Diagramming the Obama Sentence

Essays
February 16, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 57 3 min read

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coverIn a Slate piece published back in the fall, Kitty Burns Florey took on the unenviable task of diagramming the utterances of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Florey, the author of Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, clearly has a unusual predilection for sentence diagramming (which I’m pretty sure the Army Field Manual prohibits as a form of torture.) Nonetheless, her project was more journalistic than aesthetic; she suggested that diagramming a sentence “provides insight into the mind of its perpetrator.”

In honor of Presidents Day, I thought I’d return to the “lost art” of diagramming – last practiced (by me) in the Seventh Grade classroom of Mrs. Brenda Wooten – to see what I could learn about the mind of President Barack Obama. I selected a representative, and widely quoted, sentence from last week’s primetime press conference. The topic was the malfeasance of Bush Administration officials. Obama told Huffington Post blogger Sam Stein this:
The basic lucidity of this response, and its analytical ambition (this is the quality Obama critics, and some fans, call “professorial”), may be clearer in the transcript. (With apologies to the HuffPo, I’ve turned the period between “citizen” and “but” to a comma; Obama’s answer is a single, complete sentence, rather than a complete sentence plus a fragment):

My view is also that nobody’s above the law, and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.

The diagram, though, offers several insights. First, the elegant balance of the central construction (My view is that x, and that y, but also that z) shows that Obama has a good memory for where he’s been, grammatically, and a strong sense of where he’s going. His tripartite analysis of the problem is clearly reflected in the structure of the sentence, and thus in the three main branches of the diagram. (Turn it on its side and it could be a mobile.) The third “that” – thrown in 29 words into a 43-word sentence – creates three parallel predicate nouns. And then there’s a little parallel flourish at the end: “I am more interested in looking forward than I am in looking back.”

Nothing feels tacked on; the “ums” and “ahs” Obama sometimes inserts into his speeches are not meant to buy time to think about substance, or to long for a teleprompter (sorry, conservative bloggers), but to make sure his long sentences stay on solid grammatical terrain. At the same time, Obama’s confidence in the basic architecture of his sentences allows him to throw in some syntactically varied riffs and qualifiers: an absolute phrase here, a correlative conjunction or comparative adjective there.

By contrast with the syntax, the diction is quite straightforward, which may account for why the majority of Americans, unlike their pundit overlords, don’t seem to feel that Obama is talking down to them. The verbs here are all “to be” verbs, given weight by participles like “prosecuted” and “interested,” and by the muscular commonplaces, “above the law,” “looking forward” and “looking back.” The only superfluous adjective is “clear,” which sounds positively Bush-like, even as it serves to qualify the clause it’s attached to. Even more remarkable: by virtue of the third “that,” this is a complex sentence, but not a compound one. Like “I’m the decider,” it has a single, copulative predicate.

This may be the essential Obama gift: making complexity and caution sound bold and active, even masculine… or rather, it may be one facet of a larger gift: what Zadie Smith calls “having more than one voice in your ear.” Notice the canny way that the sentence above turns on the fulcrum of what may be Obama’s favorite word: “but.” What appears to be a hard line – “My view is… that nobody is above the law” – turns out to have been a qualifier for a vaguer but more inspiring motto: “I am more interested in looking forward than I am in looking back.” The most controversial part of the sentence – “people should be prosecuted” – gets tucked away, almost parenthetically, in the middle.

It is possible – mistaken, I think, but certainly possible – to dismiss this sentence as a platitudinous non-answer, and if comedians ever overcome their Obama anxiety, this may be his Achilles heel: “The beef, assuming it’s in a port wine reduction, sounds, uh, amazing, but on the other hand, given that the chicken is, ah, locally grown, I’d be eager to try it.” But to underrate the subtlety and appeal of Obama the communicator is to be out of touch with Americans’ hunger to be addressed as adults. Indeed, after “You’re with us or you’re against us” and “Putin rears his head,” such thoughtfulness seems positively worth celebrating.

is the author of City on Fire and A Field Guide to the North American Family. In 2017, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.

Essays

Pat’s Journals

Essays
June 6, 2011 | 1 book mentioned 7 6 min read

Soon after I started dating my future husband, Chris, I discovered that his deceased father had been a writer. Vernon Patterson had three published books, but what really intrigued me were his unpublished journals, named for his sons and his first grandson: The Book of Timothy, The Book of Christopher, and The Book of Benjamin. Stacked in my future mother-in-law’s closet were the originals (typed and handwritten) and bound copies (transcribed and typed by a hired secretary). The originals came with the added benefit of photographs, similar to very literate scrapbooks, and the bound copies were in blue, red, and pale green cloth hardcover with gold lettering at the spines, each volume at over 300 pages, forty volumes total.

I couldn’t wait to get my hands on them. But I had to play it cool. Chris had resented his father’s invasion of his privacy. At eighteen, he’d asked his father to stop writing The Book of Christopher, and his father never wrote directly about Chris again. Though Chris had not read the journals, he distrusted his father’s version of history, and even after his father stopped writing about him, their relationship was strained. Pat had written the journals about his family, for his family. Yet as far as I could tell, the intended recipients had no desire to read them.

At twenty-three, I was beginning to call myself a writer, but Chris (correctly) assumed that my keen curiosity wasn’t born purely out of literary motivation. I wanted a window into his soul, since I was madly in love.  Imagine: all the useful insight into his childhood, his ex-girlfriends, and his rebellious past.  An operating manual, or a blueprint to his family, and, more importantly, to him.

My future mother-in-law, Teresa, had cracked open her closet door, revealing the goldmine. Although she’d been widowed for many years, one could feel Pat’s presence surrounding her. Over twenty years her senior, Pat had lived through the Great Depression and ridden trains as a hobo. He’d never owned a driver’s license and wouldn’t drive a car, believing himself to be too absent-minded.

After Chris and I had been living together a few years, he agreed to let his mother dole the books out to me, one at a time.  What an uncanny sensation to be reading a detailed accounting of a family’s history, and then to be in the present, with that family, participating and creating more history; watching, noticing, and connecting the past with the present and future, in large ways and small.

