Josephine “Jo” March
First Appearance: Little Women
Date of First Appearance: 1868
Author: Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888)
I’ve got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.
Little Women found itself on nearly every young girl’s reading list from the time of its publication in 1868 through the twentieth century, and Louisa May Alcott’s novel is now being discovered by a new audience of millennials. In a 2017 adaptation, Maya Hawke, the daughter of Hollywood’s Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, took on the role of central character Josephine (Jo) March, who is by far the most colorful of the March family’s four daughters. In some ways Jo is a bookish Northern Scarlett O’Hara verging on womanhood in the middle of the Civil War and chafing at the constrictions that define who she should be, rather than who she wants to be. Virtually all Little Women fans love Jo because of that struggle, and perhaps at least subconsciously they see her independent nature as mirroring their own sensibilities. They want Jo to be the trailblazer for their secret rebellions and heart’s passions, and incidentally, they want her to marry the boy next door—but more about that later.
Some really remarkable, self-possessed women pay homage to Jo March as the specific source of their Little Women adoration and their own inspiration. It comes as no surprise that female writers relate to Jo as a young nineteenth-century wannabe author thwarted from following her passion. Gertrude Stein, Cynthia Ozick, Barbara Kingsolver, Joyce Carol Oates, Nora Ephron, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ann Petry, and Anna Quindlen, representing a wide range of genres, have picked up the pen to express their love for Jo. They are joined by J. K. Rowling, arguably the most popular writer on the planet, who said, “It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.” But the range of women from other disciplines who also have a strong bond with Jo is equally remarkable. Feminist Simone de Beauvoir, punk rocker and artist Patti Smith, and politician Hillary Clinton all profess their connection to Jo’s intelligence and unconventional desires. She represents for these diverse women a bridge into the new century and the freedom to burst open opportunities to pursue their desires in earnest. Jo March becomes both the poster girl and flag carrier for this cause.
The paradigm for women in the mid-1800s had been clear. They were expected to be submissive wives whose duty was to follow the ideal of the era’s famous poem “The Angel in the House,” which espoused that “man must be pleased” and doing so “is woman’s pleasure.” (Note to reader: Perfect restraint being practiced here by not supplying a snarky retort! Okay, returning to authorial tone.) Young girls were merely women in training, and Alcott’s coming-of-age story plies the cult of family and domesticity that the century’s readers consumed in large doses. Jo can be crammed into that mold as she accepts familial expectations, and her devotion to the March family is undisputable. She makes sacrifices to boost waning finances by selling her hair—a weird nineteenth-century way to make money—as well as contributing her earnings from outside the home, nursing her dying sister Beth, and respecting and honoring her parents. Jo as dutiful daughter? Check.
Alcott performs an amazing tightrope act appealing to Victorian mores while also nuancing Jo’s story in ways that connect the aforementioned high-profile women and other modern readers who could only have been imagined a century and a half earlier. Instead of painting her into the domestic corner, Alcott presents Jo as a tomboy with a boy’s name who is referred to by Mr. March as his “son Jo,” and the somewhat effeminate next-door neighbor Laurie with a typically female name calls her “dear fellow.” Jo does not want to be a wife, and she underscores this by saying, “I’m happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up for any mortal man.” You get the picture. Alcott is stirring up gender stereotypes more than a century before others found the courage to do so.
The backstories to novels are often compelling, but Jo’s is especially so. Everyone agrees she is Alcott’s alter ego as a rebellious pseudoboy with no desire for the expected endgame of marriage and motherhood. Nothing shocking there, as Alcott remained unwed. But what few know is that the original publication’s long title, Little Women: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. The Story of Their Lives. A Girl’s Book, highlights “girls” and therefore drops the plot off before marriage becomes an issue. The version everyone now knows includes in one collective binding the follow-up, Good Wives, practically forced on Alcott by her publisher because so many readers wanted to know what happened to the March girls and who they married. More importantly, they wanted to know if Jo married Laurie. The rebellious streak that created Jo also caused Alcott’s frustration that readers believed marriage “was the only aim and end of a woman’s life.” (Perhaps a double meaning on the second half of that phrase.) She stubbornly proclaimed, “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.” She also told a friend that “out of perversity” she created a marriage that didn’t satisfy the romantics. Touché, Louisa May!
Alcott’s solution was to twist the knife a bit while seeming to acquiesce. In the Good Wives portion of Little Women, Jo is twenty-five when she marries, practically an official Victorian spinster by then, and she chooses a nontraditional husband, a much older, well-educated though unattractive and somewhat uncouth German professor, and it is Jo’s inherited money, not his earnings, that provides the home in which they will raise their two boys. Like Brontë’s Jane Eyre who only marries when she is financially independent and can choose not to, Jo acts rather than reacts to life. She will not be some man’s “little woman,” but a partner holding at least some of the reins to her own future’s carriage.
Both Alcott and the readers have expressed some disappointment in the ending, however. We all love Jo bucking the system, and we want her to be the rebel who defies the drag of domesticity, but we would also like the happily-ever-after life with the boy we’ve decided is perfect for her. Essay after essay written by smart, accomplished, feminist-leaning women all bemoan Alcott’s subversion. The eNotes website even put out a call for unhappy readers to submit alternate endings, and some interesting ones have come forward—and a multiracial family with Jo’s LGBTQ persuasion was no doubt inevitable.
The conflicted feelings readers have about Jo March’s future only seems to strengthen their devotion and interest, though. The nineteenth-century youth novel with a bit of a disappointing conclusion still rates high with audiences. The BBC’s Big Read ranked it No. 18 on their “Nation’s Best Loved Novel” list, and it is consistently included on many Top 100 ratings of literary texts. Alcott may not have delivered the readers’ perfect ending in Little Women, but she certainly got her message across.
Bibliography
Little Women (1868)
Good Wives (1869) (published in England as separate volumes, usually as one volume in America)
Little Men, or Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys (1871)
Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out: A Sequel to Little Men (1886)
Works Cited
BBC’s The Big Read Top 100. 2003. https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml.
Lanzendorfer, Joy. “10 Things You Might Not Know about Little Women.” Mental Floss, May 21, 2018.
Patmore, Coventry. The Angel in the House. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1858.
Rowling, J. K. “J. K. Rowling: By the Book.” New York Times Sunday Book Review, October 11, 2012.
—GS
Philip Marlowe
First Appearance: The Big Sleep
Date of First Appearance: 1939
Author: Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.—Farewell, My Lovely
He wasn’t the first private dick to confront corruption in the mean streets, but he was the first to do it with a sense of chivalric resolve. Readers today have forgotten most of the first-generation Prohibition-era gumshoes who took detective fiction out of the quaint parlors of C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes and relocated it to the dens of iniquity where killer kingpins and femmes fatales wreak their mayhem. Carroll John Daly’s Three Gun Terry Mack and Race Williams, Raoul Whitfield’s Jo Garr, and George Harmon Coxe’s Flashgun Casey are names familiar mainly to scholars of Black Mask, the pulp rag credited with popularizing hardboiled crime fiction. Dashiell Hammett’s the Continental Op and Sam Spade remain iconic, foundational figures in the genre, but audiences influenced by their countless descendants are often shocked by how nihilistic they seem, as if they were infected by the same “blood simple” impulses of the forces they fight.
