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The Road

Cormac McCarthy

I have a soft spot for apocalypse fiction. Since the first time I saw Mad Max as a kid, with all of it bizarre fetish-wear and inarticulate thugs motoring across the desert in search of gasoline, something about the genre has grabbed me. I’d be hard-pressed to say why. At least some of it must have been the appeal of a world without rules. Preteen boys all long to see social institutions torn down, turned to sand. But there was something more in it for me. What stuck with me from the Mad Max films wasn’t the fights, the car chases across the desert, the wanton destruction (although there was plenty of that). What stuck with me were the quiet moments after the apocalypse – the children huddled in a cave around the wreckage of a bomber plane, telling stories of making it fly again to take them away to Tomorrow-morrow Land. I remember the image of a small boy, covered in dust, pulling at the string of a talking Bugs Bunny doll, as if Bugs knew the answers. I faintly remember a movie called Slipstream, a campy 80s sci-fi about people who travel the remains of the Earth by way of gliders, held aloft by those nuclear winds. I liked the apocalypse fiction that was stitched together of adaptability, ingenuity, and quiet.

So I should have loved The Road. It is all of those things: a man and his son, stitched together with adaptability, ingenuity, and quiet. McCarthy collected a Pulitzer for it, and I won’t be the one to detract from that. But the story has an incredible flatness to it. It starts at a low point, ends at a low point, and is all low points in between. The apocalypse is a tough place to live, in part because it’s desperate, but also because nothing happens. And nothing will happen, ever again. The Road is the story of what things look like after there are no more stories, and after there won’t be any more. It’s pretty clear that fifty years after the events of the novel, humans will be extinct, and The Road is about a pair of humans trying to put off that extinction for a few more days; trying to maintain a meaningful relationship while knowing that they’ll be wiped from the Earth and there won’t even be anyone left to remember.

As a vignette, it’s powerful. But I feel that the flatness of it makes a novel-length work unnecessary. There’s little narrative arc, little character development. There can’t be, because the world won’t change, only dwindle and end. In some ways, it’s an anti-story. A literary accomplishment? Probably. But not a story that really goes anywhere. The end of the the road looks just the same as the beginning. And that’s kind of the point.

I haven’t seen the movie, but I’m curious. Hollywood hates a story this flat, so I’m assuming they’ve added action, drama, romance. Probably a story of coming-of-age and redemption. Maybe I’d like it. I just can’t say no to a good apocalypse.

The Baron in the Trees

Italo Calvino

Young people are fantastic at making dramatic vows.  Not so fantastic at keeping them, but fantastic at making them.  Before we can even speak, we try holding our breath to get our way.  Blue-faced, we’re forced to inhale.  It simply cannot be done.  A bit older, we push our plate away at the dinner table, swearing that we’d rather starve than obey.  Two hours later, we’re hunting through the cupboards.  We run away from home, only to return when it starts to rain.  As a teenager, we vow never to marry, never to work a nine-to-five, never to buy a house and live like those people do.  Never to sell out.  Then we make a vow to marry, to love forever.  We divorce after three years.  Because forever is just too long for us to commit to anything.

But what if we did keep those promises?  In Calvino’s novel, the young baron Cosimo, exasperated with the instruction of his elders, refuses to eat his snails, climbs a tall tree, and swears never to come down.  But unlike the most determined of us, he keeps the promise.  He eats, sleeps, and lives in the trees, never to touch earth again, even unto death.  Long after the reason for the tantrum is gone, long after his father and teachers have died, he keeps the vow, partly on principle, and partly just out of habit.

It’s hard to imagine that sort of dedication to a vow, especially one so absurd.  But chasing hard-to-imagine things to their absurd ends is one of the things that Calvino does best.  Like most of his books, The Baron in the Trees lacks any sort of narrative suspense, but that’s not what it’s about.  It’s just a game disguised as a book, a what-if toy bound in paper.  Calvino builds the toy, pushes it down the slope, sees where it goes.  Each of his works is an experiment.  The Baron is no exception.  As an experiment, as a plaything, it serves well enough.  As a story, it comes up a bit short.  It’s funny to speak of someone as being a brilliant writer but not a great storyteller, but that’s the world that Calvino inhabits.  He builds funny wind-up toys and sets them loose in the yard.  That the toys don’t always go somewhere in particular isn’t necessarily the fault of the builder.  As long as they totter about in an interesting fashion, they’re worth the twist.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned for decades because of its sexual content, but it would be a mischaracterization to say that it’s a novel about sex.  D.H. Lawrence’s original title for the book was Tenderness, and that’s a bit closer to the heart of the matter.  It’s ultimately a story about tenderness, about intimacy, and a bit about what that does and doesn’t have to do with sex.  But it’s also about what it does and doesn’t have to do with class, with social norms, and with what it means to live a “civilized” life.  The lesson that Lawrence is trying to push is that a passionless life is no life at all.  It’s not a critique of the British aristocracy.  True, he does chastise the rich intellectuals in the novel.  But he doesn’t chastise them for being rich intellectuals.  He chastises them for pursuing the life of the mind at the expense of all else: at the expense of physical pleasure, at the expense of social responsibility, at the expense of joy and tenderness.  For all his talk of Bolshevism, Lawrence doesn’t glorify the working class, either.  They, too, are depicted as living a fairly joyless existence.  They live coarse lives, shuffling back and forth to the mines, wasting the rest of their time with drink and fighting.

The heroes of the novel — Lady Chatterley and the gamekeeper — are presented as heroes because they’re able to transcend and even willingly forsake their circumstances to find a bit of tenderness, a bit of passion.  For Lady Chatterley, that means giving up her land, giving up her nobility.  For the gamekeeper, it means giving up his pride, and being willing to be kept by a wealthier woman.  We’re not told whether they live happily ever after.  Maybe they don’t.  It doesn’t really matter to the story or to Lawrence.  What matters is that they take a chance on happiness, rather than wasting away in a mostly-comfortable stasis bestowed upon them by birth and circumstance.

It’s not hard to imagine that the moral lesson contributed just as much to the book being banned as the sexual content.  It doesn’t advocate for infidelity, but it does condone and even encourage particular acts of infidelity.  On that count, much has changed since Lawrence’s day, largely because our notion of marriage has changed since Lawrence’s day.  What the American social conservatives tout as “Traditional Marriage” is of course not very traditional at all.  It’s barely a hundred years old.  If we want to talk about “Traditional Marriage”, what we’re talking about is property exchange: i.e., a business deal between two families, the purpose of which was to protect wealth and consolidate business or political power.  Modern notions of love and faithfulness had very little to do with the matter.  They were bonuses — maybe you got them, maybe you didn’t.  Probably you didn’t have much choice in the matter, and your parents figured it out for you.  And so it’s not particularly shocking to see Lawrence’s male characters sitting around the parlor, discussing under what circumstances it is or isn’t permissible to have extra-marital affairs.  And it isn’t so shocking when Lady Chatterley’s husband gives her explicit permission to get pregnant by another man.  Those parts probably didn’t ruffle many feathers of Lawrence’s contemporaries.  But the notion that it’s a good thing for a Lady to give up her social station, leave her husband, and marry someone from the lower classes for the sake of passion — that was probably pretty upsetting to folks.  They didn’t want their daughters running off with carriage drivers.

Are we over that?  I don’t know.  Most of you reading this are probably middle-class, which is also a thing that barely existed before the industrial revolution.  Most of our families probably like the idea of us marrying doctors or lawyers, and probably don’t crave the idea of us marrying blue-collar laborers.  So I suppose it’s still with us to some degree.  But we’re not giving up a title to do it.  I don’t know any Barons.  I do know a few Doctors, but they stay Doctors, no matter whom they marry.

If you’re a Romney or a Hilton or a Kennedy, I imagine things are different.  But my heart doesn’t weep for you.  Sorry.

The Thurber Carnival

James Thurber

For some reason, tragedy seems to be something that is universally understood.  It transcends time and culture.  From the works of Shakespeare, we study Hamlet and Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, or the love sonnets.  We can watch a foreign film, and the themes of love and loss and betrayal resonate with us, even if we don’t fully comprehend their context.  The books that survive the test of time, get translated into sixteen languages, almost always fall into those categories.  It seems fair to say that we all, as humans, experience love and longing and despair in more or less the same way.

