(Note that at the time of writing this post, only four books have been released in what is expected to be a seven-book series. Also note that there are some spoilers towards the end of this post, which I’ve indicated with a rather prominent warning.)

One of the unique things about George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire book series is its use of what are commonly referred to as “POV chapters.” Every one of the books in the series has a small cast of “POV characters,” and it is through these characters’ perspectives that we see the story unfold. Each chapter presents a single point of view; each chapter is even named after the character whose point of view is being presented. The chapters are not first person narration, but rather third person narration with a large amount of focalization and free indirect discourse.

As we move on to later books in the series, more POV characters are introduced. Often very minor (or even previously non-existent) characters suddenly become POV characters, and this of course increases their seeming importance to us, the reader, since each POV character is, from their own perspective, the most important character in the world. It is also easy to empathize most with the character whose perspective filters the story. We get their view of events, their hopes, their fears, and so on.

This also means that villains who seem very one-dimensional can begin to be much more sympathetic once we get their point of view. If we only get Character A’s perspective of Character B, and Character A hates Character B, then of course Character B will probably seem like a jerk to the reader, too (even if the reader does notice a few cracks and obvious biases in Character A’s reasoning). Character A might even have good reason to hate Character B, since Character A doesn’t know the whole story, and doesn’t understand Character B’s true motivations.

But once we get Character B’s subjective perception of events, things begin to change. We realize that their seemingly completely indefensible actions do, in fact, have a defense. And even if we don’t agree with the logic guiding their actions, we might at least sympathize with them, especially if we discover that they feel guilty about what they’ve done (and, thinking back, we realize we never agreed completely with absolutely everything Character A did, either). We begin to discover that Character B has a complex interior life, a far more complex interior life than Character A initially gave them credit for.

The use of the POV chapter technique switches us between subjectivities. George Eliot’s narrators were really good at this. Jane Austen was also one of the pioneers in her fluid movements of focalization, switching seamlessly and fluidly from focalized perspective to focalized perspective within the span of a single paragraph. What this heavy use of focalization usually reveals is a more complex inner life than we initially gave a character credit for. The object becomes a subject. What seems “other” to Character A is, by contrast, “self‚” to Character B. Character B is an “object‚” in Character A’s POV chapters, but he is the “subject‚” of his own POV chapters.

Now, what is unique about the series is that as we see watch petty squabbles between these characters who have more in common than it at first seems (in terms of their fears and hopes, the surprising complexity of their inner life, etc.), we also have the threat of a not-so-petty squabble.

To clarify, the “petty” squabble I’m talking about is what characters refer to as “the Game of Thrones” (also the title of the first novel in the series). This is the game in which different POV characters vie for political power in the Seven Kingdoms. (Of course, non-POV characters vie for power as well.)

This game of thrones is of course “just a game.” It doesn’t really matter who is actually sitting on the throne: a Mad King is deposed, but he’s replaced by a king who completely ignores the affairs of state. The peasant class continually suffers, regardless who sits the Iron Throne. Nothing changes, really, and outside of the aristocracy, most people don’t really care who has political power. (They also don’t really know what’s going on, since gossip and ignorant superstition always distort the “truth” to a pretty absurd degree.)

The larger threat, coming from beyond “the Wall,” way up in the North, is certainly more important: an army of “Others” are coming. We do not get the perspective of any single Other. The Others are like empty shells of cold evil, not quite a ghost, but certainly not human. They do not have a subjectivity in the way we understand the concept. They are truly “Other” to every POV character in the book.

The Others are like a force of nature. The motto of House Stark is “Winter is Coming,” and the ominous overtones of this motto obviously foreshadows the coming of the Others, who are associated with winter, ice, cold, and the land outside “civil” society. (The few humans who are unlucky enough to live beyond the wall are called “wildlings,” but consider themselves “free,” insofar as they are not bound by the same feudal customs.) We do not get the perspective of the Others, just like we will never get the perspective of nature. Characters cannot relate to an Other the way that can relate to another character [1]. Nature and the Others are relentless; they cannot be reasoned with. The Others are not like us. Eventually the various squabbling POV characters will have to unite (because they are quite alike) in order to deal with the much larger outside threat.

—Warning: Spoilers Below—

The opposition between Ice (the cold Others, coming from the wintery and barren North) and Fire (Daenerys with her dragons, who is not harmed by fire) also plays into this important theme. I am reminded here of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, and more specifically the opposition that Brontë sets up between the cold exterior that Lucy Snowe (snow!) puts on — the cold mask of her exterior — and her more fiery, passionate inner life; passion being associated with burning desire, fire, etc. (Speaking of Charlotte Brontë, ice and fire also constitute important aspects of Jane Eyre’s subjectivity.) But going back to A Song of Ice and Fire, we have human passion, and its associations with heat, up against the icy, cold, empty shells of inhuman Otherness. The Others are like cold corpses, dead things that have been emptied of the heat of human life. (Of course this is similar to vampires and other undead creatures; it is not exactly an uncommon trope in fiction.)

Slightly off-topic, but I am reminded of a quote by John Ruskin, from Modern Painters V:

“all the power of nature depends on subjection to the human soul. Man is the sun of the world; more than the real sun. The fire of his wonderful heart is the only light and heat worth gauge or measure. where he is, are the topics; where he is not, the ice-world” (Pt. IX, ch. 1 “The Dark Mirror”).

Anyways, a couple theories regarding the series and the “song of ice and fire” need to be addressed here. The most important one is in regards to Jon Snow’s parentage (note the name, obviously), but first I should probably address the one which claims that the “song of ice and fire” in the series’ title refers to a union between Jon Snow (Ice) and Daenerys Targaryen (Fire). Jon comes from the North, and at the beginning of the first book he finds a snowy white direwolf, just as Daenerys, coming up from the southeast, hatches dragons and is herself immune to fire.

But the common theory now (and there’s a fair bit of evidence for this, as well as a Facebook group) is that the Song of Ice and Fire actually refers to Jon’s parents, who were, in fact, not Ned Stark and an unknown woman, but Rhaegar Targaryen (Fire) and Lyanna Stark (Ice). The Targaryens have always been associated with dragons and heat, and the Starks have always been associated with winter and the north. So Jon is not simply “Ice.” but is himself the song of both Ice and Fire, the realization of that union.

This theory regarding Rhaegar and Lyanna also negates the above one if the union between Jon and Dany were taken literally, since such a literal union would imply that incest is the solution to the threat of Otherness (if Rheagar is Jon’s father, then Daenerys is his aunt). Although there’s plenty of incest in the series I seriously doubt that the conflicts of the series will be wrapped up with an incestuous union. (Although I guess it could be. That would be… something.)

Thematically, then, Jon represents the overcoming of the alienation between self and other, fire (inner life) and ice (cold exterior). Without sounding too corny, one of the points of the series is that all the characters, with their conflicting points of view and petty squabbles, are going to have to overcome their differences and deal with the larger threat. After all, they all have much in common (they all have a passionate and complex inner life, regardless of what they’ve done), and together they need to deal with that which truly does not have an interior life, that cold force of nature which is truly “other” to any single subjective perspective: the force of nature (the objective world) coming down from up beyond the Wall, the force of nature coming down from “outside” human society, just as the objective world comes down upon the human subject and penetrates into his inner subjective life.

Jon Snow, then, is this union (the song) between Ice and Fire — the acknowledgment that humans have both an objective “shell” and a subjective “core” [2]. In A Clash of Kings Daenerys has a vision of her brother Rhaegar standing over a child bed, saying, “He is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire” [3]. Jon is the cold (the exterior object) and, as the characters will come to discover, he is also the fire (the interior subject).

It is significant, too, that Jon chooses to go to the Wall. He exists at the threshold between human society and the forces of nature, the threshold between subject and object, between the subjective person and the objective world outside, between self and absolute Other.

-

[1] “An Other” versus “an other.”  The capital-o Other is the absolute Other. The otherness of another human is, by contrast, not absolute.

[2] Or, at least, we have the illusion that we such a core. I think it was Nietzsche who said that subjectivity is just an illusion caused by language and grammar.

[3] From A Clash of Kings, in one of the Daenerys chapters, obviously. The quote that “he is the prince that was promised” also ties in nicely to Lyanna’s dying words, “Promise me, Ned.”

So, with that said, I enjoyed Justin Cronin’s The Passage. Vampires clearly constitute a major part of the novel, but the book is not just a collection of worn out tropes from vampire fiction. The Passage explains the various aspects of its vampires (pseudo) scientifically, in a way somewhat similar to Richard Matheson’s treatment of vampires in I Am Legend. That’s not necessary to a good vampire story, but it can be fun if handled well. And I’m not saying The Passage is even all that realistic (it’s not), but the book sets up the laws of its own universe and then it obeys those laws, which is good enough for me. Along with the scientific explanation behind the vampires, there are also things in the book that can’t rationally be explained and are actually very supernatural. There’s a nice mix, actually, of science and the supernatural.

What I think is most important is that the book is not a rehashing (or even a subverting) of the traditional tropes and clichés associated with vampires. The book uses the idea of vampires to tell the story it needs to tell, and in doing so it takes things in a unique direction, without lingering on the fact that it is doing so.

The novel is ambitious in its scope, chronicling both the fall of our world and the rise of a new one. This might cause a few readers to feel disappointed when familiar settings and characters are established only to be abandoned, but that is pretty central to what Cronin is doing. Once we “jump” suddenly to the post-apocalyptic world, there is a real sense that we’ve lost something. The world we know — the one established in the first section of the novel, with references to familiar brands like Walmart and McDonald’s —is very clearly gone. If Cronin had started the novel after the world had already ended, the effect would not be the same. In other words, yes, it sucks and it’s jarring that the world that was established is completley gone: that’s the point.

If there is one weakness in the novel it definitely lies in its pacing. In the middle third of the book things… just… slow down. There are about a half dozen events and excursions that could easily have been compressed into two or three. Thankfully, things do pick back up a bit towards the end. Some people seem to dislike the ending more than I do, but I thought it was pretty satisfying. It did not wrap up every question, but it did have a certain degree of closure for the present adventure. Since there are two more books in the trilogy (or whatever it is — I’ve heard the books might not be strictly chronological) it remains to be seen what the significance will be of some of those seemingly unnecessary events in those middle sections.

Each section of the novel (there are twelve: eleven plus a postscript, which makes for a significant number in this particular story) begins with a quotation from Shakespeare or Wordsworth or some other Western literary giant. One could debate whether the quotations are appropriate or empty ostentation (I think they’re appropriate), but it is clear that Cronin is dealing with many of the same themes as these writers. I mean, yeah, obviously Cronin ain’t no Shakespeare. This isn’t the best novel of our time or the decade or the year. But the metaphors and literary devices in The Passage are not just added in after the fact (which, according to On Writing, is basically Stephen King’s modus operandi). They’ve been carefully worked into the story right from the start and they are essential to it.

The questions and themes I’m referring to are ones relating to life and death, the certain degree of isolation inherent in human experience, as well as the possibility for human connection and sympathy. They may seem like obvious themes, especially for a genre that deals explicitly with life, death, and “the undead,” but it is still very rare for a work in the genre to deal with these questions in an intelligent, mature, or original manner (which is why most works in the genre are rubbish). But The Passage actually does deal with those questions, and it actually does so relatively intelligently. I’m hoping that the future installments in the trilogy (or series, or whatever it is) are equally up to the task of expanding on those questions and thinking about them in new ways.

“A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in the lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do no work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothens and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.” (Keats to Fanny in a lesson on poetry.)

Bright Star asks us to luxuriate, through our senses, in the experience of being in the film. The philosophy of accepting mystery and enjoying our time while we are “inside” the poem is reminiscent of John Keats’ actual theory of negative capability, but also to his “Ode to a Nightingale,” which Keats composes and narrates at one point about halfway through the movie. In “Ode to a Nightingale‚” the poet uses his imagination and the “wings of Poesy‚” (33) to temporarily enjoy being in a world of something better, higher, something not of our regular earthly existence, where “youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies‚” (26). Later on in his experience, the word “Forlorn” brings the poet back to his more earthly senses, and the poem ends.

This better, higher world is the one inhabited and embodied by Keats in Bright Star, and our experience with him is only brief. At the beginning of the film, we are concerned with the death of Keats’s brother (the youth in the Ode who “grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies‚”). Briefly, we experience the courtship between Keats and Fanny, and their somewhat idealized love. Keats, attempting to describe his feelings to Fanny, says, ‚”I want a brighter word than bright, fairer word than fair.” The end of the film brings us back to reality: Keats is often abroad, unreachable, while Fanny is forlorn. Keats grows sick and dies.

