Whatever you do, Sam, don’t let them drag you to Hell…

We haven’t thought of a name for this section yet (we probably never will), but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a strong sense and a clear vision for it.  There are three sections accessible from the main page, and there will be three articles every month.  In this section, we will discuss literature from any time period, of any genre, “high” or “low,” with the aim of observing our present day.  It could get wild (these do seem like “difficult” times)—it may even be fun, on occasion—but to be printed here, it must at the very least be interesting for the reader.  There are five writers at F.L. Ternskie.  We meet to share ideas a few times a month, and these meetings have tended toward their conclusion to veer off and become “about this section.”  We all want to publish in this section, because it is the “freest” and most “freeing.”  This section “is” what we all love about literature and what we love to do with literature.  It gives us all the chance—and of course, a direction in which–to muse on our world throughout the month, in the hope that our musings will produce the seed of a great article.  But at the end of the month, only one of us will be assigned this space to complete the article that we all agree is the most intriguing for our times.  We hope you’ll give it a chance, because we’re pulling out all the stops to inspire people to read more or to read a greater variety of work.

My article was chosen this month, as much for its appropriateness to what we want this space to be as for its appropriateness in our times. I had been thinking about how culture is being communicated (or perhaps how the communicability of it is being squandered at a critical tipping point for everyone) amidst the now familiar culture wars.  How “fractured” culture, in its appearance, if not its essence, has become, and I thought, was there one thinker we could read who could point us in the right direction?  I thought, we all come from culture(s) in one way or another–so we all can say we “know” culture–but that we are not always happy about this. We might feel the need to resist culture’s trappings, but the egoistic impulse is also highly unappealing to many who are more comfortable as sceptics of culture (although sometimes the culture itself is egomaniacal).  I asked myself: Who had intelligent ideas about the “essence” of culture–the expression of it, the hegemony of it in certain instances, but also (and in speaking of “essence”) the reality of it we all intuitively feel, that it can deeply illuminate the human soul, a human soul within as it reaches outside ourselves?  In a sudden fIash, I thought, Carl Jung might be useful right now.  So I read Carl Jung.

I was led in the wrong direction, but in making my way back over several very difficult days, I discovered that in “unlearning” Jung (as I had to do, to rescue myself), I was in a position to see certain faults and absurdities in his work as “wrong expressions” animated by true insights that were then showing themselves to be somehow profoundly salutary.  He wasn’t perfect, and he can even be dangerous (consider yourself warned, brave reader), but in knocking out of his thought certain notions that may have come of my misconstruing him (i.e. that “images” and “myths” should ever be seen as a “fabric” out of which “our” conscious minds apprehend “our” reality), I found I could move on from him with my mind wholly intact, even with a sense of well-being, and with an intuitive and enriched apprehension of culture that would allow me access to works of their time and place–where, for me, “myth” and “image” must cede “its” ground to “our” living text of our experience, to lived human history, rather than vice versa.  Perhaps the same can be said of “our culture,” that it too must make way where our own experience is telling us it must.

My article would not have been selected if I hadn’t also been thinking on Goethe’s Faust (cited also, and actually by coincidence, in Jung’s early writing as the Greatest of all German myths, something that German culture couldn’t escape until after the Second World War). My neighbour visited me and we were talking about books we love, and she was telling me how much she’s always enjoyed, in vampire novels, how the vampire’s eventual victim must first invite the vampire into her home.  (Otherwise, the vampire is not permitted entry).  I told her about a similar rule in Faust, how the devil may not enter if there is a pentagram blocking access, and that Mephistopheles gains entry only because the tip on the point of the star facing the door is missing.  In our next meeting at F.L. Ternskie, we had a lengthy discussion about this. “That’s like “the”–I mean, “the critical”–technicality,” one of us said. “It’s strange,” said another, “Because it’s like we’re all supposed to know “their” laws, bizarre and ludicrous as these are.  To prevent them from destroying us.”  We thought about this for a moment or two, and then I said, “So in a way, I guess, you’re responsible for it, if you end up in Hell.” (Goethe himself makes “them” corruptive by their (view of their own) nature, by their (understanding of their own) “essence” (so, they really “can’t” be held responsible)–and if that’s simply their nature, then only laws they themselves deem binding on them can govern them.  So, of course, these laws probably tend to appear “insane” from our perspective). “Things are different nowadays though.” “Are they? Are they really?” “I should think they are,” I said. “We don’t “believe in technicalities” anymore.” “I’m not so sure about that….I mean, how do you define “technicality,” anyway?” (Was “technicality” even the right word for it?  What were we trying to name?).  “Well, even in Faust, it wasn’t about the technicality.  He was frail, mentally I mean, or certainly badly compromised.” ““Easy victim,” then?” “Hmmm…” “And what if you’re innocent of their laws?  Maybe you’re just “too pure.”” “And I thought, ignorance was supposedly bliss.”  “It’s not “ignorance”—it’s “inexperience.”” “You have work planned on this?” “I sure do,” I lied.  We all agreed that I would kick off this section on literary work with stories that show where culture touches oblivion, while two other staff members would commence the two other feature sections. Ordinarily though, we will “compete amongst ourselves” for this and the other two spaces.