The moral sensibility of the private investigator—the idea of the PI as a knight-errant who stares down wrongdoing with bruised but unbendable idealism—comes instead from Raymond Chandler’s contribution to the art form, Philip Marlowe. Wisecracking and world weary, Marlowe brought a poetic melancholy to the voice of the crime fighter that elevated the stakes from lurid, escapist entertainment to literary poignancy. Hardly a fictional flatfoot in novels, films, or television since he debuted in The Big Sleep (1939) isn’t a variation on his prototype.
Chandler was forty-four and fired from his job as an oil-industry accounting executive for alcoholism when he broke into Black Mask with “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot.” For the moment, the detective’s name was Mallory, an allusion to Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) and an indication of the writer’s attachment to medieval literature’s chivalric tradition. Over the next six years Chandler eked out nearly two dozen pulp stories with names like “Trouble Is My Business” whose heroes were known as Carmady, Ted Malvern, or John Dalmas, but who all shared the same basic characteristics: They were loners who viewed their home base of Los Angeles as a microcosm of civic greed and hedonism, and they were as philosophical as they were quick to draw their gat. Eventually, Chandler settled on the name Philip Marlowe, evoking the Renaissance playwright Christopher Marlowe, suggesting the author’s interest in richly intricate Elizabethan language, which became a trademark of his novels’ narrative style.
One reason Marlowe stands out as a character is that Chandler’s plots are often so byzantine that readers tend to remember his sarcastic asides more than the dizzying twists and turns. As the author joked, whenever he found he’d written himself into a corner he simply had two men enter the scene with guns drawn and followed that plot strand wherever it might lead him. The Big Sleep involves blackmail, pornography, a dead chauffeur, a missing husband, and two spoiled sister-heirs to an oil fortune whose ailing father will go to any length necessary to protect. Farewell, My Lovely (1941) starts in a black nightclub with a grotesquely muscular, hot-tempered ex-con named Moose Malloy on the prowl for his missing girlfriend, Velma Valento, leading Marlowe into a vortex of stolen jewelry, marijuana, phony psychics, dope-peddling doctors, and a bribe-dealing gambler who controls LA’s dirty nearby neighbor, Bay City (Santa Monica). The Long Goodbye (1953) features a dead wife and her supposedly suicided husband/murderer, a $5,000 bill, an aging Hemingway-styled writer hampered by alcoholism, his untrustworthy spouse, the trauma of World War II, and a case of bad cosmetic surgery. Through all the treachery and deception, Marlowe maintains a hard-bitten idealism, even though the novels usually end with the characters he most tried to assist backstabbing or disappointing him in ways large or small.
Chandler completed seven Marlowe novels in just under twenty years. Compared to the detective novelists who followed in his wake, such as the indefatigable John D. MacDonald (Travis McGee) or Ross Macdonald (Lew Archer), he was far from prolific. Both his drinking and his financial dependency on Hollywood scriptwriting stymied his output. The three aforementioned Marlowe entries are uncontested classics; the other four are wildly inconsistent, although all have their flashes of brilliance. Despite the varying quality, Marlowe remains remarkably consistent throughout them (except for his age). Readers learn only bits and pieces of his backstory. His parents are dead and he has no siblings; he attended some college; he cut his legal teeth working for the district attorney but was fired for insubordination. He has no home life, living in a small apartment and later a rented house, but spending most of his time in his office in the Cahuenga Building on Hollywood Boulevard. Only in The Long Goodbye and Playback (1958), Chandler’s final novel, is he given any romantic life, taking up with Linda Loring. The pair would have married in The Poodle Springs Story if the author hadn’t died only four chapters into it. (In 1988, one of Chandler’s most successful heirs, Robert B. Parker, finished the novel to mixed reviews.) Otherwise, the most we know of Marlowe is his preferences in booze (whiskey), the cars he drives and the cigarettes he smokes (Camels), and the fact that he’s a self-described “roman-tic”: “I hear voices crying in the night and I go see what’s the matter,” he says in Goodbye.
The abstraction serves him well: As many critics have noted, Marlowe is best thought of as less a person than as an attitude, a voice of stoic but unshakable idealism. After his fourth novel, The Lady in the Lake (1943), Chandler published the quintessential credo of the hardboiled detective, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which he spelled out Marlowe’s stance. “If there were enough like him,” the piece concludes, “the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to live in.”
Marlowe made an immediate and enduring splash not only in crime fiction but on the radio and in film as well. Three different actors portrayed him on the silver screen before Humphrey Bogart’s definitive turn in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep in 1946 (featuring a script coauthored by William Faulkner). In the 1940s and 1950s at least seven different radio series featured either adaptations of Chandler novels or new adventures by spin-off writers. There have also been periodic efforts to update Marlowe to post-1960s sensibilities. James Garner’s charming interpretation of the character in the 1969 movie Marlowe led directly to his popular turn in the 1974–1980 TV series The Rockford Files. Elliott Gould’s more bumbling version in Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of The Long Goodbye, however, remains divisive. The most successful update is probably Thomas Pynchon’s shambolic Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice (2009), a pot-smoking, hippie version of the character untangling conspiracies in the Manson era (and one that owes a debt to Roger L. Simon’s Moses Wine, the first baby boomer Marlowe who debuted in 1973’s The Big Fix).
Although acclaimed novelists such as John Banville (writing as Benjamin Black) and Lawrence Osborne have kept Marlowe alive with their authorized novels The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014) and Only to Sleep (2018), respectively, the PI’s voice remains most stinging in the original novels. “I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms,” his creator wrote shortly before his death, “puzzled but never quite defeated.”
Bibliography
The Big Sleep (1939)
Farewell, My Lovely (1941)
The High Window (1942)
The Lady in the Lake (1943)
The Little Sister (1949)
The Long Goodbye (1953)
Playback (1958)
—KC
Jane Marple
First Appearance: “The Tuesday Night Club” in The Royal Magazine
Date of First Appearance: December 1927
Author: Agatha Christie (1890–1976)
It has just happened that I have found myself in the vicinity of murder rather more often than would seem normal.
Following on the heels of Agatha Christie’s hugely successful first sleuth, Hercule Poirot, one might not expect any room left for Miss Jane Marple to carve out her own fame. One would be wrong. The white-haired, seemingly unremarkable, bird-watching, gardening-loving, brocade- and lace-donning spinster in her late sixties or early seventies who passively knits in the background is as far as she could get from the vision we might conjure for a steel-trap mind, “nothing escapes my keen observation” detective type. In her first novel appearance in The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), her nondescript demeanor is contrasted against another old maid described as “a mixture of vinegar and gush,” and we are told, “of the two Miss Marple is much more dangerous.” She is fully aware of the advantage and slyly acknowledges, “Sitting here with one’s knitting one just sees the facts.” So, with Miss Marple’s arrival on the scene, add to the list of literary English old maids another remarkable but on the surface seemingly very ordinary lady who holds her own against all the great male figures penned by great male writers. Christie’s Miss Marple takes her place alongside the indomitable Brontë and Austen single ladies who have made their own way in a man’s world.
Contrary to bursting on the crime-detective scene in a flashy, grandstanding way, Miss Marple gets a slow start by being briefly introduced and then going almost unnoticed—precisely the point—and therefore becoming privy to the goings-on without being suspected of the danger she poses to others’ secrets. She only appears infrequently, quietly observing and gathering clues without anyone’s awareness she is even on the trail until near the end of the book when she puts together the pieces of the mystery and solves the crime that professionals have failed to unravel. She adopts as her distinct style a modus operandi similar to that employed by the famous tortoise, whose slow but meticulous progress toward the finish line eventually surpasses all the hares racing past the best clues and failing to accomplish the task.
Miss Marple has the advantage of holding two firm beliefs that aid in her crime-solving success. The first is that rather than seeing small villages as sanctuaries of human kindness, her opinion is quite the opposite: “There is a great deal of wickedness in village life.” Secondly, she does not support the idea of humanity’s innate goodness. Staring from the pessimistic point of view that all people are capable of anything and that expecting the worst is the best practice, she frees herself to assess upstanding pillars of the community on an equal plane of evil possibility with those who are more likely to be most suspected. In a later story, she will corroborate the consistency of her belief by noting, “It really is very dangerous to believe people. I never have for years.” Christie borrows this quality from her own grandmother, of whom she says, “Although a completely cheerful person, she always expected the worst of anyone and everything. And with almost frightening accuracy (she was) usually proved right.” Her literary doppelgänger is as well.
Christie brings Miss Marple to life later in her writing career and offers an explanation for creating a second more private PI. After years of writing about Poirot, Christie confesses that she grew tired of him, his fussy ways, and his arrogant attitude. Pairing the two was not a choice, she says, because although they are of similar age and could have bumped into each other on a particularly complicated case needing a double amount of “small gray cells,” as Poirot calls them, she writes that he as “a complete egoist, would not like being taught his business or having suggestions made to him by an elderly spinster lady.” Such a collaboration would have been an interesting meeting of the minds or maybe a showdown of the sleuths, though, and not having the opportunity to peek in on that history-making case seems a real loss.
In sharp contrast to Poirot, Marple didn’t travel the world, didn’t seem concerned about fine food or wine, and wasn’t meticulous in her wardrobe choice. She preferred to blend into the background rather than stick out like a well-dressed, attention-getting center of the crowd. But like Poirot, she was unencumbered by a spouse or children and had the advantage of being able to pour her full attention into solving a crime. Also like Poirot, she was adroit at observing behavior, gathering clues, deducing what was relevant and what was extraneous, and arriving at a conclusion that had seemed obvious to no one else, in her case even to the trained professionals whose job she was usurping without pay or help, and often with little praise.
Christie seemed to enjoy coming at crime-solving fiction from a female perspective, but she also regretted that “Miss Marple was born at the age of sixty-five to seventy—which as with Poirot, proved unfortunate, because she was going to have to last a long time in my life. If I had had any second sight I would have provided myself with a precocious schoolboy as my first detective; then he could have grown old with me.” Somehow, this seems to be less than truthful, though, and it’s more believable that spending as much time as Christie did with these two main characters—more than seventy books featuring one or the other and countless short stories—she had to love for them as they were; they were, after all, children of her own creation. Marple is less of an amusing character than Poirot, but Christie didn’t kill her off as she did him, if that counts for anything.
The detective genre translates perfectly to television and film, and Miss Marple has starred many times in both mediums. Her character lures the audience in with that harmless grandmotherly demeanor and then enthralls them with her nimble skill at cracking even the most seemingly unsolvable cases. Being a creation of British origin, she has come to be considered a national treasure, and the BBC’s Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series played by Joan Hickson was a television staple from 1984 until 1992, spanning all twelve of the original novels in which she appeared. Crossing the pond, the series also played on PBS Mysteries! some years later. Film icons Helen Hayes, Angela Lansbury, and Margaret Rutherford brought Miss Marple to life on the screen, and Lansbury went on to star from 1984 to 1996 in an American television knockoff series, Murder She Wrote, in which her character combined Christie’s talent as a mystery writer and Marple’s skill as a detective.
Highbrow literary critics often scoff at the mystery/detective fiction genre. The books are popular with the masses, after all—a fast-food equivalent to a highly nourishing meal—but millions of readers would beg to differ. Some satisfying fast food is good for the soul every now and then, isn’t it?
Bibliography
Novels
The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)
The Thirteen Problems (1932) short-story collection also published as The Tuesday Night Club
The Body in the Library (1942)
The Moving Finger (1942)
A Murder Is Announced (1950)
They Do It with Mirrors (1952) also published as Murder with Mirrors
A Pocket Full of Rye (1953)
4:50 from Paddington (1957) also published as What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960)
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962) also published as The Mirror Crack’d
A Caribbean Mystery (1964)
At Bertram’s Hotel (1965)
Nemesis (1971)
Sleeping Murder (1976)
Short Stories
From The Thirteen Problems (1932) short-story collection also published as The Tuesday Night Club: “The Tuesday Night Club,” “The Idol House of Astart,” “Ingots of Gold,” “The Bloodstained Pavement,” “Motive v. Opportunity,” “The Thumbmark of St. Peter,” “The Blue Geranium,” “The Companion,” “The Four Suspects,” “A Christmas Tragedy,” “The Herb of Death,” “The Affair at the Bungalow,” “Death by Drowning”
From The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories (1939): “Miss Marple Tells a Story”
From Three Blind Mice and Other Stories (1950) also published as The Mousetrap: “Strange Jest,” “The Case of the Perfect Maid,” “The Case of the Caretaker,” “Tape-Measure Murder”
From Double Sin and Other Stories (1961): “Greenshaw’s Folly,” “Sanctuary”
Works Cited
Adams, Stephen. “Agatha Christie Used Her Grandmother as a Model for Miss Marple, New Tapes Reveal.” Telegraph, September 15, 2008.
Bolin, Alice. “Miss Marple vs. the Mansplainers: Agatha Christie’s Feminist Detective Hero.” Electric Lit, May 15, 2015.
—GS
Oskar Matzerath
First Appearance: The Tin Drum
Date of First Appearance: 1959
Author: Günter Grass (1927–2015)
I shall try to dictate a quieter chapter to my drum, even though the subject of my next chapter calls for an orchestra of ravenous wild men.
Oskar Matzerath is one of the most original characters in literature, and to tell his story Günter Grass uses a mash-up of genres—a blend of realism, fantasy, magic realism, social commentary, and comic satire. In The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), Oskar asks, “What novel—or what else in the world—can have the epic scope of a photographic album?” Oskar tries to reconstruct his life from memories of a 120-page photo album that was among his most cherished childhood possessions, with an engaging voice that’s somehow wise, funny, poetic, and poignant, often at the same time. But there is an X factor: Oskar is telling his photograph-inspired story with the assistance of a toy drum he needs to bang on . . . from the confines of his room in a Polish mental hospital in the early 1950s. Over the course of his thirty-year life, he has always needed to bang on a toy drum, and when he breaks it he finds a replacement.
Is he crazy? You be the judge. Born in 1924 with the mind of an adult, Oskar becomes immediately disenchanted with life after hearing his mother’s husband, a grocer named Matzerath, say with frightening certainty that young Oskar will also become a grocer in adulthood. Never mind that Matzerath may or may not be his biological father (a very young Oskar discerns that his mother is continuing an affair with Cousin Jan that began before he was born). He’s made his decision, so when, on his third birthday, he finally receives the toy tin drum and drumsticks he had been awaiting—in infancy he had heard his mother say, “When little Oskar is three, he will have a toy drum”—he executes his exit strategy.
“It was then that I declared, resolved, and determined that I would never under any circumstances be a politician, much less a grocer, that I would stop right there, remain as I was—and so I did; for many years I not only stayed the same size but clung to the same attire.” He accomplishes this by taking advantage of Matzerath leaving the cellar trapdoor open on his third birthday. With no one watching, having just received his tin drum, little Oskar toddles down the sixteen worn steps and hides his drum among the flour sacks for safekeeping. Then he climbs back up to the ninth step and launches himself, landing on his head on the concrete floor. Recalling the four weeks he spent in the hospital, Oskar gloats, “On my very first day as a drummer I had succeeded in giving the world a sign; my case was explained even before the grownups so much as suspected the true nature of the condition I myself had induced. Forever after the story was: on his third birthday our little Oskar fell down the cellar stairs, no bones were broken, but he just wouldn’t grow any more.” A scientific enigma, Oskar adds, “And I began to drum.” When someone tried to take his drum he would scream so piercingly that glass would break. The same was true with his singing, and he had a talent for shattering glass. “Today as I lie here in my mental hospital, I often regret the power I had in those days to project my voice through the wintry night to thaw frost flowers on glass, cut holes in shopwindows, and show thieves the way.”
Bruno, his “keeper” at the asylum, watches Oskar through a peephole and allows him to drum three to four hours daily. Oskar needs his drum “which, when handled adroitly and patiently, remembers all the incidentals that I need to get the essential down on paper.” With Oskar, Grass blurs the line between normalcy and mental illness. Case in point: He ends up here because he found the severed finger of a nun he liked and he confessed to her murder, just because he needed solitude and quiet to think about his life and write his memoirs. Then again, Oskar’s whole life seems to skate along the thin line that separates sanity from insanity. How else to describe a character who has his first sexual experience with his father/stepfather’s second wife, and at three feet tall joins a troupe of little people who perform for the German troops at the front line, then becomes the Fagin-like leader of a gang of child criminals who call him “Jesus,” works as a nude model, and in an ironic moment of accidental success that would resurface in such later novels as Forrest Gump forms a jazz trio with two friends and becomes rich and famous?
In telling his story, Oskar drifts back and forth between the narrative first person (“I”) and third person (“Oskar”), tantalizing readers to look for a pattern that might help understand what makes Oskar tick. “Mama would throw me out with the bath water,” he writes, “and yet she would share my bath. When I sang windowpanes to pieces, Mama was on hand with putty. . . . When Mama died, the red flames on my drum casing paled a little; but the white lacquer became whiter than ever and so dazzling that Oskar was sometimes obliged to close his eyes.”
Ultimately, though, it’s Oskar’s attention to detail and his wry, subtly self-deprecating way of telling a story that makes him so much fun to read. Comic descriptions abound. When he has his first sexual encounter with Matzerath’s second wife, for example, he writes, “It was quite beyond me why Maria, with oddly pursed lips, should whistle while removing her shoes, two high notes, two low notes, and while stripping off her socks. Whistling like the driver of a brewery truck, she took off the flowery dress . . . dropped her brassiere, and still without finding a tune, whistled frantically” while pulling off her panties. Later, “shaking her head, she picked her hairs from between my lips and said, in a tone of surprise, ‘What a little rascal you are! You start up and you don’t know what’s what, and then you cry.’” The 1979 film adaptation won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but the scene above proved highly controversial, and the novel remains so.
Grass said he was a supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and in his “frolicsome black fables,” as the committee phrased it when awarding him the Nobel Prize, he created a novel that paints the political landscape with the same brush of sanity/insanity he uses for his main character. The Tin Drum pushed German readers to come to terms with their recent Nazi past. Decades later, though, Grass’s standing as “moralist-in-chief of German letters” would come into question with his late-life admission that he was a soldier in the Waffen SS. He, as much as anyone, would have had the need to come to terms with Nazism. Yet, because many have interpreted Oskar’s beating of the drum as a subconscious protest against middle-class complacency in the face of political upheaval, the phrase “to beat a tin drum”—to draw attention to a cause by creating a ruckus—has become a part of our cultural idiom.
Bibliography
The Tin Drum (1959)
Work Cited
“The Hypocrite’s Halo.” Editorial. Washington Times, August 20, 2006. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/aug/20/20060820-104132-7171r/.
—JP
Merlin
First Appearance: History of the Kings of Britain
Date of First Appearance: circa 1135
Author: Geoffrey of Monmouth (1095–1155)
Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.—The Once and Future King
Sorcerer, wizard, wise old sage, counselor to kings, protector of kingdoms, foreseer of the future. These qualities identify Merlin, a character whose history spans nearly 1,000 years and who has held kings in his hands and kingdoms in his grasp. Every wizard, warlock, or magician gracing the pages of fiction since the early Middle Ages or appearing larger than life in film from its advent at the turn of the twentieth century owes homage to this mythic man as their progenitor. Doctor Who in a BBC television show about a traveler through time says, “He has many many names. But in my reckoning he is Merlin.” His legendary figure, often dressed in flowing robes, wearing a pointed hat or a hood, and sporting a long gray or white beard, has been re-created in such figures as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings’ Gandalf, Star Wars’ Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Harry Potter’s Albus Dumbledore. Through these widely popular figures and many more, Merlin’s identity and influence continue to resonate, and he shows no sign of disappearing anytime soon.
The mysterious figure, fictionalized from Anglo-Saxon legend, would later come to be associated with King Arthur, Camelot, the Knights of the Round Table, and the search for the Holy Grail. He first appears in print around 1135 in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s composite History of the Kings of Britain and later singularly in Life of Merlin and Merlin’s Prophecies, but his history goes back several centuries to British folklore somewhere between the sixth and eighth centuries. He seems to be an amalgamation of two men, a figure referred to as “Wildman of the Woods,” and a fatherless boy called Ambrosius born of a noblewoman—some stories say a nun of noble birth—and a demon or incubus, thus the likely origin of his supernatural powers. The idea of a person unbounded by society either by birth or by choice holds such fascination in any age and culture that the telling and retelling of Merlin’s story proliferates from there: French poet Robert de Boron a few decades after Monmouth’s history, a mid-fifteenth-century Prose Merlin version composed by multiple authors from Boron’s poem, Sir Thomas Malory’s 1485 Le Morte d’Arthur, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–1885), T. H. White’s Once and Future King (1958), and on and on with new stories about Merlin or tales beyond these with characters whose authors have clearly been inspired by him.
