"We are yet but young in deed."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Saturday night, rocketlass and I saw the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre's production of Macbeth, a high-intensity staging steeped in gore that has left me ever since with one of Macbeth's lines running through my head. Late in Act III, when it has become obvious that his accession to power will not be quite so simple as he and Lady Macbeth had deluded themselves into thinking, Macbeth says to her,

I am in blood
Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

This characterization of Macbeth's dilemma has long been one of my favorite of Shakespeare's images, but this week, as I've been reading Natsuo Kirino's Out (1997, translated into English in 2003 by Stephen Snyder), I've latched onto it as a distillation of the very heart of noir. A character makes one mistake--whether out of weakness, venality, anger, desire, or some other reason matters little--and suddenly everything has changed. The doors to his old life all slam shut, but others creak open . . . and while that's anything but light he sees spilling from them, it's surely still better than the present darkness that's steadily enveloping him, right? Or maybe not . . .

Well, if noir is made of dark choices compounded by more dark choices, Out is about as noir as it gets. I turned to it after reading The Tale of Genji, and it was the perfect antidote: where Lady Murasaki's world is refined, passionate, and ancient, Kirino's world is brutal, cold, and utterly contemporary. She tells of four unhappy women, coworkers on a factory night shift in a Tokyo suburb, who become co-conspirators when one of them murders her husband. Almost before they've given the matter any thought, they're dismembering the body and trying to convince themselves that,

Garbage was a natural by-product of human life; and it was nobody else's business what got thrown away or who did the throwing.

In other words, they've "in blood stepped in so far" that it very quickly becomes obvious that they have little choice other than to make their deadly way forward--but the path they navigate from that point is impressively surprising, and far darker and more gruesome than I'd ever have expected.

The writing is a bit flat at times (The sentences here and there reminded me of the awkwardness of the English versions of Koji Suzuki's Ring novels--could this be a problem of translation?), but Kirino's attention to the realistic details of her characters' lives and world pays off in the creation of a convincing portrait of dead-end life in contemporary Japan, which makes the contrast between the goriness of the women's crimes and the everyday manner in which they set about them all the more effective. Her unflinching attention to the physicality of murder (and eye for black comedy) would do Patricia Highsmith proud, while her adeptness with the ramifications of bad choices brought to mind Scott Smith (though she displays much greater skill in delineating individual psychology).

The ending is, if possible, more troubling than anything else in the book--primarily, I think, because it's the first part of the novel that doesn't fully convince, which makes its horrors much more difficult to take--but it can't ruin a novel that to that point has offered such an entertainingly bleak and nasty ride. What we're left with is a book that you'll be guaranteed to get back within days when you lend it to a friend: lend it to the wrong person and they'll return it in shock after fifty pages; lend it to the right one and they'll hand it back gratefully, sleepless and satisfied. Thanks go to the readers who suggested it when I asked about Japanese crime fiction; I'll definitely be picking up Kirino's other novels soon.

As for those of you who may now be eying the height of the bloody stream and beginning to wonder if we should have crossed at a ford instead of just plunging in, don't worry: the next post will be about Genji, wherein there is no murder, no dismemberment, and no blood. Some angry demons and a lot of poetry, but no blood.

Bloody and guilty, guiltily awake

{William Hogarth, "David Garrick as Richard III" (1745)}

Like a good dissertation advisor, Jenny Davidson from Light Reading noted that I left out some Shakespearean ghosts in yesterday's roundup--eleven of them, in fact, who levy curses on their murderer, Richard III, on the eve of his death at the Battle of Bosworth Field. It seems appropriate that this most self-dramatizing of villains should suffer a haunting, but like everything else in the play, the ghosts remain overshadowed by the force of Richard's character: next to his evil ingenuity and ruthlessness, no one else seems quite alive--including the dead.

It should come as no surprise that Richard refuses to believe in the ghosts. After all, everyone in his eye is a tool or an obstacle; once they lose the potential to be either, why would they tarry in his sight, alive or dead? No, it must be a dream:

I did but dream.
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.

Dream or not, Richard nonetheless rehearses a sort of crisis of conscience:

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.

Yet there's little sense that the ghosts' imprecations ("Let us be lead within thy bosom") cause him anywhere near the horrors that Banquo's silence provokes in Macbeth. Macbeth, though deeply ruing the irrevocable first step that set him on his murderous path, tells himself that he has no choice but to kill Banquo because,

For mine own good
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as to go o'er.

--which renders Banquo's silent reappearance all the more horrifying, a grotesque proof that though Macbeth may plunge ever deeper into the rivers of blood, the absolving shore will remain forever distant.

Richard, on the other hand, has no false image of a distant day beyond murder--and no lost better self to regret. His crisis of conscience is in actuality little more than a batting about of the concept of his villainy. The ghosts may curse him, but he is proof against curses because there is nothing in him to damage; they lead him to worry not about what he has done but about what others might do--

O Ratcliff, I have dream'd a fearful dream!
What think'st thou--will our friends prove all true?

. Though he claims that the ghosts

Have stuck more terror to the soul of Richard
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers
Armed in proof and led by shallow Richmond,

his only real worry is the failure of his designs.

This gets to the heart of why Banquo's ghost is chilling where Richard's chorus of victims is forgettable--and thus of one of the reasons that Macbeth is the far better play. As Mark Van Doren writes,

Richard is never quite human enough. . . . He is only stunning in his craft, a serpent whose movements we follow for their own sake, because in themselves they have strength and beauty.

A ghost, like a reader, needs some flaw in a character to latch on to; a perfect good or a perfect evil leave little for the reader to ponder or the ghost to prey on. If a man be a perfect villain, what levers does a ghost have? What threats are at his disposal? Is it even possible to haunt him at all?

"It harrows me with fear and wonder."

{The ghost of Hamlet's father, as played at the Booth Theatre, London, 1870. Sketch by Thomas Glessing.}

In a comment to yesterday's post, Jenny Davidson from Light Reading corrected my half-assertion that Jacob Marley is literature's most famous ghost. That crown, she rightly notes, rests with the ghost of Hamlet's father, who should also, I think, get extra credit for appearing to so many more people than your usual ghost charged with a mission. He first manifests in front of two or three of the men of the guard:

MARCELLUS
Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us:
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night;
That if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it.

Horatio, however, is having none of it:

Tush, tush, 'twill not appear.

But once the ghost does appear, there's no denying its presence, nor that it is

In the same figure, like the king that's dead.

Horatio, harrowed, hails Hamlet.

Watching the ghost of Hamlet's father, it's easy to see where Hamlet gets his flair for the dramatic. After all, need he appear in the chill of the ramparts at midnight? Wouldn't the quiet coziness of Hamlet's bedchamber have served as well? Ah, but then he'd eschew the hair-raising buildup he knows the guards will give him before he appears to his son, let alone Horatio's ascription to him of the powers of a Will-o-the-Wisp:

HORATIO
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.

And then there's the ghost's whole, "Oh, the stories I could tell of the horrors of the afterlife!" bit:

But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine,

Only, well, it turns out he's not allowed to:

But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.

While Hamlet's father's technique is quite effective--as he surely knew it would be, if he possessed any understanding of the character of his son--I prefer the more straightforward approach of, as Perry White would say, great Caesar's ghost, when he appears to Brutus in his tent:

BRUTUS
Ha! who comes here?
I think it is the weakness of mine eyes
That shapes this monstrous apparition.
It comes upon me. Art thou any thing?
Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil,
That makest my blood cold and my hair to stare?
Speak to me what thou art.

GHOST
Thy evil spirit, Brutus.

BRUTUS
Why comest thou?

GHOST
To tell thee thou shalt see me at Philippi.

BRUTUS
Well; then I shall see thee again?

GHOST
Ay, at Philippi.

BRUTUS
Why, I will see thee at Philippi, then.

[Exit Ghost]

I suppose you could ask why Caesar bothered to appear to Brutus at all--couldn't he have just shown up at Philippi? But I appreciate his straightforwardness; it seems appropriate to a great general. And after all, shouldn't a ghost be confident that his very presence will supply sufficient drama to make whatever point he's charged with putting across?



In that regard, no one tops Banquo, who doesn't even speak--or appear to anyone but Macbeth. A model of ghostly restraint, he merely sits quietly on Macbeth's stool and shakes his gory locks a bit:

MACBETH
Prithee, see there! behold! look! lo!
how say you?
Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites.

GHOST OF BANQUO vanishes

LADY MACBETH
What, quite unmann'd in folly?

MACBETH
If I stand here, I saw him.

LADY MACBETH
Fie, for shame!

MACBETH
Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,
Ere human statute purged the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the times have been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools: this is more strange
Than such a murder is.

And his encore is even better:

MACBETH
Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee!
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with!

Now that's supernatural efficiency.

Ghosts

From Macbeth, Act 3, Scene IV

MACBETH
Prithee, see there! behold! look! lo!
how say you?
Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites.

GHOST OF BANQUO vanishes

English writers toss out references to ghosts with remarkable casualness; they seem to take the default position that they will be believed when they talk about hauntings—the opposite, I would argue, of the position Americans and American writers take. Ghosts are around, the body of literature seems to say; sometimes people see them. There's no controversy. I suppose that if your national history is one of knights and ladies and dank castles, ghosts come naturally—though I would also expect that if your national history included the largely ignored story of the extermination of the ten million people who were living in the land when your forebears arrived, you would have quite a few ghost stories, of an extremely unpleasant variety.