In one journal, Pat wrote, “I was fiddling around in the garage when I saw something scrawled on the wall. Next to the pencil sharpener appeared these words: CHRISTOPHER PATTERSON SHARPENED HIS PENCIL HERE.” The next time I went to Teresa’s (she lives in Chris’s childhood home), I looked in the garage and found the scribbling. I told no one, a little secret between Pat and me.

Pat refined and edited his journals. I’d sometimes have trouble matching our unruly lives with the distilled and amenable version that was Pat’s. Or family members would come across as far wiser and wittier.  Yet his descriptions of his family often correlated with mine and enhanced my understanding.

I’d find myself entranced by Pat’s childhood Chris. Pat wrote:  “Chris was sympathetic to all and willing to project himself with such ready and complete sympathy into the role of the unfortunate. He half-ashamedly would turn away to wipe his eyes when in one of his bedtime stories the hero would die or some heroic person would suffer. He hadn’t been taught at home that to cry indicated weakness, but he would try to conceal his tears by burying his head in his pillow or by vigorously blowing his nose.” How could I not fall more deeply in love? And why, Chris would ask while we were watching a sad movie, are you looking at me?

Sometimes I’d read passages aloud to Chris, and he’d smile, but at other times, he was ambivalent and uncomfortable, so I stopped. The written love experience, I concluded, was between Pat and me.

The journals were also an emotional reckoning.  All the particulars, the minutiae of their lives so carefully and loving documented, and yet life was uncontainable, unstoppable. “Parents can wield their power like little gods,” Pat wrote, “and then be surprised when life takes hold and swings them in directions unplanned.”

The journals became even more prescient after Chris and I married (with a two decade age spread similar to Pat and Teresa’s) and had two sons with an age difference analogous to Chris and his brother, Tim. Substitute our kids’ names, and often the journals could be describing them.

Pat’s list of questions that Chris and Tim asked as children could apply to our sons: “What is air? How long did it take the earth to cool? Have you ever seen a real, live bandit? Why do you have dreams? If you stand barefoot on an iceberg, how long would it take for your feet to freeze? Would you rather be dead or would you rather have your legs cut off? Would you rather be a glass of milk or would you rather be dead?”

Pat nicknamed his sons McGillicudy and McDougal, and I started calling our sons by these names, and the nicknames took. We still use them.

I continued to write, partially influenced and encouraged by Pat. For me, his chronicling of his family’s life had created something magical. I wanted to achieve that spark, whether published or not. And I began keeping journals for my boys, hoping to give them (or whomever) something like what Pat had given to me.

My boys’ journals have the distinction of having splotches of breast milk on their dark covers from my trying to breastfeed, write, and care for a baby and a toddler.

Soon, my journals became unedited reflections, quick furtive handwritten entries about the struggles of motherhood: “My son pinches almost every time he breastfeeds,” I wrote. “The skin around my nipple is his favorite area and we’ve had serious battles. I push his hand away. It creeps back. I yell NO! and he looks at me passively. He reminds me of a cat, the way it flexes a paw.”

My journals remain raw and unedited, and although I’m a very different writer than Pat, by ceaselessly commenting on my world, and by taking daily like as fodder, he has influenced me.

Even now, Pat’s description of Chris’s older brother Tim in 7th grade fits my son, currently in middle school: “Tim is moodier and physically clumsy for the first time, more inclined to anger. He seems to need constant action. When he gets home from school, he kicks off his shoes, throws down his books, and heads right for the refrigerator.”

The 1960s and 70s baffled Pat, as did his teenagers, and his journals became more introspective. “What kind of satisfaction,” he wrote, “do young people find in the so-called rock music? Chris has dozens of such phonograph recordings. Now and then he asks me to listen to a favorite recording, and I try to listen sympathetically, but all I ever get is a kinesthetic jolt.”

Chris and I have been together for eighteen years: fifteen married, thirteen with offspring. Like his father, Chris is an artist: a painter. Our history is entwined with his past, and although we don’t actively speak of Pat’s journals, they’re imbedded in our lives.

What Chris remembers and what Pat wrote are separate. The truth, I learned, doesn’t exist in Pat’s version, or in Chris’s. The truth is complicated and nebulous and open to interpretation. It is large and unwieldy and full of love and misunderstandings, similar to a family. Since Chris loves his privacy and I love him, I’ve learned to leave the story between father and son alone. The irony that Chris married a writer is not lost on him, nor would it be lost, I believe, on Pat.

Pat’s journals have a meditative and ruminative quality, and the final journals before his death are especially beautiful. He was an insomniac and wandered his garden, wearing his robe and slippers. “Dawn approaching almost imperceptibly,” he wrote.  “The moon sharp-rimmed, like polished steel, shadows of the trees lying black on the lawn.  The air so still that after turning off the sprinkler, I can hear the water seeping into the soil.”

Rather than that window I’d expected into Chris’s soul, I saw deeply into Pat’s. “Repeatedly,” he wrote, “I ask myself, Does my family know, blood and bone and tissue, that they are cherished and loved?”

I understand my family and my life by writing and through writing, just like my father-in-law, and his journals helped compel me to write. I often go back to them for inspiration. He quotes Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “A place to stand and love in for a day, with darkness and the death-hour rounding it.” He taught me how to love and appreciate and be in a family—his family. At times I feel so much a part of him and he a part of me, I have to remind myself that we’ve never met.

(Image courtesy the author)

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 7 6 min read
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Essays

My Own Private Iceland

Essays
June 11, 2013 | 1 book mentioned 11 7 min read
Three of Sjón's books have just appeared for the first time in America. They combine legends and tall tales, magical realism and biblical allegory, landscape and maritime studies, arcane scientific and theological musings, YA-style swashbuckling and personal confession. They’re wonder books, cabinets of curiosity, and extended riffs.
Essays
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57 comments:

  1. Perhaps, rather than having some grammatical genius that allows him to seem for confident and masculine than he may actually be, he is merely a product of several years of Warriner's English Grammar.

  2. These are not even the words of Obama, but that of his speech writer, whose job is to make him look good. Therefore, diagramming a sentence from his speech should say nothing about the Messiah.

    Kirk, Tx.

  4. Kirk,

    Are you saying Obama's speechwriter is scripting not only his prepared addresses, but ostensibly spontaneous responses to press conference questions (which was the context for this sentence)? I'm not sure I follow your line of argument, but would be happy to know more…

  5. Neil,
    The article does mention "the 27 year old wunderkind," Favreau who helps him with his speeches, so which are Obama's words and which are Favreau's?