Though in the realm of present Merlinesque characters his renown is somewhat eclipsed by Frodo’s tutor, Luke Skywalker’s mentor, or Harry Potter’s teacher, who are all derivatives of Merlin, imitation clearly is the truest form of flattery. He is the first literary figure to have embodied magical powers to promote a story’s action. He can shape-change to become another figure or use his powers to alter someone else’s appearance, teleport himself in time and space, move boulders to create Stonehenge, or cause a sword to be encased in stone only to be removed by a worthy successor to the crown. He is the force behind the scenes more than in front of them, but Merlin’s powers make him invaluable to king and kingdom, and his ability to transcend time ultimately gives him authority beyond the earthy climes kings occupy.
Merlin has been described as an archetype, a figure bearing important traits recurrent in human history, and he fits a couple of significant categories that famed psychologist Carl Jung notes. First, he is the “helper figure” whose keen grasp of circumstances, prophetic insight, intelligence, and a willingness to minister and to mentor serve him well, and he not only assists one king, he is counselor to three British rulers: King Vertigern, the first and least well known; his successor Uther Pendragon, who is Arthur’s father; and finally, Arthur himself. Merlin also might be interpreted through The Hero with a Thousand Faces and what Joseph Campbell calls the monomyth. In this structure an assistant/helper fills an important role of seeing the hero safely through a treacherous journey often in a land filled with magical elements and back home to receive the rewards bestowed upon him for his success. In comedic or satiric versions, this figure might be called a sidekick as Merlin appears in some versions of the Arthurian tale, or he can equally be portrayed as a necromancer with darker intent.
Whether Merlin is considered a prophet of good purpose or a wizard whose powers derive from evil depends on the time frame of the tale, who is telling the story, and the ideology, pagan or Christian, most prominent in the version being tapped into at the time. Merlin the wizard, descendant from demonic lineage, becomes more dominant in renderings where magic is central for control and can sometimes be misused for evil purposes. In these stories he is able to alter circumstances, shape-shift for deceptive purposes, and wield power over others to do his bidding or the bidding of the king against their will. Merlin the prophet functions more as wise counsel guiding the king and ensuring the safe succession and wise rule of the next heir.
But even the young Merlin grows old in spite of his magical abilities, and he becomes another archetype, the wise old man. This is the role, accompanied with the visual of the robe and white beard, so well associated with Merlin unless you’re a Generation Xer or a millennial, in which case the various progeny suitable to the era’s top magical sage take precedence. The wise old man is tasked first through his powers of prophetic vision to identify the young would-be hero capable of being a grand leader of men. Merlin, in at least Malory’s later version of the Arthurian legend, goes a step further in fulfilling this role first by creating the spell that alters Uther Pendragon’s appearance so he can sleep with the Duke of Cornwall’s wife and conceive Arthur. He then takes the child away to be groomed for his future. Once the wise old man has fulfilled his role and his ward has been safely secured as an effective leader, he then serves as spiritual and sometime tactical counsel until such time when he is either killed off, or in Merlin’s case is magically locked away to allow the hero full reign.
Merlin is a fascinating character in his own right, and equally important, he keeps good company. King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, Sir Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain and the Knights of the Round Table, Morgan le Fay, the Lady of the Lake. There is not a dull one in the bunch, and collectively their tale is as engaging as human drama gets. The litmus test of any good story is how many times it can be told, enhanced, altered, and adapted and still be a best seller or box office hit. For Merlin and his bevy of friends, the ticker is still counting.
Bibliography
History of the Kings of Britain (circa 1135)
Life of Merlin (circa 1150)
Merlin’s Prophecies (circa 1155)
Prose Merlin (circa 1450–1460)
Le Morte d’Arthur (1485)
Idylls of the King (1859)
The Once and Future King (1958)
Works Cited
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Books, 1949.
Jung, Carl. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Volume 9, Part 1. Princeton University Press, 1969.
Richardson, Rob. “Travels through Time and Space: Part Seven: Sylvester McCoy.” Expert Comics News and Reviews, April 11, 2013.
—GS
Meursault
First Appearance: L’Étranger (The Stranger)
Date of First Appearance: 1942
Author: Albert Camus (1913–1960)
I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so?
Rarely has a philosophy found as perfect a voice for expressing its view of the universe as existentialism does in Albert Camus’s story of a French Algerian man who, for inexplicable reasons, kills an Arab and is condemned to death. Camus may have rejected the assumption that he was an existentialist, insisting instead he was an absurdist, but the bleakness of both schools’ insistence that moral absolutes neither explain nor guide human behavior is nowhere in literature better dramatized than in the anomie of his narrator, a young clerk named only Meursault. Speaking in clipped, Hemingwayesque sentences, Camus’s antihero is a puzzling study in detachment whose inexpressive demeanor is presented as the only authentic response to death.
From the short novel’s opening paragraph, in which Meursault states that his Maman (mother) has passed away but that it doesn’t mean anything to him, to its conclusion, in which he imagines a crowd greeting his execution with cries of hatred, Camus’s speaker is an emotional blank slate. He doesn’t grapple with conscience as fellow murderer Raskolnikov does in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), nor is he a martyr for a social crisis like racism as does another convicted killer, Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Only in the closing pages does Meursault show any emotion, exploding at a priest who talks to him about God. Otherwise, he remains detached, which is why he inspires conflicting interpretations. He’s a character who can’t be made to care. When death is the ultimate fact of life, he says, what’s the point?
Camus once summed up his novel by saying, “In our society, any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death.” What he meant was that Meursault chooses not to behave as other people expect—he doesn’t “play the game.” When he attends his mother’s funeral, he fails to demonstrate the grief other people expect. He doesn’t want to see his mother in her casket one final time, and he doesn’t cry as her friends do during her memorial. The next day, Marie, a former acquaintance he invites to a movie after an afternoon at the beach, is startled to discover among his clothes a black tie worn as a sign of mourning—nothing in Meursault’s behavior hints that he’s suffered such a recent loss. Later, when Marie asks if he loves her, his blunt reply is “probably not.” As the original UK translation of Camus’s title states, Meursault is The Outsider—his actions don’t make sense to others because he speaks as he feels at any given moment, without trying to conform to anyone’s idea of what’s normal.
Meursault’s most inexplicable action is his unmotivated murder of an unnamed Arab on an Algerian beach. He might have claimed self-defense, for he first encountered his victim in a scuffle over the man’s sister, prompted after Meursault’s friend Raymond beat the woman. Yet the killing happens after this fight; Meursault returns to the scene of the confrontation with a borrowed gun, and not for revenge either. Going or not going, he says, is all the same to him. And while the Arab pulls a knife on him that catches the glare of the sun and blinds Meursault, suggesting he might fire mistakenly, or by unconscious impulse, he doesn’t just pull the trigger once—he shoots the man four more times. Four short knocks on the door of unhappiness, he calls the shots.
The second half of The Stranger depicts society’s effort to make sense of the crime, something Meursault, not surprisingly by now, sees little purpose in attempting. His court-appointed lawyer wants him to claim his grief over Maman’s death means he wasn’t in his right mind; the examining magistrate gives up on persuading him to beg God’s mercy and calls him “Monsieur Antichrist.” Because his friend Raymond is reportedly a pimp, the prosecuting attorney says the killing happens because he consorts with known criminals. The court sentences Meursault to death—by guillotine, no less—mostly because of his apparent callousness.
