamp on American literary art.

Fitzgerald’s protagonist, Monroe Stahr, stands apart from the other heroes of his novels. Amory Blaine endures a sort of intellectual maturation which coincides with his struggle with humility. Anthony Patch, born to privilege, would rather spend his time thinking about his future instead of pursuing it. Jay Gatsby put a human face on the iconic rich and influential socialite image of the 1920s. And the autobiographical sketch of Dick Diver portrays a man burdened with a sick love. Only with Monroe Stahr do we meet a hero who seems to have it all, a self-sustaining character who does not need a feminine Virgil to guide him, a successful businessman who nobly soars above a town of flared egos and disingenuous fakes. We might think of Gatsby, but Stahr differs by bearing his full persona to everyone, even by mixing an arrogant sense of savior ethics into his professional career as a producer. He also seems to embrace any self-inflicted personal detriment and defends his methods like a Hollywood mystic who confidently awaits others to naturally arrive at his conclusions.

I wanted to appreciate Cecelia’s first-person narrative more than I did. Nick Carraway remains the heavy-weight champion in this arena. But I did appreciate her overall tone. For a young woman, writing about something which happened in her childhood, I liked the contrast of her tired and seemingly cynical tone with her proximity to the glamorous bustle of Hollywood life. Fitzgerald positions her as a Hollywood insider but with no personal credits in movies – the privileged fly on a wall in a town which hasn’t wrapped her in its spider silk. Fitzgerald presents her with a keen sense of simile which cleverly meets the demands of the situation while cultivating her consistently disenchanted tone. At least half of the novel, however, happens away from her presence. So how much do we believe about a story which takes place in Hollywood about the most successful and revered contemporary Hollywood producer from someone who was absent from much of the story? I don’t believe Fitzgerald made a mistake. I think he wants us to ask this question – a scripted silver screen drama based on real life. And he developed her tone to draw us in just enough to consider how these people relate to us.

Unfortunately, Fitzgerald did not have the chance to finish this book, and though I commend Matthew Bruccoli for producing a publication enhanced with editing notes and outlines from Fitzgerald himself, readers can only contemplate open-ended themes doomed to resolution purgatory. Nonetheless, I think Fitzgerald did reach an important stage of the story as Stahr vulnerably enters the center of the hero’s labyrinth and faces himself. And, again, as opposed to Fitzgerald’s other heroes, I don’t think Stahr felt familiar with himself when coupled with some of the people who enter his life. His brief love affair with Kathleen tests his conviction for his Hollywood work by presenting an escape into a more traditional American life. The last episodes with the visiting communist force him to acknowledge his personal ethics particularly regarding relations with writers. Stahr strikes me with his honesty as he faces himself. While many heroes wage bloody battle against the beast representing their other half, I imagine Stahr finding the beast, introducing himself with one hand in his pocket, his head tipped to one side, slightly squinting as he assesses his adversary. The beast says nothing to disarm him. Stahr listens. Understands. Responds inquisitively. Perhaps he defends his choices and his noble intentions. Perhaps he even describes what he sacrifices for a growing town which transforms the imagination into a reality of sensory overload.

But we don’t see Stahr come out of the labyrinth. And we don’t know who “survives” the interaction in the center. But we do meet a very different Fitzgerald vision – a confident man, a brilliant and intuitive Hollywood producer, a loveable persona and the last of the traditional Americana icons.

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Thoughts: Dracula

Dracula by Bram Stoker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

Men often pit science against God but rarely pit it against evil. Van Helsing’s thinking dulled the nails which feather my bed. I felt like rising from my seat and cheering uncontrollably as when one’s favorite team crushes one out of the ballpark or when a general bellows an inspirational speech invoking the idealistic nobility buried under the soldier’s fear. And yet, when this subjective felicity wanes, I begin again to think through the concept. I noted how people often use Van Helsing’s arguments to defend faith in God but rarely faith in general – an open-mindedness to the unnatural. One must pause and see how Van Helsing does not flippantly partner the unnatural with good or evil. A different factor shades these unnatural occurrences with a moral hue. After the excitement of discovering something inexplicable, and counter to every scientific truth in which he believes, Van Helsing wages his war against a being which he describes as evil only because it brings an unnatural death. He and his group fight to defeat this unnatural experience, not its existence. Or do they?

