Ten minutes on May 8, 2008

Ten minutes on May 8, 2008

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
Hemingway, Farewell to Arms, 1929


I got home last night late from teaching, and read about 100 pages of a crime novel called Echo Park by Michael Connelly. I’m not entirely sure why I picked this book up, other than the fact that I am a blank reader, where blank is one of the following adjectives: compulsive, wildly eclectic, standards-free, omnivorous, impulsive. This book was sitting on the table next to my bed, where it landed when Margann finished it, and it boasts the kind of cover I usually avoid: big broad bands of color with the font of the “no funny stuff straight shooting prose” style of detective fiction and some genres of horror. The photo is actually cool/creepy: a park at night with the blue of a big halogen streetlight turning everything – picnic tables, grass, trees – into a potential crime scene. If a murder hasn’t been committed here, the photo says, just wait.

So I read about Harry (original name Hieronymous) Bosch, the apparently well known and well loved street smart tough damaged etc etc detective of the Connelly industry. And Los Angeles in this novel certainly has a canvas full of devils and devilish acts. A young woman, Marie Gesto, disappeared back in 1993 and Harry couldn’t crack the case; now apparently the killer has been caught, but all is not as it seems, and the plot careens like a car chase from hypothesis to hypothesis, mistakes to corrections to brilliant induction. We are, it seems, hard wired for stories, and we stay till the end; I enjoyed the ride, but at 2:30 in the morning, facing a busy day, I wondered whether seeing things resolved was worth the sleep deprivation hangover I risked.

From Hemingway to Chandler, we want to believe that there are some strong men out there who are competent, who have a code of ethics separate from the cynical ones of politicians, the lazy ones of the wealthy, and the corrupt ones of the criminal. We want to believe that though they make mistakes, act rashly, lose the girl, get beat up, follow dead end trails, in the end, their native intelligence and something – a drive for justice, taking injustice and violence and victimization personally – wins the day. Sort of. Often many of the bad guys get away, big fish go unpunished (unhooked?), and the general landscape looks just as it did before Harry solved the Gesto case, saved a girl from a serial killer, and uncovered the bad cop inside who was getting his friends killed.

When I read stories like these, I often think of the question I ask my students when we consider gender and literature. For this culture, for this time, for this class: what was the Good Man? What was the Bad Man? And according to what texts? In detective novels, the Good Man is very rarely a leader, very very rarely someone in government. Perhaps never. Instead, goodness must be wrung from unpromising situations, must be fed internally in the face of thousands of forces and pressures to do the wrong thing, the easy thing, the thing that, multiplied, leads to the overall evil of the culture.

One nice touch to this novel, and to a raft of contemporary texts (The Sopranos, for example) is the addition of the female therapist or psychologist who elicits the character’s inner doubts and confusions and narratives, and who provides a kind of literary analysis of this kind of masculinity. In Echo Park, the ex girl friend is an FBI operative who is aware of and sympathetic to the world the main character in habits – police work, detective work, the maddening and conflicted network of political actors and groups surrounding the simple acts of catching bad guys. She profiles the suspect with Harry, helps him see motivations and where the official story seems off base, but she also profiles Harry himself (from her point of view as a potential partner/lover, and as a fellow professional, and as a woman). And Harry comes up, not as a macho jerk or a bad man, but as someone whose masculine virtues in a corrupt world make him a bad choice for a partner, husband, intimate. She gets him, and that means she doesn’t get to get him; he gets this, and that means he doesn’t get her, and he doesn’t benefit personally from ‘getting’ himself.

I finished the book and felt myself merged with Harry – I am a very Keatsian, negative capability type of reader, who tends to merge with characters and inhabit them and so feel what it is to be me being them, as it were, and them as a version of myself. Much as I feel reading the best Hemingway stories – the Nick stories, or The Sun Also Rises, or “Snows of Kilimanjaro, whose main character’s name is Harry – I sense that I am being called to a certain Ideal version of masculinity, one that has some necessary but unpleasant downsides. There is never a moment of merging with the group, any group. It is a permanent outsider feeling, where one meets occasionally members of one’s tribe, other men who Know and who have suffered the effects of acting on principles even at the expense of self interest. It is a lovely/lonely feeling, sacrifice and intelligence and honor in the best senses of those words, though as Hemingway understood, these words need to be rediscovered in the context of a banal and greedy and corrupt and unjust society.

In Hemingway’s words in Farewell to Arms:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

This is Hemingway on how the war – World War l – destroyed his generation’s ability to say the words honor and sacrifice and so on in the old public ways. These words had been used to destroy hundreds of thousands of men, many very young, very brutally. But still the desire for this kind of man to find again those things – honor, sacrifice – leads them to reinvent the words in light of their own experience. That is what Harry Bosch, and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and many of the Hemingway protagonists do. In Farewell to Arms, Catherine says to Frederic, “What you tell me about in the nights. That is not love. That is only passion and lust. When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.” And she is right; all the abstractions are to be distrusted, are the sources of great evil and deception in the world, unless we make them personal.

And yet part of this making personal, ironically, is deciding which narratives you will accept, put on, keep. And many of these come not from experiences but from books, films, songs.

In the other novel I just finished, When Gravity Fails, George Effinger has our late 22nd Century hero join the multitudes of people who are wired for softwares, moddies and daddies, personality modifications (moddies) and data complexes (daddies) like the instant ability to speak Turkish or fly a helicopter. (Other examples of this kind of imagined future can be found in William Gibson’s novels, especially Neuromancer and its sequels, and in The Matrix). So one of the characters, trying to solve a crime, buys software that turns him into Nero Wolfe, the famous fictional detective in Rex Stout’s long series of crime novels.  Another character daily pops in a software agent that makes him a kind of stereotypic tough guy, with the sneer, the clipped speech, the streetwise comebacks.

I didn’t have a jack in my neck. I just sat there, thinking of Effinger, and holding Echo Park in my hand, feeling the virtual reality of this model of masculinity flood over me, merging with my ‘actual’ personality. Tomorrow, I thought, I will go back to being my self, which is…who? A projection, a fictional unity, an apparent character made up certainly of experiences, social molding as a male, but also of compelling stories of the Good Man and the Bad Man, calling to me, hailing me.

In science fiction, and in daily life, technology makes the invisible visible. Effinger’s moddies are simply artefacts that show us how invisible things – internalized narratives, the traces of song lyrics, memories of photos – shape us, allow us to shape our selves, and to shape our selves differently.

Which moddie would you pop in? When? To feel which complex of emotions, abilities? Which one, which ones, are the good man, the good men? For whom?

I’m reaching behind my neck and popping out this personality module…there. And now – let’s see – which one of these makes sense for the next couple hours?

Got it. Mmmm. Ok. Here we go…