Fellow poet Brown recognizes that Keats is the better writer. But Keats is also a better man, who lives up to a higher ideal. While Keats refuses to breach the walls of propriety with Fanny, Brown impregnates a maid. “With what ease you help yourself,” Keats notes, not angry, but genuinely perplexed. Later in the film, Brown too will realize that the difference between the two men goes beyond their skill in poetry.

The film touches only briefly on the agony and depression that Keats suffered, and their effects upon his mental health. Its focus is on the beauty of his life. The imagery is often of the English countryside; gentles breezes coming in through open windows cause white curtains to flutter carelessly, like the butterflies that Fanny and her sisters start collecting. The soundtrack makes you want to close your eyes and luxuriate in the music, as Keats does when he listens to the singing nightingale and composes his ode.

Keats died at the age of 25 (a horrible, long suffering death), yet he became one of the great English poets, on only a small body of work. Keats wrote “Bright Star” about Fanny, but the title of the film might equally apply to either Fanny or Keats, or simply to their experience together. Percy Shelley’s famous elegy for Keats ends: “The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are‚” (495-496). We look back on the short life of Keats, and see in him the embodiment of a Romantic ideal, a bright star. Whether that is at all fair to the man that Keats really was, I’m not sure.

The Black Knight and Friar Tuck enjoy some delicious pie

I’m studying Ivanhoe right now, and I came across some interesting articles about the book and its connection to a real-life trial by combat… in 1817. So I thought I would blog about the details, because though I think it is really interesting it will probably never make it into my paper.

Anyways:

The Ashford v. Thornton case of 1817 was the last case of a trial by combat challenge in Britain. It came at a time of rising interest in medieval England, chivalry, and romance. But of course the early nineteenth century wasn’t a time when trial by combat was considered anything other than absurd and (frankly) barbaric. Most people thought the case allowed a guilty man to get away with rape and murder. How? Through his very willingness and ability to commit murder.

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott was published two years later, in December of 1819. It includes a trial by combat, and several scholars have argued that the case of Ashford v. Thornton was popular enough that both Scott and his readers would have been very aware of the case during the climactic final scene of the novel. Scott indeed mentions the Thornton case in his private letters (Letters; click “Vol. IV“).

Details of the Ashford v. Thornton case (1817)

In 1817 Abraham Thornton was accused of raping and murdering 20-year-old Mary Ashford. Her body had been pulled from a pit of water outside a very small village, several miles northeast of Birmingham. At a party the previous night, Thornton had boasted that he’d already had Mary’s sister, and he would also have Mary, who was also at the party. Thornton later told police that he did have sex with Mary that night, but that it was consensual. Although we’ll never know for sure what happened, Thornton does not come across as a very sexually appealing fellow, considering his rude boasting and his appearance. The London Times noted that Thornton’s “natural thickness is greater than common, but his excessive corpulency has swollen his whole figure into a size that rather approaches to deformity.” [1]

At the initial trial, Thornton was found “not guilty” after only five minutes of jury deliberation. Again, based on the details available to us today, it is impossible to say whether he actually was guilty or innocent.

Mary’s brother, William Ashford, was allowed by English law to make an “appeal,” such that Thornton was called upon again to plead his innocence. Except this time, on the advice of his attorneys, he pleaded “Not guilty, and ready to defend the same upon my body” (qtd. in Dyer 386), at which point Thornton threw down the proverbial gauntlet (in this case a yellow leather glove). William, being a skinny teenager, did not accept the challenge. And so Thornton was free. (For what it’s worth, the weapons of the fight were to be “oak clubs.”)

The public at the time was shocked, given that it was the first demand for a trial by battle since 1638. It was an old law that had basically been forgotten about by the courts, and so it had never been repealed. For the public, Thornton had basically turned the chivalric code upside down. Chivalry asks men to use their power to defend women; Thornton used the chivalric code to get off the hook after supposedly raping and killing a woman. William Ashford, who actually was trying to defend a woman, was out of luck (being a skinny teenager, and all).

