Death and Rebirth

1969

A Dissenting View of D. H. Lawrence’s The Odour of Chrysanthemums

During the entire evening covered by the story, Elizabeth builds an anger, tinged with apprehension, over her husband’s irresponsibility.  She blames him for her loneliness and isolation.  She gives the impression she is suffering from doing her required duty as a mother and wife, while he makes merry with the other men, shirking his duty as husband and father.  there is a gradual growing fear that harm may have befallen him, but her past experience has been that this is not the case, and that he is well and happy in some pub.  Yet her fear is strong enough that it does not come as a complete surprise when he is brought home dead, instead of dead drunk.  It does not escape her that he died lingering behind on his job either.

But in his death she sees the realities of both their lives.  Perhaps she even sees his death as an escape from her prison of insensitivity.  This tinges her with guilt, even more than the guilt she felt for misjudging his motives.  Still this guilt seems minor to her feelings.  In the dead body, she sees the impersonal object that he was to her in life.  She ceases to blame him, realizing it was as awful for him as it had been for her.  She feels sorrow and respect toward him, knowing he had dwelt in as much alienation from her as she from him.

She views his death as not a tragedy to her and her children, because it is a death, but because their tragedy was in living together and knowing each other.  The tries to act out the tragedy of death, but cannot, for it has actually ended a tragedy of life.  Death is his tragedy, not hers, for she can try again, while he cannot. She feels no emotion toward the dead body, for it is a stranger’s body.  She feels no claim on it, because she made no claim on it in life.  She respects him enough as a man not to touch him more than she must.  At first, she kisses him, but the kiss has no more meaning than it had meant in life.  She finds their life together had been no more alive than the dead body left in her parlor.  She doe not fear her life without him, for now she has another chance.  

She does fear she will die without fulfilling that chance and be a stranger to someone, or that she really is not reborn anymore than the dead man is reborn, or their love was reborn, by the kiss she gave him when the body was first left.

She shows this not only by her thoughts, but by the lack of emotion toward his death, as in her inability to cry, her rationalization that she should cry for his mother’s sake and in her calmness in waiting for the necessary things to be done.

Idealism and Cynicism: Conflict in Fiction

1969

In one of his works, Ernest Hemingway (pictured on the right) comments that the world breaks every man sooner or later, but some are stronger afterward.  This may be the ultimate statement about the clash of man’s ideals and the world’s cynicism.  It certainly comes close.  

There are different kinds of breakage, of course.  When the echoes cease resounding from

 the clash of ideal and real, there remain four choices for the individual.  He may accept the world and become cynical.  He may withdraw from the world.  He may compromise.  He may stand pat upon his ideals and accept the consequences. There are characters representing these four choices in each of these works.  

Silas Lapham (by William Dean Howells, pictured left) is a compromiser.  He chooses to stand by certain ideals, even though they ruin his financial status.  Basically he is a pragmatic, but it is apparent that Lapham can live with his choices because the results are still satisfying to him.

On the other hand, men like Mr. Ferris or Jason Compson give themselves over to cynicism.  Mr. Ferris may still have a chance to return to some earlier ideal, but Jason Compson is beyond ideals.  Jason was well on his way to cynicism as a child.  He is the perfect triple-threat: selfish, suspicious and unscrupulous,

Perhaps the choices came easily for Silas Lapham and Jason Compson, but the choices come hard for Quentin, Laura and the Hungry Artist, if a choice comes at all.

“The Flowering Judas” (by Katherine Anne Porter, pictured right), Laura, never makes a choice.  She is all and none.  She is a staunch believer in ideals.  She indicates she left a comfortable and religious background to join the revolution.  She is risking her life and reputation by siding with rebels.  Yet, she is also withdrawn.  She hovers on the sideline, never quite committed.  She is aloof, peripheral.  She sees the need for Braggioni’s leadership, sees his talent, so perhaps she is compromising.  However, she deplores the selfish natives behind Braggioni’s actions.  Is she becoming a cynic?

Laura has moved to a personal crisis.  She can no longer afford to drift between cynicism and idealism.  She has broken her own ideals by aiding a man in his suicide.  The decision will be removed from her own hand if she doesn’t choose soon.  her dream indicates she is awaking to her difficulty, but we are not allowed to know the decision she may make.  Perhaps she chooses to become a lady writer.

Quentin (The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, pictured left) is torn between the choice of cynicism and idealism and ends by choosing withdrawal.  His desire to live by his ideals is difficult because his family has already shattered most of them.  Point of fact, he believes in Caddy’s purity and cannot resolve her promiscuity.  It is not simply Caddy’s loose morals that concern Quentin (although Caddy is the center of attention in each son’s story), it is the lack of honor and affection of his family.  Quentin wishes to uphold these virtues, but his father’s negative philosophy keeps intruding on his hopes.  Quentin simply isn’t strong enough, emotionally or physically (notices he loses his fights with Ames and Bland).  Quentin would like to stop time, which he can’t do.  No matter how many clock hands he removes, the seconds still tick off.

Quentin seems withdrawn even as a child and as he broods and frets, he withdraws further.  The love and honor in Quentin is a weak shadow that is blotted out by the darker shadow cast by his family.  He wants to stop time, to hold off reality.  He kills himself.

"The Hungry Artist" (by Franz Kafka, pictured right) also dies, but it isn’t a withdrawal.  He does not compromise on the high standards he has set for himself, and like most pure idealists, the world lets him die.  Not to climb too far out on a limb, I would say the Hungry Artist could easily represent the difficulty of any man choosing to stand by his ideals against the cynical world.  The world breaks him, but he doesn’t heal stronger -- he dies.  (Like Christ in the wilderness, the Hungry Artist fasts for forty days, and Christ is the most famous idealist and the world killed him too.)

Whether the characters are heroic or failures is hard to say.  Laura avoids heroics, Quentin is too weak and the Hungry Artist claims he cannot do differently.  It is easier to sympathize with them because they are relating to a question that must be answered in some manner by us all.

To add a personal note, I have been writing seriously for years and have been published a dozen times or so.  I have had to earn a living by other means; therefore, I fall into Laura’s trap.  What choice shall I make?  Shall I devote myself to my job and move up to management in a bank or concentrate more fully on college, which I have been attending for several years as well?  Or should I hold fast to the standards I set for my writing, ignore the other areas and chance the fate of the Hungry Artist?

I am reminded of an example in history related to Laura’s problem.  The composer, Charles Ives (pictured left), decided the world would not accept his music during his life, so he would make money in insurance, retire and write his kind of music.  He made money, but before he retired he had a nervous breakdown from trying to follow two life styles, and as a result he could no longer write his music.  Idealism versus cynicism, conflict of art; conflict of life.