Despite his inexpressiveness, Meursault does find contentment at the novel’s end by accepting the inevitability of death. Whether this year or two decades in the future doesn’t matter: the finality is the same. To the priest whose duty is to comfort the condemned, this seems like utter hopelessness, and he promises to pray for the murderer—a condescending offer that prompts Meursault’s final, cathartic outburst. In his view, the priest is just as condemned as he is, because they will both die, and any hope of spiritual transcendence is self-deception. Meursault’s sudden rage shatters the priest, but Meursault himself doesn’t really understand how it cleanses him of the worst disease humanity can perpetuate—hope—until ship sirens awaken him in the middle of the night, and he suddenly feels at one with “the gentle indifference of the world.” Accepting death, he claims he’s happy—and that he was happy, too, before he murdered the Arab.
Meursault’s claim takes us back to the beginning of the novel, where we realize that for all his apathy, he really does enjoy satisfying moments of pleasure. He loves to sleep, and he enjoys sex with Marie. He likes food and coffee, swimming at the beach, and the intense sun and ocean smell of Algiers . . . at least when they’re not blinding him as he points a gun at somebody. These sensations from our physical environment, Camus insists, are our only source of meaning—not abstractions like values or social mores, but the intensity of feeling our physical environment gives us. Higher meanings are just self-delusions; all we have is the here and now.
Understanding why Meursault became so iconic in literature has a lot to do with the context in which he first appeared. L’Étranger was written shortly before France fell to the Nazis at the outset of World War II; when it was published under the Vichy regime in 1942, Hitler’s censors had to okay it. The novel slipped by because (a) it didn’t overtly criticize the Nazis and (b) it wasn’t by or about a Jew. Yet Meursault’s story, along with Camus’s accompanying essay on the absurd, The Myth of Sisyphus, made an immediate splash among resistance forces who found in it (thanks to a positive review by Jean-Paul Sartre)—confirmation that neither faith, patriotism, nor honor would help them survive the occupation, much less regain their country. Survival would mean engaging the moment without dogma or sentimentality and recognizing that no rational explanation for the horrors of Hitler existed. After the war, Camus would soften The Stranger’s severity in his occupation allegory The Plague (1947), but no character in that novel can compete with Meursault—mostly thanks to his uncompromisingly oblique voice.
In recent decades, readers have explored Meursault’s Algerian identity and his relationship to the Arabic population during France’s colonial rule (which didn’t end until 1962, two years after Camus’s death). Postcolonial readings of The Stranger abound, many questioning whether reductively referring to the murder victim as “the Arab” reflects a colonialist mind-set on the part of Meursault (and Camus), with others arguing that Meursault’s prosecution victimizes him comparably to Algeria’s oppressed peoples. The difficulty of answering this question has recently been tackled by Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud, whose marvelous The Meursault Investigation (2013) gives the victim a name (Musa) while recasting the story of The Stranger from the point of view of his surviving family members.
Bibliography
L’Étranger (1942)
Work Cited
Kamel, Daoud. Meursault, contre-enquête. Hydra, Algeria: Barzakh Editions, 2013. English version: The Meursault Investigation. Trans. John Cullen. New York: Other Press, 2015.
—KC
The Misfit
First Appearance: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in The Avon Book of Modern Writing
Date of First Appearance: 1953
Author: Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.
The author would’ve preferred the victim of the crime be cited as the most memorable character from her most famous story. For Flannery O’Connor, the unnamed grandmother of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a woman viciously murdered for assuring a stone-cold killer nicknamed the Misfit that he’s deep down a moral man, is an agent of grace—albeit a deeply fallible one. In a 1963 essay called “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable,” O’Connor claimed that the grandmother plants the mustard seed of God’s irresistible redemption in the soul of the escaped convict a mere second before he blows her head off. The old woman’s words will haunt her killer, the writer insisted, until at some future date he stops rebelling against divine authority and transforms into the proselytizer O’Connor believed all mortals were born to be. Don’t get distracted by the dead bodies, she said. The underlying religious message was more important than the story’s slick hardboiled surface, even if the Misfit does get the story’s coolest line: “She would have been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
With a deep sigh, O’Connor admitted her words likely fell on deaf ears; give readers a choice between an upstanding citizen and a bad man with a loaded shotgun, and they’ll go for the latter. Although she didn’t say it, one imagines her thinking her audience would only accept the theological message if they, like the grandmother, were staring down the end of two loaded barrels.
Yet with all due respect to the grandmother, the Misfit is indeed the character who makes “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” such a wickedly acerbic satire of hollow faith in a secular age. Although he doesn’t appear until the final scene, his presence is felt throughout—first as a parody of the breathless media sensationalism that turns crime sprees into a form of cultural entertainment, and then as an unremittingly bleak embodiment of amoral violence, one who rationalizes his evil as the only sane response to life. In effect, the Misfit bridges two traditions of modern crime writing. Before he enters the story, the danger he presents to society seems so distant that his evil feels unreal, not unlike that of the bad guys in first-generation pulp fiction with similarly cartoonish nicknames like “Whisper” or “The Beast.” When the killer and his henchmen appear calmly wielding guns, though, he offers an emotionally detached but intellectually reasoned rejection of theological good. His calm embrace of the fallen world boils down to his credo: “No pleasure but meanness.” His ability to rationalize evil makes him a bone-chilling cousin to such nihilistic antiheroes as Meursault in Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942), Lou Ford in Jim Thompson’s noir classic The Killer inside Me (1952), or Robert Mitchum’s preacher-turned-serial killer in Charles Laughton’s 1955 film The Night of the Hunter. As more than one critic has argued, the Misfit is a godfather to the serial killers who populate today’s fiction and TV crime shows, making him a harbinger of our queasy desire to peek into the dark underbelly of the soul.
Part of what makes “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” such an effective short story is the startling tonal shift it takes when the Misfit enters the plot as a kind of anticowboy, shirtless and in stolen jeans. The first half of the text is a rollicking satire of the midcentury South’s changing landscape, perhaps second only to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) in using a road trip to parody the gaucheries of American popular culture. Packed into a car with her son, Bailey, his wife, and his obnoxious children for a Florida vacation, the grandmother witnesses a culture far more transitory and disconnected than the Tennessee of her relatives. In a world of garish roadside distractions, from comic books and jukeboxes to billboards screaming in all caps and exclamation points to greasy BBQ stands run by men like Red Sammy Butts whose punning names reduce them to stereotypical goobers, newspaper accounts of the Misfit’s crimes just seem like one more disposable amusement. The grandmother revels in gossiping about the on-the-lam felon, masking her enjoyment of the suspense he brings to her dull life with the cheap nostalgia of lamenting that the world has gone to pot.
Not that the grandmother is the good person she laments there aren’t more of. She doesn’t much care for her grandchildren, John Wesley and June Star (who are admittedly obnoxious). The malicious pleasure she gets from telling the story of a “nigger boy” who once ate a watermelon intended for her because her “gentleman” suitor, Edgar Atkins Teagarden, carved his initials in it (“E.A.T.”) is hardly Christian in spirit. It’s when the grandmother’s cat, Pitty Sing, causes Bailey to wreck the car on an isolated dirt road and the Misfit descends on the stranded family that the woman’s true hypocrisy is revealed. She not only blurts out the spree killer’s name when she recognizes his face, dooming the family to be shot in the woods, pleading for their lives, but she also insists the Misfit wouldn’t possibly shoot a lady because he doesn’t have “common blood.” Her equivalence between goodness and simplistic Christian piety is as transparent as it is desperate; by the time she’s muttering “Jesus, Jesus,” she sounds as if she’s swearing, not praying.
