On plane rides last week, I very much enjoyed reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Chabon imagines that in 1941, a temporary refuge was created for European Jews around Sitka, Alaska. The piny islands filled with millions of Yiddish-speaking, urban “Yids” who created a kind of shtetl or Brooklyn of the North. Unfortunately, their lease ends around the present time, which is the time of the narration. Thus the whole district is threatened with “reversion”–which means a new diaspora for the population. In this context, a Raymond Chandleresque detective story unfolds.

Nostalgia and imagination are two keynotes of the Jewish experience. The religious are nostalgic for the ancient Kingdom; they imagine the Messiah. The secular are nostalgic for Poland ca. 1920 or Brooklyn ca. 1950. They are prone to imagine Marxist or Libertarian utopias; fictional narratives built out of nostalgia; or successful assimilation. At the personal level, nostalgia for youth and flights of imagination seem especially common among Jews, although maybe I’m just thinking about myself.

Michael Chabon imagines–with phantasmagoric clarity–a whole world of Sitka Jews. He threatens this world with closure, thereby making his main characters and his readers nostalgic for a completely imaginary past. The Sitka world itself is built on nostalgia and imagination: as in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the rabbi’s house is an exact replica of his old home in Eastern Europe, but the inhabitants dream of Zion. Chabon is nostalgic, too, for hard-boiled detectives who live in flop-house hotels and walk noir streets. Out of that material, he imagines something completely original.

If nostalgia and imagination are two thematic centers in the book, a third is redemption. Chabon sets up a powerful contrast between religious redemption and the redemption that involves two human beings who forgive one another and decide to move forward together. Achieving that requires imagination and some suspension of nostalgia.

On reading Twelfth Night recently, I was moved by the ending. Feste the Fool is left standing alone to sing of the cold winter, when the rain it raineth every day. Twelfth Night marks the end of Christmas, an interlude from work. This particular Christmas in Illyria also seems a break from the weather, for no one speaks of cold even though most of the action is outdoors. A willow cabin seems sufficient shelter. These are perhaps the “Halcyon days” of the winter solstice, what we would call an “Indian summer” (cf. 1 Henry VI, I,ii,131).

This Christmas is also a break from war and–most strikingly–from family. Orsino, Olivia, Viola, and Sebastian, the romantic leads, are all orphaned and childless. There is no mention of any family, either, for the minor characters of Sir Andrew Aguecheeck, Sir Toby Belch, Malvolio, Antonio, Maria, and the Fool. Since these characters have no parents or children, they have no one to govern them and no responsibilities. Virtually any of these people could be paired with anyone else. Even gender is no bar, for Viola is dressed as a man and attracts Olivia’s love. Illyria is like summer camp or freshman year at college. The characters are not wanton, but for them, everything is undecided.

The marriages of Olivia and Sebastian, Viola and Orsino represent a happy ending, but also the end of the interlude. After their weddings, Illyria will have a governing structure; families will be created in separate households. Immediately before everyone leaves the Fool alone on the stage, Orsino carelessly addresses his fiancée by the name she has used in her guise as a man:

Cesario, come–

For so you shall be while you are a man,

But when in other habits you are seen,

Orsino’s mistress, and his fancy’s queen!

Orsino still sees Viola as “Cesario” and wants to postpone their marriage (and her transformation into a woman) until after the play ends. Maybe his slip of the tongue is homoerotic, but I think it is something else as well. Orsino wants to prolong the interlude, the time when he pines for a distant lover to the sound of “high fantastical” music, no one is attached to anyone, people drift freely from court to court, and you can do what you will. But the Fool is the most knowing character throughout the play, and once Orsino sweeps offstage with his retinue, the Fool sings of the winter that is adult life:

But when I came to man’s estate

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain

‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate

For the rain it raineth every day.

I think this is a fairly obvious point, but I can’t find it elaborated anywhere in the web: It seems to me that Susanna Clarke’s very entertaining novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is an allegory of the Industrial Revolution. (Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin sort of says so, but very briefly.)

In real life, steam-driven mass manufacturing was born in the North of England. The financial, human, and social capital came in part from old Northern cities like York. But York did not become a major manufacturing center–that was the fate of cities like Manchester and Sheffield, which basically sprang up in the early 1800s.

