The Jungle

 For those who believe that literature can have a powerful, positive, effect on society, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) is both a heartening and a disheartening example. Sinclair's portrait of the horrific living conditions of recent immigrants to the United States, and his specific portrait of the horrors of employment in the meat-packing industry, had a powerful effect beyond the one it had on its immediate readers. It led, dramatically and directly, to the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which greatly improved conditions at these plants -- for the meat, at any rate. The situation of the workers, and of immigrant families generally, did not improve, leading Sinclair to comment, with some bitterness, that he had "aimed at the public's heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach." Sinclair's embrace of the worker's cause, and of the promise of organizing trade unions, was prescient -- but in his day, he was more often hated than praised for it, and it's quite possible that, were a similar such story to appear today, it might re-ignite some of these same debates, which perhaps have never really gone away -- for some, "socialist" is still as dirty a word as it was in 1906.

The Jungle has been adapted in many forms, the first being a silent film made in 1914. Sinclair admired the film so much that he appeared in person in it as a sort of prologue and epilogue; once its first commercial run was completed, he bought the rights to the original negative with the hope of having it screened to wider audience. Unfortunately, as with many films of this era, no print of this version survives, though one can get something of a sense of it from the movie posters and publicity materials. A new film version was planned in 2011 by David Schwimmer (There Will Be Blood), but it was never made. And, a few years earlier. Peter Kuper also did a version for the re-booted "Classics Illustrated" series; Kuper's adaptation drew from the visual vocabulary of modernist art, making it in some ways feel closer to the period, though some readers found his version a bit too grotesque for their tastes.

Kristina Gehrmann is a graphic novelist and artist from Germany with quite a few major works to her credit, although her version of The Jungle is the first to appear in print in English. In 2015, her most substantial work -- Im Eisland ("In the Land of Ice") was published in Germany; it has since appeared in English as a webcomic, which you can read here. Filling three volumes, it undertakes to retell the story of the ill-fated Franklin expedition to the Arctic, a voyage that began with optimism and cheers and ended with cannibalism and despair. As she did with Im Eisland, Gehrmann combines meticulously researched and detailed backgrounds, clothing, and historical perspective with a facial style that is somewhat more like that of Japanese manga than of strict realism. Within that style, though, Gehrmann conveys emotion with masterful simplicity, leading a reviewer for the New York Journal of Books to remark that “In many ways, Gehrmann achieves what Upton Sinclair never quite did: She makes the characters real and complex, and she makes the political story a movingly human one.” As with Kuper's Heart of Darkness, Gehrmann's Jungle is mainly monochrome -- except for the visitations of red -- as meat, as blood, as human blushes and fury -- which haunts these pages to wonderful effect.

So read the first half of The Jungle -- and post your thoughts about it here. And, if you like, you can phrase your comment as a question for the author; with her permission, I'll be passing along some of these questions to her, and we can have the rare experience of getting answers directly from the artist/adapter herself!

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

In the realm of semi-autobiographical first novels, stands out from the crowd -- its story might seem implausible in any other guise, and indeed when in 2013 Winterson published a nonfiction account of her childhood and youth -- Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? -- it almost paled by comparison. In both books, not unexpectedly, it's the main character's mother who stands out, not simply for her inflexible views on every detail of the proper conduct of life, but for the wry and often quite funny ways her daughter finds to resist them.

The setting is England, but not the Mary Poppins version that many Americans have in their minds -- rather, it's the dreary, drafty, drab working-class town of Accrington, whose principal claim to fame is the loss of a great swathe of its young men -- known as the Accrington Pals -- in World War I. In this world drained of color, the initially dutiful daughter Jeanette eventually grows in directions that place her increasingly at odds with her mother, and eventually, as she begins to identify as a lesbian, into outright violation of the core tenets of her mother's religious faith. The efforts that her mother and her fellow Pentacostals make to exorcise Jeanette's sexuality are disturbing and strange, but as readers we also sense from the start that they're likely to be futile.

Ultimately, it's a coming-of-age tale, and also a tale of a young woman coming into further self-awareness as a literary creator, an artist. You can read about Winterson's actual life on her website -- but don't read it until you're well along in the novel -- in her case, it's a bit difficult to say which is stranger, the 'truth' or the fiction. Winterson is also adamant that she does not want the book to be seen as a "lesbian novel" -- any more than a book about anyone should be limited in its audience to those who share the identity of its main character -- and its enduring popularity is testimony to the wide range of readers it has found.

So how does the story speak to you? Are there elements of the world it discloses, the characters, the situations, that evoke aspects of your own life? And what about the role of religion which, as we've discussed in class, seems just as often to stir rebellion as it is to reproduce faith? Your thoughts below.

Eggshells

When she heard that her first novel, Eggshells, had won the prestigious 2018 Rooney Prize, bestowed by Ireland's Trinity College, she might be forgiven her initial shock -- since, at that very moment, she was still employed by that same Trinity College -- as a janitor.

She was also a graduate of the college, and like many in her situation, needed a "day job" to pay the bills while she labored on her book. At the time she won the Rooney prize, she'd moved on to her second novel, but was beginning to despair of ever having a literary career. For, it must be admitted, it's no easy path becoming a writer -- if by "writer" you mean being able to earn a living at it. As of this writing, she still works at Trinity.