And what an experience! Stoker must have realized how his epistolary form would suspend his reader’s disbelief in a character who we take for granted today. I bet Dracula would devour Edward Cullin just to regurgitate him. But the Stoker’s structure also transforms the story’s inducing fear from an emotion to something lived. When we embark through the pass in the Carpathian Mountains into Transylvania with Jonathan Harker we shutter at the wolves, stare wide-eyed at the blue flames, clench our fists as the driver grips our arm and hope our very gaze will provide the light needed to see his face. However, this literary form, with limitless transparency into the writer’s mind, has an equally powerful limitation. When executed well, it prevents the reader from gaining the same insights into other characters. Perhaps this limitation sparked the ensuing obsession with Dracula and the legend of his followers. I desperately want to read the story all over again except from Dracula’s diary! When the posse begins their hunt back to Castle Dracula, they do not privilege the reader to any words, actions or reasons on behalf of Dracula other than what they can reasonably deduce. All the anxiety and fear springs from the chase of something, for all intents and purposes, inanimate! I want to know more about the being who holds immense power but remains mostly absent from the documents compiled in this book. The reader learns of his characteristics, again from the deductions of the writers, but little of him, his person, his being. Unfortunately, since Stoker chose to maintain the integrity of the epistolary form, he cannot afford to grant us this wish.

I wonder, though, if Stoker meant to tell the story of Dracula at all – to grant us this wish. I wonder if he meant for the title character to play more of a catalytic role for the real important themes in the novel. Perhaps he would call our yearning for Dracula’s character irrelevant and encourage us to focus on what Dracula’s existence inspired in a group of ordinary people who chose to resist him. Dracula broadens their worldly perspective beyond the confines of the scientific method. He scares them into a rally around love, selflessness, honor and courage. And, if we believe Van Helsing’s reasoning, he inspires them through fear to set him free from an Un-Dead life.

More than any of the writers in this book, I enjoyed Dr. Seward’s journal entries. I felt that, like him, I struggled to understand and solve the horrible occurrences in this story – but mostly to understand. I appreciated his discussions on zoophagous, a microcosmic symbol foreshadowing Dracula’s intentions, his conversations with Van Helsing about not letting “a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth” and his ability to use scientific rhetoric to describe concepts of the human condition.

I also found his occupation, as a doctor for the clinically insane, worth noting. Any group of people charged with murdering a vampire, the father of the Un-Dead, would endure the scrutinizing eye of the sane. Yet before devoting his days to an “insane” mission, Dr. Seward cares for the insane himself. The very distinction between these two states dissolves away in a dank mist. One might argue that Seward, and all others horse-blinded by science (or by faith in their own reasoning prowess), suffer from insanity while Renfield, who, like Jonathan Harker, has witnessed the power of Dracula, should indulge their sanity. Consider how Jonathan felt cured when hearing Van Helsing’s reassurance that he really did experience the things he wrote of in his journal. The rational explanations of brain fever, etc. imprisoned him, caused him to doubt his senses, his very self, but after believing in the reality of his experience, he feels better, more courageous, and prepared to live!

Oh, but insanity, the shroud of science, the cop-out of rational excuses, anything to help men turn from the belief which cured Jonathan – can Dracula perform anything more fearful? Is the experience of disbelief, doubting ourselves, somber in pity and self-inflicted scolding, not a lower existence than the Un-Dead? wandering about missing the joys and monstrosities of life because we cannot explain them rationally? Dracula hides behind science and the rationalism of the enlightened era, depends on its shroud, though not for his security – after all, what can a powerful dead man have to fear from men? – but to promote our demise into self-inflicted madness and misery. Dracula’s existence, juxtaposed to men’s beliefs in sensory evaluations and logic, causes us to question every security and trust we have in ourselves and the world. Once again we live like babies who cannot make sense of anything in the world, our place in it or who we are. But these shameful doubts and fearful anxieties wash away when we, like Jonathan, believe in the reality of the mystery.

I love how Stoker chose scientists rather than priests and mystics to battle against Dracula. Van Helsing, the soldier angel, Mina, the holy mother of the group, and all the companions held occupations outside of religion. For me, I found this collaboration refreshing, that a writer would reconcile science and the enlightened period with the remaining mysteries of the world by allowing them to face off.

Most importantly, these two sides influence each other. The human mind, the scientific group, has to concede the existence of the unnatural, or at least concede, as to science, their partial ignorance of the world’s full nature. And the unnatural, the evil and mystical, the impossible, realizes how it can no longer move about in the world as it will without meeting resistance, a resistance which exponentially shrinks any space remaining in the world for inexplicable or mystical existences.

Yet no matter the outcome of this conflict, all mankind suffers from the result. We either bruise our pride or squash the mysticism which might let us live courageously should we choose to acknowledge them as true.

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