Thankfully, and after a few anxious days of racking my brain, the stories suggested themselves.  Perhaps all along I had been led on this path, beginning fifteen or so years ago, when I had read “The Dead” by James Joyce, but it was actually “The Garden Party” by Katherine Mansfield that struck me as being somehow highly apt.  I hadn’t read that one since high school.  And upon re-reading it, I discovered why it had occurred to me so clearly.  In it, there is something akin to what we were struggling to name, what we were calling, a “technicality.”  But it was a modern form of it, or at least suggestively analagous, and implicit in social convention and custom among the middle and upper classes.  That was more like it, I thought.  I decided I would set aside “The Dead.”

“The Garden Party” is told mainly from the perspective of a girl, practically a young woman, whom everyone who knows her regards as “artistic.”  We can see that if she one day becomes an artist, she will likely be a talented one, as her conscious mind is somehow (perhaps “curiously”) “different,” more sensitive and attuned to people and to something that is of, yet directing her beyond, appearances.  She sees without knowing, which is to say that she one day can or must know.  Her sisters are different from her, but with their own personalities in this respect, Jose being “practical” and bossy, meaning strictly observant of custom and convention but from which she feels entitled to benefit without being the least bit sensitive to others, especially those who serve her every need.  She knows without seeing, and (we believe) she can never or must not ever know.  We might feel we know her sort, as we might feel we know Laura the artist’s sort.  Jose is privileged and likes to order the servants around, who seem to enjoy this because they too cannot afford to be too questioning of the rigid class hierarchy of British society of that time, and would prefer to view themselves as part of a Great Enterprise, say, the national economy as it is set in a noble, respected British household.  The third sister, Meg, is “just Meg” (another “sort” of girl), never really developed but rather in the background, playing the piano for Jose, who sings with her voice and not her feelings or her heart.  These three girls live in a blissful, colourful, happy world, where someone who is sensitive and perceptive, but lacking in “real experience” can be critical of the prejudice that comes of class structure and social hierarchy, but without yet really knowing anything at all (and what would such knowledge consist of?  Why would such knowledge become “framed” in that way?): “Why couldn’t she have workmen for friends rather than the silly boys she danced with and who came to Sunday night supper?  She would get on much better with men like these./It’s all the fault, she decided…of these absurd class distinctions.”  This is only a little ironic, it needs saying, as while these workmen have just ignored her directions only a moment earlier, showing her little of the respect they would have shown the “matriarch” of the family, we might feel that the irony is softened by our feeling that Laura senses far more than she can possibly know about these men as human beings—could her sense of them be true? Or is it maybe “just” without necessarily being “true”?—that she finds their behaviour “curious” rather than “suspicious,” and furthermore, that she is likely “well-aware” that they don’t take her seriously so we can confidently feel she doesn’t mind but instead “understands” (i.e. her affection toward them might be attributed to something she senses about “their sort” but doesn’t yet know).