In contrast to her superficial pleas, the Misfit’s beliefs are fascinatingly complex. As the former gospel singer and undertaker reveals, he can’t remember the crime that first sent him to the penitentiary. It doesn’t really matter because original sin already condemns humanity to guilt before it can ever choose evil on its own. Committing crimes is his way of owning or “signing for” the bad deeds for which God has prejudged his children. The Misfit also rejects the idea of believing without proof that Christ redeemed humanity, because that would require a leap of faith that further robs individuals of choice. If Jesus did rise from the dead, then people should have no excuse for not following him, but if he didn’t, then humanity has no reason not to indulge in evil because life is unfair suffering. The Misfit wants theological certainty; in its absence, he thinks he can only enjoy the brutality of rebelling.
In the end, though, not even evil relieves doubt. When the grandmother touches his shoulder attempting some gesture of motherly comfort, the Misfit shoots her dead. One of his henchmen laughs, but the story ends with the killer’s sharp rebuke of his own philosophy that meanness is enjoyable: “It ain’t no pleasure in life,” he grunts. No killer in literature seems to enjoy his job less, which somehow makes the Misfit even cooler.
Bibliography
The Avon Book of Modern Writing (1953)
A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)
Work Cited
O’Connor, Flannery. “On Her Own Work: A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable.” In Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, 107–14. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.
—KC
Guy Montag
First Appearance: “The Fireman” in Galaxy Science Fiction
Date of First Appearance: February 1951
Author: Ray Bradbury (1920–2012)
There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house.
Aldous Huxley helped forge discussion of a dystopian “brave new world” with his 1932 novel of the same name, George Orwell followed with Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Ray Bradbury soon joined in with his publication Fahrenheit 451 (1953), voted “one of the best dystopian novels of all time” by Paste magazine. Bibliophiles were horrified by a society that deemed books so dangerous they not only had to be banned, but also burned along with the houses in which they were found, and the book-loving perpetrators immediately arrested. The idea was shocking. It still is. The novel’s opening sentence was “It is a pleasure to burn,” and its protagonist Guy Montag serves as a fireman whose job is not to put out fires, but to start them—chiefly for the purpose of destroying books. He readily does so until his thinking is jogged, and he begins to question the process, which is precisely the danger meant to be stifled. Like all dystopian novels, interrogating a futuristic society leads to an interrogation of the path that got them there and what that connection is to the current status quo. Guy Montag becomes the book’s social conscience, the instrument through which questioning occurs, and as such, he is as relevant now as he was more than half a century ago and will be a half century from now, and no doubt beyond.
Guy’s first name and generalized characterization portray him as a nondescript cog in a large wheel controlled by an indistinct entity, and this is the position he and the masses have intentionally been lulled into accepting. His teenage neighbor Clarisse has been less susceptible to the mind-dulling, hypnotic condition under which everyone has fallen because she and her family don’t watch the giant screen on their wall, and her relatively innocent questions cause Guy to probe his own thoughts about why things are the way they are. She asks if firemen’s original job was to put out fires rather than start them, and he laughs uncomfortably but can’t put his finger on why. When she asks if he’s happy, Guy confesses that he feels “his body divide itself . . . the two halves grinding one upon the other.” This scrutiny of his own thoughts seems too subversive at first, so he justifies it as Clarisse projecting her thoughts onto him. He also rejects the idea that he is in control of his hands’ actions, but rather that they have a volition of their own. Eventually, Guy confronts his mindless following of edicts, and he begins secretly challenging ideas, even though he is one of the enforcers meant to keep thoughts at bay by destroying the books. Guy slowly begins to rebel by hiding and reading books, and eventually he exchanges using actual fire for participating in an intellectual firestorm when he joins the few resisters left at the end of the novel’s cathartic mass destruction.
Bradbury’s purpose behind creating Guy Montag and Fahrenheit 451 seems obvious. Aren’t all dystopian novels a rebellion against government, and this one certainly has that flavor as well. Early on when asked where the idea came from, Bradbury said, “Well, Hitler, of course. When I was 15, he burned the books in the streets of Berlin. Then along the way I learned about the libraries in Alexandria burning 5000 years ago. That grieved my soul. Since I’m self-educated, that means my educators—the libraries—are in danger. And if it could happen in Alexandria, if it could happen in Berlin, maybe it could happen somewhere up ahead, and my heroes would be killed.” This connection to Hitler’s actions led many to believe that Guy Montag and his world were products of Bradbury’s rebellion against politics, though he denies the book was meant as an antigovernment invective. It is certainly easy to see why it might be read that way, though.
Autocratic regimes ruling with unchecked power had proved highly dangerous and were targeted and defeated in the previous decade’s world war. Nazis in Germany had not just burned in the streets books they saw as subversive; they began incinerating en masse people who didn’t agree with them or those they deemed inferior. But even post–World War II, it wasn’t long before the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee under Senator Joe McCarthy made people starkly aware that government was watching them, and blacklisting, censorship, and other punishments were doled out to those who didn’t fit the accepted mold. Again, this seems like an easy assumption for what inspired Bradbury’s novel and Guy Montag as his mouthpiece fighting such crimes against individual freedom.
The real motivator, Bradbury revealed in an interview much later, was radio and television. He said, “I wasn’t worried about freedom. I was worried about people turned into morons by T.V.” He saw listening and viewing as antithetical to reading, and “this sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again.” With television relatively new at the time he was writing the book, he anticipated its hypnotic qualities as the opioid of the masses, and Guy Montag’s wife becomes the zombie reflecting what is happening in all the houses. Interestingly, this concept has reared its head again, this time with discussion about the danger of social media as the new opioid with its large-scale ability to be abused. HBO released its version of Fahrenheit 451 in May 2018, and it is widely seen as ticking “all the right dystopian-horror boxes”—but it doesn’t have the power of Bradbury’s text.
In the novel, aside from the obvious danger of being found out as a rebel, the dilemma Montag faces is that he must think for himself and understand the value of books if he is going to risk so much to read them, and, like other resisters, to preserve them through memory. Books contradict each other, even themselves, and they require analysis, hypothesis, synthesis, and decisions about philosophical beliefs. Reading and digesting a book is serious business and can develop heretics against whatever regime is currently dominant. They are powerful tools, and Montag comes to understand that and to protect the privilege.
The novel ends as a large flash appears on the horizon, and it’s clear that the city has been destroyed—not completely apocalyptic, however, because Montag and the others who become the keepers of the books they have memorized will carry the seeds to rebuild. The stories will be told over and over, an idea later copied in the 1985 film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, as part of the past’s heritage that will become the tales informing the future. Montag has memorized the biblical passage “To everything there is a season. A time to break down, and a time to build up,” and the destruction and rebirth described in that passage come full circle as he and his friends usher in a new dawn.
Bibliography
Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Works Cited
Bradbury, Ray. Interview by Dana Gioia. “Creating Fahrenheit 451.” National Endowment for the Arts Magazine, 3, 2006.
“Bradbury on Censorship/Television.” Video clip. RayBradbury.com. Accessed October 16, 2018. http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html.
Gilbert, Sarah. “Fahrenheit 451 Tackles the Evils of Social Media.” Atlantic, May 19, 2018.
Jackson, Frannie and Paste staff. “The 30 Best Dystopian Novels of All Time.” Paste magazine, May 29, 2018.
—GS
Dean Moriarty
First Appearance: On the Road
Date of First Appearance: 1957
Author: Jack Kerouac (1922–1969)
A kind of holy lightning I saw flashing from his excitement and his visions, which he described so torrentially that people in buses looked around to see the “overexcited nut.” In the West he’d spent a third of his time in the poolhall, a third in jail, and a third in the public library. They’d seen him rushing eagerly down the winter streets, bareheaded, carrying books to the poolhall, or climbing trees to get into the attics of buddies where he spent days reading or hiding from the law.
Some characters become famous because they’re based on famous people. Others become literary idols and end up making the people they’re based on famous. That’s the case with Dean Moriarty, the “holy goof” who embodies America’s restless energy and reckless velocity in Jack Kerouac’s beatnik classic On the Road. Both in biographical background and personality, Dean is inseparable from the man who inspired him, Neal Cassady (1926–1968). Kerouac spent his career mythologizing the charisma Cassady exuded, seeing in him a spontaneity and vibrancy akin to the improvisational riffing of jazz musicians. While the author was convinced he captured those qualities better in his novel Visions of Cody (an excerpted version was published in 1960, but the complete text appeared only posthumously in 1972). On the Road is the book that turned both men into cult heroes and made the Beat generation’s boundary-breaking spirit of exploration and adventure an antidote to the 1950s’ staid conservatism. Over the decade that followed, Kerouac’s novel inspired beatniks, hipsters, and hippies to seek enlightenment in the unconventional. Cassady soon discovered that fans of On the Road expected the real-life Dean to live up to the legend. The notoriety cost him jail time and likely contributed to his premature death at forty-one.
From the opening sentence, Dean Moriarty dominates On the Road. Kerouac’s alter ego narrator, Sal Paradise, hears stories of him, then reads philosophical letters he mails, even before the two meet. When Dean shows up in New York City along with his teenage bride, Marylou, Sal inadvertently interrupts them having sex. From this auspicious introduction, Sal learns his new friend’s three main impulses are carnal, criminal, and literary. Dean wants to be a writer but needs Sal to teach him how. He is also relatively fresh from reform school, having done time for heisting cars to joyride, but his “criminality” isn’t pathological or psychotic. It’s a “wild yea-saying outburst of American joy,” a quest for two things usually depicted as antitheses: knowledge and kicks.
Structurally, On the Road is divided between four cross-country trips Sal takes between 1947 and 1950. The first, set a year after the friends’ initial meeting, leads Sal alone to Denver, where he learns that Dean grew up the son of an alcoholic hobo who left him to fend for himself in downtown pool halls. Dean appears in this journey only long enough to introduce his new wife, Camille, before Sal heads for San Francisco for adventures of his own. In the following year’s odyssey, Dean summons the narrator for a trip to New Orleans, accompanied now again by Marylou; as Sal realizes, his friend’s gusto renders him incapable of settling down with one woman for long. Sal is even shocked when Dean invites him to sleep with his girl. In a scene highlighted in the 2012 movie starring Kristen Stewart, Marylou sits naked between the two men and strokes their penises with cold cream. (At least one radical aspect of Cassady On the Road suppresses, though, is his bisexuality; Kerouac doesn’t allow Dean to bed Carlo Marx as Cassady did that character’s inspiration, poet Allen Ginsberg.) The most significant event occurs when Dean accompanies Sal to a bebop jazz performance where the musicians’ effortless virtuosity leads Dean to introduce his idea of “IT,” the epiphany one achieves by diving into the adrenaline of experience without concern for rational thought.
Dean doesn’t fully articulate his theory until Sal’s third journey, set in 1949, by which point their intellectual circle is fed up with Dean’s selfish hedonism. When their mutual friend Galatea Dunkel takes Dean to task for his constant philandering, Sal realizes the criticism is pointless: Dean is “the Idiot, the Imbecile, the Saint of the lot . . . the HOLY GOOF.” This latter term places him in the tradition of the holy fool, of sages who speak wisdom in bouts of madness—though in Dean’s case “madness” is passionate intensity, not insanity. To him “IT” is a transcendent moment in which time stops and one experiences pure beatitude or bliss, something the duo feels when they arrive in Chicago and watch their jazz hero, pianist George Shearing, perform.
By the fourth journey, though, the mood darkens, and Sal wonders if Dean’s energies can be put to a productive purpose. By now Dean is the father of four children, two with Camille, an illegitimate one out west, and a new one with his latest girlfriend, Inez, whom he marries without bothering to divorce Camille. Sal’s growing impatience comes to a head in Mexico when he comes down with dysentery and Dean abandons him to rush back to Inez. Sal considers him a “rat.” The novel ends with two final encounters, the first showing that Dean hasn’t changed (he is back with Camille, though he wants Inez to live across town from them), the second admitting that he has. For reasons Kerouac doesn’t explain, Dean rolls briefly through New York but “he couldn’t talk anymore and said nothing.” Saddened, Sal decides the old Dean is gone but the new one will go on, though he can’t shake Dean’s influence on his sensibility. In a melancholy final paragraph, he pictures the immensity of America and its endless circling roadways, as circuitous as his thoughts, and all he can say is, “I think of Dean Moriarty.”
Kerouac followed On the Road with a dozen Beat generation novels, some featuring another version of Dean Moriarty with a different name, Cody Pomeray. By the mid-1960s, their creator grew to resent bitterly his fame as the king of the Beats and denounced the burgeoning hippie movement—often truculently, as when he appeared slurring and bloated, nearly unrecognizable, on William F. Buckley’s syndicated TV show Firing Line a year before his 1969 death. Cassady’s fame had an equally tragic effect. Largely because of On the Road’s notoriety, police in 1958 entrapped the real-life Dean in a pot bust that cost him two years in San Quentin. Emerging as a countercultural hero, Cassady fell into the trap of trying to live up to his wild and reckless reputation, traveling frenetically but aimlessly, ingesting dangerous amounts of LSD, and serving as a guru to Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters in 1964. In early 1968, reportedly under the influence of Seconal, he passed out on a Mexican railroad track and died of exposure. “Thank God,” his ex-wife Carolyn—Camille in On the Road—said. “Released at last.”
Despite the enduring fascination with Neal Cassady, Dean Moriarty is more than a simple transcription of the man who inspired him. As Kerouac mythologizes him, Dean incarnates the paradoxes of America. Restless even as he exhausts his natural resources, he represents an ideal that remains on the go even as it’s running on empty.
Bibliography
On the Road (1957)
Works Cited
Kerouac, Jack. Excerpts from Visions of Cody. New York: New Directions, 1960.
———. Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.
—KC