More Literary Losers

Mark Servas of The Elegant Variation recently posted an article on BookForum detailing some of his favorite literary losers—those unlucky protagonists too dopey and inept to even qualify as antiheroes. It features some expected choices, like Lucky Jim’s Jim Dixon, Nabokov’s Pnin, and Graham Greene’s Quiet American, but also some pleasant surprises such as Arthur Dent and Ticknor’s eponymous hero.

It's a fun little article, but it left out some of my favorite fuck-ups-- so here they are, in all their pied beauty.

A Confederacy of Dunces, John F. Kennedy Toole

 Ignatius J. Reilly is an obese shut-in medievalist who lives with his mother, self-absorbed, misogynistic, and disgusting. Walker Percy described the character as a “slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one,” which is a fair enough description, if a bit generous. Toole’s account of Reilly’s attempts to get his shit together and land a steady job is one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read, and one of the greatest descriptions of New Orleans ever put to paper. Oh, he also masturbates to memories of his dead dog. Well.

 Kepler, John Banville

 In the history of science, Johannes Kepler is one of the greats, a pioneer of modern astronomy and one of the greatest early proponents of a heliocentric system. In Banville’s novel though, he’s a neurotic, flakey, and hysterically peevish man, an ur-Woody Allan born, tragically, 400 years before the therapist and the orthopedic shoe. A funny, expansive, and ultimately sympathetic look at the foibles of genius, the novel is worth picking up for the scenes with the Rabellaisian Tycho Brahe alone.

 At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien

 The unnamed protagonist of O’Brien’s metafictional masterpiece hits a little close to home for—an unemployed liberal arts student living off his relatives while trying, unsuccessfully, to write his masterpiece. At least I can proudly say that I hold my liquor better than O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical character, who spends a disquieting amount of the novel throwing up in various locales throughout Dublin.

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

In a Pynchon novel, you can safely assume that most if not all of the characters are off in some way, but none are more poignantly (and ickily) human in their depravity than Gravity's Rainbow's Dr. Pointsman. The stereotypical science dweeb, Pointsman makes women uncomfortable, men annoyed, and Pavlovian octopii homicidal. When he rhapsodizes about his masturbation fantasies, involving beautiful women and the Nobel Prize committee, it's difficult not to be grossed out-- and, to a certain extent, sympathetic. In a novel populated by larger than life characters, Pointsman is refreshingly banal, and although we don't want to see him prevail over the novel's heroes, we're at least a little relieved when he finally gets laid.

 Marcovaldo, Italo Calvino

 Although he’s better known for his more experimental fiction, Calvino’s short stories about a poor rural worker transplanted into an unnamed industrial city in Northern Italy are some of my favorites. Marcovaldo is something like a warmer, gentler precursor to Homer Simpson—an inept family man working a demeaning job, whose attempts to find a little happiness each day usually end up hospitalizing him in one way or another. Still, the twenty stories making up the story of Marcovaldo were written over the course of 15 years, and by the end Calvino tends to cut his protagonist a little slack. The very last story, “Santa’s Children,” is representative of the tone of the later pieces—charming, whistful, and a little bit haunting.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

 Poor Prufrock has no luck with the ladies, and can hardly even work up the nerve to open his mouth. On top of all that, he’s balding. Sometimes when I read this poem, Eliot’s virtuoso language sort of obscures the fact that at the heart of it, Prufrock is a total dweeb.

 L’ecume des Jours, Boris Vian

 Boris Vian’s hilarious, heartbreaking, incredibly strange novel (translated as Froth on the Daydream or Foam of the Daze or Chloe or Spray of the Days or…) has a lot of head-scratching bits in it, but few more peculiar than the main character’s best friend Chick, an amiable loser whose constant borrowing eventually drives the novel into tragedy. What’s he need all that money for? Simple—buying reams of books, discarded tissues, and hair clippings of the philosopher Jean-Sol Partre, a bizarre parody of Sartre. Chick ultimately proves that when you live in a surrealist wonderland like Vian’s Paris, fiscal insolvency doesn’t pay—at the end of the novel his heart is plucked out by the police for not paying his taxes.

