The Sins of the father

In writing my response to The Metamorphosis, I became angry with one character that I had never really focused on.  In Good Night, and Good Luck. Edward R. Murrow's famous line "The sins of the fathers do not belong to the sons so long as we own them." is highlighted.  Of course this line was spoken in a much different climate than that of Gregor Samsa, but the idea remains the same.  Gregor's entire life is altered by having to return to work for the company to pay off his fathers debt to the bank.  This raises the question, is it fair to make Gregor change his life because of the mistake (i.e. sin) of his father?  My answer to this question is no, parents are supposed to be the supportive ones, it is not the role of the child to make up for the mistakes of its parents.  This is not to say that parents don't need support, or that children should not give it, but it should not be required by a third party or by any party for that matter.  

Gregor's father doesn't work while Gregor is working as a travelling salesman, he spends all day reading the papers out loud and enjoying his retirement.  Sure, he is an older man and presumably worked hard all his life, but once Gregor morphs, his father goes back to work.  He was not just living off the success of his son, which would be one thing, but he tied a harness to his son's neck and was forcing him to pull the plow.  It seems Gregor was having a successful career in the army, a rank of lieutenant is a big deal, but because of his father's mistake he is recalled home.  His father is being selfish, by screwing up his business and then forcing his son to work off his debt, he has potentially altered the course of the family.  Gregor could have very well risen up the ranks to become a respected and well paid high ranking officer, making the Samsa name famous.  Instead he is a middling employee who becomes an insect.

The most despicable thing about Gregor's father is that, besides the fact that he doesn't own his sins, he disowns his son instead.  Look at part one where for the majority of the time he believes Gregor to be still human.  He completely throws his son under the bus for being late, he doesn't stall the manager, he doesn't try to defend his son, he just capitulates to the boss.  We see later he defends his wife and daughter from the perceived threat of Gregor, yet he has no inclination whatsoever to defend his son who is keeping him out of debtor's prison and his entire family in a nice apartment.  The only actions that Gregor's father makes, that are described in any sort of depth in the entire novella, are the few times he attacks his son.  The apple assault helps lead to Gregor's death, yet he suffers no grief for his son's death (or at least disappearance if we want to quibble with how much of Gregor was left in his insect body by the end).   Gregor's father is the kind of man that Edward R. Murrow hated most.  He is a weak man who allows injustice to happen in front of him because he doesn't have the nerve to say anything, and relies on others to clean up his own mess.  

Copycat

There is something comforting about enveloping yourself in someone else's style.  People do it all the time with fashion, identifying with a certain group, sports, mimicking a touchdown dance or batting stance mannerisms, and it is really no different in writing.  When you imitate the style of someone else, it is relieving because your writing is less personal.  It isn't really your voice that is on the paper, at least it isn't if you did a good job.  Sure some of you will shine through, but the majority of your work is to make people forget that they aren't reading the author you're imitating.  Pastiches are a relatively new genre for me as a writer, I only discovered them last year in Coming of Age, but in the few that I've written, I've grown rather fond of them.  There is no doubt that they are challenging, some voices are more difficult than others, but they are a perfect mix of creative freedoms in the direction of the essay, while still providing structure of how to write it.  One of the hardest things authors say when you are just beginning to write, is finding your voice.  With a pastiche, that is taken care of, and all you are left to do is internalize the voice and produce a great story.

Looking back at both my  first pastiche, of J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, and the blog post I wrote on it, I realize that not a whole lot has changed in my approach to pastiches.  I often do write a paragraph or so and then delete it, just to get "warmed up" in the voice.  I would say it's nearly impossible to come into a pastiche cold and instantly get the voice and tone right.  Sure there are sentence examples you can use, certain words or phrases that evoke images of a character to include, but it's all the things not on the page that you have to really grasp.  Good books are more than just words on a page, and that has to be the goal in a pastiche of a good book, to get beyond the physical words and get to the next level.

This next level is the elusive part of writing pastiches that is also so enticing.  Sometimes you identify with a character and their voice just comes.  I felt that way about Holden I think, once I realized how to really write a pastiche.  With other voices, it hasn't been so easy.  I wrote a pastiche of Julia Taylor, a character most of you have probably never heard of (she's from Black Swan Green, a book I highly recommend).  She is an 18 year old girl in 1983, and British.  I was none of those things.  Trying to rebuild her voice was a more step by step process.  I had to first capture the British voice, then the female voice, and finally a dated one.  Thirty four pages later I had some parts where I think I really captured her voice, but in between I fear there were points where I only captured pieces of it.

The same can be said for my pastiches from this year, I believe I had flashes of brilliance in the pastiche, but stretches that many readers would find slightly off.  Of course my goal has always been, and will always be, to write perfect pastiches.  I would never create a dialogue with the intention of ruining narrative flow, but sometimes as the author, the tone in my head doesn't match with the tone on the page.  As a kind of added challenge to myself this year, and also to make a good study of the differences of authors' voices, I've decided that through all my pastiches I'm going to write "chapters" of the same story.  The final pastiche I do this year will end my story, and then I will put them all together and read them sequentially, in all the different voices.  It will be curious to see how much is consistent throughout them all, that would be my voice, and at that far removed point how much I associate each chapter with the influencing author.  This distance I will gain from my work will be important in the maturation of my writing, because I hope it will allow me to find my voice, ironically enough by reading my best imitations of other, more famous, voices.  I suppose ideally I won't find my voice through this exercise at all, though I do suspect my plan will work, but only time will tell.

The Best Fisherman

Brett is one of those characters, at least for me, that are so frustrating to look at because your opinion of them is so complicated.  I suppose most of the characters in The Sun Also Rises are like that (with the exception maybe of Mike).  Brett is first introduced to us very physically, "She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht" (30).  Throughout a lot of the scenes with Brett she is depicted very sexually, especially by Mike calling her things like "a lovely piece" (85).  She also lusts quite strongly, and more importantly openly, towards Romero.  Brett is about as promiscuous as they come, and in a sense I don't have a problem with it, but it's the men she chooses that I don't like as much.  She tells Jake that she didn't think Cohn would be like what he turns into-- that is, a mopey guy doggedly following Brett around-- but at least from our perspective filtered through Jake's, it seems pretty obvious that he would be so clingy.  With her fling with Romero, she seems surprised that Romero wants her to look more feminine and wants to actually marry her.  Though, as has been brought up multiple times in class, the man is the epitome of tradition in his dedication to the art of his craft, so it makes sense that he would want a traditional relationship.

It seems to me that Brett is looking for special notches in her belt.  It isn't satisfying for her just to say she's been with some number of guys, but that she's broken their hearts.  Notice how the only guy she doesn't pursue is Bill, probably the one guy who could have a casual relationship.  He wouldn't fall in love with her, so he really isn't interesting to Brett.  She is trying to play the masculine role in all her relationships.  Look at how Jake mocks Cohn for him being dominated by his two previous women, essentially that he isn't being masculine enough.  Men are expected to control relationships, so part of Brett's identity, as well as looking masculine (though maybe androgynous is a better descriptor) is to also "be the man" in the relationship.  It's not that I don't approve of Brett because she is upsetting traditional relationship roles, it is that she goes to the extreme end of the spectrum, hurting a lot of men in the process.

The one relationship that I don't really feel Brett does anything wrong with is her one with Jake.  They talk about how his injury keep them apart, but it is the only thing that brought them together.  They met in a hospital in London, so if he hadn't been injured specifically in that way they never would have even met. While maybe Brett takes Jake's devotion to her for granted, she clearly cares for him.  She's more emotionally vulnerable with him than any other character, and with the little we learn about her past, that is really hard for her.  I can't expect her to be with Jake and remain celibate, if their fortunes were reversed I don't see Jake giving up sex to be with Brett.

The first time we met Brett I described her as intoxicating, unknowingly ironic as she drives so many men to drink, but that description of her still fits even to the last page.  Maybe some of this is part of her subconscious character, maybe some of it is an act she puts on.  No matter what the split is, even knowing her behavior as well as we do, I still want to meet her, not to yell at her, certainly not with a blank slate, but she is still intoxicating to me, even living on the page.  As I'm writing this I'm saying to myself, "You don't really like her, why do you want to meet her so badly?"  The answer is that I don't know why, like I said at the beginning my feelings towards her are complicated, I can't condone who she is but I also can't condemn her, kind of like Jake I suppose, she ties me into knots.