The Sheridan garden party is as successful as any party could ever be, although Laura had thought they should cancel it.  When the cream puffs were being delivered to their kitchen, the delivery man from the bakery had shared news of a young man from the impoverished class falling off his horse to his death.  His cottage was somewhat near to the estate: “[Laura’s thought of cancelling the garden party] really was extravagant, for the cottages were in a lane to themselves at the very bottom of a steep rise that led up to the house.  A broad road ran between.  True, they were far too near.  They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all….The very smoke coming out of the cottages was poverty-stricken.”  The proximity of the cottages is significant, because they were “too close” for the state of them on every other day, but on this day, they were far enough away that the thought that what happened there should not raise the ethical issue of throwing a party.  This is Laura’s consciousness, and she is reasoning from her social position, acquired from privilege.  But the contradiction is apparent.  And being who she is, thinking also with her heart, she implores her mother and her sister Jose to cancel the party.  Jose eventually accuses Laura of being overly sentimental.  But her reasoning is that “if you’re going to [cancel the party] every time someone has an accident, you’ll lead a very strenuous life.”  It’s not so ridiculous, because life must go on, and what is the nature of the connection between “there” and “here” in Jose’s mind?   There is no connection and we sense there can’t be any for her.  Interestingly, she lets it slip that, in her mind, she pictures the dead man as having been drunk, a drunken fool who clumsily fell off his horse.  Laura is outraged by this (as no one had said the man was drunk) and runs to tell her mother.  Her mother’s reasoning is superior to Jose’s: “[M]y dear child, use your common sense.  It’s only by accident that we’ve heard of it.  If some one had died there normally—and I can’t understand how they keep alive in those poky little holes—we should still be having our party, shouldn’t we?”  There are two thrusts here—first, that we may never even have heard of that young man’s accident and, in that case, we would be throwing our party for not having any knowledge of it, and secondly, that we seldom hear about these kinds of events—for they happen everyday–and this, too, shouldn’t stop us from throwing our parties.

The party is a great success, but afterwards, Laura is still troubled by having gone ahead with it in spite of being in possession of such news.  Her mother knows her very well and, following more details about the grieving family from Mr. Sheridan (delivered “tactlessly” in her view), she seems to concede a little to Laura’s feelings.  She suggests that they gather the leftovers from the party for Laura to deliver to the grieving family.  The technicality is  not actually stated, but, rather, unspoken, withdrawn.  Mrs. Sheridan is advising Laura on how to deliver the basket, but Mrs. Sheridan is aware of something that Laura must know, but mustn’t even think of.  “And, Laura!”—her mother followed her out of the marquee—“don’t on any account—”/“What mother?”/No, better not put such ideas into the child’s head!  “Nothing!  Run along!””

Laura sees something highly significant, but that, too, must only be a curiosity (to her, but also to us).  Was this what she wasn’t supposed to see?  She is taken into a room where the body can be viewed and she sees something that we might say is “beyond possible knowing.”  It’s something about the man’s expression, we understand.  Something telling her that, for him, death is beautiful, that he is “happy…All is well….This is just as it should be.  I am content.”  We don’t know how she feels exactly,  because she, herself, doesn’t know what her feelings mean.  And how do we feel about what she sees?  She finds her brother, who is sensitive and “different” like her.  ““Don’t cry,” he said in his warm, loving voice. “Was it awful?”/”No,” sobbed Laura, “It was simply marvelous.  But, Laurie—”  She stopped, she looked at her brother.  “Isn’t life,” she stammered, “isn’t life—”  But what life was she couldn’t explain.  No matter.  He quite understood./”Isn’t it, darling?” said Laurie.”

Whatever the “technicality” was, whatever “little rule” Mrs. Sheridan wanted to share with Laura before she set off for the cottages, and whatever word there is for what we feel protects us from that which we fear dwells “below” us (arising every so often in consciousness through our anxiety and fear), whatever we must avoid seeing, saying, or doing, so that we can throw a party (or lots of parties), so that we can preserve the social order for our own survival within it, so that someone like Jose can remain comfortable as Jose, or even to avoid becoming the victim of evil, the technicality will always slip the grasp of our conscious mind, confound our higher reason, cast a veil over our hearts, and the reality we encounter as a result will continue to shape us as we move in humanity through time and history.  Our unconscious “knowledge” of “what is” supercedes us, “what is” sometimes only standing in for all that we fear might be or might become of us, so that the two realities are never separate, but enfolded into one another, because the rules of maintaining one are always being determined by myths or realities of the other precisely as this other reality remains enshrouded in obscurity and darkness.  The “technicality” itself might as well be of the unconscious.  I’m certain it often is.  It is the “ridiculous” fruit of a long history of social and mental repression, and we often learn of it only upon our own descent’s arrival all around us.  In place of the technicality as the “little rule” will be Laura’s understanding, or the “meaning,” of what she would not have seen if she had learned “the little rule” before she had set out, the meaning of what she saw perhaps conveying the very reason that the myths and realities (and the social prejudices) of the repressed on one hand, and the “benign” social order as a protected space on the other, will continue to persist, by all appearances, as separate.  As a writer or artist, Laura knows that these appearances are false and that the real truth must be experienced to be actually believed.