    Garth,
    I certainly wouldn't be surprised if Obama rehearses his answers to questions that he anticipates. He is the slickest politician since…well, Bill Clinton, so polishing answers just as with speeches would be easy to imagine. After all, any politician who can convince the American people that a trillion dollar spending bill is going to stimulate the economy certainly gets props from me.
    Kirk, Tx.
    PS Garth, at least we agree on Bolano.

  6. Goodness. It must be hard work, Kirk, patrolling the entire internet for instances of flattering or admiring statements about the new President of United States which can be turned into sneering implications that those who flatter or admire him have switched off their brains.

    How do you find the time?

  8. Kirk,
    A speechwriter can only do so much. Like Obama, George W Bush had a team of 3 competent speechwriters yet he couldn't even put together two words coherently. The job of a speechwriter is to write in the speaker's own voice, not be the voice. If you're implying that Obama is just a voicebox, you're sorely mistaken. You've got to be pretty good with language to make the president of the Harvard Law Review.

  9. What troubles me about this sentence is not its grammar, but its content. Obama sees the important issue of bringing to book people who abused executive power under Bush administration as "looking backward"? Ethics are at issue here, and unfortunately Obama has failed to live up to his own pre-election standards on the question of accountability. Check out the delays and settlements he recommended in the subpeona of Rove and the nod he gave to the Justice system to basically uphold security certificates and such from the Bush era. He is not willing to deprive himself of the vast and unconstitutional powers that he inherited from the Bush administration. This will be the most serious credibility issue with his presidency.

  11. I totally agree Obama is a great communicator, which in most instances today means he reads well from a teleprompter. And I concur that Bush was perhaps the worst communicator we've ever had. Laughable. But actions speak louder than words, so after all of Obama's campaign promises he has a mountain to climb.

    Kirk,Tx.

  12. Kirk,

    It's your cult that wanted Bush's War, so that they could act out The Left Behind series, for "Jesus". I'm not surprised that logic and facts are regarded as the enemy.

  13. Sorry I don't fall into your category of Republican Evangelical. I am an atheist that happens to be a conservative in most cases.
    If you think that the Bush administration regarded logic and facts as the enemy you aint seen nothin' yet!
    Kirk,Tx.

  14. I don't think magic-talking is a sign of respect. If american people were to be treated as adults the truth would plain and clear (adults can handle the truth, right?). Instead everybody is left to draw his own conclusion (magic talking alert!). The wrongdoers will be prosecuted, or not? Keeping an eye on the future is more important than justice or not? The same political-correctness-BS just in a nicer package.

  16. I've met Obama (I was at the University of Chicago when he taught there). This isn't from a speechwriter; he's always spoken like this.

  17. The sentence analyzed exposes one of Obama's serious weaknesses – lack of precision and clarity.

    When Obama's finally gotten to the period at the end of the long sentence, the listener has no more insight into Obama's views or probable future actions than they did before he uttered the first word of the sentence. While a casual observer (or an Obama worshiper) thinks the question has been answered, it was not. He could either prosecute everyone in sight within the Bush administration (of course, only for "clear" violations), or he could do absolutely nothing (of course, in the interest of "looking forward").

    I am hopeful that Obama's seemingly intentional ambiguity and failure to take a clear position is a political technique he reserves for dodging domestic issues and that he lets experienced people craft his messages for the international stage. In international matters, failure to communicate effectively and clearly can have serious consequences including unnecessary escalation of tensions to the level of warfare.

    The article makes fun of Bush 43 for the statement: "You're with us or you're against us" [I believe the author used a fragment of Bush's sentence here, but that's not material to this discussion]. However, the purpose of speaking is to communicate. It is reasonable to agree or disagree with Bush's position, but it's impossible to not better understand Bush's position and attitude after hearing this statement – he views sitting on the sidelines on the issue of terrorism to be equivalent to supporting terrorism.

  18. If you watch his many interviews or read his two self-authored books and countless articles dating back to his law school days and early marriage life and on through the present, you will see that Obama has always talked this way. His themes, views, syntax and delivery have been remarkably consistent. Say what you want about him, but his voice – with or without a speechwriter's help – is authentically his. To say otherwise is mere ignorance or delusion.

  19. To all who believe Obama's statement is obfuscating but that there's clarity in Bush's "you're with us or you're against us" statement: You are wrong.

    Obama here says we will enforce the laws, but he's not about to set the government toward consuming itself with second-guessing all dubious Bush Administration decisions; that should evidence emerge of clear wrong-doing, your title and your friends will not save you from justice, but that his administration is not about to launch a comprehensive witch hunt. This is pragmatic.

    Bush's alleged clarity is anything but pragmatic. If an overall long-term ally like Mexico or France opposes our invasion of Iraq because they find our charges of Iraqi terrorism-abetting to be unpersuasive — are they now "with" the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11? Is Russia "with" the terrorists, or Syria — or Hamas? It would seem they are. And yet we permit them to go on existing — which makes us "with" the terrorists, doesn't it? Sorry, but I never saw the clarity in Bush's black-vs-white jingoism.

    I am pleased to have a president with an adult ability to examine the world and address its complexity. That serves the national interest well.

  20. Logosfera, I would argue that letting people come to their own conclusions is, in fact, treating them like adults–especially when compared with the paternalistic alternatives that you offer.

    Secondly, in Obama's answer you can find answers to every question you raised. Will wrongdoers be prosecuted? He says yes, when it is clear that they in fact did wrong. Is keeping an eye on the future more important and "justice" (which, in fairness, is not synonymous with "looking backward" which is what he actually said)? Yes, he says he's more interested in looking forward than dwelling on the past. These are not contradictory–He's more interested in the future than the past, but when clear wrongdoing is occurred then those accountable should be prosecuted.

  21. I think you do a great job showing how Obama's brain works as it is manifest in his construction of syntax and design. He's a remarkable thinker, strategist and writer. I think his sentence structure demonstrates all the complexity he brings to the issue, his understanding of opposing ideas, and an aesthetic sense of parallelism and rhythm.