Central Dublin (click to enlarge)

The story of Eggshells is a strange one -- in some ways paralleling the Palm-Wine Drinkard. Where the drinkard explored "bushes," the narrator of Eggshells explores Dublin, not in the usual way of someone needing to get to work or run errands, but with a kind of deliberate randomness, designed to eventually cover the city mile by crooked mile. She's fortunate in that she has a home and money, but otherwise is quite alone in the world, at least until "Penelope" answers her advertisement for a friend. She, like the Drinkard, also has extraordinary powers, and is able to read the tea leaves of city streets and sights as well as any fortune teller. And yet, at the same time, she seems not to have a very good grasp of how to behave in a conventional manner -- perhaps just what one would expect were one a changeling, a child from the fairy land of Tir naNóg substituted in the cradle for a human infant. But how to get "back"?

I've provided a map of central Dublin that you can refer to as you read of her peregrinations; you should also feel very free to Google any unfamiliar landmarks or features that you hear about. I've often wondered whether, in reading this novel, it's better to know Dublin a bit -- but I think that, either way, the landscape here is not so much the "dear dirty Dublin" of everyday reality, but more like one of the Drinkard's "bushes" -- a jigsaw puzzle of fantastical pieces, a canvas for the imagination, a great wandering -- one in which the imagination is needed even if reality is at hand. So read -- and choose an episode, a sight, a moment that stirred your imagination -- and post about it below:

The Palm-Wine Drinkard

This week, we move to consider Amos Tutuola's weird yet groundbreaking novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town. When it first appeared in 1952, the reviews were a mixture of astonishment and admiration; Dylan Thomas famously proclaimed it a "brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story," and other reviews were also quite positive; others called it a "strange, eerie, poetic novel" and praised it as the embodiment of an African perspective of Africa. And yet, today, modern African writers such as Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong'o have tended to disparage Tutuola, accusing him of being too eager -- even if unconsciously -- ready to write just the sort of exotic, juju-filled story that Western readers expected from a "dark continent."

Forty years after its publication, in 1992, I was fortunate to have a brief correspondence with Mr. Tutuola, and to receive a contribution from him for a book I had proposed at the time: Without Any Rules: The Politics and Poetics of the Vernacular. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, the book proposal never found a home, and when Mr. Tutuola passed on in 1997, I found myself with his contribution still unpublished. I had asked contributors to reflect on what they considered their "vernacular":

Although I wrote (and still do) in English, my writings, looking back now, are still in Yoruba, my mother tongue ... The medium in which my ideas are expressed is English, but when I write, the ideas I express, the atmosphere I create, and as reviewers of my works (perhaps rightly) maintain, the gestures readers encounter on the pages of the books I write are Yorubaish. Thus I think it can be said that beyond being a Yoruba writing in English, my works are African in conception.

The full essay has since been published in the journal Transition. I think that Mr. Tutuola's comments here give us a remarkable account of the unexpected combinations, conflicts, and sometimes fortuitous collisions of language and consciousness that are a powerful feature of postcolonial writings. Should a writer seeking to resist colonization be obliged to write in the colonizer's tongue? And if she or he chooses it despite its histories, can it be shaped, as Tutuola suggests, back into a "native" language?

Two years after The Palm-Wine Drinkard, he published My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which was later the inspiration for a groundbreaking electronic album by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, which is widely regarded as one of the most powerful, pioneering recordings of its kind. I urge everyone to read -- and listen to -- all of these remarkable works.

The Shadow

We've probably all experienced the sensation: somewhere, somehow, we saw a new possibility open up before us, or felt a strange impulse to follow a desire that we could hardly name. We were wise, or so we thought, to resist the temptation, to stay on the path of our sober-minded, plan-in-advance selves. And then, perhaps years later, we wondered why, and what things might have been like if we hadn't.

Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow" takes up this question -- decidedly one that haunts adults rather than children -- in a strange allegory that reads like a fairy tale but burns at the soul like some mad tale of Poe. And like Poe (and Shelley, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and many others), Andersen hit upon the folk legend of a double, or doppelgänger, as a metaphor for this desire deferred. With roots deep in popular folklore, these tales of someone with an uncanny resemblance to one's self are chilling enough as far as they go -- for it seems that there's only room in the universe for one of them: either the double or the self must die.

In Andersen's tale, the "learned man" (perhaps "scholar" would be a more apt English translation) permits his shadow to do pursue a course of action he himself was too timid to attempt, and initially counts himself fortunate. The lack of a shadow, after all, was but a minor inconvenience -- what of it? The twist here is that this decision precipitates the birth of a separate entity, one that eventually comes to possess all of the boldness and sense of purpose that the student lacked. The student, gradually and inexorably, is fated to become the shadow's shadow, and eventually even less than that.

Many people assume that fairy tales ought to teach some moral lesson. They forget that, in their original forms, most folktales had no such lesson; it was moralizers such as Perrault (who published the most popular versions of "Cinderella" and "Little Red Riding Hood") who attached morals to them, in part to make them safe for family reading, to harness their wild imaginings in the name of civilizing influence.

But although "The Shadow," like many of Andersen's tales, has a sort of moral in it, there's also a strong contravening force: if we are to avoid the fate of the unfortunate scholar, we must in fact act on our desires, must sometimes step outside the moral and personal codes that bind us. And indeed, anyone who creates -- whether a writer of fictions, a visual artist, or a filmmaker -- is already engaged in the shadow business.

The poet William Blake, in his diabolical Proverbs of Hell, perhaps put it most bluntly: "Better murder an infant in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire."

A Mermaid and a Girl

"The Little Mermaid" may be one of the best-known fairy tales of all time, but it took its time to get there. Although written in 1837, it wasn't translated into English until 1872, and although Andersen considered it one of his fairy tales "for children," there seems to have been some shyness about handing a tale to little girls that clearly seems to take as its underlying theme the subject of sexual maturity. Andersen himself sealed the ending of the story with what may be one of the most moralistic morals ever penned:

"For every day on which we find a good child who pleases his parents and deserves their love, God shortens our days of trial. The child does not know when we float through his room, but when we smile at him in approval one year is taken from our three hundred. But if we see a naughty, mischievous child we must shed tears of sorrow, and each tear adds a day to the time of our trial."

As P.L. Travers (Mary Poppins) said, "A year taken off when a child behaves and a tear shed and a day added whenever a child is naughty? Andersen, this is blackmail. And the children know it and say nothing. There's magnanimity for you."

Disney, in converting Andersen's antique moralizing into modern family fare, actually did a remarkable job of holding on to the charged understory of a girl coming of age with desire, not just for the human world, but for a human prince. They discretely applied two scallop shells, along with water-bound as well as air-bound sidekicks, and made the sisters into the same sort of annoying wannabes as those of Cinderella. But it was with the Sea Witch that they worked the best magic; by having her, with Ariel's stolen voice (thankfully not her actual tongue) embody Ariel's rival they considerably upped the ante on the final climax. And of course, the little mermaid -- who doesn't die -- gets both legs and man. 

In contrast, "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf" takes us on a moralistic tale about a very bad girl -- stepping on a loaf of bread meant for her parents is an act that loses most readers' sympathy -- though here it's once again compounded by Andersen's making the vanity of a beloved pair of shoes clean the cause -- and it seems that things must go from bad to worse to worser. The angel that visits here does not bring a sword -- but tears -- but even those fail to fully redeem the lost girl. She is only able to find salvation after being reincarnated as a bird and sharing out as much grain as it must have taken to make the loaf upon which she trod so many years before. Even then, it's not quite to heaven that Inger ascends -- though perhaps that's a more satisfying end -- at least she's alive.

Welcome!

We live in an age of categorization, one which imagines that connecting a piece of writing to its proper imagined audience is essential, whether one is an educator or a publicist. The history of literature, it seems, has always had its categories, both formal (fiction, poetry, drama) and generic (science fiction, detective novels, ghost stories). And, for each of these genres, there’s a presumed audience, as the forms and subjects of written matter follow their readers from a baby’s first board-book on through every stage of life and human interests, on up to the scuffed hardcovers scattered on table-tops in an assisted-living facility.

The genres of literature often take on the added purpose both of representing these varied stages in our reading, and catering to them. Children are supposed to read fairy-tales and books of wonder; teenagers crave adventure and romance, while young adults may seek solace for their sense of alienation. In the robust middle of life, our shared social reality and the issues of the day can predominate, along with the challenges of pursuing a career and balancing a budget. In later years, reflections – both bitter and sweet – loom suddenly larger, and at the end of (or, in some writings, after) life, we go to our graves with scores unsettled.

 

This course will take us through several of these “ages” of literature: for childhood, the tales of Hans Christian Andersen; for coming-of-age, the wild adventures of Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard, along with the fearful fundamentalism of the mother in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In young adulthood, we’ll wander the streets of Dublin with Catriona Lally, seeking signs of entrances to the otherworld. For mid-life, we’ll explore social realism and life’s struggles with Upton Sinclair’s muckraking classic The Jungle, followed by Colson Whitehead’s vibrant Harlem Shuffle. For old age, we’ll have the good company of Irish poet William Butler Yeats in his older years, which in their turn spurred some of the wry essays of Joan Didion. In the end, we’ll join in the ghostly colloquies from a country churchyard and a sleeping populace in Dylan Thomas’s play for voices, Under Milk Wood.

 

Throughout our journey, like all good adventurers, we’ll be asking questions, beginning with the most fundamental: what is “literature,” anyway? Why is it supposed to be “good” for us? And what difference does it make when the voices who speak come from experiences and times different from our own, whether in nation (Nigeria, England, Ireland, Wales), cultural identity (gay, Black, working-class, evangelical), gender or age. Is there more strength to be gained by reading of experiences like our own, or those of others? Does identity confer authority upon the author? And are those fairy-tales really for children, after all? And what does the purported genre of a book – fantasy, folktale, semi-autobiographical novel, poem, or play – tell us about how we might read it, or (perhaps) read against its form?