White Noise, pre-critical reading

I'm trying something a bit different here, and it might be interesting and it might not. I'm going to write two reviews of Don Delillo's White Noise, one before I read the background material and whatnot included in the Viking critical edition (gotta love those critical editions) and then another after. Essentially, I'm seeing how much, and what, changes in my views on a work of art when I know it in a (relative) vacuum, and when I know the thoughts of others on it.

The more I dwell on White Noise, the more I like it. The style of it strikes me as a cross between Pynchon and Vonnegut – darkly satiric and openly arty, but approachable.

Was anything written in the '80s not darkly satiric, by the way? It seems an apocalyptic decade. The next generation seemed odd and dangerous, but it wouldn't matter because they wouldn't be given a chance to grow up, at least not in anything but some post-apocalyptic hell. This seems to be the end-pointed gestured toward by so many works in the '80s.

Ultimately, the work is about how we deal with death, and the verdict seems to be that we deal with it by lying to everyone until we know until we reach ourselves. The book's tensions are all predicated on falsehoods, though it's only when the truth is revealed that the real trouble begins.

Ignorance is bliss could be the motto of the book. The protagonist, Jack Glad ney, is a formidable figure of great intelligence, at least when seen from the outside. Our perspective shows him as a man constantly fretting about the opinions of others, of becoming obsolete to his wife, to his family, to his work. His counterpart is Murray, who is painfully, prophetically honest. Murray seems incapable of deceit, gleefully showing the patchwork of lies that make up society. In a way, Murray seems a modern take on the Trickster character, setting up people for their great falls, but unlike the Tricksters of old it is not simply an element of truth, a grain of fact, in his words – they are pure fact. And they destroy.

Jack Gladney has convinced himself in four previous marriages that he wanted women so intelligent they were involved in Intelligence, but they all left him unsatiated. He has found love in a simple woman, Babette (whom he calls Baba in bed). And the core of her simplicity, as it is revealed, is her uncaring of death. They rarely discuss it, but when they do she says she hopes she dies first. It is a comforting thought to Jack, who doesn't want to die first simply because he doesn't want to die ever. The revelation that death haunts her, constantly, to the point of complete moral collapse, is the Fall of their relationship.

From here he has but one remaining comfort: the young boy, Wilder. I'm not sure Wilder's age is ever given, but he borders on ageless. He is within talking age, but he chooses not to. There is no gross hints of autism or any learning disabilities – he simply doesn't talk much. It is revealed near the end of the book, after roughly a year has passed, he is talking less. Far from concerning his parents, he becomes a simple comfort, a person of pure ego (as described by Murray), with no concern of the death of himself or those around him.

The last chapter of the book opens with an extended scene of Wilder, worth describing in some detail (after this scene there is a brief epilogue, which seems like it should be a separate entity and not the end of the same chapter). He rides his tricycle across a multilane highway as two old ladies watch, screaming but not interceding, as cars nearly hit him but don't, Wilder himself wildly unconcerned. After safely crossing, borderline miraculously, he rides down an embankment into some mud. Finding himself half-floating in the filth, he begins to cry, to weep, to wail, at which point a passing driver stops and goes down to help him, the ladies serving only as witnesses, not participants.

It's a rather odd scene, something that, in isolation, could be used as a standard mockery of art, a post-modern mess. But of course it isn't that, not when taken with what else is said about Wilder, and what the book is.

The key phrase to this is, once again, from a discussion between Murray and Jack. Wilder is either described as or described as having (the sentence is, purposefully probably, ambiguous) a “cloud of unknowing.” This is a reference to the 14^th century work of English Christian mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing. In that work, God is described as either having or being a cloud of unknowing, only pierceable with the arrows of love. In other words, Wilder serves as a symbol for God.

In what way? It seems to me that Wilder serves as God for Jack and Babette, for all those around him who need the comfort of the deathless, of embracing the unknowing. If lies are unsustainable, and the truth destroys, the option is the embracing, the worship, of the unknown, of ignorance. In other words, the novel goes about describing a sort of atheistic mysticism, an embracing of the unknown because the Truth is too grand for comprehension, the difference between it and ancient mysticism being that the Truth has gone from God to Nothing.

But the last scene calls even this succor into question. Can this Edenic idiocy avoid a Fall perpetually, or is that what we're seeing in the final chapter? Just as the book shows an atheistic mysticism, maybe this an atheistic apocalypse, an event no longer of an end in redemption, but an end in collapse.

Cheery! Thanks, the '80s!

Moneyball: A Tale of Three Movies

I feel a bit torn on Moneyball. It's well-acted, essentially well-directed, and the script holds together well; the problem is, it feels a bit diffuse. You get the feeling that there are three different movies competing for screentime, which I think comes from the problem of adapting a book like Moneyball, which isn't really a narrative. Sorkin's proven his ability to adapt well from odd sources, but this doesn't flow nearly so well as The Social Network did. The three main movies are: a somewhat detached look at a two men removing the “sport” element from team management and the conflict that brings, the super-stereotypical sports movie where the underdogs no one expects anything from come from behind to win it all against insurmountable blah blah blah, and a human interest movie about a man combining the protective impulses of a father with his job and background to find a way to protect others from the mistakes he's made. Essentially, there's the Sorkin movie, the Miller (the director) movie, and the producers' movie (which is Blind Side II: Now With Baseball).

The Sorkin movie is really good – potentially great, even. The dehumanizing of sports, one of our culture's last rites, in an effort to raise competitiveness, an endeavor which is fruitless almost as soon as it's started working, is the stuff of a Great Movie. It's a friendlier Godfather, an ambiguous allegory on capitalism and its effects, but shot through with snappy patter and Jonah Hill being large and awkward.

But, this movie isn't all there. I don't care to know the details behind its failure, whether the script just never got polished enough or whether it got torn to shreds in an effort to make the movie more palatable to the desired audience. Sorkin's had enough mega-failures of his own making (see: Studio 60) that I wouldn't put it past him to fumble this one.

The remaining movies do make me doubt that, though. The director seems uninterested in the numbers-crunching that is the heart (or, rather, lack thereof) of the story. Instead you see a lot of the games, recreated and file footage both. Particularly egregious is the nearly-concluding montage of victory's for the A's, complete with slow-mo home runs and base running, fans rising up as a tidal wave of applause, bombastic music trying desperately to convey the grandeur of the moment. Maybe this is all intended satirically, so that the lack of a world series, and the lack of notability afterward, is all the more jarring. Maybe – but it sure doesn't feel like that. The viewer gets the idea that if it weren't for all those messy facts they could've given the movie a good ending, which is rather beside the point.

And now let's deal with the – ugh – producers' movie. For those of you who don't know, Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, is also the author of The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game in which there's sort of a human interest story but mostly it's about how much football has changed due to an iconoclastic individual doing things in a new way. The movie version enlarged the human interest story and turned it into The Blind Side, which made 1000% of its budget at the box office, a fact I'm sure has nothing to do with why the producers desperately wanted Moneyball to be like it. Anyway, in The Blind Side II: This Time It's Brad Pitt, we see a devoted divorcee dad learning to love people, projected through his saintly love and kindness towards his daughter. It is a plot (and a treatment of a plot) so banal I have nothing to say about it. The most you could say about it is that it skews any interpretation of the film towards the humanistic, showing that happiness comes through love and not success, a moral that feels about as tacked on as the last chapter of The Book of Job.

Moneyball ends up being accidentally reflective of the story it tells. It tries to do things a bit differently, with a focus on the numbers, and this works for most the film, but in the end it fizzles out. Now all that's left is for someone to come along and make a totally brilliant film about the Red Sox world series and make us forget all about Moneyball and the A's.

The Golden Ass and Religious Ambiguity

I just finished Apuleius' Metamorphoses (called The Golden Ass by St. Augustine, who sorta hated it, so not sure we should keep calling it that). One thing that's interesting is how everyone approaches the last two chapters as being very serious and earnest in regard to Isis-worship. I'm not sure the text supports this (note: all quotes and citations come from the Robert Graves translation. I'll read the Lindsay one pretty soon, once I, well, own it). There are two major points to be made to refute the earnestness of these last two books. The first is through an examination of Apuleius' treatment of other religions, comparing these with what is said about Isis-worship. The second is of the satire directed towards the going-ons of the temples.

