Friday's Forgotten Book: Jonathan Lethem's MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I’ve got Tourette’s.

My mouth won’t quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I’m reading aloud, my Adam’s apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks empty of breath and tone.

(If I were a Dick Tracy villain, I’d have to be Mumbles.)

In this diminished form the words rush out of the cornucopia of my brain to course over the surface of the world, tickling reality like fingers on piano keys. Caressing, nudging. They’re an invisible army on a peacekeeping mission, a peaceable horde. They mean no harm. They placate, interpret, massage. Everywhere they’re smoothing down imperfections, putting hairs in place, putting ducks in a row, replacing divots. Counting and polishing the silver. Patting old ladies gently on the behind, eliciting a giggle.

Only—here’s the rub—when they find too much perfection, when the surface is already buffed smooth, the ducks already orderly, the old ladies complacent, then my little army rebels, breaks in the stores. Reality needs a prick here and there, the carpet needs a flaw. My words begin plucking at threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point, a vulnerable ear.

That’s when it comes, the urge to shout in the church, the nursery, the crowded movie house. It’s an itch at first. Inconsequential. But that itch is soon a torrent behind a straining dam. Noah’s flood. That itch is my whole life. Here it comes now. Cover your ears. Build an ark.
_______


No Jonathan Lethem book is yet forgotten.  His books have earned him an ardent cult of fans, and indeed many mainstream readers consider him a cult novelist.  But Motherless Brooklyn, his murder mystery from which the opening appears above, is one that deserves a much wider appreciation.

It was first published in October, 1999, and the blurbs on the back call him promising,  "one of the most original voices among younger American novelists."  The black-and-white dustjacket, credited to Amy C. King, shows the blurry figure of a man walking down the road, the words MOTHERLESS and BROOKLYN at right angles like the street sign at a crossroads.

On the title page, the font looks temporary, parts of it have vanished.  Under the title are nine winding dots, like stones on a path.  These dots are reproduced on the cloth spine of the first edition, though not on the dustjacket.


The protagonist, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette's syndrome.  His mind floods with words and he compulsively mumbles them under his breath, or sometimes barks them intermittently, or sometimes shouts them out.  His brain malfunctions in this way, and he can't control it.  Potential readers who find this off-putting and turn away are missing out on Lethem's playful language and marvelous humor inside a genre-loving murder mystery. 


For in his dreams and in his written voice, Lionel is free of his compulsions and very witty, very insightful.  People are always underestimating him, calling him a freak, but he is not so different than any of them.  In the first chapter, he muses about the character, George Bailey, in It's A Wonderful Life, as being an everyman.  Then Ullman is introduced--as a shadow character, yes, but on another level as the concept of all men, everyman.


Lionel's nervous tics are more pronounced, often extremely so, but he too is representative of everyman.  The restlessness of western man is to be seen and heard everywhere, in a flood of words.  The constant background chatter-thoughts of the undisciplined mind, the monkey mind, is an excitable trickster.  It prevents us from seeing clearly.


The oldest and most famous traditional Chinese novel addresses this.  Monkey: A Journey To The West is a parable involving a monkey, representing the the modern mind.  The monkey is always accompanied by a pig, representing the animal nature of man, always present.

It is a monkey mind culture, as we are reminded everyday in the choice of news in an average newscast, told to an everyman taking in soundbites and constantly flipping channels with his remote, while someone else gabs into his phone on one ear.

In this quest parable, which is often published in three volumes, the chattering monkey mind is always getting himself into trouble.  He was the orchard keeper of the gods--something that might have inspired Cormac McCarthy's title--and, as in Genesis, he eats the forbidden fruit.  He gathers knowledge, including the knowledge of his own temporary existence, and a subsequent fear of death.

    
In the parable, the monkey mind evolves into a buddhist, learning to control his wayward thoughts.  And that is one of Lionel's quests in Motherless Brooklyn:  he longs for self-control.  Another quest is to see Ullman, who never quite comes into view.

I've heard some people complain that they did not like the ending, but I think that these were young readers still in the grip of that possessive blood lust that passes for love in this country.  Obsession is not love--if it were, stalkers would have it.  No, true love is that which is always willing to let go for the sake of those we love.  

I'm not going to spoil the murder mystery for you.  You'll have to find that out for yourself.  But I will tell you that Lionel gets better in the course of the novel, by working on himself and becoming more aware and compassionate of those around him.  For me, it is a feel-good-ending.

We might all be better off if we all learned how to calm our monkey minds.

This is a tag-along to Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Book series.  Participating blogs offering forgotten books include:

Joe Barone

Paul Bishop
Paul Brazill
Bill Crider
Scott Cupp
Martin Edwards
Cullen Gallagher
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
K.A. Laity
B.V. Lawson
Evan Lewis
Steve Lewis/Tina Karelson
Todd Mason
Kevin McCarthy
Eric Peterson
David Rachels
James Reasoner
Ron Scheer
Kerrie Smith
Kevin Tipple

JAWS and MADAME BOVARY and ZEN: Thursday's Critical Anaylsis

You can see John P. Anderson's excellent Flaubert's Madame Bovary: The Zen Novel at google books, at this link.