Ashford v. Thornton and Ivanhoe

"Combat de chevaliers dans la campagne" by Eugene Delacroix

Ivanhoe‘s trial by combat surrounds  the saintly Jewess, Rebecca, who has been threatened with rape by the Templar knight Sir Brian Bois-Guilbert. Her staunch resistance to his advances causes him to fall even further in love with her. Eventually, she is accused by the Knights Templar of being a witch who has seduced Bois-Guilbert.

There are a few obvious differences between the case of Ashford v. Thornton and Ivanhoe‘s trial by combat. In Ivanhoe, the trial by combat is demanded by the threatened woman, Rebecca, not the villain (though it is Bois-Guilbert who secretly suggests it to her, because he wants to save her life). The combat also does not let someone get away with murder; technically, it saves Rebecca’s life. Indeed, the real villain, Bois-Guilbert, even though he is never on trial, ends up killed in the middle of the combat due to “the violence of his own contending passions” (490), and justice ends up actually being served. (The “contending passions” refer to Bos-Guilbert’s will to win the duel and thus further his ambitions towards eventually becoming the Templar Grand Master, and his conflicting will to save Rebecca, with whom he’s fallen in love.)

The two main scholars to take on the similarities of the Ashford vs. Thornton case and Ivanhoe are Gary Dyer and Mark Schoenfield. Both argue that Scott is attempting to rescue chivalry in some way, even if he realizes it’s not at all feasible in the modern world.

I think the idea of rescuing chivalry in a world in which it’s not feasible is a pretty important aspect of Scott’s Ivanhoe. Part of romance involves a kind of lost golden age we can never get back to, and despite the subtle critiques of chivalry and romance in Ivanhoe, I think that the world we are introduced to is indeed a romantic golden age. Although we can’t get back to that golden age, it is an important part of our history. In Schoenfield’s words, for Walter Scott, chivalric institutions (such as the trial by combat) “rendered modernity intelligible” (81).

[1] I saw part of this quotation originally in Mark Schoenfield’s article, and he cites it as 9 August 1817. But I could only find it in the 11 August paper. It is in regards to a Friday trial, which is why it appears three days after, on the Monday instead of Saturday.

Cited Stuff:

Dyer, Gary. “Ivanhoe, Chivalry, and the Murder of Mary Ashford.” Criticism 39.3 (Summer, 1997): 383-408. Print.

Schoenfield, Mark. “Waging Battle: Ashford v. Thornton, Ivanhoe, and Legal Violence.” Prose Studies 23.2 (2000): 61-86. Print.

Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe. Ed. Ian Duncan. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Print. Oxford World’s Classics.

- – - . “The Letters of Sir Walter Scott E-Text.” The Walter Scott Digital Archive. Edinburgh University Library. Web. 19 Jan. 2010.

“Warwick Assizes, Friday, Aug. 8. Trial of Abraham Thornton For The Murder Of Mary Ashford.” The Times [London] 11 Aug. 1817, Law sec.: 3. The Times Digital Archive 1785-1985. Web. 3 Jan. 2010.

When my Victorian Realism seminar got to the topic of Trollope’s crazy writing habits, I was reminded of comments I have often read from writers about what it’s like to write. It seems to me that if you ask an amateur writer, they’ll say something along the lines of how a writer can’t help but write; they are compelled to sit down at a computer (or a typewriter, a pad of paper, a pile of napkins, or whatever) and write for hours each day, because they just can’t help themselves. It’s like a drug fix. This has always seemed to me to be a silly myth. From what I’ve read about working, successful writers, they admit that it is, in fact, pretty difficult to soldier on through the drudgery of putting thousands of words to a page, again and again, until finally those thousands of words add up to a completed draft of a novel.

So, with that said, what I have here are a few writing habits that I’ve found to be pretty interesting. However, I suppose what I have here is not what would normally be considered the wildest or most unique set of writing habits (e.g., Michael Ondaatje’s literally cutting and pasting his stuff with scissors and tape) so much as habits about the grind of producing a completed, coherent text.

Anthony Trollope

Just a note that I’m getting a good deal of my info from a book called The Novel Machine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope by Walter Kendrick and from Trollope’s Autobiography.