But comedy is different.  Comedy, for some reason, we experience very differently.  Jokes are notoriously hard to translate.  And not just puns, which depend upon the rhythm and sound of the language.  Pretty much every joke is hard to translate — from one language to another, and from one century to another.  It’s one of the most reliable markers of linguistic fluency: do you get the jokes?  Because most humour relies upon the violation of expectations.  The setup leads you to expect one thing, and the punchline delivers something else.  So to get the joke, you need to understand the context of the setup, to know what the expectation is.  And you need to understand in what way the punchline violates that expectation.  Otherwise, you don’t “get” the joke.

But once you do “get” the joke, it doesn’t get funnier with repetition (usually).  Because now you know what to expect from it.  And it’s true not just for individual jokes, but for whole genres or styles of humour.  Once the joke no longer violates the convention, but becomes the convention, it ceases to be funny.  Jokes just don’t age well, the way that tragedy does.  Which unfortunately becomes apparent while reading The Thurber Carnival.  Thurber is remembered as one of the great American essayists, cartoonists, and humorists.  But as humour, today, it just isn’t that funny.  Some of it provokes a wry smile, and some of it is just sort of inexplicable, because the context of it is lost.  You can only do satire if the reader knows that it is that you’re satirising.  Otherwise, you’re just talking to the walls.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Robert Cialdini

If the Buddhists are right, and suffering is the product of desire, then marketing geniuses must be among the most evil beings on earth.  They’re in the business of creating and stimulating desire.  And not just any desire, but desire that can’t be quenched.  Their products can’t be wholly satisfying, because if they were, we wouldn’t want more.  Successful marketing must always leave an edge of discontent — a quick sugar rush when we buy, followed by a crash that makes us want to buy more.  Have an iPad?  Buy an iPad 2!  Have a 2010 Lexus?  Trade it in for a 2012!  Have a copy of Influence from the library?  But the revised edition with all-new appendix!

A lot of us would like to believe that we’re fairly immune to marketing.  Sure, other people are easily persuaded.  But we’re smarter than that.  We use our free will, make our own choices.  Which is pure nonsense, of course.  Open your refrigerator.  What’s in it?  Did you buy it?  Why that milk carton instead of the others?  Why those particular carrots?  Why that frozen pizza, organic cheese, bottled beer?  Was it cheaper?  Is it pitched as being healthier?  Did it have a convenient place on the supermarket shelf?  Did your friends recommend it?

Lots of things influence our purchase decisions, create desires in us.  In Influence, Cialdini reduces those factors to six: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity.  Reciprocity says that if I do something for you, you feel obligated to do something for me.  I send you a “free gift” in the mail, so you feel obligated to donate to my charity.  Commitment and consistency says that once I get you to think of yourself as a certain kind of person, you feel you have to do certain things to stay consistent.  I spoke to a political campaign organizer who would use this to good effect.  The idea was to call registered Democratic voters, and poll them about their opinions on key democratic issues.  Once you had gotten them to verbally affirm the party line, then you ask them to help out with the campaign phone bank.  Because they had just verbally affirmed themselves as “good democrats”, they felt compelled to comply in order to seem consistent.  Social Proof says that if all your friends are doing it, you should do it, too.  The Internet is full of it these days — entire marketing agencies exist to pay people to write positive product reviews in massive astroturf campaigns.  Liking means pretty much what it says — the classic car salesman stereotype who sends Christmas cards to his customers year after year so they’ll buy from him again, because he’s just so sincere and likable.  Authority also means what it says:  four out of five dentists recommend this book.  Finally, scarcity: if an item is seen as being scarce, it’s also seen as being more valuable.

Of course, these principles don’t apply just to marketing products.  As the title says, it’s about the psychology of persuasion, and the principles are the same no matter what we’re trying to persuade someone to do.  Whether we’re arguing for a political cause or trying to get a date, the methods work.  They work partly because of how we’re socialized, and partly because of how we socially evolved as a species.  Cialdini wisely appends a section to the end of each chapter entitled “How to Say No”, giving instructions for how to recognize when a particular technique is being used against us, and how to diffuse the influence without grossly violating social contracts.

Of course, he wants to sell you the book first.