Anderson gives the classic a wonderful Zen interpretation.  Gustave Flaubert drew from several influences when writing his great novel, including Flaubert's own family and the historical Delphine Delamare, the real Madame Bovary.


Flaubert invented new literary techniques to subvert reader expectations in order to bring them to a new awareness, not just of literature, but of their own daily lives as well.  One way he does this is through the counterpoint of style and plot.  "The style of the novel is grounded in Zen-like detachment and freedom whereas the plot is mired in desire, illusion, and determinism."


"Flaubert finds a principal enemy of human freedom [free will] deep in the guts of mankind in the tapeworm of desire.  The desire tapeworm feeds on freedom and excretes dissatisfaction.  Emma (Madame Bovary) is not free because she has the worm.  Emma wants, Emma gets, but she is quickly dissatisfied and then the worm wants more.  Emma could be a poster girl for our 21st century credit card society."


For a definition of Zen, Anderson uses the one in the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"...the Buddha-nature, or potential to achieve enlightenment, is inherent in everyone, but lies dormant because of ignorance.  It is best awakened not by the study of scripture, the practice of good deeds, rites and ceremonies, or worship of images but by a sudden breaking through of the boundaries of common, everyday thought."


This sparkling study is nearly line-by-line and is 229 pages long, full of insights and wisdom.  Many authors and philosophers are cited, but in particular Anderson uses Schopenhauer's The World As Will And Idea and Parerga And Paralipomena: A Collection of Philosophical Essays.


Anderson says that the first chapter of Madame Bovary is about the establishment of the self.  The change in the narrators, between Charles and an anonymous "we" and an anonymous "I" leads to the detached observer with a Zen perspective.  The observer is free, while Madame Bovary is a slave to mindless desire:  "Me me me.  More more more. Shop shop shop.  These are the call signs for Emma Bovary."

So what do JAWS and MADAME BOVARY have in common?


A lot.  The insatiable will to consume especially.  Dean Sluyter, in a marvelous essay entitled "All You Can Eat," draws a fine Zen interpretation from Jaws. 


As with Flaubert's novel, the movie of Peter Benchley's Jaws opens with the point of view of the shark, "the shark-as-self" established with an underwater camera, nosing through the seaweed as if looking for prey with that dualism of its driving music in the background.  The collective "we" of the audience looks through the shark's eyes, traveling through the ocean.  Consume, consume, consume.


The shark is the great white, the great blank, the great nothingness.  It is an emblem of what the Buddhist's call "the hungry ghost," the all consuming desire.

Sluyter says, the first victim is the long-haired girl who runs off from the beach party to skinny-dip at sunset, a naked Eve calling to her impassive passed-out Adam to join her.  "Shown in a long shot, she swims tranquilly in the twilit water, which glows with a jewel-like radiance and fills the screen with its vast expanse, a tiny figure easily at one with the ocean of wholeness."  As in Tim Winton's Breath: A Novel and all the other such transcendental works I review here, the ocean is a symbol of the collective Oversoul in this interpretation. 

Then the shark approaches and we see her from below, from the shark's point of view.

In the movie, the forces of material consumption live in denial.  They want to cover up the truth with illusions and salesmanship.  The three men who resist the denial and set out to hunt the shark represent a trinity, and the way Sluyter uses it is consistent with the way it is used by Emerson, Melville, McCarthy, Conrad, and so many others frequently discussed in this blog.

Sluyter says that the shark is the main character, that Hooper, Brady and Captain Quint "are supporting characters who exemplify three different ways to confront the hungry self."  Sluyter says that the three approaches are what Buddhists could call the fundamentalist, the Hinayana, and the Mahayana.  These approaches yield three different outcomes.

1.  Quint has the fundamentalist, eye-for-an-eye approach.  "It is the way of an aggression rooted in dualism."  You might say that Quint is  a basic man dominated by his animal-nature.  He is the body in the body/mind/spirit trinity.

Quint's fundamentalism is driven by a perpetual struggle against any adversary conceived as Other than the one who struggles.  This is reflected in everything he does, the song he chooses to sing, the destruction of the radio, in everything he says.  His consuming hatred of the shark becomes self-consummation. 

2.  Sluyter says that monkish Brady represents the Theravada/Hinayana branch of Buddhism, the "smaller vehicle" as befits the small cage in which he descends in an effort to kill the shark.  If Quint is the body in the body/mind/spirit analogy, Brady represents the mind, the scholar, the shark expert always seeking more knowledge, a better understanding.  It is Brady who, after confronting the shark face-to-face, declares, "You're gonna need a bigger boat."

3.  Sluyter says that Hooper represents the Mahayana or "greater vehicle" of Buddhism.  Hooper contains metaphorically the spiritual force of our common humanity that finally blows away the shark, the nothingness blown to nothingness.  The last scene shows Hooper and Brady paddling together on two of the buoys lashed together.  Hooper, representative of the spirit, says that he believes that the tide is with them.  Brady, representative of the mind, tells him to keep paddling.

Mind, body, spirit.  You should read Dean Sluyter's entire essay, which runs a long twenty pages and is collected in Cinema Nirvana: Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies.