September 2024

There were 12 posts published in September 2024 (this is page 2 of 2).

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” by Edward Albee

While I know that “books” (in the broadest sense) are just a bunch of pages that are put together with glue or string and bound in cloth or leather or human skin or what-have-you, I’ve always found it a little strange to refer to a play as a book. That’s why I find it a bit … surprising that “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” appears as number 11 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. Woolf isn’t a book. It’s a play.

The difference, to me, is that plays (when they are printed) are missing fundamental information that would be presented in a book. Namely, they lack prose, which is an essential building block of a narrative. Plays are spoken word and minimal direction intended to be performed on a stage. They are purposefully left open to interpretation, with one production being different than another.

This isn’t to say that they aren’t important. It’s easy to see why Edward Albee’s play, first performed in 1962, is significant. But I don’t feel that I fully got it until I’d both read the book and seen a production of the play itself. (Or, in this case, a movie of it.)

Elizabeth Taylor was actually drunk for most of the filming. #facts

There was a lot of subtle characterization — things like blocking, facial expressions, inflection — that you don’t get from the text. Seeing it performed really makes the thing come alive.

An Absolute Freud

There’s a line in the sand when it comes to being a serious reader of literature, and that line goes by the name LITERARY THEORY. I recognize why many people don’t want to cross that line — some of the most avid readers I’ve ever known have never bothered to concern themselves with LITERARY THEORY and, to be honest, they are happier staying in that particular section of the desert.

Hell, I have a degree in English Writing & Rhetoric and I barely think studying LITERARY THEORY is worth the effort. Those discussions just don’t seem to be happening anymore. Or, more aptly, things have gotten so goddamned fractured that any conversation about LITERARY THEORY lacks a fundamental vernacular.

Harold Bloom is dead and he isn’t coming back.

Or was Harold Bloom ever really there in the first place?

There are certain works, though, that beg to be viewed through a certain lens, and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” is one of them. It seems to me that Edward Albee was just dying to talk to someone about Freudian Analysis, couldn’t find anybody to chat with, and so wrote a play out of frustration.

Talking about Freudian Analysis is difficult, though. Not only because modern psychology has largely moved on from Freud, but also because nobody understands how or why we should read books utilizing that theory. I dare you, however, to approach “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” without thinking to yourself, “Just what in the hell is wrong with these people?”

The Theatre in Your Head

The way I wish I’d had LITERARY THEORY explained to me is this: There’s a theatre in your head and it’s full of all the people you’ve ever met, heard about, or thought you knew. Your parents are in there and so are your siblings. Your teachers are in there along with your friends, coworkers, and neighbors.

They see everything you see and read everything you read. It appears as if on a screen before them, and they sit comfortably munching on popcorn and slurping diet soda while enjoying the show.

“This movie SUCKS!”

Every now and then, you come across a movie or TV show or a book and you think, “By golly, Dad would love this.” You think so because you have a clear understanding of good ol’ Dad and you know what would turn his crank. In your head, that little version of your father stands up in the theatre and cheers.

“Bravo!” he cries.

Alternatively, sometimes you see something Dad would hate, and your little head-pappy starts throwing ice cubes at the screen.

“Filth!” he roars as a little version of your mom tells him to pipe down and grips his leg so tight her nails almost cut him.

“Typical,” your brother mumbles.

LITERARY THEORY is just a way of thinking about how certain groups of people would respond to whatever you’re reading. You try to see a work through the eyes of somebody else, respond to it the way the would respond to it, etc.

So, when we say we’re going to consider “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” through the lens of Freudian Literary Theory, all we mean is that we’re reading the book as if there’s a little psychoanalyst sitting in our head-theatre chiming in about what we’re reading.

“Mind if I smoke?”

A Night of Fun and Games

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” features four characters. There’s George (a college professor) and Martha (the Dean’s daughter), an older married couple, who have invited Nick and Honey over to their house for drinks late one night after a faculty mixer. The only problem seems to be that George and Martha are both certifiable (in a literal sense) and are intent upon tormenting each other for their perceived failures and shortcomings. Every quip in the fast-paced dialogue is a barb meant to incite a drastic response as George and Martha use the younger married couple in their attempts to humiliate one another.

They think of this torment, which seemingly happens with great regularity, as a kind of “game” that they play. While the torment is real and both George and Martha say things that are so abysmally cruel, this is all just part of who they are. They’ve been doing it for quite some time, and they don’t show signs of stopping.