Yet it is England, not America, that is rich with ghosts. And, unlike the ghost of Banquo (which, understandably, greatly frightens Macbeth just by his appearance), most of the ghosts I've come across in English novels—and especially in English memoirs—are unthreatening, ordinary, even quotidian. Penelope Fitzgerald, for example, tells of Keats's ghost haunting the then-pastoral village of Hampstead when she was a girl, and in her novel The Bookshop (1978) a ghost troubles the heroine, though never in a particularly menacing way. Anthony Powell, in his memoir, To Keep the Ball Rolling (1983), mentions a ghost that haunted one of his childhood homes; that ghost, transmuted like all the facts of his life, appears in his fiction as the driver of a particularly vivid domestic scene. Rebecca West, in The Fountain Overflows (1957), a thinly veiled retelling of her childhood, includes ghosts, poltergeists, and magic, invisible horses. Unexplained presences manifest themselves here and there in Iris Murdoch's writing, and—perils of being away from my bookshelves!—I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting.

Halloween, of course, put me in mind of this topic, as I was reading ghost stories (of which the English are the masters (followed closely by the Japanese?)). And then I was thinking about William James (because of a new book on his paranormal researches), the first chapter of whose The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) includes several stories of ghostly encounters that James collected. But it was Hilary Mantel who really brought it to a head, with the opening pages of her enthralling memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003):

About eleven o'clock, I see a flickering on the staircase. The air is still; then it moves. I raise my head. The air is still again. I know it is my stepfather's ghost coming down. Or, to put it in a way acceptable to most people, I "know" it is my stepfather's ghost.

I am not perturbed. I am used to "seeing" things that aren't there. Or—to put it in a way more acceptable to me—I am used to seeing things that "aren't there." It was in this house that I last saw my stepfather, Jack, in the early months of 1995: alive, in his garments of human flesh. Many times since then I have acknowledged him on the stairs.

She talks herself back from that certainty a bit, offering the reader a chance to believe her sightings are the result of migraines; but throughout the book, presences abound, flickering at the edge of consciousness like ideas too large and unwieldy for childhood apprehension. They aren't exactly benign, but Mantel gives the sense that their danger is more potential than actual, like the shadowy adult secrets that quietly define childhood.

Childhood is when I, too, reportedly saw a ghost. I have no memory of it, but I've been told by my parents, no wild-eyed new-agers they, that it happened when I was three or four, while our family was being given a tour of a house in Colonial Williamsburg. I turned to my mother and, pointing to the empty corner of a room and said, "Look, Mommy--there's a ghost." The guide blanched and told my parents that the house was rumored to be haunted.

From Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost (2003)

One night, I hear my mother and Jack, discussing. I am lurking in the cold Glass Place, coming in from the lavatory. "Well," she says, "so? So what do you think it is?" Her voice rises, in an equal blend of challenge, fear, and scorn. "What do you think it is? Ghosts?"

Elementary

From Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" (1891), collected in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

"And the murderer?"

"Is a tall man, left-handed, limps with the right leg, wears thick-soled shooting boots and a grey cloak, smokes Indian cigars, uses a cigar-holder, and carries a blunt penknife in his pocket. There are several other indications, but these may be enough to aid us in our search."

If you've ever read any Holmes stories, you didn't even need me to identify the quotation. No other fictional creation could be so rapid, certain, and detailed, while at the same time suggesting that what he's revealed is only the tip of the iceberg.

"We have got to the deductions and the inferences," said Lestrade, winking at me. "I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies."

"You are right," said Holmes demurely; "you do find it hard to tackle the facts."

Stacey and I have been reading Holmes stories aloud to each other on car trips for seven or eight years now. We don't read one on every trip—too often on winter trips we're leaving work right before sundown—but we've gotten through a fair number. We were reading from three or four Oxford World's Classics editions, but on the publication a year or so ago of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, we decided to start over at the beginning. We've therefore still got a lot of unread stories ahead of us.

Holmes stories are just about perfect for reading aloud in the car. (My coworker Carrie said she had recently suggested to her husband that they read aloud from Macbeth, but that's of necessity a two-person, home-based activity—too many parts to keep track of with a lone voice. And too much blood for a rental car.) The plots clip along, the dialogue is just stilted enough that one person can read each character's dialogue with reasonable conviction, and Holmes's arrogance rears its charming head often enough that the reading doesn't get monotonous, broken as it is by astonished laughter from reader and listener.

And there seem to be just enough stories, too. Just enough stories that, in fifty, sixty, seventy years of marriage, we could run through them again and again—but not so often that they get repetitive. The plots will become more familiar, but we're really reading for Holmes and Watson, and they, like a good marriage itself, should only become more comfortable—and comforting—with repetition. Watson's wife could be speaking to us all when she argues, in response to his worries that he might be too busy to travel on a case with Holmes:

"You have been looking a little pale lately. I think the change would do you good, and you are always so interested in Mr. Sherlock Holmes's cases."