  22. It's an odd world we live in when sentence structure *is* construed as indicative of morality, but actions aren't.

  24. The commas are misplaced in that sentence. Here I fixed it for you!

    "My view is also that nobody's above the law and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen but that, generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards"

  25. Unfortunately this quote didn't contain the one mistake which I observe fairly regularly in Obama's speech: the use of "a" before a noun beginning with a vowel. For example, he says "launch a attack" instead of "launch an attack." I've also heard several friends who were raised in Hawaii speak similarly, so maybe it's a local Hawaiian thing?

  26. The semicolon was correct. When the first clause contains commas, the punctuation mark before the conjunction should be a semicolon for the sake of clarity.

    Yr pedantic trivia for the day

  27. Anonymous @ 6:01:

    It isn't clear what you hope to imply about the comparative morality of the actions of Presidents Bush and Obama, if anything, in this thread about clear communication.

    No one here is claiming that sentence structure indicates morality, only that it indicates a person's thought patterns. Sentences that become complex without becoming unclear indicate something very promising about the mind producing them. That's all.

  28. Using "a" for the *unstressed* article in all positions is hardly localized to Hawaii; I've heard it all my life. I say it – and I've never been to Hawaii. Many people do it, even if they wouldn't write it; it's simply a phonological feature of a large number of English dialects. You may call it a "mistake", but the difference between "an" and "a" has been a fluid one in English for a long time.

  29. @Ridger–

    I think it's the glottal stop that arises between the "a" and following vowel sound that reminds me of the spoken Hawaiian language. Hawaiian is replete with consecutive vowels that are separated by glottal stops. I was just wondering if that found its way into English as spoken in Hawaii.

    As for it being a "mistake," I was taught that it was incorrect, both in speech and writing.

    Why does it matter that it's unstressed??

  30. What with all the sentence diagramming? He still didn't say anything. Typical politician – platitudes and no substance.

  31. The second "that" clause isn't really parallel to the other two, because it's subordinated to the "if" clause

  32. In my experience as an applied linguist specializing in the American accent, "a" and a following vowel sound overall tends to be more of a male characteristic, and then secondarily, a sub-30 trait.

  33. "I certainly wouldn't be surprised if Obama rehearses his answers to questions that he anticipates."

    Non sequitur; you asserted that these were Obama's speech writers words, not his — strongly implying that they were part of a speech. Your response simply confirms what was evident from the first — that you're a grossly dishonest person.

  34. Can we go easy on Kirk, folks? He's been commenting here for a while and is a Bolano fan, which is two marks in his favor, and while his first comment did strike me as a bit piquant, I'd like to invoke (invent?) the law of proportional snark.

  36. Thanks Garth!
    Nothing against Obama or his supporters. His English is that of a well-healed Ivy Leaguer, I just don't agree with his policies.

    Bolano Rules!

    Kirk, the "Texas Troll"

  37. Sheesh … You would have thought that Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) would have ended on January 20, 2009, but clearly, it hasn't.

  38. "You would have thought that Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) would have ended on January 20, 2009, but clearly, it hasn't."

    Seeing as his two wars and 5 trillion dollars of national debt are still with us, I see no reason to let up.

  39. Kirk,

    You are welcome to disagree with Obama's policies, but your critique is not based on much more than unexamined assumptions and rigidified bias, with a liberal (muahaha) dose of snarkiness thrown in for good (read: bad) measure.

    This, unfortunately, is a dire disease of the conservative mind. The previous President and his slavish followers being prime examples. Listening to the likes of Rush Limbaugh only releases more toxins into the body politic and offer no cures at all.

  40. "Bush Derangement Syndrome" not letting up? That's nothing — 8 years later, conservatives are STILL blaming stuff on Clinton.

    Kirk, Obama's been in office a few weeks. Bush was in there screwing things up for 8 years. I'm not willing to talk down the new president, on whom we all depend, for a few years yet.

    I want him to have his chance to make things better, and I'll support him in much of what he does in his early days in office.

    Considering that conservatives spent 7 years shrieking about how unAmerican it was to question the president — calling the rest of us traitors and haters (and a lot of you are still doing it) — I'd think you guys would be willing to give THIS president a little leeway.

  41. @Kirk: "If you think that the Bush administration regarded logic and facts as the enemy you aint seen nothin' yet!"

    Really? This administration is going to play looser with logic and facts than the *Bush administration*?! Now we *know* you're a troll.

  42. There is everything to respect about the wise words of a thoughtful, respectable and intelligent president of the United States – something we have not enjoyed for a while.

    But the sentence in question is remarkably simple; so much so that if it represents such cause for celebration by the author, one would wonder whether he too shared this property.

    I refuse to believe that we have reached the stage where anything uttered in public that is not incomprehensible garbage is reason for elation. Things have surely not grown that bad yet.

  43. I never said anything about Bush…

    As I stated before Obama is an eloquent communicator but what he is communicating is his desire to make us a socialist nation.
    After 7 years of the New Deal, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau said that all the money that had been spent had not worked. Trying to spend our way out of recession is an exercise in futility.
    Kirk, Tx.

  47. I chuckle every time someone uses the phrase "socialist nation" or even the word "socialism" today, in reference to Obama. It's right out of the GOP playbook.

    The funny thing is, the GOP lost this election, and they're not bright enough to notice they continue to lose ground. Their talking points just aren't getting any traction, except among the very small number of Sarah Palin syncophants.

    Keep on digging in your heels, Republicans, and do your best to wreck the country even more than George Bush managed. Stay right out in the open, spreading your lies, where we can see you. The rest of us will get on with business while you squabble in the mud.

  48. Hank,
    Obama wants to "spread the wealth," how is that not Socialism?
    I believe that the GOP message is getting traction…They're certainly not going down without a fight about this "stimulus" package.
    Again, George Bush is no longer in the White House!!!
    But I would rather have the country wrecked by Bush than utterly destroyed by Obama's policies.
    Furthermore, I believe that those that pulled the lever for Obama will live to regret it when they are giving half of their paychecks for programs that only make individuals and businesses more reliant on government.
    Texas Troll

  49. I'm sorry, but I just find it hilarious that Obama making the US a "socialist nation" (which I don't think will happen) is regarded as a bad thing. I, personally feel that we should work to close the ENORMOUS gap between the rich and the poor, and since those who are well-off obviously aren't doing it themselves, I think the government should assume more responsability for that.

