... as chosen by 100 literary luminaries.
Posted by Alan Allport at March 3, 2005 05:01 AMI'd have to go with Geoffrey Firmin in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, with the runner-up being the nameless narrator in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at March 3, 2005 08:16 AMThis is a very tough choice. I hardly know where to start.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 3, 2005 08:46 AMOH, yeah, David Mitchell's got it. The Devil from The Master and Margarita. For a minute I was afraid I would have to vote for Marvin the Paranoid Android, which is an entertaining but pretty, well, extremely flat character (the whole point, after all).
Hm. Porfiry Petrovich from Crime and Punishment too. I seem to have developed a thing for Russian novels some time in my late teens without even realizing it. Hell, while I'm at it let's say Chichikov from Dead Souls.
British lit, on the other hand, is not looking good. The only authors I recognize from that list are David Lodge, Rob Grant (TV writer), DJ Taylor (obvious), Cynthia Ozick (not read, but recognize), Hanif Kureishi (L. got Buddha of Suburbia from someone and says it's awful), AS Byatt (not read), Will Self.
I keep meaning to read more modern literature. Anyone recommend any very recent British novels? I hear Cloud Atlas is supposed to be splendid.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 3, 2005 09:07 AMJeeves
Wooster
Widmerpool
Biggles
Captain Grimes
Henry Chinanski
These are sentimental favorites, which turns out to mean very little fancy name-dropping:
- Sherlock Holmes
- Philip Marlowe
- Ged/Sparrowhawk, the wizard in LeGuin's Earthsea stories
- Ford Prefect
- Miss Flite in Bleak House:
"Another secret, my dear. I have added to my collection of birds."Apart from having issued the definitive indictment of the legal profession, she reminds me of several real people."Really, Miss Flite?" said I, knowing how it pleased her to have her confidence received with an appearance of interest.
She nodded several times, and her face became overcast and gloomy. "Two more. I call them the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach!"
No, no Orwell characters among my fictional favorites, unless "George Orwell" himself counts as fictional.
No heroic females, I find. Unless possibly Molly in the William Gibson stories. Heroic female heroes are not easy to write, and won't be until the world changes some more.
Oh, by the way, I'd just like to say I wasn't name dropping. The devil from Master and Margarita really is probably the coolest character I've ever read.
:)
Just to get that out of the way. Now back to work!
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 3, 2005 04:07 PMSorry, A.H., didn't mean to suggest otherwise. He is cool, he's just confusing. It's hard to work out to what extent Bulgakov is expressing Sympathy For The Devil. Clearly he's using his Devil to inflict comeuppances on people who deserve it, but does he really want us to cheer everything his Devil does?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at March 3, 2005 04:16 PMI agree he's an ambiguous character, but for me that's a very big reason why the book is so wonderful.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 3, 2005 04:31 PMOff the top of my head, and after closing time:
Long John Silver, Philip Marlowe (I picked The High Window up the other day for the first time in years: GREAT opening page), Tintin, Biggles, Fagin, Bill Sikes, Captain Grimes--is it p(r)issy to add Guy Crouchback, Basil Seal and Mrs Stitch? I am fond of them-- Steptoe, Son, Hamlet, the Buk character, Sherlock Homes, Robinson Crusoe, the fat boy in Pickwick Papers, the artful dodger, Peachy Talliaferro Carnehan and Daniel Dravot. Newer fancies: King Lear, various in Powell's 'Dance', Huck Finn, anyone in Firbank's Prancing Nigger, Falstaff. I noticed Margeret Schlegel in that list and her side of Howard's E. is quite memorable.
I've never read the M and the M and people I don't wholly approve of--not you Hogue m'boy--keep banging on about it but notwithstanding that i hold nothing against it as it inspired such a great record.
Posted by: Airbrushed By The Commissars at March 3, 2005 04:43 PMI agree he's an ambiguous character, but for me that's a very big reason why the book is so wonderful.
Care to explain?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at March 3, 2005 05:59 PMCare to explain?
It's interesting, and I'd never thought about it before, how a modern novel with the devil as a character is automatically an allegory. Ordinarily an unambiguous character would seen as flat and uninteresting, but soon as the devil shows up, we are on the lookout for some kind of schematic interpretation.
Art that is reducible is bad art. It wasn't always this way. You could argue that in the Middle Ages it was exactly the other way around, but that hasn't been the case for a long time. Kafka, writing around the same time as Bulgakov, discovered the power of irreducible allegory. This causes a bizarre dissonance that highlights the absurdity of his stories, because the allegorical aspect of them leads a reader to repeatedly seek after an explanation that is completely and pointedly not there, we ram into a brick wall after having been tricked into the kind of search after meaning that for Kafka was always on the horizon but inherently unreachable. Read "An Imperial Message" and you'll see it laid out plainly.
I believe, though I don't know for certain I would probably bet on it, that Master and Margarita is by far the greatest allegory of the last century, and will not be topped for a long, long time. The reason is that the allegorical satire of the book is animated by what seemed to me a wrenching outpouring of anger, grief, despair and tenderness. The grotesqueries of the book, perpetrated by the devil and his coterie, are wild exaggerations of the experience of living in Stalinist Russia brought to the level, in some places, of abject terror. Using these devices Bulgakov reveals the helplessness and absurdity and desperation of living in such a society. I don't think I could have better understood what it felt to live in Stalinist Russia from reading any history book.
The devil in this book is most certainly bad, evil really, but he does punish those who have it coming, as you point out, with interest. And on the other hand those who are shunned, ruined and denounced as degenerate or in a sense evil by this state are rewarded by him. I suppose that is the, really, beautiful irony of the book, that it takes this ludicrous inversion where the mediocre are great and the bad are good and seems to say, very well, if that's how it is, I'm with the devil.