One of them leaving the other would be an easy, sure-fire way to fix their problems, but that seems to be against the rules of the game.

Do they really love each other? That’s up for debate. But they are dedicated, and often that is enough.

Afraid of Virginia Woolf? You will be. You will be.

The four lunatics drink and drink and drink the night away and readers are left feeling second-hand embarrassment as George taunts Martha and Martha taunts George. Some of the scenes are just so goddamned uncomfortable that it strains believability. Right around the time George tells Nick that he thinks Honey is “slim-hipped” is when Nick and/or Honey should have just gone home.

But for some reason they don’t. Even when Martha starts grinding on Nick and George just sits there pretending it doesn’t bother him. (It can’t bother him, don’t you see! He’d lose the game if it bothered him.)

Eventually, the sources of their psychological trauma are revealed and we begin to see a picture of why they’re doing what they’re doing. I won’t spoil it for you, because it is a fairly good twist, but astute readers will see it coming.

The Freudian Slip

As to why this play begs to be read through the lens of Freudian Literary Analysis has to do with several of the elements of psychoanalysis. There are themes and imagery of repressed memories and the unconscious mind. There’s the Uncanny, and the mother (ba-dop CHING!) of Oedipal Complexes. The play oozes sexuality at several points and readers can’t help but see themselves within the characters and begin to psychoanalyze themselves in the process.

Essentially, a little Sigmund Freud sits in your head-theatre in a smoking jacket and mumbling, “What is wrong with these people? Is it a symptom of a broader psychological malady that has infected the whole of 1960’s America? Or, perhaps, is it representative of our own inner desires to murder our fathers?”

Then everyone else shushes him and demands that he puts out his goddamned pipe. “You can see Liz Taylor’s cleavage!” your dad stage whispers.

“No, YOU’RE a floozy!”

All in All

People in the 1960’s were nuts for psychoanalysis and seemingly thought we were somehow going to unlock the mysteries of the mind by carefully analyzing the way people speak and act. Edward Albee thought about it so hard he gave himself fits. And while there might be some elements of truth to it, as much as we might wish we could understand why we’re all so messed up, Nick and Honey would have left that shitty party as soon as they got there. Liz Taylor or no Liz Taylor, it was an awful party, and that schtick with the umbrella gun was a straight up dick move. Nobody would stick around to receive such abuse, and even if they did, there would have been more punches or at least some biting.

“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is worth checking out, but, if you read it, you’ll run the risk of starting to psychoanalyze yourself and that’s a fool’s gambit. Only suckers try to therapize themselves.

Did I say that?

Anyway, you can read the whole thing in an hour, which ain’t bad.

“The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler

With a big enough lens, you can think of all literature as a conversation that people have been having with themselves since Gilgamesh decided to forgo godhood and embrace his humanity. You could probably say the same for art in general, but this is a blog about books, so we’ll skip the cave paintings and focus on writing.

The fact is: Nothing is written in a vacuum. No author is free from influence, and while writers have for centuries sought to create something new and utterly original, what ends up happening is they mash things together or decide to write in ways that are completely counter to the status quo. Either way, everything that has ever been written has been written in response to something else.

Is that pessimistic? Maybe. But knowing that’s the case is what allows us to look back at works of literature and decide what’s important and what isn’t. Generally, we celebrate anything that seems to have taken a substantial step forward or have been influential to others — works of literature that are genre-defining, or that represent a hard swerve to the left when everyone else was going right.

If literature were a car, what sort of car would it be?

The Big Sleep is Death

This is the mentality that I brought to reading “The Big Sleep,” number 189 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. Considered a pioneer of hard-boiled detective fiction, one can’t possibly count the number of books/movies that have been influenced by Raymond Chandler’s 1939 pulpy crime novel. Hell, we should consider it a classic if only because The Big Lebowski wouldn’t have happened without it. Never mind The Dresden Files. Or Se7en. Or L.A. Confidential. Or True Detective.

Somebody had to be the first person to think, “I should write a book from the perspective of a poor, drunk private detective with a heart of gold,” and while Chandler wasn’t the first to do so, “The Big Sleep” was one of the most popular works to take on such a character.

And now, nearly 100 years since its first publication, the gritty detective novel is still hugely popular. Does the modern version need twists, like having that detective be a wizard who fights gods on or around Lake Michigan? Sure. But the grit is still there. And the stories all start with some dame walking into a smoky, run-down office.