  50. "I chuckle every time someone uses the phrase "socialist nation" or even the word "socialism" today, in reference to Obama. It's right out of the GOP playbook."

    Sorry, but there are more than knee-jerk conservatives who think that running a huge deficit is fundamentally immoral. The impulse to control and direct is not unique to the right; you on the left employ the same tools for different ends. The real issue is individual liberty vs. statism, *classical* liberalism versus collectivism, whether progressive or conservative.

    Nationalization of the banking sector doesn't amount to socialism? Read some Von Mises. Please.

  51. Very erudite, I’m sure. I think by now we’ve all concluded that Obama is a thinker, that he doesn’t go off half cocked like Bush and his ball-and-Cheney. But what bothers so me about Obama’s use of language is his frequent grammatical mistakes. He says things like: America is doing our duty. Correct version: American is doing ITS duty or We are doing our duty. He says things like: President Bush has invited Michelle and I to the White House.

    How can someone who has attended Harvard and taught constitutional law not be able to master such mundane and fundamental concepts as which pronoun agrees with its noun? I honestly can’t understand. His grammar is helping to dumb down America.

    Even Mrs. Obama uses this construction. She said, “I am a woman who loves my husband.” She too has been privileged to receive a wonderful education, but helps to dumb down the language.

    Come on, Obamas! Start cracking those grammar books with your kids!

    Mae

  52. Socialism aside, I’m no “grammar queen,” but this sentence needs a lot of work. Too many “that’s,” a useless “also,” and if one moves “forward,” why would they not alternatively move “backward” (minus the s).

    For example:

    –My view is that no one is above the law. But if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, people should be prosecuted as ordinary citizens. In general, I am more interested in looking to the future, rather than the past.–

    If Obama could put together a really great string of words off the cuff, then, he might be considered a great speaker. Otherwise, in my opinion, he needs all the help he can get–including a teleprompter.

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  57. I’m anxious to see an update to this article. How does “word salad” fare in the realm of sentence diagramming.

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Essays

Anthologies Evolved

Essays
February 21, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 3 min read

When I was 16 or 17, it felt like Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather were my own personal discoveries. I had read through all of Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, and T.C. Boyle after discovering their books and then working steadily through their bodies of work until there was nothing left to read. (And it’s amazing to think about how much time I had to read – time that I set aside for reading – back in those days.)Empty-handed, a self-taught reader as yet unaware of many literary greats, I turned to anthologies. They were plentiful at used bookstores and I was already enamored of the form thanks to the New Yorkers lying around the house and to my adolescent thoughts of becoming a writer. What I quickly realized is that these books could open me up to a new world (almost the whole world, really) of literature. Delightful little tomes like A Pocket Book of Short Stories packed an incredible punch, introducing me to the likes of Balzac, Chekhov, Ring Lardner, Somerset Maugham, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, and Cather – the table of contents is a chronicle of the weight of my discoveries. These discoveries would be made to seem mundane in college when I was instructed in the importance and context of these writers’ bodies of work, but discovering them first, in these beat up, little pocket paperbacks, bought for a dollar or two, was a revelation. Looking through all the tables of contents at the amazing, no frills “Miscellaneous Anthologies” site is like a walk down memory lane, not to mention an unparalleled catalog of the highlights of the form.I ended up collecting quite a few of these anthologies, which I suspect are still ferreted around my parents house, as I can’t seem to find any on my bookshelves now. As my reading horizons broadened, I saw that these anthologies were nearing extinction, brought on by the combined declining market fortunes of both short stories and the declining prevalence of pocket-sized (or mass market) editions of literary fiction.Nowadays, most short fiction anthologies you’ll see fall into three categories: academic (Norton, et al), yearly series (e.g. Best American and O. Henry Prize), and thematic. The latter two categories more and more have become known for the involvement of “celebrity” editors, typically big name authors who can grab a little press for the books. For example, Best American was edited by Stephen King in 2007 and Ann Patchett in 2006.Likewise, celebrity editors are at the helm of a pair of themed anthologies already released this year. Jeffrey Eugenides has put together My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro. Of course, who’s ever seen a contemporary short story that plays out like a fairy tale? As Eugenides told NPR, “I started to realize that not only the love stories that I liked, but actually the love stories that everybody liked, had a certain bittersweet quality to them. The stories in this collection are by no means tragic, but in order to even get to a measure of happiness, the characters usually have to go through a lot of difficulty.” That sounds about right.The Book of Other People, Zadie Smith’s anthology effort, is even more “low concept” (not necessarily a bad thing) than Eugenides’s. We are told her only instruction to her contributors – which include the likes of David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, and a generous sampling of the McSweeney’s set – was to “make somebody up.” USA Today quips “just when you’re ready to howl in frustration at the anthologification of the book world – I’ve seen the best minds of my generation, live blogging about recipes that inspire them – along comes The Book of Other People,” but ultimately the verdict is that the book has flashes of goodness, as is echoed by the Washington Post: “Variety — in approach, style and, in some cases, quality — is certainly on display here.”At the very least, there’s much to applaud in the creativity of Eugenides and Smith in compiling these books, and, for that matter, in the yearly anthologies for insisting by their very existence that the year’s “best” short story is something that matters. However, the idea of carrying a varied compendium of literary goodness in one’s pocket appears to have gone by the wayside, consigned to the dusty shelves of second-hand shops. For those in the know, a treasure trove of short fiction is there for the taking.

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 3 min read
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Essays

‘You Like Sandra Cisneros, Don’t You?’ On Reading Outside Your Culture

Essays
October 13, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 3 6 min read

1.
When people ask me about my hometown, I think about the sweet taste of mangos and running in bare feet. But mostly I remember pressing my nose against the windowpane just before a hurricane. Once the power went out, I would read book after book until the sun went down. Though we spoke Spanish in my household, I would read only in English.

I grew up in Little Havana, an ethnically Hispanic neighborhood in Miami, Florida. Most of its residents are recent or semi-recent immigrants to the United States from the Caribbean or Central America. As a whole, we are not big readers. Young families worry about making ends meet. Children struggle with language barriers. Most teenagers prefer to watch television or spend time with their friends. Few people can afford to pick up an addiction to literature.