Over the course of his life Anthony “the machine” Trollope wrote 47 novels and 16 other books. For about the first 20 years after the publication of his first novel in 1847, while he continued working as a novelist, he also maintained a full-time job with the Civil Service in the Post Office, a job he actually took a great deal of pride in. Here’s how he did it: Trollope paid a servant an extra ¬£5 a year to wake him up at 5:30 am every morning and get him a cup of coffee. Trollope would then work on a novel for three hours. The first half hour was spent reading over what he had already written, and after that he wrote at a pace of 250 words per 15 minutes. So, over three hours, he would write approximately 2,500 words. According to him, it “allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year” (An Autobiography 272). He admits that he never did write more than three novels in any one year, but, like, c’mon man, give him some slack. He was pretty darn prolific.

Like other novelists of his time, Trollope’s works have been associated with attempts to convey “the real.” (A lot of this part now is sort of an off-shoot from class discussion.) To do this, he tried to reduce the significance of the physical text (the signifier) as much as possible. He “lived” with his characters (the signified) in his imagination all day, every day. Then he would put his characters to paper as fast as he could, over the span of a few hours every morning, as if doing so reduced the obtrusiveness of the text. To Trollope, a text should just be a clear window to its characters. He was very pleased by a comment of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, who said Trollope’s novels were just as real “as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of” (qtd. in An Autobiography 145). Trollope seemed to enjoy living with his characters in his imagination, but considered the physical act of writing to be a job to be done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

This is kind of funny when you actually read his books and notice the way his narrators often directly address the reader and reveal the very artificial and constructed aspects of the novel. My favourite are his narratorial intrusions that completely break a novel’s flow: “How easily would she have forgiven and forgotten the archdeacon’s suspicions had she but heard the whole truth from Mr. Arabin. But then where would have been my novel?” (Barchester Towers II.32). Or, in the conclusion of the same novel, he says “The end of a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner-party, must be filled with sweet meats and sugar plums” (II.266). Addresses like these blatantly show the reader that the plot is unfolding the way it is purely for the sake of art and fulfilling the rules of the genre, and not for the sake of being “real.”[1] (I was also amused to learn just how much this drove Henry James bonkers.) I should add, though, that Trollope wasn’t big on plot; it is a common criticism against him, and he openly admits to using plot purely as a vehicle for his characters.

This is my own interpretation, now, but it seems to me that “plot” was too caught up in literary conventions for Trollope’s taste. We all know the novel is going to end in a marriage, and that the ambitious, scheming chaplain won’t get the girl, so why bother pretending otherwise? Let’s just admit that the heroine isn’t going to fall for the bad guy and move on (Trollope does exactly this in Barchester Towers). Let’s focus on the characters, because that’s where there is actually some freedom to represent something “real.” The plot is too pre-determined by the traditions of the novel. Most of the interruptions from the narrator that highlight the story’s fabricated aspect focus on its plot. The characters, however, are completely “real,” and it’s not a coincidence that it his characters whom Trollope purports to have lived with everyday in his imagination.

Footnotes:

[1] Compare that to the Chapter 17 digression in Adam Bede, where George Eliot breaks the flow of the narrative to do the exact opposite; defending the actions of her characters because, though their actions may not create a thrilling, romantic narrative, they supposedly create a more “real” one.

Some Stuff I Cited:

Kendrick, Walter M. The Novel Machine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1980. Print.

Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. Ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

- – - . Barchester Towers. Ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

• Email your ebook to a friend with all your annotations/marginalia/notes attached. Or just send your notes for them to apply to their own copy of the ebook.

• Save all your annotations/marginalia/notes for each time you read through a given book. Start “fresh” every time, but then compare your notes between different read-throughs. Or just have different sets of notes depending on what the purpose of the read-through was (e.g., reading through Middlemarch with the goal of writing an essay on realism, then reading through it later, paying more attention to references to class conflict).

• Download other people’s annotations/marginalia of a book, like all the notes of a respected academic’s or an well-known author’s. These might possibly be available to buy, for, like, 30 cents per set. (Go go gadget “Long Tail.”)

• A heavily annotated version of a book (like Lolita, for example, which already has heavily annotated versions and is a book with which annotations really help) in which the annotations are longer than the book itself… but reading each annotation is a painless process where you tap the screen, an annotation comes up, and then you tap the screen again to get rid of it. No flipping back and forth while trying to keep your page with one finger.

• Compare one edition with another, flipping back and forth within the text. This would be neat for things like some Shakespeare plays which seem to have a thousand small word substitutions spread throughout.

• Control-f. (You can pretty much do this now. Hurray!)