The Industrial Revolution began during the Napoleonic Wars when, for example, pulley blocks for British ships were mass produced. But new manufacturing techniques did not seem to alter the war profoundly. Meanwhile, the new techniques were being used to create specialized luxury goods, such as Wedgwood pottery. The use of steam power and interchangeable parts was still a gentleman’s pastime and an interesting sideshow.

But these innovations expanded beyond anyone’s control or expectations. Suddenly, factories that burned fossil fuels and used interchangeable parts were producing most of England’s ordinary products (such as clothes); were employing a large proportion of the population; were threatening to enable mass human slaughter through deadly armaments and chemicals; and were changing the landscape itself–driving iron railroads across it and tearing the mountains open for coal.

[Spoiler warning: I reveal the conclusion of this very suspenseful novel below the fold.]

Continue reading →

Early in P.D. James’ mystery Death in Holy Orders (2001), she establishes that her characters will speak formal, allusive, complex English of the type that an average reader could never master in real speech. Here, for example, a divinity teacher is addressing his student:

“You might as well take your essay. It’s on the desk. Evelyn Waugh wrote in one of his travel books that he saw theology as the science of simplification whereby nebulous and elusive ideas are made intelligible and exact. Your essay is neither. And you misuse the word ’emulate.’ It is not synonymous with ‘imitate.'”

“Of course not. Sorry, Father. I can imitate you but I cannot hope to emulate you.”

A few pages earlier, in discussing an anonymous letter, another character says, “And the writer is educated, I’d say. He–or she–has got the punctuation right. In this under-educated age I’d say that means someone middle-aged rather than young.”

I think this is a relatively easy game to play. In the quiet of her study, the author composes careful sentences that incorporate quotes from books she happens to have at hand. In the text, she explicitly mentions the difference between educated, erudite speech and ordinary talk. She thereby creates an air of superiority that some readers seem to enjoy.

Thus I have to admit I was pleased to encounter the following sentence of narration early in the novel: “In addition to its size, Father Sebastian’s office contained some of the most valuable objects bequeathed to the college by Miss Arbuthnot.” This is a howler–the room doesn’t contain its own size. The Baroness James has committed a basic grammatical error. Ha! I only hope the plot turns out to be good.

I’ve recently read two reviews that are highly pessimistic about narrative. Daniel Mendelssohn reviews 300, the film by Zack Snyder about the Battle of Thermopylae. He notes that the movie (which I have not seen) lacks a meaningful plot. Neither side seems to be fighting for any particular reason. Their characters and their choices have no discernible consequences. He compares the film to a video game, meaning a shoot-em-up game in which the hero mows down aliens or monsters. The popularity of “300” strikes him as deeply ironic since the first great original narratives of the Western tradition (Herodotus’ History and the attic tragedies) came soon after the Battle of Thermopylae itself. Mendelssohn suspects that the grand narrative of the Persian invasion stimulated the Greeks’ interest in meaningful stories. As they saw it, a Persian king of cruelty and hubris was defeated in a struggle against freedom and virtue. Thus ethos (character) and daimon (destiny) were meaningfully linked. That was the mainstream spirit of Western literature until–well, possibly until the movie “300.”

Meanwhile, Edward Rothstein reviewed Lawrence Kramer’s book, Why Classical Music Still Matters in The New York Times. Rothstein argued that the Western art music tradition produced complex and lengthy narratives in which the components were abstractions (melodies or themes). That was an impressive achievement, but it is dying with the manifest decline in classical music since 1950.

These two arguments are parallel, and they are both worth worrying about. I’m not actually too concerned about narrative in films and books. “300” sounds like a shoot-em-up video game, but there is nothing profoundly new about such entertainment. (There were very popular bear-baiting shows right next door to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.) In our time, fictional and historical narratives seem to be in pretty robust condition.

However, I agree with Rothstein that power and vitality is slipping away from the Western art music tradition, which includes not only classical music but also ambitious forms of jazz. That doesn’t mean that the future is barren; we could see a revival. But the Western art music tradition was much shorter than the tradition of meaningful text narrative. It started with the sung masses of the late Middle Ages but really flourished, as Rothstein says, during the “long 19th century” (ca. 1775-1914). There’s no guarantee that it will recover, whether in the form of jazz or any other style.