But I did. As a child, I flew through the selection in our local library. It was an effortless and good way to travel. I read about poor British children rising up the ranks of society and falling back down again, wealthy American women moving to Europe to seek out their destiny, colonizers traveling through the Congo in search of their soul. I thought a lot about money, and privilege, and ambition. I wondered if anyone in books ever ate rice and beans and tortillas in the morning. Maybe heavy breakfasts got in the way of affronting destiny. So I asked my mom to make us pancakes. This was good for my morale.

My dad didn’t understand my fascination my literature, but he was willing to indulge it. He gave me his textbook after taking a required English class for his college degree. I devoured it, reading Lorrie Moore and Tillie Olsen and Shirley Jackson. They were indecently good writers; they told good stories, with good language, about some things I recognized. Their characters were not society women. They were often poor or middle class and remained such. It was an honest approach I appreciated.

But it wasn’t until I read “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club that I felt like my experiences could belong in the page of a book.

2.
“America was where all my mother’s hopes lay. She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters – twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better.” (Tan, The Joy Luck Club)
I’m not Chinese. Until high school, I had never even met anyone Chinese. But I took “Two Kinds” to heart. This was a girl who faced more than her socioeconomic circumstances, and more than her femininity. She struggled with her sense of place. Born in the United States to an immigrant mother, she was the link between the old and the new.

Within the text, Jing-Mei mentions cutting her hair to obtain Shirley Temple’s “big fat curls” only to end up “an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz.” Someone who understood hair! I thought as a child. Or more specifically, a writer who dealt, in an implicit and off-hand manner, with the frustration of fitting into a country your parents don’t understand.

When her mother is disappointed with her piano performance, Jing-Mei lashes out. “I wasn’t her slave. This wasn’t China,” she thinks, right before refusing to resume practicing the piano.  I felt something for Jing-Mei’s plight, perhaps just the idea of meeting different, often confusing expectations at all.

“This isn’t Nicaragua,” I wanted to say sometimes, but I couldn’t say it so I underlined this sentence and gave the story back to my dad in a fit of eleven-year-old fury. He laughed, and asked me to get him a glass of water.

In response, I stalked out of the kitchen and kept reading.

3.
I read Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” with the fascination of a recent convert to feminism. I read Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Anjana Appachana. I read Judith Ortiz Cofer.  And I appreciated it all, taking from writers of other backgrounds moments of insight that I couldn’t find in other works of literature.

Yes, Langston Hughes was a black poet from the Harlem Renaissance, far from me in distance and time. But “Theme for English B” touched a nerve. The speaker’s relationship to society could have been my relationship to society. I saw only our similarities, and none of our differences, in my desperation to relate to poetry and literature.

When I met a girl from Hong Kong in high school, I had to revise these thoughts, or at least look them over. “You don’t understand,” she said, seemingly about everything.

I didn’t understand the Cultural Revolution (and she was right, I didn’t). I didn’t understand Chinese cooking. I didn’t understand the One Child Policy, the importance of pleasing your parents, the frustration of having slanted eyes (“your eyes are American,” she said, as she touched her face in front of the mirror while I stood beside her). I didn’t speak Cantonese or Mandarin, and my attempts at mimicking her intonation failed. I didn’t even really understand The Joy Luck Club.

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “This just isn’t your experience. It’s not your culture. If I were you, I would read more Hispanic literature. You like Sandra Cisneros, don’t you?”

I didn’t feel as if I could cut myself off from an entire body of literature based on ethnic and cultural differences, and I told her so. She responded with a shrug.

“I guess it’s nice that you’re interested,” she said. She meant that it was flattering; she couldn’t fathom reading about someone else’s culture. Everything outside of China, and by extension, Asia, was irrelevant to her. But it remained very relevant to me.

I kept reading, and writing, and didn’t say anything when she refused to read Garcia Marquez or Borges.

4.
My best friend from college, a short Indian-American girl with strong opinions on everything from politics to literature to religion, wanted to know what I thought about Jhumpa Lahiri.

“She’s a strong writer,” I said, starting slowly and gauging her body language. It was often easier to agree than to disagree with her, and in this case, I didn’t have much of an opinion of my own. I thought her work was solid, but in some cases, not particularly memorable. Still, I respected her writing. “I liked her collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth.”

“I don’t like her writing at all,” my friend said, shaking her head. “She’s overrated. I think–”

Sometimes when she discussed books, I would wonder why some people insist on attacking art, as if the existence of a writer at her desk, producing her best work was something offensive. But I tried not to say anything, because this was a sore subject between us. At least she didn’t question my right to read Jhumpa Lahiri in the first place.

However, she did question the wisdom of many of my actions. We argued about my major–I wanted to switch from international relations to English literature–for months, until she realized that I wasn’t going to change my mind.

“Just wait and see,” she said, as we ate samosas outside of my dorm. “Right now, you’re an English major set on law school. A few months from now, you won’t be. You’ll get caught up in this writing thing.”

5.
My mother doesn’t understand why I want to be a writer or what that entails.

“What is fiction, exactly?” she asked me, as she stood over the stove, stirring some soup. My mother, an immigrant from Nicaragua, doesn’t read for pleasure in either English or Spanish. She understands writing in terms of reports and newspapers – utilitarian texts, meant to convey information with a direct impact on daily life, such as whether your child passes the 2nd grade or why Congress is passing a certain bill.

“It’s writing that tells a story,” I tried to explain. “Usually a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Like a television show, but written down.”

“So you want to write books like Jorge Ramos?” she asked, referencing a Spanish news anchor on Univision. She respects journalists; their good looks, and clear voices add to her respect.

“No,” I said. “He writes non-fiction. He writes about current events, and things that are real. Things that are happening or have happened.”

My mother turned around to face me more fully. “You mean you want to write about things that are not real?”

“Yes,” I said slowly, drawing the word out. I consider her dubious expression before continuing. “Like Isabel Allende.”

It was a poor defense; my mother had heard about Allende, but wasn’t familiar with her work. Still, she had heard her name, which was good enough for my purposes. If our interests could be graphed as a Venn diagram, we would have to struggle to come up with something to place in the overlapping space. That my mom had heard of Allende would have to do.

“Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” my mother asked me again.