• Have an academic article which keeps referencing page numbers from the 2004 Oxford edition of a book, and another that keeps referencing the 2007 Penguin edition? No problem: switch back and forth between the different paginations.

• Heck, read an academic article that links directly to your ebook whenever it references the text. Or have books come with neat articles attached, and referenced via footnotes in the relevant parts of the text.

• Tap the screen, plug in your earphones, and painlessly switch to the audiobook version from where you left off reading.

• Tap a word and the official Oxford English Dictionary definition comes up. (You can do this now with e.g., Wikipedia or Websters, but not with the OED. That could probably be implemented as an app on the iPad, though, if the folks running the OED had the money and/or inclination.)

• If an annotation mentions that the text is referencing a previous text, look up that text immediately (or, rather, the specific spot within that text), whether it’s in your ebook library or it is available through wireless.

• Create subscriptions with a series of really advanced filters. For example, automatically download every article by X author whenever they publish in The New Yorker’s “Shouts and Murmurs” section, or download every article in the New York Times’ “Politics” section that has certain keywords in the title. Or every fiction piece in The Atlantic.  (A system or algorithm which created a price for you, based on your subscription filter, would be good.)

That’s all I’ve got, off the top of my head. This list would be even longer if ebook readers were basically computers. But who knows what’s going to happen with e-ink technology.

I came across an article about Salinger’s Nine Stories on JSTOR, which describes the ending of Salinger’s stories:

“In lieu of the customary author photo–which Salinger had refused since the third print run of The Catcher in the Rye–was a Zen koan: We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping? A koan has no right answer; it’s designed to float in the mind of the Zen aspirant. While the riddle may be approached from all sides, often over the course of many years, the essence of the conundrum remains insoluble. This seems to mirror Salinger’s mission with Nine Stories: to create engaging paradoxes or puzzles that, at their core, both reflect life yet refuse to be a part of it.” (Smith 641)

[You can read a bunch of his stories, including all the ones I just mentioned, here.]

Anyway, I got to the point where I’d read all the short stories by Salinger that were available. Later, I even read one in its original formatting from the CD version of The New Yorker archives–it wasn’t that exciting. However, there are a bunch of stories I haven’t read, because Salinger is, of course, a famous recluse. Has he spent the last 50 years writing? Who knows. (There is evidence to suggest he has written something, or was writing something at some point during his seclusion.) But there a bunch of “lost stories” that are available to be read, assuming you are willing to go to the one library that has them, sit alone in a room, read them, and then leave. The Dead Caulfieds website on Mr. Salinger has good info on these harder to find works.

In particular, I’d really love to read “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” (Dead Caulfields summary of it here) and “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans” (again: Dead Caulfields summary). They’re not about the Glass Family, but they are about the Caulfield one from Catcher in the Rye. The provide insight that you obviously can’t get from the book alone. Holden Caulfield has little to do with these stories; Vincent Caulfield is the main “subject” in each (he narrates one and is at least a primary character in the other). In Catcher in the Rye we know Vincent as “D.B.”

After looking around the net a bit, I got the idea in my head that I’d spend a few days and drive down to Princeton’s Firestone Library, the one place where you can read them. They have a collection of unpublished Salinger materials. You have to give them a bunch of ID, then sit in a room with the story–no pens, no pencils–and read it, then leave. I called up the Firestone Library one time, asked about it, and whomever I was talking to said, “Yeah, yeah, look: just find the call number and come in.” Well, I never did.

The thing is, I think some solid academic criticism about these stories would be really cool. The problem is that reading a story sitting in a room, taking no notes, and then going home to immediately write down as many thoughts as you can, is a really inconvenient way to try and construct a critical argument. Perhaps if you were allowed to take notes as soon as you left the room that would be a little better, but still.

It remains one of my fantasies to really examine Salinger’s entire body of work from a critical viewpoint, including his lost short stories, his letters and manuscripts. There is so much intertextual stuff between his stories that you really need to have the whole picture in front of you, even if you’re not going to try to create an argument that encompasses the “whole picture.” Who knows, maybe one day.

Cited Works:

Smith, Dominic. “Salinger’s Nine Stories: Fifty Years Later.” The Antioch Review 61.4 (Autumn, 2003): 639-439. JSTOR. Web. 6 Nov. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4614550>.