A typical scene. College guys sitting in their dorm watching Monday Night Football. Mohlson’s Golden Ale. Doritos. Lots of cross-talk. Somebody said, “Hold on, something’s happening.” I hung on every word, and every word lasted an eternity, hoping it would still be alright.
And then the words, “Dead on arrival.”
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© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.
In the late 1850′s, three wealthy Russians have supper at the home of one of the men. After the plates are cleared away and the middle-aged gentlemen are enjoying cigars, they trade stories of their first loves. Two of them tell stories that are completely lacking of passion and soul, revealing the shallowness of the men themselves. The third, Vladimir Petrovitch, has a story that is so out of the ordinary that he is reticent to tell it. His companions, desperately lacking any passion of their own, beseech him to tell them his tale. Reluctantly he agrees, but in order to do the story justice, he must first write it down, promising to read it to them at a future date.
Thus begins Ivan Turgenev’s 1860 novella, First Love. At age sixteen while living in the country, Vladimir meets twenty-one-year-old Zinaida Alexandrovna Zasyekina, the daughter of a titled but very poor family living on the adjoining property. Zinaida is a beautiful and spirited young women and Vladimir falls hopelessly in love with her. Zinaida toys with him mercilessly, enticing him with hints of a deep and romantic affection and, alternatively, pushing him away and treating him with condescending, sisterly affection. (Perhaps the 19th century equivalent of “Let’s just be friends.”) At one point, she even asks Vladimir to look after her twelve-year-old brother, emphasizing the their age difference and that Vladimir is still just a boy.
Adding to Vladimir’s frustration are the numerous suitors who come calling on Zinaida every evening. They are all older than Vladimir and superior to him in either wealth or social class. She plays them all off one another, but occasionally indicates that she favors Vladimir. On these occasions the young man’s heart swells and there is no joy greater than the joy felt by a young man in love for the first time. There is also no sadness greater than the sadness brought on by unrequited love.
© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.
In part four of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, aging author Briony Tallis is revealed to be the author of the novel that comprises the previous three sections of the book. She is dying of vascular dementia, and that this, her last novel, is her final act of atonement for an unforgivable sin that she committed when she was just a young girl. As her mind and her memory are leaving her, she has written this novel while she still can. Although much of her novel is entirely the product of her imagination, it is the impending loss of her memory that drives her to complete her work. The loss of memory is death for a writer.
At the very end of his life, Ernest Hemingway was convinced that the electroconvulsive therapy that had be used to treat his depression had destroyed his memory and, therefore, his ability to write. Whether or not shock therapy can actually do that and whether or not it was true in 
Hemingway’s case has been argued ever since then, but Hemingway believed it and it was perhaps the final blow that pushed him into the despair from which he could find no escape. About a year earlier, he had completed the manuscript for A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his early days in Paris when he was on the threshold of literary stardom. While one might imagine that memories of true events are crucial ingredients for a memoir, they are not the only ingredients. In the years since A Moveable Feast was first published it has been extensively fact-checked several times. Major parts of it cannot be verified, including an infamous anecdote involving F. Scott Fitzgerald, a ruler, and a men’s room, that I will forever refuse to believe ever happened. So really, what purpose did memory serve him in creating his memoir, especially since even though much of it may be fiction, it is still vivid and poignant, and a prime example of a literary genre? For Hemingway, memory was everything and he couldn’t live without it.
So what is it about this fragile and mysterious thing called memory that sustains us, that inspires us, that tricks us, and sometimes horrifyingly eludes us, that makes it so essential to the creation of fiction? And what is it about memory that is essential to the reading of fiction?
© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.
A couple of weeks ago, my day-job required me to fly to Chicago for a day to attend a meeting. I’d been to Chicago on business a couple of times before, but on those trips I was visiting companies that were located outside of the city, so I never got a chance to see the downtown commercial center known as The Loop. Like most Americans, I’m ignorant about the places in our country that I don’t actually live in, much less the rest of the world, so I was quite surprised to see an architectural treasure chest suddenly appear before me on the cab ride to the Hyatt on Wacker Drive, where my meeting was being held. Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know a lot more about the architecture of Chicago.
After my meeting at the hotel had ended, I had a couple of hours free before I needed to get back to the airport for my flight home, so I took a little walk around the general vicinity. Some of the buildings were quite captivating and I started feeling nostalgia for an era that I never actually lived in. I imagined that it was the 1950′s and the hustle and bustle around The Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower was comprised of men and women wearing hats. I had arrived in the city by train. I had my new Android-based smartphone with me, so I snapped a few pictures. I had just gotten the phone the week before, so I fumbled a lot with it, trying to figure out how to work the camera function. The results are rather mediocre and you can probably find much better pictures of these landmarks elsewhere on the internet, but at least I’ve documented my trip there.
© 2010 – 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.
In his essay, “In Praise of Dead White Men,” Lindsay Johns argues that efforts to make education more “relevant” to black people can be both patronizing and harmful, and that western literary canon should be taught to everyone. While I agree with him in general, I think that teaching literature written by women and men of color as a genre separate from and in lieu of western literary canon. The importance of Homer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Melville to the culture of western civilization is undeniable, but it’s also about time that the physical and metaphorical shackles and chains applied to people who played as much a role in western civilization as those honored dead white men became an integral part of our literary tradition.
A few days after I posted The Art of the Novella: Seize the Day by Saul Bellow, my brief précis and commentary on Saul Bellow’s 1957 novella, I received an email from an old friend complimenting the piece, but also with an admonishment about my somewhat narrow view of what literature is all about. Tommy Wilhem’s fight against the abyss, a common theme throughout the history of western literary tradition, from Odysseus to Bloom (Leopold), is certainly one of the major themes of the book, but, as my friend Maria pointed out to me, it is a theme largely owned by middle and upper class white men. It is one of the dominant themes of western literature largely because western literary canon has always been, and to a large extent still is, defined by Dead White European Males. Battling the abyss is a luxury of the privileged and empowered. Literature created by women and minorities, she pointed out, tends to be about more immediate and worldly challenges – poverty, discrimination, subjugation — human experiences not common to privileged white men, dead or otherwise. Essentially, she was telling me as politely as possible, “Fred, your Updikean life in suburbia has made your brain go soft, you need to get out more.”
© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.