I was sure. I am sure.

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 3 6 min read
Essays

Setting a Rant to Music: On Adapting Thomas Bernhard’s ‘The Loser’ for the Opera

Essays
September 22, 2016 | 1 book mentioned 5 min read

In 1998, I wrote music for a production of Friedrich Schiller’s play Mary Stuart at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.  The director was my friend Carey Perloff, the music was sung by the spectacular men’s vocal ensemble Chanticleer, and the translation of the text was by the writer and Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold.  There can be a lot of down time for a composer and a translator during theater rehearsals so Michael and I passed the time telling each other stories about books we should be reading, and Michael suggested I read Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser.  So I did.  As soon as I got back to New York I picked up a copy and I was immediately hooked by the power of the novel, especially the psycho energy of the narrator.  Written in the first person as a continuous stream of jumbled information — one giant paragraph — and changing its focus and time and location and perspective and subject matter with almost every other sentence, it really felt like a rant to me — a condescending, angry, smart, rich, witty, not very nice man ranting about his life.  I couldn’t read it silently.  I ended up yelling the entire book to my reflection in the mirror in my bathroom, from start to finish, which was very exciting.  And that day I started imagining what it would be like to add music to it.

I was drawn to the tightness of the language, the intensity of the character and to the self consciously indirect way the story is told, but most of all I was drawn by the subject matter.  The novel tells the story of a man, never named in the book, who wanted to be a concert pianist when he was young.  He was good enough to participate in a master class with Vladimir Horowitz, but in the same class was a young Glenn Gould, and the knowledge that Gould would always be a better pianist than he could ever be destroyed his life, and the life of his best friend, Wertheimer, who was also in the master class.

There is not much plot.  The narrator’s friend Wertheimer has just killed himself, causing the narrator to reflect on their relationship together, their relationship to Glenn Gould, to the people and places and history of their native Austria, to their wealth and class, and to the odd philosophical thoughts they explored over the years to keep their various Glenn Gould fetishes alive.  And Wertheimer has a sick relationship with his sister, which is discussed in great detail.  Eventually there is a little bit of action — the narrator goes on a trip to Wertheimer’s hunting lodge to see if he can find Wertheimer’s notebooks, which may contain writings about the narrator, or about Glenn.  That is pretty much it.

One way to read the book is as a painful meditation on disappointment.  This is certainly a theme that runs through many of Bernhard’s novels.  The Loser has its own special type of disappointment for musicians, however, which is guaranteed to hit us where we are most vulnerable.  To become a musician is to throw yourself into years of study and practice and hard work, all of which you must pursue wholeheartedly and without compromise, before you can even begin to ask yourself if it might pay off.  It is an immense struggle just to get yourself to a high enough level of sophistication and proficiency that you can see and understand just how much higher you will need to go.  The close connection in The Loser between the erudition of the narrator and his disappointment feels all too real to us.

This feeling was also very real to Thomas Bernhard.  Like his narrator, Bernhard trained to be a musician, before a health crisis forced him to give it up.  Many parts of the novel are autobiographical, with odd fake details about Gould that in real life were facts about Bernhard himself.  Most of these details are tiny — about various diseases or locations.  Bernhard’s sense of musical disappointment, however, is fundamental to the novel.  Not only does it feel authentic throughout, but it also plays into a musician’s deepest fear, that he or she will never be good enough.

I had a very personal connection to reading the book and I wanted to preserve that, to make sure that my own reading remained the center of the piece.  And my opera really is in the service of the reading of the book.  I made the libretto entirely out of the (excellent) translation into English, I didn’t change a single word or the order in which any of the text occurs, just trimming it all for length — I wanted to preserve its odd and compelling flow.  And I had an idea of how to stage it that would keep our attention on how the character of the narrator is revealed, and not on the actions described or the physicality of the performers.  I wanted to keep everything as true to a reading of the book as I could make it.

I began with cutting the text into a workable libretto.  There is only so much one singer can sing, so there was a lot of amazing, significant material I had to cut out.  I omitted almost all the nasty things the narrator has to say about Austria and Switzerland, which is a huge part of the book.  I ended up having to take out many things that are quite important — I left out that the narrator is a failed writer, I left out Wertheimer’s funeral and burial, that Wertheimer was Jewish, etc.  What I tried to keep were the things that allow us to see better into the persona of the narrator.  Our perception of him changes across the novel, as Bernhard shows us more of his inner life.

It is this aspect of Bernhard’s storytelling that ended up exciting me the most as I went about adapting it.  It seemed to me that managing our perceptions of a character could be a new way to focus action in an opera. Opera traditionally includes love and death and revenge and coincidence and mistaken identity and elephants — usually a lot goes on.  I loved the idea that the dramatic shape of an opera could be made only out of the changes in how we perceive the motivations of a character, and how the music reveals him to us.

I have also been the stage director for this opera.  For the staging I wanted to make physical the separation that the narrator feels from Glenn Gould, and from the life that he did not lead.  I had the idea to seat the audience only in the mezzanine of the Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and build a platform right in front of us, on which the narrator stands.  It seems like he is floating in space, telling us his story, within the giant void of the empty hall.  Two thirds of the way through the piece, the stage behind him begins to glow, revealing a piano floating in the air.  A pianist begins to play, a very delicate and simple music.  We can’t hear it very well, because in front of us a man is singing, very intensely and directed right at us, about his miserable life.  What I hoped we would feel in this staging is that there is something blocking our path to the beauty of the piano on stage, just as the narrator’s path to the piano became blocked.  We become frustrated at not being able to hear the music.  Frustration is a big part of the reading of The Loser as well.

I am grateful to all the amazing musicians who have helped me make this piece — the commanding Rod Gilfry as the narrator, the very sensitive piano virtuoso Conrad Tao, an ensemble of great musicians put together by Bang on a Can and conducted by Karina Canellakis.  Most of all I am grateful to the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and in particular the courageous Joe Melillo, for commissioning this work and for letting me make it.