Besides Isis-worship, I can think of four other major representations of religion (not myth, but the active practice of spiritual matters): the black magic at the beginning, the thieves' worship of Mars, the “one and only God” worship of the baker's wife, and finally the goddess worship of the catamite priests.

As regards Apuleius' thoughts towards black magic, there's only so much that can be gleaned from the text. It's dangerous, and, with a bit of a stretch, can be said to be generally anti-nature, pushing people or objects away from their platonic ideals (vs. white magic, which pushes things towards their ideal through healing and whatnot). There can be a bit more gained from his Apologia, which was the defense he gave for himself against charges of black magic. For my purposes, the main thing to report is the description of black magic as “left-handed.” This comes back in the Isis parade at the end of the novel: one of the holy images is that of a left hand, which, the text says, symbolizes “justice.”

I have nothing to say about the thieves' worship of Mars, other than that they seem quite sincere about it all, far more so than the other examples. Maybe that's worth mentioning, but it doesn't really tie into the broader point I'm making with the other examples, so I'll skip it.

The “one and only God” worship in the baker's wife story is rather infamous, as it's directed against Christianity and is the primary reason why the book has suffered persecution for the majority of its existence. It is in no way a favorable look on Christianity, saying that it was a religion used as an excuse to get drunk early in the name of God. The key, though, is that at the end of the novel, we see Isis and Isis/Osiris being (both) referred to as the One True God (my paraphrase). So, despite his distaste for worshipping one god, he ultimately does anyway (admittedly through the worship of multiple gods, which the real-life Apuleius was said to have done).

Of all the worshippers, though, the eunuch priests get the harshest treatment by Apuleius. They are androgynous, greedy rapists with no thought towards spiritual matters. Now, the most obvious point is that they are “goddess” worshippers, and the focus on “goddess” instead of giving a definite goddess leads me to connect their goddess with the generic representations of Isis that she goes through during her various dream-visions with Lucius. And, interestingly, cross-dressing comes back into play during the parade as well (the parade has a bit of a carnival atmosphere, so could be dismissed from this, but I think it's still a worthwhile detail).

So, of our various religions – all of which are shown, through their devotees, to be rather fallen – they all share some elements with the religion presented as “true” at the end. This leads to two possible scenarios: Apuleius is presenting the true religion as a combination of them all, or, rather, as being large and diverse enough that other religions contain some element of its truth; or Apuleius is slyly saying that all religions, the final true one included, are in some way fallen and untrue.

An element to push it towards the latter is the quiet motif of money running throughout the final two books of the novel. For being mostly a connected of initiations, rites, and dream-visions (and their fulfillments), they manage to mention money quite a bit. First he finances one temple, then spends all of his money getting to another one in order to finance it, eventually selling the shirt off his back (literally) to buy his way through another initiation. As he becomes a successful lawyer, he can afford to give even more money (at one point, having a charge directly related to how much he believed). The end result is that he shows his allegiance proudly, bearing his monkishly-shaven head around town (after putting all that money into it, it comes off a bit like Veblen's conspicuous consumption).

It leaves one a bit at an impasse. The elements of what we know of Apuleius' life definitely point towards him being rather like this, a devotee of all gods, of having gone through more or less every mystery rite he could find. But this information doesn't tell us how seriously he took the religious aspect of it all, nor does it tell us if he personally donated money to temples, or if he simply paid for the mystery initiation (was he only a religion tourist, in other words). An alternate way to simplify this debate is this: does the novel end as a comedy, or a tragedy? Does the protagonist live happily ever after, or does his series of failures continue?

There's no convention to fall back to on this, either, as the tales included in the novel go both ways (Cupid & Pysche, far and away the largest of them, ends on a happy note, while most the others end at the very least semi-tragically). Nor can you look at other Roman novels, as this is essentially the only full one we still have. I don't have a particularly good answer to this, I simply think the end of this oldest-of-novels is ambivalent moreso than is traditionally accepted, and I hope I've shown that.