Which is another thing entirely from having sympathy for him.
Did I manage to make any sense there?
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 3, 2005 09:10 PMOK, I can see life under arbitrary rule being allegorized in some of the Devil's stunts, as where the (IIRC) theatre manager is suddenly removed to another city and has trouble proving his own identity, or the free ten-ruble notes that turn (back) into useless bits of junk, or the forged but convincing written authorizations, or the functionaries who otherwise disappear. But what about the Party man's slip onto the trolley tracks at the start of the book, or the closing disaster at the Writers' Union cafe? This is the irreducible ambiguity of which you speak?
OK, parts of it are affecting, especially the unhoped-for escape from the mental hospital. But why "by far the greatest allegory of the last century"? And what does the idea of mercy for Pilate have to do with life under Stalin? And is he trying to update Dostoyevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" scene with that or wot?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at March 3, 2005 10:05 PMOne more candidate: Jack Keefe, You Know Me Al, Ring Lardner.
Now a question for Alan H. concerning the phrase irreducible allegory. (and I'm sorry if it's a dumb one) But if an allegory is irreducible, then how is it an allegory?
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at March 4, 2005 07:15 AMif an allegory is irreducible, then how is it an allegory?
Well, you can still have characters which are personifications and similar kind of symbolism and a latent narrative without the allegory as a whole being reducible to one clear point or message. The whole symbolic system may work and be "reducible" up to a point, but at some level you may run into contradictions or general senselessness. This speaks to me because I think it's a pretty elegant model of human life and the world generally.
As I was trying to suggest with my muddle of comments on Kafka, it is in any case more about directing the audience's attention and expectations than about really being an allegory strictly defined.
On the other hand, it's probably common for complex extended allegories to break down at some point under their own weight, even when that is not the intent.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 4, 2005 08:44 AMBut what about the Party man's slip onto the trolley tracks at the start of the book, or the closing disaster at the Writers' Union cafe? This is the irreducible ambiguity of which you speak?
I guess I'm not seeing your point. Can you tell me more about why this is problematic for you? That would also be helpful, as I haven't read it in a long time and seem to have lost my copy. Thanks!
And what does the idea of mercy for Pilate have to do with life under Stalin?
I never figured that out. I guess I didn't feel the need to think about it much because the Pilate chapters didn't bother me. They were very interesting and quite beautful, weren't they? So vividly imagined with such subtlety of tone.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 4, 2005 08:53 AMI can still see the purple clouds I imagined in my head.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 4, 2005 08:58 AMMaybe what I'm really trying to say here is that I dig ambiguity, maaan.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 4, 2005 09:13 AMWell, the death of the Party editor seems more nastily gratuitous than anything else, though we're apparently not meant to feel sympathy for him. And the fires at the haunted apartment building and the Writers' Union cafe make up sort of a gotterdammerung whose allegorical point, I'm afraid, escapes me.
Re: the Devil allegory stuff, tho -- well, it's at least a very old notion, though a strangely contradictory one, that the Devil is the personification of evil and yet at the same time he's a servant of Good in that he imprisons and torments sinners on behalf of Heaven. This has never really made sense but I have to admit it wasn't Bulgakov's idea. Maybe I should be taking my requests for an explanation to somebody else, like Saint Augustine or the California Correctional Peace Officers' Association, I dunno.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at March 4, 2005 10:43 AMThis has never really made sense but I have to admit it wasn't Bulgakov's idea. Maybe I should be taking my requests for an explanation to somebody else, like Saint Augustine or the California Correctional Peace Officers' Association, I dunno.
Well, if you find the religious element of the book objectionable, then yes, you probably should.
Well, the death of the Party editor seems more nastily gratuitous than anything else, though we're apparently not meant to feel sympathy for him.
Short answer, yes, this is indeed the sort of thing I had in mind when I mentioned "irreducibility", although the more I think about it the more I suspect there is a better answer.
The devil is nasty and brutal. That was always the way I thought he was supposed to be. I can't see what makes that gratuitous, unless the only justification can be purely allegorical one. If it weren't for these things, this character would be nothing but an ironic device winking at the reader and all of the considerable emotional impact and complexity of the novel would be gone, in my opinion.
I don't know, as usual I get the feeling there is a basic framework which we do not share which makes these discussions in the end pointless.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 4, 2005 10:59 AMI don't know, as usual I get the feeling there is a basic framework which we do not share which makes these discussions in the end pointless.
I disagree. I think the lack of shared framework is what makes the discussions meaningful.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at March 4, 2005 12:55 PMMeaningful is the wrong word. I meant interesting.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at March 4, 2005 12:59 PM- Wemmick from Great Expectations
- Owen Meany from John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany
- The entire cast of Douglas Coupland's Microserfs
- Winston Smith from Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Inspector Grant from the mysteries of Josephine Tey
- Snoopy
Welcome back, Grame. How you feeling?
AH -- Maybe it would help if you explained more about this here framework you feel I don't share. Unless you've just decided I suffer from invincible ignorance. (Not to mention suffering from irreducible allegories. Boy, these here allegories on my left bunion keep puffing up like nobody's business. Epsom salts, mustard plasters, Occam's Razor, nothing works...)
Care to try your explanation again?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at March 4, 2005 03:34 PMCare to try your explanation again?
No. Sorry if I offended you.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 7, 2005 09:30 AMNo, not offended, just confused. If it's any help I agree the whimsicalities and satires are a pleasure. It's just the theology that's confusing.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at March 7, 2005 11:22 AMInspector Morse, in Colin Dexter's novels. I'm sorry - but he's absolutely gorgeous.
Posted by: Alex at April 18, 2005 01:15 AM