 The Brief & Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

When we first meet Oscar, he’s a fat, lonely kid whose only pleasures are comic books and fantasy novels—in a subversion of the usual bildungsroman expectations, he remains fat, lonely, and nerdy through most of the novel, despite the efforts of various characters. In the end, he’s dead. Brief & Wondrous indeed, I guess—but at least he got a Pulitzer out of it. 

On Hazlitt, Proposition 8, and the Will of the People

Hey, this first post is going to be unusually political-- it is just what got me writing first. In the future expect more talk about lit and music and less "Mister Schaeffer Goes to Washington" I guess.

Today is not a banner day for democracy in action—I’m talking, of course, about the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8’s ban on same-sex marriages, a decision that is doubly appalling in that it not only demonstrates a  disregard for basic civil rights, but is an active step away from progressive and compassionate politics, an instance of the people not clinging to the reactionary and old-fashioned out of comfort or familiarity but actually calling out for it in protest of a more broad-minded status quo.

 Its one of the ugly realities of democracy that when the people speak, sometimes they speak incorrectly. One part of me, the part that reacts viscerally to oppression and bigotry, is pretty much down with all of the voices I’ve encountered on blogs, in the news, and in conversation denouncing the entire state of California as a bunch of inbred morons, loony fundamentalists, base homophobes. Come friendly earthquakes and fall on Frisco, as it were. However, there’s also a meek voice of dissent at the back of my mind reminding me that if you’re going to put the democratic process on a pedestal, you can’t break out the chisel and wrecking ball when things don’t go your way. You can speak out, sure, you can work within the system to enact some sort of change (as the drafters of Prop. 8 itself, unfortunately, decided to do) but you can’t have a republic without admitting the right of the population to occasionally fuck things up, right?

 In other words, as a matter of social and moral justice, Prop. 8 is a black and white deal—no amount of arguing will ever convince me that the love between a man and a man or a woman and a woman is any less emotionally, socially, or legally valid than that between a man and a woman, just as the inverse is true for those against gay marriage—but as an issue of civics, of the political process, I’m more troubled and ambiguous. How do you go about loving the democratic system when it churns out this kind of thing? What do you make of a government designed to protect the liberties and rights of its citizens, when those citizens use that government to turn on each other?  I yield the floor to a dead white guy:

 William Hazlitt, the 19^th century British critic, is one of my favorite political essayists—although, like Orwell, he was much better at pin-pointing society’s flaws than at proposing workable solutions, he was so damn good at it that I tend to give him the pass. In particular, I can’t think of another writer who dug his hands as deep as Hazlitt into the messy contradictions inherent in the liberal ideal. I’m talking gore up to the elbows. Hazlitt’s political thought hinges on two basic ideas, as I see it. First, that any power emanating from outside of the people is necessarily against the people, against virtue, and is wrong (“the love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves”), and that only the people have the right to govern themselves. Second,  that the people are a bunch of superstitious goofballs who can’t go a hundred years without signing away their integrities to whatever happens to come along. If these notions seem familiar to you, you might be a progressive living in America—congrats. These two notions don’t necessarily contradict each other—Hazlitt seemed quite confident that if given the opportunity to exercise power as a people, as a unified mass looking out for itself as a whole, even the most credulous subjects of a given monarchy could get their acts together. From “Who is the People?”:

“The people is the hand, heart, and head of the whole community acting to one purpose, and with a mutual and thorough consent. The hand of the people so employed to execute what the heart feels, and the head thinks, must be employed more beneficially for the cause of the people, than in executing any measures which the cold hearts, and contriving heads of any faction, with distinct privileges and interests, may dictate to betray their cause. The will of the people necessarily tends to the general good as its end; and it must attain that end, and can only attain it, in proportion as it is guided—First, by popular feeling, as arising out of the immediate wants and wishes of the great mass of the people, --secondly, by public opinion, as arising out of the impartial reason and enlightened intellect of the community. What is it that determines the opinion of any number of persons in things they actually feel in their practical and home results? Their common interest. What is it that determines their opinions in things of general inquiry, beyond their immediate experience or interest? Abstract reason. In matters of feeling and common sense, of which each individual is the best judge, the majority are in the right; in things requiring a greater strength of mind to comprehend them, the greatest power of understanding will prevail, if it but has fair play. These two, taken together, as the test of the practical measures or general principles of Government, must be right, cannot be wrong.”

