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Tuesday
Last week I posed a set of questions about memorable reading experiences. Today I seek to answer them. Here they are:
–Who is your favorite hero and heroine? (they can be from different works)
–Who is your favorite couple?
–Who is your favorite villain?
–What work has held you in the greatest suspense?
–What work has given you the greatest shock?
–What work has given you the greatest erotic thrill?
–What literary ending do you find the most satisfying?
–What literary ending do you find the least satisfying?
–If you could change an ending to a work, what would you do?
–What work do you most wish had a sequel? (fan fiction is driven by such works)
–What is a work that you believe has damaged you?
–What is a work you wish you had never encountered?
–If you could have any character as a partner, who would it be?
–If you could have any author as a partner, who would it be?
–What literary family would you most like to belong to?
–What is a work that had you laughing out loud?
–What’s your favorite open ending?
–Add your own question and answer.
—My favorite hero is Alyosha Karamazov, the spiritual brother in Dostoevsky’s novel. My favorite heroine is Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch.
—My favorite couple is Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth from Jane Austen’s Persuasion. It helps that they have a wonderful couple to model themselves on, Admiral and Mrs. Croft, who are pretty much the only example of a long-time successful marriage we encounter in Austen’s novels (although the Gardiners in Pride and Prejudice seem contented).
—Favorite villain: the horrifying Judge Holden from Cormac McCarthy’s Meridian. I think what particularly gets me about this psychopath is that he represents a violent streak within the American psyche.
—The moment of greatest literary suspense is when Inspector Javert is closing in on Jean Valjean and little Cossette, who are trapped in an alley with no apparent exit. While, when reading, I consider it a sacred contract not to jump ahead, in this case I made an exception, thumbing ahead to make sure everything works out before going back and reading the intervening pages..
—Greatest shock: I still remember exactly where I was when I read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” I read it, as an Emory graduate student, on campus late on a Sunday afternoon with no one else around. The short story took me totally off guard as it shifted from comic social satire to mass murder in the space of a few pages. The ending of George Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel delivered a different kind of shock, with an ending so perverse (in my eyes) that I hurled the book across the room upon completion.
—Erotic thrill: Pauline Reagé’s Story of O held me riveted for years. I identified with O, not with her male tormenters.
—Favorite ending: I decided to devote myself to 18th century British literature in large part because I fell in love with Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones: History of a Foundling. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it one of the three most perfect plots in literature (the other two, he said, are Oedipus and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist). How Fielding engineers the final union between Tom and Sophia still seems magical to me.
—Least favorite ending: I hated, hated, hated the ending of John Fowles’s The Collector, where the kidnapping victim of the protagonist dies and we see him cruising the streets to find the next vulnerable young woman.
—Most longed for sequel: I can only follow the mob with my answer here. I too fantasize about the future of Elizabeth and Darcy’s marriage.
–For a work that damaged me, I choose a novel that also came to my rescue. When I was growing up in the segregated south and was being called a “n***lover,” To Kill a Mockingbird bolstered me. The year was 1962, I was a vulnerable 12-year-old, and my family was engaged in a lawsuit to integrate schools in our Tennessee county. But although Harper Lee’s novel assured me that we were fighting the good fight, it also engraved in my mind the white savior myth and the notion that African Americans should all be like Tom Robinson and Calpurnia (which is to say, grateful to Whites for coming to their aid). This in turn made it hard for me to relate to a number of the African American students at Carleton College and even for a while after. I appreciate that Lee provided a healthy corrective years later with her sequel, Go Set a Watchman, showing that Atticus would go on to join the White Citizens Council when African Americans started demanding equal rights. (Calpurnia leaves him in disgust.)
–Although I generally admire Joyce Carol Oates–especially novels like The Gravedigger’s Daughter, short stories like “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and autobiographical works like The Lost Landscape—I wish I had never read Daddy Love. It’s a story about a child who is kidnapped from a loving family, with his mother becoming horribly mutilated as the the abductor’s car drags her, and I experience it as something rotten in my memory bank. There’s even something sickly in the supposedly happy ending when the child, years later, escapes death and reunites with his family. He appears to be psychologically destroyed, however.
–I’ve already named the character I would most like as a partner: Dorothea Brooke, because of her integrity and determination to make the world a better place. But unlike Casaubon, I fantasize supporting her in her own ambitions rather than having her be subservient to mine.
I definitely would not make the choice of Woody Allen’s Kugelmass, who conjures up Emma Bovary (through a special device) and then regrets it when she starts running up their Macy’s credit card debt.
—Author I would most like as a partner: Although Dorothea shortchanges herself by dreaming of becoming amanuensis to a great mind (she fantasizes about being like Milton’s daughters but Casaubon is no Milton), I have sometimes fantasized about seeing gender roles reversed and providing support for a great woman author. Aphra Behn sounds like she would have been a blast.
—The family I would most like to belong to actually provided me a model for my own childhood. I loved the Bastable kids in E. Nesbit’s Treasure Seekers, Wouldbegoods, and New Treasure Seekers, identifying especially with Oswald. I therefore tried to engage my brothers and neighborhood kids in our own collective activities.
—Funniest moment: I was reading John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meanie on a plane and nearly exploded trying to suppress my laughter at the Christmas pageant scene, where tiny Owen has been cast in the role of baby Jesus. Suddenly he is making oracular pronouncements—speaking in the voice of God, as it were—to his delinquent parents as they enter the church.
—Regarding my favorite open ending, it’s hard to beat Paradise Lost:
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
But since, in a sense, we know what happens next—the archangel Michael tells Adam all about the future and we know our own history—we need a different story.
For a reluctant open ending, I choose Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, which might have had a closed—and grim—ending had not readers objected. Bronte therefore wrote the following, where a storm hits the ship carrying the Mr. Emanuel back to the heroine. Can you figure out whether he is drowned or makes it back safely?
Peace, be still! Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered—not uttered till; when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some!
Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.
In other words, if you have a sunny imagination, you can imagine “the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror,” etc. But if you don’t…
Then, to make clear how unhappy she is with this open ending, Bronte concludes by showing that she is indeed capable of writing a closed ending when she is not being pressured by readers and publishers:
Madame Beck prospered all the days of her life; so did Père Silas; Madame Walravens fulfilled her ninetieth year before she died. Farewell.
If you would like to send in accounts of your own reading experiences, I’d love to read them.