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 5 min read
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Essays

Team Ladislaw: What Henry James (and Everyone Else) Gets Wrong About Middlemarch

Essays
May 26, 2016 | 1 book mentioned 3 5 min read

There exists within criticism a genre of rereading, of essays about books revisited years after first encounter and the richer appreciation that time and experience lend to their reconsideration. In this vein, George Eliot’s Middlemarch is perhaps one of the most written about, in part because it is a book that itself looks closely at change — how its characters deal with it and how they themselves are altered — and thus invites readers to do the same. Virginia Woolf famously called it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” who seem to relate to it more, not less, as they get older.

But if rereading can prompt new insights, more often it reveals one’s fixations. Indeed, when I read Middlemarch this spring, I was at least nominally more adult than when I first picked it up three years earlier: I had a boyfriend, dental insurance, and enough professional frustration to make the young doctor Tertius Lydgates’s wasted ambitions feel a bit more poignant. Still, I found myself preoccupied with the same couple, Dorothea Brookes and Will Ladislaw, that had drawn my attention before — or, rather, I became preoccupied with defending them. We are told in the book’s final chapter that they live out their lives “bound to each other by a love stronger than any impulses which could have marred it.” Yet critics and scholars have long voiced dissatisfaction with this ending.

I first became aware of this in college, when Rebecca Mead published the New Yorker essay that would land her a book deal for My Life in Middlemarch. In an accompanying Q&A with readers on the magazine’s website, a certain AJ remarked that Dorothea’s marriage to Ladislaw was “bizarre.” I came to learn this was not a new complaint. “It strikes us as an oddity in the author’s scheme that she should have chosen just this figure of Ladislaw as the creature in whom Dorothea was to find her spiritual compensations,” wrote Henry James upon the book’s publication in 1873. That same year, an unnamed reviewer asserted that Ladislaw “seems to be a favorite with the writer to an extent which hardly justifies itself to the mind of the reader.”

If I don’t share such frustration, I do understand it. It arises from readers’ assessment that Dorothea’s perfect mate is not Ladislaw but Lydgate, and Eliot clearly encourages this view. Lydgate, a progressive young doctor who seeks the greater good in medical discovery, is the clear counterpart to Dorothea’s Saint Theresa. When each marries another early in the novel — Dorothea the stodgy Casaubon and Lydgate the shallow and intractable Rosamond Vincy — the very symmetry of what James called their “matrimonial infelicity” suggests they are on similar paths that will eventually cross at the altar. After all, if David Copperfield could marry twice in a book of the same length, then surely Dorothea can, too — marry Lydgate, that is. When she doesn’t, it is the narrator, channeling Rosamond, who voices our disappointment, reflecting of her husband in the book’s final chapter, “It was a pity he had not had Mrs. Ladislaw, whom he was always praising and placing above her.”

However, it is precisely Eliot’s transparency in promoting such expectations that suggests her intention to disappoint them. By highlighting Dorothea and Lydgate’s similarities, Eliot invites readers to apply the same delusive logic that Rosamond employs in courting Lydgate, occasioning Eliot’s famous extended metaphor of a candle shone upon a scratched surface that stands at the heart of the book:
Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent — of Miss Vincy, for example.
If the narrator’s parable applies itself most immediately to events — Rosamond believes that her brother Fred’s typhoid fever is the work of Providence, as it requires Lydgate to frequent their home during his treatment — the egoism it describes also causes characters to misestimate prospective partners more generally, projecting some qualities on them while ignoring others. Wishing to escape her humdrum life, Rosamond sees Lydgate’s pedigree and station — a physically attractive outsider with elevated relatives — and is blinded to the finer points of both their characters. A similar desperation leads Dorothea into her tragically loveless marriage with Casaubon, mistaking his pedantry for intelligence. That both marriages are unhappy comes as no surprise. Each woman has pinned her hopes on a man because he appears her perfect match on paper.

Anyone who has spent time in the trenches of online dating knows that this is a bad idea. It’s an approach to human affairs that neglects the individual and ineffable and applies intellect where one should use intuition, and which Eliot everywhere attempts to correct. Yet it is this same impulse that leads us to make similar calculations on Dorothea’s behalf, arranging the most articulated qualities she shares with Lydgate into romantic compatibility. It’s also what readers find so frustrating about Ladislaw: If Lydgate is great on the page, Ladislaw, an orphan of mysterious provenance with “rebellious blood on both sides,” is hardly there at all. He lacks, according to James, “sharpness of outline and depth of color,” making him the novel’s “only eminent failure.” The scholar Rosemary Ashton has called him “the least successfully imagined character in the novel.” But what they and others identify as a shortcoming seems likely to be by design. By repelling our efforts to analyze Ladislaw, Eliot wrests control of Dorothea’s romantic narrative from readers who have unwittingly become Rosamonds in their own right.

This theory differs from the more popular explanation for Dorothea and Ladislaw’s marriage, which draws on the theme of chance and circumstance, and the extent to which they make folly of our lives. Eliot is careful not to exempt even her heroes, particularly Lydgate, from this unfortunate reality. Thus, we often read Dorothea and Lydgate’s never-was relationship as star-crossed, the result of poor timing: By the time a widowed Dorothea begins patronizing Lydgate’s hospital, he has already married Rosamond, who refuses to conveniently fade away in the manner of Charles Dickens’s Dora Spenlow (sturdily surviving a miscarriage and bucking the Victorian trend that allowed so many female characters to die of nothing more, apparently, than their own vacuity). In contrast, time favors Dorothea’s courtship with Will, whom she meets a second time during her honeymoon in Rome, just as her expectations of marriage to Casaubon are being leached of their fantasy. The very proximity of Lydgate combined with the unlikelihood of Dorothea’s run-in with Will while abroad would seem to underscore the determining role that happenstance plays in thwarting one love match and making another.

But in light of all the evidence that enables a reading that takes the happy ending at its word, why does the consensus so strongly incline to this sadder one? The answer, I think, lies in our own fears. The pro-Lydgate camp emphasizes that we are victims of the world, our best interests defeated by outside forces. It may be tragic, but it affirms our own capacity for understanding. If we take Ladislaw and Dorothea’s storyline on good faith, we must confront an even more terrifying truth — that it is often the heart that defies our best plotting. No doubt for people who elect to read (and reread) an 800-page novel about early-19th-century provincial life seeded with moral admonitions, the allowance this makes for unaccounted pleasure may be the hardest to accept, even when it’s imperative: Stop thinking. Enjoy the romance.

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 3 5 min read
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