 Ok, so far so good, right? The voice of the people, in this model, is basically a self-correcting, self-regulating system. Taking our theoretical “people” as rational actors, as Hazlitt does, common sense and reason will prevail through a mixture of enlightened self-interest and engagement with a vigorous and open intellectual debate. Where in California did this fall apart? Hazlitt trusts his model citizen with two basic cognitive feats—the ability to recognize what’s best for himself, and the ability to recognize and distinguish between rational and irrational arguments in the public discourse. These are deceptively simple-sounding responsibilities, ones on which even the well-educated and clear-headed can easily fall short. In California, both the “head” and the “heart” failed to carry out their civic duties with the compassion and reason that Hazlitt counted on. Not only is Proposition 8 morally repellent, it is judicially irresponsible, economically inconvenient, and theologically trivial. It is in no one’s best interest, and isn’t supported by any kind of logic. In the ideal democratic machine, it wouldn’t have happened. And yet it did—and wonky decisions like it have been made before, and will be made again, because, like any machine, democracy can’t possibly be 100% efficient. The best you can do as a concerned observer (although let’s not bullshit ourselves—we’re also all participants) is shake the machine around, look inside and poke about and try to fix what’s wrong. So again—what went wrong?*

 Here, Hazlitt is his own best critic—“Prejudice is the child of ignorance”. Remember “Milk”? One of the late politician’s greatest achievements was pushing more and more of the gay community to come out to their friends and families, replacing the broad strokes of public perception with specific experience. Not surprisingly, people found it easier to accept and respect homosexuality in a sibling, a parent, or a friend than in the stereotypical representations of mass media and rumor. As Hazlitt wrote in “On Prejudice”:

“As our actual knowledge falls short of our desire to know, or curiosity and interest in the world about us, so must we be tempted to decide upon a greater number of things at a venture; and having no check from reason or inquiry, we shall grow more obstinate and bigoted in our conclusions, according as we have been rash and presumptuous. The absence of proof, instead of suspending our judgment, only gives us an opportunity of making things out according to our wishes and fancies; mere ignorance is a blank canvas, on which we lay what colours we please, and paint objects black or white, as angels or devils, magnify or diminish them at our option; and in the vacuum either of facts or arguments, the weight of prejudice and passion falls with double force, and bears down everything before it. If we enlarge the circle of our previous knowledge ever so little, we may meet with something to create doubt and difficulty; but as long as we remain confined to the cell of our native ignorance, while we know nothing beyond the routine of sense and custom, we shall refer everything to that standard, or make it out as we would have it to be, like spoiled children who have never been from home, and expect to find nothing in the world that does not accord with their wishes and notions. It is evident that the fewer things we know, the more ready we shall be to pronounce upon and condemn, what is new and strange to us.”

 How many Californians in favor of Proposition 8, do you suppose, could count a member of GLBT community as a loved one? How many do you think had one as a relatively solid friend? As an acquaintance? How many would proudly say they’d never ever met a homosexual in their life? A look at CNN exit polls from last November is revealing; most of those who voted in favor of Prop. 8 were Republican, belonged to a historically conservative church, and fell firmly in the middle class—just the demographics in which homosexuality is most strongly frowned on, bastions of entitlement and resentment in which hostility towards anything transgressive is the norm. Ads in favor of Prop. 8 released in 2008 showed San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom stating in regards to same-sex marriage, “This door’s wide-open now—it’s going to happen, whether you like it or not.” Gay marriage is framed not as a step towards civic equality but as an ominous rumbling, as if California’s gay community was an army of barbarians clamoring at the gates. Online ads on the Proposition’s website similarly rely heavily on an “us vs. them” rhetoric, a tone of imposition and invasion—“what it means when gay marriage conflicts with our religions freedoms,” “it was forced on us,” “voting yes on Proposition 8 restores traditional marriage”. The intention, I guess, being to make heterosexual voters see themselves as embattled, to make middle-class demographics view gay marriage as a threat to their comfortable status quo (did anybody ever honestly think “traditional marriage” was going anywhere?). The most disturbing moment of these online ads shows a mother sitting cozily with her daughter—“What it means (sic?) when our children are taught about it at school?” Even the prospect of a society in which homosexuality is free to be discussed and recognized, the ad hints, is menacing. A vote against Prop. 8, it seems to say, is a vote for some kind of unwholesome knowledge.