“The broad was all legs, with hair that went all the way to her scalp.”

Who Is This Chandler Guy, Anyway?

Born in Chicago in 1888, Chandler spent his early years in midwest America before his alcoholic father abandoned their family, after which Chandler’s mother moved them to Ireland so Chandler could get a decent education. He skipped college in favor of traveling around Europe to improve his language skills before returning to Britain to become a civil servant.

The job didn’t suit him, so Chandler found work as a reporter. He might have dedicated himself to becoming a writer at this point, were it not for an encounter with Richard Barham Middleton, author of “The Ghost Ship.” While Chandler admired Middleton, he couldn’t help but notice that Middleton was miserable all the time and eventually committed suicide. “If that guy can’t make it as a writer, what chance do I have?”

He moved back to the U.S. (Los Angeles this time) in 1912 and enlisted in Canada to fight in World War 1. He fought in the trenches of France, which, I’m sure, did nothing to contribute to his mental health problems later in life. When the war was over, he came back and fell in love with a woman who was 18 years his senior. He worked for an oil company before all of his vices caught up with him — the company let him go because of his penchant for booze, women, and skipping work to drink booze with women.

“#feltcute Might try to off myself later.”

He started writing pulp detective fiction during the great depression as a way of making ends meet. He was influenced by a lot of other crime writers and primarily learned his fiction writing by driving around California reading pulp magazines and feeling bad about himself.

As difficult it is for me to imagine making any money through writing (especially during the Great Depression), it’s easy to see how Chandler’s life contributed to his writing style. Hard-boiled detective fiction is full of no-nonsense characters, sex, violence, and deals primarily with the darker side(s) of society.

Chandler probably felt right at home.

“The Big Sleep,” his first novel, was published in 1939.

“Couldn’t I be a public dick?“

Welcome to Grim Reality

Chandler, in an essay for The Atlantic called “The Simple Art of Murder,” had this to say about English mysteries the likes of which were written by Agatha Christie:

There is a very simple statement to be made about all these stories: they do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. They try to be honest, but honesty is an art. The poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn’t know what to be honest about.

If we take literature as a discussion that’s been going on for thousands of years, it seems clear that Chandler is writing in direct response to a handful of other authors; those who wrote detective stories before which “do not come off artistically,” and those stories that are honest.

Ernest Hemmingway looks on approvingly from his watery grave.

So, the detective can’t be a prim-and-proper little Belgian who speaks in an odd manner — that’s unrealistic! We need a guy who drinks his breakfast, rattles off one-liners, and risks his life for around $25 a day. Because that’s reality, baby.

What’s more likely is that Chandler took detective stories and injected them with things like sex and pornography and guns and booze because, despite what Chandler himself says, people who like reading about that sort of thing aren’t psychopaths. They’re just people who like excitement in their stories and aren’t necessarily getting it from Poirot or Holmes. Plus, he was following a formula. Editors told him how to put his stories together in a way that they thought would sell, and “The Big Sleep” was essentially just two of those stories put together and padded out to make a novel.

It’s an Absolute Crime

There’s a lot you can learn from “The Big Sleep” and hard-boiled detective fiction in general. One of the biggest and most lasting impacts of this genre has been its effect on prose. The grit, the realism, the short and punchy dialogue. Aside from the language being dated, “The Big Sleep” reads like it could have been written last week rather than in the 30s.

I had a chance to watch the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall movie from 1946, which seems to put some paint over the grime and soften the story in places. It’s good if you like watching guys hike their pants up over their belly buttons and sweat through their shirts, but otherwise I’d suggest the novel.

Was Humphrey Bogart ever a young man?

The story also popularized “the twist” — not the dance we did last summer, but the idea of a plot that takes sudden and unexpected turns. Again, you have to remember that this story is pretty old, so it’s not like we’re getting M. Night Shamusalan “He Was Dead The Whole Time” sorts of twists, but still.

A Denouement at a Bar With a Double Scotch

Is “The Big Sleep” worth your time? Is anything? It’s hard to tell these days. In a world gone haywire, what are we to make of an unlikely hero, a dedicated shamus who’s too good for this world? Maybe it don’t amount to much, but it sure amounts to three fingers of rye whiskey from a warm bottle.

The answer must be down here somewhere, nestled into the corner of my glass where it kicks up its heels and waits for the next dame to come walking through those doors. When she talks, I know it’ll be a story I’ve heard before, a story I’ve heard a thousand times.

Will I have it in me to hear it again?