 Hazlitt’s model government relied on a healthy cooperation between the head and the heart of the people. He acknowledged the importance of moral outrage and gut feelings—“those evils that inflame the imagination and  make the heart sick, ought not to leave the head cool”—but this visceral reaction, if it is to be put into action responsibly, has to be tied to a rational discourse, in which participants can argue on a level playing field where the best, most solid arguments can rise to the top. If this is perhaps a  little bit idealistic, it’s still closer to what we should hope for than the crude anti-intellectualism espoused by pro-Proposition 8 propoganda. In these ads, in the discourse created by the anti-gay marriage power bloc (heavily, heavily funded by Utah’s Church of Latter Day Saints) knowledge isn’t just used misleadingly; knowledge is set up as a threat, as something poisonous to the good old image of white picket fences and waving flags. It is a discourse insidiously resistant to any kind of argument or compromise, since compromise and argument are anathema to it. “Logic should enrich and invigorate its decisions,” writes Hazlitt, “by the use of imagination; as rhetoric should be governed in its application, and guarded from abuse by the checks of the understanding. Neither, I apprehend, is sufficient alone.” There’s the problem—today’s decision represents a failure of these subtle checks and balance and a victory for unabashed rhetoric. The vote could have been on anything—gay marriage, desegregation, a heliocentric universe, whatever; when we let our discourse slip into this kind of ugly bluntness, in which rhetoric completely outweighs reason, in which easy exaggerations and crude caricaturing are more prominent and influential than thoughtfulness, sympathy and responsibility, is it any surprise that we find people voting in favor of whatever interest group is shouting the loudest and running the slickest commercials? 

Hazlitt wrote that “the spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion of it. We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone. We give up the external demonstration, the brute violence, but cannot part with the essence of principle of hostility.” Could there be any better description of America’s current climate, in which we can collectively shudder at the memory of Matthew Shepard’s death while blithely voting against a universal suffrage of marriage? Although we’re all entitled to a period of balling up our fists and tweeting indignantly about how, well, how completely fucked up this situation is, what’s more important is taking steps to prevent something like it from happening again, by fostering a broader respect for humanity in our families and friends, by exposing them to artists like James Merrill or Proust, who speak with vast beauty to human universals through a homosexual lens, by gradually making our communities more open and understanding in whatever ways we can. "The boundary of our sympathy is a circle which enlarges itself  according to its propulsion from the center-- the heart."

 While we may not have been able to influence the California supreme court, or vote against Prop. 8 last year, the power to shape our national discourse is one we share a responsibility in. If the “head” of the people is ever going to keep the heart and the hand in check, it will be young, intelligent citizens that put it there. So throw up your hands at the system, get angry and fantasize about kicking Roger Mahoney in the nuts—“men act from passion”—but don’t stop there.  Today, we’ve been reminded, painfully, about how fucked up democracy can be. The machine is broken—but in whatever tiny ways we can, with our words and our actions and even, I don’t know, our little online noodlings around, we can step up, borrow a wrench or even just a dust-rag, and start fixing it.

 *And as tempting as it is to be glib and just say “religion”, its simply too easy. Even if you want to take the position that religion is fundamentally inimical to rational decision-making, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum—people still adopt it as a result of social forces, psychological or social needs, or any number of other things;